[New Users] Please note that all new users need to be approved before posting. This process can take up to 24 hours. Thank you for your patience.
Check out the v.255 - The Dark Ride: Ride or DIe Patch Notes
here!
My first login in years, how lost will I be?
I just redownloaded the game after years of inactivity. I'm not sure when the last time was when I logged in, but I remember is that the Pirate class was just launched, so it has been years for sure.
If there are any players who kept playing between then and now: how much changed and how lost am I going to be when I log back in?
Comments
Storywise (more or less chronologically):
1. Cygnus Knights joined shortly after Pirates release.
2. Six heroes who were trapped by the Black Mage awoke from their curse and with them came another boss, Damien.
3. New "region" called Edelstein was discovered along with the Resistance jobs (basically a new job for each of the five classes), along with new boss called Lotus.
4. Victoria Island (original five classes), Cygnus Knights, and the Resistance band together to form the Maple Alliance.
5. Grandis, the area Magnus is from got two "champions" (?), Kaiser and Angelic Buster
6. The warriors from Sengoku (Japanese Maplestory [I think?]), Hayato and Kanna, got teleported to Maple world by Nobunaga.
7. New area, Arcane River (lvl 200+ area) , is discovered and the Maple Alliance follows the river, defeating the Black Mage's commanders, Lucid and Will.
8. More jobs from Grandis, Cadena and Illium.
9. End of the Arcane River leads to Tenebris, where the Black Mage is hatching his plot.
10. Maple Alliance defeats the Black Mage.
11. Maple World is recovering from the fight with the Black Mage.
12. Aftermath of the fight causes Maple World and Grandis to merge into the same universe.
13. Maple Alliance is helping Grandis with their "big baddy", Gerand Darmoor. (present day)
Gameplay wise (more or less semi-importance):
1. Much much easier to level up.
2. Level cap is 275.
3. Ability points system changed from primary + secondary stat to just primary stat system.
4. Gear is much easier to get, both common gear and boss gear.
5. Scrolling is now done with Spell Traces (basically common drop item you can get that let's you get decent scrolls.)
6. Starforce is done through mesoes and event scrolls primarily.
7. Gears now have potential and bonus stats that give extra boosts
8. Free Market closed and Auction House replaced it.
9. Monster Collection and Legion which allow you to get rewards even when you're not actively playing.
10. A whole bunch of the worlds/servers got merged together. (I guess this should should have kind of been at the top, xd.)
Probably left out a lot of important stuff here and there, but think I covered a good part of it. But like Aggraphine said, it's almost like a whole new game (hence there's still group of players here and there that aren't happy with what Maplestory is now since it's changed so much). But the game does an okay job of guiding you through everything. If you're interested, feel free to join my guild in Scania and we can help you if you need advice.
Here's a section of a comment I wrote on reddit about a year ago with regards to someone who was coming back after a long hiatus, much like yourself, OP:
(Edit: the price was changed sometime in the past year. The price was reduced by 2m for each book. 5m -> 3m; 7m -> 5m)
To a brand-new player, the cost does sound fairly expensive and, assuming you haven't made an alright amount of money by the time you need them, you'd be right. There are several theme dungeons that give a set(1x 20, 1x 30) of books upon completion as well as typically being available via event shops(like the current glory coin shop for example). It sounds significantly less expensive when I tell you that I once sold a MW20 book for about 120m way back when. That's one 70% chance to increase the max level of a single skill for around 3x the cost of raising all of your 4th-job skills to max level with no chance of failure.
Thank you, completely forgot about that since I one trick Night Walker, who doesn't use mastery books. xd