[EMS] Level 276, and a lot more!

Ding! Time for this month's news roundup. Trying to fit all the milestones into today's title would've made it too cluttered, so I had shorten it! There's a lot to talk about, but as I have a lot on my plate now, I'll keep it short...

I've hit Level 276 early this month, and I'm still on schedule to 280. I'm expecting to hit Level 277 mid-September.
My second Hyper Burning is also done! Like last time, it's another Ice/Lightning. I've job changed the previous Hyper Burning into a Bishop, and this one to a F/P. With the next Hyper Burning during New Age, I'll do Ice/Lightning one more time to have the complete set (and a second character with 6th Job). After that, I'm considering Viper next.

In terms of how easy it was to grind out this season's Hyper Burning - it was slightly easier. Out of curiosity, I've tried to incorporate the daily EXP into Hyper Burning to see how significant the EXP rewards are from doing the Arcane River daily quests. While this approach is slightly more costly due to Symbol costs, it has a much faster EXP yield compared to traditional power-grinding, and you'll avoid being low on Arcane Force requirements for later maps. Conclusion: it's a viable alternative, and it's going to be even better after New Age with the many upcoming changes.

After saving a bunch of mesos, I finally got my hands on a Source of Suffering! Even with the current trade restrictions, I'm always looking for workarounds that fall within the rules. You see, Nexon has enforced their trade restrictions very literal to what is described, meaning that anything that falls outside seems to be fair game. Player housing and the Guild Castle have proven themselves to be essential*. Now, if only we still had Duey for sending/receiving items...

*Going into detail on the many ways to circumvent the trade restriction will have to be for another blogpost.

Additionally, I've also managed to get my Source of Suffering straight to Legendary Additional Potential with a well-timed Double Miracle Time! I still had my stack of Additional Potential Cubes left from the Savior event shop, and that seemed to do the trick. Now, while that's my third item with Legendary Additional Potential, there's still a lot left...

What is perhaps the biggest milestone of the month: my Amaterasu's Glove has 22 Enhancements! At last, my first item to have reached that milestone (it would've been Ribgol if Nexon allowed me, blech). With the Sixth Star event, I've took a bit of an unusual gamble that I probably wouldn't have tried, were it not for the event reward. After buying the Source of Suffering, I still had more than enough mesos left to give it a shot. I did boom the Amaterasu's Glove a couple of times, but in the end I still managed to get it to 22. For now, it's back to saving up mesos for 6th Job.

Last but not least: my obligation to report on my progress on the Destiny blogpost. Out of the 98 chapters, 17 chapters are already done, 22 chapters are confirmed to not require a GIF (which saves a lot of time), and I have the material ready for at least 4 chapters. To summarize: work is going decently well. Not as fast as I'd like to admit, but it's going somewhere nonetheless. It's easy to forget how deceptively time-consuming working on a few proper GIFs are...

The chapters and my work on the GIFs are in chronological order of Job Advancements, so I'm expecting to wrap up 2nd Job and parts of 3rd Job in September. Flash Slash and Aura Blade are the chapters with the most amount of work, because they'll need multiple GIFs per chapter. Every other chapter will only have one, if not two, each.

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

[EMS] Level 275! Second Legendary Additional Potential GET!

Ding! Level 275, the old level cap! That means one thing: Odium!

More symbols, more daily EXP! And not only that, I have my second Legendary Additional Potential! As I still have all of my Additional Potential Cubes left from the Savior shop, there's a good chance to get my next item to Unique.

Now that I've hit Level 275, I'm aiming to reach Level 280 before Arteria hits. Currently, I'm at an average of 2% a day, so it is very likely to happen as 6th Job is a three-month update. Arteria isn't released until the second update, so there's still plenty of time with one entire month of Shangri-La dailies, a reduced EXP curve and higher EXP rates for pretty much everything. I'm definitely not going to reach Level 285 before Carcion hits, but I'm more than happy with the prospect of having two of three symbols unlocked at release day. Much better than what happened last time.

But both 275 and the rank-up happened last month, actually. I was planning to release this blogpost several weeks ago, but I've been so busy lately that before I knew it, it was already the end of the month. Now, I have been working on the GIFs for the Destiny blogpost, but as I didn't have much time, I only have completed a handful of them.

To give you an idea: one GIF takes between one and three hours to create after I've recorded it. I've mentioned that my Destiny blogpost would be under 50000 words. It's well past that now. Here's a perspective on how much it is: the completed works has a total of 98 chapters, and each chapter is about the size of this blogpost you are reading now. So yes, you could argue that the Destiny blogpost is worth one hundred monthly blogposts: that's eight years, in fact.

Certain chapters will contain multiple GIFs, some will not. It's safe to assume that I'll need over 70 of them, and with my ongoing health issues, I can only produce a handful a day. While I want to have this thing out as soon as possible, I'm currently facing the reality that it might take until the end of the year, in worst case scenario maybe even next year. I'm not even sure anymore if I can have this and the Crest of the Solar blogpost out before 6th Job arrives.

Right now, Maple's been exceptionally loaded on dailies because of several overlapping events. I'm currently playing between five and six hours a day now because Hyper Burning and Guild Castle are very time-consuming. This hasn't really given me much spare time to work on said blogpost, but thankfully most of these events will end early August. So I'm expecting to be able to pick up the slack next month. So, let's assume I'm able to produce at least ten GIFs a week - that would still require up to three months. Either way, I'll do my best to deliver on it. Speaking of delivering...

I do have good news. After messing around with my blog's source code, I've managed to add a table of contents feature to my blog. I have already updated several older blogposts to include one. You can see them for yourself:

• All of the published seven (of eight) 5th Job skill waves: V, Beyond, Nova, Ark, Black, Glory and Awake.
• Other blogposts: Upper Charge & Leap Attack, the Enrage 1/3 Split, Blink and Adventure Rings 101.
• Examples of blogposts without, but are planned to have one later: Ryude's Ruling, LEGO Inside Tour.

It might not be perfect, but it does the job. If it works, it works. And that's all I really need, to be honest.

Of course, the Destiny blogpost will have it now, too*. This is also why I haven't been able to get much work done on the GIFs. It took several days to find the right table of contents that suited my needs, to figure out how to get it to work, and to keep it from interfering with Blogger's core functionality. I went with this one. I initially tried the code as it is, but after I had an incident, I had to modify the code and define new headers for a cleaner environment. That did the job. Apparently, headers such as h1, h2 and h3 are already occupied by Blogger's source code for the blog's template, so these can't be used with the suggested code as is given by the tutorial. It will mess up the blog's appearance if you do.

*Yes, I'm implying here that the Destiny blogpost would've originally been without one, if it weren't for this. Pain.

But now that it's working, I think it's a great addition to the blog. I've wanted to have one for a long time, and for some reason, Blogger doesn't have one by default. The main reason why I picked this code in particular, is because it allows me to hyperlink immediately to chapters of choice (example), as seen with the hyperlink ending with #point(number). It's a very handy feature, especially in case of the Destiny blogpost, where I'm constantly referring to older blogposts. I'll update older blogposts to incorporate chapter-based hyperlinking where appropriate, in the future. And while there are several other features I'd still like to add (i.e. picture slideshow for LEGO posts), I'll leave that for another time.

Anyway, that's it for today - I'll see you guys again next post!

[EMS] Level 274!

Ding! Level 274! Should have Odium unlocked around the end of the month. Next week will be the showcase for the New Age update. Of course I'll be watching it live. Always interested to see what the madmen at Nexon are up to next.

Now, here's some good news: I've wrapped up writing the Destiny blogpost. Since last month, actually. It's close to fifty-thousand words, but the total word count is going to be lower after I've cleaned up and streamlined the text. 

I have yet to start on the GIFs though, and that's mainly because I've been busy for the past couple of weeks. I'm trying to get a proof of concept for a LEGO project to work before the end of the month, so most of the past couple of weeks have been spent in that - I haven't had much sleep. I've also been casually working on a short Youtube video, so expect that somewhere during the Summer, after Destiny's blogpost. But that's it for now, time to get back to work...

I'll see you guys again next post!

[EMS] Level 273! Cernium Symbol MAX!

Ding! Two levels left to unlock the next destination: Odium! Just a few more months...

But more importantly, I've finally maxed out my Cernium Symbol! Kinda like with the Arcane Symbols, I maxed it out the "old way" before they'll drastically reduce the difficulty. With Savior, there's going to be double the symbol rewards for Cernium and Arcs, and in KMS, they've announced that tradeable symbols will drop from monsters in a few weeks.

Honestly, I much prefer Grandis Symbols over Arcane Symbols, and that's mainly because it is what Arcane Symbols used to be: the late-game tutorial. They had to reduce the difficulty of Arcane Symbols in order to accommodate for MapleStory's shift towards Union; that makes sense. But having high symbol requirements in order to proceed with the game is something I find more fun and rewarding. Y'know, having goals to work towards. And a truckload of STR.

Anyway, from all of MapleStory's progression systems that I've experienced over the past 15,5 years, I much prefer the symbol approach above anything else. It's guaranteed progress, divided in digestible chunks of dailies, that also provides a bunch of EXP. If only everything else could be more like this... but then the game would go bankrupt lol.

It'll still take forever until my Hotel Arcs Symbol is done, though. For the time being, I will continue the Cernium dailies for the EXP reward. At Level 273, it's still way too much, for that little effort. That, and I occasionally need event fodder.

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

[EMS] Level 272! Super Yeti x Pink Bean Medal GET!

Ding! Time for this month's news roundup. As I've hit Level 272 early this month, I'm not too far away from Level 273. That should happen next week, alongside finally maxing out my Cernium Symbol!

I've also managed to obtain the Super Yeti x Pink Bean Medal, which is a reward for reaching Level 220 on either a Yeti or Pink Bean character. Last year I've mentioned that I would give the next Yeti event another swing to claim a second Yeti Incredi title, as I've had to exchange my previous one for the Yeti x Pink Bean title. Which of course, I did.

As Level 200 was as effortless as last time, I was curious to see how challenging Level 220 would be. To my surprise, those twenty levels were arguably easier than the first two-hundred. You see, the event is incredibly generous when it comes to post-Level 200 support. You'll receive more than enough 3x EXP coupons, a free Arcane weapon, a billion mesos and hundred Arcane Symbols to start out. Even better, after Level 210 you'll receive 5x (!) EXP coupons, free Arcane gear and even more mesos/symbols. This kept the EXP rates consistent all the way to Level 220.

To make the grind even easier than it already was, the current Rock Spirit growth event gives everyone enough EXP to go from 212 to Level 220. As Yeti and Pink Beans are located on a separate world, it would not sacrifice the rewards on your main account. I planned to take the daily approach, where I would kill 3000 monsters each day for twenty days to max out on the Rock Spirit EXP coupons and hit 220. However, I reached 220 in considerably less time.

That was how effortless Level 220 was for the Yeti class. I ended up with everything in spades: lots of unused items, lots of unused EXP coupons and with minimum effort, one-shotting everything with Yeti Smarts skills was pretty much guaranteed. If you are aiming for Level 200, you might as well give 220 a shot... Free 250 Growth pot if you manage.

Anyway, I'm close to wrapping up on the first draft for the Destiny blogpost. I'm expecting to have it done towards the end of May, where I'll then be cleaning up the bloat and streamlining the text. Creating all the GIFs required will take another several weeks, so I'm currently expecting a June or July release. Whether if that's possible will depend on how many breaks I'll need, or how many distractions I'll have. Because remember: blogging is just a hobby.

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