Getting Ready for Zakum in Classic, the Old-School Way

Zakum was the first real boss most of us ever fought, and the first one that needed a plan. It sat under El Nath, it took an evening, and the Zakum Helmet on your head afterwards told everyone in Ludibrium that you had done it. If MapleStory Classic follows the old content order, Zakum will be the goal a lot of guilds organise around in the first few months. What follows is how we prepared for it back then, and what will probably still apply.

The prequest, part one: the Dead Mine

The prequest started with Adobis, the NPC in the El Nath area near the entrance to the Dead Mine. The first job was a jump quest. You went into the Dead Mine maps and worked through a set of platforms, collecting a handful of documents along the way, then brought them back. It was not the hardest jump quest in the game, but it was long and it was easy to fall, and doing it at level 50 with lag was a rite of passage. One of us failed the last jump seven times in a row on a school night and finished it at one in the morning, then had to walk back because we were out of return scrolls.

The prequest, part two: Eye of Fire and the Golden Pass

The second stage sent you into the Zakum dungeon itself to gather materials. You killed the mobs on the way to the altar for the pieces you needed, and combined them into the Eye of Fire, which was the item that actually let you summon the boss. Adobis handed out the Golden Pass along the way, which is what proved you had done the work.

The important thing to know is that the Eye of Fire was consumed per run. Every time your party wanted to fight Zakum, someone needed a fresh one, which meant someone had to go back and grind for the parts. Guilds usually rotated the job or kept a stock.

The fight itself

Zakum had two phases. First the arms, eight of them, each with its own HP and its own attacks. Then the body, which went through three forms, each with less HP and nastier tricks than the last. The whole thing lived on a small altar map with a few platforms, and where you stood mattered.

The attacks people feared were the ones that undid your buffs and the ones that hit everyone at once. Dispel took your Hyper Body and Haste away at the worst moment. Heavy area damage meant a warrior without Hyper Body could die from full in one hit. A lot of early Zakum deaths were simply people standing in the wrong place when the body summoned.

Party composition in the old era

A Zakum run in the old era used an expedition, the "squad", of up to thirty people, though experienced guilds ran it with far fewer once they had the levels and a couple of Priests. The core was fairly fixed.

• A Priest, ideally more than one, for Heal, Dispel and Holy Symbol.
• A Spearman or Dragon Knight for Hyper Body, which was the difference between surviving and not.
• Hermits or Rangers for ranged damage that did not stand in the arms.
• Whatever else had the levels and the potions.

The Priest was the bottleneck. A guild with two active Priests in the level 100 range could run Zakum weekly. A guild without one begged in Free Market channel one.

Why the Helmet mattered

The Zakum Helmet was, for its time, absurd. It gave a large bonus to every stat, plus HP, MP and accuracy, on an item that had upgrade slots on top. Nothing else in the hat slot came close. It was also untradeable, so you could not buy your way to one. You had to be there when it dropped and win the roll.

That combination made it the first piece of gear that separated the people who bossed from the people who did not. On a fresh server we expect it to be the single most wanted item for the first half year, and the guild that runs Zakum reliably will have no trouble recruiting. Our post on finding a guild explains why that matters early.

What a run actually cost

This is the part people forgot to budget for. A Zakum run burned potions like nothing else in the game. Warriors went through stacks of the good HP potions. Mages drank blue by the hundred. All Cure potions were needed for the status effects, and they were not cheap. Add Wings of Zakum, or whatever the current version of the return item is, so that dying did not mean a fifteen minute walk back. Add the Eye of Fire grind.

We tallied a mid-2000s run once and it came to a fair chunk of what a level 90 might earn in a week of training. The scrolling post explains why serious players never had spare mesos, and Zakum is the other half of that story. Being honest, this is the point where a lot of players without much playtime decided to buy mesos rather than farm potions, a shortcut Nexon's rules do not allow and one that can cost you the account, as our honest take spells out. We would rather you split costs with a guild.

Preparing at launch

Get to the level, obviously. Do the jump quest early, before you need it, because it is miserable at any level. Find a Priest and be kind to them. Stock potions for two runs, not one, because the first one will go wrong. And read up on the other old-era bosses, because after Zakum the road goes to Horntail, and Horntail was a different kind of problem entirely.

The first time our guild killed it, in the spring of 2007, one Helmet dropped and the roll went to a Cleric who had joined that week. Nobody complained. That is the kind of guild you want to find.