General

Before I put the game down, about a year and a half ago, I mained a dark knight. I had good times with that one. They have high damage, high survival, good bossing capability, training efficiency, you name it. When I picked the game up again, instead of logging into my dark knight, I swerved over to my Hayato to pick up a part time job reward that I hadn't claimed for over a year. During a flight to El Nath, I looked at his skills and my jaw dropped for a moment. What really got me was his impressively high resistance to abnormal effects along with a very high chance to dodge. It was so different from my dark knight, who was effectively a walking meat tank.

Now, I'm aware that my Hayato will possibly never match my dark knight in terms of striking power, but I was already tired of being completely susceptible to 1/1, seduction, and the plethora of abilities bosses have that can make any mapler weep. Another thing to add is I'm a warrior player at heart, always have been in every game I touched, and will likely stay that way. Hayato has the "thief" feeling built into him with his super high dodge chance, ability to shake off voodoo nonsense from bosses, and is an effectively mobile fighter, while wielding a badass katana. I don't think I have to tell anyone how lame it is to be slamming down hordes of baddies only to have that pace interrupted by climbing a ladder or a rope, to get to the next platform above.

My dark knight and I had some good times, and he'll always be a dear memory, but I don't have the same abnormal resistance as my Hayato. I've been easily seduced by his alluring skills, flashy combat... and that Dankuusen... gotta love that Dankuusen, along with Whirlwind Cut.

Sigh. RiP dark knight.

I have mained Bucc (pre-Mutiny), MM, and F/P in the past only because they weren't popular classes. It's the same reason I switched over to Hayato! The one thing in common with all of these classes except MM is that you weren't stuck with one mobbing attack- you could switch it up if you really wanted to.

I'm still a Hayato main because...it's just cool. I like wielding a samurai sword.

Look at all these fine looking Hayatos. Looking good, boys! (No homo)

OT: Not much to say... Bowmaster, then finally Hayato. In between was a long and painful period of being undecided and couldn't settle on anything... And then the revamp happened.

My main was a DB before, but after the rework with hayatos they made me love them even more. So I decided to pack the bags, and transfer everything.
PS. I love all things revolving samurai/ronin so it was a must play for me.

I started maple as a brawler around when they came out (let's ignore my few failed mages shall we?) and loved the freedom of movement and crowd control options I had as a marauder. Me and one of my old friends would actually train by ksing eachother to keep things interesting, and this got our control with each character to some ridiculous levels. I loved the movement options, I adored the i-frames and the entire class just felt so engaging. I can't remember which patch it was that ruined us, but it was some time after BB and I was devastated when our playstyle got devolved into spamming. Left that class at around 140. I still occasionally hop back on my bucc, but it always ends in me getting pretty depressed.

I played a ton of classes to around the 130 level since then, but let's skip to when I moved to broa. I played a bowmaster to 150, but grew incredibly fond of a wild hunter for the LONGEST time. THEY HAD I-FRAMES SORT OF. This was obviously exactly what I was looking for. A ranged bucc right? RIGHT? It wasnt really what I was looking for though, but I did have a blast and experienced most of my maple firsts on it. I trained that to my new record of around 183 (played it for almost two years) and eventually I found corsair and I really enjoyed it. The bossing mostly, they just had so many ways to dodge bosses which made RA a blast and they didnt have the enormous hurtbox that wild hunters had to deal with. It passed my wild hunter and got to 186. Played that for a while then I played Zero.

Oh Zero, it was so close to what I wanted. I loved almost everything about this class. Crowd control, decent movement options, bossing capability, quick world travel... but it just became too flow-charty and ridiculous for me. It became my most powerful character with a 210k range and Lv.203, but I grew tired of my mobbing consisting of covering an entire map with DoT and tornadoes. The flowchart for maximum dpm was so tedious and I decided to give hayato a shot. This was around 7 months ago and I loved it. The class felt great, the mobbing was still there but I couldn't justify maining one due to their pitiful damage and the fact that I had no perm nx to give it like on my explorer classes or zero. I didn't have the mesos/cash to get it looking how I wanted and so it died at around 140.

Skip to around a month or so ago. I decided to give them another shot (I was completely unaware of the revamp by the way, which is amusing) and actually started researching mobbing/movement techniques and fell more in love with this class than I ever had before. Aside from bossing not being the most enjoyable this class just had everything I wanted and brought back my old marauder/bucc vibes. I started training on maps not for the experience, but to optimize my rotations on them again and was having the time of my life. I decided to main this character regardless of its mediocre damage, and then I learned of the revamp and became even more dead set on that.

Now I'm Lv.204 and nearing a 300k range and am absolutely in love.

I used to main both NL and NW back and forth, I just loved the style of throwing stars.
I've made 6 NL's and 4 NW's just to have the fun of levelling them up. (Wasted so much PSOK's transferring all my gear to one another) but once I reached the hard part of funding (Going past 500k range was my problem) + there were so many more NL's and NW's who was obviously better than me... So I decided I can't go past this stage without emptying my life savings.. Then my next "goal" was to reach 250 or highest in my world (or GMS if possible lol) so I searched all the rankings and came to a conclusion that Hayato's have 242 as highest in GMS and 220 as highest in Windia! So I decided to main a Hayato and I absolutely fell in love with the class, and the style play it has. (I used to hate the class when it used mp for a basic attack and couldn't even basic attack lmao) but now I love the class and how it has a skill that can one shot/mob at SDH while still having a set of skills that can combo and fly around the map! I'm already at 500k range since STR is cheaper than LUK and I can see that I am capable of going further! love the class to No.1 Hayato in GMS

@repentant Yeah, I had the same experience with Hitokiri. Learning that you can permabind bosses with it was extremely satisfying--you sacrifice the majority of your damage, of course, but if you already have highly funded attackers in the party it's easy mode. I love it.

If only this was doable on CVellum...oh well.

@deeemon: "Trash Dash" HAHA. Aww, your comment makes me miss the days of dancing around Typhons with my Chief Bandit. My first love. I miss it so much. My class history is kind of similar to yours, except the first time I tried Hayato, I hated it for the reasons mentioned in the first sentence of my original post. I didn't understand comboing. The only thing I did was spam Sanrenzan, so my general attitude towards the class was "wtf is this"

I spent a long time jumping between classes, until around 2 years later I found a video of a Hayato flying all over the map with these crazy combos. It was awesome, completely changed my view on the class. I wanted to try it, so around 6-8 months ago I made a Hayato for myself--only this time I tried my hardest to understand the class and utilise every single one of their skills to their full potential. And here I am now, absolutely obsessed. This class has given me an experience like no other. I stick to this class simply because I don't want to play anything else. I haven't felt like this ever since the days of my Chief Bandit. My only regret is not maining this class sooner.

And I agree, Hitokiri Strike is one of my most favorite skills. Before Level 177, I would track it closely and get so giddy with excitement moments before it came off cooldown (I could write paragraphs upon paragraphs about the little details that make Hitokiri Strike so badass, but the length of this post is beginning to make me self-conscious, heh). And when I finally got Cooldown Cutter, I spammed it like no tomorrow. There was a time when it got so out of control I considered taking a point out of Cooldown Cutter for my own good, because spamming it was hurting my performance (I would press it at inappropriate times, e.g. using Hitokiri Strike in place of Surging Blade hehe). I eventually learned (kinda) to use it properly though.

I love Hayato. Though I still think about my CB from time to time. I secretly wish Shinsoku looked like old Savage Blow.

I mained an F/P for most of my time in the game, since...well, since before pirates had even been released. I switched to an Aran at one point because the grind was excruciating for F/Ps before level 70 (meaning I had to redo all my funding work for STR/ATT, yaaaay) and rocketed to 70 because Aran training was a joooooooooooke with how easy it was (12 mobs at a time holy Monster Carnival Batman!), and then switched back to my F/P because the massive update that added Mist Eruption was possibly the most amazing thing to ever happen to Explorer magicians.

Then Kanna and Hayato came out in GMS. Ironically, I was in Japan at the time...meaning I COULDN'T EFFING PLAY THEM OR DO THE EVENTS WHYCALLITGLOBALWHENIT'SNOTGODDAMMITNEXON

*whew* anyway, I found Hayato REALLY fun when I returned to the States and after reaching 4th job, I wept over the fact that JMS had let them wallow in their abysmal damage values and buggy dodge buff mechanics. So I continued overfunding my F/P to have around 500k max range.

Then JMS finally announced their two large Hayato/Kanna updates and I waited, stockpiling decent STR gear and moving whatever I could from my Aran. And I am pleased with the results. The class deals good damage, scales extremely well in some departments, and is always fun. The video I saw on here earlier about the BJ Dash-Falcon Dive-Shinsoku silly travel combo made me try to master it for a whole day. I still suck at it, but whatever.

To answer your final question, I don't really play my F/P anymore because of a sense of defeatist apathy knowing that F/Ps are getting nerfed into the ground in the next big class reorg (and the fact that our main bossing skill has lower capping DPS than our main cannon-fodder mobbing skill).

@deeemon: Deng lol, I miss Assaulter too. Shad was always my main and Hayato was secondary main, but that upcoming meso explosion and dark sight nerf is gonna put me on tilt I think. Hayato is just so much more fun right now.

[Pre-BB] Fighter -> Evan; [Post-BB] Evan -> Hayato -> Xenon -> Hayato

Hayato was the first character I created when I moved to Scania. Then the bug happened where you had to jump to use most of your skills, so I tried out Xenon (because I hadn't made one when they were first released). Ended up liking it a lot, so I funded it for awhile. Still think Xenons are cool, but missed playing Hayato, so I started fresh with a new one. Why do I still play Hayato? Because katanas are cool.

Used to main a Shadower because it had these awesome fun skills, but Nexon decided it was too fun and so they deleted them for some garbage-looking thing, trash dash. I guess I also used to main a Demon Avenger, because it was the best class for my unfunded noobiness, also because of Alucard from the Castlevania series. Symphony of the Night is still damn good.
I was so depressed when whatever update killed Shadower, I thought I wouldn't find another class like this again. Then Hayato arrived and showed us all his crazy-ass skills, flying around and dashing all over the place, slicing everything down in his path, it was the next best thing I've ever seen. When I saw Dankuusen for the first time, I thought "holy frig, they have Assaulter now?", and I remember I kept hoping that Global MS would get Hayato some day, and we did, it was like 7(?) months after Nexon ruined Shadower. When I got to level 30 on my Hayato and added a skill point into Dankuusen, I said "Welcome back, Assaulter", it was strange, but that's what Dankuusen felt like anyways. I still didn't care too much about damage back then, I was having a lot of fun playing around with Dankuusen, that's all that really mattered to me, the skills and how fun they are, just like how Chief Bandit used to be. Then I got to level 100 and added a skill point into Hitokiri Strike, holy damn, it felt so bad ass, an ultimate Assaulter! I knew by then, this would be the only class to replace my Shadower, some similar skills, like Sweeping Sword looks like Boomerang Step, and Dankuusen and Hitokiri Strike is like Assaulter.
But some other classes have skills ripped right off from Chief Bandit, Kanna's Soul Sheer, Zero's Flash Assault, Jett's Vortex Cross, and now Evan has some Magic Debris skill just like Meso Explosion. It felt like Chief Bandit/Shadower used to be the most perfect class back then. Nexon probably ran out of ideas or something.
I also played Fire Emblem games and I really liked the Swordmaster class, I wanted to be like those guys, they were so awesome, their critical hit animation and stuff. I kind of thought it was weird in FE7/8, when they attacked with an Iron or Silver Sword, it still looked like a katana.

TL,DR: Used to main Shadower. Nexon turned Chief Bandit/Shadower into boring garbage. Hayato has Assaulter. Assaulter is fun.

You scared me so much...

I was once a Hero, but spaming raging blow maked me bored and doing a under swing and thrust all the time seemed lame to me. So then I became a Hayato to have more fun by have a large variety of attacks that are effective in battle.