MapleStory Iceberg: A Party Quest Retrospective

if you've ever played MapleStory I think it's safe to say you're familiar with what a party Quest is remember this that we love this stuff exp mesos exclusive items and the ability to participate in a social activity are defining characteristics that make party quests so universally loved within the MapleStory community ask anyone in 2023 the number one thing that they want to see in modern maple story I can guarantee you'll hear bringing back the social aspect of the game more than a few times and for good reason party quests are without a doubt one of the things that they're referring to in this video we're going to go over every PQ that has ever been a part of GMS at least every PQ before Arcane River was released these really aren't that fun or interesting there are a lot of pqs to cover nearly 30 to be precise some still remain in modern maple story in some form but most have been removed and some forgotten entirely over the years these pqs were also modified in a variety of ways so for the sake of ease and consistency I'll be primarily discussing them as they were in their initial implementation but if it's interesting enough I'll discuss any changes they may have received this is a topic that I'm very close to and care about a lot some of my Fondest Memories of MapleStory lie within the walls of EOS Tower or in carnival PQ so sit back relax and join me as we take a look through one of maplestory's most forgotten and dearly remembered pieces of content but before we get started however I want to take a moment to discuss today's video sponsor Idol on eidolon is a free Idol MMO with so much content I wouldn't be able to fit it all in this video eidolon is heavily inspired by games like MapleStory and RuneScape which is what interested me in playing it to begin with and as someone who really enjoys idle games on top of that one as in-depth and fleshed out as eidolon instantly hooked me if you enjoy MapleStory you should give Idol on a shot where a game like MapleStory struggles to give direction when starting out nowadays overwhelming players pretty quickly eidolon does a great job of teaching you the game and helping you get an understanding of how it's played so that you never get lost and you're always making progress I started playing it myself recently and I've absolutely loved how the game is available on both iOS and steam allowing me to seamlessly switch between my phone and my computer you can play idol on for free on Steam using the links posted in the description and the pinned comment thanks again to eidolon for sponsoring this video so what's a party Quest I think a lot of you are familiar with the term but let's cover it quickly you can think of them like Dungeons and other MMOs like World of Warcraft a group of players work together to complete the challenges laid out before them pqs often have a little bit of a Twist when compared with Dungeons and other MMOs though for example puzzles are a common theme within party quests other times a party Quest consists of competitive content between two different parties and usually the puzzles and challenges laid out within the PQ will require a specific skill from a specific class in order to clear making that class a requirement to complete the PQ the term party Quest can apply to all kinds of content in Maplestory but the community generally agrees on the ones in this video being the most accurate I did leap out a few pqs because they were really only a PQ in spirit and not really in practice and the fact that there's plenty of content in this video already don't worry though I'm well aware of what I left out and they will all be covered in a separate video with that being said let's move on to our first PQ the first PQ ever added to MapleStory Finds Its home in kerning City first time together colloquially referred to as simply kerning PQ or kpq seems to have been a part of the game since before the GMS beta launched in September 2004. I can't find any record of it being released leading me to believe it was part of the initial game which is pretty cool this first party Quest requires exactly four players to enter the level range is 21 to 30 and since this range primarily encompasses first job classes actual class choice is almost irrelevant however the monsters in this PQ are pretty strong with decent avoidability so you probably don't want a party of four level 21 Warriors you'd never kill anything I definitely did not ever have that happen the first stage requires three passes to complete these passes are obtained whenever a party member collects the correct number of coupons based on the question they receive from cloto and you absolutely did not want the 35 coupon question especially as level 21 Warrior the coupons drop from the LIE Gators located in this stage and the drop rate is 100 this is something you'll find as a common theme you don't deal with RNG drops in pqs very often at least not where it matters for progression of the PQ the ligators in this stage have a solid HP to exp ratio and make pretty decent grinding mobs when you're dealing with a party of players who are all very strong more than once I've found myself in a party grinding on the ligators for the better part of 20 minutes since we were able to get better exp rates doing so than by actually finishing the PQ once all three passes are obtained the stage is complete and everyone can move on to the next stage in stage 2 you have four Vines three of these Vines when occupied by players make up the correct combination to move on to the next stage and the combination is random every time simply have your party members try every combination and ask clodo if it's correct until you find the right one this is the first of many combination puzzle stages as we'll call them that we'll see for quite a while in the PQ scene these Vines required precise placement of the character as well and it wasn't uncommon to find players constantly readjusting themselves so that they were as close to the middle of the vine as possible you see the code that handled checking whether a player was on a specific box Vine platform Etc sometimes didn't work right it wasn't very accurate especially in the early days when someone was on a platform but not being counted the NPC would let you know and this was another somewhat common occurrence Party leaders would often have to tell someone to get closer to the center of the platform so that they were actually counted it's a dumb thing but it's fun to remember after the vine stage it's on to stage three this is another combination puzzle stage slide more complex having five options instead of four but still only requiring a three-person combination this stage is my personal favorite within kerning PQ since it's cat themed [Music] and if you want a secret trick that I use to utilize constantly try to stand on the platform with two kitties as this statistically gives you the best chance to have a head start and get your desired placement in stage four [Music] oh stage four the first combination puzzle stage that could almost be considered tedious it's a race to get to the first Barrel as fast as possible so that you didn't have to jump around a bunch whoever was last to the barrels was likely standing on Barrel 3 and this meant that they had to move around the most of the three party members in order to find the correct combination it was sort of an Unwritten rule first come first serve level 30 second job magicians thrived in this race to the barrels as they had better Mobility than any other class that could possibly enter the PQ if you wanted a real Advantage though you wore white bottom shoes and a bathrobe maybe even sneaking a speed potion so that you could be the one to sit on the throne though it was nice when you were partied with someone who just loved being on Barrel 3 as you never had to worry about being there yourself even if you were last you might have noticed that every stage in kerning PQ so far has only required three players as stage four is the last stage that has a party member number requirement this meant that you could technically do kerning PQ with only three players but entry required four the only time this became relevant was when someone would disconnect after entering but three-person kerning pqs happened more often than you might initially think once stage 4 was completed it was on to the boss stage the finale of kerning PQ the party leader needs to collect 10 passes to finish the stage party members kill curse eyes Junior neckies and the boss itself King Slime a pretty tough and exciting first boss to be introduced to King Slime had a jumping earthquake style attack that hit pretty hard and was decently tanky with high avoidability my fellow Warriors this boss is not for us we struggled to have enough accuracy to hit the Junior neckies and King Slime so the only hope we had of squeezing out a little more exp from this stage was by killing the curse eyes it's hard being a warrior nobody gets it once all the passes are collected the party leader needs to talk to clodo to finish the PQ and move on to the bonus stage and each player receives a reward these are two more Staples of party quests yes players would get exp at the end of most stages and they had an opportunity to participate in the social activity that is overcoming a challenge with other people but everyone loved the rewards at the end of a PQ and kerning PQ had some iconic ones [Music] notably this PQ was the only source of blue or green bamboo hats for a very long time they were likely obtainable through gotchapon but since they were a kerning PQ reward they weren't actually too difficult to come by these aren't the most coveted items within the maple world but the stat boost is nice and they're absolutely iconic pieces of headwear the earrings were also a nice semi-valuable prize but if you already had the bamboo hat you wanted all you were really looking for was that overall armor for Dex 10 squirrel this would have netted you a good bit of mesos in the early game from high-level players who wanted to merge you pretty hard by undercutting the actual value of the scroll but the early game was for most players myself included the whole game so this 40 000 mesos you got from the level 99 dragon knight who then sold it for 300K two minutes later that was good money for us the PQ set item for kpq are the squishy shoes which were dropped by King Slime at a low rate and were a decent pair of shoes for a new player but these weren't added until much later in the game turning PQ is nothing special a large number of platforms that are filled with horned mushrooms and green mushrooms by the way did you know that Nexon intentionally changed the name of horned mushrooms to horny mushrooms in the version 28 update that's weird anyway this bonus stage doubles as a decent grinding location but primarily serves as a waiting area where players bide their time evading potential trackers let's talk about tracking in Old maple story there was a command that allowed you to track the location of any player as long as you knew their IGN this is how players were able to stalk high-ranked players and see what they were up to slash find was removed on February 28 2018 with the version 193 update prior to that anyone could use it at any time to find whomever they wanted because of this and the fact that party quests were restricted to one party per Channel locking out anyone else until the party inside the PQ left a meta of tracking was created players would acquire igns of other players who were inside the PQ either by sheer coincidence or by any number of other methods and it wasn't hard to get these igns to track it could be as simple as logging in to see a group of players standing outside the entrance to the PQ making a mental note of one of their igns and there you go you now have a track players would use this information to leverage themselves into a party and attempt to steal the channel from the party that they were tracking this is what tracking refers to it happens in almost every PQ in some form and it was very prevalent in both kerning PQ and ludibrium PQ which is where our journey through maplestory's party quests takes us to next [Music] dimensional crack colloquially referred to as ludibrium PQ or just lpq is a fan favorite as well lpq feels like a journey a huge dungeon a raid even okay maybe I'm playing it up a little bit but it was Big Eight normal stages a boss stage and a bonus stage and even if you could get better exp rates just grinding the teamwork required and the rewards you could receive at the end made lpq very rewarding and a strong Contender for being the best overall content at its level range lpq had a level requirement of level 35 to 50 and required six players a full party this means that between kpq which was able to get you to level 31 before you were no longer allowed to enter and starting lpq you were on your own it was also very common to find parties who only wanted players above level 40 making it very hard for a new LP cure to get a slot even if you did if someone stronger came along it was likely you'd be kicked and replaced this happened in kpq as well but much less frequently the party Quest scene was utterly ruthless do not mess around with those 13 year old egos it was also mandatory that you had the following classes in your party a magician with teleport a bandit or assassin with Darkseid and an Archer or assassin with their range increasing passive skill maxed a cleric was highly recommended as well for their healing capabilities you also wanted to have all cure potions the boss of this PQ was tough and would lock your skills and inflict Darkness on you which would make the fight take a lot longer than it needed to if you didn't have a way to cure those ailments if you didn't get the the tinctures from the Apothecary these requirements made clerics and assassins absolute royalty when it came to lpq having an assassin would fulfill both the dark side and range requirement and a cleric would fulfill the magician requirement while also giving your party A Healer magicians did not have the horizontal attacking range that an assassin or an Archer provides and while an Archer technically has more horizontal range than an assassin it was unnecessary to have more range than what an assassin could provide Gunslingers didn't have the range either but they could actually be used in place of an assassin or Archer and we'll discuss that later if you thought kpq culture was aggressive lpq was a hundred times worse lpq was a much larger time investment and people never wanted to waste their time so they were often very strict when forming parties the requirements were a lot more stringent as well and this made people very picky about who they let into their parties once that party was formed however you were in for a treat of a PQ stage one opens up with everyone on the bottom of the floor of the tower you'll climb up killing the enemies and collecting the passes and when the party leader collects all 20 you'll move on to the next stage the only interesting thing to say about stage one is that until down jump was added in version 59 on September 10 2008 there were two passes that could only be obtained by a magician using teleport or with Max haste and a precise jump once down jump was added though they could be acquired by anyone with ease stage 2 is the first stage where players sometimes get confused in this stage you're meant to break the blue boxes and collect the passes 15 in total however one of the boxes is rigged and will teleport anyone in the map to a very tall secret map that has four more boxes to break getting out of this secret map takes a little while especially since you need to break all four boxes and collect the passes and if you leave without collecting them the PQ is no longer completable the strategy for stage 2 involves letting one person go in and break the rigged box which was always in the same location when that person was teleported to the secret room they'd inform the party that it was clear and the rest of the players would go in and collect the passes from the regular non-rigged boxes by the time all the regular boxes were destroyed the player in the secret room would be just about finished collecting the four passes there and stage two would be completed [Music] stage three is more of the same this time instead of the Box teleporting the player to a secret room all the boxes would spawn block to pusses that needed to be killed in order to get the 32 passes required to finish the stage these blocked pistas gave insanely good exp being a limited PQ only mob and since they'd all jumped down to the bottom of the stage Warriors thrived here by using slash blast and collecting the majority of the EXP from them we finally did it we finally got a win Warriors are back baby stage four is a weird one that confuses newer lpqers pretty often there are five portals and each lead to a room with a mini boss monster that must be killed to collect one of the six passes with one of the rooms containing two of these mini boss Monsters the monsters in the top three rooms are weak to Magic attacks and the bottom two are weak to physical attacks this means unless you're very strong you should only go into the portals with the monster that you know you can kill walking through these maps to find the missing passes can be very time consuming if all players are not approaching the stage methodically this is also the first instance of marking when you decide what portal to go into simply drop an item on the entrance to indicate that the map is occupied this at a glance allows the rest of the party to know what portals are finished and what portals aren't finished a common source of confusion when players fail to mark their portals don't bother marking your portal with an expensive item as a flex either by the way someone will just pick it up and replace it with tin mesos just some advice based on no personal experience at all once all six passes are collected we move on to stage five combines most of what we've learned from the first four stages in this stage there are six portals that all lead to rooms with boxes that drop passes 24 passes in total two of these stages are special though and this is where the hard teleport and nearly hard dark site requirements come into play at the top of stage 5 is a portal that can only be reached one of two ways with teleport or with very very high jump even if you could get into this portal as a non-magician and it was after version 59 when down jump was added the room it teleported you to disallow down jump so you couldn't do anything here without teleport this was the magician room conversely at the bottom of the stage there was a portal that was blocked off by dark block Golems these guard Golems hit over 8 000 damage one-shotting any class that was within level range of the PQ there were a few ways to get past them but by far the easiest was to use Darkseid as there were more of them in the portal if you could get to it this is the thief portal pages and fighters who had access to power guard could actually take down all these dark black Golems if they had enough HP which often required putting points into HP instead of strength these characters were referred to as HP Warriors it took a while to deal enough reflective damage to kill them though and HP warriors were a novelty class so while this did happen rarely it wasn't very efficient they could just use their massive HP pull to tank hits instead and go through the thief portal without actually killing the dark block Golems so it was just there was no point to doing it at all Brawler's also possessed the ability to bypass these dark black Golems either by getting lucky with Oak Barrel or by using their massive amount of iframes this was difficult and skill based and was only available after version 62 when pirates were released this is why Darkseid is only a strong recommendation as it is practically speaking a requirement but not technically so these two portals actually defined a lot of lpq successes and failures mostly the thief portal after version 59 down jump was not disabled in the main room of stage 5. this meant that if people were inattentive and jumping down towards the floor after finishing their portal there was a solid chance they would down jump one too many times and land on the dark block Golems killing them instantly and if they had a pass on them the PQ was over I saw this happen many times as well as thieves getting killed in their portal because they forgot to turn on Darkseid this was also a run killer even if you had a second Thief items can't be dropped when you're dead if you did somehow manage to make it past the most treacherous Stage 5 you were rewarded with a couple of the easiest stages in the PQ stage six is simple alright I'm gonna say it follow along with me all right guys one three three two two one three three three one two three one one one after lpqing for years this set of three-digit numbers is permanently ingrained in my mind I see it when I close my eyes it's a problem stage seven is another mini boss stage and this is where the horizontal ranged attacks come into play the monsters on the platform are far enough away that it's impossible to jump or teleport to them and if your assassin or Archer didn't put points into their range increasing passive it's not possible to even reach them with an attack however if you found yourself in this incredibly unlikely scenario and you had a gunslinger with wings they could take out the mobs very slowly by floating over and dealing as much damage as they could before falling and being forced to climb all the way back up to do it again the rombots that are spawned when the rats die and drop the passes that activate the boss to summon them are a decent fight where melee classes tend to thrive because of the cramped Battlefield another win for warriors dude after all monsters are defeated the leader should have three passes and it's time for the most tedious stage in the PQ stay 8 the Box stage [Music] combination puzzle stage at its worst five digit combination with nine boxes to stand on 126 possible combinations the obvious way to approach this is the same as in the combination puzzle stages that we saw in kpq one player each on boxes one two three four and five player 5 jumps between boxes five through nine and then goes back to six at which point the player on box 4 moves to box 5 and so on this is a valid strategy and it's referred to as the GMS strap it's simple to understand and easy to keep track of but it's not nearly the most efficient moving between boxes takes time in fact it's heavily recommended that players don't use haste on this stage as it makes box movement more difficult than it already is the inaccuracy of the platform checking code we discussed earlier becomes very apparent in this stage as well if you're too far off from the center of the Box the NPC won't count you and this happens often when you're dealing with small boxes and a large number of combinations because there's a factor of time that has to be taken into account when doing this stage there's a much more efficient way to approach it that results in Faster completions on average though it does take a little bit more thought than the traditional GMS strap the JMS Strat is named as such because it is the strategy that Japanese MapleStory players invented that allows players to move around the boxes with much less effort and in fewer moves this saves a lot of time and is the preferred method since it's objectively better in every way outside of the fact that it's the slightest bit unintuitive the approach is the same you simply go through every combination one by one but the different layout of the boxes is what makes the JMS method Superior I remember back in the day I heard people say one person specifically told me that JMS in this context meant jumping maple story no idea why someone would think that but it's very funny to me I think I even laughed when I heard that when I was 13 or whatever it did Poison my mind though I never forgot it this stage can be a huge bottleneck more than any other stage in the PQ so much so that people would rush lpq just to avoid needing to do it and this led to something called smuggling which we'll cover shortly once your party had finished stage eight it was on to the boss stage your ranged attacker who killed the rats in stage 7 needed to kill one more to summon alishar the boss of the PQ you actually don't need that much range to kill this guy but the Assassins loved to do it because like I could throw the Stars dude a cleric is an absolute godsend here as they can save the party a lot of potions and you do need some solid damage to be able to kill alishar I've been in parties before where we ended up being so weak that we had to give up on the very last stage alishar will skill lock and blind you so all cures or holy Waters and eye drops respectively were your best friends in this fight once he's eventually defeated it's on to the bonus stage [Music] this is the first bonus stage that has a severe time limit with boxes that need to be broken in order to get your Rewards most of the time you just get mesos and some potions not even that many of them but sometimes oh sometimes you'd get a Napoleon cape seeing one of these capes drop was incredibly satisfying I had it happen to me plenty of times and it always felt amazing you could also get various earrings but the skull earrings and red hearted earrings were by far the most exciting also it's worth noting everything I read said that Maple throwing stars dropped from the boxes as well but I never personally saw them it might have been an event only thing during the anniversary either way the bonus stage of lpq was a great reward and seeing a cape or earrings drop from a box you broke was one of the best feelings in the world it was generally considered a kickable offense if you looted someone else's drops from the boxes and would often cause a huge argument that didn't stop me from doing it though shout outs to the guy who got me a free pair of red-hearted earrings back in the day I burned that bridge for 90 000 mesos once the time limit was over you had to speak to Arturo who would give you another reward on top of whatever you got from the bonus stage these rewards were solid and lpq was a highly valuable PQ because of it the PQ set item for lpq is the broken glasses which were acquired after 35 completed pqs these are one of if not the very first I accessory slot equips in the game back when they were added an additional one stat was a pretty solid Improvement and very much worth at least attempting to complete the 35 pqs required though I was never able to get them myself but between failed pqs and people giving up halfway through it wasn't uncommon to reach level 51 before completing 35 full pqs and that's lpq it's a lot each lpq could take upwards of 30 minutes and because of all the drama and tracking that went on it was very rarely faster than just grinding but it was certainly more fun [Music] earlier I briefly mentioned smuggling this is another weird PQ specific concept similar to tracking it was used in many pqs including some that we'll cover later but it was definitely prevalent in lpq I even did it myself many times normally when you leave a PQ with PQ specific items like passes they're removed from your inventory so as to avoid exploitation of the PQ smuggling is a technique players use that allowed these items to be taken outside of the PQ regardless of this check the technique itself is very simple if you have an item on the ground and your character is standing over it you can initiate a conversation with an NPC and disconnect your internet at the same time then you would spam loot the item and reconnect your internet since MapleStory used to have a huge grace period with disconnections if you were fast enough you could very easily queue up all these actions in your client and when you were reconnected to the internet they would all get sent at once and processed normally this was limited however and you were only able to smuggle one stack of items at a time so now we know what smuggling is but what can we do with it remember stage one of lpq the one where you just kill monsters and loot passes since passes are a universal PQ item and they needed to be fully tradable so players could hand them over to the leader the party could kill all the mobs in stage one smuggle the passes and begin the PQ again with a large number of passes in their inventory this was done a few times in a row allowing the party to immediately clear every stage up to Stage 8 and since this was the combination puzzle stage most people wanted to skip this and this is how they did it the actual strategy gets a bit more specific but the general idea is to exploit something in a stage that benefits the party while also reducing the amount of time spent on stages that could take a long time to clear supposedly this was far better exp than doing traditional lpq clears the only downside being that you wouldn't get any rewards including the broken glasses and you could lose a lot of time if The Smuggler messes up it's worth pointing out that Rush lpq didn't actually happen that often though the more practical use for smuggling an lpq was to salvage a failed run remember when I mentioned people dying with passes in their inventory if this happened it wasn't uncommon to find someone willing to attempt to smuggle whatever passes were available in the stage to allow the party to have a bit of a head start when restarting the PQ remember smuggling it's going to come up again in the future take freaking notes dude [Music] the third PQ ever released might surprise you it's the original Guild PQ version 34 February 6 2007 its real name is charanian ruins PQ but obviously nobody was going to refer to it as that this PQ was very important for guilds as each stage rewarded GP which was the only score tracked for the worldwide Guild rankings it was not uncommon to find top guilds doing this PQ nearly constantly in order to maintain a top spot this PQ takes place in the perion excavation site you need at least six people who must all be a part of the same Guild including a junior master or the Guild Master if the number of people in the PQ ever drops below six everyone gets teleported out and the PQ is over alongside the six-member requirement you need the following classes a thief with dark sight flash jump is a bonus a magician with at least level 17 teleport a ranged character or a fourth job magician with an ultimate a character between level 10 to 30 who is capable of killing some level 25 mobs and strong attackers who can kill the level 115 final boss or just a super Chad Chief Bandit could just be a Chad Chief band it doesn't even be that high level 7 level 71 level one Mesa explosion The Guild Master or Junior Master once everyone had been gathered would then talk to shuang at the excavation site to register for the PQ all members who wanted to participate would then need to register with shuang and after a three minute countdown the PQ would begin the preliminary stage contains purple crystals scattered across the rocks and once broken would drop special earrings called protector rocks you remember these I love these things they look so nice everyone in the PQ would need to equip these and keep them on for the entirety of the PQ or they would immediately die dying in this PQ doesn't instantly disqualify the party though since the person who died is returned to this preliminary stage and allowed to walk back to wherever they died once all members had their earrings it was time to move on to the first stage in stage 1 there are three tiers of statues with a total of 20 statues overall these statues will light up randomly in a specific order because of the size of this map it's not possible for one person to see all 20 statues at the same time so this is a Cooperative effort with one person standing to the left of the gate and another person standing to the right watching their respective statues and communicating whenever one lights up after hitting the statues in the same order that they lit up the cycle repeats two more times and then the stage is completed failing to replicate the exact order when hitting the statues will start the stage over regardless of how many successful Cycles have been completed I only ever observed this stage being done by adults when I was but a young lad I couldn't wrap my head around it back then but it seems fairly straightforward nowadays stage two is the Hall of the knights this is the stage where the magician with teleport and the thief with Darkseid are mandatory the party must collect four longinus Spears these Spears are collected by completing various challenges for the magician and the thief who must work together there was a room filled with muscle Stone and master muscle Stone enemies they're almost indistinguishable aside from the Buckle holding their leather belts around them the master muscle Stone drops a key that needs to be picked up and brought back to the main room and dropped on the door near the top left of this room this unlocks the room of faith the room of faith has two sections the magician and Thief working together need to get the longinus spear located in the room at the end first the magician needs to teleport across the bottom through the normally impassable pile of rubble and pillars upon reaching the end and breaking the Box containing the keys that unlock the doors at the top the magician hands those keys over to the thief who walks through the massive number of dark muscle Stones littering the top platform these guys had insane stats and were impossible to survive as the HP cap back in those days was only thirty thousand and they easily hit more than that just like the dark block Golems though these guys could be killed with power guard on an HP Warrior but it was completely pointless to do so and the room at the end was one of the longinous spears required for finishing this stage but we still needed three more while this was going on the rest of the party had to get through three different jump quests in order to acquire the last three Spears these jump quests were quite unforgiving and took some effort to get through but they held the spears required to continue so someone had to do it it wasn't gonna be me once all four Spears are acquired the party continues to another series of jump quests these thankfully are a lot easier there are four that must be done one for each spear jump one can be done by anyone no special Buffs or skills required jump 2 required Max haste to finish jump 3 was similar to lpq's teleport box stage with the combination for this being 2152212 and jump 4 required either a magician with teleport or a Hermit with flash jump to complete the four longinus Spears are placed on the platforms at the top of these jumps and the gate to stage 3 opens stage 3 the Fountain of the wise men is similarly complex there are four different items in this stage The Scroll of wisdom the medal of valor the junior necky drink and the spoiled food there are four of each of these items that need to be acquired before attempting the combination puzzle it's not impossible without all 16 items but it does become more complex the first two items the Scrolls of wisdom and the medals of Valor are acquired by killing the Black Knights and the Mist knights in this room the wine is located in The Wine Cellar which is the room on the top left and the spoiled food is located in the center banquet room on the top right once all 16 items are collected the puzzle begins four specific items must be placed in front of the four statues in a specific order speaking to the guard statue informs the party whether the combination is correct or Not by telling you the number of items that are placed correctly if the combination is wrong seven times monsters are spawned and the combination randomizes meaning you must effectively start from scratch Gathering hints from the guard statue once more once the correct combination is discovered a secret door is to the left of the statues opens up and the party moves on to stage four stage four the garam Scythe waterway that no that can't be right the underground waterway in this stage there are four sewer holes that lead to a piece of King Char in the third's clothing at the end sewer number three can only be entered by someone level 30 and below and contains double slimes this is the reason it's highly recommended that your first job party member be somewhere between level 20 and 30. all four pieces of clothing must then be dropped on King Char in the third's body in a specified order summoning his spirit and unlocking the door King's Corridor requires a sacrifice your lowest level party member must stand in front of the door and drop the protector Rock earrings straight from their equipment inventory unequipping them would kill the player before they were able to drop the item and the earrings are the required component to actually open the door once opened the final boss fight can begin anyone who doesn't want to participate in the fight can enter the hole in the pillar and to be brought to a platform overlooking the throne room where they can't be hit Throne contains a crystal that must be broken in order to summon him airgoth will hit about 4 000 damage and if you don't have strong attackers all you really need as we discussed earlier is one Chad Chief Bandit with Chad maso explosion to take him down quickly after defeating airgoth the leader needs to talk to the tiger statue with the crystal in their inventory in order to acquire GP based on the completion speed at this point everyone is teleported to the bonus room you're given 40 seconds to break as many boxes as possible and these are some of the notable Rewards this stage is very similar to the bonus room in lpq and has a few very valuable drops that far exceed what lpq can provide I don't have much experience with this PQ personally but learning about it was pretty fun I can't imagine doing this over and over for weeks at a time for the sake of maintaining Guild ranking but that just meant I didn't have what it takes to run a top Guild tracking wasn't really a thing with this PQ as it was rarely required since the PQ was done so infrequently there might have been some top Guild tracking to keep an eye on other Guild's GP progression but this could have also been done by just clicking on the guild rank board in the excavation site or The Honorable rock found in most major towns smuggling could be done with this PQ as well but it was usually a lot more effort than it was worth and didn't result in any significant improvements like with lpq rushing I remember seeing someone drop a longinus spear outside of the PQ one time as well as smuggling out the protector Rock earrings the longinus spear is a massive item so seeing it out of context was jarring overall gpq was quite complex and not very rewarding especially since it didn't have a PQ set item though the story and atmosphere are very cool [Music] [Applause] in version 35 the patch immediately following the release of Guild PQ orbis PQ was released this was on March 20th 2007 and it was known as the Tower of goddess this PQ is all about restoring the goddess Minerva statue to its former glory broken by Papa pixie who serves as the main villain Minerva's diary also known as the diary of the Goddess tells the backstory of Minerva's statue and holds the lore explanation for orbis PQ April 16th I have finally started writing a diary The Owl of Minerva brought me some news apparently there's a major movement amongst the humans in regards to writing a diary every day as a goddess who needs to set a positive example to the humans I have decided to follow suit truth be told I'm already worried about writing an entry every day April 19th the humans erected a huge Tower as well as built a statue of my likeness for them to make a beautiful statue out of these rocks made me realize how brilliant the humans are with their ability to create something I was so impressed by the statue that I have decided to keep it inside my tower April 23rd Lazy Afternoon it's been a habit of mine lately to start each morning by staring at my statue while drinking tea the more I look at it the more I like how the statue resembles me a lot for humans to create a statue of my likeness with rocks it still blows my mind April 24th today Papa pixie came by for a visit wearing this round weird looking hat he came wanting to buy some water of life so he can raise more Pixies I had to sternly tell him that the water of life is not for sale much to his Chagrin April 27th today was a really rough day I heard a crack in the middle of the night so I woke up only to find out my statue has been busted next to the crumbled statue was a footprint how dare that person to walk into my tower and have the audacity to break my statue April 28th Papa pixie who came by a couple of days ago wanting the Water of Life came back again asking if I was interested in selling that water amazingly Papa pixie offered to help fix the statue which I was glad to hear but then again how did he know that the statue was busted in the first place April 30th today the humans paid a visit to the tower I didn't want them to see the busted statue so I had to hurriedly cover it up with some cloth the humans seemed to wonder why I put a cloth over the statue I better get this fixed before they find out May 5th eek was following me around all day telling me that Papa pixie is indeed acting suspicious and that I should kick him out of the tower immediately apparently he kept on bringing unknown and unwanted Pixies into the premises May 7th looking at the busted statue of goddess Papa pixie said in order to make a new one he'll need a new model and ask me for help apparently all I need to do is walk into the statue for a second and he'll use his magic power to sketch it up and make a new one it doesn't seem like a hard thing to do so I agreed to do it finally the statue will be back up by tomorrow obviously this was a trap by Papa pixie after trapping Minerva in her statue Papa pixie acquires the Water of Life and uses it to summon massive numbers of pixies which results in orbis beginning to sink from the sky due to the weight of all the Pixies being summoned this is explored further throughout orbis's storyline as a whole but we've dealt with enough lore for now so let's get back to the PQ orbis PQ takes place at the top of the Orvis Tower taking the portal on the right leads to the unknown Tower which is where wonky the ferry resides and this is the first time he ever appeared in the game in any form this PQ requires six party members all between level 51 and 70 and if you have one of every class wonky will give you a buff called blessing from wonky the fairy this buff has a few different variants and getting the one that increases weapon and Magic attack is probably the best outcome it's also required that you have a character with over 113 jump in the party a very specific requirement the easiest way to achieve this usually is with a thief who has haste so while it's not strictly required that you have a thief it is practically required the final requirement is odd and specific to opq on Fridays Saturdays and Sundays you'll also need a mage that has teleport though it's probably a good idea to have one regardless it's also a good idea to bring all cures if you can afford them for the boss fight once everyone's gathered up the PQ can begin stage one is very simple and straightforward break the clouds and collect 20 Cloud pieces drop the cloud pieces on the pedestal in front of the glowing orb and Chamberlain equal appear talk to him to move on this unlocks access to the sensor Tower from here all the stages can be reached and this acts as sort of a hub area for the PQ you can find the goddess's Statue here the one we're repairing stages in opq were generally not sequential and could be done in any order so for the sake of this retrospective video we'll refer to them only by their room names instead the next area is the lobby and this is where the day of the week becomes relevant a party member must Ascend the small jump Quest and break the box at the top to get the lp you might need haste and or teleport for this depending on the day once the correct record is dropped on the record player in the middle of the stage a box will spawn on the right and it contains a piece of the statue after collecting this everyone returns to the center Tower towards the top of the center Tower lies the entrance to the sealed room this stage is a combination puzzle stage as we've seen many times before but this is a slightly different flavor there are three platforms that five people must occupy you can think of it as a three-digit code that must equal five there's a whole strategy involved with determining which platforms are correct and if you don't get it in seven attempts you must leave and re-enter the room to reset the code and try again unfortunately there are no interesting strategies like an lpq it's just a matter of trying combinations in the most efficient order once your party figures out the correct code a box will spawn at the top of this room that contains another piece of the statue if the leader leaves without someone grabbing the statue piece the PQ would be incompletable and the party would have to leave and start over I believe the party could continue on to other stages to keep getting exp but actually finishing the PQ became impossible back to the center Tower the portal to the right of the portal that leads to the sealed room will take you to Storage storage is a fairly straightforward stage as well as a very common trick in Wind Waker speed running cut that out of the screw just cut that off of the video acelian will spawn on a platform and once killed will respawn on another platform there's a set pattern to this and once the celian dies on the 15th platform it will drop another piece of the statue once again back to the center Tower this time we're heading into the sewer-like opening in the middle of the room directly above the statue of the Goddess this room is the lounge there are four portals in this stage and each stage contains 10 Rock pieces the three portals up top require haste to reach and all three contain enemies tin of either selians Groupons or lioners the real star of the lounge though is room 304 this room is a kind of jump Quest slash hidden platform stage with 10 boxes that must all be broken in order to complete the lounge this room was usually split by two players due to its size this is also another instance where the practice of marking was widely used once all 40 small pieces of the statue are collected by the party leader Chamberlain equal give them another larger piece of the statue and the lounge is completed back to the center Tower the next area takes place outside of the tower the portal directly above the portal that led to the sealed room this is the walkway the walkway is another very straightforward simple stage where all 40 Pixies must be killed to collect 40 small pieces of the statue the portals that led to the platforms that helped the Pixies were also common marking spots since it was impossible to see the whole map at once when the star Pixies and lunar Pixies were killed they would turn into ghost Pixies the ghost Pixies were optional enemies but they gave a little bit of exp the party leader then collects all 40 small pieces talks to Chamberlain eek gets the larger piece of the statue and Returns the party to the center Tower once more the final room before the boss stage is called on the way up this is a puzzle stage similar to Stage six of lpq but this time the order is random through simple caveman style communication or by marking platforms the party eventually figures out the correct order and the leader remains at the bottom when everyone's at the top the party spam attacks the levers and the party leader spam clicks the NPC at the same time usually after no more than a few seconds the correct lever combination is discovered and the stage is clear a box will appear holding the final piece of the Statue of the goddess everyone returns to the main room and repairs the statue by dropping the pieces on their respective platforms once the statue is fully restored the leader talks to Chamberlain eek to enter the boss stage to summon the boss the nepin death in the stage must be killed they have a chance to drop a strange seed that then must be put on top of one of the pots in the stage when the strange seed is dropped on another pot one of three things will happen nothing another normal nepen death will spawn or a dark nepen Death will spawn killing this dark nap in death will summon Papa pixie and begin the final boss fight Papa pixie similar to alishar has a lot of HP and casts debuffs on the players however unlike alishar he has very low avoidability my warrior Brethren can shine in this fight when he's defeated he'll drop an even stranger seed which must be planted in the correct pot this will grow some grass that needs to be cut down to receive the grass of life drop the grass of life on the Statue to rescue Minerva and she'll thank you and send the party onto the bonus stage this bonus stage functions almost identically to ludibrium PQ and Guild PQ one minute to break as many boxes as possible and rewards that aren't too valuable unlike the ludibrium PQ days when you are lower level and your standards for good gear were much lower orbis PQ doesn't up the quality of the bonus stage rewards sufficiently The Capes and earrings aren't bad but the guaranteed reward upon leaving the PQ is the only place to get anything worth some real value having access to a variety of Scrolls orbisbq actually has a few different PQ set items the first item is the goddesses wristband a very mediocre pair of gloves that could only be acquired after 40 full pqs eventually the PQ was changed to reward feathers of goddess upon completion and after collecting enough you could turn them in for various items [Music] now you're familiar with orbis PQ but there's a lot more to it first of all we need to quickly cover rush opqs rush opq similar to rush lpq was reasonably faster than regular opq but there is something odd I came across while doing research for this topic that I want to cover real quick I can't confirm this and only heard it from One Source but this Source claimed that after completing a full PQ your exp reward per stage would be significantly reduced I don't know if I believe that this is true since I had heard about this before but I it's it's schoolyard rumors either way it's interesting and potentially makes Rush opq far superior to traditional opqing it's a dumb design choice though we'll start out the explanation from Square One nobody in the party has any materials to use this means starting from scratch in order to effectively Rush opq the party needs two items and two Smugglers and neither of the Smugglers can be the party leader don't hit your Lacroix while you're reading the script dude firstly the party progresses through the PQ and heads immediately to storage the room with the decelian who responds until it drops a piece of the statue this is given to the first Smuggler to smuggle and the PQ is restarted then everyone collects 20 Cloud pieces and hands them over to the second Smuggler The Smuggler smuggle both of the piece of the statue and the 20 clown pieces and the party leaves and starts to PQ over but this time with both items that they need to rush opq this period of gathering items to rush opq was referred to as farming and was a common complaint among Rush opqers despite it not really being that big of a deal once the party has 20 Cloud pieces from stage 1 they can immediately clear it which results in teleporting everyone to the top of the cloud stage so that they can enter the center Tower this is where the first exploitable part of the PQ becomes apparent since there are no walls blocking players from jumping down after being teleported the party can be split up to more efficiently clear the PQ three party members after being hasted would stay behind and clear the cloud stage once again eventually giving the 20 new Cloud pieces to The Smuggler at the same time the rest of the party would enter the center Tower and get to work clearing the rest of the easy stages firstly the leader will have been given the piece of the statue required to clear storage and will quickly do so the storage stage is another hugely exploitable section as the celian drops the piece of the statue directly and if you have that piece you can talk to Chamberlain eek to immediately Clear the Stage however this piece of the statue is also required later so Chamberlain eek doesn't take the item from you this effectively makes this piece of the statue a reusable ticket to get free exp every time you restart the PQ as long as it's smuggled properly once the party has received the free exp from Storage the leader and two other party members will do Lobby the stage with the LPS that change based on the day of the week this is very straightforward you just complete the stage it's such a simple jump Quest it takes like a minute after these three stages have been completed relatively quickly the cloud Smuggler will have all 20 pieces in their inventory leave the party smuggle the pieces and rejoin the party outside the piece of the statue Smuggler will similarly re-smuggle their item and rinse and repeat for quick efficient opq clears in doing research for this video I discovered that 15 years ago people were doing this second strategy a lot more often than the first complex strategy the second strategy is very simple clear stage one go to the lobby clear that stage rinse and repeat this was less efficient but the fact that it was simpler made it more approachable for random parties to do Rush opq was so efficient and ubiquitous that you would see people do it more often than regular clears as it cut out some of the Annoying tedious stages and was still quite fast exp also because the rewards weren't very good in opq there was no incentive to actually finish it next on the list of opq related topics the secret missions when preparing for an opq you must talk to wonky he has a dialogue option called give wonky something to eat when you click this option you're given a list of foods that you can feed wonky this is how you unlock secret missions in opq you can give him the same food over and over but choosing a different option increases your chance of receiving a secret mission eventually after a few messages you'll get something like this in your chat window at this point the party enters the PQ and the leader talks to wonky to see if they activated a secret mission some of these are very straightforward but the last two introduce new opq content that we haven't seen yet believe it or not kill all lucidas takes us to the first hidden map the room of the guilty which is accessed by climbing down the ladder at the bottom of the center Tower this room is a little Annoying featuring a kind of reverse jump Quest where you have to climb down in order to reach the jail areas of which there are three these lucidas function very weirdly they can't be damaged by any regular attacks and are only susceptible to the spikes that can be activated by hitting the switches throughout the map these jailed lucidas deal crazy high damage upwards of 2 000 so be careful around them they were best tackled by Warriors and mages with their inherent tankiness each jail would lead to a storage room that had a box with some rewards similar to a bonus stage the dark crystals were a good drop and likely worth seeking out since you needed at least one fourth third job advancement which would have been right around the corner for opqers the final secret mission kill all celians takes us to the last hidden map the room of Darkness this secret mission is fairly straightforward as well since it only requires the party to kill all the junior salience to complete the big gimmick of the room of darkness is in its name you can only see in a small radius around you like in Granite cave in hohen okay it's just what a random reference these Junior salians also drop diary Pages which are used in the quest the record of goddess Minerva these Pages make up Minerva's diary which we read earlier a massive betrayal of Trust on our part I can't believe you guys did that orbis PQ was something else comprising the most content of any PQ we've encountered thus far in its early days it was widely regarded as the best way to reach level 70 Fresh Off The lpq Grind tracking was pretty common in opq as it was by far the best source of exp for most impatient players who didn't feel like grinding the rewards were good but the EXP was great and all the extras associated with opq make it probably my favorite PQ retroactively even though it's definitely one of the ones I've done the least orbis is a strong Contender for a favorite area in Maplestory for me already even though elnath takes first place always I'm gonna live in osiria and travel between the two orbis will be where I build my winter house and then I'll just live in elnath in the summer it all right that's locked in I'm gonna do that [Music] thank you version 39 June 13 2007 introduces us to a new party Quest the omorion challenge colloquially referred to as apq the main NPC of apq is almost the strong who runs the entire show this PQ is also exclusive to any version of the game that actually had amoria and marriage at this time amoria pq's requirements are quite unique but at least they stay true to the theme of the area six party members all over level 40 all of whom must be married although their partner does not need to be present the next requirement is that the party consists of at least one male and one female character ratios don't matter you can have any combination but you need one of each however if you do have three couples in the party you get access to a secret bonus stage with some extremely rare items which we'll cover in a bit these items are so rare I didn't even know they existed until I wrote this script I'm not joking I don't have to another YouTuber say like just wait till you hear about the next thing I talk about trust me this is this is actually pretty cool content I'm gonna discuss every member in the party will also need an entrance ticket these can be acquired every six hours by turning in 10 lip lock keys to Amos these lip lock keys can be acquired from the monsters on the maps surrounding the entrance to the PQ and they have a very high drop rate it doesn't take too long to acquire the keys and get the entrance ticket once everyone has all their tickets and the other requirements are met the PQ begins stage one magic mirror the party leader speaks to Amos who summons three portals the correct portal is randomized but when you find it you'll be teleported to the middle of the map there are two portals one on the right and one on the left four male and female characters respectively defeat the monsters and have the leader talk to the Glimmer Man a magic fairy will be summoned who drops the wing Hammer the wing Hammer will break the mirror in the middle of the stage that then drops the mirror piece that you need to move on to the next stage I don't know why you need to break the mirror that's bad luck first of all secondly it's just an extra step for no reason and maybe go through the mirror to access the next stage I don't know it seems dumb stage 2 heartstrings this stage is a combination puzzle stage that acts almost identically to the sealed room in opq a three-digit code that must equal five the correct number of players need to hang off of the ropes until the correct combination is found or seven attempts are used up after seven failed attempts monsters will be summoned and the combination is randomly changed after an incorrect guess the leader will get a hint as to where the party members need to go next and these hints make it statistically impossible to fail seven times in a row if you know what you're doing and approach it methodically this stage is also one of if not the only stage in the entire game that changes its appearance based on the time of day I would give so much for a day night cycle in Maplestory I would even give up my orbis winter house no I wouldn't never mind stage three twister Switcher this is another combination puzzle stage but this one is even more complex not only are the platforms labeled with both numbers and letters for some reason but there's also nine of them adding up to 126 possible combinations just like an lpq stage 8. Nexon did give us a little bit of a break with this one though when you get a combination wrong a number of monsters are summoned the crystal bores are just there to be annoying as they move quickly and will knock players around but the slimes hold valuable information [Music] the number of slimes summoned upon an incorrect guess is equal to the number of correct platforms because of this the shotgun approach of trying every single combination is just not efficient instead the apq stage 3 Strat is as follows four party members stand on the top four platforms one party member covers the bottom five platforms and once all the slimes have been counted the appropriate number of party members move to the correct bottom platforms and the rest of the party tries to figure out the correct combination of the top platforms this approach significantly cuts down on the time spent figuring out the code with this stage taking a lot less time on average when compared with lpq Stage 8. despite having the same number of combinations stage four Last Man Standing is a fairly simple one where the party needs to collect 50 Cupid code pieces there's not much to say about this stage other than that it's generally easier and faster if everyone collects in a piece after that it's on to stage five stage five fluttering hearts a unique stage in this one the entire party runs to the right and breaks open the gates along the way at the end everyone jumps on the platform to reach almost and it's on to the boss stage thank you stage six Love Hurts this is a battle against Geist balrog the boss of apq who spawns in three phases Junior balrog crimson ballrog and finally Geist balrog the party leader will collect the Geist Fang that Geist balrog drops and the stage is complete along with the PQ entirely now let's discuss the hidden secret that apq holds that I didn't know about until now amos's Vault for couples is a secret stage that most people probably didn't know about and I say that because I didn't know about it and I represent most people I guess if you finish the entire PQ with three married couples in the party almost will send you to amos's Vault for couples in this stage the married couples are split into teams to see who can collect 35 Cupid code pieces first the pieces drop from Monsters summoned by breaking the boxes throughout the stage the couple that finishes first will have an opportunity to receive an additional reward but only one spouse is actually allowed to do so the other person must sacrifice their reward the rewards for this stage are odd legendary Elias capes and Cecilia capes these capes are untradable meaning they are locked to the person who acquired them because of the strict requirements to even reach the point where you have the opportunity to acquire a cape these are some of the rarest items in all of MapleStory I have never seen one firsthand after finishing almost Vault for couples or more likely immediately following stage six the entire party is sent to the bonus stage and this bonus stage is Iconic this is the main source of Onyx apples the buff item that increases weapon and Magic attack by 100 for 10 minutes and the only source of them outside of gotcha systems there are a few other notable drops but nothing quite so game changing as Onyx apples amoria PQ is odd because it's only real purpose is to acquire these Onyx apples the PQ isn't exceedingly long it's not excessively challenging and it doesn't give great expe when you consider that Geist balrog is level 95 with 1.5 million HP meaning you need at least one strong high level player to finish the PQ it's also the first PQ to implement any sort of time-based restriction to entry and has no PQ set item further cementing its status as nothing more than the Onyx Apple PQ [Music] September 18 2007 saw the version 42 update this update contained two different pqs but we'll cover hennis's PQ first moon Bunny's rice cake colloquially known as Genesis PQ this is the lowest level PQ in the game being accessible as early as level 10. it has no level cap meaning everyone can do it it also has the lowest required number of players of NEP Hue we've seen thus far requiring anywhere from three to six party members to enter this PQ is a single map PQ with two stages and one main objective acquire 10 rice cakes for growly the first stage consists of acquiring all colors of the Primrose seeds from the plants at the bottom of the stage and planting them on the corresponding platforms Primrose seeds have a somewhat low drop rate for some reason and it's not extremely uncommon for it to take multiple minutes to acquire them all after the Primrose seeds have been dropped on the correct platforms the moon bunny spawns and begins making rice cakes waves of weak flying enemies will spawn every so often to attack the moon Bunny and stop him from making the rice cakes all the party has to do is kill these enemies and keep the moon bunny alive until all 10 rice cakes are made and turned into growly and that's the whole PQ it usually only takes a few minutes but it does have a bonus stage that's worth talking about the bonus stage is just a map filled with pig enemies well what most people don't know is that they have a different drop pool than normal pigs they possess the same stats and were virtually identical with the only differences coming from the iron Hogs who would spawn and had much lower stats than their normal counterparts these iron Hogs had half the HP and triple the EXP this combined with their Superior drop pool makes this a good bonus stage on paper but in reality most people didn't bother grinding here the items weren't so valuable that it was worth the grind when your goal is to get the PQ done smuggling and Rush pqing was extremely prevalent here the moon bunny never stopped making rice cakes until he ran out of HP or the timer for the PQ ran out on top of this if a weak player used a low attack weapon like the pumpkin basket they could aggro the mobs off of the Moon Bunny and hold them on the side of the map there was a limit to the number of mobs that could spawn at once meaning the moon bunny would never get hit and nobody had to waste effort killing enemies if they were all held by this weak player referred to as the allurer this also allowed the moon bunny to make rice cakes at the fastest possible speed under ideal circumstances it was possible to get up to 200 rice cakes in one PQ though most of the time parties would get somewhere closer to 50 or 100 or something because of the RNG of the Primrose seed section of the PQ there was an exploit that made Rush pqing way more efficient than normal pq-ing you could get something like five times the reward for almost no additional effort just a bit more time investment the PQ set item for hinesis PQ is called a rice cake on top of my head this was earned by turning in a cumulative 20 rice cakes at the end of the PQ [Music] Genesis PQ rocks it was great exp for super weak first job characters especially when rush pqing and bridged the gap between early first job and kpq a wonderful addition that was very welcome and I have many fond memories doing Genesis PQ back in the day [Music] the other PQ added in version 42 is ludibrium maze PQ similar to Genesis PQ and amoria PQ this is also an exclusive PQ ever wonder why the monsters in lmpq have JP appended to their names well in typical GMS fashion this is a PQ we share exclusively with JMS lujibria maze PQ took place in the main city of ludibrium the requirements are as follows level 51-70 with a party of three to six members this PQ had no specific requirements outside of level and party size so the optimal party composition was a cleric a warrior or two for damage and a thief for haste if the party ever dropped below three members due to a disconnect or someone dying the whole party would be kicked out of the PQ because of this it wasn't often recommended to run with only three players the objective of ludibrium maze PQ is to collect at least 30 tickets and reach room 16. the tickets are acquired from the monsters that Spawn from the boxes with rooms 1 through 11 containing three boxes one of which contains monsters that drop tickets each type of monster drops a certain number of tickets but the only ones we care about are rooms 6 and 7's Toro Macy's as they have a chance to drop 50 passes each which is more than enough to complete a PQ even if you only get one drop the more passes the party has the more exp the party will receive at the end of the PQ the main gimmick of this PQ is the fact that it's a maze it's not fully random thankfully and the way it works is as follows each room contains three portals except for the final room room 16 which only has one portal the three portals always function the same the left portal leads to the room that is four higher than the room you're currently in the middle portal always leads to the room that is seven higher and the right portal always leads to the room that is three lower this means that if you're in room 15 which is the cap and you go into the left portal you'll end up in room four because of this system lmpq can be kind of complex and unforgiving for a new player but hey at least it's not completely random not to worry though because we have Rush lmpq unlike most rush pqs rush lmpq does not require any smuggling to do effectively in fact because of the Simplicity of this PQ smuggling is actually kind of pointless instead Rush lmpq is simply the name for the strategy of everyone rushing to room 6 and 7 clearing the Taro Macy's in these rooms and then heading immediately to room 16 to finish the PQ skipping every other stage this would result in anywhere from 2500 to 15 000 exp per PQ which took around a minute to finish usually it was very common to see people recruiting and joining lmpq offering or asking for rates of one percent exp per minute the other major upside of this PQ was the fact that the rewards were very good on average the Scrolls kind of suck and most of the equips only NPC for one meso with only the red-hearted earrings the Yellow Umbrella and the Cecilia's earrings being worth anything you don't get those items often though and the most common rewards are potions good potions a potion reward from lmpq on average was worth over twenty thousand mesos since this PQ could be rushed in about a minute if you got nothing but potions for an hour or 60 pqs straight you're looking at a raw profit of 1.2 million mesos sounds great right no no no this was not a good thing all of these mesos were generated from NPCs which definitely contributed to inflation especially when this PQ was at its peak popularity but hey if you ignore that part this PQ was awesome all around it was perfect even as is the case with with a lot of these older pqs I have very fond memories doing lmpq I did it a lot back in the day on my assassin I probably would have been in middle school at the time I remember drawing claws in my yearly planner like a loser dude lmpq was great exp great rewards and easy to do it immediately replaced opq and opq never held the same status that it did prior to lmpq's release thank you [Music] the next BQ added to GMS was herbtown PQ in version 48 on December 13 2007. it's been called lord pirate PQ but I don't think it had an official name Beyond urbtown PQ or pirate PQ colloquially it was known as PPQ or just herbtown PQ for our purposes we'll refer to it as PPQ [Music] PPQ has the widest level range and at least among pqs that have a level cap any character between level 55 and level 100 can participate and it requires three to six players to enter this is very interesting actually level 55 to level 100 is a huge gap that encompasses players who aren't really close to third job all the way up to players who are nearing the end of third job and have a good chunk of their skills maxed that is a ridiculous range of power what the hell next on before we get into that though let's go over what the PQ actually is there are no class requirements for this PQ but the general recommended party composition rules are in play here you probably want some strong attackers and a Healer as well as a thief poor haste and dark side [Music] stage one is very straightforward within six minutes the party needs to kill all the enemies on this map stage 2 also has the six minute timer but is slightly more involved here you talk to Guan and summon the first wave of Mr alleys after collecting 20 marks of the rookie pirate that they drop you talk to Guan again to summon crew the crew dropped marks of the rising pirate and again you need 20. talk to Guan one last time to summon captains and collect 20 of their marks of the veteran pirate do all of this within six minutes talking to Guan one last time in order to open the door to the next stage stage 3 is more of the same killing enemies within 6 minutes there are two optional hidden stages here remember these two stages we'll cover them and what they do a little later on after clearing stage 3 and optionally clearing the hidden rooms it's on to stage four stage four is literally exactly the same as stage 3 in every way six minute timer goal of killing every enemy and two hidden rooms again remember these Stage 5 is where a thief with dark sight becomes exceptionally useful this time you do more than just kill the enemies you kill them and look for a key that they drop go this key needs to be dropped on the open doors to close them and there are four doors total dropping the key isn't as straightforward as it might seem though since these annoying dudes keep hitting you while it's easy to just manipulate the enemies and move them away it's often a lot more trouble than it's worth when you could just have your Thief go into dark side and drop the key completely ignoring the enemies not a requirement but a strong suggestion stage six is the boss stage and this is where we encounter Lord pirate himself the namesake of this PQ just a boss nothing too special to report about him however if we go back to stages three and four the ones that had the hidden optional rooms we get a little bit more complexity Garden of the 100 year old bell flowers one and two are the first of the timed optional rooms in stages three and four respectively with the goal of killing all enemies after doing so and talking to Guan once again he'll summon a treasure chest that requires a key to open this key drops from Lord pirate and is a unique held item meaning one person can only hold one key opening this chest upgrades Lord Pirate into angry Lord pirate probably because you took his booty dude you don't do that to a pirate and if you do the same thing in the stage 4 optional room as well angry Lord pirate becomes enraged Lord pirate supposedly the drops are different between these bosses but there is no database I could find that lists off their drops party kills whichever Lord pirate you summoned the PQ is complete and the party receives a decent exp reward but not a good exp reward [Music] in Pirate PQ there's a very counter-intuitive system in place to deal with the massive level Gap remember how I mentioned that the level requirements for this PQ encompassed such a wide range that you could have a party of mid-second job characters in the same party as mid to late third job characters yeah Nexon decided they didn't like that either so they did the stupidest thing imaginable to counter it when there's someone in the party over a certain level I think 70 the EXP reward at the end of the PQ is reduced because exp values were changed so much and most information about pirate PQ is post Big Bang finding precise information about the EXP reduction or the exact level was very difficult regardless this system just sucks there's absolutely zero upside to it and it punishes people for being a high level taking a step back however we could maybe justify this as being a system that was put in place to allow players to get the pirate hats which required 350 complete runs to get because this is a party-wide exp Nerf however that theory is kind of thrown out the window it could be a part of it but it's more likely the case that they didn't want level 90s carrying level 55s all the way up to third job with ease thinking one of the only draws to Pirate PQ were the quests associated with it because of the way this PQ was designed these four quests were done most efficiently by running it and three of the four actually required the mobs within the PQ finding the ingredients for Thai song required you to collect 100 ginseng concentrates and 50 Bellflower concentrate both of which only drop from mobs within pirate PQ The Outlaw in the sea required you to kill all three forms of Lord pirate normal angry and enraged pretty simple pirates map required you to get six pieces of the pirate map which only dropped from Lord pirate and eliminating the Pirates is the only Quest I couldn't find concrete information about it's given to you by Guan so it's heavily implied that the 200 crew and Captain kills must be done within the PQ but I'm not a hundred percent sure on that Lord Pirates servants 1 and 2 are the other timed optional rooms in stages three and four and could be used for the eliminating the Pirates Quest but it would have been difficult these rooms are just for killing but they have a very strict time limit of one minute with the Pirates dying automatically every 10 or so seconds you must kill them before those 10 seconds are up or you don't get the EXP or drops from them I'm honestly not sure what this stage's purpose is but I wanted to make sure I covered it since kills in here count towards completion of the quest pirate PQ was not very popular most of the time all channels would be empty so tracking was not something people bothered doing the EXP rewards weren't very good because of that genius anti-fun system that Nexon implemented the Lord Pirates hat that you would receive as a reward for doing the PQ and obscene number of times wasn't very good either not even getting close to a zakum helmet which was often easier to acquire mad respect to you if you did the PQ something like 350 times and got yourself a lord Pirates at four seriously that's badass smuggling wasn't really a thing in PPQ either it just didn't add a lot I guess you can make a case for smuggling extra keys in stage five but I'm not sure it was possible and more importantly I'm not sure this PQ was even popular enough for people to bother with smuggling I've done this PQ a few times myself but it never felt very substantial lpq and opq are huge adventures with pretty decent rewards while pirate PQ is just killing a bunch of Monsters the Lord Pirate's hat was all right but like I mentioned earlier it was way too difficult to acquire anything beyond the first one which was not even remotely a good item back in the day even the final upgrade requiring 350 clears still fell short of a zakam helmet pretty heavily which would have been easier to get considering PPQ was practically dead at all times now I could see a group of players committed to getting the fourth hat and running the PQ over and over for weeks at a time while it probably wouldn't have been super fun in the moment that's a nice memory that I'm sure someone out there has [Music] it's time for one you've probably been waiting for Monster Carnival PQ colloquially referred to as just cpq this PQ was added in version 52 on March 19 2008 without a doubt a fan favorite this PQ was the first instance of PVP ever added to MapleStory unless you count amos's Vault for couples in apq which I wouldn't based on the IDS of the NPCs and monsters within cpq I would also bet that this is non-kms content but I'm not certain of that cpq has a level requirement of 3250 with varying party size requirements and no specific class requirements this is the first PQ that isn't strictly tied to a specific area as well though it is ludibrium themed spiegelman can be found in kerning City orbis and ludibrium and he will teleport the player to the cpq lobby Carnival PQ pits two teams against each other fighting mobs and collecting Carnival points from each kill mobs were assigned to each of the two parties meaning party a was unable to attack any of the mobs assigned to party B the monsters that couldn't be hit would be shown as slightly transparent on the player's screen Carnival points can be spent to do a variety of things summon a monster for the opponents to have to deal with debuff an opposing party member or buff the enemies that the opponents are fighting making it harder for your opponents to kill them when enemies are buffed a pillar will appear somewhere in the stage and must be broken to remove the buff from the mobs one of the big differences that players will notice immediately is that you can't use your own potions you can only heal or recover MP by picking up potions that were dropped on the ground by killed mobs this added to the difficulty for low-level characters as they'd struggle to kill anything and also be unable to heal luckily there wasn't much punishment for dying in cpq if a player died in the middle of a match they'd be sent to a respawn room and allowed to re-enter the main area at their Leisure if you did a lot of cpq below level 40 or so you probably saw these rooms a lot I know I did the goal is to have the higher score by the end of the 10 minute match and your exp reward is based on the number of points your team acquired categorized into ranks the battle takes place in various Carnival Fields Carnival field one through four are four two to four players and Carnival field five and six are for 3-2-6 players generally the higher number the carnival field the stronger the monsters although Fields one and two three and four and five and six are identical maybe to avoid people clogging up cpq too heavily it was popular when killing monsters in cpq they have a small chance to drop a maple coin these very aesthetically pleasing gold octagon-shaped coins with a bright red maple leaf in the middle seeing one of these coins drop was hugely satisfying and they could be turned in for a variety of items by talking to spiegelman not only did spiegelman have level 35 to level 50 weapons available for trade this is also where you would get spiegelman's necklace it was available for 50 Maple coins you could also trade in 40 Maple coins and get spiegelman's Marble spiegelman's Marble was an upgrade item that could only be used on spiegelman's necklace and it gave plus 30 HP and MP at a 60 success rate I don't think anyone bothered buying the marbles as they didn't give enough in return for their cost getting your necklace and then spending the rest of your coins on the weapons was a much more effective and common route to take so that's the normal cpq interestingly perhaps even surprisingly a meta emerged very quickly of Trade Winds this is simply where party a will take a win and then let party B take the next win the reason for this was that when you win you get around triple the EXP of a loss based on your Carnival points rank people very quickly realized that it was extremely efficient to just trade Victory back and forth so that players got the most out of their time consistently without having to actually compete but where there's the beauty of players working together there's also the ugliness of humanity perhaps unsurprisingly when trading was taken advantage of very often you could easily get two free wins back to back if you tricked the other team if party a took the first win and told party B that they could have the next win party a could simply Trail party B and Carnival points for the majority of the battle and then at the last minute spam debuffs and jump ahead you could often catch the other party off guard by doing this resulting in a win but it would have completely broken any trust between the two parties whether he won or lost a calculated risk to be sure only for the truly degenerate I promise I never did this in an alternate reality where I lie in videos if you could find a good group to run with Trade Winds would result in relatively fast exp with no worry of actually participating in the PVP aspect of cpq there is always the possibility of getting scammed though especially when it was someone's bedtime and they were about to get off for the night we did crazy [ __ ] back in the day when it was bedtime we were so pissed that we had to sleep and then wake up to school I was getting the hell out of some kids older than me who got to stay up an extra hour I don't care as players reached the upper level cap of cpq they would become much stronger killing all the mobs in cpq with relative ease eventually this meant that you were either doing field five and six battles all day against other strong parties which was very fun or that you would find a buddy and do grind P Hughes grind pqing is simply when you solo cpq against your opponents monsters in cpq gave full exp that their non-cpq counterparts would give and this resulted in a great grinding spot with an exp reward at the end grind pqs would often be combined with win trading with one party consisting of a single high-level player and the other party usually comprised of the maximum number of people this worked because if you kicked everyone else from your party they would get removed from the battlefield and you'd have it all to yourself usually this was done on fields 3 and 4 where the monster density was the highest and the layout was the best if your grind pqing alone it was common for the opposing team to summon a large number of monsters for you so that you have the most to work with exp rates work good doing grind pqs and if you were trading wins the EXP was even better because this could only be done efficiently at higher levels it wasn't something that you'd come across quite as often as simple wind trading and if you were a low level hoping to get into a PQ and you find yourself in a party with a level 48 Spearman not me though because I was nice you were probably being used and I would kick you the moment the PQ started I mean they would kick you the evil Spearman would kick you I'm sure you knew what cpq was when you went into this video it was so good that it eclipsed lpq immediately upon release and combined with it being the first instance of PVP in an overwhelmingly PVE game it became very iconic higher exp rates better Channel availability more consistent rewards and the lower level requirement basically turned lpq into the second choice people still did lpq despite cpq being better in practically every way but it became a lot harder to find parties for lpq once cpq took over [Music] the next PQ added to MapleStory was magadia PQ its official name was Romeo and Juliet party Quest it was added in version 64 on January 22nd 2009 colloquially people would refer to it as rjpq mpq or just R and J this is actually the first PQ that we've discussed that I have zero experience doing mpq requires a party of exactly four players between level 71 to 85 as well as a thief with haste and a magician with teleport the PQ is started by talking to either Romeo or Juliet by accessing them via alcatno's hidden room or xenomous hidden room from what I can tell there may be a difference between starting the PQ via Romeo versus starting it via Juliet but due to the incomplete data about this PQ that's available online and my lack of experience I do not know if these differences were anything more than superficial NPC changes throughout the stages in stage one the entire party has to look through the books scattered around the mysterious lab to find a switch to progress to the next stage you can also find Romeo's letter and Juliet's letter randomly within one of these books and these are used later on in stage 4. once the switch is found the party can move on to stage two stage 2 is shrouded in darkness you'll only be able to see in a small radius around your character and the goal here is to kill all the enemies then it's on to stage three a monkey lion stage 3 need to be killed to get their suspicious liquid drops which then must be dropped onto the beakers at the top of the stage to fill them the beakers will leak if you don't fill them up all at once so it's recommended to gather seven suspicious liquids and drop them on the beakers all at once so that they don't leak do this four times and the stage will be finished stage four is where the letters that you may or may not have acquired come into play giving the letter to Romeo or Juliet will unlock a stronger version of the boss at the end of the PQ similar to Pirate PQ in this stage you need to kill the Neo who roids in this room and acquire four card keys in order to gain access to the rest of the rooms in this stage remember how I said most pqs don't rely on RNG drops for progression well that's not the case here so much and it hasn't been the case for a few stages we've talked about in previous pqs so I lied the drop rate of the card Keys is very low and it can sometimes take a few minutes to acquire all four ice lightning Mages do very well in this stage because they're able to attack the neoids from a safe platform using ice strike and freezing them prevents them from using their ranged attack there are two rooms in this stage the room on the right is for magicians similar to lpq Stage 5's magician room teleport is mandatory here so it can't be used in any way the room on the left is for thieves and requires max haste in both of these rooms you need to break the boxes and get the alcatnos experiment files and The zenu Mists experiment files the gimmick for the doors to these rooms is that they require a card key to open and automatically close after only a few seconds because of this you need one to let the party member in and when they've collected the items another one to let them out the door can only be opened from the outside so party members can't let themselves out and in typical saw trap fashion both rooms are filled with poisonous gas which will deplete the HP of anyone Inside by 100 every three seconds after the files are collected and the players are back in the main room the party leader can talk to Romeo or Juliet to move on to the next stage Stage 5 is a little special upon entering you only want one player moving to the right slowly until a small part of the NPC you let can be seen on their screen that party member should then talk to you let and choose the second option this is only required if you gave the letter to Romeo or Juliet and wish to fight the harder version of the boss at the end of the PQ after doing this the rest of the party can move forward and once you pass the hidden switch you let is alerted and disappears summoning reinforced iron mutate and reinforced mithril mutate that must be killed to move on to Stage six stage six gets a little complex there are four rooms and every party member has to go into a different room this stage is very similar to the orbis PQ stage on the way up where there's a combination of platforms that will teleport you to the top with the order being random every time there are 10 rows in each room and no two rows can have the same correct platform between rooms the most efficient strategy is to work together with the rest of your party to figure out the correct code by process of elimination if three of the four rooms have been cleared and everyone shared the numbers for the correct platforms for their rooms then the numbers that remain unused make up the correct code for the last room it's a bit difficult to explain but you're a smart enough cookie that I think you get it it's not too difficult in practice though especially when you have good communication between your party members once everyone reaches the top of their room they must head to the door that takes them into the center lab the boss stage the boss stage in mpq is more involved than most bosses we've seen not only does the party need to fight the boss but at least one person has to stay up top and defend Romeo Juliet from the monsters that spawn both frankenroid and the buffed version angry frankenroid have the same abilities and will randomly warp you to another map drop your HP and MP to 1 or blind or poison you meaning caution and a lot of all cures are highly recommended finishing the PQ without successfully protecting Romeo or Juliet will yield normal exp but you will get a bonus if you manage to protect them depending on the boss's difficulty once frankenroid's slash angry frankenroid is dead the PQ is over and everyone receives their reward you'll also receive either an Alcott no or a xenomist marble from completing the PQ and when you collect enough you can turn them into you let for either an Eye of Horus or a rock of wisdom the Eye of Horus is the PQ set item from mpq and it's not really anything special by this point most players would have a silver Deputy star but even if they didn't the 70 runs you would need to do in order to get the number of marbles necessary would likely stop them from trying to get it the rock of wisdom wasn't anything special either as it functioned similarly to spiegelman's Marble in that it only had a 60 success rate and would only add 70 HP and MP upon success this meant that in order to get a pendant that was not even as good as a silver Deputy star you would need to do a minimum of 130 pqs in total like I mentioned earlier you could start this PQ through either Romeo or Juliet and this may have determined which marble you would receive at the end of the PQ if this is true this added a level of complexity that would require that your party be on board with starting the PQ through Romeo or Juliet I couldn't find that specific information though since this PQ was relatively unpopular in the early days similar to what we saw in Pirate PQ mpq has some quests associated with it these are fairly simple all you need to do is complete the quest line from Kini starting at level 70. once you reach the point where you need to kill angry frankenroid you do so via the PQ after that you do the quests for you let the purpose of these quests is to unlock the quest from roulette that actually allows you to acquire the Eye of Horus not mandatory by any means but this is also the only instance of a prequest being required just to receive the PQ set item from a PQ not even to access it mpq is similar to PPQ in a lot of ways just like PPQ it wasn't too popular just like PPQ its reward wasn't really worth the time spent and there was a better alternative available as early as level 50. since PPQ very heavily discouraged anyone being over level 70 in The Party The Monsters within the PQ were quite difficult to kill and mpq was definitely worse about this specific issue I haven't done mpq a single time in my life surprisingly learning about it for this video was really fun and I honestly wish I had some experience with it this is my biggest regret in life [Music] bet you weren't expecting this I didn't even know Mal volan's PQ was a thing until I found out about it when digging through every single update Mal volan's PQ is an event only PQ that was available for a short time during the version 66 update which was between March 5th 2009 up until April 8 2009 this PQ encompasses a huge level range with the one video I was able to find on it containing characters as low as level 23 and as high as level 75 in the same party malvolin's PQ is very similar to the guy Fox event that took place in EMS in fact it's virtually identical in stage one the party needs to collect 15 Letters by breaking the rocks found around this Haunted Mansion style map you get teleported to the beginning if you fall that's all there is to it stage 2 is the boss stage and in order to summon MV the party must break the rock in the middle MV will drop fireworks upon being defeated and if the player purchased a ticket from the cash shop they were allowed into the bonus stage and that's where public information on malvolin's PQ ends but because I wanted to know more I dove into the files and dug around a bit I wanted to know what the treasure room contained and what it looked like since neither of these things were well documented and through some sleuthing I was able to find solid information on both of them I needed an entry point to have any chance at finding what I was looking for and I had two I found the name of the maps used in the PQ through the one video that remains I also had the knowledge of the fact that the boss is simply named MV and using these two pieces of information I was able to find out everything I wanted to know first I went to bbb.hiddenstreet.net and looked up MV BBB doesn't have any information about the maps but this gave me a few Clues as to where to look next I found an item called mv's hat that came in four different types one for each stat keeping this in mind I looked through the version 83 files and found the map ID of one of the maps used in the PQ since the MapleStory files are organized by an ID system knowing the first few numbers used for the map immediately gave me access to every map used in this event I found a map with no name and opened it up in a map viewer I don't know what this map was used for but it contained a few NPCs the ones we care about are Charles and Laura heading over to maplestory.wiki I looked up what I had learned I tried searching for the items that I found on BBB but that was a dead end next I tried searching for some of the NPCs that I found on the unnamed map Charles seems to be an NPC associated with entry to the P Q as is Milla but Lara provided much more information she has two quests associated with her mv's treasure is a quest that requires a ticket to initiate and requires the player to get mv's saber in order to complete when you turn in the saber you'll get one of the following rewards oh look it's one of those MV hats that I found earlier a headache for Treasure Hunters also requires a ticket to initiate and once started requires the player to kill 50 skell guard dogs 50 mummy guard dogs and 50 angry guard dogs all of which are found in the Treasure dungeon the treasure dungeon is a tall map that is absolutely filled to the brim with monsters there are low-level versions of Baines Junior and crimson ballrogs and even the muscle stones from gpq unfortunately I was unable to find whether the item drops came from boxes on the map or if they dropped from the monsters directly but either way this is where you got the saber to complete the quest so from what I was able to gather the rewards available from mvpq are listed here at some point likely at the end of a PQ if you have the quest in progress that required the ticket to access you were allowed to go into the treasure dungeon map and do yo Fang I couldn't find any information on time limits either but I would imagine that the treasure dungeon was timed and it was probably quite a generous duration well that was a fun Journey Through the files of MapleStory to find out that the rewards from this PQ kind of sucked and or locked behind a paywall the best item you could get was mv's hat and these were time limited so it was pretty much completely pointless this was well before the era of anvils as well so there's no way to permanently document this item's existence in the game there might be more to MVP cue's paywalled rewards but this is the extent of what I was able to find [Music] version 66 contained more than just malvolence PQ it actually added an extremely impactful meta-changing PQ called Crimson would keep PQ located in the depths of crimson would keep this PQ was intense and had some great rewards it also required a massive prequest that could easily take a couple hours to get through and had the highest minimum level requirement that we've seen thus far CW kpq requires the following 10 to 20 players two of each class a character with a rush skill Max haste and strong archers who can deal almost 50 million damage in 15 minutes all players must be over level 90 with a minimum of 3500 HP for arranged classes and a minimum of 7000 HP for melee classes all cure potions are practically required as well these are by far the heftiest requirements we've seen for any PQ we've encountered up until this point CW kpq's entry functions similarly to zakam and horntail Expeditions where there's a sign up period and up to 20 players can sign up before entering it's easiest to Envision CW kpq as having two distinct sections the tests and the bosses stage one is not really a stage it's more of an entry to the PQ the Expedition leader needs to speak to Jack barricade to summon the hidden portal which leads to stage two and if you Linger on the stage for too long Master Guardians will appear stage 2 The Forgotten storage chamber is the introduction of sigils there are five sigils that must be activated using specific skills and these sigils will come up again throughout the PQ once all five sigils are activated the Expedition can continue on to stage three stage three the test of agility is a jump Quest but it's not too restrictive like traditional jump quests haste and I believe even flash jump can be used here and the five sigils scattered throughout the stage must be activated and five players must enter the portal on the top of the map to finish the stage once finished the portal at the bottom of the map becomes active and the party can continue on to the next one stage four the test of wit is also a pseudo jump Quest jumping around through the fire and the bats to reach the platforms that hold the sigils again the five must be activated to complete the stage there are fake sigils in this stage as well so communication is important stage 5 the test of unity is the final test of the PQ each class has a portal to enter and each portal has an objective and a weapon that needs to be acquired by completing that objective after all the weapons are dropped onto the statue in the correct locations the Expedition can enter the Grand Master Council Hall where the real cwkpq begins Grand Master Council Hall is a massive wide Battlefield talking to the battle statue will summon a handful of mobs and once those are killed talking to it once more will summon the five bosses of crimson would keep let's cover each of these one by one first is red nerg the warrior boss it will hit up to 7 000 damage which is where the 7000 HP minimum requirement for melee classes comes into play it can cast a knockback move summon Crimson wood mobs and spawns on the bottom floor of the Grand Master Council Hall Relic is the Archer boss it can also cast a knockback move it can lower a player's HP and MP to one poison the player and seal the player's skills most impactful of its abilities though is its ability to stun Relic spawns on the bottom platform and would often be dealt with by melee attackers soft is the thief boss it has incredibly high avoidability but not much else interesting about it it also spawns on the bottom floor the nag ROM is the pirate boss it has a very long-ring shark barrage attack similar to thunder Breakers sharkwave skill and will dispel players if they get too close nag ROM spawns on the top floor and is often pinned to one side by a ranged attacker who can stay outside of its dispel range finally we have Morgana as you might have noticed by now every boss's name is some word backwards and margana's name is anagram backwards which I thought was very on the nose and funny Morgana Peaks my interest since it's set up perfectly for paladins Morgana can zombify and poison players as well as heal itself and will summon a pillar that blocks projectiles most important to paladins however is the fact that Morgana is Holy weak meaning a paladin using wholly charge can deal insane damage Morgana spawns on the top platform of the Grand Master Council Hall this boss Gauntlet takes up by far the most time out of any stage in cwkpq and is often what people remember when discussing it there are many different ways to approach this stage efficiently and parties would often do things differently based on their composition and power levels after the five bosses are defeated the Expedition can proceed to the bonus stage like a few bonus stages we've seen such as an lpq gpq and apq this is a box breaking stage that has insanely valuable rewards unlike those bonus rooms though there's actually a strategy and organization involved with clearing this room because there's a one minute duration boxes are usually distributed based on the number of players and the harder to reach boxes are saved for the classes with the highest Mobility some good rewards include gelt or jelt I don't know how it's pronounced chocolate Black Fist cloaks a variety of fourth job Mastery books dowels that are used to craft balanced Furies and most important of all Mark of narokane now the mark of narokane doesn't actually come from the bonus stage it drops from the bosses in the Grand Master Council Hall but I figured it would be more impactful if I discussed it alongside other rewards this is a pendant slot item that absolutely demolishes any other item available for this slot even beating out horntail pendants that's not a joke the major difference between a mark of narokane and anything else is the plus 10 weapon or magic attack stat since they dropped from the bosses the stats were rolled randomly between a range meaning you could get a mark of an Arcane that gives you plus 11 weapon attack which is roughly equal to 55 of your main stat give or take a few based on your gear this was essentially impossible to beat upon release of CW kpq and only stopped being the best pendant once cwkpq was no longer available even a fully upgraded hornetail pendant couldn't beat out an average Mark of narokane isn't that crazy but who is narokane narokane is the name of a demon found within the masteria lore narokane and subani are very important figures Within masteria akin to deities of light and darkness with subani being light and narokane being dark narokane's appearance is reflected in the items associated with it Mark of narokane and Nara Kane's demon Elixir however at the end of the Crimson would keep PQ there's a fairly clear image of what narokane's True Form looks like in a hologram kind of an intimidating figure to be honest hold on this is too scary I have to go cry and that's cwkpq not as much to talk about here the PQ is straightforward and consisted primarily of boss fights which is what I would imagine most people remember it for it's what I remember it for at least in version 141 cwkpq was replaced with a PQ called crimsonwood altar PQ which is similar but not the same and doesn't have the same rewards again I've never done CW kpq but I have seen it done quite a few times a good roll of thumb with these pqs is if it's high level content I probably never did it myself my indecisive ass back then was switching characters every other week I was lucky to get above level 60. foreign version 72's Summer Event there is another event PQ temporarily added to the game this one's extremely simple enter with a group of up to six players and take on boss's lunch stage at a time the boss stages are as follows with resting spots after every five stages this PQ primarily rewarded agent points that were used to turn into Asian Inn for agent ins disposable receiver you could turn in points for the Disposable receiver four times and the fifth receiver would then be a permanent version Called Agent ends receiver the bosses didn't drop anything but the monsters they could summon had their usual drop tables this PQ was very fun and could be soloed which is what I usually did I probably spent hours upon hours clearing the first three stages and maybe got close to 200 points by the time the event was over I really wanted those earrings but I was way too weak back then to have a shot at getting them it's weird looking back at all of this content that I could have participated in but just didn't due to my lack of ability to stay focused on one character for any significant length of time there is another more permanent PQ added in version 72 known as The Forest of poison fog and colloquially referred to as lnpq or epq this PQ required a party of four to six players all between levels 45 to 55 and cygnus knights were originally excluded from being allowed to participate though they weren't released until version 73 one patch after this bq's release there are no class requirements otherwise though all cure potions are also strongly recommended upon entering everyone will be transformed to appear like the Explorer Representatives there's some kind of lore involved but it's way complex and outside of the scope of this video to be honest however the basic story behind epq is as follows Ellen Forrest was peaceful and clean some time ago a mysterious man in a black robe showed up drove out the fairies who lived there and started researching strange things due to this research the forest is becoming more and more polluted each day and the goal of this PQ is to save the forest from the overwhelming pollution stage one has the party killing all of the poisoned Lord tree monsters on the map and proceeding through the portal on the right once they're all defeated stage 2 requires diluted poison to destroy the green Thorn bushes on the right side of the map in order to acquire these diluted poisons the poison Stone bugs must be killed in front of the green poison tree and only when killed in this spot will they drop the diluted poison if killed anywhere else on the map they drop concentrated poison which cannot be picked up once four diluted poison items are acquired The Thorn bushes can be destroyed by dropping the poison on them and the party can proceed to the next stage stage 3 is a maze of portals similar to the opq stage on the way up there's not really a strategy here everyone just chooses random portals until someone finds the correct combination and speaks to Ellen at the bottom of the stage stage 4 starts out with everyone in the party speaking to Ellen to receive 10 purification marbles weaken the poison Sprites around the map and capture them using the pure vacation marbles to turn them into monster marbles once 20 monster marbles are collected they must be passed to the party leader who can then talk to Ellen Ellen will summon a Sprite who will send the party to the next stage stage 5 is a jump Quest stage with false platforms and throwing stars the boxes up top must be destroyed to find a purple stone of magic and once acquired the person in possession of it can talk to the Sprite to proceed to the final stage the boss stage in stage 6 the boss stage the party leader must drop the purple stone of Magic on the Rock statue to summon the boss of the PQ the poison Golem has three phases and in phase three it can debuff the party pretty significantly which is where all cures come in handy poison Golem has a chance to drop a few Scrolls when defeated after this stage the PQ comes to an end and everyone receives their exp reward and an all-tire fragment epq also had a separate ranking system that tracked your performance over multiple pqs from what I was able to figure out you had a rank associated with your character this rank was determined by your fastest time ever the number of times you've attempted the PQ and the percentage of pqs you attempted that were completed successfully reaching certain ranks was required in order to have the option of trading Altair fragments for the Altair earrings the PQ set item for epq are the all Tire earrings if it wasn't obvious are required after collecting 20 all-tire fragments and holding a rank of a or higher the Altair earrings can be upgraded to glittering Altair earrings after turning in 30 more Altair fragments as long as you hold a rank of b or higher this means that the PQ requires 50 complete clears to get its PQ set item reward let's do some math at 52 000 exp per clear you'll have acquired 2.6 million exp total by the time you finish 50 complete pqs since gms's exp reduction took place in version 70 before this PQ was released this meant that if you started at level 45 exactly you'd be able to get the glittering all-tire earrings as early as level 50. it also means that if you don't want to die to lose exp and still get the earrings you would have to start pq'ing non-stop at level 52. I did Ellen Forest PQ a couple times in the past it was low enough level content that I was able to reasonably access it and it's a pretty solid PQ overall it doesn't take too long to clear it only requires four players and it's a nice way to fill the void of the mid to high 40s where cpq and lpq slowed down in leveling speed significantly cpq is still a good Contender if you were a strong mobbing class doing solo trade wins but epq definitely outdid it without much effort a theme you might be noticing throughout some of these recent pqs is a lack of smuggling or tracking the two defining aspects of the old school PQ meta because of the change in design and lack of desirability for some of the newly added pqs these things just weren't required for efficient pqing anymore tracking might have taken place in epq but with other options available at that level range I would imagine it wasn't extremely prevalent everyone has a different idea of when old school maple story stops being old school and this is the cutoff point for me personally basically anything after this PQ is what I consider to be fairly new and not like the rest of the pqs we've seen previously that being said our next PQ isn't exactly offensive to me but it's also a weird one foreign make something new when you could just make the same thing again but worse a senior director asked this in a board meeting back in 2009 while they were coming up with the most uninspired PQ of all time Monster Carnival pq2 referred to as cpq2 was added in version 75 on August 26 2009 as we all know the sequel is rarely better than the original and that Rings true here cpq2 was literally just cpq again at a higher level this time encompassing levels 51 to 70. there were some slight changes to what Carnival points could be spent on and the carnival Fields were all themed after deep ludibrium Maps rather than the more surface level ludibria Maps found in cpq1 these Maps were very uninspired and there were only three fields in cpq2 field 1 and 2 are for parties of 2-4 players and field three is for parties of three to six players one thing cpu2 got right at least is the fact that the fields are treated similarly to mini dungeons in that there can be multiple matches happening in the same instanced Fields within the same channel further reducing the effects of overcrowding the first major sin of cpq2 though is the fact that monsters only give anywhere from one to eight exp nowhere near a usable amount and way lower than what you could get in cpq1 the next issue with it is that the monster spawn rate was awful I can't speak to this personally taking a look at the two side by side cpq2's spawn rate doesn't seem that much worse one of the other major differences is that you could attack any monster on the field there were no assigned monsters like there were in cpq1 a weird change but I guess it added to the competitive nature of the matches so I'm all for it Larry what are you a strong Evan you want to go you want to go chaos your opponents dude hell yeah if you weren't planning on actually competing though there were a couple different ways to trade wins effectively first was the C rank win trading the party needs to get 50 carnival points before the clock hits 7 59 and then the team designated to lose will disband instantly losing and allowing the winning team to get their exp the timer was relevant since exp was not available until a certain amount of time had passed C rank exp was unlocked after the timer reached 7 minutes and 59 seconds the better more effective win trade strategy was trading a rank wins this required parties who could acquire 500 Carnival points within 5 minutes acquiring 500 Carnival points waiting until 4 minutes 59 seconds on the timer and then having the losing team disband will reward the winning team with 87 500 experience in both of these scenarios the losing team receives zero exp however because you can leave the match early it's actually more efficient for everyone to consistently trade a-rank wins than it is to win non-stop back to back in full length a-rank matches so there's another major design flaw that makes cpq2 not very competitive now math heads out there I know that the EXP is the same over time but the fact that there's no Randomness or challenge involved with getting that exp once again makes when trading the superior option the PQ set item from cpq2 is another pendant just like in cpq1 spiegelman's necklace of chaos it's not really anything special but the plus one attack is all right if you don't have a silver Deputy star this is a solid Choice instead the rest of the rewards are identical to cpq1 meaning you only have access to weapons up to level 50 which are completely useless for characters over level 50. monsters in cpq2 do drop Maple coins just like in cpq1 and supposedly the buffies had the highest drop rate for them this is another PQ I never did like I mentioned when discussing Ellen Forrest PQ this is around the point where I stopped enjoying MapleStory and was no longer playing very often cpq2 isn't the worst thing in the world its hate was a little unjustified in my opinion but I also have no first-hand experience so my opinion might be completely meaningless either way after discussing it I don't think cpq2 was that bad but it was a lazy implementation the rewards were the biggest defense from what I could tell I do Wonder though would it have been done less often if you couldn't leave early and get the same exp reward [ __ ] did Bill Nye answer that [Music] next we introduce yet another type of PQ monster survival these types of pqs require anywhere from one to four players meaning it can be soloed two of these pqs were added in version 81 on January 20th 2010 and the first of these is the construction site PQ this takes place in the kerning City construction site and is directed by Mr Lim upon entering the PQ either alone or with a group you'll see a portal where a bunch of monsters will spawn from killing these monsters who only have one HP fills up the act bar at the top of the screen the goal is to kill as many monsters as possible in order to keep your act bar filled until the timer runs out after each stage is cleared a new portal will spawn summoning more monsters and after clearing three stages the PQ will be completed and you have the option to enter the bonus stage if you choose not to enter immediately you'll be given a ticket that will allow you to enter the bonus stage independently of the PQ whenever you wish a couple more things to mention about this PQ your exp reward is based on your ranking which is determined by the number of hits and misses that you get on the monsters throughout the stages as you accumulate kills you're given special Buffs that increase your damage and attack speed the bonus stage of the construction site PQ when entered consists of a finite number of bubblings who drop Subway lost and found items that contain mostly potions and not much else you can also get a medal if you kill 10 000 monsters within the PQ from what I remember this PQ was decent exp scaling based on the number of kills and the rank at the end if you are a mobbing class it would have been faster than kpq and maybe faster than grinding especially with the potion reward which saved a lot of mesos Warriors my fellow Warriors I'm looking at you the more players you had the quicker the act bar would drain but the more exp bonus you would get information about this PQ was only available through a hard to follow video so I had to piece together quite a bit and borrow from our next Monster survival PQ Nets pyramid [Music] the other PQ added in the version 81 update was Nets pyramid and this monster survival PQ was a little more fleshed out with better rewards than the construction site PQ Duarte is the director of Nets pyramid and offers differing difficulties based on your level easy normal and hard all had a level cap of 60 while the real PQ was Hell mode requiring level 61 plus to enter higher difficulties contain higher leveled monsters and differing rewards from the bonus stage there are no gameplay changes between difficulties otherwise Net's pyramid required anywhere from one to four players just like construction site PQ and functioned almost identically in most ways the only differences lie in the number of stages which is increased to five stage one lasts two minutes and the rest of the stages last three minutes for a total PQ time of 14 minutes the bonus room lasts one minute and is also optional with Duarte giving you an entry token that allows you to enter the bonus room as you please just like in the construction site PQ one major difference in Nets pyramid versus construction site starting in stage 2 Yeti pharaohs will spawn and hitting one will lower your act meter these guys never disappear on their own and can only be killed using the Rage of pharaoh skill this is rewarded to players after every 500 kills and will kill all monsters on the map instantly including the yeti pharaohs players will also receive Pharaoh's blessing after reaching kill Milestones which is a buff that increases damage and attack speed just like in construction site PQ most of this PQ is a reskin of construction site PQ different enemies that function identically but it does add a nice Twist by disallowing you to hit certain enemies the most important difference between the two is the reward the PQ set item for Nets pyramid is called The Immortal Pharaoh belt it's only possible to acquire this from Hell mode as it comes from Jewel chests and Only Hell Mode's bonus room drops these there's also a metal reward from Nets pyramid obtainable after killing 50 000 enemies I did Nets pyramid a lot when I was younger but I never got to do Hell mode it took quite a while to get through a full PQ as well and I definitely didn't have the patience to grind it out back then at some point Net's pyramid was overhauled almost entirely this new PQ required four players and only had two difficulties easy and hard instead of being a carbon copy of construction site PQ it turned into more of a tower defense type of PQ comprised of 20 waves and four lanes with each party member taking one lane the party's goal is to protect the Obelisk which has 20 hp if a monster reaches the Obelisk without being killed it deals damage to the Obelisk normal monsters deal one damage Pharaoh Yeti deals 2 damage and the Pharaoh mummy deals 5 damage [Music] as players accumulate damage on enemies they receive points and these points can be turned in to use various Buffs within the PQ it's extremely simple requiring even less explanation than the original and at the end of every wave players earn one Nets Emerald all of which are claimable upon completion of the PQ 200 Nets emeralds can be turned in for the immortal Pharaoh belt 250 can be turned in for the immortal Pharaoh shoes and 300 can be turned in for a Time limited Immortal Pharaoh ring players also receive exp and this PQ was considered quite good for a long time I definitely did this Tower Defense version a lot as well [Music] the next PQ added was the Dragon Rider PQ in version 85 the fifth anniversary update on May 5th 2010. this is a slightly more modern PQ that I think a large number of players will be familiar with this PQ also has a mandatory prequest to unlock the soaring skill a requirement for participation getting the skill was pretty straightforward Chief tatamo will ask the player to speak to Matata in the forest that disappeared Matata will require a variety of items in order to create Dragon Moss extract and once the player acquires them they will receive the soaring skill Dragon Rider PQ requires a party of three to six players all of whom must be over level 120 and have the soaring skill in this PQ pets cannot be used and if you die during the PQ you'll be sent to a safe room and allowed to return to the PQ at will similar to cpq the PQ consists of a few kill stages and then eventually after getting through these you reach Dragon Noir sometimes for whatever reason Dragon ore will not spawn and either after defeating him or simply not seeing him appear on the map the party can move on to stage four stage four is a pseudo jump Quest wherein you're allowed to use the soaring skill which is highly recommended after reaching the end of the jump Quest the party can enter the true boss stage Dragon Rider is the final boss of Dragon Rider PQ [Music] who would have thought the party is allocated 20 minutes and within that time they must kill Dragon Rider even upon release I don't think this boss was difficult enough that the 20 minute timer was ever an issue however as we've seen timers in pqs are more of a hard cap rather than a suggested time to beat as the overwhelming majority of the time no PQ ever takes as long as the timer allows Dragon Rider will buff himself summon monsters and has a few attacks including a knockback attack once defeated Dragon Rider will drop a sky scale when any one player picks up the sky skill everyone else in the party will receive their own as well assuming they have an Etc slot open this Sky scale can be turned into Matata for a variety of items and the party will also receive a dragon rider box for their class little known fact this PQ still exists in this form in modern maple story and is a source of some rare anvils that are otherwise completely unobtainable so that's Dragon Rider PQ not very intensive and not very interesting the most interesting parts of this PQ are the boxes that can reward cool Anvil items and the fact that dragonoir and dragon Riders Monster cards were used to unlock the leaf free codex set back when that system was still in the game [Music] [Music] so in version 89 there was a big alien themed update this was on August 19 2010 and was called the visitors update it was the beginning of the alien themed masteria slash Omega sector content that we saw exclusively in GMS I believe this PQ was a part of this update and is very hard to find I've searched everywhere I could possibly think of and only unveiled one guide originally I thought spacecraft PQ was the same as the alien visitor PQ that we received in the Unleashed update which we'll cover in a minute then I thought this might be the space Gaga jump Quest but that was a different event entirely I even thought for a moment that the PQ was this short escort Mission through this underground passage to the OSS base eventually though I stumbled across the real PQ this PQ had a couple different difficulties and level requirements and supposedly required visitor equipment to enter you needed to have at least one piece on to be allowed entry eventually both of these things were changed there was only one difficulty and the visitor equipment was no longer required the entrance to this PQ is identical to the alien visitor PQ but the PQ itself is slightly different there are 13 different rooms and they're randomly selected in series to make up the stages of the PQ I have no information on the number of rooms players needed to get through to reach the boss but the boss was also just a random room so it could have been a set order of rooms or completely random after getting through enough rooms and eventually killing the ultimate visitor it will drop alien items and that spacecraft PQ in a nutshell it's a much more complex version of the alien visitor PQ which we should probably cover now in the Unleashed update version 137 the alien visitor PQ was released this is a reimagining of the spacecraft PQ and was around until November 2022 it was a very simplified version of the spacecraft PQ consisting of five static stages with two of them being boss stages the new requirements for alien visitor PQ are as follows level 200 plus any party size this PQ can even be soloed stage one is a kill stage you need to defeat 180 monsters to clear it stage 2 is also a kill stage also requiring 180 kills stage 3 is a boss stage where you will kill the violent visitor stage 4 is a kill stage 180 monsters required and Stage 5 is the final boss stage where either the high visitor will spawn or the perfect visitor at a low chance throughout all these stages you're given a grade based on your speed which affects your exp reward the EXP isn't really worth much of anything and this PQ was only run for the items the alien fragment earrings and alien fragment necklace are super good accessories being level 180 and 25 Stars they made some strong gear I still use them on my Paladin and GMS as drop gear nowadays spacecraft alien visitor PQ was a fun one to research a few hours of searching just to find a single video about the original spacecraft PQ but I'm happy to have it archived in this video now even if it's a bit incomplete [Music] luckily ghost ship in the Sea Mist is more well documented than spacecraft PQ added in version 90 on September 29 2010 my 15th birthday this is another competitive PQ and might be the most interesting of the ones we've seen so far this PQ is for characters level 60 to 80. since it's a competition you need another party to compete against but both of the parties can only consist of three players no more no less the PQ is organized into two separate sections the strategy rooms and then the final boss room upon entering both parties are sent to their own separate strategy rooms these are really no different than a standard PQ stage requiring the party to kill all the enemies to proceed to the next stage as the party progresses their progress is tracked separately players will receive points as they kill enemies and this influences the amount of exp gained at the end of the PQ strategy Room 2 is another kill room wherein you have to summon The c-man Apprentice ghosts by killing the wooden boxes strategy room 3 is a mini boss who can summon other monsters if he manages to do so they must be killed before moving on increasing the time spent on this stage pretty drastically strategy room 4 is another kill room the first lieutenant ghosts can darken the entire map preventing you from being able to see anything outside of a small radius around your character strategy Room 5 is the final kill room as well as a tiny jump Quest this stage has first lieutenant ghosts as well meaning you can be blinded and there are a couple jumps required to reach the spring that will bring you to the end of the map the first party to the boss stage will receive a 5 HP reduction on the boss giving them a slight Edge over the other team when someone enters the boss room all players on both teams are teleported to begin the fight the final boss fight is a competition between both parties to defeat the boss first effectively turning the final boss into a DPS race the winners will receive a bonus 1000 points increasing their exp further 30 times you can get the inside scarf and completing it 50 times will get you the captain scarf it doesn't matter whether you win or lose you just need to complete the PQ to get the rewards I didn't even know this PQ existed until I started doing research for this video it is incredibly cool that there was such a competitive PQ in Maplestory and I'm surprised that it completely went under the radar for me this was probably a very fun PQ to do and the EXP was good I would have done this PQ a lot back in the day if I had known about it another PQ added in version 90 alongside ghost ship in the Sea Mist resurrection of the hoblin king also known as ice Gorge I have actually done this PQ before and it has a very iconic reward this PQ also has a small series of prequests that the leader of the party must have completed in order to enter the PQ most of these quests are very boring talking between characters grinding a few l-nath mobs for Quest drops and eventually gaining access to the PQ the PQ is started via shamos the hoblin character found in elnath Remember that little green guy at the bottom of el nath's Chief's residence where you get third job he's the director of this PQ you'll find yourselves in a little pre-stage room twice once at the beginning and once at the end of the PQ when speaking to shamos in the pre-stage you'll be allowed to proceed to the actual PQ or you can attempt a jump Quest as long as you have the item Empty Bottle for ancient glacial water you'll never guess what this empty bottle is for the jump Quest is not too difficult and if you complete it you can fill the empty bottle with ancient glacial water this can be used once during the PQ to restore shamos's Health by about 50 percent it's generally recommended to avoid doing the jump Quest as keeping shamos alive is pretty easy upon entering the PQ you're met with another dead simple stage kill all the monsters and speak to shamos to continue to the next one stage 2 is an escort Mission wherein you must safely escort shamos to the end of the stage and kill all the monsters on the way hopefully keeping shamos very healthy and spry if a party member Strays too far away from shamos for an extended time during this escort Mission the PQ will fail after reaching the end of stage 2 shamos will teleport the party to stage 3 which is another escort Mission at the end of stage 3 is a portal leading to the boss room after some monologue shamos will summon Rex the boss of the PQ Rex has the usual assortment of debuffs and attacks but drops a few interesting items Rex's hyena saddle a unique equip that when paired with another reward from this PQ gives the player access to what was considered an insanely good Mount at the time possessing 180 percent move speed another drop from Rex is the essence of the hoblin king which is used in a quest that is unlocked after completing the entire prequest and finally Rex's earrings these come in three flavors and introduced most players to durability items a short-lived system that still exists today with certain items durability was nothing more than an added stat that degraded over time and required players to repair their equips via a collection of NPCs Final Fantasy 14 did it better Rex's earrings were also unique in that they could only be upgraded using tablets I couldn't find much info on tablets but it seemed like they dropped from bosses and functioned similarly to dark Scrolls destroying your item at a percent chance if it failed Rex would also drop a hob Warrior Mark at a 100 chance and just like in Dragon Rider PQ when anyone looted it the whole party would receive one if they had an Etc slot open the PQ set items from this PQ were Rex's perfect earrings an upgraded version of Rex's not perfect earrings these could be obtained by turning in 50 hob Warrior marks plus the earrings of choice you also have the option to acquire Rex's hyena by turning in 300 hob Warrior marks which was the other piece required for unlocking the mount alongside Rex's hyena saddle Rex's perfect earrings are a common Anvil found throughout the game nowadays I've seen them dozens of times I only ever did this PQ once or twice and there's not a lot to say about it most of the PQ consists of escorting shamos to the end of a stage which just isn't very exciting compared to some of the other stuff that we've seen [Music] nearing the end of this list next up we have ice Knight's curse PQ this was added in version 101 this is a very low level PQ for this era of MapleStory only requiring level 30 plus this PQ also has a limit only allowing the player to complete it 10 times a day this has actually been the case for a few of the past pqs as well but I didn't realize this and didn't think to include it until now you want as many players as possible due to the nature of this PQ and because it was so poorly documented I wasn't able to find out the exact number of players required I assumed it was anywhere from three to five I don't know why I assume that but it's what I wrote down this PQ has two stages and a boss stage the first two are an escort mission to guide Iceman to the end very similar to the hoblin king PQ upon reaching the final stage you confront the ice Knight and defeat him it's not an interesting PQ the ice Knight will drop a cold ice fragment that everyone in the party will receive upon looting and the rewards for the PQ are as follows ice Knight's ice earrings which I really like the look of actually and the ice Knight chain crampons these are just a reskin of snowshoes I don't have much to say about this PQ nor does the rest of the internet it was so simple so uninteresting and the rewards have been forgotten with time I think by this point Nexon were on their last legs with regards to designing pqs so let's just go on to the next one yet another PQ added in version 101 kinta in danger this is a PQ that takes place within Aqua road which is the first time we've seen a PQ in this area and it's one of the very few that still exists in GMS to this day the objective of kinta in danger is to protect kinta while he performs research within the dangerous sea the less damage kinta takes throughout the PQ the more bonus exp the party receives at the end I guess party quests just turned into escort missions during this era of MapleStory it's a good thing too since it's the most widely praised mechanic in video games this PQ was fairly simple in its first implementation stage 1 is a kill stage stage 2 is also a kill stage but this time you have to collect 20 air bubbles for kinta and stage 3 is a three minute long Gauntlet of monsters who must be killed to protect Kenta stage four is the boss stage and consists of two pianists one on each side of the map they have the same debuff capabilities as normal pianists and both drop pianist scales which are the currency used to acquire rewards from the PQ the PQ set item from kinta in danger is actually a part of the PQ set kinta's new goggles these seem to be a decent eye accessory if it weren't for The Aquatic letter I accessory which has better stats is easier to obtain and makes up part of the boss accessory set the bonuses of which are incredibly valuable in the early game though the Aquatic letter eye accessory wasn't added for quite some time after this pq's release you can also turn in five pianist scales for a random pet scroll including ones that give stat interestingly so that's kinta in danger this is of course a very Bland era of the game and we can see that reflected in the uninspired design of some of these pqs next up in version 101 Escape this PQ takes place within Lionheart castle and consists of slightly more interesting stuff than kinta in danger or ice Knight's curse the objective is to rescue the prisoners trapped within Lion King's Castle stage one starts out hardcore with a jump Quest there are Spears popping out of the ground at set intervals which will knock back the player in typical jump Quest fashion it's quite forgiving overall however since only one person actually needs to complete it to move on stage 2 is a kill stage where the party must eliminate all of the gray vultures and Castle Golems to proceed stage 3 is a bit of a maze through a series of random portals you must make your way to Dark Tower 6 which holds the portal to stage four this might be the most unique PQ stage we've seen since ghost ship in the Sea Mist stage four is another kill stage all the gray vultures and prison guard boars must be killed Stage 5 is another jump Quest more Spears but just like in stage one only one player has to actually finish the jump quest for the party to move on stage six is slightly more involved there are prison guard bores and prison guard rhinos in this stage the prison guard rhinos will drop prison keys and these keys can be used to open the gates there are boxes throughout the map some of which will spawn more enemies some of which will drop prison Keys once all four gates are unlocked the party moves on to the final stage stage 7 is the boss stage prison guard Annie must be defeated and he has a very interesting buff that makes all non-critical attacks Miss this might be the only instance of this buff existing in Maplestory I've never heard of it before it's pretty cool I assume that the prison guard he that prison guard Annie drops after being defeated is shared between all party members just like in the past few pqs we've seen the PQ set item reward for escape is the Von Leon War belt this comes in five different flavors based on stat and can be directly redeemed with five prison guard keys so Escape is mildly more interesting than the last two pqs we've seen and that's good it shows that maybe not All Is Lost with regards to PQ design I've never done this PQ I didn't even know it existed until doing this video but I would imagine the jump Quest aspect was probably very unfun for a lot of players but the Von Leon War belt was pretty decent so maybe people just did it regardless though in typical late PQ fashion this PQ could be completed in as little as two minutes ridiculous version 132 introduced the next PQ on our journey Dimension Invasion Dimension invasion is a one to four player PQ with a minimum level requirement of 140. it has an entry limit of 5 per day which means if you enter but don't clear one of your entries will still be consumed the level of the monsters within the PQ will be the average level of all the party members rounded down and capped at level 180. in this PQ you're protecting Pantheon from hilla's invading Army who have reached Pantheon with the help of gelimer Dimension Invasion consists of five stages all within the same map and a bonus stage that takes place in another map players are given one hour to clear the PQ and in usual PQ fashion this is just a hard cap and not really a suggestion for how long the PQ ought to take almost the entirety of the PQ is just killing enemies and there's a meter at the top of that fills up based on the number of monsters on the map if this meter is completely filled due to not killing enemies fast enough the PQ has failed kind of the opposite of the ACT meter from Nets pyramid and construction site PQ stage 1 consists of seven waves of Pikeman Skelly Knights and Vanguard blood fangs they're summoned in the middle of the stage and must all be defeated stage 2 is more of the same a large wooden horse is summoned near the left side of the map and must be defeated the large wooden horse can summon enemies though and if the enemies are present it is Invincible until they are killed once the large wooden horses defeated it's on to the next stage stage 3 will spawn three portals on the map waves of Skelly Troopers will spawn from the portals at random and the final wave will have them Spawn from all three portals at once really good for a bowmaster with aeroplatter that's the random thing to mention to again what are you talking about stage 4 starts out with monsters flying across the top of the map dropping green meteors that deal 80 HP damage after roughly a minute of this the meteors will stop dropping and monsters will begin spawning 30 waves of gargoyles and gargoyle Knights will spawn at the bottom left of the map they must all be defeated in order to move on Stage 5 is similar to Stage 2 but in Reverse this time you're fighting the meter at the top of the screen the Obelisk Shield must be defeated to clear this stage but it will continuously summon Spearman Scully Knights who are invincible until the Obelisk Shield is defeated once the player successfully defeats the Obelisk shield and the Spearman Skelly Knights they're rewarded with a normal dimensional drop and will move on to the bonus stage there are three unique bonus stages that are chosen randomly at the end of the PQ the first is hila she will summon a giant black heart boss who is pretty difficult this giant black heart will cast damage reflect at 90 health and this lasts 15 seconds with an 80 second cooldown this damage reflects buff sucks by the way I've never been able to beat the stage because as far as I remember there's no indication that damage reflect is happening until you're already dead even if you manage to break past the damage reflect wall giant Blackheart will heal itself for 99 million HP every 30 seconds this is not a lot nowadays but back in 2015 it was obscene especially if you were low level and didn't really understand the game and I promise I'm not talking about me if you manage to beat giant Blackheart you'll get a necromatic dimensional drop as your reward the next option for bonus stage is Hilla versus Magnus Hilla and Magnus will both summon enemies on either side of the field who walk towards the middle to fight each other and if they reach their destination they'll die and Grant no EXP you'll never guess what the goal here is kill everything these monsters have solid HP but aren't too difficult to kill in time this stage rewards a fearful dimensional drop [Music] option is Magnus probably the simplest of the three you must defeat hordes of Specter Shield bearers and receive a psychotic dimensional drop upon winning Dimension Invasion actually has a lot going for it it's not exactly the most fun PQ ever made but since it has an entry limit you don't really get overwhelmed by doing it over and over again one of the things that it provides is an incredible amount of exp as well as Dimension gloves and high quality Dimension gloves both of these were decent gloves for their time and when paired with the high exp and daily entry limit this PQ was done to death by just about everyone I have fond memories of doing this PQ a lot by this era of MapleStory I had started to get back into it and I was playing a bowmaster at the time unfortunately the game wasn't perfectly balanced bowmasters struggled to clear stage four because the number of monsters that would spawn per wave was higher than the number of monsters that we were able to hit with aerostream even placing aeroplatter down wasn't quite enough and I had to practically one shot everything in order to get through that PQ once I was able to hit hard enough to one shot though it was a cakewalk kind of miss playing bowmaster such an incredibly underrated class nowadays version 137 added another really solid PQ there was definitely a lull in the quality and release schedule of pqs for a while but I think things kind of turned around a little bit with Dimension Invasion and definitely when cooking with tangyun was released for levels 6290 cooking with tengun is a fairly straightforward PQ that gives great exp and great rewards this PQ requires one two three players and upon entering you can choose which monsters to summon from a selection of five you'll also be informed which dish you're attempting to cook and for every dish there is a set recipe meaning you must choose the correct Monster to summon to cook the dish properly choosing the correct ingredient is usually fairly intuitive and you'll know if you chose correctly based on the yellow text that will appear at the top of the screen if the text says you can look forward to some great Cuisine it means the correct ingredient was selected if the text on the screen says the pot is giving off a funky stench it means the incorrect ingredient was selected unfortunately there's no way to undo a selection but at least you'll know that you messed up eventually taste burners will spawn and must be killed by the designated firefighter in your party this is selected automatically by the system but if you're soloing it always selects you after that salt is added the amount is random every time and it's just a little timing minigame if you successfully cooked the dish Mr Chomps has spawned if you incorrectly cooked the dish the trash can is spawned instead once the boss is defeated the PQ is over and rewards are handed out each player will receive Chef's certificates two for a successful dish one for a failed dish the PQ set items for cooking with tang Yoon are the chef's hat and the chef's outfit these make up their own little two-piece set giving the wearer a total of 32 allstat and eight attack it's really good for the very early game and you would often see people wearing this set in revamped Nets pyramid Nexon really kind of figured out how to implement pqs properly and flow naturally with the new direction of the game I could spend a long time praising cooking with tangyun to be honest it was simple efficient and had great rewards and most importantly you received a reward even if you failed the only real complaint I have with this PQ is that it might have gotten a little boring after a while but that's a hard criticism to put on a PQ since they're often repetitive by Design version 165 saw the final PQ added to MapleStory Xerxes increase this is a PQ based off of the crease theme dungeon area that was removed in version 150 completely unfairly by the way this PQ requires one to four players with a minimum level of 110. in stage one you'll encounter a large slab of rock that you need to crawl under climb up the vines and you'll see a large area of rocks that you need to place vines on to climb stage 2 gives you a grappling hook skill look at that a unique Mechanic In A PQ this late into the game's development crazy monsters will spawn in multiple waves throughout this stage with several weapon dummies appearing throughout the stage appearing on one side and moving all the way to the other side these can't be killed and touching them will stun you and deal 10 HP touch damage after you kill all the monsters in this stage you can move on to stage three in stage 3 a spinning column with spikes will appear on the bottom and you'll need to use your grappling hook to hoist yourself to the top of the map before the column reaches you once you reach the top of the map you'll automatically enter the boss stage this is the final stage of the party Quest where you fight Xerxes he has some debuffs and can summon kefivaras and tragos once you defeat Xerxes you will have 30 seconds to pick up any Soul shards that he dropped before being transported to the bonus stage in the bonus stage you can jump down and collect crease core fragments while using your grappling hook to navigate you have 30 seconds to claim as many as possible and if you fall to the bottom of the stage the PQ is over Xerxes increases PQ set items are Michael's new glasses and Michaela's new glasses or that's pronounced Mike new glasses I'm not sure they're not anything special especially since boss accessories set items exist and were added in version 157 before Xerxes increase the only upside I could see to these is that they can be traded with regular scissors of karma which makes them a good candidate for easily tradable drop gear I might actually get a pair of these now that I realized that crease as an area was one of my favorite pieces of content back when it was still available I'm honestly so upset that it was removed as I loved it and it was a fun theme dungeon out they'll bring it back but I hope they do save that discussion for the removed content video [Music] well we reached the end I've wanted to do a video like this for a very long time and it surprised me a little bit how much I learned and the story I discovered by writing about this revisiting old pqs tells the story of A game designed with passion creativity and a focus on much baser MMO Concepts in the early days that was then undermined at some point to instead focus on other aspects of the game was this good or bad who's to say what's your take on it all I know and all I can gather from the evolution of peak Hues throughout maplestory's history is that at one point there was a large focus on party content that was dropped pretty suddenly in my opinion we saw the biggest shift after construction site PQ and Nets pyramid PQ were released in version 81. these were the first pqs added to the game that could be soloed and the majority of pqs added after it were all soloable as well this takes all the meaning out of the term party Quest when it's optional to participate as a party it might as well be Called Quest Quest you can solo and sometimes party if you want that's going to do it for this video thank you so much for watching and if you used this video to fall asleep to thank you unconscious person I appreciate it follow me on Twitter at twitter.com there I post various updates on new videos and information about streams and other things I'm working on I'll see you guys in the next one take it easy [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Togain

Views: 92,256

Keywords: Togain, Vs., Video, Games, playthrough, let's, play, gameplay, maplestory, gms, reboot, mihile, progression, bossing, gear

Id: PQovWxTtlMc

Length: 165min 36sec (9936 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 06 2023