[EMS] 11 years of Rayque!

Today's the 30th of September, which means another year has passed by. Eleven years of playing daily with close to twenty thousand hours of playtime... Yet there is still no end to my journey - and it will not be any time soon.

I'll see you guys again next post!

[EMS] 1000 Arcane Force!

Hi guys! Yesterday I reached a thousand Arcane Force! I've been occupied with getting things off my "to do" list in the past four days, hence why I forgot to write this one. 320 Arcane Force left to unlock...

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

[Other] Well... shit 2.0

 

My weekend is officially over. My room is all back in business, so I can play on my consoles again. The game has arrived just in time, I guess.

Wait a minute, this actually sounds familiar. This is going to be another one of those recurring blogposts, now isn't it?

Here's the obligatory showoff. Time to catch up on the DLC content which has been released in the past nine months, which should be worth at least another one hundred hours. I should probably start playing the game instead of writing a blogpost...

[EMS] Third Level 20 Arcane Symbol GET!

Hi guys! Today my Arcane Symbol for the Arcana region has hit Level 20! This means I'm already halfway done with maxing out my symbols...

It took me a bit longer than it normally should to get my Arcana symbol maxed out.

At first I couldn't get maxed out daily scores with Spirit Savior, resulting in just a few symbols a day for a couple of weeks and slowly crawling up that high score to a decent-but-still-not-amazing number. But after doing Spirit Savior for several months, I managed to figure out how Spirit Savior works (i.e. how the respawn locations for Rock Spirits are programmed, how the Toxic Spirit's movement behavior can be manipulated) and get consistent 10.000 scores for each run, even if I required three to five hits to free each Rock Spirit. Of course nowadays it's easy for me to hit a score of 15.000 each run while only requiring two hits for each Rock Spirit, but that still results in the same amount of symbols because of the rewards-based-on-scores limit.

So for now I can take a break with Spirit Savior until they release the maximum level of 25. I'm actually curious to how Nexon will approach this, given the "max Level 15 to 20" change hasn't been received all too well and the process of maxing out the Lacheln/Arcana symbols is often disliked by the community because it's slow, punishing when making mistakes and tough to manage maximum daily rewards. It doesn't stop me from doing those dailies anyways, but I could understand why people dislike it. It's a shame that I haven't been able to make good use of the ticket or pitty systems for Spirit Savior, but at least the system will be there to help out new or returning players.

I should unlock my Esfera symbol next month after I hit Level 235. Expect my Lacheln symbol to be maxed out next Spring, my Morass symbol next Summer and my Esfera symbol before the end of 2019.

Anyway, I should reach a thousand Arcane Force in a few days (expect a small blogpost to celebrate by then).

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

[EMS] Level 234!

Ding! I took the opportunity today to grind out 20% because my room is currently being worked on until the end of this week, and thus I couldn't do more than messing around on my PC since everything else is unavailable to me. It took me about four hours for that 20%, but at least I'm getting close to Level 235! The Bug Brawl event certainly gives a lot of additional EXP...

I've grinded out a total of 40% in the past four days, so you can imagine I feel a bit tired. Time to take it easy for 235 and start with 3% a day again. I should hit that level somewhere next month. Even if the Black update is planned to arrive in (late?) November, there's still plenty of time and space left.

That's it for today! I'll probably see you guys again tomorrow!

[EMS] Ryude's Sword - Still a relevant option for Hero, if you ask me.

Sup guys! Today's blogpost is that "special column" I've mentioned I was going to write about. In this (hopefully informative) post we're going to take a look at a sword that was a popular weapon for only a moment - Ryude's Sword!

Ryude's Sword, without upgrades.

Ryude's Sword had an interesting life so far. When it came out, a vocal majority went nuts for it - it was deemed a top tier sword for a very long time, and it was used in many major builds. It even was unaffordable to many players and it has remained a tough-to-find weapon. Then, a fair balancing adjustment happened to this weapon when it became too popular... Suddenly nobody talked about it any longer, and people moved on with their lives.

MapleStory has a respectable list of special(ized) equipment that allow for certain gimmick builds. The majority of this list involves equipment that has a specific stat modified to distinct itself from the norm, or it has a special effect or skill applied to it. These things have been around since almost the beginning of the game, and even to this day, new ones are released almost each year.

Gimmick builds are usually not a popular choice among the majority of the community (although there are exceptions every now and then), and they often require players to have advanced knowledge and experience in order to pull this off. That, or at least an insane budget in order to afford said items or to even get them running in the first place.

Although, Ryude's Sword has fortunately been a rather easy-to-implement-sword in most cases. This is due to its special effect it has to offer. One that is still pretty much unique to Ryude, and can be outright broken in the right hands.

"So, what does Ryude's Sword do?"
It's simple. According to the item's description, it has a 70% chance to increase the number of attacks by 1 when using a skill. "Not applicable to all skills".

Imagine your main attack has 10 lines. Using this skill with Ryude's Sword gives you a 70% chance to get another line on top of that. That makes 11.

Now, of course there is an actual ruling behind the "Not applicable to all skills" part. It almost takes the same general ruling as the "increases the amount of targets on multi-target skills by 1" from Monster Life and Inner Ability.

Imagine your main attack with 10 lines affects three targets. This means it falls under Ryude's ruling so it gets that 70% chance to get another line. But imagine you also have another attack, which only affects a single target. This attack will not be affected by Ryude. This is an essential difference that is very important - it's the reason why Ryude's Sword is broken for a class like Hero or Kaiser, but loses a lot of appeal for a class like Paladin.

Anyway, as you probably can tell from the blogpost's title (or, if you're a frequent reader of my blog), we're only going to take a look at the skill tree of Hero. And we're also going in-depth for some of these skills, in order to explain why they are affected by Ryude, or why they aren't.