Doddler's RO Journal
Sealed Shrine - The True Baphomet
By Doddler on September 13, 2008 in category 'MVP'
Just a short video I made durring testing on the Philippines RO test server for episode 12 (don't ask). While I'm not the best geared in this video, I wasn't expecting what ended up happening. Harder than expected!
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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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