Doddler's RO Journal
Viewing category: kRO Sakray RE
A Story of RE
By Doddler on February 20, 2009 in category 'kRO Sakray RE'
So I figured it was about time for a real Renewal server post, so here we are again. In retrospect I should probably do my Valk server post first and the god item quest, but I think everyone is a little more interested in how the future of RO is shaping up.
So what's in store? Some more Rune Knight stuff, some Warlock stuff, two videos, and more screenshots than you can shake a stick at!
You might remember that I 99'd my wizard previously. I gave it some careful thought, and decided that I would trans prior to taking the step and changing to warlock.
Unfortunately they have yet to fix the fact that porings are still savage beasts out for blood. I beat the poring eventually, by respawning repeatedly and rushing it. Once I got the job requirement for storage though, its easy to one shot them even with the novice dagger. Its so much simpler when they can't fight back!
Soul Strike unfortunately doesn't scale well with the other abilities you get later on as a Warlock, but its a pretty kick ass levelling tool as a mage. I think I kept Soul Strike on my hotkey bar up to level 60-70. With a good weapon it still does 2k-4k damage, but its overshadowed by better skills later.
More so than Soul Strike, Fireball quickly escalated to be a favorite of mine. In Renewal the cast time is incredibly fast, has practically no delay, and does a respectable amount of damage against most targets. Nearing the high point on high wizard my fireball was doing about 1.5k-3k AoE on most targets. I'm not entirely sure it would ever be useful in a levelling situation as a Warlock, but I can see the advantage of super-fast aoe's in WoE, especially with the loss of instant cast magic, and the skill served me well during leveling.
More fireballing.
And finally job change to high wizard.
Amusingly after changing to Wizard, it was back to the old Mage skills still with firewall and fireball. The combination works pretty well on most lower level monsters.
Checking out some alternate leveling zones. That's a pretty heavy hitting firebolt!
Ouch! I had forgotten that traps got buffed a lot in Renewal, and the ones from monsters apparently aren't any different. With only 4k max HP, the pitman's trap one shotted me.
Another odd leveling spot I tried out. It was actually pretty good for the 85-90 region, but I took a lot of hits from the undeads. Firepillar works pretty well now that its free to cast, though you notice the lowered blast radius on levels 5~10. Still, its a useful skill, and does a respectable amount of mdef bypassing fire damage.
Approaching the mid-90's, I went to everyone's favorite passive monster, Siromas. I feel a bit at a disadvantage on a HWiz since most people I saw could kill faster than me one on one.
Lucky for me then, that I'm not restricted to fighting 1 on 1. LoV appears to have a much higher modifier than before. All 4 primary wizard AoEs (Storm Gust, Lord of Vermillion, Meteor Storm) had their damage ratios increased, and while it happened after I left siromas, their base cast time also dropped by 20% of its original value.
Yay? I guess I'll throw it on the stack with my 3 others. 
And there's level 99! 
Unfortunately, hitting level 99 wasn't the end of the journey, as I was only about job 65. In order to get the skills I wanted, I needed to get up to job 68. No fun there, thats for sure.
I ended up resetting my skills so that I could get safety wall. Unfortunately firewalling and hunting passive monsters only gets you so far, you need to be able to take down more aggressive monsters, some of which can go through your walls.
Storm Gust level one still does a pretty decent amount of damage. Initially I just kept an SG down over the wolves for when they broke out of the ice, but eventually I changed to LoV.
Here it comes...
Boom!
So here's a video compellation I made of the whole leveling journey of high mage. I apologize for the atrocious recording quality early on, I accidentally had camstudio set to low quality recording. Yeah, I kind of suck playing wizard, but I have fun.
The music in the video is from the World of Goo Soundtrack (amazing game btw). It doesn't fit the video at all, but I'm running out of original music to use! If anyone has any suggestions of stuff along the lines of what I've been using so far, that would be pretty cool. 
Oh, I guess I use Frost Nova a bit in the video. Like Fire Ball, the skill is buffed to the point where it is useful. Fast cast, low delay, higher AoE, higher damage... its a good skill. Like I use it in the video, its really good for freezing things that are currently on you if you need them off quickly. Annoying monsters like Mimics, Ridewords, and Mantis's come to mind (the monsters I used it on!).
And with a bang, I'm a Warlock.
Oh yeah!
For those who haven't seen it, the warlock skill tree.
To start out before having any warlock skills, I began in Niflheim, a pretty nice spot for 100-110.
After I unlocked Frost Mist and Jack Frost, I went down to Veins to hunt plants and Magmarings. Here's Jack Frost in action. It does a lot of damage... only downside is the requirement to have freezing status (not frozen, its a different status) on monsters by using Frost Mist first. Frost Mist however is only 70% chance of success, so its not the most reliable combo skill in the world, but the fact that both skills affect all monsters on screen make up for that fact. If Jack Frost hits, the monsters definitely feel it.
Using Frost Mist, showing off its high radius. Unfortunately I was unable to combo Frost Mist with Jack Frost on magmarings, they just never were affected by the freezing status. After testing I was forced to conclude that Frost Mist can't cause freezing on fire element monsters. On the plus side, frost mist does about 4-6k total and does a good job of pulling them into an SG.
A better shot of the damage from Frost Mist.
Of course you can't spam Frost Mist, you can only use it once every 10 seconds or so, so the usual combo is to mist to get them to come after you, drop an SG down, and when they freeze, use chain lightening between the frozen monsters. The resulting chain lightening does 6-10k per hop, and if there's several monsters there, it will jump back and forth until they're all dead.
A quick shot of the elemental spheres that Warlocks cast. They look pretty neat, and they each orbit around the caster at different speeds. I haven't used any of the orb skills though, but it could be pretty good.
After being bored of magmarings, I went to the slightly more dangerous Glast Heim Chivalry. Raydrics are good killing 110-120 or so, the trick is not getting yourself killed.
In this screenshot you can see Crimson Rock, the new high damage fire element Warlock Skill. Its probably flat out the most dangerous of the warlock skills... like other warlock skills though you can't spam it even with strings because of the specific cooldown (again about 5-8 seconds). I don't mind it, since I wasn't a fan of the single skill mindset of most wizard pre-renewal had (SG SG SG SG).
Earth Strain in action. It doesn't look very good but what it looks like in game is a moving wall of heaven's drive moving away from you. The damage is high, and the chance to divest helm/shield would be devastating in war. Its a bit tricky to use, since you have to be facing the direction you want to cast it. Additionally, the skill will fail if you're facing diagonally. I found it difficult to aim myself for the skill while in my battle stance since it only faces 4 directions.
Still, its a very powerful skill.
The abysmal knight doesn't take much from elemental magic unfortunately, but his Khalitzburgs definately don't like the crimson rock.
They still die eventually though.
There were a few other people leveling there that I saw. This ranger was one of them. The "Camouflage!!" above its head and the dark shadow kind of give it away, but in a light colored area a hidden ranger is actually really hard to spot.
Their skill "Aimed Bolt" works kind of like pierce, in that it does bonus damage based on the size of the monster. It only works on trapped targets and has a long cast time, but I wouldn't want to be hit by it.
Now at Rachel Sanctuary. Moving up in the world! Crimson Rock does pretty good against them as well.
Of course, harder monsters means higher risk.
My Warlock equipment. Some of those items might not be immediately identifiable, so I'll go over them. Equipped are a Dark Illusion Hat, Sprint Mail, Eraser Staff, Hodremlin Orleans Server, Immune Diabolus Manteau, Green Sprint Shoes, Nimble Orleans Glove, and a Sprint Ring.
The idea here as you can guess is all cast time reduction. Since even with my dex there's still a substantial amount of reducible cast time remaining, so stacking reduction gears is a good way to get a faster cast. The sprint gears combo to make 12% cast time reduction, the orleans server and glove combo for 10% reduction, and the dark illusion gives an additional 10%, for 32% cast time reduction.
An unusual sight. In Renewal, there's NPCs vending all kinds of equipment and cards, except headgears. With the addition of Rangers, there was an exploit of sorts that allowed you to get unlimited zeny. But what good is zeny on a server where everything is available from npc vendors for (nearly) free? Well, apparently gambling is where you spend your zeny, everyone gambling on headgears.
A similar sight at the zeny exploit. Basically what happened is that they added an NPC that sells these new Alloy Traps for Rangers to use, which cost 200z each. In order to make them easier to use, they created an Alloy Trap Box, a low weight box that contains 100 Alloy Traps. This box however was also priced at 200z. By buying boxes and selling the traps, it was really easy to get zeny.
And you better believe I did it to! There's no risk because its a test server, but my days of poor leveling were over.
I decided to go back to Rune Knight to check out the various things they've changed. This here is Ignition Break, which now takes your weapon element but deals bonus damage if you're endowed with fire. This is without fire element.
And this is with fire. A 50% increase! Not bad for a skill that's already 1200% at short range.
I touched on it in a previous journal entry, but one thing you'll see on kRO is that lots of the female Rachel priests wear these white hoods. I don't personally see whats wrong with them, as the game does absolutely nothing that would give the idea that there's any racially motivated hatred within Rachel or RO at all, its just a clerical robe. Maybe its because I don't live in the US that I don't understand, but on iRO, they removed all the NPCs wearing the hoods and replaced them with the masked versions. Its a shame because that means we lose the cut-in images for npcs such as Urstialla here.
Did I mention I enjoy Ignition Break? Its definitely more reliable than Bowling Bash at hitting a group of monsters. The downside is the cast time... I've had to use a Phen during leveling because I keep getting interrupted on my skill attacks.
And this is Storm Blast. Again like Ignition Break there's a short interruptible 1s cast time, but it being a Rune skill makes it infinitely more annoying. If your cast is interrupted, not only do you still lose the Rune, you also still suffer from the re-use delay of the Rune.
On the plus side, the skill is a beast, dealing huge AoE damage.
A practical use of Storm Blast while leveling.
This is the new animation for Sonic Wave. The damage is low but its only level 3 (goes up to 5). The damage increase is nice (now 1000% at level 5), and the skill is instant casting and 9 cells range, but it seems they've given it a short reuse delay that stops it from being a spammable skill.
A short test I did to show the defence reduction of having multiple enemies on you. These hornets are very low level... level 12 I think, and don't have very much base attack.
However, if you gather enough of them, your defence becomes worthless, and they start dealing full damage. Its not really an issue with hornets, but most monsters 100+ monsters have a base attack power above 1000, so if you lose your defence, you won't last long.
In a search for strange new leveling areas, I ended up back at Volcano Thor. The Kasa's are still out of my level range, but the Knockers and Imps made good targets.
The damage in the screenshot is clashing spiral, which is a very, very nice skill now.
Wahaha, for years Kasas have been ruining my days with their clashing spiral, its time to clashing back!
Ouuuuch. The Salamander is probably the hardest monster I've fought in Renewal. While its base attack is like most monsters still fairly low, the speed at which the Salamander deals his hits is still insane.
Interested in how the New World looked, I stumbled through the quest. For those that are curious, the entrance to the New World isn't actually on the Satan Morroc map. It looks similar but it is a different area entirely. You don't even need to have started the Continental Guard quest in order to access it, this NPC here (when you're on the quest) will take you to the map with the portal.
I have to admit, its a pretty damn cool visual effect.
Before you're able to make the transition to the New World you're attacked by these guys. You have to kill about 30 of them before you can continue.
And there I am. As you may have guessed from my previous post, I do really like the design of the new world. It seems immediately obvious that the texture design in particular is from a newcomer to gravity. You can see his first works with the Tierra Canyon Battleground and Endless Tower, and it just gets better from there.
I'll skip the tour since you've probably already watched the video in my last post. These spots here seem to be mining points. By using them you get a random stone of some kind. When I did it I got some plain stones, a few green live and wind of verdure, and some special type of ore that I'm not familiar with. You can't keep using the same ore location, so you'll have to wander around the map to find others.
The Bradium Golem, a level 149 monster, the highest level monster currently in game. Sadly, I think the Salamander was a lot harder.
The Nepenthes. Basically a super mandragora, this thing hits fairly hard, but it also does it very fast and at high accuracy. Despite my very high agility and agi gears equipped, it consistently hit me, forcing me to use potions just getting past them. Thankfully they're immobile.
The statue in the city of Manuk. Did I mention I like the new art style?
This girl appears to be the leader of the Faries. How do I know? She's on both login screens, two of the loading screens and the room looks pretty leader-like to me!
In the basement of the leader's building is this. It reminds me a whole lot of the signup rooms for battlegrounds in WoW. Doesn't help that there's one of these rooms in each of the 3 faction towns in the new world, and they DID suggest that they might be adding some kind of faction PVP. Who knows?
Unlike the Ore gathering spots of Manuk, Splendide fields have several locations where you can literally go fishing. The process is quite slow, about 10 seconds, and you get a random fish related item. I have a lot of tails, gills, and nippers, but I never got anything really useful. I hear you can get fishing equipment to improve the speed of fishing too, but not sure how.
My fishing exploits came to an end when I was chased down and murdered by an angry pack of Nagas.
(Edit: Looks like I botched this one up, metadata is still at the end of the file. The video still plays, but it needs to completely buffer. I'll upload a fixed one later)
And lastly, a leveling video of Rune Knight in Abyss Lake. Most monsters there are level 126-130, an optimal range for my level 124 Rune Knight. I use lots of runes, and lots of skills, I'm sure its interesting. Dying at the end is embarrassing, it sucks when you can't use your other AoE skills because they're on cooldown, and bowling bash fails because of the gutter lines. Oh well.
If its not immediately obvious, I'm using several items this time around to make up for my character's short-comings. Equipped is a Phen card in a Pingicula's Corsage to allow uninterupted cast of crush strike, storm blast and ignition break, and a +6 Solid Dragoon Violet Fear. The Golem card does indeed allow casting of Crush Strike without breaking your weapon, which is pretty cool!
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Quest to Rune Knight
By Doddler on January 9, 2009 in category 'kRO Sakray RE'
So I guess posting the Rune Knight video with no explanation or follow up wasn't a great idea, so here's the follow up! The video generated a lot more discussion than I was expecting too.
Before I go any further there was a few people wondering about the BGM in that video. All the BGM was added after recording, and all of it was remixes found off an older RO remix album by Scinicade titled 'Innocence'. If you can find it, its pretty good if you like that kind of remix, I've used his music in a couple videos so far.
I'm not sure if I mentioned I was leveling a knight before, I think I did... last I played renewal I got a knight to the level 95 range and stopped. With the release of Rune Knights though, I figured I'd have to go all the way and try 'em out.
While playing on renewal though cool things like buffs, endows, and unless I want to farm for them sp items, are out of reach for regular leveling. As such, running around and relying on constant skill usage didn't seem like the fastest leveling plan. For that reason, my knight (and following rune knight) were agi based two hand quicken builds.
Additionally I caught word through a series of videos on Ragnagate that Frenzy was an amazing leveling tool. Along with the change to allow spiral pierce to be used with a sword convinced me to trans before changing to rune knight.
I'm not sure when this happened but apparantly low level monsters hurt like all hell now. Lucky even the default novice falchion allowed me to kill most of the monsters I wanted without taking more than one hit, but it was a bit of a suprise. Hopefully they fix it!
And I changed to Lord Knight.
While critical attacks are slightly less effective now, they used to be amazing. Luckly they're still useful, but not quite as broken.
More critical action. And yeah, thats a Violet Fear. :)
It seems like I wasn't the only person running around critting monsters to death either, everyone is doing it!
It turns out frenzy is as amazing as everyone said it was. Using a +5 double beast soul gain violet fear (don't think I'm lying when I say I'd kill someone if they make that weapon on a real server) and a deleter armor, I was able to keep SP for buffs and frenzy.
Unfortunately I ran some issues with hitting monsters. Even with 60 base dex on a 90+ lord knight, if I didn't maintain spear dynamo up, I had troubles hitting the monsters in my level range. Its much harder to perfect hit, or even perfect dodge for that matter in renewal. I guess that makes crits even better right?
And level 99 at last. 
Off to the incredibly well hidden job change NPC.
Boom!
And I'm Rune Knight. When you become a 3rd job you keep your 99 aura until you level it seems. That didn't take very long though since leveling 99->100 took only a fraction of the experience it took to 99 initially. It ramps up pretty fast though.
Frenzy leveling in Niflheim with a little help from Skidoosh. There's a number of places you can go from 99->110 for leveling, between Niflheim, Ice Dungeon, Kobolds near Rachel (yeah, kobolds) and I suppose magmarings and gallions are good too. I chose to do Niflheim though, since Aspersio owns.
Thats a really long picture isn't it... Anyways since its in my list of pictures I figured I'd go over some of the client enhancements that have been periodically popping up during renewal. This particular one is probably fairly self explanatory. The bar to the right of the icon indicates remaining time. Well it doesn't really. An interesting design choice, the bar counts down from 2 minutes remaining (around there), and if there's more than 2 mins remaining it shows as full. My guess is so that you always know when a skill is going to end (the bar is hard to read if it represents say 30 minutes), and so every bar represents the same period of time. It is a bit annoying when you use a skill that lasts a short duration like 30s, but you always have an idea of how much time is left.
Its a pretty nice feature though, probably my favorite new client feature so far.
Here's another feature. Note here in this screenshot the paw icon blocks out all the skills. That means I'm currently in aftercast delay and can't currently use skills. When the icons disapear, I know I can use skills again.
In this shot you'll see that only one skill has the icon. Thats because Ignition Break has a 5 second re-use delay thats separate from its aftercast time. This icon shows how long it'll be before I can use that particular skill again.
Another pretty handy feature. Not sure what I think of the paw icon, its a little confusing, but it gets the job done.
This is actually from the same screenshot, but its the new visual effet for ignition break. Personally I think its centered a little high up on your character, like a giant pillar of fire is shooting out of your head, but its pretty neat.
Ouch! The skill itself appears to be an upgrade of Magnum Break (hence the name). Odd that Magnum Break isn't a prereq. Anyways its a fire element skill, which limits its usefulness a bit but its a decent element to be throwing around in woe and it has a pretty large blast radius.
This here is the Storm Blast rune skill. Yeah, its the same visual effect as Raging Thrust and yes, the damage does suck. Hopefully they fix it up to be useful. The runes in general are pretty awesome, I mean they're basically skills that are usable for no SP cost, though they are limited by the cost of creating the runes (of which you can only cary a limited number of each) and preparation time. In this case, this rune isn't very good.
Here's the Crush Strike rune skill in action. No visual effect at the moment, though the damage is alright. If I had to guess I'd say its just a flat out single hit instant casting skill for 1500%-2000% attack. There is a re-use delay on the rune though, and the drawback is pretty tough.
As the skill says, when casting Crush Strike it broke my weapon. I haven't tested the skill with an unbreakable weapon yet though.
Still, leveling seems to be easiest when frenzy is involved. For this, the Giant Growth rune is pretty impressive. The rune not only gives you a hefty str bonus, but also gives you a chance to activate 3x damage on your melee hits. This chance as it turns out is pretty good, probably around 10% or so.
When the Giant Growth 3x damage activates on a critical hit while in frenzy, massive damage does occur. Admittedly this was before the critical changes so I'd probably only see like 12k crit instead of 17k, but its still sexy!
While there's not much to show in screenshots, the other two runes I really enjoy using is Vitality Activation and Abundance. Abundance rune gives you 60sp every 10 seconds for 3 minutes, which is an amazing boost. While you can't go absolutely crazy, it definately makes constant skill usage possible. Vitality Activation actually kills your SP regeneration and reduces SP regen from potions by 50%, but boosts your HP regen and HP potion recovery by 50%. The cool thing about this though is that you can use the two in combination, still getting 60sp every 10 seconds as well as improved HP recovery. Can't recover SP with Abundance while in frenzy but I guess thats to be expected.
Anyways thats it for now! Thanks for reading.
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Back to Renewal
By Doddler on January 5, 2009 in category 'kRO Sakray RE'
Sorry I've been too busy for an update lately. I was going to do a big renewal post, and I still plan on doing so, but for now, here's a quick video I made of my Rune Knight. Unfortunately aspd is a bit bugged atm so I attack a bit slower than I'd expect with a character of my agi, and some of the skills are bugged and/or have no visual effects. Hope its interesting!
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Ragnarok Renewal: Continued
By Doddler on September 21, 2008 in category 'kRO Sakray RE'
I've been kind of putting off making a new Renewal post, so I guess I should take care of that. Its quite a big post, as I've got some... 100 images and two videos to share with you. It will likely be my last major Renewal post, since the open test is scheduled to end in just 2 days. Based on its existing status though, I don't think we've seen the end of it. I still want to share with you a champion video which I didn't get to cover here, but its something I want to make because champion combos are too cool. Also I'm in the middle of testing status resistance. 100 vit definitely isn't status immunity anymore... but I'm not entirely sure how the formula works. More on that later!
A rather embarrassing moment. Without novice gears from the training ground, it turns out that some monsters are harder than I recall!
Hardest hitting level 5 acolyte ever? Just maybe. It may be cheating however, using a triple hurricane novice mace, porcellio pantie and bloody shackle ball. The hurricane novice mace was actually a bit of a surprise... the mace shouldn't have slots in it, and it doesn't appear to have slots in it, but apparently it is in fact slotted. Still can't be upgraded though.
I used this picture earlier, to show off my amazing heal. Before people start crying foul though, with my level and stats, on existing mechanics, my aco would have actually healed for 0! An infinite improvement.
Sea Otters are a bit toned down, and good hunting in the 40-50 range. In what I can only asume was a result of some kind of mistake though fur seals were level 90+. Sucks to have to do the rogue quest!
Orc Lady Card. 
And champion at last. You know, I didn't mention this, but finding enough zeny to trans on a server with no market is harder than you would think!
One of those angry fur seals.
I didn't actually know grand peco's dropped gold... but it certainly helps for cash.
These things are actually pretty scary. Holdens, along with metalings are now re-leveled to be a level 80ish monster. They are on a surprisingly mobby map though, and since they spend lots of time hiding, when you hit one, its not surprising to be ninja'd by several previously hidden holdens. Too much for me to handle.
Its been quite a while since I leveled on the GH staircase, and let me be the first to say that its about as bad of a map as I remember it being years back when I last was here.
What you see here is Seyren Windsor... missing and eventually landing a hit on me... for 235 damage. Not sure what he's doing on turtle island though.
It gets slightly uglier when he uses power up and stun.
Another monster previously responsible for angry players and one-shot kills. I'll be the first to say that his sonic blow can and will still kill people though, even if his melee attack is down. Funny enough though, his previously pathetic fireball actually does a bit of damage due to the new matk formula.
Imps suck... actually in general while monster melee damage is down, their skill attacks are where they will deal the majority of the damage.
Another monster thats apparantly weaker than it was previously. It still took me down fairly fast with its high attack speed though.
A wizard killing bathories? It would be unheard of, but their magic defense can't nullify magic damage anymore (though it does reduce it a decent amount).
I showed you this spot on week 1... well now there's a portal there again. Gravity seems to have re-added all the removed maps, though they're all empty right now.
One of the wierdest things I saw... apparantly his pet is higher level than I am.
Card! I'm never really happy about getting cards on a server that I don't seriously play, and where you can buy the cards from an npc vendor. On the other hand, the drop rates are 10 times their norm.
It would appear as though misses do not count towards killing safety wall anymore.
Fun stuff, even if it is just SG 1.
Dragon Egg: The target of my experiment.
732 firepillar damage. On a normal monster, firepillar does approximately 2200 damage, meaning damage is down to 1/3 its original damage. This is the test I did to determine the penalty to monsters above 10 levels difference. Its the only skill I can accurately use to test it, since firepillar actually bypasses magic defense.
The same test, though it doesn't work as well on a monster with very high elemental resistance to fire.
It doesn't hurt that much though...
This is just strange. I suppose that since monsters now go above level 99, its fair to asume some monsters would land on the 99 mark, but its strange that they have auras. Its also strange to see aura anacondaqs. Its like some horrible iro event on an airship all over agian.
Tanking Gazeti without assumptio.
Tanking Gazeti with assumptio. Personally I think the defense formula needs to be reworked so that it has some kind of diminishing return. The current formula for defense makes it all too easy to bring damage down to the 1 mark. A skill such as assumptio which doubles defense (or increases it by 33% in pvp/woe) seems a bit too powerful in such a scenario.
Siromas, the easy way to 99. They aren't aggressive, they don't cast sense, and they take a whole lot of damage from JT. Or pretty well anything else for that matter.
That there is a Siroma card.
I know they've re-done the stats of all monsters, but that is one tough icicle.
A gunslinger I saw leveling down there. Pretty high attack speed and damage...
I took some time to do some monk leveling. This unusual effect you see is the Vanberk card activating. At low chance (about 0.5%) it can give you CRIT + 100 for 5 seconds. I'll be the first to say that its probably a bit too low to be anything more than a novelty, but it does also give STR+2 in headgear. Can't go wrong with that.
Go go vanberk card!
In order to do my bard tests, I needed to level a bard. Dead branches really make things suck for leveling...
Yeeah...
These spiders do pretty well what you expect them to do... poison and spin webs. Pretty annoying little buggers though. Poison seemed more effective at a glance, but I didn't spend much time to test it.
Quick bow test. Bow is a novice bow (64 attack power), and the panties are picky, +10 attack.
And this is a Rudra's bow, with 165 attack power. A noticeable difference. Of course I'm jumping from the starting bow to the strongest attack power end-game bow, so you'd hope there'd be an obvious difference!
Killin' Sohees. Yeah.
And that, is a Sohee Card. Why my luck!?
Not the smartest move I've attempted while playing RO.
You would think here that I may have been down leveling there for more than half an hour.l Maybe I should go down there on iRO...
99 armor defense on Horong can't stop physical attack power anymore! It does mean I hit horongs for about 30%-40% less than other monsters, but it doesn't stop physical damage outright like it did before.
These two plus the one I found in the wizard cast time video makes 3 orc zombie cards. WHYYYYYYYY 
I don't remember why I took this screenshot, but here's a screenshot about nothing.
Don't be deceived by their looks, these two girls are related to the SE god item creation quest! After you complete the quest, you're given a token by wish maiden, and if you bring it to one of thse two girls, you start a half hour long festival celebration in that town.
I took a random trip to Odin Temple to get some monster sense info. Overall monster HP is down, but you'd hope that to be the case. Oddly the 'fake' frus and skogul still have the old stats, which means they're also level 76 I think, and more HP than the real ones.
Definately lower HP here. Again oddly their slaves remained relatively low level and still have over 100k HP.
I have a bit of a reputation as being a foreigner, so people sometimes greet me in english, and sometimes with rather random english phrases. These guys were killing skeggiolds... I don't really know why, but they were.
And here's the secret...falcon assault bypasses the level restriction. Wonder if that will be fixed. Also note the 1 damage that the priest takes. Oddly skeggiolds still throw out 1k-2k elemental attacks from time to time, but these priests seemed to be geared enough to only take 1 from their regular melee. Again I think the def formula could use some work...
This is just cruel, when the portal you need to get to is on the other side.
Even if magmarings are about 20 levels higher, a strong attack can still hurt them.
More than I expected to be honest.
A high mdef creature such as a Kasa, many levels above me (about 40 levels difference) still takes some damage from SG.
Interestingly Kasa's stats are... about the same as they were before.
This guys a bit different though.
I died to get this screenshot, you should be happy! 
On my road to 99 my Wiz, I came up with a great plan to mob siromas. They mob pretty easily, and LoV does a good job of taking them out.
BOOM!
And thats level 99 for my wiz.
I thought briefly about making a thief... but familiars are very dangerous at low level... its almost impossible to make it to the thief guild. I hope that gets adjusted.
So instead, I turned to making a Gunslinger instead. Why? Well I was inspired by the one I saw earlier.
The gunslinger quest is way different on kRO though. First off, you talk to this guy here and he warps you directly to einbroch to the gunslinger guild. The guild leader gives you the task, and sends you back to payon. In payon, you're asked to get 10 shell, 3 feather, 3 clover, 1 mushroom spore, 1 trunk, and 3 green herb. I think thats what it was anyways. Generally easy stuff.
Taking on a spore at level 10 wasn't the easiest or smartest thing I've ever done, but I got the mushroom spore I needed.
Gunslinger~
The gunslinger skill tree.
I started off using a shotgun for its high attack power. Actually I didn't even know it was a shotgun until later, I thought it was a rifle! Oops!
Until this happened. Shotgun is pretty good for mobbing, though mobbing is a pretty good way to get yourself killed, especially in renewal where the def hit is pretty killer.
Here's a bit of a video I made while leveling in Orc Dungeon, a favorite leveling zone in the 50 range. I started at level 46, and quickly sped through levels. Note that when I first entered the dungeon I didn't have silver bullets equipped and suffered a bit from the level penalty until I got some levels. Used were a black rose shotgun, a hurricane garison and I don't remember what type of rifle I used.
Triple Action... in action.
It seems madness canceller is broken (I think its called Last Stand on iRO), and instead of increasing attack speed by 20%, it increases attack speed by... 20. Well its an intended change, but they might have overlooked the high aspd mod of the skill. With it I hit 190 attack speed instantly with a pistol (and later I could do it with a rifle). Still, I ended up being defeated by some dbs.
This is my regular attack with a grenade launcher with fire spheres equipped. As I figured the high attack power of grenade launchers makes for some big, yet slow damage. At this point I think I had only 120 aspd with the launcher. Aspd is a bit interesting now, so for comparison sake, at this level (73) I had 177 aspd with a pistol, 173 unarmed, 166 with a rifle, and 120 with a shotgun. Base attack speed seems up, when I changed to gunslinger, pistol attack speed seems roughly 150, up from 130 base before.
Triple Action with a grenade launcher. Pretty decent damage.
Triple Action on a High Orc.
For comparison sake, Rapid Shower (Trigger Happy Shot) with my +6 double hurricane garrison. The grenade launcher is quite a bit stronger, though you lose out since you need coins to use Triple Action.
I ended up moving to a crit type. The Lever Action Rifle is a pretty decent rifle, with its CRIT+50. I'm actually using a +7 Double Drosera Lever Action Rifle. Drosera gives CRIT+15 to ranged attacks, though it doesn't show up on the status window. Oddly I'm told that drosera doesn't work with FAS. Anyways, the high attack of the lever action rifle and the bonus damage of critical attacks might make it stronger than the garrison, even with its lower attack speed. In this screenshot, I have the effect of the vanberk card active as well, and Last Stand.
Even a stronger monster like an elder goes down to the critical fury of the lever action rifle.
Off to alarms! I'm not actually sure why the Lever Action Rifle doesn't actually look like a rifle. Actually thats a problem with most gunslinger skills and attacks, the sprite never really shows the correct sprite for what you're using.
One thing I'm confused about is that I can't actually figure out why I'm doing different critical damage in both of these screenshots. Nothing really has changed...
Here's a video of clocktower leveling on gunslinger. Again note that when the video starts there was a 5 level difference, and I had slightly lower damage until my first level up.
Also, don't mind the icecream! I'm using 2x snowier cards, giving me a 40% chance to get icecream when killing a monster. It also means icecream gives me about the same healing as a white potion. Its good stuff for no-expense leveling.
There are, sometimes negative side-effects though!
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