bossing profit and equip upgrades.

'ello. I might return to maple, but I don't know which version yet.

I want to know if it is at all possible to get and upgrade equips worth having, with the profit you get from bossing - without using nx.

I'm looking at people like user;, Green4Ever;, Mazz; and qtpie;. they do all the top notch bosses.
are the drops enough to buy nx for cubes, wheels and freezers, or do you feel that you have to buy nx, in order to keep up?

is it possible to make a mule like a paladin, that can bind and stuff, and make my way by attending boss runs like that? are drops given to players with the sole purpose of buffing and binding?

I hope this isn't an inappropriate question to the people I have mentioned.

It definitely is possible, whether it's worth the time/effort or not is another question entirely though. Most of the other 'end-game' bossers I know in GAZED got to that point by throwing a large amount of money at the game, and in some cases even buying finished equips with the sole purpose of being able to kill stuff in order to resell, but I'm pretty old school with my method (which I essentially stole from the Zakum Helmet crews of Windia circa 2007).

I don't know how other people organise their 'squads' but I have a group of 4/5 or so that come bossing with me (Chaos Root Abyss, Gollux, Magnus or Empress - the groups differ slightly depending on which boss we're killing). I take all the drops at the end and sell them in my shops in the FM and give everyone a split of the profit, the biggest splits go to the people who are either more valuable in terms of use (so bind mules, or high DPS), and people who mainly just tag along for fun get a smaller (but still reasonable, usually 10-20% depending on how many people attend/what drops we get) cut.

The two people that come with me to basically every boss run I do have gone from ~50-60k ranges up to 400-500k since a little before the summer, but pretty much the only effort they put into upgrading is taking splits I give them and using it to either buy NX to cube, or to buy equips to use. If all you do is attend bosses and earn money from splits you will be able to improve, but it'll be a lot slower than if you were putting more time/effort in. I've gone from 8k buffed range on my old Shadower (winter 2011) to 2mil clean on my Dual Blade (current, so roughly 2 years) with about $300-500 or so of my own money invested (most of which went on emergency charging so I didn't lose my spot in the Free Market, or to take advantage of a sale that was about to end. I also bought like 5 permanent Hyper Teleport Rocks when they were available which cost something absurd like $120). This would've been impossible had I have not done the following:

1. Pretty much always be at my computer ready to race online and grab a FM 1 spot just as a server check (or unscheduled) ends, preferably near the door: this is extremely important for bossing because from ~FM3 onwards or so people like to drop the prices down so potential buyers feel more inclined to look around in the future for cheap deals. It's also useful to have a good FM spot if you spot something cheap in another room, you can overprice stuff a LOT if you have a good spot, because people are lazy.

2. Make an unreasonable amount of mule accounts to farm events with: this is a very easy way of making money without really 'playing' the game, it does however require an enormous amount of patience and organisation. You can either hoard hundreds of event items to use when you have suitable equips in the future, or sell scroll service to people who have good equips but do not have the means to upgrade them themselves (generally people who spend absurd amounts of money on NX fall into this category).

3. Be online a lot: this isn't so important any more since the current bossing set up seems to be something along the lines of 'kill everything on 4x+ drop, then wait a week for the entrance limits to reset'. Back when Empress was a daily ordeal it could take up to 7-8 hours to get into the map to kill her due to a high number of people trying to do the same thing, and hackers did not help either. I guess this is similar to the first point; you will need a lot of free time.

Once again, I can't speak for anyone else really but that's how I've done it at least. I consider myself fairly successful in that I've upgraded from pretty much nothing up to the max damage range without putting too much money into the game, but I feel like this isn't how you're /supposed/ to do it, mostly because if I didn't buy NX with meso none of this would've worked at all, and that's explicitly against the ToS.

Sort of went off on a tangent a bit, but I hope this helps. I would say you could tag along and join me for a few runs but I already have about 4 bind mules, and short of making a bossing rota (which would be even less efficient for those trying to earn money without doing much) it wouldn't work. Most people fall back on buying NX with real money because it's a ton easier and they'd rather spend the time doing something else/something productive.