Elrios Rift & My Current Progress

If you've known me for a very long time, you know that I have a lot of feelings about the videogame Elsword. What you might not know is that I actually had a personal relationship with the community team for the Brazillian Elsword server, before it shut down. I wasn't part of it, and after a while we lost contact as we grew up and became, y'know, adults, but this is a game that has been an unfortunate part of my life for a very long time.

My feelings can be summarized in "this is a game with an absolutely insane amount of potential and a lot of genuinely incredibly good things about it, all of which are completely undermined by capitalism".

Simply put, I'm sure that the developers of Elsword care, but they are not allowed to care, and, knowing what happened to Elsword's sister game Grand Chase, and what's become of it since, I can pretty confidently say that they never truly will be able to care.

So you can probably imagine my joy when a private server of Elsword, made up entirely of people who care incredibly deeply about the game, and importantly, are allowed to demonstrate that care because they are not bound by capitalism, showed up.

I've been playing Elrios Rift for a long time now, almost since its release, and I am very happy with how it's going. I'm also, y'know, hoping that this tiny like 4-5 person development group doesn't go the way of cohost, although I imagine that they are, comparatively, playing on easy mode (though I imagine it's still incredibly difficult).

I once played Rune Slayer, and later switched over to playing Sakra Devanam. In the rift though, I primarily play Anemos, who was a character I always wanted to try out seriously but never could because the gearing/levelling process in that game is glacially slow. Private servers are the best way to solve that, though.

I have been progressing at a very lazy pace, all told. My next primary objective would be to grind out the Pruinaum raids and get the ever important Black & White title, but I took so long to get that, that the requirements got eased up and raid/giant boss titles became account-wide instead of character-specific, which is just funny to think about.

The latest patch also introduced the Anemos rework, which removed her defining characteristic (she gets guaranteed crits and therefore doesn't need to build crit) but to compensate gives her a reworked Violent Attack, into possibly her single most consistent bossing tool. 

I actually consider the removal of her guaranteed crit to be a blessing, mostly because of how the game's insane Combat Power system works. Since it doesn't care about conditional passives (like Anemos', even though the condition is trivial to achieve), her effective 100% crit chance doesn't get counted for her Combat Power, which means that in terms of gearing, she's always lagging behind. This meant that, for example, I couldn't run Abyss raids or Tirnog Dungeons or the 4th tier of Secret Dungeons before, since the game prevents you from playing if your Combat Power is too much lower than the content you're trying to queue for.

Anyway, the rework allowed me to swap seven of my sockets into crit chance, which skyrocketed my combat power at its peak from 3.2 million (which my "I am literally fishing for combat power" setup) to a very comfortable 6.4 million (with my standard "this is what I run when I'm actually doing content" setup).

This means that I can run all the things I couldn't before, and more besides. It also means I have more space to play around with my Tenebrous set. It actually changed my daily routine in the game a bit.

•  Varnimyr 4 and Varnimyr 8 have been staples of my daily routine for a long time now. They're a decent, reliable source of Mystic Stones to run daily.
• Running Heroic dungeons isn't necessary anymore, since I won't need boss damage sockets to fill all the empty space that I'm not filling with crit.
• I can swap my third daily dungeon (minimum for the battle pass) with Elrianode 5, which is quick and gives me a source of ElShards.
• I can also run Drabaki pretty quickly and reliably, which means running the 5 daily Drabakis is also another good source of ElShards. (I can get about 30+ of those per day like this.)
• Weeklies are still a little on the rough side. Challenge Henir once per week is still a w/e thing, but swapping the third tier secret dungeons to fourth tier is rough.
  • That said, I much prefer running the fourth tier dungeon over either of the third tier ones, even if it takes twice as long.

The primary problem, of course, is that I'm way behind on the progression curve. Everyone is running Abyss Raids, and I'm here still trying to grab Black & White. While I'll be able to swap to Abyss Raids pretty readily once I get it, it's unlikely it's going to happen anytime soon, since farming parties for B&W are scarce to nonexistente nowadays.

Oh well.