[EMS] Sailboat GET!

Hi guys! Yesterday I managed to obtain the Sailboat vessel for the Commerci Voyage system.

The Commerci Voyage system is a mini game that you can unlock by going through the Dawnveil content and get formal access to the trading system in Commerci itself. And boy, what a mini game this one is!

The Voyage system is your typical "Beat all the enemies within a certain time and they come in different waves" gameplay - there is nothing you need to protect from enemies, it's just a simple game of whacking your weapon until they're all defeated.

This isn't something "new" for MapleStory, as we've seen this kind of system before - but Commerci certainly stands out for its rewards. On top of that, you're actually rewarded greatly for doing this mini game more often - because the more Commerci you'd do, you'll be able to unlock higher difficulties - which is the typical "higher risk, higher rewards".

Commerci is notorious for the Potential-related rewards; there's a significant chance to find (Chaos) Cubics and both Master and Meister Cubes! Even without 2x Drop events, I have been able to find a lot of these in just a few runs. I'm currently stacking these up so I can have a good shot at cubing some proper Potential, and hopefully I'll be able to get my first Legendary equip soon. Yes, most people don't know this by now, but I haven't been able to obtain my first Legendary equip at all (because A. I haven't focused that much on cubing to Legendary yet and B. frequent readers know my typical luck), but that might change soon enough.

However, these types of mini games cannot be complete without some interesting "You are allowed to do more if you spend more time with this content" that we have seen in a few previous content such as the Evolving System. In order to start a Commerci voyage, you have to pay Denaro (a currency limited to Commerci) - and if you have successfully completed a voyage, you'll get everything you've "invested" back, with a small profit, based on what "cargo" you've deciced to take with you.

The more voyages you've done, the more Denaro you'll have, which allows you to spend it in certain (boat) upgrades or a handful of Sweetwater equipment (accessories-only). Most people probably want to get some of those Sweetwater equipment, but Denaro is very important to get all the "trading permits" to access all "locations" (read: difficulties) - and when you've got all permits, it'll smooth sailing from now on because the only "upgrades" you might want to invest in will be upgrading your boat (which is rather expensive, but is no big deal if you just simply save all Denaro you'll earn).

Because we're sailing on seas, you'll always start with your "rookie ship", the Cargo Skiff, and it'll gain experience by doing voyages (don't ask me how that works). The higher the difficulty, the more Vessel experience you'll get, but the more energy (read: fuel) you'll consume. Energy is fully restored after midnight.

When you get your Cargo Skiff to Level 10, you can upgrade it to a Sailboat! A Sailboat has more firepower than a Cargo Skiff, but also allows access to a whopping 100 attack buff (with short duration), which will surely aid in faster voyages when most bosses have quite some HP.

You can ultimately upgrade a Sailboat to a Dreadnought, which is the "final" upgrade, but that will take a while before I'll get there. It'll probably be somewhere near the end of the year (yes, it requires *that* much experience to get a Sailboat to Level 10). The most interesting part from the Dreadnought is that it can hold the most cargo of all boats, and it has the largest "fuel capacity" of them all. Especially the latter is something I'm looking forward to, because having three Voyages to Lith Harbor a day will result in some crazy pile of loot... as if the months of voyages that is required to even get to a Dreadnought isn't enough loot already!

That's it for today! Later next week I'll be back home and there's a pile of LEGO® sets waiting on my desk...
I'll hopefully get back to that when I'm there - see you guys again next post!

[EMS] Level 213!

Another milestone that kinda happened yesterday, but surely an important thing to celebrate! At first I didn't expect Level 213 to be this soon, but the experience gained from most bosses has been improved by a lot and there has been several events which were generous on rewarding high amounts of experience too.

As most of you frequent readers know by now, I'm not really a person who likes to rush things, especially on the level department. Leveling beyond Level 200 requires a lot of time and preparation, and I prefer to simply do daily bosses on a way to gain experience and restock on resources. Since I don't have any plans on quitting this game or my Hero, as it has been for almost nine years by now, you know I will reach "high" level eventually.

Usually a level up here takes me about 3~4 months, but that'll be slower sooner or later consider the EXP required on each level up progressively becomes larger - most of my experience on each level is actually gained through events. Perhaps the EXP gained on each day might be more than I used to gain, given a lot of bosses have been more rewarding nowadays, and I also have access to all Commerci Voyages.

While my Level Ups aren't as frequent as they used to be, in one way they feel more significant to me because they don't appear as often as before. I'm no stranger to powergrinding in this game, don't forget that I have done many sessions that over 4 hours each - that is why I reached Level 154 before the Big Bang update, because having 32x Experience rate is broken as F. In a way I'm glad that they fixed that though. You thought Kishin Shoukan was bad? You should've seen Premium Mini Dungeons, the Welcome Back system and Genesis/Blizzard/Meteor Rain without cooldown...

That's it for today - I'll see you guys again next post!

[EMS] The "Mad" in Madhouse

Hi guys! Earlier today, I managed to finish the Madhouse event, and oh boy, what an event it was...

This is one of those contents in-game that kinda puts me on the fence on where we can draw the line for what feels appropriate to be released in a game as MapleStory. But before I'll get into that because at first it might seem I disliked the Madhouse event, I want to point out I actually enjoyed this event - and I'll also explain "why".

The Madhouse is an unique event which is built around a "dungeon" system where the player progresses through a fixed amount of maps by solving puzzles in order to get to the next. Solving puzzles is optional, but it is rewarding and you'll most likely to go through them all in order to 100% this event. Unlike other events, you're actually encouraged to gather resources in said maps, because you'll need those in order to survive - you'll need certain resources to get through or access certain maps. You can either just farm for resources, ignore most of the puzzles and breeze through maps - or you can do them if you feel like it.

I do like that kind of system in a game such as MapleStory, and I'm sure there are other people who usually play games that are centered around this type of gameplay as well - but the environment and the story behind it is what spices it up.

Let's put the PEGI and ESRB systems aside. It's a suggestion, they have to put it there. There isn't much content in Maple that feels out of place to me "for a PEGI 7 game" - and to be fair, this game started out as "PEGI 12" when it was still rather young. Aside to the Madhouse event, other things that felt slightly out of place for even Maple's standards, were such things as Gelimer's plan and where he ultimately ended up during the Black Heaven storyline, or just some minor character/monster designs such as the often-made-fun-of Cold Eyes and the Crimson Queen boss.

The Madhouse centers around an abandoned hospital where you enter with several other characters, after you've been contacted through an old friend (which goes by the name Chloe) that you haven't seen since like forever. Well, this sounds already fantastically familiar, right? What could possibly go wrong, assuming you have been living under a rock ever since they introduced any media such as books or movies?

Going through the Madhouse itself is pretty straight forward, and because this is a hospital, you'll find a lot of useful (and convenient!) tools to open air vents and doors, recharge your flashlight, etc. There's plenty of anatomical and skeleton models to whack for resources as well. And well, if you're a fan of background stories and you often read NPC dialogues (let's be honest, most of you guys don't), you'll figure out a thing or two about what happened to this hospital by finding pieces of paper of Chloe's diary. And this is where things become disturbing and puts me on the fence. And no, to keep things rather spoiler free, I won't discuss the story details here.

That aside - this event has been a very generous one to get permanent Totems! Since we got the Totem slots in EMS a few weeks ago, Nexon Europe has been thoughtful of releasing events and other content for us to immediately get those as soon as possible. While most permanent content, such as Dong Fang Shen Zhou and Alishan gives phenomenal Totems, either they expire monthly and you have to get a new one by farming, or you need to do months of daily quests to get them.

Madhouse gives three permanent Totems straight off the bat, for about 2200 coins. While that usually that requires you some hefty farming with Maple's standards, you could get a lot of coins a run (usually between 300 and 400 should be very easy to get) if you get the hang of it (which usually ends up over 500 coins each run). There's plenty of guides out there to explain how "coin farming" in this event works.

While you can get a maximum of three entrances a day, unlike most events, the entry tickets are permanent! So you want to stack them up and find a moment where you can run a few hours, and about one week of tickets should be more than enough for all three Totems!

Probably the reason why we got the Madhouse event, has to do with the Sengoku High and Shimo's Hunter Club events - two other infamous events to gain fantastic permanent Totems. We already had both of them more than once, prior to the Totem slots. And instead of those rewards being Totems, they were actually changed to be Badges and Pocket items - which is actually pretty good. Especially when you consider we didn't have the Boat Quay Town's Badge that can have Potential and you could get the Sengoku Secret Manual skill passively without the need of equipping a certain item set you need to do in order to get that skill. And if you run with a lot of Attack in your build, that might be even better than what you could pull off with Potential...

While I'm not sure if we'd ever see the "Totem-variant" of both events, I would love to see those being released for the players who either don't like the Madhouse event or simply weren't playing at the time this event was running. I would certainly be happy to see the "Badge/Pocket" variants of said events again too! I haven't been able to get the Rifle Bullet Pocket item, despite doing two perfect attendances, so yeah... the Ribgol of all Pocket Items I guess.

That aside, while this event was rather "2spooky4me", I did like the "dungeon" system and the need of resources, but especially the fact that you have plenty of options to tackle puzzles - and you don't even need to. I always enjoy fresh ideas like these and Nexon has rarely failed to surprise me to come up with new things for this game. And well, if there's another thing what this event did right, is the environment. Just don't play this event with your background music on. It doesn't help!

While there's an almost guarantee that I'll hit Level 213 (Yay!) later on today, I'll rather save the blogpost for tomorrow or something. Because I'm far from home this month due to working abroad (gotta fund my LEGO® stuff somehow right?) and thus I'm playing on my toaster laptop, I have a hard time creating images for my blog so I'll probably can't even record my Level Up (it'll probably be captured like this instead).

That's it for today - I'll see you guys again next post!