[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!