MapleStory Iceberg: The Race to Level 200

in the iceberg video I made a while ago I briefly covered the topic of the race to 200. the race to 200 was a big deal for us in GMS as it was for everyone in every version of the game I won't mention it too much more since it's technically a spoiler and I'd like to keep this video self-contained but I knew I wanted to make follow-up videos exploring some of the topics on that Iceberg a little more and the first one that really grabbed my interest was the race to max level where there's a ceiling to be reached there will be people who set out to do it before anyone else and in this video we'll cover the race to level 200 for GMS discussing the big players showcasing the dedication and commitment and documenting one of maplestory's craziest and coolest competitions we'll discuss how players used to train based on the information I was able to acquire and my own knowledge and hopefully this video can serve as a sort of historical document of something that I and hopefully others find very fascinating [Music] MapleStory being a Korean MMO operates a little differently than most MMOs you might be more familiar with in a game like Final Fantasy 14 or World of Warcraft you can reach max level on a new character with nothing more than maybe a few weeks of grinding questing or doing msq maplestory's level cap is not nearly as easy to reach before we get into the discussion though I want to take some time to mention something I came across while doing research for this video because it was so unrealistic to get anywhere near level 200 for such a long time and because of the rumors of a certain player reaching level 150 before rankings were even officially added to the website there are some people out there who believe that the first level cap in the game was 150 120 100 Etc now there is no evidence to suggest that the level cap was ever anything other than 200 before big bang and that includes the beta however this is a case of a myth that can't be confirmed as true and also can't technically be explicitly debunked the game client was programmed to hard cap levels at 200 by setting the EXP required to level to zero this is in spite of the fact that the variable was stored as an 8-bit integer meaning its max value was 255 and this can be observed in an emulation scenario where you can manually set your level as high as 255 setting it any higher would require the level variable to be stored as a different data type or some kind of more complex programming work around it's also worth noting that despite the client hard capping levels of 200 server side code could have soft capped players by simply not allowing them to gain exp after a certain level both JMS and KMS had been out for a couple years before we even got the beta of GMS and by early 2006 we would see players in Japan who were in their late 150s and Beyond it's really hard to believe that GMS would have been developed without wizit knowing that they wanted the level cap to be 200. there's probably a stronger argument for the level cap being lower if we were to discuss the very early beta of KMS but it's most likely that the level cap was never anything but 200 in the beta and if it ever was it was silently changed and unable to be observed from our perspective until a developer or someone who would have had access to the source code confirms this one way or the other we only have empirical evidence speaking of the beta though that's where our Story begins there are quite a few characters to mention and a lot of things to talk about when discussing the race to max level in the beta days I did a bit of research to find some remaining screenshots of the highest level characters people came across back then since we don't have any official data you see from the release of the beta until July 1st 2006 official rankings would not be hosted on the game's website mapleglobal.com the earliest version of the beta website that was actually related to MapleStory didn't have any rankings the top bar had an entry for it so it was likely something that was being developed but was not yet available October 23 2005 saw a major revamp of the website which is likely the one most people remember as this design was around for a long time but again no rankings page it took them a while information from the beta era is scarce and very hard to even search for but like I mentioned earlier there are some notable high-level players I was able to find from those days from lowest level to highest level we have the following beta gods dub on zaito level 85 spearmen leafy level 85 wizard [Music] Maxwell level 88 ice lightning wizard egiro level 91 Bandit moonshining level 92 cleric mild sauce level 93 assassin tin icky 01 level 102 fighter I'm sure there are plenty more but this is what I was personally able to find with evidence shout outs to these players and all the others who reached crazy high levels without even having access to the continent of osiria in fact shout out to anyone who participated in the beta I didn't I was like nine so I had no idea what was even happening like in life the continent of osiria this region was not available in the beta and without it players would only have had access to Victoria Island where the highest level monsters are found deep in the Sleepy wood dungeon Toro Macy's and Toro Spears despite being one of the only high level options in the prio Syria days Taro Macy's and Toro Spears were not usually a great mob to grind and there were a few reasons for this first and foremost they had far more HP than most monsters in the game at this point and third job didn't exist players were very weak without it secondly they possess a very strong magic attack these attacks are difficult to avoid and do anywhere from 700 to 1200 damage on a squishy character making grinding here very expensive you see back in the early days it was extremely important to be able to at least break even in terms of mesos at your grinding spot whether this be accomplished through raw meso gains or by getting drops that you then sell so potion cost was a big concern and a monster that hit this hard would have been costly to train on the next issue with these mobs becomes apparent if we open up the map viewer for MapleStory and take a look at some data we see that there aren't many of them on their respective Maps you end up killing a lot more cold eyes than anything else which wasn't terrible since you were almost definitely one-shotting them by the time you were training here so it was actually an okay source of exp the Toro Macy's and Toro Spears though had such a long respawn time and only spawned a few per map they were some kind of pseudo mini boss with how long it would take them to respawn this is heavily offset of course by the fact that killing a single Tauros back then pre-third job would take almost 10 seconds so by the time you were getting through with clearing the map it's likely you wouldn't actually end up waiting more than a few seconds for another one to show up this allowed for a pretty decent training rotation but there were still many issues with these guys with the most egregious one being the sheer amount of damage they would hit resulting in very high potion costs another good option for training back then were wild cargos the cat-like mobs found on a slightly different path through this dungeon cargos were good but they possessed a weaker drop pool and or lower level you would also find people grinding on Drakes and maybe Golems though Golems didn't have a great spawn or drop pool either Forest of Gollum wasn't released until sometime in early 2006 which is the best map for them so your options for training on them were limited since Victoria Island was the only continent available these were basically the top grinding spots for high-level players during this era you didn't have much other choice luckily this whole struggle of grinding on sleepy wood dungeon mobs would end by the official release which was version 2. this was on May 11 2005 and included orbis and elmath with these areas being available late game training spots really opened up you were no longer stuck training on Victoria Island and that was huge but not quite as impactful as you might initially think this is where the race to 200 begins characters were wiped at the end of beta meaning everyone started from scratch and after a few months rumors regarding the identity of the highest level player began spreading like wildfire with the release of Osteria mobs up to level 90 became available to train on these mobs possessed a generally more favorable HP to exp ratio when compared with what Victoria Island offered and expirates became noticeably better the top players over the next year would shoot up to the mid-140s with access to these new areas before rankings were even available it is worth noting real quick that the old exp curve used to scale in such a way that the halfway point to level 200 was level 187 so while the mid-140s was impressive for sure it was still not anywhere close to 200. this is still the era where it's nearly impossible to find consistent data on top players though only bits and pieces are available but I was able to find some information on a couple characters I wanted to make sure I mentioned ninjagaru since he was a pretty big deal in the very early days he became kind of obscure fairly quickly though and there's not much more to say tiger passed him relatively quickly and he just disappeared third job wasn't released until version 14 so from release until December 21st 2005 a little over seven months people were stuck with second job and this is why training didn't really speed up too much after oh Syria was released it was better definitely but second job classes are just so weak that there's not a whole lot they can do against Monsters over level 70 or so it wasn't until version 14 that players were able to really see a big Improvement in their leveling speed as a quick example training at zombies on a level 89 assassin who could two shot gave an exp rate of about 340 000 per hour whereas giving that same character Acts S2 Flash jump Avenger and Shadow partner their third job skills allowed them to one shot and get exp rates around 500 000 per hour without any other change in power level this also scaled better later on when players trained at higher level monsters like Yeti and Pepes again though just because a monster is high level doesn't mean they were necessarily the best choice for grinding and this is something I want you to remember if we take a look at this video someone took of tiger we see him in his mid-120s grinding at lucidas a level 73 monster training here would have resulted in a very slow exp rate of about one percent per hour at his level on the surface this doesn't make much sense Yeti and pepe are higher level and give more exp per kill resulting in 1.3 percent exp per hour at his level instead it's possible he was looking for an eclipse a level 80 pole arm that was an exclusive drop from lucidas at that point but I'm not sure maybe the potion cost difference was just that significant and he was farming mesos there were plenty of monsters available who were all higher level but we once again run into a few issues with those monsters map layout damage dealt or respawn times and in the case of Warriors lack of accuracy to even hit them a lot of variables go into picking a training spot in this era of MapleStory and they're not always readily apparent to the outside Observer if you didn't have a lot of mesos to spend you trained somewhere that gave great mesos even if it meant sacrificing exp raids jumping ahead to when we finally get official rankings this is where it really begins by July 1st 2006 ludibrium was out and all the top players were grinding on the Deep looty mobs exp rates were solid all the way up until 150 which is when it really started to slow down it's likely that competition up until this point wasn't very strong as can be observed from Tiger's massive seven level lead ahead of like talks after this though we'll see it start to heat up since ranking information from this point on was publicly available and I'm sure that sparked a lot of competition it's at this point that I want to highlight something ludibria mobs were extremely strong hitting thousands of damage and possessing tens of thousands of HP potion costs were very high and these monsters gave such good exp that you couldn't afford to not grind on them if you wanted to maintain a top 5 spot while Hermits and archers had it a little easier due to a variety of reasons primarily the ability to attack from afar warriors were kind of out of luck they struggled a little more on the solo grind because the potion costs were very high and arranged classes didn't spend nearly as much due to their ability to stay out of attacking range and often not get hit these Maps were also huge and would benefit from high mobility and party training especially when a priest was involved the often unnamed Duo partners of the big players like tiger priests were very much forgotten in the story of the road to 200 and I don't like that priests are one of the biggest reasons why warriors were able to thrive in this era of MapleStory let's take a closer look at what a priest provides that's useful for a warrior specifically focusing on their insane Synergy with Dragon Knights priests had two incredibly impactful Buffs called bless and holy symbol bless was a buff that would give everyone in the party some increased stats but the most important of these stats in this context were accuracy and avoidability in Old maple story Warriors would often struggle to hit monsters as I've briefly mentioned before you needed a lot of accuracy to be able to hit the things you wanted to train on there were plenty of sources of this accuracy but the best and most readily available Source was your own stats Dex increased accuracy at a fairly acceptable rate but for every point you put into decks you would be sacrificing a little bit more damage however if you had a priest you basically had a permanent plus 20 accuracy buff it's hard to overstate how valuable this was while you could get accuracy Buffs from potions 20 accuracy is equal to 25 decks some of you are already aware of how ridiculous that figure is but to quickly put it into perspective that's nearly a five percent difference in damage from one buff alone the more important factor though was that the 20 accuracy could be the difference between reaching the break point that allowed you to hit the Mob 100 of the time which was even more valuable the next Buff that priests had called holy symbol was and still is considered one of the best skills in the game this skill provides party members bonus exp the exact formula varies based on how many people were in the party it's a little hard to explain succinctly without delving into equations and showing you tons of numbers but basically a dragon knight the one doing the killing would receive full exp plus a little bonus and the priest the one supporting and likely not killing would get half of that number however priests could not in any scenario kill mobs nearly as fast as Dragonites could so their share of the EXP is actually extremely high relatively and results in priests leveling almost as fast as a dragon knight would when considering other factors that contributed to their leeched exp but that's still not where it ends Dragon Knights have a very high HP pool naturally as a warrior as well as the only skill in the game that would increase Max HP and Max MP temporarily called hyper body because of this they were very tanky but their potion costs could get pretty high coupled with the fact that Warriors had almost no avoidability no mobility and had to be very close to the enemy to deal damage they got hit a lot and spent a lot of mesos on HP Potions there wasn't much of a workaround for this it's how the job was designed there are elixirs which are potions that restore HP and MP by a percentage rather than a flat amount and were often what classes with very high HP and MP pools would use but they were expensive and couldn't be purchased from any NPC only other players meaning procuring large amounts would have been time consuming and difficult inter-priests with their second job skill heal they could heal a dragonite's entire HP pool by using only 24 MP this skill had no cooldown no diminishing return turns and gave a small amount of exp whenever it was used to heal someone based on the amount of HP it healed so it was easily spammable and created the coolest meta ever where a priest would duo with a dragon knight and provide free infinite healing while gaining crazy exp just for being present the Dragon Knight would end up spending practically nothing on potions since they didn't use much MP anyway and the duo would often at least attempt to train at Undead monsters this was so that when the priest used heel it not only dealt a little bit of damage speeding up kills and giving the priests more of the share of the EXP but it also had the chance to proc the skill MP eater this is a passive that second job magicians get which allows them to leech and pee off of mobs at a 30 success rate per attack if the priest had high enough HP to survive a hit from the mobs and was just spamming heal they wouldn't even need to have magic guard on the skill that diverts some of the damage they take to their very large MP pool this meant that they used significantly less potions because they'd recover so much MP when attacking the undead mobs they'd heal their own HP pool upon getting hit again for free because of MP eater and the majority of the potions consumed in this ideal scenario are the Dragonite MP potions hitting the HP threshold to take a hit was made a lot easier as well with dragon Knight's hyper body skill so the Synergy between these two classes was absolutely absurd this is basically the reason why you always see Warriors and magicians on top while other classes could compete Warriors had insanely high damage and also had an advantage that other classes didn't because they scaled so well into late game with their priest supports they were more desirable of a training partner for the priests because they actually offered something in return ranged attackers often had to look elsewhere for good exp and non-priest magicians would just have to work a lot harder Warriors could definitely get by without them and there were plenty of instances where priests could train alone or with a non-warrior partner but the warrior priest's Synergy just made things so much easier for everyone we don't get our next rankings update until August 10th like talks is completely gone from the rankings as is XX Koreans xx and we never see either of them return tiger is still in first now followed by Sushi cleric Zoe vietx Hue and hydrange the levels are a little closer here as leveling speeds slowed and competition sped up Aqua Road was released on July 26th before this rankings update but deep gorge which is where high level players would be grinding was not released until August 15th a few days after this screenshot no major changes happened in the training meta during this time without the new deep gorge area being available Hermits would still abuse ranged attack hitboxes and get crazy exp rates priests and Dragonites were still attached at the hip to one another barely outshining Hermits and I have no idea what Mages and archers were doing their best I imagine the next update to the rankings comes on September 28th one day before my 11th birthday we can still see tiger in first followed by sushi but we have a new player in the mix Shinobi a bear a thief cleric Zoe fell pretty hard from Rank 3 to rank 5 and hydrange past her this is the first time a character outside of Scania shows up while you might think that the first released server Scania would dominate the rankings due to it being the oldest the way content was released and really good indie game training areas kept getting added it was pretty reasonable to be in the top five for quite a while even if you didn't start in Scania though this did eventually become too much of a gap to be reasonable for some servers like windia to ever have a hope of breaking into the top 5 rings Barrow was not excluded from this competition though as we'll definitely see eventually we've seen a few thieves in the top five already and will continue to see them so I think now is a good time to discuss how they are consistently able to keep up with the crazy Dragonite priest combo we just discussed one thing that I can't confirm outright but do believe based on all the research I've done is that every single thief in the top five so far has been a hermit this doesn't actually make a lot of sense to me I Know Chief Bandits are very good mobbers so what's going on well Hermits are known for being an insanely good 1v1 damage dealing class they can contribute crazy damage to boss fights and when fourth job is released they easily beat every other class in DPS by such an insane margin that it's not even worth having a conversation about we're still in the third job days for now but that honestly doesn't make a huge difference their ability to kill a single Monster very quickly makes up almost entirely for their lack of a really good mobbing skill because of this as well as their crazy Mobility with flash jump and haste their insane avoidability and access to a passive that increases the effectiveness of potions their only downside is their swishiness which can be circumvented by HP washing though most players didn't bother doing so Hermits had enough going for them that one downside wasn't a big deal Chief Bandits on the other hand are designed almost entirely differently they're more of a utility class in a lot of ways and receive a huge power spike in the form of meso explosion right towards the beginning of third job there's an inherent design flaw with this skill in that it requires the player to manually drop a large number of mesos in order to deal damage and the damage of this skill is based on the amount of mesos dropped meaning it doesn't scale well past the initial spike in the beginning meso explosion does the same amount of damage whether a chief bandit has no gear at all average gear or has perfect plus seven 10 scrolled items in every single slot this is a big issue with the chief Bandit's ability to deal damage it's more intensive less rewarding and doesn't scale well but since this is the race to 200 we're really more focused on grinding and chief Bandits have a lot of tools that one would think would allow them to grind very quickly they do lack the mobility that Hermits have since they weren't given a flash jump until post Big Bang but they possess decent 1v1 attacking skills and have a very good mobbing skill called Band of Thieves this would have meant that they could train just about anywhere with relative ease and I think the only reason we didn't see a chief Bandit beating a Hermit is because Hermits were more popular and there wasn't a great Chief Bandit representative to break into the top five however now that deep gorge was released exp rates shot up dramatically for just about every class thieves included where a level 147 Dragon Knight could get something like 3 million exp per hour in deep looty they could easily see rates of 4 million and above training at gobies a solid 33 increase in exp rate and yes I said gobies the level 85 monster players specifically good mobbing classes would get much higher exp rates training on monsters that were lower level than deep looty mobs and there's a few reasons for that gobies while only being level 85 have an insanely good HP to exp ratio and win their spawned in a group of six after killing the bombing houses they automatically aggro to whoever they see and they move fast get a Dragonite and priest duo in here and you will easily be getting over 4 million exp per hour with less effort than trying to Traverse deep looty Maps they also hit a lot less and didn't have a ranged magic attack which made grinding much more relaxed Hermits had it pretty rough with this deep gorge meta though not being able to flash jump as effectively underwater dropped their Mobility down significantly to nearly that of their normal non-hermit Piers permits trained at squids in dangerous sea Gorge the direct alternative to gobies they were slow and couldn't swim so despite them having a much worse HP to exp ratio than gobies exp rates were still decent for Hermits because of their insanely good 1v1 abilities it was easy training too Hermits were likely looking at an exp rate of up to 3.75 mil exp per hour if they could convince a priest to give them holy symbol reasonably close to what a Dragonite and priest Duo could achieve but Falling just short likely within the margin of error if you take a look at deep gorge monsters you might notice these shark enemies it's worth discussing these things really quick because they're in a very odd spot with their existence they're a higher level than either squids or gobies and have a better HP to exp ratio so you would expect players to grind there but they had one major flaw that rendered them basically completely useless for grinding some monsters in this game possess the ability to debuff the player you might be familiar with the junior Boogie mobs that used to apply all sorts of debuffs if you ever accidentally hit them while grinding on wild boars sharks are similar in this regard however their debuff is a lot more impactful when attacked sharks would attempt to dispel all your Buffs often successfully this meant that if you were a magician who relied on your main buff Magic Guard to survive they would just take that away from you you could recast it but it was more effort than it was worth for just about any class in the game not only did it pose a danger for some classes it also heavily increased Supply costs because you'd be buffing all the time as well as using attacks and this is before even considering the amount of time you would waste always reusing your Buffs which eight into exp rates so heavily it was just never worth training here I don't think I've ever heard of someone effectively training at sharks unless they were farming a specific item in which case it was likely a necessity more than anything else [Music] taking a moment to check out the rankings again we see the first update with this deep gorge meta on December 5th a big jump in time here you see between October and December Nexon migrated the domain from mapleglobal.com to maplestory.nexton.net this likely caused a bit of confusion for a while and archives of the sites between those months are simply not available however we do see some more big changes mostly in the lower half of the top five tiger and Sushi were very dominant in the top two ranks for a long time and this update is no exception Shinobi is long gone replaced by a new Thief named silencer X which is a pretty cool name hydrange took his place on the rankings and is now sitting at number three with cleric Zoe being gone and replaced with Zoe Cherry a suspiciously similar IGN I believe this to be the same character renamed or there were two Zoes all along [Music] foreign begin 2007 and then jump forward a month and a half February 17 2007 is the next major rankings update tiger and Sushi are in their assigned seats followed by the usual high range silencer X and Zoe Cherry not a lot of interesting movement Happening Here in fact all placements are identical and the only difference is that everyone gains some levels this Arrow was pretty dry in terms of new content the last in-game area aquariums deep gorge had been added in version 28 back on August 15 2006 about six months prior to this rankings update and this was still the best place to train since it wasn't really intended to be an area where players were reasonably able to reach level 200 it really fell off hard by the 170s so character growth during this time was very slow and pretty uneventful people were still grinding away at gobies and Squids but there's something interesting that a few of you might have picked up on already the presence of archers on the rankings and that's just instead they have no presence on the rankings we haven't seen any in the top five yet I've thought a lot about why this might be and I believe it to be for a couple reasons similar to Chief Bandits archers are in a weird spot with a third job only meta they have good damage and decent utility as well as two very good mobbing skills that I'd argue beats out hermit's Avenger in certain scenarios their biggest issues are simply due to based on my tests their damage output and Mobility for some reason on a similarly geared hermit I was always out doing archers and exp tests not by a huge amount but more than enough to be significant Mobility between an Archer and a Hermit are closer than one might think with Hermits obviously still beating archers due to their ability to attack in midair and having access to flash jump and this alone might account for most of the difference but I don't fully believe so even an aqua Road where Mobility is heavily nerfed and Hermits can't flash jump nearly as effectively archers were on average coming out anywhere between 10 to 20 percent below Hermits in all of my exp tests I really couldn't figure out why exactly this is even when I gave archers as many advantages as I reasonably could they still couldn't match hermit exp raids archers often had more choices in training spot though even having reasonable access to gobies which was decent exp for them after a lot of testing I really have started to believe that Hermits are just stronger they're easier to use have higher avoidability are more mobile hit harder and use less potions archers do have some utility that Hermits don't and can come very close but never quite reach the consistent performance of a hermit this coupled with archers being less popular likely meant that while they were inferior it wasn't by that much and the fact that an Archer hasn't appeared in the top five might be due to a combination of being lower tier and a lack of a dedicated player really pushing for that top five spot though in defense of archers a difference of even 10 percent lower exp rates on average which is a generous estimate based on my tests is a massive hurdle to overcome in a race to max level I will say though quickly that I personally think archers are a lot cooler bows and crossbows are cooler weapons they have a very versatile kit solid mobility and really good 1v1 damage while they don't beat the best in any of those categories the fact that they can do it all is really awesome and I know if there was someone out there dedicated enough back in the day we could have seen an archer in the top five by March 13 2007 roughly a month later we saw Sushi breaking into the 170 Club being the first thief in GMS to do so and Zoe Cherry snuck her way into third place passing hydrange over the next few months we watched vietxu and hydrange Trading Places every update until eventually Viet XU loses his clothes on May 1st he will never be seen again it looks like hydrange won this battle May 20th 2007 a new Contender enters the top five his name Curry is hot coming out of seemingly nowhere this ice lightning Mage beat everyone else and got himself into the top five now if you want to talk about fan favorites curious hot is certainly a contender for being the most liked top five player in all of maplestory's history I think only Sushi comes close to his reputation we can see him absolutely destroying the magician rankings as of June 26 2007 passing both Zoe cherry and hydrange in one Fell Swoop positioning himself at rank three tiger is the first GMS player to reach level 180 entirely off of gobi's and likely zacom runs with Courier's hot being in the race suddenly and a major part of it at that let's take a look at how ice lightning Mages would have trained up until the aqua Road days I thought it would be interesting to go over Elemental damage and how it impacts a character's ability to grind unless a mob specifically resists the ice element it can be frozen meaning it can't attack or even move for a few seconds most monsters do not resist ice and this means most Monsters can't be Frozen when a monster is specifically weak to an element they take 150 damage and when they resist an element they take only 50 damage lightning is a little less interesting as it only has the damage bonus and damage penalty with no secondary effects like freezing but it's still very impactful ice lighting Mages benefit from Elemental damage as early as the mid-30s very early into second job utilizing both ice and lightning in various Maps against various enemies to level at a faster rate than most classes are capable of while a cleric is basically limited to only Undead mobs that can be damaged with heel an ice lightning Mage is given much broader range since they only need to find mobs that don't resist their elements it's also worth noting that fire poison Mages don't get a mobbing attack until third job and because of these factors ice lightning is almost the fastest leveling second job class of the three magician branches barring crazy FP strats like poison brace training though clerics are close maybe even beating them out at times and have the added bonus of becoming valuable supports in third job while also not requiring HP potions to train without diminishing returns on freezing monsters playing ice lightning Mage properly results in the player incapacitating every mob they encounter indefinitely and in an ideal scenario never taking damage especially with third job's ice strike skill this skill has a great hitbox and because of its innate freezing ability is incredibly valuable as a mobbing tool the mobs in deep gorge have a variety of resistances gobies only resist fire but the mob you have to kill to spawn the gobies resists all elements this effectively kills gobies as a training spot for ice lining Mages it can still be done but the rates are a lot lower than at squids neither of which resist ice this means they can be Frozen and provide crazy good EXP Mages certainly don't have the 1v1 damage and avoidability that a Hermit has but their ability to mob and utility of freezing enemies makes them a really fast efficient grinder beating Hermits on average in my exp tests before looking into it more I found that I heavily underestimated what an ice lightning Mage was capable of their ability to mob is so far ahead of most classes that they managed to keep up pretty decently well in terms of grinding all the way to level 200. they still can't touch the Dragonite priest combo but they can get closer than a Hermit can this is a decent indicator that this is where they would have trained especially since none of my other tests produced results close to this so I guess I have to believe this is how they did it Curry is hot proved that ice lighting Mages can hold their own on the race to 200 and I think that's awesome back to the rankings they look completely different than they did two months ago Zoe cherry hydrange and sushi have all been overtaken Curry is hot is close to passing tiger and four of the top five are warriors including none other than fangblade himself at this point New Leaf city was out but there weren't any amazing new training spots that came with it at least none that were relevant to these guys Phantom Forest wasn't added until much later and the only thing that came with NLC Was the removal of potion costs when factoring in training NLC potions were so effective for the price that they instantly became the meta pick and because of this they were no longer a huge expense for classes with a lot of HP or MP though most high HP or MP classes were already using elixirs anyway which were reasonably cost effective the levels are a lot closer here as well exp raids are a lot slower by this point and with no new major changes happening in the training meta for a while longer it's entirely a race of determination and willpower a race that it seemed Curry as hot was winning based on his leveling speed up until now who could bear the slow tedious Aqua Road grind the longest and maintain their position in the top five at least that's what we thought October 11 2007 the end of an era Tiger has been dethroned fangblade has secured rank 1. for the first time in the history of the game tiger Falls below number one in fact Tigers growth throughout this period seems to have come to a dead stop while the point of this video is to focus on the facts it is somewhat relevant to mention that its speculated tiger was hacked and eventually deleted nobody really knows for sure other than whoever was playing the character so we'll just leave it at that however that does bring me to an important point that I've been withholding until now while not easily confirmed it is also speculated that a few of the top players participated in illicit activities in game exploits NX fraud outright hacking account sharing Etc not every player was accused of these things but in the Adolescent drama-filled world of 2007 maple story if people didn't like you and you were a public figure in any capacity you were constantly accused of cheating this is one of the things that separates someone like Curry is hot from Tiger not only did Curry as hot actually get farther than tiger did but because he was so well liked nobody really ever had anything bad to say about him people seemed to enjoy interacting with curry as hot as he was a generally nice friendly person you don't find nearly as much of this with someone like tiger or Fango played who as far as I can tell weren't very sociable this isn't inherently bad and really doesn't mean much of anything I just thought it might be interesting to point out the reputation these high-ranked players held by this time in late 2007 zepengu was expanded to introduce dreamy ghosts colloquially known as Hemes these monsters provided a much better exp rate than gobies and were on a flat map which made grinding there a lot more Mindless training here did require you to kill a boss known as Crow but that wasn't much of an issue for top players by this point a near 100 increase in exp rates for certain classes was absolutely worth killing any boss to access one thing I want to point out is that in the latest picture of fang blade on the rankings he's holding a red surfboard this is significant because while tiger was always using Spears fangblade would often be seen using pole arms either due to rocking a hybrid build where he put points into both Spear and pole arm related skills or because he was all pole arms I'm not sure either way this was a very smart move on his part let me explain why Dragon Knights have two types of third job attacks Crusher and dragon fury Crusher is a stabbing attack that hits Three Monsters three times and dragon fury is a swinging attack that hits 6 monsters once the distinction between stabbing and Swinging is significant because Spears received extra damage when stabbing and pull arms received extra damage when swinging Dragon Knights were free to use either type of weapon as long as they put points into the relevant skills which was easy to do since they had a lot of extra points due to only having a few useful skills because dragon fury had a larger hitbox and attacked more monsters and pole arms received extra damage when swinging a dragon fury pole arm attack consistently does a lot more damage than a spear Crusher if there are a lot of enemies it's a little complex but what you need to know is that pole arms result in Faster grinding almost always just take a look at this quick test I did as an example in a race like this any advantage is going to make a massive difference over time and fangblade was well ahead of the Dragonite meta by grinding with pole arms there are plenty of other variables to consider though and since tiger basically stopped grinding at this point we don't really know for sure but if this difference in exp gain was accurate between the two of them it's likely tiger would have had to swap over to pole arms or fangblade would have passed him eventually anyway it's also worth noting that priests were still a dragonite's best friend at this point so the priest using teleport and heal since it would hit the undead fast-moving hemaze would have been Gathering all of them and bringing them to the Dragon Knight to kill this is important because in my tests I did not have my priest partner doing this this greatly increases exp rates and would have likely exacerbated the difference between Spears and pole arms even further October 30th this is the last time in the history of the game that we'll see tiger on the top 5 rankings from here on out he's no longer a part of the race to 200. Phantom Forest was released a little bit before this update and I would imagine that top players started killing Bigfoot for some crazy exp I'm not sure how prevalent of a meta this was as it's not exactly profitable and it's a little difficult but if it gives better exp I think players would have been doing it especially in the early days when the competition for them wasn't overwhelming at 2.66 million exp per Bigfoot kill and about 4 million exp with holy symbol if you were strong enough this could have been decent exp you would only need to kill two per hour with holy symbol in order to match hime's rates on a dragon knight and Bigfoot was likely killed by classes that thrived in 1v1 scenarios like Hermits Hermits who would have not gotten anywhere near that exp rate training anywhere else Archer struggled a little less at Himes due to the fact that their main mobbing skills Aero rain and Aero eruption didn't have a minimum distance requirement this would have allowed them to consistently deal better damage without having to constantly reposition and if they were partied with a priest healing them it would have been very good exp without much of a potion cost at all NLC pots were a lot better than anything else but they weren't free after all if there was ever a chance for an Archer to break into the top five this might have been the best opportunity [Music] shortly after this heme meta is the release of fourth job version 49 January 23 2008. Lee free and mounts were released and this is where we reached the final stretch of the race to 200. Dark Knights got a lot of nice Buffs most important of all being berserk this allowed them to do crazy damage pretty easily but it also introduced a problem with the Dragonite and priest meta now known as The Dark Knight in Bishop meta a dark knight needed to be below 40 HP to activate berserk and when a bishop heals a dark knight they recover most slash all of their HP as we know there was no way to circumvent healing that amount so that coupled with Genesis shifted a Bishop's role into a more active attacking position Bishops were now generating most of the EXP a complete 180 from what had been The Meta for literally years thing blade was already level 194 when fourth job came out so this meta shift didn't affect his ranking very much at all it just meant that his last six levels would need to be done quickly and they were with the release of Lee free came the release of skellies skelesaurus and skelegon these were Peak grinding monsters and pretty much the only in-game option they were Holy Week meaning Bishop's Genesis would do bonus damage great HP to exp ratio especially considering the massive power Spike everyone had just received from fourth job they were an incredible addition to the game and resulted in much higher exp rates for everyone I've killed so many hundreds of thousands of skellies over the years it's not even funny I hate hearing their little bone rattling death sound these monsters hovered around the early 110s and hit hard enough that they were still a bit of a threat even for some of the top characters due to the innate squishiness of archers and Hermits now night Lords Chief Bandits now shadowers didn't have this problem with squishiness because of mesoguard and the addition of boomerang step which was a very good mobbing skill meant shadowers were doing a little better all magicians received an ultimate blizzard Genesis and meteor positioning them as the top Grinders instantly and warriors were overall given Buffs that allowed them to be tankier and stronger Rangers and snipers now bowmasters and Marksman respectively both got some nice new skills that made their 1v1 damage a lot better and they both got the skill sharp eyes which increased critical rate and damage it was such a valuable buff that nightlords benefited from so heavily that it became almost mandatory and now all archers in the game had a much more important role a lot of fourth job stuff just doesn't really apply to grinding too much outside of magicians and the ultimates they received but to be honest I kind of dislike fourth job it killed the Dragonite priest meta that I enjoyed so much and makes the game a lot less interesting in my opinion one month after the release of fourth job fangblade was already on the cusp of level 198. the Skelly grind was real and I'm sure he had a squad of Bishops available to him at all times and then on March 14 2008 it finally happened fangblade became the first player in GMS to hit Level 200. this character who came out of nowhere his two appearances within the top five being rank 3 and then immediately after that rank one and he never dropped below that over the next few months there was a little bit of competition to see who could lock in their top 5 placements by reaching 200 with curry as hot eventually taking second place on May 8 2008. likely helped significantly by the fact that he had an ultimate to work with not to discredit his effort though he kept up with the top five well before fourth job was released and was the only magician to do so that's badass on May 15 2008 Corwin became the third player to reach level 200 in GMS on June 1st 2008 Han F1 reached level 200. and then finally the fifth player to reach level 200 in GMS was Starlights [Music] and that's it the top 5 players to reach level 200. no archers ever appeared in the top five at any point in the game's history no fire poison Mages ever made it into the top five either as far as I know and this might be for reasons similar to archers however it's worth noting that fire poison Mages had it a little rougher as they didn't really have great training spots for a very long time in fact it wasn't until fourth job came out that they were even generally considered a decent class at all by the public ice lightning Mages could freeze things Bishops could support and fire poison Mages well they had no useful niche Shadow wars were not part of the top five at any point either I also believe we never saw a paladin in the top five again though there's no good reason why a paladin wouldn't be able to make it into the top five until fourth job they were as good or better than Crusaders since they had access to three different Elemental damage types allowing them to grind very effectively at a variety of areas and when fourth job was released they received holy charge which would have allowed them to deal crazy damage against skelly's the top grinding mob it might be the case that there just wasn't a committed palette and willing to make that push into the top five and I feel bad saying that because I'm sure there were plenty of committed characters out there archers fire poison Mages Chief Bandits paladins but none were able to break into the top five throughout all of the data points I was able to gather we saw a total of 18 different characters pop in and out of the top five only 18 players were ever in the running for top five and none of the players we saw in 2006 made it into the final rankings Curry is hot showed up on May 20th 2007 and is the oldest entry in the top five who actually made it into the final rankings thanks for watching if you enjoyed this video leave a like subscribe comment share it with people and check out some of my other stuff I have plenty more videos like this planned including one that I've already begun work on so look forward to that in the meantime if you're looking for something to watch you can go check out my other channel youtube.com lpp show there's a podcast that might be posted by the time you see this check it out it's something I'm really passionate about and care about a lot and if you want to see more MapleStory stuff you can go check out some of my progression series I have a new JMS series starting soon that might already be posted it might just be in live vods I'm not sure where you're gonna find it on my channel but if you look around my channel you'll likely find some JMS stuff there I'll see you guys in the next Iceberg follow-up video I hope you enjoyed this one and I hope you enjoy the next few

Channel: Togain

Views: 152,479

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

Id: 5XZcfGaSt4k

Length: 48min 21sec (2901 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 14 2023