Something I've wanted to do for a while, was put togeather a compelation of some of my MVP efforts. The first such compelation is complete, and you can see the video hosted on youtube.
In the video I do teleport, but only to escape from earthquake. If I had ghostring armor I could survive the attack, but as it stands I have no choice to run. The bosses do heal if you warp away, usually at the rate of 10000 every 5-10 seconds, so I have to be diligent in returning to fight the boss or it will have recovered all the damage I dealt.
Anyways, enjoy.
So over the last few days, I've been doing a lot of the harder MVPs with Alpha. Its a good fun time, I must admit. While we've mostly been doing Valk and Ifrit, it is also fun to hit some of the other challenging MVPs face to face.
This here isn't really an MVP shot, but it is on our way down to Ifrit. With all the TKM's down there, you'd think someone would clear that bottom right portal!
First up: The Memory of Thanatos. A twisted tale of a man who sealed away the greatest demon and paid the price.
Thanatos is actually quite easy really. His mob is pretty strong, but you can kill all but one to make him quite weak. He can't even heal himself, only the Dolor can do that for him, but you can kill the Dolor in his mob. He two hand quickens at low HP, but you can just dispell it away. When he switches to holy element, he becomes even easier.
However, what thanatos lacks in power, he makes up in annoying. He constantly uses Exile which is a forced teleport on the tank. Even if you can counter Exile (fiber lock or ankle snares can disable him long enough for the tank to get back), he has a stupidly high chance to simply teleport away. More than half your time fighting Thanatos will simply be trying to find him after he constantly teleports. The only saving grace is that he has low HP, which means you don't have to keep up the game of cat and mouse for very long.
An easy victory.
No good drops durring any of our runs though on Thanatos.
Second up is Detardeurus. He's a pretty heavy hitter, and with shield reflect he's tough to take down with regular physical damage. Atleast you'd think that way. His shield reflect is only level 5, which puts asura and EDP-Sonic Blow out of the question, but it doesn't do enough back to stop my bowling bashes. My LK is primary killer on Detar, using bowling bash with a holy endowed dragon killer. In this shot we had a second tank to hold his hydrolancer minion. Its not a requirement though, I can tank both him and his hydrolancer without too much difficulty. Overall I still end up using about 150-200 whites, which is usually made up in item drops.
Third up is the great Ice Salamander, Ktullanux.
I always liked the story behind him. The high priests of Arunafeltz ended up in a panic when the chosen one to become the pope had a twin brother. In order to conceal the truth from the people of Rachel, they decided they would seal away the boy. To the north of Rachel in a magical frozen cavern, the priests took with them the magic eternal fire from Volcano Thor to the master of the place, Ktullanux. They charged him with protecting the boy and threatened to use the fire to destroy his domain should he refuse. Ktullanux agreed and the boy was sealed in ice benieth a magic barrier. The magic torches themselves became part of that seal, and remain in the cavern as a constant reminder of his promise.
This is his speach when you use the freezing snow powder to put out Thor's fire. Apparently Ktullanux takes his promises very seriously and decides he will kick your ass for putting out the fire.
Luckly for us, we are well equipped to deal with the ice salamander. Our strategy here is simple. There are a series of points on the map where stormgust will not knock back. We use these points to safety wall tank him. Our scholar tanks the mob, with the use of Kaahi to constantly replenish HP without the need of a priests heals, and using indulge to constantly recover SP needed to both recover SP of other players and support Kaahi. Ktullanux makes heavy use of Dispell so the tank needs to be constantly assumptio'd. He uses Agi Up fairly frequently, but its nothing Dispell of our own can't take care of.
Ktullanux also uses a strange skill, Random Elemental Attack, which strikes the player for a high powered attack of random element. This attack is unpredictable and in many cases can be strong enough to one shot one of the hardest tanks. Its for this reason we make heavy use of safety wall.
On our first trip, we made use of EDP sonic blow to kill it. I think it worked pretty well, and faster than using sniper. It is however, several magnitudes more expensive.
Second run we used sniper as killer. Overall I think it went pretty smoothly. Survivor Manteau both trips!
Even in death Ktullanux wishes to honor his promise. While I figured Dragons were more the honorable type, I suppose Ice Salamanders are too.
And thats all for today.
So of course leveling my noob character isn't the only thing I've been up to. Since I haven't posted an MVP post in a while, there's a lot of catching up to do.
After some organizing, planning, etc, we decided to hit some of the higher tier mvps. My LK nor bio aren't all that useful for this kind of thing, so I decided to hop on my hunter to help out.
Did you guys know I had a hunter? I guess I didn't mention him much here. He's level 86, and kills stuff pretty well.
Finding Valkyrie Randgris is a path fraught with dangers... scary, square-ish blob like dangers.
But we found Randgris, and we did somehow kill it after an hour of constant death. And yay, super sexy drops. Can't hate that.
Our party, on the way down to check out Ifrit. Double KO on sword guardian.
Ifrit was a similar mess, a disaster waiting to happen. Ifrit makes Randgris look fairly easy in comparison. Still, we overcome the odds, and killed him.
And kill him did we ever do. Thats a cart full of rares, and a cart full of cash.
The last two days of MVPing with the guild prompted us to create some kind of distribution system for equipment. Its unreasonable to vend that many items and expect to keep track of items that haven't sold for weeks or months and who deserves money for them.
Having some friends who play WoW, after some consultation with our friends we created a DKP system that lets us distribute items as we get them, with little to no downtime. I plan to modify it to allow us to track expenses as well. You can find the page here.
So we decided to test earthquake damage again. As we figured, magic defence is mostly negligable in terms of reducing the damage. I'm starting to lean towards earthquake being a hybrid of physical and magical damage, in the same way that say, grand gross or soul destroyer is. A monk in mental strength takes reduced damage, about 30%-40% less, but it won't be enough to save him.
Overall its considered a regular magical attack, you can reduce it with immune, race shield and equipment, and if you stand far enough away, alligator card, horn card, and long mace. In spurt status, you can tumble earthquake, and Kaupe will block one single strike of three. Presumably you could use a crusader's sacrifice to take hits from up to 5 party members, although that sader most definately would only take one hit before dying. Ultimately in an optimal party with crusaders getting themselves killed for party members and two soul linkers, you could bring the number of hits from earthquake to only 1.
With 6 people being hit, as you can see most party members took roughly 1500-2500 per hit, for 4500-7500 damage after all three hits struck. In power up, earthquake hits for roughly 3 times the damage, killing most of our party members instantly (only I on LK could survive by using pots, due to having 16000hp). I can't honestly understand how gravity expects people to deal with this skill, on a monster such as Ifrit that has 8 times the power of orc lord, you just can't take the hits. Even GR is barely enough to save you. I think earthquake was way more balanced when it only did a single hit instead of 3... this is just unreasonable to expect people to do without godly gear.
Enough complaining though. We killed orc lord, and I'm last man standing.
While looking for lord though, I poped a poporing by accident, and look what I found. I can't imagine a bot dumb enough to let an earing get picked up by a popo, but apparently it happens, and I'm richer because of it.
Thats not the only thing we checked though, we decided to test bowling bash in pvp. See, bowling bash is an interesting skill. Its not like any other blast skill... it takes one target, pushes him back, and anyone he bumps into gets pushed back, and it just cascades into a giant chain reaction.
Our problem we found durring testing of course was that the knock back wasn't predictable, players seemed to move in random directions. We still managed to get a chain reaction across 6 different people in a row after a few attempts though. Fun stuff. In woe, you could get this to chain react across dozens of closely packed players.
That is, if the skill weren't horrifically broken due to the bowling bash gutter problem.
Back to MVP'ing though. Mistress has been pretty nice to me. I still didn't get that Gungnir that I wanted though. I have three Coronets though, and made one into a mistress crown.
Somehow, Shikieiki decided to multiply. One was no doubt a bug and not really there, but it is amusing none the less.
Gloom Under Night is fun. This party we were going to get to kill Randgris except EMan from insur kept killing our party by getting it to throw earthquakes at us. I can take joy in the fact that it took them another three hours to kill it after we left though.
So we went to gloom. No drops, but fun none the less.
Those bombs he leaves behind are way too much fun. Our entire party was eventually goaded into hopping in. Peer pressure is a bitch. Remember kids, don't try this at home!
I killed bapho again, and got this. No pictures from the mvp itself. As I figured, its not slotted.
I decided to upgrade my Jewel Crowns. Out of 12 of them, only 4 made it to +5. 2 made it to +7. Determined to take them to +8, I grabbed some enriched elu.
What the heck. Two bucks to break my gears, I could have done that without paying money.
God damn, enriched elu is a piece of crap. I think I've spent like $6-$8 on the stuff and every single time my stuff has broken. They should drop the price on the elu, cause its clearly not useful for what they're selling it for...
Its that time again!
**Drum Roll**
Holy cow, I think this is the first card I've gotten from an OCA thats actually covered its cost! I'm simply speechless.
aaaaand...
#@%@#%^@@#~$!
Thats 3 hornet cards from ocas now...
I held off on doing a Loki post while doing the server project, even though I still play quite consistently there, and the reason is a bit dumb. People coming to the site wanting to look up the noob project wouldn't want to wade through the crap I usually post. So I have a solution! There is now a page navigation set up. Feedback is encouraged.
There's a lot of stuff to go through, so I'm going to start with the MVP stuff in one post, and everything else... in the next post.
What you see here is the latest addition to my MVP arsenal.
While I'm holding out on that s2 Gungnir for the mummy/ancient mummy combo for massive hit bonus, for now this thing is useful for lowering def on demon/undead MVPs such as bapho. And it works quite nicely at that.
You know how I said never again? I lied. Signum crusis level 5 boosts my damage on him by a good 20%, which is a substantial increase. While I'm not cursed (which isn't very often to be honest), I can deal in excess of 8000 damage per pierce. Even his healing can't keep up with my massive offensive.
Continuing the trend of killing mvps that use agi up now that I have my ancient spear, I decided to kill drake. Even with aqua armor he hurts... Drake is one of those mvps that even if you did get something rare from him, its never worth it. At least people don't usually kill him for that reason.
I decided I'm better off without using the ancient weapon for him. I miss him maybe 20% of the time but the loss in damage is too substantial to warrant using the ancient. On the plus side, he's really easy to tank with the peno buckler I made. More on that next post.
This is something thats been happening annoyingly frequently, and quite frankly it really annoys me. What you are witnessing is Samurai Specter dying AFTER he teleports. What this means is, that he took damage just as he used the skills, and his dead body, and more specifically his drops, land some unknown place on the map in which I cannot find before they disappear.
Samurai Specter is not the only person who likes doing that. Do you see lady tanee around? Unfortunately, thats because she's not there... she warped just before she died, and my 1m+ in items used to kill her have gone to waste as her drops disappeared on some random corner of the map.
On a happier note, I did get some good items. Ice Falchion from Hatii.
And Coronet from Mistress. This is in fact the first time I've gotten the coronet. You'd think, that after the dozens of OCA's I've gotten, and even a young twig, that I would have gotten one, but this is the first. Not that I will complain.
And last but not least, our Thanatos party. I would have made a bigger deal about killing Thanatos earlier, but we encountered several serious problems.
When we went up, we invited Dr Azzy to join us as he has not done Thanatos before. Unfortunately, while on the top floor, Azzy disconnected while talking to one of the tile npcs. Gravity has for some stupid reason made it so logging out on the top floor impossible. I can see it as a fix to the Thanatos summoning exploits, and maybe I wouldn't mind if they didn't make their damn game so prone to disconnects and crashes.
Anyways, we lost Azzy, and shortly after while fighting Thanatos, my connection bit the biscuit and desynced, disconnecting me. So both of us were unable to actually fight the boss monster we spent and hour attempting to get to. Good going gravity. Maybe they should just fix the quest.