Doddler's RO Journal
Orc Lord on Valkyrie
By Doddler on October 22, 2008 in category 'MVP'
I figured I'd post this here. We decided to do Orc Lord on the Valkyrie server. There were two of his drops in particular we were after, the Doomslayer Axe, as well as the Bloody Axe. Doomslayer is a beast of an axe, and while people hardly expect you to use it for say, bowling bash on a Knight, it can do the job well. The Doomslayer is generally given a bad rep but I think its not a bad weapon. If you have enough strength to use it, its a whopping 350 attack power level 4 axe, with a 30% chance to stun on every attack and 5% chance to break the targets armor. You lose attack speed and it does increase SP cost of skills, so I don't think you would keep it as your primary weapon, but considering I cause a pretty hefty rucus with a 120 atk spear that merely bypasses defense, a 350 attack axe that paralyzes and destroys armor could be seen as a step up. Even if I don't use it, there's some other characters in guild that could equip it and utilize its abilities.
Anyways about the actual MVP. Like many earthquake MVPs, Orc Lord basically doesn't do anything that can be seen as a challenge other than earthquake. Unfortunately, earthquake is really a bad thing to deal with when you have no cranials, immunes, and limited access to assumptio. As you can see, our strategy generally involved simply falling over when it did end up using earthquake. More than that, the plan was to burn it down in a way that it would never use earthquake while in power up. We were successful in that, though just barely. Another 2 seconds and we would have been toast.
Ninja as main killer was fairly effective I think. BURNING is a pretty damn good ninja, and his high level contributes to his abilities. I don't think any other main killer could have done the job of avoiding the powered up earthquake at this point.
In the future we hopefully can reduce party size to 5-6 players, as we add in more shields. Its unfortunate that cards like Horn are made available due to rampant botting of low level areas, but its availability does give us an opportunity to do this a little easier. With the 10 people we had in range of EQ, players with horn can survive without assumptio, so I think if we reduced party size we could do it as long as people were willing to use assumptio scrolls.
I apologize for the poor video quality though! My computer sometimes doesn't do a very good at capturing video with fraps. I couldn't actually pull the MVP while recording with fraps, so the very first bit while I get it moved into position was missing.
Oh! The drops we got were a Grand Circlet and a slotted ring. Not what we were looking for but pretty decent drops none the less.
-View Comments (22 comments)
Valkyrie Leveling and MVPs
By Doddler on October 21, 2008 in category 'MVP'
Back again, with some more Valkyrie server goodness. The above video is our guild taking out the 5 Atroce spawns. While we were a bit rough on our first attempt, you'll see that each run was notably smoother and faster than the one before it. It simply goes to show that you don't have to be particularly well equipped as long as you're smart about what you do. Atroce is no pushover, and to take him out easily at this point since Valkyrie server opening is nothing short of impressive.
Behold, the gear of a true Atroce tank. Not quite optimal for the job, but I'm sure you see in the video that aside from our first attempt, Atroce very rarely ever landed a blow. Counter Attack turned out to be more useful than expected, since attacks that are countered do not count towards safety wall hits, making walls last longer.
The Flamberge is just a store bought weapon. I got it since it was the strongest attack power 1h sword that was easily available. A spear would work but counter relies on ASPD so a fast hitting weapon is important. In retrospect I should probably have bought a dagger, but the sword is nearly as good.
As you can see from the previous shot, I've been getting some levels. Generally my in game time has been spent somewhere on gear hunting and efficient leveling, and while there is usually very little overlap, some places like Glast Heim Chivalry 2F can be fairly good for both. The Ahlspeiss, the two handed spear that we have in guild is an amazing spear that can bypass defense. You can see here that it can deal pretty decent damage on targets normally highly resistant to physical damage. We didn't get any cards from chiv yet though.
This is unfortunately my reaction as well when seeing another player at Thara Frogs. The GMs have generally had a very good response time for taking care of bots, which is why I'm generally a bit confused as to why bots are suddenly running wild. Maybe its cause some of their staff is in the Philippines for RWC? Not really sure.
Nothing special, just thought it was a kind of cool shot. Counter Attack owns though!
Same party, one level down, against the real Maya. Now that we have a buckler of gargantua in guild, Maya is no longer able to kill me with her powered up brandish spear, generally making hunting her much safer for everyone.
Improvements in skill, level and gears are winding down the party size needed to do some of the weaker MVPs, such as moonlight flower. Tolrin is giving her a good hit in this shot.
I missed shotting the item on the ground, but we found one of these while on the way down to kill her. Lucky!
Most would consider drake a worthless boss, but between Cutlus, Saber and Haedongun, these are items that players at this point in the game really need, so we've been making a note of killing him.
Once we got a wind armor, mistress instantly became the easiest boss on earth. Well, that's not entirely true, as only certain players are effective at killing her, but we were sure to bring those along. The real battle however, is finding her, which is much more annoying when you have 4 people waiting for you to find it.
Osiris was a little harder than expected. I think it simply came down to being unprepared... the fight got off to a real bad start when I got JT'd trying to pull it and the boss was never on me the entire time until people started dying. I would have had a victory shot but Tychon ignored us and tried to kill it on his own.
An unusual place to find such a monster. Hydrolancer is known for its fairly good drops, so we took the time to try to kill it. Hydrolancer isn't exactly an easy monster though.
Victory!
.....
...
..
OMG! WTF! 
...
So yeah, we found a Hydrolancer card on our very first kill. I'm amazed at our luck, but at the same time I'm disappointed because Hydrolancer card, while very rare, isn't really that good. The card slots into a weapon, and gives a 10% chance to cast spell breaker level 1 when attacking an enemy. While it sounds reasonable, spell breaker is really a skill that requires timing to use, and an autocast card is anything but reliable. In woe players rarely are using skills that are uninterruptable, and spell breaker doesn't work very well on boss monsters... which really gives a limited selection of targets that its useful with. We might just keep it as a trophy.
-View Comments (12 comments)
Life on Valkyrie
By Doddler on October 16, 2008 in category 'General'
Probably the most unusual mail I get in game!
So its been a bit since I posted so I figured I'd image dump and talk a little bit about whats going on.
One thing I wanted to bring up is of course WoE, and more specifically, how amazing it is. I didn't get any shots during woe itself yesterday unfortunately, but it definitely is great. When I played on Loki I usually skipped woe because it wasn't really much fun, but since we've been woeing on Valkyrie I feel that it is different. Both the Valkyrie Guild and the Inertia alliance have some very skilled players, and fighting across such a vast battlefield with the guilds on such an even playing ground (most of us are similarly ungeared), the war becomes as much about logistics and organization than it is about manpower. We're basically pulling what amounts to a 10 castle defense, and while we weren't perfect on our defense, as we lost one fort entirely and had econ broken on two others, we managed to land punches back and push them onto the defensive by seizing their forts at random and also captured the enemy's primary econ fort. It was a great time, and I look forward to future woe battles on the server.
That said, the level of coordination required to properly get players to where they need to be is nothing short of a monumental undertaking, and I saw similar levels from Inertia as we had ourselves. Part of it is that there is no recall... though I'll say right now I think woe would be better without the recall skill. Still, in the Valkyrie woe of today, with our guilds seemingly fighting battles on 2, 3, 4 or more fronts in different locations, using recall would amount to nothing but suicide, a victory in one location but a loss in many others. It works when you have one fort to attack, or one fort to defend, but not in our current setting.
Breaking a ragequit fort. 
Counter Attack... unappreciated as an attack skill, but also unappreciated as a defensive skill. While you can't counter skills, if you have a decent enough attack speed you can basically negate all of a targets regular melee damage.
$$$
Not quite so cool. 
So because I'm unfortunately far too lazy to make a sage slave and I think that goes for probably everyone else in Valkyrie, I conscripted a scholar to make some converters for me. Its all part of my master leveling plan.
OOOOOOOOHHHH YEEEEEEEAAAH
One shot on High Orcs at my current level of 79 (though the one shotting of orcs rocketed me quickly from 72). The weapon right now is merely a +8 triple smashing pike. Overall I make enough from drops to continually fund my potion use. When I first started I needed to use dex and bless to even hit and kill them efficiently, and at times I even used assumptio scrolls to make the potion use reasonable, but now I level there using only str+ food as the kafra shop. During the exp event, with a manual it can hit 6m exp per hour solo. Not bad. 
Of course I can't help but kill bosses. While I have to compromise for something more reasonable to solo, there's always something worth killing. Personally I don't fully understand the removal of the Deviling card, especially since what I would consider its superior counterpart, the Ghostring still exists in game. I think making it a monster drop only would have been fine. Oh well.
Power Up Orc Hero is scary. It only lasts 30 seconds though, so you can just wait it out and go back to killing.
Counter attack tanking is pretty cool.
Dracula is an all-trick MVP. While none of us can even take his hits, it doesn't take a while lot to be able to completely avoid those hits. His strongest attack, Hell's Judgment can be negated at short range with safety wall, and at range with pneuma. You can see how it works here.
Of course it goes poorly if someone forgets to pneuma the person tanking the bats. Luckily it wasn't a full wipe.
Pharaoh is much the same thing as Dracula, except without the piling up on the boss. His dark blessing removes all the HP of the tank, but as long as you have safety wall up it shouldn't kill you (although sometimes he combos with a magic attack right after, which is just mean). Its not really practical to do, but I'm certain we're the first on Valkyrie to do it.
Even Tao Gunka! Not sure why you would kill Tao Gunka for anything other than his card. Gemmed Sallet is kind of cool, but binoculars are totally owned by the existence of the robo eyes on the shop.
Speaking of the Kafra Shop, I must say I'm happy with how gravity handled the upgrade situation on Valkyrie server, by greatly reducing the cost of enriched ores to 30 points. Its a smart business decision, as I'm sure people will be willing to pay for the improved rates, but most importantly, I think that the new prices are in some respects fairly affordable, which means your average joe will be able to make use of them. Personally I'd like to see some of the other shop items become more affordable, in particular, the buff scrolls, but its a very nice step in the right direction.
Anyways that's it for today, stay tuned for more Valkyrie stuff in a couple days.
-View Comments (12 comments)
Valkyrie Server MVP'ing
By Doddler on October 11, 2008 in category 'MVP'
You didn't honestly expect us to take long to get into the MVP scene did you? Even in the relatively ungeared and under leveled scene that is the Valkyrie server, many MVPs are still possible, though they take a little more work than one would normally need to beat them. I apologize for the crappy maya portion of the video, I will put in a new final segment if I get some new footage.
Overall all the MVPs were fairly simple. The gears I have aren't exactly optimal, so I made use of assumptio scrolls. Honestly I save two monthly subscriptions worth by playing on the free server now... but I never intended to take that money out of RO. The free server model is easier to pay for I think because you get tangible benefits for paying, so I don't feel bad about using scrolls on something like this. Its probably required without a mental strength tank, which we're lacking at the moment.
Phreeoni isn't all that tough. He does still hurt in power up though, which is why I still made use of assumptio. Main concern is stone curse. Its harder to deal with when no one can resist it, and none of the casters can hold a monster to break stone because no one has phens. Our first attempt was pretty rough, but once we started having people off screen it wasn't bad. Realistically this only takes 3 people with our current gear, but we don't want to leave our guildies out of the fun.
Moonlight Flower is a bit angry in melee combat, so we made a very visible effort not to tank it when we could. She basically forces us to do it anyways, because her constant use of magnetic earth requires you to keep moving. We've done moonlight twice so far, and no major casualties yet.
Our first decent MVP loot.
Orc Hero is pretty hard. Luckily our guild has a cranial guard that I use for this, or it would probably not be possible. Tanking it isn't so bad, as long as pneuma is kept up. Problem comes with power up. His earth element attack is what kills me in the video, and each of the three times we've done I've died to it. Actually main issue is when they blast him with SG like that I can't see his power up until its too late to move. I'm contemplating getting more earth resistance via a hode garment or fire element armor to prevent this one shot problem, which would make this another easy MVP.
The last MVP featured in the video is Maya. Her slaves move independently of her, and as you can see from our first encounter if you don't control it properly the minions run free and will kill everyone except the tank. Physically the arclouse deal more damage than maya herself. Again like the other MVPs we fought Maya becomes tricky when she powers up. Her brandish Spear struck me for 12k before. If I manage to find the brandish blind spot (a place you can stand where brandish spear will miss), then its not so hard to tank, but I can't seem to reliably figure it out. Maybe later we'll do this MVP more frequently.
Eddga isn't in the video, since we've only got to do him once, and that was in GD. We basically did what we did with Moonlight Flower, keep moving, don't stand in one spot for too long, and eventually it falls over.
These are my MVP tanking gears, nothing short of epic eh? 
-View Comments (19 comments)
View Previous Entries | View Next Entries