General

@coldinside Influence. Runned by dc hackers, coders, dupers all sorts.

@bannedalot: that's an interesting little tidbit (Although i can't assess the validity of it). If you don't mind me asking, what was the name of that guild?

@coldinside @Tariq She got funded by hackers. Was in the scanias top hacking guild before the leader quit. She also had videos of her fing[erin herself that someone leaked. And is the reason why she never answers questions with complete honesty is because of hacker buddies and previous hacking guild.

@coldinside: I haven't done it but I think you can buy cubes with maple rewards as well. Star Planet would probably help with that.

@ashleyattacked:

Oh that's cool. Definitely explains how you got your meso. How do you obtain the money to buy your NX though?

The general guideline is once you cap with ME which is around 800k-1mil range, you upgrade your gear up until 1.5m+ range at which point you change class to i/l mage (it depends on other stats as well this is just a very general range point). I/L will be far superior to a capping mist eruption at this point. And then you swap back to f/p when you are near capping with paralyze.

So no you don't hit a wall since you are supposed to change jobs to i/l. And yes capping with paralyze is not easy and you need to be funded a lot so that is why most players swap to i/l as it caps way faster than paralyze + it the attack speed is way quicker than the slow me setup.

P.S: You need to plan in advance for gear upgrades and keep in mind it is better to upgrade 1 item fully than to spread your mesos to buy many items at once. Focus on a good weapon + offhand first.

@coldinside: Rather than funding my gear 'directly' I worked slowly to make %luk gear to sell it. Reasoning being that the conversion rate for %luk into anything else is so good. I make a 12/9/9% luk gollux something...and I can come out sooooo far ahead insofar as %dex gear is concerned.

Beyond that...I always did events, always collected drops, always obsessively made various alchemy related items. Those sold extremely well.

@coldinside: i fund her. she's my sugar baby.

@ashleyattacked:

Hey! I had left a post in one of your stories, but i guess i'll repeat it here. I just wanted to know how you fund yourself nxwise? You never really elaborated on it. Just curious because you said you don't have a job, so how do you obtain the NX to cube your gears and change the aesthetics of your character? Do you use college savings? Allowance from parents? Or is your method one that allows you to obtain large volumes of NX without spending any currency? Just wanted to know how you do it (Especially if it's one that doesn't require you to spend any real money). A cashless method to obtain the necessary NX to fund your character would be a great help for many maplers . Share with us!!

@ashleyattacked To be truthful, I'm doing the same as you said you did, looking at stuff and trying to little by little upgrade them. However, your words gave me some motivation. This post was also a bit of a rant about F/p mages. Mist Eruption is a skill that gets high damage easily, so low ranges can get more damage out of it. However, because of that that when I got to capping it, I realized that there's some gap before my damage increases. It's either I raise my range and upgrade my equipment to get my Paralyze to become more efficient than FH + ME, or I somehow increase my attack speed, which means getting DSI or IA of attack speed. I just wanted to talk about how it feels a bit how you hit a wall that you have to put a lot of effort into breaking through.

@tariq:
1) why does it matter to anyone but me...let alone you? Figure yourself out and let everyone else deal with their lives the way that fits them the best. They don't need your help or approval - you're not that big a deal.

2) I did tell the truth. I'd love to have rl money to spend - would have saved me infinite time. Prolly, tho, I'd be less proud of my char...but in the end...I'll never know what I could have become had I not lost all that endless time doing stupid, cautious low risk low reward.

@ashleyattacked: Why don't people like you ever tell the truth on how you got funded?....

I never took the time to focus on my characters gear till I made this AB. I decided I should, tho, if only because it was worth learning to be patient and save money over time. I asked around...determined that a goal that fit me was to at least become strong enough to train effectively on my own at SDH. I found out that for me that would occur around 600-700k range buffed...and there was my end game goal.

Got there...and had had so much fun along the way I wanted to push on further.

Reason I'm sharing is because I found a way that really worked for me and didn't seem like endless work between each goal... Basically I just started focusing on my gear, each individual piece, instead of my range itself. Started trying to reasonably complete my Primary + Secondary Weapons, then my Emblem. Then I decided to get my remaining gear to 9% primary stat. Then it was getting hard to fund without rl money so I had made part of the goal to be strategically doing the whole thing as streamlined as possible. Where most people decided 'I wanna finish my hat'...I decided to only do what was both money conscious and worthwhile in return. If I wanted 15% dex but got 12% dex on a cube - it wasn't worth the money it might take to keep trying for 15% at only a further 3% dex improvement when I had another item I could hopefully boost by 6% dex in the same amount of cubes/money.

That ended up being a whole ton of fun for me...and I ended up topping 10mil range and near 25k dex, etc...but the goal wasn't any of that, it was just having fun making the gear...and let me have goals I could readily reach and feel good about.

Iono. Maybe boring to you but thot I'd contribute my experience in the event it appeals to you, too.

A cool aside to that approach is also that when I look back on my char - I don't value her range, but I do value each piece of her gear and have cool memories behind almost every piece.