Doddler's RO Journal
Viewing category: kRO Sakray RE
Wizard Cast Time Test
By Doddler on September 13, 2008 in category 'kRO Sakray RE'
So I decided to do some comprehensive testing with skill cast times. While its clear that they take longer to cast, there's little evidence as to what the fixed cast time is for most skills. So I figured I would find out.
A thing that most players on iRO haven't seen yet, is that the Issila Card bonus stacks with Magic Strings. Being in strings when the Issila Card activates (reducing cast time by 50%) generally gives you instant cast. I figured this would be the best way to test what the actual fixed cast values are for wizard skills.
The results as you may see are actually rather surprising. Storm Gust appeared to have a fixed time of a mere 2 seconds. Lord of Vermilion around 1.5s, Jupitel was roughly 1s, and Heavens Drive seemed the fastest with a 0.5s fixed cast time. Its conceivable that the skill delays may even be different for High Wizard, but at this time I couldn't test that.
So there you have it. Cast time may not be as bad as you think it is. While you need to stock pile a relatively healthy sum of dex to have the similar effects as you did before, its not beyond reasoning that gravity, like they did with weapon attacks and skills, wanted to put slightly more emphasis on equipment based cast time decreasing. After all, right now a wizard is solely based on his % increase to matk and how close to 150 dex he can get. This might change things a little.
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Renewal: A Rant
By Doddler on September 11, 2008 in category 'kRO Sakray RE'
So week two of the open testing of the kRO Renewal server has come to an end. There's something I wanted to address before I made my week two post... a lot of people have been complaining about the renewal update, without fully understanding what its about. I was initially going to rant about this later but I decided I'll post my week two update later The point is, people are saying that this is going to ruin RO. I digress. While I don't claim that the renewal update is as good or as polished as it could be, the game I am playing is not wow, its not another MMO, I'm still playing the game called Ragnarok Online. It may play different, but in my opinion, it is a better Ragnarok Online.
Lots of people are ragging on the changed stats, but I think its an improvement. Its true, there is an increased reliance on equipment. Stats aren't the only thing that make or break your character. But in my opinion, that's the way it should be. By increasing my strength, I improve my physical damage. Strength is not a baseline it is now, where a character cannot deal damage unless you have a substantial amount of it, no matter the weapon you have on. A properly geared character could still level and kill monsters, even though he is low strength. You don't require strength to deal damage, but it does what its supposed to do, and improves your damage. On a high str build, your strength probably makes up close to half the damage you do. Its a useful stat, but you aren't gimped as a melee class if you don't, say have 120-130 str as is normal now.
Other stats go the same way. Agi improves dodge rate and attack speed, vit improves max HP and recovery rate. There's advantages to getting each of these stats, but none of them are required for a build. Same thing with Int, which improves magic damage in a similar way that strength improves physical attack, and dex improves hit rate, and magic cast time. You can still deal decent magic damage even with low int if you're wielding a weapon that reinforces your magic damage, but the strongest casters still invest in this stat. Dex has a noticeable effect on cast time, even if you can't get instant cast like you can now. Instant cast was a sign of broken mechanics anyways... how can they use cast time to balance out skills if cast time means nothing to high level players?
I want to touch on cast time separately, in particular, how wizards play RO. Its no secret that for wizards, the game they play is an SG game. Fighting 1 monster? SG is the answer. Fighting 20 monsters? SG is the answer. In PVP? SG. In WoE? SG. Monster can't be hit by SG? Don't level there. Why is this the case? SG is their most powerful skill obviously. So is there a reason why one of the strongest AoE attacks in RO can be nearly (or completely) instant cast? It doesn't strike me as a valid balance. Its not like all wizard skills are slow to cast after the patch. With right gears I can drop firebolt 10's in half a second. The single target attacks seem to be well improved. Its just the AoE magic that's received a sharp change. So I think this is a marked improvement.
Luck is probably the most improved of the stats. Its a nice all rounder. Luck improves your chance to critical, chance to dodge, chance to hit, and provides a small boost to physical and magical damage. Making a character built solely on luck might still be crazy, but it might be possible.
Don't you see what they've done though? Each stat has a visible and noticeable effect on your character, but stats are balanced out properly. Like you see with my character build above, no stat is useless, no amount of a stat is useless anymore. They've freed characters from being forced down a specific class. Sure, a caster with high int is obviously going to hurt way more than a caster without int. But that's not to say that as a caster now you couldn't say, invest in agi (for dodging), vitality (for bonus HP and resistances), or say luck (to improve magic damage along with int). A character focused solely on forging or potion creation isn't doomed to a life of leeching. If a priest can't find a leveling partner, or even if they have, they could legitimately pick up a decent mace and start beating on monsters like the rest of the players. So while the reliance on stats has gone down, what you'll find that you actually have more freedom when building your character.
The second most frequent complaint is based around the level adjustment. Basically a low level character is basically penalized by fighting a higher level character or monster. The exact differences I've seen are as follows:
The lower level player/monster:
- Has physical and magical attack power reduced (30% reduction for 5 level difference, 60% reduction for 10 level difference)
- Has a lower chance to hit.
- Has a lower chance to land a critical attack.
- Receives bonus experience for killing a higher level target (if its a monster)
The higher level player/monster:
- Receives a bonus to their physical and magical defense.
- Receives less experience from killing the lower level target (if its a monster).
Thats about it from what I've seen. The chance to hit/crit and defense changes appear to scale linearly based on the level difference. The reduced attack power and experience changes appears to occur at specific points. After 10 levels difference, physical attack power doesn't appear to be reduced any further than 60%. This is a number that's hard to really tell, because defense is generally applied after the reduction, in attack, making the reduction seem bigger than it really is. However, if you're using skills and attacks that bypass defense, you'll see that the reduction is quite simple.
Inversely, the player doesn't appear to have their experience received penalized beyond 10 levels above the target. Contrary to popular belief, you can still gain experience from killing a monster that's lower level than you. While I haven't been able to get exact test results, the experience received from killing a lower level monster appears to max out at about 10%-20% of the monsters original experience.
Some people ask the question, why? Well its quite simple, RO is currently broken. The leveling system is right out in left field. Maybe for first time players it seems OK, but take a good look at what experienced players are doing. I see players leeching characters in thors, one of the highest level dungeons in this game, from level 20 archers (I'm serious here). I see players getting to max level, 99 trans, in only a days work, and without ever actually playing the character. iRO didn't help with its unbalanced anniversary event this year. The Role Playing is gone from this MMORPG... people don't play 'their' character, they play 'a' character, something that they can create in very short notice and start playing it right from max level. You see players in these high level guilds having literally every character class. What ever happened to players getting into their own class and role?
And for those of us that aren't so gifted as to be able to hop onto the leeching dynamo that makes up high level guilds, how do you level? I hate grinding as much as the next guy... but if you want to level a character in current RO, how do you do it? There's leveling zones commonly seen to be the most 'efficient' areas in game, and players level there from start to finish. There's few people in this game who haven't, or at very least haven't heard of someone who leveled an archer class from level 50 to 90 on hill winds. A knight or blacksmith from 60-99 on high orcs. An assassin from 70 - 99 in ice dungeon. Why do people do that? Obviously, its the most efficient way to do it. There's over 500 different unique monsters in this game, and several hundred maps (317 as of episode 11.3), and we constrain ourselves to 1 or 2 monsters and 1 or 2 maps for the majority of our game time because the game deems that unless you want to dump thousands of hours into leveling your character in random off zones, thats the way you have to do it.
And people complain when Gravity decides to mix this up? That confuses me the most. I'll be the first to say that there's some issues with the level difference setup (particularly, I think the defense adjustment is unnecessary), but really, is having to change what you're killing after a couple levels really a bad thing? For me, and the friends of mine that I have playing the patch, this is the most refreshing part of the update. When you can go out, explore the game world, fight different monsters and still be efficiently leveling, it doesn't feel like grinding anymore. There is an abundance of maps and locations in the game right now, you never truly run out of places to go leading up to level 99. Even though the renewal test is 10 times experience rate from normal servers, I don't think its bad. When playing renewal I get the feeling I'm leveling too fast, because I don't get enough time to explore different places.
So its really not that bad. Monsters are adjusted to be more fair as well for players of that level. Attack power of monsters doesn't scale as harshly as it does now. Even when I went into Volcano Thor, despite it being well above my level (its a lv130-140 zone), its refreshing to see that monsters such as salamanders no longer hit me for tens of thousands of damage. Monsters are still dangerous, but you don't really run the risk of many instant-kill attacks that you have to worry about currently in almost all end game dungeons. Melee characters naturally fair better against melee damage than support and magic classes because attack stats such as str and agi now improve physical defense, but even playing a wizard no monster yet could drop me before I could react to them, and that includes bio3 monsters.
Some people mentioned concerns that this patch kills partying, but I don't agree with that. There's definitely many cases, and many places to go from low level to high where players would benefit from grouping. While most monsters of a similar level are comparatively difficult and give similar amounts of HP, the map arrangements, individual skills used by monsters, and most importantly quantity of monsters varies quite a bit, and some locations are very clearly intended for party play.
I can't comment on bosses since boss monsters (and minibosses) are currently all missing from the renewal test at this time. I take this as a sign that they are intending to balance them properly for the renewal update. Personally I'd like to see the MVP system removed, as the concept that an individual player is rewarded for being the strongest while fighting a boss monster is an archaic idea from a time when bosses involved 50 swordsman ctrl-clicking on golden thiefbug, and not representative of a time when bosses generally require a team of players working together.
There's three common misunderstandings I see quite frequently, related to healing, attack speed, and damage. Its true that healing is slightly lower than it was before, but its very important to remember that healing is now based on magic attack power, which means its not just about your stats anymore. Having good equipment is fairly important. A high priest's int might account for 1000 HP recovered, and using say a lich's bone wand will account for 1000-1400 healing (2000-2400 heal total). Players can still achieve fairly high levels of heal though, and during testing I saw up to 2800 heals. It's actually kind of amusing now that skills such as gloria now makes a noticeable improvement to your healing because of how luk affects magic attack power.
And while it was true that attack speed was initially widely reduced when closed testing initially started, attack speed of characters has changed fairly dramatically since then. Novices see a base attack speed of about 140 still, and attack speed varies based on class, and weapon. Its unlikely people will be able to achieve 190 attack speed with any relative ease, though some specific builds can probably still do it. To make a point, my champion, who has 99 base agi, can achieve 185 attack speed with a knuckle, 185 barehanded, 181 attack speed with a mace, and only 168 with a wand. Of course that's without a shield equipped. The patch allows you to sacrifice the defensive bonus of using a shield for a bonus in attack speed. You lose about 4-5 aspd for using a shield, but at times that's worth it.
There's also some changes in the way attack speed modifiers stack. Attack speed increasing items and skills actually appear to give your attack speed stat a direct modifier instead of reducing the attack delay by a %. This can be a boon if you have a high base attack speed, or a negative hit if you do not. While a lord knight right now with a berserk potion, two hand quicken and frenzy can achieve 190 attack speed with only 1 agi (due to the fact that the 3 used in unison reduces the delay between attacks by a monstrous 80%), after the patch the same character will only have about 170 attack speed. If you tossed in a handful of agi you would probably still be able to get the same effects as before.
And lastly, a lot of people say that damage that players deal is reduced. During testing, I found this to be false. While attack power no longer improves exponentially with strength, and % increasing cards modify weapon attack only and not status attack, you'll find that the new damage formulas are actually more graceful than they were before. Damage improves more linearly as you add a stronger powered weapon or improve your base stats, but you'll find that with the right combination of weapon and the right stats, you'll be stronger than you were before. Of course, in a way damage may have gone down for some, because even with strings, you won't be chaining guillotine fists or soul destroyers anymore, but generally physical (and magical damage) are in good shape.
So I'm running out of things to talk about, so I guess I'll end it off here. Renewal isn't without its problems, and I think it definitely could use some work in a few areas. But at the same time, I'm tired of people complaining that this is going to ruin RO without looking at its merits, because honestly, there's quite a few of them.
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A Fisting Good Time
By Doddler on September 3, 2008 in category 'kRO Sakray RE'
And by fisting, I very definitely mean Guillotine Fist.
I noticed some rather peculiar behavior while testing guillotine fist damage, so I decided to go back and verify it. This is Guillotine Fist with my triple hurricane electric fist, without endow.
After receiving elemental endow, I performed the test again, and amazingly enough, the elemental modifier appeared to affect the damage from guillotine fist. Its quite something. Interestingly enough though the damage only improves by about 50%, even though a wind element attack should nearly double the damage. I imagine that the elemental mod is affecting either only equipment or status attack power.
I took the test further then, and attempted to use gfist on a ghost element monster. Miss. I guess that means its handled like Cart Revolution; the skill damage is augmented by elemental attributes, but for all intents and purposes the skill still calculates for resistance as a neutral skill. My guess is that this is because of the modified damage formula, in which % increasing cards and elemental modifiers seem to be factored in with your weapon attack power, rather than calculated later (though not in all cases).
I ran the same test on a whisper, using the skill while endowed with wind element. Definitely not hitting.
Off topic, but shown here is unarmed damage versus whisper. Since the damage has gone up since last time, my guess is that the entirety of the damage being dealt is due to demon bane (the effectiveness of demonbane increases as you level up). Demonbane and Divine protection seem like pretty kick ass skills now. Gazeti's hit me for a paltry 30-50 damage because of the hefty reduction provided by the skill (it seems to hit others around the 200 range). For Demonbane though, the fact that GFist misses on the whisper suggests that demonbane isn't calculated into all skill damage formulas, but it definitely seems to work for combos.
Here's a video showcasing the increased damage from being endowed on GFist. The mechanics are unusual however. Being endowed increases damage from around 48k to 59k... not what you'd expect when fire endow is expected to boost damage by 50%. Maybe I'll look into it later. I unfortunately cannot endow myself while unarmed, so that makes it harder to test how endow affects damage. Maybe I'll make a TK for that.
And yes, that damage is with a +5 double hurricane stunner (and bloody shackle ball).
That actually looks kinda cool... never mind. Anyways, since the patch changed the job exp chart, which basically meant that I could hit job 50 in a flat 20 minutes on siromas, I decided to test out Mental Strength. In testing, Ice Titans struck my monk for about 200-250 damage.
Here you can see the damage after using Mental Strength. From the looks of things, the final damage you receive is directly reduced by 90%. I imagine this means skills that bypass defense, etc will still be reduced. Well, to a degree, it will still bypass your defense, but the final damage will still be reduced by 90%. This change is interesting because it means that to use Mental Strength effectively now you still need to have defense, something that wasn't required before.
Ouch!
Anyways last patch also brought some other interesting changes. The monster distribution map provided by gravity has now been mostly corrected (see it here), though generally monster levels were modified, not the map modified. Some monsters are harder now. Siroma's in particular seem to have a much higher hit rate, and while I could still dodge them most of the time, they definitely landed hits more often. I imagine monster abilities were generally brought into line to how difficult they should be at that level, and maybe added a few more tweaks around so that monsters don't seem so formulaic.
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Ragnarok Renewal Test Server: Week 1
By Doddler on September 1, 2008 in category 'kRO Sakray RE'
Long time no post! As some of you might know, the Korean RO staff are currently running a large scale balance change patch called Renewal. Renewal changes stretch across most areas of RO, and fundamentally change gameplay mechanics. If you're not overly familiar with the update, I suggest you read up at least the first post on the irowiki thread (here) before you read further or you might be confused!
The concept of Renewal is basically to scale back mechanics. A fundamental flaw with RO is that much of its mechanics were... exponential in nature, from the experience chart, to attack power, cast time, defense, monster attack. These things have scaled over the years to give us an RO that really can't expand. So Renewal is Gravity's response to the current game flaws.
Renewal was in closed testing for 4 weeks, and now is in open testing. This means that those of us with free kRO accounts can play. For testing purposes, the server, called "Sakray R" or "Sakray RE" has 10 times experience and drop rates, and most every piece of equipment and non mvp cards are on sale from specific vendors in prontera. A full stat and skill reset npc is also available.
Now that the first week of testing has come to an end, I decided I will chronicle my experience with you.
Right off the bat things you can see things are a bit different. The NPC failed to actually give me a level because the base experience requirements have changed. Hit and Flee are also noticeably different stats, though really they're not much different than they are now except they show the base amount.
After a minute stabbing porings, which was really really easy because they die in 1 shot, I hit job 10. As you can tell the base/job ratio is quite different.
This is the vendor row in prontera, that sells all the gear.
An example of the armor shop. Lots of the gear that is regularly sold from vendors have their original price, but lots of rare items only cost 20z. The same goes for cards, they all sell for 20z.
Signs of a truly competitive war of emperium.
Thanks in no part to the horribly documented irowiki guide on the job change test, I hit mage. 
In the first shot here I'm using firebolt 1 with my dagger. In the second shot, I'm using my novice wand, a 32matk staff. The formula seems to favor weapon attack. Unarmed the magic damage doesn't vary at all, the variance of magic attack power seems to come entirely from the weapon you have equipped. In the end after playing for a bit, a good mage will have his damage around 50/50 based on stats and his weapon.
An entirely new concept in the renewal update, is the fact that you cannot (or can't easily) damage monsters that are much higher level than you. Monsters in which you incur a damage penalty have their name shown in red.
After poking around hornets from level 3-10, I went to rockers. Already at level 10 the magic damage is pretty good. Its not hard to one shot monsters of your level at this point.
Just wow. 
After massacring rockers for literally all of 5 minutes, I was becoming too high level for the area. If your base level is too much above the monsters, your experience drops drastically. So at level 20 I headed down to culverts. At this point I could damage thief bugs normally.
The place was pretty easy so I went all the way down to floor 4. At my level I didn't do that much damage to them but overall it was still good experience.
I encountered a rather annoying problem, what became a reoccurring theme. While for the most part zones are leveled properly so that a player of the right level for the map could properly fight the monsters there. Unfortunately some monsters, particularly the ones that appear on more than one area, are too high level for players leveling there. I couldn't harm drainlairs for example, and cramps are in the level 80 range.
Oops!
After leaving culverts, I cut a path across western midgard, first clearing out coco's, and around level 40 started making my way through the orc fields. Once I got soul strike high enough I could one shot them.
Its worth mentioning that most mage skills seem to cast considerably faster. Bolts seem about 1/4th their original rate.
Here's a short video I made of me leveling my mage. Note the decent damage for the characters level, and the speed at which he can cast skills.
And yes, I do get the irony of using RO2 music for the video. 
After orcs, around 46 I went down to orc dungeon. At around 10%-15% per kill (at 10x rate), and monsters dying easily in firewall or a single soul strike, you can imagine just how fast it was. It was only a couple minutes before I hit job 50.
A rather unusually placed NPC in orc dungeon will change your job to second class without doing a quest. Its also quite flashy too.
At this point I noticed that while players have a hard time hitting and damaging monsters higher level than them, it appears as though monsters also have that same problem. I guess annoying mobs are far less annoying if they can't hit you.
This is where the portal to (what is currently) west high orcs usually is. According to gravity, the map is removed. I wonder if its a permanent change or just temporary.
Drillers and Sidewinders provided good experience in the level 60-70 range. They spawn on the old mistress map. Drops are nice too!
While killing monsters much higher level than you isn't generally practical, it is possible. This argiope is 8 levels higher than my player.
Old school, frost diver + JT!
Higher level monsters seem to be affected by status effects for far less time than monsters of your own level. I couldn't use Jupitel Thunder 10 because argiopes would usually break free.
Monster heals seem broken. Shown here is a geographer healing for... 0.
Here's me successfully killing a monster 11 levels higher. The penalty for monster levels seems to go in steps. At 5 levels higher, your damage goes down by half, and at 10 levels higher, you take an even higher penalty. Still, its possible to kill, but generally not worth it to do so.
Same skill, now only 9 levels different. Its rather jarring when you go from doing 260 damage to doing 1200 damage just by leveling up.
From the looks of things, the town of Umballa leads directly to the Yggdrasil roots. I guess that means the Umballa dungeon is completely gone... Not that its a big deal, I didn't like the dungeon much myself but its odd for them to remove entire dungeons. Also, what happens to the sign quest? Maybe they'll move the guys hut.
I can only imagine this is due to a typo. Earth petites are apparently undead race and undead element.
Around level 82 I decided to perform alarm genocide. Even at this point, leveling is really quite fast.
Who in the world uses LoV while leveling? Well apparently I do. Its a bit stronger I think, but not really that great. Well SG now freezes almost too often to be reliable damage, and meteor storm while high damage is pretty random, so I guess LoV is probably the most 'reliable' AoE. Its too bad the cast time is nerfed so hard. More on this later.
TI was my next destination after clock tower. Most monsters died rather fast, with the exception of freezers which were slightly outside of my leveling range.
Rather pointless but it looks cool!
Two examples of how outleveling a monster by more than 10-15 levels gimps its ability to do... anything to you.
Breezes are very very scary monsters. After renewal, you should probably avoid them.
Frost Diver + JT wins again!
Oddly when leveling wizard I tend to only use my mage skills because dex doesn't reduce cast time enough. While I understand the intention here, that large AoE skills should take a long time to cast, 10-15 seconds is a long time in RO. They're destructive and very powerful, and currently wizard in RO could live without casting any skill other than stormgust. Rather broken I think. But under the current renewal update, there'll be pretty well no way that those skills will be cast in WoE. I think it would be acceptable if say, they reviewed rules for interrupting skill casts, because right now I don't think its realistic to have skills take so long to cast and be able to stop them to just a simple tap.
Yay for siromas, the new level 90 leveling zone.
So my friend decided to join me on the renewal server, so I started a new character. This time I decided I would go monk.
It doesn't take long to get to this point. In fact, up to level 70 or so I was regretting the 10x rates because I couldn't really experience much of the lower level content.
I usually took 1 damage from orc zombies, thanks partially to the now very powerful divine protection skill, but your defense goes down very quickly if you have a sizable mob.
Yeah, 1 damage from orc zombies. Since defense seems to be calculated strictly as direct reduction, in that your defense directly reduces the targets attack power, it can come a point where the damage is reduced as far as it will go. This is generally only noticeable on lower level monsters, or in this case I get an additional -40 damage from undead and demon with divine protection. It helps that monster attack power is way lower.
You know I thought that the plan was to scale back attack power, but really I think most characters with decent weapons will actually be stronger after the patch. The reliance on weapon attack power is pretty obvious though, much more than with magic attacks. I guess thats not a bad thing... a priest for example, even with no strength could pick up a suitably strong weapon and start leveling without too much penalty.
Since defense is subtraction type now, monsters like Horongs are no longer invincible to regular melee damage. They take reduced damage for sure, but they certainly take much more.
Dead branches is a very very annoying problem. As you might imagine because of the level restrictions, its quite possible for monsters that are impossible for you to kill to come from dead branches. Compounding this problem is the fact that some monsters are higher than level 99... this flame skull, though you might not imagine it due to its pathetic damage is in the level 120-130 range.
Mimics, annoying no longer.
Another example of monsters too strong for certain areas. Pyramids 4f is a level 70 zone, but several ancient mummies, level 120 spawn there.
Heal formula has changed too. Its now based on your MATK. Since rods contribute heavily to your matk, you probably shouldn't use heal without one equipped. The left shot is heal 3 without a weapon, and on the right is heal 3 with a bone wand. Note that I don't have much int (probably only 10 at this point).
While gravity's leveling chart said hill winds were level 101, they're really only level 74, and good hunting to boot. I found out the hard way though that flee penalty for mobbing is still very much real!
Veins fields are all kinds of screwed up. Muscipular are killable in the 75 area, but drosera are almost 10 levels higher. The galions that spawn there are over level 100. Not to mention that you can't even walk from Rachel to Veins, because they removed Veins field 01.
Finally a magmaring field! They're good leveling too.
Kasa's seem considerably weaker, even though they're now in the 120 range. I guess that since assumptio no longer halves damage, that these monsters had to be toned down too.
Clock Tower is definitely the place to be level 80-90. CT HO's are pretty efficient, as are alarms.
While I am packing more flee than most characters would, using a mocking undershirt + pantie, +15 flee from the monk skill and almost 90 base agi, it seems that dodging in general is a bit easier than it was before.
I couldn't really explain this. Whispers took the same damage with and without a weapon. Under normal rules you shouldn't even be able to hit them.
They definitely take more damage with an elemental weapon! I'm totally confused.
The level 90 zone of choice is Turtle Island now. As I mentioned earlier, the change in the way defense is calculated makes certain monsters considerably easier.
Out of all the leveling from 1-90, my character was never in a real threat of dying. I don't even carry potions with me because what I don't flee generally doesn't hurt too much. TI was the first place I generally was at risk of dying if I didn't pay attention.
Well trying to kill necromancers isn't a good way to live either. 
Yup, armor defense just isn't what its cracked up to be anymore.
Occult Impaction 3 on a monster considerably higher level than me (14 levels I think). Even skills that bypass defense are reduced by the level difference.
When fighting a monster thats higher level than you, you definitely get a penalty to your damage, and you definitely get a penalty to your hit rate, but it doesn't appear as though the opponent gets a bonus to his hit (beyond the +1 hit per level). That creates relatively amusing scenes when fighting higher level monsters when really you both can't do crap all to each other.
The sting is about 10 levels higher than me, and I ended up having to kill it with occult (600 damage) because my melee attack didn't do any damage.
To some, you'd think Sakray RE means Ragnarok Upgrade Sim. There's an npc in town that upgrades items free of zeny or item cost. As cool as that is, it seems like a seriously large portion of the players online are using this npc at any given time.
Yeah kinda random.
There's a field near Einbroch with groups, no, ARMIES of teddy bears. Its the most frightening thing I've seen in RO for a long time.
Well, I can dodge breeze on monk but I still can't kill them.
Battle Biochemist! Nothing special, I just thought they were rare enough that I should screenshot it. I guess thats probably going to be the norm after renewal though, since int builds are probably a thing of the past.
A bit of a showcase here about how things have changed. Damage from most monsters is way down, and even I can flee her a little. Her skills still hurt like all hell though, and I did have only around 60% dodge rate. Still, she's a level 140 monster now... and no one would consider dodging her before the patch. I guess things are just that much different.
Aren't dead branches annoying? Leveling in zones with monsters that drop them is particularly bad. Another monster that failed to be able to hit me. I can't really do much against these monsters though.
I love the job they did with amatsu. It looks so nice. I got a good amount of time to appreciate it because apparently there are no monsters in the field. Oops?
There were monsters in the dungeon though, and it was a fairly good 95 zone. The weirdest thing here was the tengu's provoke though.
You can see that my damage jumped up from 530 or so to 760-800... an impressive boost. What you can't see though is that the damage monsters did to me also jumped from about 140-160 a hit to about 450 a hit. It actually made it a fairly challenging place to level.
Another ghost element monster. This time my regular attacks only do 1.
...except my skills apparently do more, even though I'm not elemental endowed. Screwed up in many ways.
Apparently I can crit them too... though the critical damage appears to be equal to my unarmed attack power. Again very confused.
TI was probably the better leveling zone for me so I decided to head back, now that I was in proper level range of assaulters.
Nice.
Here's a video I made of leveling the monk down in TI 4F. Its nothing too interesting, and doesn't really show too much of the new mechanics, but it gives you an idea of how I was leveling.
From TI I decided to make the last push to 99 at ice dungeon. Unfortunately 99 wouldn't be the last leveling I need to do before I go trans, because the job experience rate is so bad. I haven't mentioned this yet but I probably should have, job experience is much, much slower than it was before. In general, by the time you get to 99 you'll be anywhere from job 46-48. Yeah. 
Occult Impaction Lv 3 on a level 110 monster. Again there's a hefty reduction in damage here.
Yay, level 99! ... 99/46.
Apparently this assassin has found out the secret to 190 attack speed. My guess would be 3x cecil damon cards in a high upgraded wind element katar, but I might be wrong.
After getting job 47, I finally unlocked guillotine fist. While its partially obscured, the damage on siroma, a level 98 monster, was 31798, with no weapon equipped.
Do you know how hard it is to take guillotine fist shots where the damage isn't obscured? Anyways, the damage on an ice titan, a monster that is 11 levels higher, is 8104.
The conclusion I drew from testing so far is that when a monster is 5 levels higher than you, your attack power is penalized by 50%. When a monster is 10 levels higher, its penalized by 75%. The higher level also appears to get a bonus to their defense rate (which also appears to occur after skill modifiers), though I haven't been able to determine exactly how much it is. With your attack power lowered, subtraction defense is considerably stronger, which is why your normal attacks almost always do 1's to monsters 10+ levels above you.
To further prove a point, I decided to test things the other way around.
Currently in RO you receive a -5% penalty to DEF for every monster above 2, just like you receive a flee penalty. It appears that if you mob enough low level monsters, that your defense drops so much that it can even negate the bonus defense you get from your level difference. It appears as though you still get the % reduction but you can lose the defense reduction you get. Not sure exactly how its calculated because I'm sure hill winds have around 200-300 attack power. Maybe there's further % reduction steps above 10 levels difference (the damage I received would be in line with 90% reduction), since I outlevel hill winds by 25 levels.
Now thats a mob train! I tried to run the test on orc zombies first but I couldn't get the damage to go above 1, likely due to divine protection and low attack power.
This is how my monk looks like now! The weapon is a triple hurricane electric fist, pantie is picky card (didn't want the def reduction from porcellio), and the undershirt is whisper card. Usually I use a double hurricane stunner, the highest attack power weapon available to monk, but the fist is stronger against siromas by a good amount once endow goes off.
And thats it! Stay tuned for future installments. I made a series of testing videos, that while I didn't embed them in this post, you can take a look at yourself.
Wizard magic attack 2 / bolt cast test
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