General

@AshleyAttacked that is one of the most comprehensive end game guides ive read. GG ashley, GG

-edit- just realized I already shared this with u xD lol. meh, I'll keep it here for others.

I wrote down some general steps about gearing from beginning to godly...hope it helps.

Make the following link skills, get them to level 120.

Kanna - 10% total dmg
Demon Slayer - 15% boss dmg
Demon Avenger - 10% total dmg
Xenon - 10% all stats
Jett - you can get a core with 34atk easily
Phantom - 15% critical chance
Luminous - 15% pdr

beyond that, organize your character cards. Try for three sets all containing only cards over lvl 100. This will give you 3% boss dmg and some atk...for each set, so 3 times.
Having three lvl 100 pirates in one set will also give you 6% pdr
the cards for Hayato give you, iirc, 6% max crit dmg, shade gives you both 3% min and max crit dmg...the cards for Kanna give you 3% boss dmg, demon avenger gives 3% boss dmg. Angelic Buster gives a massive boost to dex. At lvl 200+ I receive 80 dex from it.

Use this --> http://www.basilmarket.com/MapleStory-Character-Card-System.html

Beyond that make sure you have a complete set of superior gollux gear. The tip/trick I'd advise you to use here is to buy a second pendant slot from cash shop. This allows you to equip 2 superior gollux pendants at one time which completes the gear set, giving you 30% boss dmg and like 35 atk, all without having to use the belt. This is important because the Tyrant Belt is incredible once you get it up above 7+ stars.

Make sure you have an entire CRA set and that you're getting the set effect

Collect the tyrant gear slowly over time.

Once gear is all in place...do not give in to the temptation to scroll or enhance any of it. The first move you make is to slowly work out the regular potential for each piece of gear. Don't focus too long on perfecting the lines of any one piece of gear...this is a waste and the money is much better spent on a piece of gear with crappy stat lines vs perfecting a piece so that it can gain a meaningless small amount of of extra %.

You may be wondering which gear to cube first...the answer is easy and this will make a massive difference in how quickly you boost your range. Do not cube any of the gear. Cube first your primary weapon, your secondary weapon and your emblem. This is because these pieces of gear are different than every other by allowing you to get potential lines that include boss dmg, atk%, pdr%, etc. Keep in mind that the Emblem does not allow you to get boss dmg, just total dmg, pdr and crit chance. Try to get boss dmg% lines, atk% and pdr on each item. Once you have decent lines focus on the bonus potential for these three items...and for the same reason listed above. The lines you can get are far better than the lines you'd get on other gear allowing you to increase your range exponentially with just these items. The rough equivalency between these lines is 9% atk = 30% boss dmg, 12% atk = 40% Boss dmg. Total dmg = Boss dmg in the formula so when you have the choice between boss and atk%...its obvious that a line like 9% or 12% total dmg is a waste of a line on your gear. rmbr...this is bc 9% total dmg is added to the range formula identically to boss dmg. So since totaly dmg is the same as boss dmg...9% and 12% are crap when you could get 30% or 40% in their place, or atk which is just as good. All told, once your stat window shows you being between 200 and 250% boss focus on %atk...try for at least 36 to 45% atk or higher. Rmbr that with %atk, bc of the nature of the formula you will never have to account for the nature of diminishing returns.

After these three items...try to slowly boost your other gear so that each piece has like 9% primary stat at first, then maybe 12% and then 15%. Once you get your remaining gear a reasonable amount of stat% bonus pot everything and first make the effort to get at least 1 line that is 10-14 atk. Remember...do NOT buy yourself Tyrant Gloves now. Buy every other Tyrant as soon as you can, but do not worry about Tyrant Gloves until much, much later...I'll explain and outline the process involved with them further down...

Once you've got your CRA gear, your Sweet-water Glasses and Tattoo up to at least 12-15% primary stat and at least one decent line for Bonus Pot(ie, 10+ atk or 4+ primary stat), as well having at least some decent lines on your primary weapon, your secondary weapon and your Emblem, then you're ready for the next step. That would be scrolling.
In general most people will tell you that the only real way to scroll your weapons is with Primes. In my opinion this is far from true and a serious waste of time and money. I personally would scroll anything other than your primary weapon and your Heart with whatever you feel like. The key at this point is just to make sure that you do it perfectly, which means pass every single slot, hammer it twice and pass the scrolls there as well. A decent route to take for some gear would be a few chaos scrolls of goodness. But to this end and towards being careful...if you don't gain at least 3 atk with the first COG/ICOG...then innocence the item and try again. Once you're working with some decent atk boosts, -->or if you just want to get it done quick and cheap with 30% or 70% StarForce <--, which is perfectly fine and likely will never, not ever, never ever never ever never ever be noticed by anyone including yourself. To make things all pass, if this is something you dunno...do the following:
Use the scroll, whichever you choose, if it fails, go to fm and owl for 10% clean slate scrolls. Once you find a store, normally there are a bunch selling them cheap and in bulk, stand beside the store and just go one after another till you regain the spot you lost. Once you have the slot back, try again to pass the scroll. Do this over and over till you've perfectly scrolled every single slot, including hammered slots, and succeeded on EVERY slot. At this point you can work on enhancing. In general I would suggest you work first to enhance your tyrant gear and your weapon. With tyrants this is where their benefit really starts to shine. For example my tyrant boot started with just 30 attack. However, I've enhanced it to 12 stars. This added a further 88 attack to the boot. It now has 118 attack...
How this works is for the first 5 stars I would suggest strongly that you buy a 5star enhancement scroll. (Here on Basil, Emplex http://www.basilmarket.com/user/Emplex suggests the following: With Scanian NX rates, guardian+5 starring is more expensive than star forcing tyrant items to 5 stars, unless your star forcing luck is really bad. Guardians are like 6k (6*120=720m), 5 stars AEEs are around 900m, That's AT LEAST 1620m and likely a lot more since the 5 star AEEs are 30%. If you regular AEE the first star every time your tyrant hits 0 stars and just try star forcing it to 5 stars, it should be a lot cheaper.)

You do this at the VERY beginning before you've enhanced the item AT ALL. Go to cash shop and purchase a Guardian Scroll. Click this and then attach it to your 5 star scroll...these scrolls are fairly expensive so you don't want to have to buy one over and over as you fail them. This item will cause the scroll to be saved and it will not disappear when you fail it. Use the Guardian Scroll on the 5 star scroll over and over until you successfully pass it. You will now have 5 stars on your item. Now, go to cash shop and buy a Superior Shielding Ward. Use this by double clicking it and then applying it to the Tyrant you're working on. Now, buy a few regular enhancement scrolls, the kind that blow up when failed. They're cheap enough that you don't need to protect them with a Guardian Scroll. So, once you have the enhancement scroll and the Superior Shielding Ward successfully on your item(it will be listed on the item that it's there)...now try to pass the enhancement scroll. Each time you fail the scroll you will need to go to cash shop and get another Superior Shielding Ward to protect your item. Just repeat this process until you have passed the enhancement scroll and have 6 stars. Now, repeat this process again just as described above and do it until you have 7 stars on your Tyrant. For me this process, and I've done it more than 5 times, never took more than 25k nx per item brought to 7 stars. At this point things get hard...you'll need a large amount of mesos saved. Buy as many cheap No Boom Enhancement scrolls. These will be over 1 bil mesos each, typically. Before you click buy, double check that the scroll you're buying actually describes in its description that it WILL NOT blow up the item on failure. A lot of disgusting people in the FM try to trick people buy selling a bunch of real No Boom Scrolls...and immediately beside them they'll put up a few regular Enhancement scrolls that DO blow up your item. Make sure you're not falling for that each time. Read the description. Now, once you have the No Boom and have at least 7 stars on your item, go to cash shop and purchase a Guardian Scroll to attach to your No Boom Scroll. This will prevent the scroll from disappearing when you fail it...and you will be failing it a LOT. Now, try to pass the scroll. Repeat this process, buying a Guardian Scroll to use on EVERY attempt, and always read your item to make sure it has the protections you have listed as active on them. Eventually you'll pass the No Boom and have 8 stars. If you're serious about capping you'll want to get every Tyrant that you have up to at least 10-11 stars. At that point most people slack off and just try to work on them periodically. As you get up to 9 or 10 stars things will get seriously hard. The success rate drops below 20% pass rate and then down to 10 and then 5%....it won't be a stretch to say that you'll be spending 50k nx trying to enhance successfully just 1 star at this point. It gets insane.

Now, once you have your Tyrants dealt with, buy primes for your Heart and your Weapon.

ArchM0onL, http://www.basilmarket.com/user/ArchM0onL thoughts on primes: If you want to go to the extent of prime scrolling, prime them first then cube them so that you can save one protection scroll on the first slot.
From my point of view, prime scrolls are not efficient except for xenons and android heart, but just a small tip lol.
Protection scrolls should be used only when the item is already decently scrolled (primed), or the clean item is expensive (Tyrants, Android hearts from marvel)
However there are some cases when protection scrolls can not be applied. We are forced to use no boom aee + guardians (7+ star Tyrants, 12+ star Ryude's Sword) //end

To perfectly Prime Scroll an item, this is the process: Buy The primes. These will be very expensive unless you gained some via events. Protect the Prime Scroll with a Guardian Scroll from CS, then go through FM and buy Protection Scrolls. Take the Protection Scroll and attach it to the piece of gear you're Priming. This will now protect your scroll from failling and protect your gear from being destroyed on failure. Of note...you only need to do this if you're dealing with an expensive Heart such as a Superior Lidium Heart or a Titanium Heart. Now, when you have the Prime protected with a Guardian and the Heart or the Weapon protected with a prot scroll, attempt to pass the Prime on your item. These are difficult for a lot of people and the success rate seems to be incredibly random. Sometimes you'll pass 5 Primes in a row, first try...other times I find myself buying Guardians and prots 4-5 times in an effort to pass just ONE Prime Scroll...surprising since the success rate listed on the Prime says its 40%. Doesn't feel like it fairly often in my experience. You do this process over and over until your Heart is perfect and until your Weapon is perfectly Primed. At this point you'll move to Enhancing. The Heart is a simple process, but the weapon gets a bit difficult at times. You'll want to get it to 15 stars and the last stars will be very hard. The difference between this and Tyrants is that you'll be best off just doing this via the StarForce Window. Once you get to the higher numbers you'll likely blow your weapon up. At this point you'll receive a Weapon Trace...now, go to FM and rebuy a perfectly clean version of the weapon you just boomed. When you get it, go to enhance the weapon. It'll flash the option to use the weapon trace, do this and it'll suddenly restore your weapon back as it was before you boomed it, minus the Stars you had gotten. You'll have all the stats from scrolling back as well as all the lines of potential. It even returns the item tag if your item had one before. Try again and again until you pass all 15 Stars...the boost for each star is meaningful enough to justify the frustration.

At this point you'll be in the position to just go at your own pace with regards to finalizing your items at the point that you're happy with them. Things left at this point are limited mostly to trying to get your items at the % primary stat that you want them at. Weapons and Emblem you'll be working towards getting as many lines of %atk and %Boss Dmg, combined with %pdr(you'll want your PDR, as listed in the stat window, to be at or above 90% if you have any intention to try Chaos Vellum or other high level bosses. Your damage will likely be extremely, read: EXTREMELY limited and diminished by a boss like CVellum if your PDR isn't high enough...so it's necessary to get a few lines.

For NEBs, the first move you need to make is to buy two 25% boss dmg nebs. If you can't find these, a 20% boss neb will likely be your only option. Put one on your weapon and the other on your Secondary Weapon. Your Emblem is different, even though the potential lines were the same...for Emblem just try your best to get a 3-4% Primary Sta/All Stat neb and attach it. You'll also want to pass 3-4% primary stat or all stat nebs on all of your other gear as well. The reason you'll likely avoid 4% Nebs is because the price for them is typically insanely high whereas nebs specific to you primary stat, with the small compromise of maybe 3% instead of 4% will be far more easy to find and afford. For me I mostly tried for 4% All Stat nebs just on items that I really prized, such as my Tyrants, Superior Gollux Ring, Pendants and Earring, Lightning God Ring, etc. Work at it the way that fits your mood, no one is likely to ever notice that you have a 3% luk neb instead of a 4% all stat neb on an item.

Tyrant Gloves. These are something you do not worry about until you're finalizing your gear. In general Dojo gloves are extremely good and relatively easy to acquire as needed. Once you get your gear to the point where it's virtually done and finished, purchase a clean Tyrant Glove. Cube it until Legendary. It needs to be Legendary because, in order to compete and surpass the Dojo gloves, you will need at least one line of 15% max crit or 15% min crit dmg. Try your best to get this line in combination with at least one other useful line. Then for bonus potential you'll also be aiming for Legendary as you can get another max/min crit line. However you're fine with just trying to get a decent amount of atk, such as 14, and two lines like 4% primary stat, 4% primary stat. Once you're at this point, follow the same process used to scroll your other Tyrant items. You'll want do this as best as possible and then get your Tyrant Glove to at least 11 stars. This is why you wait till so late in the gearing process to do this. It's insanely expensive, especially when you realize that in the end the glove will still be only slightly better than the Dojo gloves you've been using. Vaguely, Hero Glove is equivalent to a Glove with the potentials I outlined combined with 8-10 stars.

Decent items. You'll also most likely be interested in acquiring some items intentionally scrolled to allow you the option to cast various decent skills like Speed Infusion, Adv Blessing, etc. To this end, you'll be best off using:

Adv Blessed - Use Chaos PB Helm, the lvl 135 one. Cube the helm until it hits Legendary Tier. Now keep cubing and if you get lucky, you'll eventually get the line for Advanced Bless.

Speed Infusion - Cube a high level glove, such as Pensalir or High Quality Dimension Glove. Get the item to Legendary and keep going. This one took me quite a lot of time to finally get the Decent Speed Infusion Line but I did get it eventually.

Combat Orders - Any shoe that you can equip above level 100. Pensalir is an easy option to find in fm. Cube till Legendary and like the others it'll happen eventually. I found this skill to be fairly easy and I've seen it many times on other boots I was working with.

Sharp Eyes, Hyper Body skill can be acquired as Nebs. In general HB isn't a very common skill to get.

Thats virtually covers everything about making your gear that i can think of. Try for at least 250% boss dmg, perhaps 80%+ atk, 90% pdr and 100% crit. You'll want to work at your Inner Ability the way that best works for your class as it changes completely from class to class.

Some easy tips to make some money:
Get involved in Professions. I highly suggest getting the Alchemy Profession. Work carefully to level this up past level 10, then to Master and finally Meister Level. At this point, go to random maps that you know to be very active with people training, even maps frequented by botters. Look around and you'll find mysterious herbs and ore veins. Mine or collect these...by doing this often when you have free time you'll acquire many of the items needed for Alchemy for free. When you need specific Herbs in bulk and feel like farming them, the best option is to go to Evo and attach the cores specific to what you're looking for. Buy a few Lucky Winter Drop coupons. Also, if you've been doing MPE fairly regularly to farm green and red mpe potions, you'll find eventually that you'll get a Greed pendant as a drop. This will give you a significant boost to your drop ratio as well. Combining these together will acquire for you a significant number of herbs.

Some recipes that sell well: Make Advanced Hero Potion(10% atk boost) and Advanced Boss Rush Potions(20% boss dmg). These sell fairly well over time and for a very high price. Furthermore, if you boss often, particularly Zakum, you'll likely occasionally acquire some EXP Potion Recipes. Once you've acquired a ton of the herbs necessary(Juniper Berry Seeds) make these en masse. Remember that once you click the recipe and learn it...it will disappear in 24 hours. Now start mass making these potions as much as you can till it expires. These sell insanely well in the FM.
You can also make 12 slot bags as a Meister level alchemist...from my experience Mineral Bags sell for far more than herb and much faster as well. Do this often and consistently, maintaining yourself at Meister level at all times...and you'll slowly but surely build up a great amount of savings eventually.

Mckelway http://www.basilmarket.com/user/McKelway from Basil says: For the second pendant slot, if you don't want to buy it from the cash shop, the Grand Anthenaeum questline gives a 21 day one that can be renewed by completing a quest. Also I think it's worth noting that Gollux and Commerci are very worth doing. Gollux maxes Willpower and Ambition, and gets you gollux rings and earrings, which are end game. Commerci nets you a sweet H20 tattoo/glasses roughly every 7.5 days. That's 200-250 mil every week.

Also if you learn Alchemy, you can extract all your equips from those DIPQ runs or whatever. I get ~20 superior item crystals per run. At 200k each, that's 4mil a run.
//end

Hope that helps.

@angelicSith yeah that's true. I got some clean Superiors. Nobody I knew was selling any Gollux scroll service soooooo I just equipped them for the clean effects whee. Loooking to get that +atk with each scroll :O

Superior stuff and ra stuff is way better than what you probably have. Scroll them for hp or if youre rich, buy them prescrolled with 20+att

@goodvibes and @vicetone, your names go hand in hand

Thanks for both your comments. What I'm getting - and correct me if I'm wrong - is that end game gear is better than my current gear, despite the HP effects. I guess increase from HP can always be cubed for while actual attack is far more difficult to. I guess I'll work my way up for tyrants, sup gollux, and a full faf set. I'm considering stocking up on drops and tokens/coins from Commerci, Gollux, etc, and scrolling them up and only after everything is all set and done, then I'll equip it all and hopefully the +100 or so from the Sup Gollux. Maybe I'll even sell some things for monies along the way :]

Which things should I look to replace first? Well... I guess I could just replace them all at once and save myself the trouble of having to decide haha

you will lose some range at first although that's to be expected once you scroll/pot your gear it'l be better than your current gear

From my experience as a DA, I say go for the end game and take your time! There's no need to rush equipping all of it at once. The CRA and Gollux set also has %HP set bonuses that could help boost you back up. If you're currently satisfied with your damage then you should surely take your time working on your end-game