I want to stress that I still like Ragnarok, I’ve put an absurd amount of hours into playing, researching, writing about the game. When I first took a break from RO I played Rift for a couple months, which while enjoyable (it was an impressive game to say the least), I came to eventually understand why old school MMO’s like RO remain appealing against the big name online games these days. RO has always been a sort of harsh game for players to pick up and play, but it’s a freedom that you don’t see much these days. The modern MMO is a treadmill of goto’s and do-this’, and for it’s grinding leveling gameplay, my experience with Ragnarok and how I play it, even how I build my character is always different from the next guy, which is something the modern MMO doesn’t give you.

I don’t necessarily dislike where RO is going right now. I don’t even dislike what they’re doing with the cash shop, it’s just how online games these days work. It’s just that spending a good part of the last decade playing the game, the game continued to take up time that I wanted to spend doing other things.

I look at RO right now and I can definitely see it being around for a good while. I’ve got to give my shoutout to Heimdallr and the GM team, they do a job that would drive a regular man insane. I don’t think I could have done it in their position. They are finally getting the freedom to tweak and change things with the game, and now it seems on a weekly basis they’re coming out with something nice for players to do, so I’m sure iRO will be well served.

So I hopefully will continue to make use of my new-found free time practicing my programming and making small games. *Shameless Plug* You can even see some of what I have online at the moment. (Game1 Game2 Video1 Video2 Timelapse1)

Anyways thanks to everyone who played with/against me on iRO, it’s been a fun time!

Edit: Of course, the resources available on this site will remain accessible for as long as I can maintain them.

No big post really.  I finally hit bishop, which means I can smack stuff, faster.  I saved up all my stat points from 90-99 so I could dump them into agi once I changed.  192 aspd on bishop?  Hell yeah.

I didn’t want to continue doing things as I was  before, so I quickly whipped up a novelty character to mess around with.

Behold, the battle priest.  It’s not a very useful character, but it is definitely fun to play.  People might not know, but battle priest was the first class I played when I started playing Ragnarok.  Renewal allows me to do kind of crazy things to the stats, like get away with 99 crit and 190 aspd on a battle priest.  Reliance on adrenaline rush scrolls is a bit of a downer, but it’s no worse than keeping up bless/agi as RK.  I didn’t post about getting the veteran hammer before, but it’s a sweet ass weapon for battle priest, with 160 attack power, increasing heal and giving me 20 crit for having max mace mastery.  Also very rare, I’m lucky to have one.  Rare hunting pays off!

I made two quick videos of it in action, one at level 83 and one at 94. Check it out.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDtZp8aRkQQ

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkYn1CMemyA

http://rojournal.doddlercon.com/old/