Thinking of New Post Names is a Drag

Randgris MVP competition has certainly been picking up since people are slowly catching on to the trapping technique.  We still do pretty good for ourselves, mainly because teamed up with Insur, we have 24 hour coverage of her, and other teams just can't find the times.  Still, we do lose from time to time, but its always a good time.

Competition usually results in bringing out the big guns though, and its always impressive to see how fast she dies.

Since we're on the topic of MVP'ing Valkyrie Randgris, I figured I'd reveal my little project.

Behold, a completed Crusader card set.  The shoes kinda suck, but the card was pretty cheap and I couldn't find any decent boots to put it into.  I would have put it in the greaves, but as you may know I broke all of mine.

Having holy element armor allows you to do exciting things, such as this!  While trapping her is the tactic of today, I expect it will get nerfed, and its always nice to have a backup plan for the future.

On that note, we did some further testing related to Earthquake from MVPs.  Due to some helpful tips from some players, I found that MDEF doesn't appear to affect earthquake at all.  I updated the EQ simulator as well as added a helpful variety of defensive equipment people may want to bring to MVPs.

You know that part where I said the St. Patrick's Day event sucked?  Turns out I was wrong.  After finding a map with high enough spawn of snakes, it turned the event from a dud to an amazing opportunity.  I busted out the heavy guns, and by heavy guns I mean a couple bubble gum (it was a gift!), and went about my merry farming way.

Bubble gum on those coins was crazy.  I don't think I'd pay myself for the increased drop rate, but I think I did better using it here than one shot for some MVP.

My final stash.  I never quite made the 1000 goal I had in mind, but I think I did pretty good.

I bought a new bow for my hunter.  Many people under-estimate the Ballista, but I think thats a mistake.  I found a cheap slotted Ballista selling for only 3m, so I decided to give it a shot.

Damage versus argiope using my double titan arbalest (it was the closest large monster to the AFK spot in alde!).

Damage with the +4 Kingbird (archer skel) Ballista.  Its higher... its not much higher, but you have to keep in mind that the Ballista does the same damage versus all monsters, where as the Arbalest is only good versus large.

Double strafe damage with +7 Quad Hallowed Composite Bow on Frus.  The damage barfly varied so its hardly worth getting multiple pictures for comparison.

Double Strafe damage with the Ballista.  Its down a bit over 100 damage total... but its not bad eh?  Considering the ballista is equally effective versus every monster in the game, its impressive that it can nearly match a quad carded element specific bow.  People under-estimate the importance of weapon attack power in the bow attack formula.  I doubt I'll see another ballista go for so cheap on the market, but its definitely a handy investment.

Likely because I'm a sadist of some kind, I continue to hunt Lady Tanee.  I don't really think I would consider killing her fun.  Its more of a experience in heavy frustration.  Its not even rewarding really, her drops do cover most, but not all of my expenses.  Each Tanee run takes anywhere from 20 minutes (really lucky) to a bit over an hour (really sucky).  A Tanee card would certainly be rewarding, but considering the chances I'm not really holding out for one.  I'm not sure why I subject myself to it. Maybe its the feeling of accomplishment that I can do something in RO very few players can do.  Or something like that.

I certainly have a little bit to show for it though!

One last image, a Alpha guild screen shot after WoE.

As a last little treat, here's some interesting videos I found on nicovideo.  Don't know how to log into nico?  Check my last post.

- An ME High Priest soloing Cursed Monastery 3f.
- A jRO idol of mine, an LK player who spends his time doing stupid, crazy, but exciting things.
- A SinX 'full buff' MVP solo video (full buff means any and all buffs are fair game).

Kickin' MVPs and More

You may have seen the earthquake simulator posted on the main page.  You may think, how does he come up with these things?

Well the truth is that we get earthquaked a lot and compare numbers.  Millions of experience was lost to bring you the simulator!  For those who haven't seen it, you can check it out here.

The formula is really surprisingly simple.  Originally I thought it was different because our Orc Lord tests were way out, until we recently realized that Lord's attack power had been increased by the last patch.  Basically EQ is 3 hits at 1000% attack, magical, bypassing 50% of the players magic defense.  The base attack power is reduced by the number of players on screen.  The rest is left up to basic mechanics, differentiation between short range/long range attacks with monsters, etc.  Some things cropped up late in testing and were a surprise, like the fact that blinding mist could reduce earthquake by 25% if you were far enough from the monster.

Knowing what we're up against gives us a good idea of how to properly plan on dealing with it.  Power Up'd earthquake on the other hand as you can see here, sucks a whole lot.

In the video I posted I survived Orc Lord's earthquake using a ghostring valkyrie armor.  To clarify, that armor wasn't mine.  A member of Alpha, Ichigo who had the ghostring armor is busy with school and letting members of the guild use the armor.

Surviving Earthquake is one way to kill MVPs, but simply not letting them do it is another.  I suppose by now its no secret that you can ankle snare boss monsters by pushing traps under them.  Its already a widely used practice on Loki to defeat Valkyrie Randgris. It can also be used on a lower level to kill other boss monsters such as baphomet.

I initially set out to solo him as a test to see if it was possible, but I was joined by a ghostring hunting wizard who happened to be adventurous enough to help me out.  No drops, but it was an interesting experience.

I do think that ankle snare MVP'ing should be fixed... its without a doubt an exploitation of game mechanics.  The reason it works is simple.  Back in the day when Gravity realized that you could cliff snipe hard monsters and gain experience relatively effortlessly, Gravity fixed the issue by giving monsters the ability to teleport when they were attacked without the ability to retaliate. 

Hunters around this time felt really shafted because monsters would teleport from their ankle snares, making a primary method of hunting useless for them.  This was also abusable though... remember back then boss monsters didn't recall their slaves.  Hunters would solo MVPs by using traps to individually teleport each of the boss monsters minions away so that only the boss was left.  Gravity added a fix that addressed both problems; they made it so monsters were blocked from teleporting from traps.  To prevent abuse, trap duration on boss monsters is reduced to its absolute minimum duration (6 seconds).

This fix is biting them in the back now because now players, running low on mvp abuse options and too cowardly to tank boss monsters are using this to immobilize boss monsters, preventing them from using any skills or attacks.  Ankle Snare affects boss monsters now like magnetic earth once affected boss monsters in the past, it blocks the use of teleport.  I figure its a matter of time before Gravity fixes the bug due to its absolutely rampant abuse on jRO, but you never know.  I would like to see it fixed before we get Beelzebub and Satan Morroc at very least.  Beelzebub is already being trap killed on jRO now...

Anyways, enough rambling.  Here's my hunter decked out in ASPD gears.  184 attack speed on a hunter... down right sexy!

While it takes more people, we do enjoy killing MVPs the old fashion way.  I suppose the old fashioned way would really be in a duo with a wizard or hunter, but I'm sure you get it.

We do a lot of MVPs as a team now, and while we don't get particularly rich off of it, we do have ourselves a good time.

Apparently a flock of likely sadists decided they wanted to hunt Mistress, depriving me of my OCAs and what was once an 'always mine' MVP.  I can't really fight them for it because they're members of my alliance though, so I have to move on to other things. No one will take my Tanee away from me, even if she does drive me crazy.

I seem to have all the luck!  Atleast nothing valuable dropped... not that I would have expected it from Dracula.

Did I ever mention I have this strange habit of getting rare items while fighting bosses? Its annoying!

I even found this while hunting Doppelganger.  What luck.

Speaking of cards though, I ended up opening a good sum of card albums since last I posted.

Looks like I was dealt a pretty poor hand this time around.  I guess there's always next time.

The St Patrick's day event is a short distraction from things.  While the concept is good, the execution of the event is lacking, making it hardly worth doing.  You need to kill snakes for various types of coins.  On average, you need to kill some 10-15 snakes in order to get enough to trade in for one green ale.  Green ale is pretty nice, and it would be worth it if it were easy to hunt like last year.  Unfortunately most maps have maybe 2-4 snakes on it tops, and the distribution is so random that I have no idea what they were thinking when they were picking where to put the snakes at.

Not that I liked last years event, having everyone cram into the airship hunting snakes resulted in a festival of ill-mannered play.  If they were going to make the snakes really rare though, they shouldn't make us have to get 10 bronze coins or 5 silver to get an ale.  Not to mention they don't drop all the time.  There is the gold coin that you can trade 1 coin for 1 ale, but I've only seen one drop in my two hour expedition to look for good snake spawns.

I have been doing some WoE.  To be honest I've skipped out on doing some woes... The WoE point system makes it desirable to hold econ on a fort, but when the alliance wants to abandon that and simply attack other guilds, I don't feel motivated to participate.  Still, I do play sometimes, although I'd prefer to be on defending, as attacking in the existing system isn't really enjoyable.

If any of the jRO players I know from baldur see this picture they'll probably have a heart attack, seeing the Kaminiji emblem in use.  Kaminiji was the guild I was in when I played on jRO Baldur.  The full name was "Kami no Tsukurushi Nijiiro no Uta" (_‚Ì‘n‚邵“øF‚̉Ì), which meant roughly "The Rainbow Song of God's Creation".  Its an honor for me to see Alpha to be using the emblem.

What would a good journal entry be without me breaking lots of items?  Here's some helms I've saved up from many Randgris MVP runs.  Ignore the party hat, its just there for a separator during upgrading.

Starting with 29 helms.

23/29 - 79%.  Not bad.

...7/23 - 30%.  What the heck happened.  I failed over 10 in a row.

2/7 - 30%.  Closer to average for this level, but I don't have to like it!

Atleast I got one +8 helm.  The other one broke. Still only used enriched on the two +7s.

You thought I was done didn't you?  I still have more... items I claimed in my Thanatos MVP runs (does it show I MVP a lot?).

8/10 plates, 4/6 greaves.  Not a bad start.

2/8 plates, 0/4 greaves.  16%... I don't know what it is about going to +6 that sucks so bad.

2/2 to +7.  Somehow a stroke of luck.

I broke one... but I saved the other.  It will be good enough for my purposes.

There's a few spots here that could be tightened up a little here, but overall the gear is starting to shape up to something pretty nice.  Wondering about the Anti-Evil?  I'll let you know some other time. 

Thieving Redux

Sorry for my lack of posts recently.  A combination of work, forum trolling (lol) and working on future additions to my site such as the 11.3 guide have kept me from making posts to the journal.

Episode 11.3 will bring a lot of awesome to RO, some of which comes in the form of new fancy equipment.  I don't plan on being last in line for getting and profiting off of these new items.  No, much to the contrary, I hope to be first.

To meet that goal, I employed my amazing personal skill "RO character A.D.D." and created a character that would be optimal for taking advantage of the new item drops; a Gank Rogue.

Before I get started though, I did some gambling.

!!??

Wooooo!  Undershirt[1] obtained after 83 diamonds.

It really is a sexy piece of gear for an agi type character isn't it?

And now, its an even more amazing piece of gear for an agi character.  Just as planned, I had no mocking garment before now anyways, so this works out good.

Holy flee batman!  96 flee on a level 14 character without any buffs at all... how sexy. 

As much as I enjoyed leveling Akuji Yamamoto on Iris (gasp, the secret is out!), leveling with gears endow and buff slave certainly is much different.  Even at the low level of 30, I decimate siroma's and dodge their attacks.

Siroma's got a bit boring after a while, so I took myself down to Sleepers.  I didn't stay at sleepers too long to be honest, only for a few levels.  Its not that it wasn't fast, but with only 1176 HP, I can't take too many hits, even if they are rare.

What was faster than sleepers though were Anolians.  They've a fair bit of HP, but they give a substantial amount of experience to go along with that, so it averages out in the end.  I spent a good deal of time hunting them.

You know though, I'm not overly fond of the RO grind.  I love the game and the things you do in it but grind leveling has never really been my thing.  I guess thats why I always keep making new low level characters.  While at Anolians I thought about how nice some of the game features in RO2 were.  While not much different than what you see in other MMO's, RO2 had these quest signboards located at several points on each map, where you could pick a quest that you wanted to do for items and experience.  These were basic little tasks really, and they never sent you very far.  Kill some nearby monsters, find a mini boss, collect some items, deliver something to some other location on the map.  When you were done, you came back to the kafra post box to receive your reward.  While it never really changed the fact that you were still grinding on monsters, they never sent you too far and these objectives and small quests really broke up what would be an otherwise very boring experience.

Anyways, I encountered Toad a few times while I was leveling there.  Its funny to say that in the years of playing RO, I've never actually seen Toad in game.  Funny isn't it?  I guess since anolians and roda frog maps are the only place he spawns, I never had any chance to see him.  At least I wasn't missing much.

And finally Job 50!  I have no clue why I really went to job 50.  Its not as though I really need hiding level 8, but it was enjoyable.  178 aspd on thief? Its pretty sexy.

So on to the rogue test.  These little question tests can be surprisingly ruthless, many times I don't complete them first try (the crusader one was especially hard).  This time though, 100%. 

When the quest NPC asked me to go collect skel-bones, I don't think this is what they had in mind.  But hey, it works.

The maze was amusing.  The quest NPC tells you you're supposed to prey on the weak and flee from the strong.  Unfortunately for the monsters in the maze, they're all weak.

I'M INVINCIBLE!!

I told you guys I'd be abusing this quest. 

Ok ok, so I gave up farming abyss knights cause they hurt a lot and I accidentally summoned a dozen of them by stepping onto the cell multiple times.  Whoops!

But yay for Rogue.

This is my current stats on the rogue.  Looking pretty sexy!  Gotta love that 179 aspd, can't wait to get even more.  I still need another 8 levels though before I can get myself into nameless island, but from the looks of things I still have a few weeks to go.

Thats it for now, Doddler out.