MapleStory M Player guide (beginner to intermediate)

How to win at maplestory - f2p

First off, go check out the great guides under Useful Links above. This is a simpler rule of thumb guide for beginner players to level up and make money doing it obviously.

Do questline till around level 90. They give a lot of epic powders, some AB tickets depending on event, and good exp. Leafre quests at 120 also give some good exp. The main way to level up is through starforce field dungeons. This should be your progression in terms of difficulty: 55, 65, 80, 110, 113, 123, 120, 133, 130, 147, 144, 150, 153. These maps give the most bang for the buck.

Also do the following:

• do netts pyramid everyday for jewelry and belts and some cash. Good way to get gold leaves also.

• daily dungeons to get yellow jewelry set for exp. you want to get all A pieces for now, and eventually get it to S and above.

• mulung every day to get coins to buy 15% exp necklace. you can stack with 10% necklace also

• kerning tower every month to get coins to buy 15% exp ring.

• when you get to level 100, start doing monster carnival if you can find players: you'll get between 18-22 million exp per run x3 a day = 1 level in the 100s for under 15 mins of work. Scales exp the higher level you are.

• when you get to 110, legends once a week to get a participation prize of 20,000 coins which is enough to buy 15% exp legendary medal. you'll have to go to rank, and then claim it there.

• do normal zakum everyday, you can leech off for belt and helmet and other stuff. transition to hard zakum when you can handle it. Horntail after 110. Eventually pink bean. normal empress to collect stones for end game. The goal is to build the boss set. you can look it up under set effects to see what you'll need. aim for the 6-7 set effects.

First things first, start doing elite dungeons and collect epic gear for your character. Ignore pba, just get something on the higher end of the dmg spectrum for now, over 620 raw attack for epics should do.

Epic belt cape shoulders could cost you millions in early game to buy from the ts which is hard (check your ts for good deals). Instead, buy rare shoulders, cape, belt, level them up. Buy some other random rare armour for fuse fodder, level them up. Now fuse them to get epic belt, shoulder, cape. You'll save some money in this long route, it will cost you 3 million total in fuse costs for all 3 combined which is probably the price of an epic cape on the ts. Again, depends on server so make sure to check.

Buy remaining cheap epic gear from trade station and slowly starforce everything to 10 each. This will cost money, and time to get that money. Start making some investments to earn while you level (read Q&A below)

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You should have sf80 now. Enter sf80 field - you will stay here till level 120+. it will take you a long time. You will also die a lot in the beginning depending on your class, at least till 110. But you'll get there. Do sf65 if you keep dying overnight and work way up. Find out a good balance between potion tier and income.

You should have built up some cash by now. Now get each of your epic equips to sf 15. Don't use shield or warding scrolls, save them. Buy replacements for broken gear via TS. That's the whole point of enhancing while everything's epic, it's cheaper to fix broken gear. Once you get every equip to sf15, buy a fresh set of epics for fuse fodder and level up all the gears you have. Now fuse them to unique - their sf will drop by 1. You should have 112sf now. Buy an epic secondary weapon and enhance it, you'll be at 119sf now. Gamble and get to 120sf and hope the uniques don't break. Take a look at the ts to see which is cheapest to replace before doing this. (From this point on, you may want to invest in temp gear. read more in Q&A below). Well done, you're at 120sf now. you'll stay here till level 135+. If you can't survive, get to sf123, and stick around there for a while before coming back down to sf120. If you can't survive in either, stay at 113.

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You should have built up a lot more cash by now. Now get uniques to sf17/18. Use the shield scrolls you've saved up. Fuse uniques to legendary with sf16/17, welcome to sf133/130 - you'll stay here for a long, long, long time (ostensibly till you get 170 hyper for f2p). You'll then rinse and repeat for sf147/144, rinse and repeat again till you get to sf150/153 by which point you'll know your way around emblem gear, chaos raids, etc. You can also start worrying about pba somewhere along the line here.

Oh and find yourself a guild. You get rewards for attendance, guild dungeons and exp from banquets and possibly more from guild forts, shops etc.

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Q&A

Focus on armour or weapon?

Weapon almost always. Armour comes next, honestly don't need to rank up armour unless you keep dying at a certain sf. If you do, then it's worth it. You can also help yourself by focusing on armour that gives you good evade.

Ignore weapon pba then? that's not what i've heard.

Look, pba is important, but not at level 120. you can choose to spend gold leaves and slowly rank it up from the beginning but that's a waste of gold leaves unless there's an event going on where they give you rank up stones. It's way more important to get your sf up than waste money and time trying to level up an epic weapon that's just like 10-20 more attack. that's not to say ignore wep attack completely but just get something that's over 80th percentile attack and that should be enough. Focus on money and levels in the beginning to set up a solid foundation for later. When you have enough money, you can simply buy a pba. Focus on the big picture, investing all that time and money into the pba when the rest of your foundation is trash is not big picture. It's like equipping an emblem item when everything else you have is rare or epic. Pointless.

But i've already invested so much on my weapon, i don't want to get rid of it.

Ok, take a screenshot of it, print it out, frame it and hang it up in your living room for sentimental reasons. Here's what's guaranteed for all maplers. You *are* going to make mistakes in your 1st go round. In fact, you *will* continue to make mistakes till the end of the mapling career. You know how you overcome those mistakes? money. money to fix what you did wrong. money to replace what cannot be fixed. focus on getting money.

Besides, If you can't fix it, you can always use it for fodder material.

How do I make money?

When farming for mesos, ludibrium-sky terrace 2, sf80, mulung-snake area, dark ereve-armory, twilight perion-rough wilderness in that order of approximate difficulty and mesos/hr. look for parties to join.

There's 2 ways to make money long term. Once you have a stable of level 125 alts that are regularly doing EDs, you'll get a lot of powders. In the beginning, I'd say just level up epics and fuse them to unique and sell them in the TS for a fair price. if done diligently, you can sell up to 3 unique items per character. this will net you about 10-15 million a day per character. More if you sell them at max level. You also have the chance to fuse to an unique emblem and they go for close to a billion or more mesos. Once you get up to a fair bit of cash (over 200 million), it's probably more worth it to level and fuse up those random epics all the way to max level in legendary and sell them. These take a lot longer, but sell for 200-400 million depending on your server so it's a lot more stable income than waiting for an emblem drop.

I just spent months on my main, you want me to make alts? this is gonna take too long..

If you have crystals, wonderwisps pets and royal styles are the best way to make money. But this guide isn't about spending real life $$.

There's no quick way in the beginning really f2p, as in real life, the hardest million to make is the 1st million, or in the case of msm, the 1st 100million. So it's in your best interest to build up a stable of level 125 alts, it's going to pay off in the long run. You get link skills and also get to bypass daily limits on dungeons, storage space and trade station sales. Welcome to the grind.

Besides if you ask me, you really shouldn't have a main till you get a couple of alts to over level 120 anyway so you know which class you really enjoy.

Why level 125 for alts

Level 125 EDs give you unique powders, which give the best item exp per powder per meso. 155 EDs give even better exp, but that takes too long. For reference, it takes around 3 billion exp to get from 1-125 but around 6 billion exp just to get from 154-155.

What do i do with all those powders I collect?

Save them and use them for 2 things: to level up your items that you want to use for yourself, or to level up random epics that you get as drops. you cannot transfer powders using storage so you'll have to ferry items via storage from alt to alt and use the powders. Don't equip anything you want to level up with powders from alts as they'll get bound.

What do you mean by temp gear?

Temporary gear. This is not necessary and takes a bit more money, but it's very convenient past sf80. It's usually pieces that meet minimum requirements to farm at a specific sf while you focus on building up a separate set that is futureproof. That way if they break or lose sf, you don't die and lose time/money farming - the idea being you're not messing around with anything that's necessary for your current survival.. These temp gears are not necessarily good stats or futureproof. For example, I'd have a full set of max sf epics to farm at 120 where my class survival skills allow, while I work on a separate set of higher tier pieces that i'll be slowly sfing past 15 to 130+. If these break, i'd replace them as the temp gear.

This is a lot of work..

Maplestory is pay2win. you either pay with money or time. If your irl job pays very well, i'd say your time is worth more and you're probably better off paying with actual money. If not, then this is how you progress toward end game, there's no way around it, otherwise you're really going to struggle to get past sf130 in any decent time period.

Mar-04-2021