[2022] What happened this year to Rayque?

Another year's end, another summary.

This year marks the 12th summary on this blog. As always, the Rayque3 Staff wishes you a great 2023!

To me, 2022 hasn't seen much of a change compared to last year. It's been another busy and expensive year where most of my time was spent on my LEGO projects, or work on our Youtube/blog. Work has been piling up; mainly in the form of unfinished blogposts. Those that come to mind: the Xenoblade DE article and MapleStory's Destiny revamp.

Truth is, work on these blogposts have consumed my daily life for months on end*. After working on and off on the DE article for about one-and-a-half year, I parked it to work seven months on our Multirandomness video. After that, I've started writing the Destiny blogpost. By the time that blogpost is published, a total of two-and-a-half years have gone by; and I'm not getting that back. That made me reconsider to scale down the amount of time I spend on my blog.

Moving forward, I'm going to put the Xenoblade article on ice. After publishing the Destiny blogpost, I'm going to take a break from writing long blogposts. Because as it currently is, the amount of time I've spent on these things has gotten out of hand, and it's been detrimental to my health. Knowing myself, I'll probably continue and finish the article at some point in the future, but it's clear to me that I'm currently in no shape to do so right now.

*This is also why the amount of new blogpost has considerably decreased since 2020.

With that out of the way, let's get to those statistics of 2022.

[EMS] Level 266!

[Lego] And down the 12V rabbit hole I go...

Legends say that Rayque is still pressing these two buttons, to this very day...

They don't make 'm like these anymore, as they would say. Old but gold, I guess.

If you are familiar with my preferences in LEGO products, I'm always interested in their niche offerings. That can range into themes like Bionicle or Galidor, set designs that are remarkable and boundary pushing, or toy peripherals where LEGO develops an entire new system that ends up with a short shelf life because it failed to sell enough copies. 

Having experienced pretty much every track or pipe system that LEGO has produced, including trains from DUPLO, 4,5V and the Monorail, their modern roller coaster sets, all generations of pneumatics and even solar panels - I was bound to inevitable go down the rabbit hole of what is LEGO's most ambitious train system: 12V track, the Gray Era.

Basically, during the golden age of railway modelling, LEGO sought to participate in an over-saturated market with their own expansions to their already existing 4,5V train system. Unfortunately, this was during the 1970 to 1980s, so LEGO was still a small toy company at the time. Expensive LEGO sets that do not have a broad appeal, contain many specialized parts that are exclusive to these few add-on sets, released almost forty years too early, and was also only available in Europe. The perfect recipe to create a niche line-up of sets, and that's everything I could ever ask for.

While my earliest hands-on experience with 12V as a system was when I was a child, I've never really owned any of the 12V sets until today. And in typical Rayque fashion, my entry set to the 12V system isn't even a train, but one of the track peripherals that LEGO offered to expand your layout. You see, what makes 12V stand out from LEGO's other train systems is that the emphasis of 12V isn't on the trains themselves, but the ability to add all kinds of gimmicks to your track, such as the set that I bought: #7866, from 1983. And personally, as an engineer and LEGO enthusiast, I'm far more interested in the inner workings of these add-ons and its system, rather than the set designs themselves.

The 12V system has a good selection of add-ons, including railroad switches, some street lights, a switch to turn off specific sections of track so that trains that drive over it will stop, and even a module that allows you to separate your wagons from each other. All of these modules are connected to a separate two-button controller, which you can stack onto each other to build a large keyboard, so that you can control your train layout from a distance. It's simple and charming, yet an effective system that was ahead of its time. LEGO has never truly recreated something similar since.

And with good reason, because 12V didn't sell well enough. Not to mention that all of these electric components and specialized pieces are very delicate; handle them with care. LEGO has tried many other train systems after 12V, for them to realize that keeping it to simple plastic railroad sets tends to sell better. While I'm not planning to go bankrupt now by purchasing more add-ons for a future LEGO project, I will continue my 12V scavenger hunt another day.

Now certainly, with modern LEGO peripherals such as Mindstorms, you could build far more advanced custom add-ons to your tracks. But where's the fun in that? If you really want to do it right, build a dedicated 12V layout, then use Mindstorms to automate it all. Now that would be cool thing to see. So many things to build and collect, so little time...

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

[EMS] Level 265!

Ding! A level up, just two months after my last one. And not just any level up; it's that all-important Level 265 milestone that unlocks Burning Cernium and the next 5th Job skill, Crest of the Solar! That was earlier than expected...

The currently ongoing Midnight Carnival, which is the successor to the Celestial Festival, is one of those grind-heavy events where you have to grind an hour a day to get your event rewards. Since one of these rewards are Grandis symbols, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to aim for 265 while also capitalizing on those valuable rewards.

Now, here's an interesting conundrum: the Crest of the Solar blogpost can now be written, but I still haven't published my Destiny revamp blogpost. I've decided to prioritize the Destiny blogpost over Crest of the Solar, and publish that one first. You see, I've finally been able to continue my work on this blogpost earlier this week and I've been able to comfortably add chunks on a daily basis. I had to bench my LEGO projects to get there, though.

However, I don't think I'll be able to have it finished before the end of November, simply because I realized that after wrapping up the 2nd Job section, it was already well over 6000 words. To give you an idea, this blogpost has just over 8000. Woops. So uhm, yeah. Work on that Destiny blogpost is going to take a while. But at least I've now figured out how to approach and structure it, as that took me a couple of tries.

Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to grab some lunch now and complete Burning Cernium after that.

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

[EMS] 15 years of Rayque!

Farewell Abrup, as you won't be here for next year's anniversary.

Fifteen years already, huh? I kinda lost track of it a couple of years ago, so my blog helps me to remember.

Been busy with several LEGO projects (yes, deliberate word choice) and working through my backlog from the past two months (you can blame Xenoblade 3 and Gunvolt 3 releasing on the same week for that), but I should be able to get back to writing about the Destiny revamp in October. When you read it, you'll probably understand why writing it took me longer than usual.

Anyway, the past year for EMS (and MapleStory in general) has been interesting, to say the least. With the absurd amount of quality of life improvements being dumped on a frequent basis (with some being long-overdue), the game's certainly moving in the right direction, but it's still not quite where it should go. Sounds familiar.

Because of the mixed reception for the Destiny and Ignition revamps, Nexon has pretty much dropped their initial long-term plan to have every (outdated) class modernized. What concerns me the most about this, is that this would theoretically mean that Nexon's not going to rework every class from the ground up to have skeleton animation.

I'm not going to give a thorough technical explanation, as that would require another blogpost of itself, but the gist of it is that not reworking every class from the ground up will bring a very awkward inconsistency between modernized and old fashioned characters. At one side you'll have all of the classes released since Kinesis, with Adventures and Knights of Cygnus, that run skeleton animation for pretty much everything. Flashy skills with complicated animations and behavior, but more importantly: smooth(er) gameplay. On the other, you have everyone else without, with classes such as Mechanic, Kaiser, Luminous, Mercedes and Evan being a couple of examples that needs skeleton animation the most. Due to their archaic and sluggish gameplay, they struggle to keep up with the game's increasing demand for finer mobility, precise movement and quick responses. Newer skill mechanics such as built-in ammunition (introduced with Pink Bean's Blazing Yo-yo), or something as intricate as secondary cooldowns (introduced with Kain) are heavy on the game client, so they can only really be used in conjunction with skeleton animation, which old classes then can't have for their non-5th Job skills until these are reworked from the ground up.

Thus, the unchanged classes from the early 2010s are showing their age, and Nexon's eventually going to hit that physical ceiling where numerical changes to attack speed and skill damage will no longer suffice. That is why they introduced skeleton animation and the 64 bit client, and that is why they started with reworking classes from the ground up... until they stopped with Knights of Cygnus. Whether if Nexon will change their mind has yet to be seen, but I hope that they will reconsider it once they have the appropiate staff for it (which they currently do not). They kinda have to at some point, considering that the current producer of KMS, Wonki (yes, that one), has declared that Maple is going to continue for the next 30 to 40 years. At that point, why would you ever choose any of the unchanged 32 bit classes over an up-to-date, modernized 64 bit class, moving forward?

Revamps and MapleStory's doomsday of 2079 predating the Maverick outbreak of 2095 aside, Housing's pretty good. I haven't unlocked everything just yet, but I might consider to write an in-depth blogpost (similar to Monster Life, or any of my other informational blogposts) at some point, since there's interesting stuff to write about. Definitely more fun to write about than whatever I'm trying to do with that Destiny revamp blogpost, or that Xenoblade article...

Shame that the first chapter of Monad's going to be removed soon, but that's been on the chopping block ever since they removed Captain Vaga several years ago. All things considered, a four year run aint bad for such a bunch of spaghetti coding. Not to mention that Monad's story is going to continue regardless, since World Tours have been integral to the main plot for almost two decades now. And to all of you recent loremasters out there: everything is canon, and always has been. If you don't believe it, you just haven't figured it out yet and have a lot to catch up with.

Cheers everyone. Dammit, I should've bought ice cream. But that's it for today - I'll see you guys again next post!

[EMS] Level 264!

Ding! One more level, and I'll have the next 5th Job skill unlocked. That's probably before the end of the year.

So, what about the blogpost covering the Hero revamp? I started writing it somewhere mid-July, but I was unable to finish it before the release of Xenoblade 3. That has now consumed most of my spare time, as I've clocked over 150 hours in the past four weeks. Trying to blind 100% it on maximum difficulty, but y'know, these games are pretty lengthy when it comes to going the completionist route. So I won't be able to continue writing on the blogpost for a while, but I am expecting to get back on it somewhere in September after I'm satisfied with my current playthrough.

I'll probably throw my thoughts on Xenoblade 3 on this year's summary, or perhaps a separate blogpost (like with X).

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

[Other] And now for something different... (again)

My weird obsession with collecting video game plushies and artbooks continues. But here's an interesting question: what if one of your favorite game series had artwork made, but it does not have an official artbook for it? Would your quest end there, or would you continue to search for an alternative?

Artwork from Sin & Punishment (ISBN978-4-7753-1754-9). Any artwork from the first game is hard to find.

Sin & Punishment is an arcade-style railshooter, a short lived series with only two games that remains exclusive on Nintendo's platform. Its developer, Treasure Co Ltd, hired the freelance artist Yasushi Suzuki for the development of this series. His artwork was used for the game's box art, instruction manual and promotional material.

Artwork from Sin & Punishment 2 (ISBN978-4-7753-1552-1). Posters of the left artwork were printed to commemorate the second game's release, which has been hanging on my wall for over twelve years now. The artwork on the right was used for the non-Japanese box arts.

While Sin & Punishment does not have an official artbook (because Treasure seems to prefer to merchandise Ikaruga 

instead and port their older games to NSO), there are several volumes of Yasushi Suzuki's works. From my limited knowledge, only two volumes has artwork for the series: ISBN978-4-7753-1754-9 contains five pages of artwork for the first game, and ISBN978-4-7753-1552-1 contains sixteen pages of artwork for the second. Relative to the total of several hundred pages, that's only a small amount of available artwork for Sin & Punishment - but that's fine by me.

Artwork for Xenoblade X (ISBN978-4-7753-1552-1). Several years after Yasushi Suzuki made this artwork for Xenoblade X,
he would return to design a similar character for Xenoblade 2, who also shares the same Japanese name.

Here's a fun fact: Sin & Punishment has a couple of interesting things in common with Xenoblade. Yasushi Suzuki has made official art for both series, and Nintendo's Hitoshi Yamagami has been crucial to both game's development as without his involvement and patience, the first Xenoblade and Sin & Punishment wouldn't have been the same.

Artwork for Anubis: Zone of the Enders (ISBN978-4-7753-1552-1).

But back on the art of Yasushi Suzuki. The way he makes his art look like watercolor paintings is drop-dead gorgeous. I love his work on science fiction, and he's also been my entry into the world of biomechanical art. As an appreciator of his work and as someone who has the desire to become competent at hand-drawing, I know that I'm probably never going to get on his level of graphic design when it comes to drawing as an art medium. Despite that, perhaps a field of LEGO design is the right art medium for me, and for that, books such as these will provide plenty of reference to draw inspiration from. There's a lot I can learn and pick up from Yasushi Suzuki's works. While I still have a long journey ahead of me, maybe, just maybe, one day... I hope to be able to build something as beautiful as he draws.

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

[EMS] Cursed Blue Spellbook GET / Erda Nova - Level 25 / All Jobs Level 200+!

Hi guys! The Destiny update has been out for a week but I've been busy all month with making some drastic changes to the Hailfire Droid. So busy in fact that I haven't even opened the LEGO sets released this month, and neither have I started with the ongoing Breakthrough event to grind a new character to Level 220, nor did I have time to work on the Xenoblade article. But today is the perfect opportunity to write a quick blogpost, before the next Bricklink order arrives (shoot, it literally arrived while I was writing this blogpost) and some random parcel from Japan.

Now, here's a fun fact about this blogpost: I had to rewrite paragraphs of this post because I was writing this during today's maintenance. You see, the first week of the Destiny update brought an undocumented partial removal of the Dutch trade restrictions, which were implemented last year. Why it was undocumented is unknown and it was not mentioned in the patch notes. Neither was there a lot of awareness within the community. I did say partial removal, because you could only drop items and buy/sell items in the Auction House. You still couldn't drop mesos, (NX) trade with others or use the Meso Market. So, after the maintenance, I was about to grab screenshots for this post, and I made sure to double check if I could still drop items and use Auction House - but nope. They patched it out, and as it was an undocumented change to the game, it was not mentioned in the maintenance notes whatsoever.

But if you've been reading my blog for a while, it should come to no surprise that I'm usually pretty good at not leaving things to chance and making the right calls every now and then. With the trade restrictions only being lifted partially for a week - a week is all I need. I immediately bought the cheapest Cursed Spellbook that was available, a single Mitra's Nodestone in advance for Level 265 and some resources that were running dry. And because I expected that I would eventually have access to Auction House, I haven't been sleeping on stockpiling valuable items for the past half year. In the short week that I had, I've managed to sell a small portion of that supply, resulting in a quick 2 billion mesos.

And here's the punchline: if we now read the patch notes for the Destiny update, under Known Issues, it says:

• [Updated June 22] Certain players received an error and could not proceed when attempting to list items in the Auction House.

But whether if that's related to us losing access to Auction House again, I dunno. Why we had access to the Auction House for a week remains speculation, but by the time you read this post, we'd probably know if the aforementioned "known issue" is related. Either way, I'm not going to rewrite this blogpost again, and I'll save any updates on the subject matter for my next EMS blogpost, assuming if there are going to be any. To be continued, I guess?

The Destiny update is notorious for forcing every Adventure main to redo their enhancement cores, without providing any compensation. Thankfully, because EMS is half a year behind KMS, we also get that much time to prepare in advance. To nobody's surprise, I took that half year advantage and I've managed to redo my set-up within only 7000 Nodeshards; keeping the damage to a minimum. I still have 40000 Nodeshards left, and that total continues to grow weekly. You get so many Nodestones from events that there really is no reason to buy them for ridiculous prices off the Auction House. To give you an idea on how many: I didn't even need to recycle my old enhancements for shards.

And that transitions perfectly into the next milestone: Erda Nova is now Level 25! Half a year worth of preparing also means I've managed to collect several hundreds of Nodestones, to open after the update for those new enhancement cores. Opening hundreds of these provides plenty of duplicate skills, which gave me the last Erda Nova's required to max out the skill. And with Erda Nova done, I have now every relevant 5th Job skill that I use, maxed out!

Last but certainly not least, with the Destiny update providing another batch of Extreme Growth Potions, I've managed to get my last character to Level 200! Now, I have one copy each available job at Level 200; a total of 49 characters. Remember that I do not really grind out characters unless it's for some event reward like the special outfits for doing Adele, Kain and Lara, or if there are Maple Points to be gained from a Breakthrough event. Thus, almost all of mule levels were done by consuming EXP potions in the thousands, all sourced from events and Union for the past 5 years.

The only class that isn't available in EMS yet is Mo Xuan (Dragon Warrior/Zen's successor), and I expect to see it one day, given Nexon Europe's track record and how Nexon has changed their stance on releasing World Tour content overseas to soften development costs, which started with the Dong Fang Shen Zhou revamp of 2015. And while I do have a couple of duplicate jobs that are not Level 200 (i.e. I still have my Level 50 Fighter from the original Adventure Ring event), I'm not going to go through the effort of getting those to 200 because there really is no reason to do so. 

Now, I did say that I haven't started the current Breakthrough event, but I will in July. Unfortunately, because character slots are limited, I have to delete my Level 201 Bishop to make a new 220 Bishop. It's a pain because it has a couple of Unique Blackgate equipment on it, and I'm not going to have enough Platinum SoKs to transfer everything. For the new Level 220 Bishop, I'm only going to need about 20 hours at best, so I'm expecting to have that done in two days.

Speaking of: I'm expecting to write about the Hero revamp somewhere in July. It's going to take at least two weeks to write the initial draft, because there's a lot to talk (read: complain) about. Now, since I no longer have to buy level up pots from the Union coin shop, it's time to buy meso boxes until the end of time...

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

[EMS] Level 263!

Ding! So many Level Up potions.

I should be close to Level 264 by the end of the Destiny update, because there's going to be another pair of Magnificent Growth Potions. You simply can't have enough of these...

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

[EMS] First Legendary Additional Potential / 21st Legendary Potential GET!

Hi guys! With another coin shop event, comes another batch of Additional Potential Cubes. This batch was enough to get my Ribgol to Legendary Additional Potential! This marks my first item to have a Legendary Additional Potential, as all of my other items are still only at Rare or Epic. In total, it took between 60 and 80 cubes to get it to Legendary.

In addition, I've managed to rank up my Berserked to Legendary Potential on the same day! "Wait a minute, you have a Berserked?", you might ask? Yes, this is fairly recent too - after about 70 Hard Lotus runs, it finally dropped on April Fool's day (which is amusing because the achievement unlock on my account is set on this date forever).

With all of my main equipment at Legendary Potential again, I'm going to continue rolling for items with three %-STR. I'm also going to re-scroll my Berserked with the same as my other accessories: the Premium Attack scrolls. I should have that done towards the end of the Destiny update. While I have no idea on how I'm going to obtain a Cursed Red Spellbook and a Source of Suffering with the current trade restrictions, I'm going to indefinitely save up mesos anyway, because you can never have enough mesos. Either way, I'm going to toss the next batches of Additional Potential Cubes on my Ribgol and see if I can get something fancy. I should also hit Level 263 somewhere in June.

Now, if you excuse me, I'm going to wrap myself in bubble plastic because I'm pretty sure that I've used up several months of good fortune in order to have this moment. Oh, right: now that the Multirandomness video is out, I've slowly started to resume my work on the Xenoblade Definitive Edition article again. About time.

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

[EMS] 10.000.000 Guild Contribution!

TEN MILLION CONTRIBUTION!

Today's the first day in EMS where it's possible to have 10.000.000 contribution, since it's been 2000 days since the migration happened in 2016. Having a perfect contribution score is easier said than done, because it is mandatory to smuggle at least one guild member with you on boss runs in order to cap 5000 contribution on a daily basis. 

The procedure of capping on guild contribution is unfortunately prone to human error, where the occasional disconnect or incorrect boss difficulty can end the streak if it is not handled with care. It used to be much worse, and thankfully there are changes coming soon to EMS that alleviates most of these issues.

Now, I did say that you have to smuggle at least one guild member with you. Most people that I know of who do guild contribution in EMS rely on other guild members, as is the intended way. Screw that. I hate to impose on others for these types of things and it is unreasonable to expect that it will remain a reliable way of getting the job done. Thus, the easiest way to pull this off is to use a second account where you smuggle a guild mule for the party bonus. 

Nothing new, as the "2 PC meta" has always been a problem with this game. Pre-Big Bang with the Welcome Back mule for Premium Mini Dungeons, the occasional Guild/Crimsonwood Keep/Amoria Party Quest, you name it. This is the reason why I've always been travelling and working with multiple computers since I've started EMS. Once you understand the value being able to rely on yourself for small tasks like these, it's difficult to live without. It's so much easier to rely on self-sufficiency than to impose on others. That and it's a pain to ask others for help. Too lazy for that.

You might ask: am I the only one with a perfect contribution score in EMS? Unfortunately, yes - and with good reason. Everyone who has any experience with the game knows that Maple suffers from reliability issues on multiple levels. Despite that the game always had its daily content since Pre-Big Bang, the service is plagued with unoptimized code, stability/connectivity issues and the always-present looming threat of the unscheduled emergency maintenances. You don't always have 24 hours to do everything, and once in a blue moon are the log-in servers dead for over half a day.

Imagine that even if those things rarely happen, they do happen a couple of times in the course of a thousand of days. And when it does... shit hits the fan. What better example to give than the one day that single-handedly ended the competition between EMS players in having the highest guild contribution score: the infamous "15-minute-day".

Its name is self-explanatory: 15 minutes after reset o'clock, the game went on an emergency maintenance for over 24 hours. To make matters worse: prior to reset o'clock, there was another maintenance that required the game to be patched afterwards. Meaning that if you didn't pay attention to the server status, patch the game immediately post-maintenance and get on those dailies, you were out of luck. And this is me writing about the events of that 15-minute-day in hindsight, because in the heat of the moment, nobody was prepared for it, and nobody was expecting it. But since contribution is one of the first things that I do when I log onto Maple, I was fortunate enough to have it done within that 15 minute time period. I can't say the same for others; everyone was busy exploiting a silly event instead.

Days such as those are a constant reminder that it's best to do your dailies while you still can, unless you are willing to risk being caught off-guard. But ultimately that's a matter of how much one cares for it. Dare I say that it's healthier to not pursuit these things, but personally: I don't care. While it is a silly thing in a silly game that has no right to be that important - it is meaningful to me. Let's see how high this number climbs. To greater heights!

[EMS] Yeti x Pink Bean Complete!

In honor of the old bean, the self-aware namesake continues to lives on.

Sup guys! With the Yeti x Pink Bean event closing soon, I thought it would be interesting to write a blogpost about it. Released over a year ago (!) in KMS, this event was long overdue for EMS. It was about damn time.

Having experienced the original Pink Bean event in late 2015, I've expressed my fair share of criticism on how that event went - mainly about the grind being inconsistent and overstaying its welcome. I tried out the second round of Pink Bean (which only added a handful of new skills) and gave up between Level 165 and 180. After that, I didn't feel like trying out the event again, simply because there was no reason to go through that slog a second time. That has changed with the Yeti x Pink Bean event however, as there is an incentive to grind out the Yeti class to Level 200 for the Yeti Incredi title, which you can then exchange together with a Pink Holy Beanity for the new Yeti x Pink Bean title.

But as the original Pink Bean event makes for a terrible point of reference, I expected the new Yeti class to be the same. It took me weeks to get my Pink Bean to Level 200, so I was prepared for another slog. However, against my expectations, I was in for a surprise: the event was actually a lot of fun. All of the unnecessary fat is trimmed away and many of the improvements were made on the good ol' grind to Level 200.

For starters, Yeti and Pink Bean can now only be created on a separate world, and that was for the best. Previous Pink Bean events were plagued by the maximum character limit; you would have to destroy a character to make space, which then after the event you had to grind the lost character all over again since it often was part of your Union progress. Additionally, the main servers are no longer swarmed by the large number of Pink Beans (and Yeti's) in every popular grinding spot, which used to be a legitimate problem that was made worse by the slow leveling speed (which then affects map and Burning Field availability, which in turn perpetuated the poor leveling speed). Having all of these characters grind on a separate server also reduces the load on the main server, which further proves why these supplementary servers (including Burning World) are important to have.

To say that the grinding speed has been greatly improved, would be an understatement. Instead of having to spend several weeks like with the original event, I was able to grind my Yeti to Level 200 in less than a day. There are several factors that contributes to this difference, including but not limited to:

• Compared to the original Pink Bean, Yeti has more than double the amount of skills. Skill unlocks are more frequent and better spread out, and Yeti skills are far more consistent than the original Pink Bean. I felt that there was always a new skill around the corner, so the experience never got stale.
• Compared to the original Pink Bean, Yeti's gameplay loop is far more suited for grinding. Lots of AoE skills that can be used often, with a good number of homing skills to help out defeating enemies that are out of reach. Roll for a cooldown skip Inner Ability, and amusingly nuke the map each time Violin Solo resets.
• The leveling curve from 1 to 200 has been reduced a couple of times since the original Pink Bean. Keep in mind that the original Pink Bean came out before 5th Job, Union, Wild/Fury Totem, Kerning Tower, Omega Sector's reopening, Twilight Perion being available at Level 180, Guild Skills giving stats, many staple Skill Links, modern Hyper Stats such as Bonus EXP and Monster Damage, and the EMS migration.
• The Yeti x Pink Bean world runs on a higher EXP rate, topped with Yeti having additional skills with built-in EXP modifiers to further boost it to higher rates. Even without access to guilds, Cash Shop and Union, the grinding speed of a vanilla Yeti outperforms a modern class with over 5x EXP and Wild Totem in the same map, with far less funding available on the character and with half the Burning Field bonus applied.
• The Yeti x Pink Bean world has a special merchant that supplies all kinds of items to fund your Yeti from scratch, similar to what they did with the LAB server. In addition, the "Step Up!" event also provides free equipment and many useful items. Keep in mind that the original event had much less of these shortcuts.

Having finished the Yeti class early, I still had plenty of weeks left on the event. So, out of curiosity I decided to try out the latest Pink Bean, just to see how much difference those 6 years makes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Pink Bean is now (almost) on par with Yeti, and it didn't take much effort to casually grind Pink Bean to Level 200 either.

• As with Yeti, Pink Bean has a bunch of new skills. Many key skills are now unlocked 20 to 40 levels earlier, several older skills have their cooldowns greatly reduced (one even has it entirely removed) and some of the inconsistencies (read: wrath of RNGesus) that harmed the grinding experience are gone.
• Gameplay loop is drastically different. Pink Bean now has two Flash Jumps (the original Flash Jump is replaced with a new one but the old one can still be used through a command input). Instead of relying completely on Pink Powerhouse to defeat enemies, Pink Powerhouse is now mainly used to trigger various homing skills to clear the map instead. The staggering amount of homing skills that are activated makes the grind at least four times faster now, not to mention it greatly improves the grinding experience. Imagine that with the original Pink Bean, you had to party up with six others in Veracent's Dim Light until 160 by holding down shift for many boring hours because Pink Powerhouse's lackluster hitbox was all you had.
• Missed opportunities: the skill Twilight of Gods is unlocked way too late at Level 195 (only for five levels, which is about less than an hour worth of grind), and Pink Bean's cooldown cycles (mainly Pink Shadow) are definitely not suited for the Monster Punch King challenge, making these rankings on Pink Bean mostly decided towards whoever got the luckiest by rolling high cooldown skip rates on their Inner Ability.
• While not new for this event in particular, being able to change the color of your Pink Bean is a great addition. In fact, most of the skills are also adjusted to that same color, and that's just fantastic. Forget soloing Kalos and the grind to Level 300; FashionStory is the end goal what all true warriors strive for.

And last but certainly not least, the Pink Bean's Secret Diary has been reworked into "Step Up!", which takes out all of the poorly designed milestones and narrows it down to the essentials. No more requiring players to do insurmountable tasks such as gaining traits on a character that has no access to Professions, be forced to complete certain Theme Dungeons, do silly nonsense or to complete the We Are Forever Warriors challenge. Additional rewards are available (including a very generous amount of 50.000 Maple Points for little to no effort) and thankfully they are optional and not part of "Step Up!". And as icing on the cake, you no longer have to wait until after the event to claim any of your rewards. You'd be surprised to hear how many Maplers couldn't be bothered to read any of the patch notes back then, and ultimately went complaining on the forums because they ended up empty-handed. Silly Maplers. Heh.

Imagine spending twice the amount of grinding effort... for not even twice the amount of stats.
A weird way of doing things, but it'll do. Is it really too much to ask for double the Boss Damage?

All in all, kudos to Nexon. I had fun with this event, and it's definitely the right way moving forward. Now, if they would further improve some of the skill unlocks and cooldowns for Pink Bean, allow players to receive Yeti x Pink Bean without having to lose your two titles and give Yeti the same recolor option as Pink Bean, then next event would be even better than it already is. For now, I'll have to wait until the next round so that I can get myself a new Yeti Incredi.

Here's a hot take: Yeti isn't just a Pirate, it literally is a pre-Big Bang Buccaneer reskin - but then if the class didn't suck and was released in 2021. Yeti Rage is awfully similar to Energy Charge, and Yeti Smash is awfully similar to Energy Blast. Yeti captures the original Buccaneer's concept and likeness better than the upcoming Destiny revamp. Ironic. 

Don't forget that tomorrow is the 15th anniversary of EMS!

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

[EMS] Level 262!

Ding! With several Magnificent Growth Potions scheduled this Summer, I should be able to reach Level 263 during the Destiny update. Let's see if I can reach Level 265 before the end of this year, for that Crest of the Solar coverage.

I wonder if I'm able to reach Hotel Arcs before I max out my Cernium Symbol. That location is unlocked at Level 270, and unfortunately that's still far away. While currently events distribute more than enough Grandis Symbols, support on the leveling side is a bit low by comparison. As of now, I'm expecting to reach Hotel Arcs towards the end of 2023... But knowing Nexon, there's probably a bunch of improvements waiting around the corner, so I guess I'll be fine.

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

[EMS] Bishop and HP Recovery Skills +30%

I wrote this in an attempt to make information about this more readily available to those who care, since it doesn't seem to be well documented or public knowledge. While it's not the kind of blogpost I was expecting to write about, 

it's an interesting topic to have researched and covered, nonetheless. Let's see if this'll help anyone out.

Released with Potential in 2010, a stat that many players are familiar with: HP Recovery Items and Skills +30%. 

• Can be found on any item with Potential, except for weapons, secondaries and emblems.
• Can appear multiple times on the same item; no restrictions.
• Only appears on Unique and Legendary Potential.
• Unique gives 30%, Legendary gives 40%, assuming the item is Level 71+.
• Lower healing rates can also be sourced from Additional Potential, but that's a waste of money.

I'll just shorten it to "HPR+" from now on.

Despite what its name implies, the way HPR+ works is not exactly what it should do. This Potential line will only work on a handful type of skills, but covering that much is not the goal of this blogpost. But basically, if you regenerate health periodically, or if you heal while attacking, this HPR+ boost is not applied. It must be as simple as "press skill to recover health", for skills such as Heal and HP Recovery. The Skill Link Invincible Belief currently works with it, but I believe it is a bug: its skill description states that it is unaffected by effects which "modify recovery skill potency".

Bishop has a bunch of healing skills, but only three skills will work with this Potential line. Since Heal already fully restores everyone's health, the only skill that matters in context of this blogpost is Angel Ray. For clarification:

• Holy Fountain does not work with HPR+ (as stated in its skill description).
• Pray and Angels of Libra do not work either, since both skills "regenerate health".
• Peacemaker does work, and it's pretty much the same story as Heal.
• Let's not forget Heal and Peacemaker have a cooldown, while Angel Ray does not.
  
  

Angel Ray heals the user, and then also heals any party members standing inside the projectile's trajectory.

• Angel Ray will always heal the user each time the skill is used, unless the situation prohibits healing.
• Angel Ray will only heal party members if they stand inside the projectile's trajectory.
• AR's trajectory is narrow in height, so it's difficult to heal party members with it that are jumping around, were launched by boss attacks, or are using flight skills such as Blink.
• Angel Ray's healing rates are susceptible to changes in healing proficiency.
• AR's healing rates can be further boosted with HPR+.
• AR's healing rates can be deteriorated in bosses, such as Magnus and Damien.

The base healing rate of Angel Ray is 20% HP. For each 30% HPR+ line that you have equipped, a bonus 30% of the base 20% healing is added, and this bonus calculation is applied for each HPR+ line that is currently equipped.

• My Bishop has 23171 HP, and has eight lines of 30% HPR+ equipped. Angel Ray would heal 4634 (20% of 23171) per attack. My equips would add 1390 HP (30% of 4634) eight times (number of HPR+ owned) on top of the base 4634, making it a total of 15746 HP. That's about 68% HP restored with each attack.
• To fully restore with each Angel Ray, you would only need 14 lines of 30% HPR+.

So, if you were to have a single 30% HPR+ on most of your equip slots, you would see your health bar go back to full each time you use Angel Ray. Contextually, this is a very powerful advantage as you would mitigate chip damage, which often is more lethal than instant-death attacks as items such as potions or healing familiars are restricted in how often you can rely on them. Ideally, the "most optimal" build would be to run four Legendary items with 40/30/30 to achieve a 99% restoration rate, but that's easier said than done - let alone expensive. Food for thought, though.

The effects of HPR+ are only applied to the character and that character's skills. So if you have HPR+ on a Bishop, use Angel Ray, you would receive the boosted healing - but if you party with a Bishop, you wouldn't receive the boosted healing, even if you had HPR+ equipped and were also playing Bishop. So that's when the other healing skills, such as Heal, Holy Fountain, Angels of Libra and Peacemaker come in handy. That said, for whatever reason did Nexon decide to nerf Bishop's healing with the upcoming Destiny revamp, as it's going to halve Angel Ray's healing rate without compensation. So much for demanding improvements. Like I said: be careful what you wish for.

With the post-Destiny healing rate of only 10%, players would now need double the amount of HPR+ lines: twenty-eight. The difference between needing 14 and 28 is as night and day, due to the limited amount of equipment slots. Fourteen lines of HPR+ can be easily achieved by simply having it appear once on each equip; 28 would require you to have it twice on most items. And given how Potential works, aiming for two lines of 30% with only Unique drastically increases the amount of Master Cubes required. At that point, it's no longer the "budget build" that it currently is, since you would then need to resort to Legendary Potential to make life easier - which is prohibitively more expensive.

But let's be real: it's not necessary to have full health restores on a fast skill such as Angel Ray. Having a modest amount of HPR+ will do the job. And thankfully, if you're aiming for just that: you're in luck. Master Cubes and Cubic Blades are common to find everywhere, and they are dirt cheap to buy in bulk. Additionally, Phantom Forest provides Unique equipment, which also has no cubing fees once you have over Level 90 Insight. And if you really want to source HPR+ from Legendary, there's the abundance of staple Event Rings, such as the Glory Guard and Tenebris Expedition rings, which each comes with free Legendary Potential scrolls and hundreds of event cubes a year. 

Since most players will end up owning duplicates, they can decide to re-purpose those into HPR+ fodder.

So if you have some items with HPR+ lying around and have no clue where to use it, or if you are like me and have plenty of spare resources collecting dust - have fun messing around on a Bishop with the ridiculous amount of healing. It makes Bishop one of the easiest classes to play as (even easier than Paladin) when you need to do "boss muling", which is only becoming more prevalent with the requirement to do weekly bosses for events and the upcoming boss crystal changes. Since events demand you to do the same bosses in different difficulty tiers, it's more common than ever to create a mule to join boss runs - and Bishop is probably the best class for that. At that point, you might as well grab a few lines of HPR+, since in most cases you aren't going to contribute for much damage anyway - and it's not even an expensive investment to begin with. It's dirt cheap, and with only a couple of lines, you would continuously recover stupendous amounts of health with only minimal effort. It almost can't get any more lazy than that. Nice.

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

[EMS] Level 261!

Ding! Just hit Level 261. I should have a large chunk of EXP soon from the upcoming Magnificent Growth Potion, which is going to be distributed in a few weeks. Towards the end of this event, I should be halfway to Level 262...

Mitra's Nodestones have finally started to appear in the Auction House this week. With its non-existent demand as not many players are Level 265+, they should be more than affordable by the time I hit 265. Good. All according to plan.

In other news, I've finished scrolling my Commanding Force Earrings! Attack scrolling has always reigned supreme in the damage department... and these days we have an abundance of Premium Attack scrolls, sourced from events.

I hope that Nexon will consider to release a Premium Attack scroll for armour. You see, while events have been generous with giving out attack scrolls, these can only be used on accessories. Ironically, this difference in scrolling power often makes the average accessory stronger than our main pieces of equipment.

With each Premium Attack scroll having an established price of 1 billion mesos each, it is currently the best value because enhancing through Star Force and buying from the Meso Market are so disproportionately expensive. Heck,
I wouldn't mind it if the hypothetical armour scrolls are priced twice the amount amount of its accessory variant... since that would still be better than enhancing. Shows how much of a problem late-game costs currently are, eh?

Anyway, it's time for me to get back on that Multirandomness video. I'll see you guys again next post!

[EMS] 10 years of Ribgol!

"It's not about the numbers; it's about sending a message."

Hi guys! Today I've been using my Ribgol Sword for ten years!

For those who are unfamiliar with its story, here's a summary. In 2008, I made the decision to use Ribgol as my main weapon. It took an arduous three-year journey before I could obtain one. At the time, Ribgol was the meta. Hundreds of updates have come and gone since, but I still continue on EMS with it. Ribgol is part of my identity.

Now, here's an honest question. How playable is modern EMS with it?

Surprisingly, it's still very much playable. Old meta items such as Ribgol Sword and the Elemental Staves have aged remarkably well. The beauty of Maple's powercreep is that it's all about the upgrades. The bigger picture, if you will.

Base stats on equipment and item sets do not necessarily matter all that much compared to what is available for upgrades on each item. Scrolling is now a luxury, as the sum of Potential and Additional Potential matters far more. Even upgrades such as Additional Options and Enhancements don't add that much when you try to min/max - as long as you have a sufficient amount of it, it'll do the job. In a way, I believe that the general community underestimates how little is required to do any content in this game, and that it's all about having enough of everything. One item choice does not make or break a run; the individual behind the wheel does. 

A common analogy I use when teaching newer Maplers is one of a catapult. Maple's upgrading system is very much like that. Let's say if you have a lot of Potential but nothing elsewhere, it's like building a huge catapult that will only throw a pebble. Conversely, if you had lots of Star Force but fall short in the cubing department, it would be trying to fling a huge rock on a small-scaled catapult. The right way to upgrade in Maple is to have a good balance.

That said, what upsets me the most about Maple's way of upgrading items is how the game encourages equipment selection based on arbitrary rules, and this has always been a problem with the game's design. MapleStory has a great and diverse selection of items, but almost none of that matters since only a handful of these will get the most out of Potential, Additional Options and Enhancements. To make matters worse, the introduction of Star Force redefined how Enhancements work. So while it was possible to have up to 15 Enhancements legally on an item like Ribgol, that no longer is the case as I'm limited to up to 8. Even using the traditional method of warding items with Enhancement scrolls are overruled by Star Force. That and there's also the Supreme transferring meta, which is no longer available.

But does any of that matter when it comes down to it? No, of course not. The reason why it upsets me is because Nexon shoots themselves in the foot with this. You have all of these fascinating methods of upgrading but none of it is used to its fullest potential as everyone is thrown into the same stale ideology of "the most optimal build". And for a game that invented the modern gaming monetization industry, it is baffling that Nexon somehow hasn't decided to capitalize on removing these restrictions on any item of choice, allowing one to upgrade items to their fullest potential.

I believe that the game would be more fun if it was possible to make any item "viable" again. Most people forget that there used to be a sense of build diversity where no matter what class you played, everyone had their own layout and it all worked. Now, while there's more diversity in class choices, there's less difference between players. That's just a shame. Ironically, given the current direction of Maple's storyline (both its main story and the World Tour-related content around it), it would be fitting within its own narrative to overcome these restrictions as the player's side of the story are opposing the concept of a predetermined destiny dictated by a group of control freaks who limits everything.

Anyway, let's see if I can get my Ribgol ranked to Legendary Additional Potential this year. With the generous amount of Additional Potential Cubes given out with each major update, it shouldn't take too long for me to obtain my first. And what better way to achieve that, by unlocking it on the item that personally matters the most?

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