[EMS] Traits: Level 100 Ambition!

Hi guys! Today I finally managed to obtain my first Level 100 trait on my Hero! It's the Ambition trait and its level is mainly raised through defeating non-World Tour bosses.

Since the Chaos update back in 2011 the "Trait System" has been added. This system includes some small but useful bonus stats if you would raise specific area's on your character. All area's have their own sources to level these and all area's give different types of stat bonus.

Ambition majorly concentrates on raising your Percentual-Damage-Reduction (PDR) ignore and on your experience loss penalty if you would die in most maps. It also raises your Battle Mode damage, but unfortunately this mode has been closed in MapleStory Europe so it doesn't have much use at the moment.


To prevent an overflow of boss hunting (which could've potentially made roaming bosses nearly impossible to find) and botting, there's a limit on how much Ambition experience you can obtain per day. It's a fair limit of 500 experience points, which enables you to instant-level most of the lower levels each day and in the later levels it'll only require two to three days. The same thing applies to all the available traits - every trait has a limit of 500 (in exception to the Charm trait limit of 5000) to keep it fair for other players whereas having no limit would create chaotic hassles in several major maps for players fighting about leveling their traits. This would include harvesting maps, boss maps and Party Quests (where the latter has a maximum limit of entries per channel at the same time to prevent server overflow).

Unfortunately, this also means if you would have a perfect-daily-farming you'll end up requiring more than 180 days to reach Level 100 in any trait. This may sound easier than it looks but you'll have to be able to defeat strong bosses to make it sufficient, spend multiple hours in harvesting, spend multiple hours in crafting and do Party Quests with other players. There's also a penalty system with a cooldown so that you can't craft or harvest too much - both share the same cooldown system.

Unlike most players in MapleStory Europe, I actually do raise my traits to a significant higher level, aiming to reach Level 100 for every trait in a far future. Most players end up with low level traits before they quit a specific character and they really miss out some good bonus stats on those! However, unlike most of the highest level players that do raise them often in our version, I do take my sweet time for raising them. Rushing sucks, it actually makes people quit significant earlier than other players that take their time because they'll reach the end of the line (the game's limits) much earlier. I often just defeat bosses that spawn on my way or harvest sources that are near me, so there's always some slow growth in most of the traits. So I'm more of an opportunist in this scenario. Occasionally I do for for a full saturated 500-limit in several traits when I feel like to or when the level up of a trait is near.

In comparison with my other traits, I'll have to note that I did perfect-daily-farm my Ambition Level after Level 93 in the past few weeks. However, this was for some research I wanted to do consider there was something interesting that drove and motivated me to this daily farming. According to different sources of calculation and my own knowledge - MapleStory does round down numbers, even if they are considered to have at least a half decimal fraction (for example: 3,5 becomes 3 instead of 4).

I had 69% PDR-ignore, which would mean I would be 1% short on the "safe zone" for the highest raid bosses. The "safe zone" is considered the minimum PDR-ignore, valued at 70%, where you can be able to hit all the main raid bosses, because several raid bosses have that much Percentual-Damage-Reduction that you'll end up hitting only "1". By being in the "safe zone" you'll never hit "1" on any boss, guaranteed (until the game mechanic changes or when new bosses will be released). Consider I had Level 95 Ambition back then - Level 95 Ambition would give 9,5% PDR-ignore bonus in addition to Combat Mastery (50% PDR ignore), Luminous Skill Link and Zero Skill Link. Consider these are multiplied instead of added - that would mean I'll end up with only 69,26% - thus 69% rounded down. However, having Level 100 Ambition with 10% PDR-ignore bonus, that'll mean I would end up with a total of 69,58% PDR-ignore. For the sake of "Maple science" I decided to just try for fun and look if Maple actually would be different in this situation.

I left out all the other irrelevant details for this blogpost for private reasons.

So with obtaining Level 100 Ambition, I managed to obtain a total 70% PDR-ignore, which basically means it seems PDR-ignore is rounded up if you would manage going past a half point of total PDR-ignore. This also confirms that Hero is able to reach the "safe zone" passively without the need of PDR-ignore on any of the equips - with only Level 100 Ambition, maxed Combat Mastery, Level 2 Luminous Skill Link and a Level 5 Zero Skill Link.
 

I don't expect to have another Level 100 trait any time soon - but I'm sure about that Willpower will be the next Level 100 trait, presumably in the second half of this year. That's it for today guys! See you again next post!