General

Pirate Lore and the 5 heroes

Ok so alot of pirates are (somewhat understandably) raging over the lack of a pirate hero, and other people trying to justify it by saying a pirate hero could not have existed back then. Overall there is alot of confusion over the lore so lemme clear a few things up.

First off: the people who say pirates did not exist back then because the pirate class was introduced later than the other 4 classes are wrong. Lore-wise, kyrin and her pirates were sailing maple world long before the pirate class was introduced. The class when introduced when kyrin decided to land in victoria island and train disciples to fight the black mage.

However: on the other hand, the people who say that pirates are equal to the other classes and have been around just as long are also mistaken. Pirates lore-wise are younger than the other 4 classes, though not as young as they are game-wise. I'll elaborate on this shortly.

So, the main question: did the pirates exist at the time the Black Mage was sealed? The answer to this question depends on how you look at it. Testonen was certainly alive at the time. However, in my view, pirates as a group/class did not exist. The pirate class was still in its pre-beginning stages at the time. Yes, Testonen was there, but Testonen wasn't just a famous pirate, he was THE FIRST pirate(one of nexon's comics confirms this). It is even highly likely that Testonen was the ONLY pirate at the time, though you could perhaps count yuris as another one. There was simply no group identity of "pirate" at the time. Testonen wasn't seen as a pirate, but simply as a powerful fighter with a novel style different from everyone else. The lack of a "pirate" group label is further evidenced by the fact that there is no pirate representative at altaire camp, and also by the fact that yuris states that she like guns and martial arts rather than just saying she likes pirate stuff(meaning these things have yet to be grouped under the pirate label).

Because pirates as a group did not exist, there is only one person who could have filled the role of "pirate hero" in the band of 5 than fought the black mage. That is Testonen himself(yuris cannot fight the black mage and be at altaire camp at the same time). Now, Testonen certainly did fight the Black mage at some point, and according to maple wiki, the energy released in this fight is what split the victoria and ossyrian continents. Since during aran's intro, athena and the rest of the explorers are fleeing TO victoria, that fight must have occured before the final battle during which the black mage was sealed. However, maple-wiki also claims that zakum was grendel's apprentice so idk how reliable that is. But the general consensus seems to be that Testonen died sometime after the sealing of the black mage in el nath, and judging from the aran intro, the last battle occured somewhere in leafre.(And in the comic he is shown alive on victoria seemingly after the sealing) This pretty much rules him out as one of the 5 Heroes.

That's just the lore though. Obviously there has to be some seperation between storyline and game mechanics(why didn't demonslayer just hire a bishop to ressurrect his family? hurr hurr). And the pirates probably do deserve a new class. However, I think we must accept the fact that making a pirate hero would create such a massive continuity error that not even nexon could pull off such a thing. A pirate hero can't exist, but game-wise, a class is still a class, there is nothing stopping nexon from making up for this in the future by introducing new pirate classes in another(non-hero) form.