This is going to be a long post, and possibly one that isn’t super coherent, because I’m doing this at 1am at night. But I need to get it out now that the event is gonna be over tomorrow.
This month, we got an event that introduced a new grade-A gun merc, Patriot (a.k.a. George Washington). With this event, we got a new area that is mostly for level 150’s, but one part, Secluded Outskirts (henceforth known as SO), was open to all from level 20+ due to the level-scaling system that have recently been all the rage for Nexon. Don’t get me wrong, I love that things are scaled to level now. It adds a bit of excitement for higher levels because it’s now a challenge, and lower levels can also participate. But what if something is wrong with the scaling?
This is what happened in the case of SO. The event would’ve been great if those under level 120 could participate. It seemed promising, until level 130’s said that they couldn’t kill there. There’s something wrong where level 130’s have a problem. Either they’re undergeared (usually not the case if they do tbs regularly) or the mobs hit too fucking hard. I was curious, so I went in because even though the summon was 1200 flyers (was eventually dropped to 1000), I wanted a chance at it if my luck didn’t pull through with the boxes you get for being logged in for 4 hours.
I switched my formation around a bit so that if these things did kill my formation off, at least it’ll take forever for them to kill my main. So I was in the back row, whereas I normally frontline my main since even if I got mainsniped by mobs, I usually will live a lot longer than my valk and druid. I lived. However…these fuckers hit hard. And they link. And I was able to handle the triple link, but getting loot was another story.
Did I mention that the drop rates on these flyers were abysmal?
so yeah, if I got triple linked, half my loot’s gone. But even if I didn’t, I would come out with 0 flyers within an hour of grinding. Was almost reminiscent of the warlord event, except these aren’t level 50 acongs; these are level 127 mobs that have Toxic Sword (ap drain the front, part of why my main was in the back), Deva Shell, and generally just hit like fucking bosses even though they were just regular mobs.
Someone made a theory (which was confirmed to be true) that the mobs are actually 26 levels higher than what it says they are. So at 127, my mobs were actually 127+26. If you are shitastic at math, this means that my mobs clocked in at level 153. So level 20’s were killing level 46’s. That is, if they can kill them at all. What level 20 do you know that can kill level 46 mobs unless they were in +10 level 15 gear (the highest a level 20 can wear until level 25 gear). And even so that’s not a guarantee.
So this event encouraged partying. Which is a good thing. This game is pretty easy to the point where you can solo anything if your gear is OP enough for it. However, even with partying, the loot’s still the same. I went to SO with Escorian and it was MUCH easier, yes. But we were out there for 4 hours and got 20 flyers between us. At the time, to get the merc using flyers, you needed 1200. So while partying was still done, flyers couldn’t be farmed fast enough.
They eventually fixed flyer drops so now it dropped 3x as much. Personally, I got 3x more the Oriental Mushrooms (just call me Yvi the ‘shroom dealer). However the difficulty stayed the same. Those who wanted it really bad geared up and went back out, but the majority of under 120’s were left out in the cold. I didn’t bother to do it on IvyKyori, because there just wasn’t anyone her level (at the time of this posting, 97) who dared to venture into SO lest they wanted to have a pole rammed far up their asses to the point that it impales them through the mouth.
ANYWAYS. Luckily, we got Washington’s Safes every 4 hours, and for also doing the new GD, Revolution. In those safes, you got patriot crystal/jewels, which really are multi-hued soul crystals/jewels in disguise (you needed 50 of these event crystals for just the first upgrade. You needed 7 flyers for 1 crystal. ONE), extra flyers, and…the patriot merc himself. If you were very unlucky, you’ve opened every single one that you got for free and ones you did if you were in a guild that did GD every 2 days, and gotten nothing but water of lifes. If you were lucky, you got the Patriot from the event boxes. I was one of the lucky ones. If you were VERY lucky (to the point where it’s gonna be curse), you got multiple Patriots. Since they are untradeable, and since you can only have 1 in your formation, you just drop it and hope you never get another one…then you do.
Personally, I couldn’t bear to go through SO because lag was killer. So I prepared for the worst–waiting to hit level 150 and do the quest or grovel to a level 150’s feet to get one for a hefty 2 bil pricetag, which is gonna get heftier once this event is over. One morning after GD (our guild does GD 2 hours before reset, which is 4am my time, so sleep deprived by totally worth it), I got the pistol and promptly used up all my flyers to level him up. He’s the lowest level in my formation, but holy shit his stats are absolutely nuts. My might barely took a dive with him in formation. And he’s only level 106. Fucking a, GW. Fucking. A.
Anyways, I thought that this event was a bit rushed. Why? It seemed as if they wanted to release him in time for the US election day, which was fine and all. But you see, with this patch and event came other issues. For example, no one can duo TBS for the past month. SO mobs were still not adjusted, so they still hit like beasts. The flyer-to-item ratio was (and still is for most of the items) wacky. The flyer drop rate suck monkeys. Just call me Yvi the ‘shroom dealer. And while this can be looked at in a negative light, it’s one that should be looked at on both ends–gear market crashed.
Nix/DG/Evil/Pega got so cheap that it was a loss trying to craft them. In other words, if you crafted gear for profit (which I don’t do because it always ends up as a loss unless there’s a + in front of it), you were spending 300+ mil on mats for something worth 11 mil (in the case of DG gear). But like I said, there are two sides of this coin, and the gear market crashing was also a good thing. It made it cheap to gear up. I was able to get the rest of my mercs (mostly my melee since they get neglected in favor of my ranged/tbs mercs) out of Divine gear and into Nix/DG. I was also able to get evil gear for my main for less than 1 bil, which will be worth close to 3 bil (that +4 evil instrument alone I made for less than 500 mil is now worth ~2 bil) once prices start to stabilize once the event is over. So if you didn’t take advantage of it now for whatever reason, I have no hope for you.
All in all, I found it a bit hard to find a silver lining in this event, but I got a free merc out of it (thanks luck!), full evil gear waiting for me, and my main mercs are all geared to level. But going into SO for grind sessions was not possible with the ungodly amount of lag, and I dare not venture out on IvyKyori. You know what they say–can’t make everyone happy. So even though I wasn’t horribly happy with the execution of the event, I am happy for the side effects of the event. Which may never happen again.
Sarcasm and a Guitar 