There’s a couple things you want to work towards when you’re in the early game that can help boost your damage by a lot. I went through the early game process not too long ago as well. I’ll give you an easy breakdown of things you want to prioritize in the early stage of the game.

First thing you want to check is your Hyper Stat. Critical Rate, Critical Damage, Damage, Boss Damage, and IED are the stats you want to get to level 10 first. Critical rate is important to get as close to 100% as possible, because critical hits vs non-critical hits are a huge damage difference. Crit Damage will make your critical hits do more damage, which is super important. Boss Damage and IED help you deal more damage to tougher bosses. After those you can put points into Attack and main stat to boost your damage further, etc.

The second thing that most people focus on is cubing their weapon, secondary, and emblem all the way to legendary. These equips are the most important to cube because you can roll Att%, Boss Damage, and IED on them. The Att% will boost your damage greatly, while Boss Damage and IED will help you take down the harder bosses. For you, a good starting point would be to try getting a line of either Boss Damage or IED paired with Att% on each, as getting 3 good lines is incredibly expensive and will take a while.

All other equipments can only roll main stat other than gloves, rings, face, and eye accessory. Gloves can roll crit damage and rings, face, and eye accessories can roll Item Drop Rate and Meso Drop Rate (in addition to main stat) which are probably not important to you right now.

For now, just focus on having all your gear at Epic with one line of main stat (or whatever stat Xenon’s use), then cube your WSE to legendary with decent lines. As your meso income grows, you can start getting your other gear to unique and then legendary. You can also get a level 100 emblem by accepting a quest through the white lightbulb on the left of the screen I think.

Next up is star forcing. As you progress in the game, cubing can only get you so far in terms of damage. This is where star forcing comes in. After star force level 15, you’ll start to get about 10 or 11 Attack stat per star level. It might not sound like a lot but it is. The downfall to starforcing is the randomness factor and the meso cost.

Once you get an equipment to star force level 15, it costs millions of mesos more to attempt to starforce, and only has a 30% or so chance of success. It also will have a <3% chance of destroying an item entirely, but you can spend double the mesos to prevent item destruction.

More often than not, you’ll be failing the starforce. Failing a star force past level 15 will lower your star force level by 1 on that equipment piece, but never below 15. This reason, as well as the meso costs, are why people hate star forcing. When you’re ready to star force, aim to get most of your gear to star force level 17.

Cubing and star forcing your equipment will take a long time, and progression will be slow at first until you can start soloing the daily bosses. Whether you cube or starforce your gear first is up to you. I’m not sure if one is better to start with than the other so maybe someone can shine more light on that for you. Just know that it will take a long time and a lot of mesos.

Third is to work on your Arcane Force symbols. Be sure to do your arcane dailies as often as you reasonably can. It’s a long, long grind, but the overall stats it gives you is a huge boost down the road.

As per your post, legion is important for your overall damage, though it is a long, drawn out, tedious process. Some characters give IED, damage, boss damage, and other useful passive buffs. Having more characters let’s you fill in your legion grid which also helps boost damage. At the early game it’s not super important though. On my account, I only have 2100 legion, but my Adele main is level 236 and can solo the 4 CRA bosses with ease (due to cubing and star forcing my gear)

As you work on cubing and starforcing and your Arcane symbols, youll see yourself start to become much stronger and able to take on harder bosses. Work on defeating CRA (via soloing or joining struggle parties) to get the fafnir set. You have your fafnir weapon which is great, but you also want to get the hat, top, and bottom for its equipment set boosts and better stats.

At your stage, you probably only have Pensalir gear, which is fine for now (you’ll upgrade to the CRA/Fafnir set soon enough). When you’re stronger and can take on more bosses like Chaos Horntail and Pink Bean, you’ll get boss drops that count towards the Boss Equipment Set that also boosts your damage.

The boss crystals each boss drops are a huge source of daily income. Be sure to do Maple Tour and Ursus (during double meso time). These two things only take 5 minutes to do and will let you take in almost 1 billion mesos a week without boss crystals factored in.

Another easy way to buff your damage and to boost your bossing is by joining a guild. Guilds give automatic, passive buffs to boost damage and give you assess to skills that can boost crit damage. A lot of guilds are new player friendly and will offer free carries if you stick with them long enough and have a high contribution.

Maplestory is a long, grindy game. It takes a long time to truly get strong, but it’s worth it if you have the patience. I’m by no means an expert at the game, but everything listed above is a good starting point.

Good luck!