Doddler's RO Journal
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A Little Less Complaining, A Little More Action
By Doddler on February 13, 2008 in category 'General'
Its the season for events I suppose, so I figured I'd get on the bandwagon and enjoy them myself.
The coolest thing about this years Valentine's Day event quest is that it has re-occuring characters from last years quest. It wasn't quite as involved this year, the basic quest, but it was interesting to see all the old faces. Its interesting to run into characters from an event I did a year ago still recognize me.
So bonus props to Gravity for an interesting quest. Of course, the main attraction for me, again like last year, is the sale of chocolate.
キタ━━━━━(゜∀゜)━━━━━ !!!!!
White chocolate again, 4k zeny. For those who arn't familiar with white chocolate, white chocolate costs 4k zeny, its identical to a blue potion, but weighs less. Whats not to enjoy?
Oh yeah, buying them one... at... a... time... is... so... time... consuming. But atleast I can contribute to massive market deflation and drop a dozen million on so a good stockpile of SP recovery. Might take a few hours though.
Last weeks event was pretty good too. I wish it was longer; I ended up spending about 15m zeny on pouches getting the items I was really looking for because I couldn't dedicate myself to hunting tarous the whole time. Overall though, I think it was a pretty solid event. There was some low drop rate items while I was down there though. I got a good deal of rares from the Tarous and Martins, if you can really refer to them as such.
That one should be slotted goggles. I got 3 of them while down there, and one Safety Helm. Let me tell you, safety helm goes good with Hahoe! Its a shame I don't have a screenshot of that yet. 
Last minute turning in of items seems to have been popular. Durring the event there was always a crowd, but not like there was at the very end. This is where I got a good deal of my pouches for cheap, ranging from 8k-14k per pouch. Not cheap, but not bad either.
My stash after the event. I wish I could have stocked up more... most of these items we'll never see again on iRO so I wanted to get a lot. But I think I have a decent amount to last a while, as long as I use them pretty sparringly.
Aside from pushing quests, we've been leveling our monk in the hopes to get him into labs in the near future. Abyss Lake is pretty good, with a mental sensing party and manual we pull some 14-16m/hr (durring 1.5x exp), asuraing well, as you can see just about everything. We can probably even do Detar now, now that we found the secret about getting past shield reflect. 
Hint: You can dispel it.
We've also been doing a fair bit of thors leveling on monk. Its a bit more dangerous, and requires a higher level of control than we usually have in Abyss Lake. Learning to control the guardians and properly pulling the monsters is a good stepping point for getting us moving towards Bio3 leveling, which we intend to do in a fairly similar fashion.
At this time, the monk, who was named by some twisted mind "Softcore Monkey", is now level 89. Getting there!
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Breaking Things, the Bad Way
By Doddler on February 8, 2008 in category 'General'
So I finally got the courage to attempt to make the +9. It was a tough decision really, but I decided in the end that the +8 valk shoes won't help me much beyond my existing shoes... its +9 or bust. I've already thrown everything away for them anyways, so I figure, I may as well take the dive.
One step...
...and a deep breath...
What!?
Close up please!
And thats the end of the story.
Expenses
| 42x | Enriched Elunium | $42 |
| 15 | Valkyrian Shoes | 300,000,000z aprox. |
Rewards
...nothing!
And you know, I would be upset, but I'm not. Or maybe I tell myself I'm not upset. I can live with busting 300m on a gamble, but my main beef is with the enriched elunium. For the hefty price tag, it doesn't show a strong enough benefit. I feel that I can understand why kRO charges $0.15 for enriched elu; because its not worth more. I would hope iRO would reconsider their pricing rather than gouging users on items that shows no obvious benefit. 
Edit: I made a signature for use on the iRO forums!
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Catching Up
By Doddler on February 7, 2008 in category 'General'
Its been a while since I've made a real post on my site, and I suppose thats because I've been pretty busy lately.
But what have I been doing in RO? Well lately we've decided we need to make a monk. See, we have a pretty small team that we use for various MVPs and things such as bio parties and such, but we lack several competent players in specific roles. We eventually just gave up on finding a monk/champion for our parties, and simply decided to make one.
Poorly disguised in here is a recruitment message for Alpha. We need more people!
So in order to make a monk, I made a character to leech it on my LK account. With several people helping, it would be job 50 in no time.
All characters have to start somewhere, and killing wolves is a must for all low level characters.
After doing some time in wolves, we moved on to hill winds. We stayed here for a few hours until the monk became job 50.
I ended up turning my archer into a dancer, simply so I could have more SP for leeching purposes. Later, we decided it would make a good Mental Sensing slave.
Binoculars: The least sexy headgear ever.
Once the monk got asura, we switched gears and began using asura to level. In our particular party setup, with 1.5x experience event, mental sensing, and the odd experience tap, these gold acidus were putting out 100k-180k experience each. The monk himself was making aproximately 16m exp an hour. Not bad!
At this time the monk is level 81, three days after we started him.
It would be bad of me to skip out on the current event, considering how nice it is. I only subjected myself to hunting tarous for a few hours, the remainder of my food item collection would come from other players. I did get a new year doll egg though!
My army is growing!
The name of my newyears doll. A nod to touhou players and my Lif, named Shikieiki Yamaxanadu. Props to anyone who gets it.
So something I've been working on for a long time, gathering valkyrian shoes. My ultimate goal was to make superior valkyrian shoes. I realized it was a foolish plan from the beginning, but I did want to make them.
In order to realize my dream, I had decided I would use enriched elunium. It would be pricy, but at aproximately 20 million zeny per broken valk shoes, I could justify the cost, as long as I got my goal. Or so I told myself.
2 down going to +5. 86% rate, thats acceptable.
5 down going to +6. 61% rate... pretty bad I think. Especially considering it cost me $13 to do...
3 casualties going to +7. Still on track. 62% success. I've seen worse.
....................
20% success. $41 dollars in real money, 280,000,000z in items down, and all that is left is a +8... I'm speachless. Just what are they marketing this enriched elu for? Its just not worth it, not for this level of failure... On kRO where enriched is affordable maybe I could live with it, but a dollar a pop is just stupid.
The worst thing is that I can't bring myself to break the +8 valk shoes (well, attempt to +9 the remaining one), and throw everything that I've put into it away.
At least woe wasn't as stressful as my upgrading failures. I missed our defending, but attacking was pretty fun.
We took out some of the stress by polying mushrooms at our guild spot. By continually polying monsters that have Eske on it, you can stack the Eske effect to give the new monsters considerably more attack power. This abyss knight is the strongest thing we got. What you can't tell here is that it is quadruple esked, giving it a monstrous 1600% attack power! Watching the 50000's fly off the people was sweet. 
We did get two threats from users that wanted us banned. How fun.
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Double Exp Downtime
By Doddler on January 30, 2008 in category 'General'
Sorry guys for not making any posts in the last week. How can I be posting durring a double experience event?
This last week had a lot of time in Thors. In particular, I did a lot of leveling on my crusader in 3f parties, leveling on my LK on 1f, and a bit of a mix as I used my LK to leech my crusader.
We organized a sizable floor 3 hunting party several times during the week. I can't say it was really efficient; with 10 people each person pulled about 5m exp/hr. If it wern't double experience, it probably wouldn't be worthwhile. I've got a bit to say about party share exp for large parties but I'll save it for a rant sometime.
We attempted to bring down a Mental Sensing party to increase our experience rate. We unfortunately we did not actually know that the skill doesn't work on boss type monsters; there are actually no normal monsters on floor 3 of the volcano. That made our efforts pretty worthless. Amusingly enough even the GM team showed ignorance on this issue... a party member submitted an inquiry and they said that they would test to see why we weren't getting bonus exp. We now know that it doesn't work on boss monsters though.
The general form of the party is that the main party would remain mostly stationary, and I would pull monsters back for them to kill. This particular time I pulled back a particularly impressive mob, Ifrit!
... So we killed it.
Leveling lord knight at kasas is fun, particularly because mobs like this can be killed. It takes a crapload of pots, but its quite rewarding to be able to off a group like that. Of course I lose exp doing this, but can you say no to good fun?
I do enjoy killing mobs of kasas, but mobs of sword guardians are still slightly out of my league. At least I can take the barrage of spear boomerangs from them to get at the kasas I want to kill.
So my LK finally leveled up!
Behold, the coveted secret lord knight build! Its not really anything special. Now 96/64.
MVP'ing was still part of our repitoir this week, mainly because mvps are worth an obscene amount of exp, and I'm always a fan of getting a few mil exp plus valuable drops.
Taking Thanatos head on isn't actually all that challenging. Once his mob is mostly dealt with, he's really kind of weak.
Of course, killing him with a party is surely much faster.
Of course, killing MVPs isn't the only thing I did in my spare time. I hunted ghostring for a little bit, determined to get my hands on one of those cards. No luck I guess. My LK isn't particularly well suited for the job.
My hunter on the other hand is. Damn I love sandman traps. 
Also in the lineup during the week was testing. You might not be able to see him, but there's definately a dracula hidden there.
A little known fact is that armor defense is reduced when you tank multiple monsters. Killing dracula is dangerous not because his familiars hurt, but because those familiars cause a punishing penalty to your defense rate. When I kill him on my biochemist, I take twice as much damage from his hell's judgment, instantly killing me if I'm personally tanking his familiars when it happens.
But no sites seem to have info on this reduction. Most players argued with me that only vit defense was reduced. I recall seeing some numbers when this feature was first introduced back when comodo patch was added to the game. The comodo patch if I recall correctly stated flee would be dropped when you have more than 2 monsters on you, and also that defense would drop in much the same fashion. So I went to Dracula, a convenient source of a huge mob, and tested.
The results were actually about what I expected. You can see the numbers as follows:
17 Monsters: 509-873
14 Monsters: 458-707
11 Monsters: 420-627
9 Monsters: 370-528
1 Monster: 227-328
The numbers listed are damage I received from Dracula. Quite clearly there's a linear reduction. Based on the numbers I remember seeing from back at the old comodo patch, my final conclusion is that both armor and vitality based defense is reduced by 5% for every monster on you above 2 (in the same way that flee gets reduced by 10%).
No OCA's today, sorry!
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