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!
