Rant 406 / Going Up

Putpockets, the opposite of pickpockets, are operating in various parts of London. Instead of stealing money from unwary victims, these ex-pickpockets are secretly putting cash into pockets. Really gives everyone an excellent reason to visit London. It would be like getting a small rebate.








Birthdays gifts.

Birthday gifts are tricky things. They need to be significant enough that you won't be embarassed when you hand them over to the receivers, yet insignificant enough that they wouldn't burn a hole through your pocket.

Furthermore, they need to be meaningful enough that the receivers would remember that you got them something on that occasion, yet meaningless enough that they would just dump them in a corner where they would eventually collect a layer of dust thick enough to cushion the fall of the next gift to be dumped in that direction.

Personally I don't have an income, so anything I buy with "my" money wouldn't be sincere. Never understood the point of other people buying gifts for each other using their parents' money. It wouldn't be from you, but from your parents instead.

I'm not being cheap. Cheap is when you get something "economical" when you're earning a million times the price of the item. I am not earning any money, hence all my money is really my mum's money. It makes sense to say that anything I buy would really be from my mum.

Birthday gifts are a tricky business.

Maybe this would work.











Now I've learnt another form of equipment upgrade. There are about 3 methods of doing so, using Jewels from item shop, using mana stones to add stats and using mana stones to raise tier.

Using Jewels is the easy method because all I need to do is buy them and use them on the piece of equipment I want to upgrade. For example, a "Dagger" can become "Dagger +1". Most people would raise it to +6 at most, probably because it's the maximum.

Mana stones are more complex and took me a while to understand the guide. Mana stones are made from fusion stones and equipments. When I transmute (using my Transmutator) a piece of equipment and a fusion stone, I get a mana stone that has the stat bonuses and tier level of the equipment.

When I transmute 3 mana stones of the same tier, I get a mana stone that is 1 tier higher.

When I transmute 3 mana stone with a piece of equipment, the equipment will get the tier and the stat bonuses on the mana stones.

There are always catches.

First, a piece of equipment can only hold up to 6 stat bonuses.

Second, the equipment or mana stone will always retain the 6 worst stats from the ingredients.

The third problem is the method of obtaining a fusion stone in the first place. There are two:

- buy from a NPC vendor using gold (the cheaper way)
- buy from item shop using diamonds/tokens (the expensive way)

NPC vendors will only offer fusion stones with at one or two confirmed stats (all crap, but at least they are not random) and one or two random stats. This means that if I just buy 3 stones from the NPC and transmute them, I would just get a mana stone with 6 crap stats.

The trick with this is to buy lots of fusion stones and pick those with only 2 of the same stats. It's like buy Magic: The Gathering booster packs and hoping for good cards. I bought around 30-40 stones that cost me around 5.5k gold each and all I've managed to get is 2 sets of 3 fusion stones with the same 2 stats, allowing me to transmute items that only has 2 bad stats and 4 good stats.

This is the best situation I can afford. The most ideal case is when I can find 3 stones with only 1 bad stat and its the same on all 3 so that I can make a fusion stone with only 1 bad stat and 5 empty slots for the good stuff.

On the other hand, I can also buy purified fusion stones from the item shop. For 1100 tokens (I can only earn 100 tokens a day) or around 80 diamonds (20k gold each) I can get one of those. These fusion stones are blank, so if I can get 3 of those I can make empty mana stones that can be filled with 6 good stats, which is the best scenario.

But this is expensive. I can only buy 1 purified fusion stone every 11 days if I play this game diligently, which I can't. Hence I'll just stick with buying lots of inferior fusion stones from the NPC and pick those with 2 of the same stats.

Raising tiers will come later because it's even more expensive. To get a tier 4 mana stone, I need three tier 3 mana stones. To get a tier 5 stone I need three tier 4 stones, ie NINE tier 3 stones.

Then I'd need three tier 4 mana stones just to raise the tier of one piece of equipment, ie NINE tier 3 stones. Nine tier 3 stones with the same 2 bad stats is means I'd have to buy lots of fusion stones. It's basically like trying to find the same rare cards from the booster packs. I had to buy about 30-40 fusion stones just to find 3 with only Stam I and Dex I, the best of the "bad stats". I also found a single fusion stone with just Stam I, but it's kinda useless unless I find more of it.

This means to raise a tier of one of my equipments I would have to buy about a hundred fusion stones that cost 5.5k gold each. That's over 550k gold! It takes me 2 hours to gather enough stuff to sell to make 300k!

I'll try that after I'm done giving myself more stat boosts. So far I've raised my HP to 4.5k and 5k is the magic number that all decently armoured lv50s should have at minimum.