While being stuck in a grrrMAZE! –

SilverFx: The ability to walk through walls will be nice for Christmas.
Halovite: I’ll get you an electric drill.
SilverFx: Aw Halo, you’re so sweet :3
Halovite: You’ll have to find the power point by yourself though =/

So, somewhen in March, darling PbSO4 – the Maple hubby – told me that he was going to try playing Cabal, the newest (and heavily advertised) game in town, and asked if I wanted to go over as well for the open beta.

At first I was apprehensive about starting a new game, what with schoolwork and exams looming ahead of me. In addition to the fact that I have been proven Hopeless in navigating a 3D virtual world, there didn’t seem to be much of a chance for a long stay in that new game.

Anyhow, I signed up, and flipped through the different jobs on the character creation page, trying to figure out which was the support-type job in this game. No answers availed itself readily, so I was about to settle on a Force Blader when I clicked on the Force Archer icon…

DAYM. THAT BOW IS SMEX.
And with that sole thought bouncing around drunkenly inside my head, I quickly customised the look of my character, typed in my IGN, and whee, I was in.

… Too bad you don’t start with the smexy bow they show in the character creation page. -.-

(Coincidentally, I somehow did wind up choosing a support-type class in the end; Force Archers have the healing skillz in this game. Andandand, liek Force Archers get these Smexy Guns~ )

Then I told Imppala over the phone that I was going to try this new game, and then he joined the game and got hooked, and then my brother joined as well, and then Imppala went and levelled up like crazy in the span of a day, and then everyone was TRYING to catch up with him…

The rest is history. Muffin’d history.

I got caught up in the game, hooked in by the quests and the way they directed gameplay so that you aren’t left aimlessly grinding away on mobs just to level up. I usually stack the few quests that require the same mob and then happily went on my way to finish all of them at once. Plus, the quests aren’t stingy at all in their rewards of EXP and money, unlike the lousy Maple ones. </3

But sometimes, I forget to plan, and it turns out that I have to kill the same mobs as a previous quest I took up…

SilverFx: PANTHERHORN ZOMBIES AGAIN?!
SilverFx: I JUST KILLED SEVENTY! >O!
SilverFx: *knees Henderson*
MariaTraydor: rofl
MariaTraydor: ow
MariaTraydor: sympathy pain!
SilverFx: *runs away* >(

So, as it turned out, this game kept me away from Maplestory for a good two months or so. So much that I even converted my existing Maple cash to Cabal cash and bought myself the 30-days Premium service, because I so needed the extra inventory space and the GPS warp is oh so convenient. >D

And whilst I was busy studying for my finals, I continued to progress on Cabal with the help of Auto Attack. Whilst not as sophisticated as the Auto Attack feature in Granado Espada (ah, more grand days of Being Lost), it allows me to ‘punch’ monster for skill EXP whilst being AFK.

Yar, like boxing-punch. And yes, that is an oversized mosquito. And a silly conversation going on in the guild.

Usually, punching is a Boooorrrrring process that people undertake to raise their skill levels for Stats bonuses at lower levels. But with Auto Attack and Windowed Mode, I was free to do the same while tackling my studies. ^^

When I hit Completer (second highest skill level available), I immediately went and bought the skills, and daaaamn, Shooting Star is SOOO SMEXH.

There’s actually another way to skill up, which is to use low-level skills in Combos, but it’s beyond me. I can’t even get up to fifteen combos; this is the best I ever got. I keep on missing right after 14! T_T So yeah, it was punching all the way for me. >.>

So there’s a Town named Green Despair in this game.

MariaTraydor: where are ya now?
SilverFx: in DESPAIR~
MariaTraydor: NUU DUN EMO ON ME
SilverFx: *does EXACTLY THAT*
SilverFx: IHATEMYLIFEITSUCKSWORSETHANAVACUUMCLEANER
MariaTraydor: FINELETSEMOTOGETHER

<3

Back at level 41, whilst I was dashing back to this punishingly painful dungeon that I failed about two times before (Dungeons aren’t usually that tough for me; I have no idea why I was so weak then >.&gt, I received a guild invite out of nowhere, and accepted it. Thus began my unforgettable journey with one of the most tumultuous (read: Drama) online group of people I have ever met: Valhalla.

At first, I wasn’t very impressed. I did receive a warm welcome to the guild and all that, but things seemed pretty quiet, and Valhalla was defined as ‘the name of a game’ rather than the name of the Norse haven I thought it was. (I am a stickler for the proper origin of names. :X)

(Speaking of guild names: look at this. Looks like someone let their fingers traipse all across the keyboard lol.)

But then I got to know the people better, and by and by, I was soon in the thick of all the madness that went around, a lot of which involves converging on people who PK fellow Valhalla members to melt out vengeance, then staying in these random spots to PVP and chill out.

My twin in the guild~ XD

We also had punching parties, where a group of us will monopolise an area to punch, and to watch out for each other so that we don’t accidentally die while AFK-punching (because you can get mobbed link]like this[/url]), and to ward off KSers and possible PKers. ^^

It’s more entertaining to punch as a group as well, as you can see.

It’s even more entertaining to punch as a group… to punch our beloved leader, Benson, that is. ^_______^;

It is also rather entertaining to dance* as a group too. :X

*What’s cool about this dance is that it is actually based off the routine from a Korean girls’ group, Wondergirls. I mean, just compare.

Heh.

Once, we even formed a daisy-chain of people using the command ‘Follow’ on one another and waltzed through the entire map of Bloody Ice, with me at the head of the line. XDD

The lower levelled people were yelling at me not to slow down, because some of the mobs we traipsed through were red names for them, and true enough, the train broke down halfway because one of them died. I remember people giving us ‘o_O’s and loads of mobs joined the train as well.

That day, I laughed so hard.

Of course, not everything was sunshine and daisies in this guild. There was a lot of drama. Like, a LOT of it. People argued over racism, people stormed out of the guild because they got rejected, people PKed each other for fun and then got pissed off at each other, people switched servers, people got pissed off when confronted with evidence that they use botting programs (which is a lot more widely use than I had first expected), the first guild leader abruptly handed over leadership and left the guild, people kept quitting and coming back and quitting and coming back…

*gasp*
*deep breath*

Ye-eah. And it went on and on and on. But well, I just stuck with Valhalla, for better or for worse.

I got promoted to third-rank with privileges to invite people, made friends with quite a few people and even found out that a couple of them stay in blocks right next to mine, whilst others are just in my neighbourhood. I have never met them face to face, but it was a pretty cool discovery anyway. ^^;

And on my birthday, the nice people in Valhalla nearly drowned me in presents. ^__^ Some of them gave me Upgrade Cores, which are Cabal’s equivalent of scrolls, and are very much sought after and pretty expensive. I still haven’t dared to use them yet, knowing my abysmal luck. >>

When I left, things have pretty much quietened down, especially after that last guild war (in which our opponent didn’t show up at all lulz). I’m just sad that one of my favourite-est guild person, Raorao aka oOSexyLoveOo/oOAmunRaOo, (who was incidentally also the person that invited me into the guild ^^; ) abruptly went on a long hiatus from the game. ._.

Random picture of the two people I spent most of my time in Cabal with. <3 Raorao and Kiros. They helped me so much and are pretty awesome people. Other awsm guildies include: UruruChan/Eniale (Ruru), Benson (Bendan) (HE CALLED ME STUPIG >O), LegendaryHunter (Popo), 0AllenWalker (Alien) (HE KEPT CALLING ME PIG TOO), xiaodreamer, coffey, Kororo/KiyoyaHibaru, Servebot (Server), FleurDeLis, WindEternal, Zephyz…

Oh dear, I can’t seem to remember anyone else, though I’m sure there are others. ._. *leaking-sieve-memory*

So yeah. Valhalla. Boy oh boy, you are such an experience.

Anyway, I doubt I would have gotten very far in this game without the support of the guild, and more importantly, Imppy’s help. He gave me cash when I was broke from buying too high-levelled pots back when I was a nub, and sponsored me a lot of good equipment, from the Adept set that I used for skilling, to the awsm double-slotted Osmium Battlesuit set that SilverFx running around in right now. :3

That’s not counting the advice on builds, and the guidance on navigation through dungeons and maps, and the hilarious conversations. Not to mention the entertainment on seeing how everyone thinks that MariaTraydor is a girl IRL, and hearing the guys hitting on ‘her’. *giggles madly*

No matter which game I play, one thing anyone can safely assume about me is that I’ll travel around the game world in the most klutzy way possible. In Maplestory, I’m bad enough, mixing up north-south, east-west. Now, add an additional dimension to the game in question and there you go, instant Entertainment and Hilarity, the Silvar way! Watch as the silly girl goes around in circles in the Undead Grounds, unable to find her way even with a map! Marvel at her genius as she paces the same path in Green Despair over and over, trying to find a single coffin that she has already passed by about four times before!

Ahem. Right.

So, Cabal has these instanced dungeons, some are for specific quests, whilst others are training maps that you enter with map entry items and fight specific mobs and painfulpainful bosses. ._.

Usually, the minimum level at which you can enter the latter dungeons are never high enough for you to survive on your own. ^^; Especially since Force Archers are one of the most delicate classes in Cabal and I remain clumsy at controlling my character, it means that I die very easily in these dungeons, especially if I try to solo-ing them. Keyword here is try. >_o

So there’s one half-an-hour dungeon called Ruina Station, (refer to link for video example) which is

Why? Cause it HURTS like jeeblezels, but gives heck a lot of EXP, which is unfortunately very worth it for thirty minutes of pain. =.=

AAARGH THE COWS ARE AFTER MEEE.

Okay, let’s not give them gender issues (who knows, they might really be male!); they’re actually buffalos. Right.

Those cow- I mean, buffalos, are awesome! …except for the pain. Parties usually go in with Force Shielders as tankers for higher chances of survival. (But there was one run in which a Wizard tanked for us. ) You can get loads of EXP from them at levels 85-110 and people rarely finish a complete run of Ruina Station, preferring to stay at this stage to milk all the EXP they can get from these cows, pun intended.

In my first half-an-hour run, I shot from level 85 to 86, gaining around 110%. It would probably have been more if I didn’t keep dying, but hey, you win some, you lose some. It is thus that Raorao and Kiros helped me powerlevel from 85 to 95. :X

All that rambling aside, Ruina Station remains one of my fondest memories for more than just the reason that it is a jolly good training ground. The other reason?

See, the entrance to Ruina Station is side by side with this other portal to the NPCs you need to finish a quest. Both are only activated if you have the entry item for the former and the completed quest for the latter. And on one occasion, this Silvar happened to have both.

And being oh so smart, this Silvar, intending to talk to NPCs for the quest, somehow managed to mix the two entrances up and walked right into the painfulpainful Runia Station by accident. Alone.

*headdesk*

Of course I didn’t have the ability to do survive properly alone in RS, but I tried my best in the next half an hour. Ended up only managing to just finish off the first boss after the entrance before time’s up. -___-

Oh, but that isn’t the worse.

After levelling up to 105, I went to the town of Port Lux to check out on this new quest. The cheerful officer rambled on and on about something or the other, shoved me a Seal of Darkness and pointed me in the direction of the Volcanic Citadel, which I have heard to be a very painful place.

See, I didn’t REALISE that VC was an instanced dungeon like Runia Station. I thought it was just a map that required an entry item, like Undead Grounds and Forbidden Ruin.

Well, I thought wrong. But I only knew that AFTER I walked right into the damn place.

Curiously enough, I have no screenshots of that place. Probably because I was too busy trying to survive. This could possibly be recorded as one of those field reports that are incomplete due to the death of the agent.

Correction: repeated deaths. I sort of lost count after a while.

You guys know El Nath/Aqua right? The cold/water takes off 10 HP every five seconds or something.

THIS Citadel takes off 600 HP every five-ten seconds. It’s like, a FIREBALL of DOOOOOM will come SOARING towards you from the SKAAAI and WHAM, SIX HUNDRED HP gone like THAT!
I only have 2165 HP after buffs. And the mobs themselves hit another 400-750 dmg.

I mean, come on man, duuuude. Map damage is one thing. INTENTIONAL MURDER IS A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT MUFFIN!

As a smaaaall consolation, at least I recovered the price of that Seal of Darkness, which could have been sold for 7mil. I was sulkily killing the less painful mobs near the entrance of the Citadel and obtained a slotted Osmium Blade, which can go for 10mil apparently.

Still. After Ruina Station, I thought nothing would surprise me as ‘painful’ anymore, but oh unholy muffins, Volcanic Citadel practically rewrote the dictionary for Pain.

.___.

Like I said, what hooked me in Cabal were the quests that they have. They have a pretty well thought out series of quests referred to as the ‘story quests’, because they are actually narrate a long and epic story concerning the fate of the world in-game, which is discovered to lie on the shoulders of this rather sad (pudgy) young man, Patren, who pretty much broke down under all the pressure of being manipulated and went berserk.

It must be some tough beauty regime he had to go through, because look at what he turned into!

Then, after lvl 99, all the story quests will come to an end. Me, being the quest fanatic that I am, I finished all of them except for this infamously difficult final dungeon named Patren, Patren, in which you have to kill the berserk Patren.

Here’s a video link for it. I was trying to study the ‘how to lure’ part, but I have no idea what language the instructions are in, so er. *scratchhead* So far, my two attempts at the dungeon have resulted in my death past the first boss… Eeps.

Anyway. The whole thing is: THE QUESTS STOP AT LEVEL 99! DDD:
No more quests. No MORE quests! T____T

Okay, not entirely no more quests per say.

First, you’re left with the normal quests, which usually require you to make repeated instanced dungeon runs. When I say repeated, I mean repeated. Like, ten-to-twenty-times repeated.

>________________>

It wouldn’t be so bad if we could take all the quests in a go. But nooo, you’re limited to five quests at any one time. So you end up needing to actually do more than twenty runs of the same dungeons to clear everything. >.>

We-ell, in the last few days of my Premium service, I did repeated runs of Lake in Dust (hereafter known as LiD) to clear four of these quests, but since I merely did the one-hour dungeon seven times in a row, I only cleared the ‘kill the final boss ten times’ one.

Ye-eah.

It would have been cleared one run earlier IF I didn’t happily waltzed into LiD forgetting that there was to be a server check about thirty minutes later. =_=

Then, you’re left with your rank-up quests that happen every ten levels. *sigh*

The last relatively easy rank-up that you get is at level 90. Then, at level 100, it gets horrible. D: You have to get into this two hour long dungeon commonly known as EoD, after the map entry item Epaulet of Death.

Then you have to farm the painful (‘I hate that word’ – Raorao) monsters inside for mission coins. The difficulty is (1) the coins don’t always drop, and (2) the mobs only spawn every twenty minutes. >O

Thank god, with the help of Popo* (aka LegendaryHunter, guild member. *Popo is ‘granny’ in dialect, hehe. Despite that, no, he ain’t a female. :X ), zzkzz and Imppy, I managed to get through EoD and clear the level 100 rank-up quest in three EoDs. ^^;

And if I ever get to lvl 110… I know Imppy cleared his lvl 110 rank-up at lvl 120. So not looking forward to it…

With the death of my 30-day Premium service and the death of the steady flow of quests, the death of my enthusiasm for Cabal has come as well. I haven’t logged in since, oh, two months ago? It’s all been Maplestory, and all those private servers. :X

Last I heard from Imppala, Valhalla the guild is dying, with people concentrating on school, going over to other servers and other guilds etc. Oh well, all good things must come to an end, I guess. *shrugs*

But hey, Cabal was fun while it lasted, and though I admit to myself that I might never go back to that game again even though I ought to, it wasn’t a bad diversion from Maplestory. ^^

Em. I’ll stop rambling now. ^^ I haven’t done this is quite a while, but hey, old habits die hard. Cookies for the reader! *tosses*