Dear Maplers,

As I discussed in last week's blog, we have a few major changes coming in with the new expansion and the new Soul Binder job. The new content will be covered elsewhere, but I would like to discuss how we are going to take care of two major ongoing discussions within the community - Gear Progression and Chaos Raids.

Gear Progression

As mentioned earlier, we see a few improvement points for Gear Progression, and we are going to be making major changes to support three things:

• Create new ways to collect resources    
• Provide more resources for gear enchanting    
• Let players focus on getting the required resources faster    

Hard Adventure Dungeon

We are revamping the overall dungeon structure to enable players to choose which gear to farm and also let players enjoy different types of dungeons to diversify overall gameplay.

One of the issues with the current dungeon reward system is that there are too many possible items that can be rewarded from each run. While random item drops are a core part of the MMO genre, being unable to aim for a specific item slot was proving frustrating for those with a final few pieces of equipment they wanted to upgrade. Also, it was forcing players to only play Fire Dragon dungeon which was hurting the overall dungeon experience.

As such, we are adjusting the reward structure for the Hard Adventure Dungeons to help you focus on a specific item slot. Also, we believe this will let players try various different types of dungeons, which will eventually benefit the entire community. Please see the details below:

Dungeon Gear Score Requirements

We are adjusting the difficulty level for each dungeon and, as such, will be changing the Gear Score requirements. This is similar to the structure used for Chaos Raids:

Dungeon Difficulty

We believe that, since the BeyondLink Tris and Rune Temple already require more complex strategies and skills compared to the others, they do not need a difficulty increase to reflect their new Gear Score requirements. However, we will be weakening the bosses for The Fire Dragon and Labyrinthine Halls Hard Adventure Dungeons, giving them 10% less health and 25% lower attack.

Reward Structure for the Dungeons

Now players will be able to choose dungeon based on which part of their gear they want to progress. This will enable players to experience different types of dungeons to farm required gear to progress to the Chaos Raids.

Since this will reduce the number of Onyx Crystals and Chaos Onyx Crystals obtained from overall dungeon runs, we are going to compensate for that by adding more Onyx Crystals and Chaos Onyx Crystals to the Normal/Hard Adventure Bonus Box. In total, players will be gathering the equivalent amount of resources by running dungeons.

These Onyx Crystals and Chaos Onyx Crystals from the Normal/Hard Adventure Bonus Box will be bound to your character.

As part of the above improvements, however, we will be making Onyx Crystals and Chaos Onyx Crystals that come from dismantling enchanted gear bound to your character. The reason behind this change is to enable us to give out more resources which meso sellers cannot leverage. For example, if we give out character binding Chaos Onyx Crystals, meso sellers will be able to enchant their weapons and dismantle them to obtain tradable Chaos Onyx Crystals, which is limiting us from adding more resources to the game, since it gives easier ways for bots to make mesos and impacts the overall market price for Onyx Crystals and Chaos Onyx Crystals.

With this change in mind, please review the following changes which are also planned.

Daily Mission

We are tweaking our Daily Mission system with the update. Now you can participate in the daily missions and collect Weekly Mission Points (not Daily Mission Points), and you will be receiving a bigger reward on a weekly basis.

Now you will only need to complete 30 missions per week to receive Gold Mission Complete Boxes, versus having to complete 70 missions. You can now open three Gold Mission Complete Boxes every week (Tier 1 to Tier 3), and we are going to provide a guaranteed amount of Onyx Crystals and Chaos Onyx Crystals in each box, along with other rewards such as Blue Star and Metacell.

You will be getting a guaranteed total of 20 Chaos Onyx Crystals and 14,400 Onyx Crystals if you get all three Gold Mission Complete Boxes. You will be able to obtain boxes at 300 MP, 600 MP and 900 MP. All the resources from the box will be all bound to your character. (Note: this section originally stated that you would earn 14,400 Chaos Onyx Crystals. That was in error, we apologize for the confusion)

This will provide players with different ways to collect resources required for enchantments outside of dungeon runs.

Sky Fortress

Another big change with the December update is that, with the addition of the Sky Fortress content, we will let players collect gears and resources from Sky Fortress contents. This is still being finalized and we cannot disclose more yet, but this will help players expand their gameplay outside of dungeon runs and let players gather resources faster.

Overall Summary

The overall change to gear progression might not seem big enough yet, but you will see the overall experience changing more than you think once the new changes with the Sky Fortress content and the new Chaos Raid Normal Mode gets added to the game.

We want players to experience seamless progression with a variety of content the game can offer. Along with the new addition of Normal Chaos Raids, overall progression and requirements for enchanting will change. Please stay tuned for the update on early December to provide us with more feedback.

Chaos Raid

As we discussed with our last blog, the current Chaos Raids will remain as the most difficult content with the best rewards. We discussed potential options to reduce the gap between the Hard Adventure Dungeons and the Chaos Raids and came up with the idea of Normal Chaos Raids with different gameplay and reward structures, with the current Chaos Raid will be labeled as Hard.

Objective of this change is:

• Creating content for players at 4500+ Gear Score to enjoy on top of Hard Adventure Dungeons    
• Create a practice ground for players to prepare for the Hard Chaos Raids    

Normal mode will be different from Hard to ensure that Hard mode keeps its unique value and provide players with a goal that everyone can work towards.

Normal Mode will be as follows:

• Gear Score requirement will be the same as [Hard] mode    
• It shares the same daily and weekly raid limits with Hard mode, similar to how Normal and Hard Adventure Dungeons share a limit    
• It will be a 6-player dungeon instead of a10-player dungeon    
• Damage meter will still exist    
• It will be less difficult than the current Chaos Raids, but still require skill to clear it within 15 minutes    
• Type of reward is similar, but you will get fewer rewards (approximately 37% of rewards compared to Hard mode)    
• No specific Rank rewards    
• [Normal] mode won't have separate rankings    
• Ludibrium Clock Tower's Chaos Raid won't have a Normal mode, and it will remain as the most challenging Chaos Raid for the players    

The detailed rewards are as follows: 
Please note dungeon boss pets can only be obtained from Hard Chaos Raids;

Note: This post originally mentioned the Labyrinthine Halls instead of Moonlight Fortress Chaos Raid. Additionally, each Hard Chaos Raid has the chance to drop a random Exceptional Pet. We apologize for the error.

As you can see from all the changes we are preparing for the game's major expansion in December, you will see the below improvements.

• More ways to collect resources required for gear progression, which includes the addition of Sky Fortress and Normal Chaos Raids, meaning you will be able to collect resources faster, and you will be able to play a variety of content    
• With the addition of new content, your gear progression can be faster, but also your requirement for the gear enchantment can potentially change since you can earn legendary gear from Normal Chaos Raids.    
• Hard Chaos Raids will still be the most rewarding content and the most challenging contents. Especially Ludibrium Clock Tower won't provide Normal mode as flagship Chaos Raid contents    

Other Important Upcoming Changes

• New Instruments: Due to popular demand, we are going to introduce new instrument types. We are adding to the percussion with new cymbals, big drums, and little drums. These instruments will be added to our service for the first time anywhere!    
• Priest Skill Change: We are going to change the Heavenly Wings skill for the Priest to become non-targeting, but at 4.5 fixed distance. Also, we will be fixing the Celestial Light skill bug where the DoT has been reduced to 6 seconds from 8 seconds.    
• New UGC: Three weapon templates will be added to the game with the new update    
• Joddy Squad: Criteria will be revealed and we are also going to open up a public submission in December    
• Meso Sellers: We are continuing to add more measures and more Customer Support agents. We have agents patrolling Tria and Queenstown to remove bots, and the removal of ad balloons happened with the last maintenance. We are continuing to ban an average of 10,000 accounts a day, and triggering trade bans for the meso sellers and some of the meso buyers. We have seen a few tickets and verified that those were meso buyers. PLEASE refrain from purchasing mesos from these sellers since it is against the Terms of Use, and it is helping the sellers continue to evolve their system.    
• Guild Change: Based on the feedback, we have decided to expand the size of the guild. A guild will start with 60 players and expand up to 100 members. Guild size expands by 10 at Guild Levels 4, 7, 10 and 13. We are also looking at changes for Guild Leaders, especially when they are not present in the game anymore.    
• Maple Arena (PvP): We are getting more details on the Maple Arena for December! We can confirm it will be added and that there will be a dedicated PvP weapon. This will be slightly different from the Korean version, and please note we are adding this to ensure players can play PvP arena content based on the control skill.    
• You will be able to enter the Maple Arena at level 50        
• Each match best of three rounds, meaning you need to win two rounds        
• It will be based purely on skill, meaning you won't be able to use consumables, and the dedicated PvP weapon will be the most efficient weapon because of the debuff we will be adding for other weapons        
• PvP weapons cannot be enchanted, because we have seen players in other regions using PvP weapons instead of other regular gear because of its efficiency        
• You will be able to earn Valor Tokens, which you can use to purchase items from the Arena shop        
• No reset for the Valor Tokens        
• Rankings will reset every 4 weeks, meaning the term for each season is only 4 weeks        
• You will earn mesos and a special, limited-duration mount as rank rewards        
• Black Friday and Cyber Monday: We have prepared great deals for Black Friday! There will be Doorbuster deals and a personalized Black Friday Merchant where you can purchase items at up to 60% discounted price! If you want to avoid your charging limit we recommend purchasing Karma Koin cards or other prepaid payments (Karma Koin, Nexon Game Cards, Xsolla, or PaySafeCard (PaySafeCard only available in Europe)) You can also purchase digital Karma Koin cards from some vendors!    

We didn' t start teasing our December update yet, but we already have tons of content and changes to share! We always strive to take your feedback and make the best decisions for the game. While we understand some of the decisions are different from what you have hoped for, we believe the community will see similar end results from the changes.

As always, thank you for being part of the MapleStory 2 community. We will provide more updates next week in regards to the major December expansion we are preparing for MapleStory 2.

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