Doddler's RO Journal
Rant on RO Mechanics
By Doddler on July 29, 2008 in category 'Ranting'
I'm going to warn you here that the following Rant is very long. Very very long. I'm not sure if there's much point to it either. You have been warned.
RO is the kind of game that you have to come up with your own goals. Games like WoW have a sort of treadmill experience; the whole thing is carefully and meticulously planned from start to finish (or lack of finish). RO is different though, and maybe it’s just its age showing, but the experience is far less clear cut. How you play RO is really up to you, and there’s a good deal of end game content to choose from, and always more coming. I, as you probably know focus on the MVP aspect.
RO’s stance at game mechanics is probably one of the most extreme in an MMO. There’s little in the way of moderation, and other mainstream titles would cry at some of the things that are done. Items just don’t give you some status effect resistances, they give you immunity. Elemental resistance armor doesn’t just reduce damage by a little bit; it cuts incoming damage by 75%. Shield cards don’t just offer a little resistance; they cut damage by a whopping 30%-40%. Skill attacks don’t simply deal extra damage; they deal several times your normal attack power. You don’t simply increase your attack speed by a couple percent, the rate you attack increases exponentially.
The list could probably go on and on, and there are lots of things I could list, from specific skills, classes, and abilities. The point is though, is that RO’s take on game balance is quite different from other games. Some people say there is no game balance, but behind the seemingly random cloak of high numbers and %’s, there is some method to the madness. RO seemingly pulls off balance by making things not equal to each other, and everything classes throw out is seemingly overpowered in their own way, they’re all unique and excel at something. You have to generally concede that in Ragnarok, some character classes simply are going to suck at certain things. Each character class, of the some 39 jobs if you count transcendent characters separately, strikes some kind of balance between things they do really well and things they don’t.
For this reason I usually simply laugh to myself when I read of complaints about character balance. Gravity’s answer to a class or skill being unbalanced never usually results in that class or skill being modified. No, the answer is to create more extremes for other classes and other skills. Skill A is overpowered? Well ok then, now Skill B is twice as strong. It’s a strange way to handle it, but by the time you hit the end game each class’s role, how they perform and what they can and can’t do is so unique that I can’t help but think they’ve succeeded.
It’s no surprise then that the same philosophy to balance also ends up extending to monsters. While there are some basics in place to keep leveling and character building balanced, the game rewards those who can do crazy things. Only in RO can you have your new archer leveling in Thor Volcano with some friends, build a 99 character literally over night, and pull off some insane leveling blitzes by using various combinations in Biolabs.
Again it comes as no real surprise then that when Gravity finally decided that they wanted to stop dallying with stupid things like the World Project and crappy little towns and focus on making challenging content for high end players, the method that they chose to do it was to make monsters impossibly strong. It wasn’t enough that a monster could hit you for 1000 damage a hit. No, they would make a skill that causes monsters to triple in damage. They couldn’t just make a skill that makes a monster evade some of your attacks, they had to make a skill that made monsters impossible to hit. While they make impossibly hard monsters, they expect players to utilize their extreme equipment and abilities given to them. I think though that in their desire to make things challenging, I can’t help but feel that they’ve overlooked some important aspects, such as reward for being challenged.
Take Orc Lord for example, as an example of the balance they’re striking here. He’s a boss monster that with relatively decent end game equipment, you can probably expect to take 500-600 damage per hit from his attacks. He does a powerful earth element attack, which hits for 5 times his attack, so you’re looking at 2500-3000 damage. Once weakened, he’ll use Earthquake, an attack that hits for, with say 2 people on screen (there’s little value in having more players for a low reward MVP such as Orc Lord), for 3000-4000/hit, for about 9000-12000 damage depending on your resistances. Again, a properly equipped duo could survive this. At 30% HP, he uses Power Up, a skill that increases his attack power by 3 times and makes his attacks un-dodge able. Now he’ll use his earth element attack, striking you for 7500-9000 damage. If he uses his Earthquake, you will be taking 9000-12000 damage a hit, an attack that is literally impossible to survive.
In traditional RO style, there’s dozens of ways you can deal with this. Earthquake is split across the number of people on screen. You could, if you wanted to bring 6-8 players to Orc Lord to make this Earthquake survivable. If you have very rare gears such as Ghostring or Golden Thiefbug cards, then you can survive those attacks. You can engage in hit and run maneuvers, simply die and plan to get up quickly with the help of another player (or Kafra Shop). Again I could probably keep listing things.
But for what? What is the point of killing a monster so strong? If you were rewarded for your efforts reasonably then people I’m sure would take the time to do so. But you’d have to engage and kill him probably 15-20 times in order to receive a valuable item, and if such an item does drop, his rare items are worth only a fraction of what you can get from other, far easier targets.
Part of it comes down to how the MVP game is played. Boss monsters have a set spawn on their own map, and there’s dozens of them in the game. The drop rates on rare items from boss monsters are generally very low. That is, they’re considerably higher than say, regular monsters, but having to kill a boss monster 120 times in order to get his rare item can be a real drag. As such, the way the MVP game is played is that players generally take on the task of killing many bosses across the game world, keeping track of when they spawn and taking them down. While individual rates from bosses are low, players can actually increase their odds by basically being in a constant state of killing bosses. These players generally clash with other players hunting bosses and compete for their rewards. The end result is a sum of all these parts, players can stay in constant action by engaging in difficult content that sometimes results in player versus player battles, and can be quite exciting.
However, the lack of ‘Real’ bosses didn’t help RO much, so Gravity ended up creating a new tier of boss, one that requires many players to kill but yield much higher rate of reward. Of course, it goes without saying that they cranked up the impossibility meter up a few notches, to make sure that it wasn’t too easy.
I can’t entirely say for sure why gravity decided to ‘promote’ some of their older bosses that used to be part of the MVP game to the tier of endgame boss. It would be understandable if these monsters had their rewards improved to match their difficulty, but generally they didn’t. Well they did, but not really enough. Sure, you can get a slotted majestic goat if you kill Baphomet some 200 times, but most people won’t see the point of doing so. RSX-0806 is a boss that I think they completely missed the point on; after being raised to the status of ‘really frigging hard’, they gave him an incredible rare item, the slotted ice pick. It’s unfortunate then that you’d actually have to kill him roughly 5000 times in order to get the item. The amount of times this boss has died on iRO in the last half a year probably ranks in the double digits because of this.
Some of these Endgame Bosses seem impossibly hard due to some skills such as Earthquake. It wouldn’t surprise me though if the development team expects players to have ghost armor in order to tackle these monsters. After all, they expect you to have fire armor to level in Volcano Thor, or water armor to battle Ktullanux. Maybe they simply underestimate how few of these there are in the game, and how their distribution is so top heavy among the top 0.1% or so of players that most players cannot hope of achieving one. Either way, most players wouldn’t hope of defeating Endgame Bosses such as Randgris and Ifrit without a well organized, well equipped party of at least 12 people. So again it’s a shame that killing these monsters is hardly worth having 12 people along to do the job. It’s for this reason that endgame content isn’t about player skill and coordination as it is about finding exploits to do things with as little work as possible.
Because of the harsh balance of endgame bosses, It not only encourages players to find and abuse in game mechanics to kill the bosses, for many people, it’s a requirement. Many people simply can’t rise to the level required to fight these monsters properly. So instead people find ways to kill them by exploiting various tricks or bugs in the game. At first it was magnetic earth, to prevent boss monsters from teleporting. Right now its Ankle Snare abuse to keep a monster from reacting. If they eventually fix Ankle Snare, I’m sure they’ll move onto ice wall + Guillotine Fist. If that fails, I’m certain they’ll move on to killing bosses with reflect damage. I’m sure there are other things that players can abuse as well to fight boss monsters without ever having to actually fight them.
Another thing that tends to happen on many RO servers (some more than others) is that the first team that can kill an endgame boss gains a monopoly on killing it. They keep the time for themselves, and any players that do show up to attempt to kill it will face stiff competition. Usually, the monopoly team wins because the challengers have no previous experience in fighting the boss. So the monopoly team continues to control the boss, and other players are unable to experience the end game content due to the competition and learning curve.
I’ve been asked before, why do I care about abuse of bugs at boss monsters. He told he that MVP’ing basically comes down to killing bosses in as few people as possible and getting valuable rewards for doing so. The answer I told them was that if every boss monster comes down to abusing a bug, usually the same bug, what is there left to do in this game? On one hand you can easily achieve end game items and rewards, but on the other hand you’re losing the actual fun part of getting those. Sure you can get fancy new gears, but for a person who plays this game TO fight bosses, if all future content comes down to the same abuse, then I have unfortunately seen everything this game will have to offer.
So that’s it. I figured I wanted to write something on the issue, and while it turned out to be stupidly long (4 pages in word), I hope there’s some interesting information for players. I commend anyone who read the whole thing! I do indeed wish to see boss bugs fixed, but at the same time if they are going to make us have to take these things on head on, then they likely should look at the balance.
To conclude, I’ll leave a quote from a Q&A session with the jRO GMs at the 2008 User Symposium.
Q. What do you intend on doing about Ankle Snare abuse at boss monsters.
A. The current trend of the game appears to be to create harder and harder monsters that are impossible for most of our users. Some resourceful players are using skills such as Ice Wall and Ankle Snare, and while I think that this is a bug, I think that if we are to fix it we also need to review the difficulty of these Bosses.
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A couple random RO videos
By Doddler on July 25, 2008 in category 'General'
How do people like the video's I've been posting here? They're time consuming to make but in retrospect they tend to speak for themselves, and writing a umpteen page writeup is fun, sometimes video's give you more of an idea of what things really are like.
Anyways I made a few things the last week or so and they don't really fit into their own post, so I decided I'd group them together.
First up is the Endless Tower. My thief is poorly geared, level 52, and definitely not cut out for it, but I found out recently the level limit was only 50, so I decided to give it a go. This video may win an award for the most boring RO video of all time. Still, it gives you an idea of the process to get to the Misty Island where the tower resides, and shows how sign up is for the Memorial Dungeon system.
RO is an old game, so its no real surprise that a feature like Instanced Dungeons are a little clunky. Creation of instances aren't well, instant. Generally players are put in a queue and the server given a moment will create the maps for your instance on a random zone server. This process takes about a minute roughly, though if there are multiple people waiting for instances to be created, you may find yourself waiting several minutes or longer. Given RO's current population and the current instances available I doubt you'll ever run into much waiting other than on maybe opening week of the system.
About the dungeon itself, obviously my thief fails pretty hard, and the latency between Canada and Korea (through a proxy no less) generally meant I couldn't pot fast enough to clear room 2. Still, the video gives you an idea of what you're looking at. It shows you neat things like how the monsters won't spawn near the entrance portal (they seem to spawn only on the left side of the room), and it gives you a good idea how big the rooms really are. If nothing else, the video may just give you a better idea of what to expect.
Here's a rather distasteful playthrough with the new battleground "Krieger Von Midgard". KVM as they call it for short, is a 5 on 5 PVP match, designed for a quick head on head team battle. I of course participated in the under 60 level bracket. As with the other battlegrounds, you chose which side you wish to participate in. These guys weren't very happy with me because they can't really stop me from joining their team (Its the good old 'wait in an NPC chatroom until ready' system), which kept one of their other members from participating.
As you can see here what ended up happening wasn't a real PVP match at all though. What happened is that since not many people participate in the under 60 bracket, the one team simply threw 5 vend merchant characters into the opposing team, guarenteeing an easy victory and free KVM points to exchange for various rewards. I wonder if the GMs will have to police this for us when we get it on iRO... This isn't likely to be as big of an issue with the 20v20 matches with the other two battlegrounds, but then you get the very different issue of people AFK'ing.
Beyond that problem though the battleground system seems to work ok. Players are automatically assigned to teams, and players within the same team are basically considered partied (they aren't really but they can see others HP and cast party skills on them). Players on the same team show up on the minimap as a grey square, and enemy players always have a crossed swords emblem dislayed above their head in the same way emblems display in woe. For KVM, a score indicator in the top right shows how many players on either team are left alive. The indicator isn't used for Tierra Canyon, and in Flavius it's used to display the current score (best of 3). Overall its pretty good, though some issues such as AFK'ing the battlegrounds and padding the opposing team with useless characters are a problem that I haven't seen solved yet.
After our relatively rough Ifrit run last week, I wanted to get a better idea of why Earthquake was flooring us there but not with Randgris. In this short test I managed to reproduce the problem we faced: players dying caused earthquake damage to increase on the final hit.
So I investigated a little more into the issue. This little video might give you a better idea of what happens. If nothing else it has one of my favorite piano tunes, the Maple Leaf Rag. 
Anyways in this video, the High Priest here has 7777 HP. What you'll see is that there's a delay, of about half a second from when you take damage from Earthquake to when it actually applies to your character. Earthquake itself seems to hit every 1/3 of a second. You'll see that while the first hit of EQ is higher than the priests max HP, the delay before the damage applies to the character means he's still alive for the second hit. When he does finally die, the third hit is applied to the living character with twice the damage. If the person survives just the first hit, he'll be alive to reduce the 3rd hit of EQ.
So my brief assessment of what happened at Ifrit was a bit incorrect. For the tank to survive, we just need to make sure players are surviving hit #1. This wasn't an issue with Randgris since most players were being hit for about 4k/hit, so no one died on hit 1. Ifrit's EQ was doing 7k-8k though, and with the low HP characters dead, the final hit became unbearably strong. I had hoped Kaupe would fix this, and indeed the one time we survived EQ (when the tank didn't use the ghostring), was when Kaupe blocked the first hit for the full party. Unfortunately an underplayed linker combined with the issue with meteors breaking kaupe effect meant that it didn't really go according to plan. But now we know we don't have to survive EQ to not wipe... we just need to survive the first hit.
One thing I do want to test is if the Sac sader lives the first hit, if sacrifice will absorb the second and third hits entirely. Would be worth testing I think!
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Ifrit MVP
By Doddler on July 20, 2008 in category 'MVP'
Get the video in higher quality AVI format here.
After our run-in with Valkyrie Randgris, I came to the conclusion that Randgris could be done with 12 people. It could be done with a lot less if you didn't magically need to conjure a full party of players for the sole purpose of absorbing earthquake, but it is possible. When Endless Tower comes along, we'll be able to down Randgris at very least I think. Having done Randgris and Beelzebub without traps, there's only one boss left, Ifrit.
I didn't really want to do Ifrit. Randgris was a struggle with 12 people, and ifrits earthquake hits for nearly 50% more than Randgris. We could bring more than 12, but since 12 is the limit in the Endless Tower, and no one in their right mind could convince more than 12 players to go to an MVP on a regular basis, we stuck with 12.
Anyways surviving Earthquake simply comes down to mechanics. When we fought Randgris, we observed that her Earthquake has a base attack of around 210,000 to 228,000 damage per hit. In a 12 man party this becomes about 17,500 - 19,000 damage (times three) that you need to properly reduce. For party members, simply the use of Assumptio, Horn Shield and 2x Alligators will result in an average damage received of 4,812 - 5,265 a hit. Few classes can hope to survive this, but the tank can without too much difficulty survive the approximate 15k damage, and as long as one priest is alive (or we used Kaizel), the party can get back on its feet in surprising speed.
Thats an interesting point of high end MVPs in RO; it doesn't really matter if people die because of how fast they can get on their feet, the only way to completely wipe to a boss is really for the tank to die.
Anyways, we already knew of Randgris's Earthquake, and how powerful it was. However, Ifrit is in a completely different league. When he starts using earthquake, its not so bad. On average EQ has an attack of 120,000 damage per hit, which in a 12 man party means 10,000 damage per person. With proper reduction, I think this is manageable. Indeed in our run few people actually died to this attack. With Assumptio, Horn, and 2x Alligators (pretty optimal gears if you're running on the cheap), you take about 2750 / hit, for 8250 total.
The problem comes when he uses Power Up. The 3x attack power combined with EQ is pretty devastating. It augments his earthquake to approximately 360,000 damage per hit... approximately 65% stronger than Randgris's Earthquake. This means that on Ifrit, you're looking at having to absorb 30,000 damage per person. With our gears listed before, you're looking at about 8,250 damage per hit, or approximately 24,750 damage over 1 second. I think thats pretty unreasonable.
We knew it was unreasonable too, which is why we planned on using sacrifice from a paladin to absorb the first 1-2 hits on the tank, making it so he survived the final hit. Unfortunately we encountered something we've never seen before.
Generally when people think about earthquake, they think that if you have 12 players on screen, it does constant damage across the three hits... unfortunately that turns out to be not true. What we found was that if a player dies from a hit of earthquake, they don't count as targets for further hits. Let me illustrate how this snowballs into a losing scenario for the party.
First hit of Earthquake: everyone takes about 8000 damage. Three dies.
Second hit of Earthquake: With three less people, the remaining 9 take 10,666 damage. Six more die.
Third hit of Earthquake: With only 3 people alive, they take 32,000 damage. No one lives.
And thats exactly whats happening in that screen shot. Note the damage the fire pillar takes: The fire pillar having no reduction to damage shows the total raw damage of Earthquake. Generally our sader could absorb the first two hits for the tank, but its downright impossible for anyone to live 32,000 damage.
Anyways we did kill it, by the sole virtue that Ifrit sucks at healing himself and we could repeatedly throw ourselves at him. I don't really see how they expect people to live that though. As I've maintained before its fair until bosses use Earthquake in combination with Power Up, and then it becomes unreasonable. We attempted to use Ghost armor on the tank too, but it resulted in the tank taking 55000 damage from his fire-breath. Switching would work but I can't really think that Gravity expects high end MVP'ing to be a game of how fast the party can resurrect itself when everyone dies every 20 seconds.
Two of the people in this screenshot were dual cliented, and weren't involved inthe killing of Ifrit! 
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Randgris MVP - Part Deux
By Doddler on July 11, 2008 in category 'MVP'
Apparantly I've been had! While I specifically advertised last time that we would do Randgris with a 12 person party last time without any god items or 'godly' gears of any kind... we ended up going with an 18 person party, and I find out that among party members were using 2x Meginjards, a GTB, and atleast one ghostring. Not what I intended.
So here is round two. I took a pack of Alpha players (and one Peco Whisperers), and formed a complete 12 man party, to head on the MVP. No God items where used, only 12 players. Technically we had a ghostring for use on a priest but we didn't really need it. We didn't even have an Angeling card, some of you may remember how a few months back I made a +7 Legion Plate of Paladin (Archdam Card - grants holy armor with the crusader armor set), which while I didn't reveal its purpose at the time, it was build specifically for... this. Considering the set itself was quite cheap to manufacture compared to angeling, I think it did pretty well.
We specifically geared party members with ranged reduction (horn shields, alligators, long mace, noxious garment) and HP gears... the only two things that really help against earthquake. After doing this MVP run, I think I have a new-found respect for Earthquake... its not quite as broken I anticipated, and our party survived it fairly well (though there were some deaths). I think as we get more advanced gears in which to increase max HP, survivability will be easier. I still don't see how we could do Ifrit in a 12 man group, but I'll have to work out the logistics of that some other time.
I want to thank everyone that came along, regardless of how crazy our scenario may be. At least we've proved that the Alpha Guild will still be at Randgris even if traps are gone entirely, and that it can be done without godly gears.
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