Hey guys, it’s been almost two weeks since the Final Test for MapleStory 2 ended! I had a ton of fun and was able to play a lot more than the first CBT due to the removal of the time limits. I thought you might want to know my opinions on the game since I don’t think I’ve talked about it much and it might help tide you over until you can play.

Speaking of which, MapleStory 2 will return in July! Although there’s no information on whether or not it will be the full game release or just the OBT, I’m excited!

I only had the chance to play one job in the Final Test, Heavy Gunner! I’m a sucker for the Archer branch in any game haha. In the first CBT I chose Ranger, and to be honest, Heavy Gunner was 100x better. Ranger’s skills were sort of boring and lacked the ‘punch’ of shooting missiles and spitting fire at enemies that Heavy Gunner had.

In terms of other classes, I believe Knight was a bit disappointing to other users. It wasn’t as tanky as it should be and didn’t have a big impact in parties. Berserker was very popular, it looked very fun to play! I didn’t see many Wizards but Priests were a big help in any party, their supporting abilities are so useful. Assassins are what you would expect, they’re fairly nimble and throw stars haha, this was a very popular job as well. Finally, the third new class was Thief, which I heard was not very strong so not many users played it.

Hopefully they can change up some of the less popular jobs so they’re up to par with the others before the next testing phase.

In terms of levelling, I was able to reach a much higher level than last time! This testing period, the max level was 30 and I got to 25 in about 4-5 days. The early levels are pretty boring because you only have access to a few skills but as you get higher and unlock better skills, hunting and fighting bosses becomes more fun!

If they keep the same experience requirements and quest rewards, then your best bet to level fast will probably be to gather a party and grind at the most popular maps with others.

In MapleStory 2, if you hit a monster once you’ll get the full experience and your own drops no matter who kills the monster (regardless of if they’re in your party or not). This is what allows party training to be most efficient, as you can group up monsters and kill them quite fast with everyone else’s help.

For quests, although the story lines are entertaining, the experience rewards are lackluster. They’re fine from level 1 to 15-ish but after that, even doing all of the quests available to you at each level will only get you to ~75%, and it only goes down from there. At level 25, I only got like 50% of my total experience to next level by doing quests, so grinding becomes a must.

What I did was grind a few levels at a time then do all of my available quests because I was interested in the story haha. For example, the fairy Arwen returns in MapleStory 2, and guess what? She lost her Glass Shoes!

I tried out a party quest for the first time, Golden Tower Research near Kerning City. It had a few interesting mechanics like having to stand on all four switches to clear a room and things like that, and there were like three boss stages! If you noticed, if you die in a party, you can switch to a ‘cinema mode’ which lets you follow one of your other party members.

I waited to revive until the end because if you do die in a boss stage, you cannot re-enter the boss room unless your party members are able to kill the boss.

There are actually a ton of other party quests in the game and I’m sure they all have something different about them. They’re not very good for experience but the rewards are pretty cool, I got some blue equipment from this one!

The bosses in MapleStory 2 are hardcore! They definitely require a lot of people to work together to fight them! My Heavy Gunner was fairly squishy and I had to work extra hard to dodge attacks, otherwise I would get two-shotted. You need to figure out a boss’ attack patterns to fight them well. For example, there’s a turtle boss that… poops all over the island he spawns on and it does SO MUCH DAMAGE if you stand in it.

Something super cool was that when fighting Devlin, a group of users managed to defeat it but then Bella appeared and summoned a stronger Devlin Chief in it’s place (like the cinematic)!

I didn’t actually get a chance to try out actual PvP. There are a few ways you can fight against other players:

Shadow World (open world PvP)

Red Duel (1v1 PvP)

Bloody Tear Mine (free-for-all PvP)

Peaks of Valor (guild PvP)

The only one I experienced was Shadow World, because I was doing a few quests there. It’s so annoying because for 10 minutes after entering Shadow World, you are protected from other players but after that, it’s so difficult to finish your quests while making sure no other players kill you…

If you guys have watched my videos, you might have noticed my character’s outfit. My friend Rigu designed it based off of Red from Pokemon and it turned out awesome!

I even put up the designs in the Designer’s Market and it sold pretty well, I made like 3000 Merit haha.

I was able to try out housing this time as well! I got an apartment at first which gave me a small area to decorate however I wanted, which was cool, but I wanted an entire room.

So… I bought some land. It cost like 900k mesos!! The saddest thing was I spent all of my money on the land and ended up not having enough money to buy a building to put on it, so I had nothing to decorate. R.I.P. my mesos.

All in all, you guys should definitely try out MapleStory 2 when it becomes available to you! It’s a much more party-oriented game than the current MapleStory so if you’re one of those players who prefer to solo everything, it might not be your type of game.

I am currently working on updating my Comprehensive Guide to MapleStory 2 with a lot of new information which I have collected from the Final Test, so watch out for the 2nd edition!

So, what is coming next for MapleStory 2? Like I said before, it’s either going to be the open beta or the full release of the game!

On May 29 at 11 AM KST, there will be a media showcase on the Ready2Play homepage where MapleStory 2’s schedule and new information will be released!