[2019] What happened this year to Rayque?

It's that time of the year again! It's time for another summary!
This marks the 9th summary on this blog. Next year will be our tenth!

As always: the Rayque3 Staff wishes you a great 2020!

2019 to me was a year where the ups were fair but the downs were rough. For instance, this year marked the end of my time as a student as I've graduated from school. However, doing so was not an easy thing to do, and neither was graduating without consequences. From what I'm aware of, I now tick all the necessary boxes to apply for the job I've been working my entire life towards. But that of itself has become a difficult situation of its own.

Basically, I'm stuck in a limbo for the time being until I can apply for the job. Despite that I'm now ready for the job from an objective point of view, working abroad for the remainder of my life on my own requires more than just being a potential candidate for that Product Designer life. How long this "limbo" will take, I don't know. But what I do know is that it'll be time to finish my Hailfire Droid next year and hopefully be done with the Constructor in (early?) 2021!

Let's get to those statistics of 2019.

[Lego] So, I just got this Sealed Box of #8924...

Behold, one of the best Bionicle sets of all time! At least, that is the general consensus about this particular model.

Maxilos is one of the very few Bionicle sets to have both shoulder and waist articulation. You'd be surprised to hear that from the hundreds of constraction figures and combiner models that LEGO® has produced in two decades, only a couple of them have shoulder articulation and less than thirty have waist articulation (the majority of these being CCBS, which came out after gen 1 Bionicle).

I had to wait about a year before I could snag a sealed box from Bricklink. Most of these (larger, boxed) Bionicle sets are always in a continuous cycle of ebb and flow on the aftermarket. Sometimes there are plenty of them available, sometimes there can be years of none. That said, the 2007 lineup is truly among my favorite in the line.

That's it for today - I'll see you guys again tomorrow, with our annual tradition of the Year Summary!

[EMS] Spider in Mirror - Level 30!

Sup guys, I've managed to max out Spider in Mirror recently! There has been plenty of EXP Nodestones in the past couple of coin shops, so I managed to get my hands on enough of them to max the skill out.

Anyway, I have to bring some less positive news that I can't avoid mentioning here.

Due to a change of circumstances in my personal life, I can no longer publish my Glory's skill wave blogpost any time soon. I have to postpone it until at least February 2020, after the update is over. The first draft of about 7500 words is done, but I just can't do any of the quality checking and image building soon. I really can't do any of that earlier than until after the update. Eh well, on a positive note: we should have more information about the Rise update around that time, which I can then include in the blogpost if necessary. Apologies for the delay.

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

[EMS] Maple World Goddess' Blessing - Level 30!

Well, the Glory update is out today and as you could expect I came prepared. As mentioned earlier this year I've been endlessly saving up Nodeshards to spend them in skills that are worth maxing out. The skill that came with today's wave of 5th Job skills is one of those that encourages you to max it out, which I did.

No, I am not going to do the whole skill coverage now. I'm going to need some time to collect my thoughts, as I usually prefer to wait at least two weeks before I write like a madman on this blog. Expect the blogpost either early or mid-December. There is some stuff I need to talk about regarding this skill, and there's also some (positive) changes made to several Hero skills that I need to address as well.

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

[EMS] First three-lined %-STR Potential GET!

Sup guys! Earlier this week I managed to roll my first item that has three lines of %-STR!

I was doubting whenever I should make a blogpost out if it or not, due to the possibility of needing to publish a new post for every instance an item gets to three lines of %-STR in the near future. I then decided to just write this one-off celebratory blogpost to focus on the milestone of having rolled my first three-liner instead.

Unlike most players, I actually don't tend to craft Meister Cubes myself. Any Meister Cube materials I find are stored on a mule in case of emergency, i.e. if there is an upcoming Murgoth season and I would need to roll a couple of Item Drop Rate lines in short notice. Instead, I keep doing Commerci dailies (and bosses) and that rewards me with a couple of these Meister Cubes a week. I had to use these cubes to rank up every item to Legendary first, which took me a total of three years. That also meant that getting any progress on Potential was difficult during this period, as all of my cubing efforts could not be invested in damage improvement. But since I achieved that milestone earlier this year, I can now focus all of my cubes into rolling something good, and apparently the first item didn't take that long all things considered.

What item I decide to cube has to do with something I call "ladder cubing", which basically means you first start out with trying to cube a reasonable amount of stats on every item, and then work your way up by raising the bar each time. In example: you start out with trying to roll one 9%-STR on every Legendary item (excluding special items such as gloves, shoes, weapons, secondaries and emblems), and when you're done, you raise the goal to 12%-STR on each. Then, you'll try to roll at least two %-STR lines on each item and you keep raising the bar in small increments until you eventually hit 12/12/12 on every item that needs it. Then you do the same for Additional Potential.

Although as you would probably know by now, Potential is RNG so it all boils down to luck. Usually I end up with the short end of the stick in pretty much anything, but fortunately that has not been the case this time. I'm currently on a ladder of trying to get two lines of %-STR on each item as I still have a couple of items with only a single line. So, my Chaos Pink Bean Mark was one of the items that I was trying to roll from one to two %-STR lines, but I somehow managed to get to 12/9/9 early on by sheer luck. So it seems that I wouldn't have to recube this item until everything else has 12/9/9 and then I'll be aiming for 12/12/9 and 12/12/12 in the distant future.

While I won't expect to write more blogposts regarding 12/9/9 or 12/12/9 rolled items, I would write a post about when I hit any 12/12/12's (since that essentially means that item is "done" with its main Potential stats, unless there will be a future update that would change this) or when all of my items are decked out with three desired Potential lines.

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