Maplestory E3 interview this morning-BIG INFO

Well, those 11 new monsters better be pretty good EXP and on a great map... otherwise Nexon just bluffed us once again. At any rate what excites me is the new weapons. I hope they may actually be somewhat useful, such as a fast speed BW/Axe or a commonly available 1H sword around level 80-100(try finding a decent attack Fraute/Sparta).

The point of axes and blunt weapons is that they're slower.

It's not supposed to be just a graphical choice that makes the difference. Axes and blunt weapon are SUPPOSED to hit harder, but hit slower, yet still maintain balance. While it is arguable if balance is actually struck, it'd be plainly unbalanced to have an axe/bw which is as fast or faster than a sword (this is, of course, ignoring the fact that axe heroes get pineapple'd in the ass due to poor skill design in 4th job... if you're looking for balance in the 4th job skill set, a change to the skills is what you should be looking for, NOT better weapons).

I'm just hoping they don't take this as an opportunity to release elemental weapons for Mages as a balancer, when in releasing a new area, they can fix the balance more fairly by just adding better monsters that are elementally weak. All along when I was speaking out about elemental weapons, I would repeatedly say "what we need is new monsters what we need is new monsters the problem isn't in the strength of the characters, but in the lack of good monsters". Well, this is Nexon's first shot to deliver fairness for Mages, let's hope they manage it.

*expects to hear people crabbing about no pirates*

I'm a little surprised myself. I'd bet there will be some allusion to it, or will be explained away once it comes out. Something like one of the NPCs saying "oh yeah there's another job or something right? oh well they were all off doing something else when the grandmasters were chillin' in here, so they got left out of the fun".

Yes, yes it is.

If you notice it has FOUR Posters of the FOUR main jobs DISCOURAGING THE FACT THAT PIRATES ARE INCLUDED IN THE MAIN SYMBOL.

There was no overt allusion to Pirates in the main logo. Anything you could call as a set of knuckles could just as easily be a Thief's claw or even cutter. The only thing which would be overt would be the inclusion of a gun, and there is most definitely not one.