Hello

This time, the keyword is challenge letter, and what I wanted to write about was taking a shot at this newly added high-difficulty content.

MapleStory recently added a new obstacle stage through an update, and although I chipped away at it whenever I had a bit of spare time and still never managed a clear, I at least put together a few notes on it.

MapleStory's obstacle maps

In MapleStory, not exactly the main attraction but something that has kept asserting its presence with surprising consistency is the obstacle map. Alongside the pet walking roads in Henesys and Ludibrium, there are the usual representatives like Forest of Tenacity, Kerning City Subway, and Forest of Patience, and even Cave of Trials, which now is another one of those places nobody has much reason to visit but which used to be mandatory if you wanted to challenge Zakum, has long since settled in as a piece of content in its own right.

One example would be a few floors in The Seed, which, if nothing else, was at one point probably the only obstacle map that gave what could be called a “practical reward,” even if that is no longer really the case now.

More recently, this tendency has been pushed further with the steady release of the Tower of Dimensions event. That one also never really became popular with the broader playerbase, since the rewards are only cosmetic items like the ones above and the difficulty is frankly brutal, but it still feels meaningful because it was put together with a fair amount of care around themes from MapleStory's past event maps.

The newly added “permanent” obstacle map content

And then, rather abruptly, a permanent obstacle-mode piece of content showed up out of nowhere, namely Path of Challenge. It is arguably the first official content of this kind in a very long time since Victoria Island's Forest of Tenacity, Forest of Patience, and Kerning City Subway, and you can enter it after accepting the related quest from Manyu in pre-Cernium.

It is divided into 3 areas in total, and each area contains 4 stages. Every map uses Cernium as its backdrop, and the story follows the same familiar flow, with Manyu asking you to recover the items he lost.

The clear rewards are only achievement points, artifact points, and Maple Home furniture, so thankfully this is not mandatory in the slightest.

Content that was much harder than expected ,,

For this kind of content, I tend to think there is some romance in going in blind rather than checking a guide first, so out of the three I chose the encampment, since on first impression it looked the most manageable.

No matter which area you enter, you are given a common movement skill called Black Powder. It is basically a backstep, and if you use it while jumping you can travel farther. Since it is a backstep, if you want to move forward you have to turn around and use it facing backward.

Stage 1 had sections with broken platforms along left and right routes, a bit like Forest of Patience, but it was easy enough that I cleared it in one go, so I went into the next stage thinking the rest might be manageable too... and I think I spent about 3 hours here.

Stage 2 consists of 7 floors in total. The goal is to cross from one side of the map to the other for the 1st floor, then turn back for the 2nd, then do the 3rd, and so on until you make it all the way up to the top of the 7th floor.

The platforms themselves have the same collision as normal platforms, but there are 4 obstacles in total. First is this lightning. The effect looks huge, but fortunately it is very honest and only hits the exact spot where the lightning is actually placed.

Because of that, even in a position like this, if you are standing on the upper platform you will not get hit by lightning striking the lower one. That said, if it does hit you, it knocks you back with no mercy.

Next, this Flame Spirit moves either left and right or diagonally. Unless you get hit in midair, taking it head-on only nudges you slightly and does not send you flying off. If you get hit while airborne, though, you just drop straight into the abyss.

These arrows fly in endlessly from both sides of the map, and I could not tell whether there was an actual pattern or if it was random, but in practice it certainly felt random.

At least the hitbox is honest, so if you look at a spot and think, “If I duck here, I probably will not get hit,” then ducking there really does work.

Also, if you press the forward directional key while facing the direction the arrow is coming from, then even if you get hit you are only pushed a little and do not fall. You can even move through one-tile platforms this way.

Still, as expected, if you get hit in the air, you fall.

Lastly, this High Flora Knight is, at least in this stage, relatively sparse and fairly easy to avoid.

Sometimes there is a knight in front with a platform sitting some distance behind it, and in that case too, if you face it and hold the forward key you will not be pushed back, so you can tank one hit and then go over it with jump + backstep, or jump + backstep just before the attack connects and let the knockback carry you across.

Individually, these obstacles are not all that remarkable, but aside from the knight, which only appears now and then, the other three often overlap at the same time, and with the arrows constantly interfering, this stage, which does not even have some particularly distinctive gimmick, was absurdly exhausting. Of course, the first and most obvious reason is simply that my hands are bad.

I got so irritated doing this that I even bought equipment with the option that increases invincibility time after being hit, something I did not bother buying even back when I was doing The Seed. The difference between having it and not having it is pretty large, so if you are planning to try this, I would strongly recommend treating it as mandatory.

If you fall on the right side of the map, it takes a while to make your way back to the left, so it is faster to leave and re-enter.

So, one way or another, I did clear Stage 2, but

the moment I saw Stage 3, my mind more or less left my body, so for now I retreated.

Afterward I searched around and found someone who had written a guide, and according to them, Stage 2 in this area seems to be the hardest one, but even after reading the guide I still could not get past Stage 3, so I am thinking I will come back and try again later if I can work up the resolve. In any case, for anyone else planning to challenge it, I wish you the best of luck.

Thank you for reading.