Doddler's RO Journal
Randgris MVP Round 2
By Doddler on August 10, 2008 in category 'MVP'
This is our second attempt at a guild 'No-Trap' Valkyrie Randgris event. While our best run yet, it was not without mistakes. I've been told the video here paints a pretty picture of what happened, so for those who want to see the full story, I created an uncut/unedited version using all of my recorded footage. Dubbed the 'ichigo' version, after his monstrously under-edited 25 minute woe videos, this might be as uninteresting as it is long, but some might enjoy it.
Anyways the run was alright. Some very basic mistakes probably kept it from being a solid run. Two of our three high priests realized after they were wearing the wrong shield, we ran out of bombs halfway through causing us to disband temporarily, and our champion (a low str woe build no less) had this deep down obsession with killing one of her minions (a good idea), and obsession that apparently never ended even after we did kill one of them (a very bad idea). Probably my mistake, but my armor chemical protection ended leaving me with a broken holy odin blessing... again resulting in another trip to town. Still, it was faster than our last run and resulted in fewer wipes.
To address what occurs in the video specifically, tanking it with the LK was the way to go. The guild has acquired an angeling odin blessing, which means LK tank is fully possible now. I had overlooked the fact that sacrifice would break at each of her dispels, but combined with strings our paladin had no trouble recasting (when he remembered).
I'm not entirely sure why we died to the first earthquake. The fact that some party members were not equipped with the correct reduction gear was probably not helping, but in the end we simply went with the assumption that the lack of assumptio on some members caused the wipe. After we stressed re-assumptio'ing players things went a bit smoother for future earthquakes. The reason why I attempted to flee was that as the clock quickly approached the 25 second mark since her last earthquake, with everyone still dead I felt we couldn't take another earthquake and wanted to get Randgris away from the party. After all at that point my odin blessing had just broken (it just broke after the EQ that killed everyone), and I doubt I could tank her power upped attacks without it. I was partially right, because her holy cross murdered me, but unfortunately I didn't get it far enough away.
So there it is. I'm contemplating organizing our Beelzebub second attempt sometime in the near future. I've heard rumors that the Exile skill is a forced-ranged attack and potentially block-able by pneuma at any range like clashing spiral is now. Unfortunately to date I've been unable to test it. If its true it could make Beelzebub quite a bit easier... its been something I wanted to know before attempting him.
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A real post!?
By Doddler on August 6, 2008 in category 'General'
A real post? Who would have thought!
So I decided I would 99 my Knight and trans him. The reasoning behind it is fairly simple, and that's that my existing Lord Knight is hefty on the attack power, but a teensy bit lacking on the HP/Vit side. To be fair he has 17500hp and 65 vit but to use an LK as a real tank you have to do better than that!
I actually started this Knight, Sir. Aegis a long time ago. Sir Aegis is a name of probably one of my most respected players from jRO Baldur, who played a LK and Sniper (the sniper's name was narukagami.rebirth). I decided I'd take the opportunity to get him to 99 during the last exp event (these screenshots are pretty old eh?).
Nearing the end the last 30% was made just a slight touch easier. 
It wasn't cheap, thor leveling solo is never cheap, but I did it.
And you thought you could get through an entire post without a video, didn't you!? Too bad! The whole transing with a mercenary works really well if you prepare properly before hand. While it was technically 2x exp, I got to level 50 before the mercenary expired. Sexy times.
Epic props to anyone who can identify the song this time. Its from one of my favorite console games from a good number of years back.
Yay.
So the plan was to make a 'tank' LK. Naturally though having an LK that can tank but not kill makes leveling suck pretty harshly, so I decided I would comprimise and go with a pure CS build.
Getting to job 50 by bashing hill winds with 1 str wasn't the easiest thing in the world, but ut was acceptable.
Yeah, it was something like that. Just lots, and lots of that.
Clashing Spiral level 1 is fast casting, low SP cost, almost no delay, and 1 shots hill winds. It was a pretty fast way to level.
It probably wouldn't be possible if I didn't prepare before hand, but I took the time to craft myself a +4 Kingbird Hunting Spear before this whole ordeal. Its a pretty amazing piece of weapon.
One shotting monsters across the board is what CS is good at, so it makes leveling fairly quick. The biggest drawback of Clashing Spiral, of all things is the very rough modifier based on size. Since CS is based pretty much only on weapon weight and your % modifiers, you really notice the size mod. The skill basically does 1750% on small monsters, 1400% on medium monsters, and only 1050% on large. There's not much you can do to compensate for that difference either.
For the record, I maxed VIT first. 
People generally presume CS has poor damage output but it can be fairly strong if you have magic strings. You probably won't kill anything PVP or boss wise without a bard, but it can still be a useful skill.
An Odin Blessing hunting party. The size mod helps damage on skeggiolds, since they're small. There's probably better killers but the exp/hr is pretty amazing. Well, base exp anyways.
This is a bit random, testing an odd bug where monster's won't teleport. Apparantly its used on kRO when they weren't aware of the trapping exploit. Durring testing we got it to work a few times but it was too unreliable and reliant on surroundings to be really useful.
Somehow, for some reason, I still hunt Lady Tanee. The value of killing it isn't getting better, and the expenses (bombs) just keep getting worse. Still, its something to do thats challenging that I can do solo.
It is nice to finally take her down though.
I had organized another no-trap Valkyrie Randgris run. We had fully assembled and moved to Odin for the Valkyrie spawn. Unfortunately we encountered an Wasa MVP party coming to compete, so players in the party decided to drop the event. I'm pretty disapointed we didn't just go ahead with it, as it seems pretty stupid that we abandoned doing the MVP, but I guess thats life.
The gears used to tank Randgris. Its not my Paladin though! The armor is +7 Legion Plate Armor of Paladin, which grants holy property armor when used with the crusader armor set, which is fully present. The shoes are pretty bad though!
And a bonus screenshot. This is what wasn't recorded on camera at our no-trap ifrit run. Wipe to guardians on 3f entrance. 
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Rant on RO Mechanics
By Doddler on July 29, 2008 in category 'Ranting'
I'm going to warn you here that the following Rant is very long. Very very long. I'm not sure if there's much point to it either. You have been warned.
RO is the kind of game that you have to come up with your own goals. Games like WoW have a sort of treadmill experience; the whole thing is carefully and meticulously planned from start to finish (or lack of finish). RO is different though, and maybe it’s just its age showing, but the experience is far less clear cut. How you play RO is really up to you, and there’s a good deal of end game content to choose from, and always more coming. I, as you probably know focus on the MVP aspect.
RO’s stance at game mechanics is probably one of the most extreme in an MMO. There’s little in the way of moderation, and other mainstream titles would cry at some of the things that are done. Items just don’t give you some status effect resistances, they give you immunity. Elemental resistance armor doesn’t just reduce damage by a little bit; it cuts incoming damage by 75%. Shield cards don’t just offer a little resistance; they cut damage by a whopping 30%-40%. Skill attacks don’t simply deal extra damage; they deal several times your normal attack power. You don’t simply increase your attack speed by a couple percent, the rate you attack increases exponentially.
The list could probably go on and on, and there are lots of things I could list, from specific skills, classes, and abilities. The point is though, is that RO’s take on game balance is quite different from other games. Some people say there is no game balance, but behind the seemingly random cloak of high numbers and %’s, there is some method to the madness. RO seemingly pulls off balance by making things not equal to each other, and everything classes throw out is seemingly overpowered in their own way, they’re all unique and excel at something. You have to generally concede that in Ragnarok, some character classes simply are going to suck at certain things. Each character class, of the some 39 jobs if you count transcendent characters separately, strikes some kind of balance between things they do really well and things they don’t.
For this reason I usually simply laugh to myself when I read of complaints about character balance. Gravity’s answer to a class or skill being unbalanced never usually results in that class or skill being modified. No, the answer is to create more extremes for other classes and other skills. Skill A is overpowered? Well ok then, now Skill B is twice as strong. It’s a strange way to handle it, but by the time you hit the end game each class’s role, how they perform and what they can and can’t do is so unique that I can’t help but think they’ve succeeded.
It’s no surprise then that the same philosophy to balance also ends up extending to monsters. While there are some basics in place to keep leveling and character building balanced, the game rewards those who can do crazy things. Only in RO can you have your new archer leveling in Thor Volcano with some friends, build a 99 character literally over night, and pull off some insane leveling blitzes by using various combinations in Biolabs.
Again it comes as no real surprise then that when Gravity finally decided that they wanted to stop dallying with stupid things like the World Project and crappy little towns and focus on making challenging content for high end players, the method that they chose to do it was to make monsters impossibly strong. It wasn’t enough that a monster could hit you for 1000 damage a hit. No, they would make a skill that causes monsters to triple in damage. They couldn’t just make a skill that makes a monster evade some of your attacks, they had to make a skill that made monsters impossible to hit. While they make impossibly hard monsters, they expect players to utilize their extreme equipment and abilities given to them. I think though that in their desire to make things challenging, I can’t help but feel that they’ve overlooked some important aspects, such as reward for being challenged.
Take Orc Lord for example, as an example of the balance they’re striking here. He’s a boss monster that with relatively decent end game equipment, you can probably expect to take 500-600 damage per hit from his attacks. He does a powerful earth element attack, which hits for 5 times his attack, so you’re looking at 2500-3000 damage. Once weakened, he’ll use Earthquake, an attack that hits for, with say 2 people on screen (there’s little value in having more players for a low reward MVP such as Orc Lord), for 3000-4000/hit, for about 9000-12000 damage depending on your resistances. Again, a properly equipped duo could survive this. At 30% HP, he uses Power Up, a skill that increases his attack power by 3 times and makes his attacks un-dodge able. Now he’ll use his earth element attack, striking you for 7500-9000 damage. If he uses his Earthquake, you will be taking 9000-12000 damage a hit, an attack that is literally impossible to survive.
In traditional RO style, there’s dozens of ways you can deal with this. Earthquake is split across the number of people on screen. You could, if you wanted to bring 6-8 players to Orc Lord to make this Earthquake survivable. If you have very rare gears such as Ghostring or Golden Thiefbug cards, then you can survive those attacks. You can engage in hit and run maneuvers, simply die and plan to get up quickly with the help of another player (or Kafra Shop). Again I could probably keep listing things.
But for what? What is the point of killing a monster so strong? If you were rewarded for your efforts reasonably then people I’m sure would take the time to do so. But you’d have to engage and kill him probably 15-20 times in order to receive a valuable item, and if such an item does drop, his rare items are worth only a fraction of what you can get from other, far easier targets.
Part of it comes down to how the MVP game is played. Boss monsters have a set spawn on their own map, and there’s dozens of them in the game. The drop rates on rare items from boss monsters are generally very low. That is, they’re considerably higher than say, regular monsters, but having to kill a boss monster 120 times in order to get his rare item can be a real drag. As such, the way the MVP game is played is that players generally take on the task of killing many bosses across the game world, keeping track of when they spawn and taking them down. While individual rates from bosses are low, players can actually increase their odds by basically being in a constant state of killing bosses. These players generally clash with other players hunting bosses and compete for their rewards. The end result is a sum of all these parts, players can stay in constant action by engaging in difficult content that sometimes results in player versus player battles, and can be quite exciting.
However, the lack of ‘Real’ bosses didn’t help RO much, so Gravity ended up creating a new tier of boss, one that requires many players to kill but yield much higher rate of reward. Of course, it goes without saying that they cranked up the impossibility meter up a few notches, to make sure that it wasn’t too easy.
I can’t entirely say for sure why gravity decided to ‘promote’ some of their older bosses that used to be part of the MVP game to the tier of endgame boss. It would be understandable if these monsters had their rewards improved to match their difficulty, but generally they didn’t. Well they did, but not really enough. Sure, you can get a slotted majestic goat if you kill Baphomet some 200 times, but most people won’t see the point of doing so. RSX-0806 is a boss that I think they completely missed the point on; after being raised to the status of ‘really frigging hard’, they gave him an incredible rare item, the slotted ice pick. It’s unfortunate then that you’d actually have to kill him roughly 5000 times in order to get the item. The amount of times this boss has died on iRO in the last half a year probably ranks in the double digits because of this.
Some of these Endgame Bosses seem impossibly hard due to some skills such as Earthquake. It wouldn’t surprise me though if the development team expects players to have ghost armor in order to tackle these monsters. After all, they expect you to have fire armor to level in Volcano Thor, or water armor to battle Ktullanux. Maybe they simply underestimate how few of these there are in the game, and how their distribution is so top heavy among the top 0.1% or so of players that most players cannot hope of achieving one. Either way, most players wouldn’t hope of defeating Endgame Bosses such as Randgris and Ifrit without a well organized, well equipped party of at least 12 people. So again it’s a shame that killing these monsters is hardly worth having 12 people along to do the job. It’s for this reason that endgame content isn’t about player skill and coordination as it is about finding exploits to do things with as little work as possible.
Because of the harsh balance of endgame bosses, It not only encourages players to find and abuse in game mechanics to kill the bosses, for many people, it’s a requirement. Many people simply can’t rise to the level required to fight these monsters properly. So instead people find ways to kill them by exploiting various tricks or bugs in the game. At first it was magnetic earth, to prevent boss monsters from teleporting. Right now its Ankle Snare abuse to keep a monster from reacting. If they eventually fix Ankle Snare, I’m sure they’ll move onto ice wall + Guillotine Fist. If that fails, I’m certain they’ll move on to killing bosses with reflect damage. I’m sure there are other things that players can abuse as well to fight boss monsters without ever having to actually fight them.
Another thing that tends to happen on many RO servers (some more than others) is that the first team that can kill an endgame boss gains a monopoly on killing it. They keep the time for themselves, and any players that do show up to attempt to kill it will face stiff competition. Usually, the monopoly team wins because the challengers have no previous experience in fighting the boss. So the monopoly team continues to control the boss, and other players are unable to experience the end game content due to the competition and learning curve.
I’ve been asked before, why do I care about abuse of bugs at boss monsters. He told he that MVP’ing basically comes down to killing bosses in as few people as possible and getting valuable rewards for doing so. The answer I told them was that if every boss monster comes down to abusing a bug, usually the same bug, what is there left to do in this game? On one hand you can easily achieve end game items and rewards, but on the other hand you’re losing the actual fun part of getting those. Sure you can get fancy new gears, but for a person who plays this game TO fight bosses, if all future content comes down to the same abuse, then I have unfortunately seen everything this game will have to offer.
So that’s it. I figured I wanted to write something on the issue, and while it turned out to be stupidly long (4 pages in word), I hope there’s some interesting information for players. I commend anyone who read the whole thing! I do indeed wish to see boss bugs fixed, but at the same time if they are going to make us have to take these things on head on, then they likely should look at the balance.
To conclude, I’ll leave a quote from a Q&A session with the jRO GMs at the 2008 User Symposium.
Q. What do you intend on doing about Ankle Snare abuse at boss monsters.
A. The current trend of the game appears to be to create harder and harder monsters that are impossible for most of our users. Some resourceful players are using skills such as Ice Wall and Ankle Snare, and while I think that this is a bug, I think that if we are to fix it we also need to review the difficulty of these Bosses.
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A couple random RO videos
By Doddler on July 25, 2008 in category 'General'
How do people like the video's I've been posting here? They're time consuming to make but in retrospect they tend to speak for themselves, and writing a umpteen page writeup is fun, sometimes video's give you more of an idea of what things really are like.
Anyways I made a few things the last week or so and they don't really fit into their own post, so I decided I'd group them together.
First up is the Endless Tower. My thief is poorly geared, level 52, and definitely not cut out for it, but I found out recently the level limit was only 50, so I decided to give it a go. This video may win an award for the most boring RO video of all time. Still, it gives you an idea of the process to get to the Misty Island where the tower resides, and shows how sign up is for the Memorial Dungeon system.
RO is an old game, so its no real surprise that a feature like Instanced Dungeons are a little clunky. Creation of instances aren't well, instant. Generally players are put in a queue and the server given a moment will create the maps for your instance on a random zone server. This process takes about a minute roughly, though if there are multiple people waiting for instances to be created, you may find yourself waiting several minutes or longer. Given RO's current population and the current instances available I doubt you'll ever run into much waiting other than on maybe opening week of the system.
About the dungeon itself, obviously my thief fails pretty hard, and the latency between Canada and Korea (through a proxy no less) generally meant I couldn't pot fast enough to clear room 2. Still, the video gives you an idea of what you're looking at. It shows you neat things like how the monsters won't spawn near the entrance portal (they seem to spawn only on the left side of the room), and it gives you a good idea how big the rooms really are. If nothing else, the video may just give you a better idea of what to expect.
Here's a rather distasteful playthrough with the new battleground "Krieger Von Midgard". KVM as they call it for short, is a 5 on 5 PVP match, designed for a quick head on head team battle. I of course participated in the under 60 level bracket. As with the other battlegrounds, you chose which side you wish to participate in. These guys weren't very happy with me because they can't really stop me from joining their team (Its the good old 'wait in an NPC chatroom until ready' system), which kept one of their other members from participating.
As you can see here what ended up happening wasn't a real PVP match at all though. What happened is that since not many people participate in the under 60 bracket, the one team simply threw 5 vend merchant characters into the opposing team, guarenteeing an easy victory and free KVM points to exchange for various rewards. I wonder if the GMs will have to police this for us when we get it on iRO... This isn't likely to be as big of an issue with the 20v20 matches with the other two battlegrounds, but then you get the very different issue of people AFK'ing.
Beyond that problem though the battleground system seems to work ok. Players are automatically assigned to teams, and players within the same team are basically considered partied (they aren't really but they can see others HP and cast party skills on them). Players on the same team show up on the minimap as a grey square, and enemy players always have a crossed swords emblem dislayed above their head in the same way emblems display in woe. For KVM, a score indicator in the top right shows how many players on either team are left alive. The indicator isn't used for Tierra Canyon, and in Flavius it's used to display the current score (best of 3). Overall its pretty good, though some issues such as AFK'ing the battlegrounds and padding the opposing team with useless characters are a problem that I haven't seen solved yet.
After our relatively rough Ifrit run last week, I wanted to get a better idea of why Earthquake was flooring us there but not with Randgris. In this short test I managed to reproduce the problem we faced: players dying caused earthquake damage to increase on the final hit.
So I investigated a little more into the issue. This little video might give you a better idea of what happens. If nothing else it has one of my favorite piano tunes, the Maple Leaf Rag. 
Anyways in this video, the High Priest here has 7777 HP. What you'll see is that there's a delay, of about half a second from when you take damage from Earthquake to when it actually applies to your character. Earthquake itself seems to hit every 1/3 of a second. You'll see that while the first hit of EQ is higher than the priests max HP, the delay before the damage applies to the character means he's still alive for the second hit. When he does finally die, the third hit is applied to the living character with twice the damage. If the person survives just the first hit, he'll be alive to reduce the 3rd hit of EQ.
So my brief assessment of what happened at Ifrit was a bit incorrect. For the tank to survive, we just need to make sure players are surviving hit #1. This wasn't an issue with Randgris since most players were being hit for about 4k/hit, so no one died on hit 1. Ifrit's EQ was doing 7k-8k though, and with the low HP characters dead, the final hit became unbearably strong. I had hoped Kaupe would fix this, and indeed the one time we survived EQ (when the tank didn't use the ghostring), was when Kaupe blocked the first hit for the full party. Unfortunately an underplayed linker combined with the issue with meteors breaking kaupe effect meant that it didn't really go according to plan. But now we know we don't have to survive EQ to not wipe... we just need to survive the first hit.
One thing I do want to test is if the Sac sader lives the first hit, if sacrifice will absorb the second and third hits entirely. Would be worth testing I think!
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