Doddler's RO Journal
Back To Mains
By Doddler on April 11, 2008 in category 'General'
>>CENSORED<<
Damn those aggressive mushrooms! Can't turn your back on them.
I figured I'd get caught up with whats going on with main servers and not just Sakray. That means two posts in a week... unheard of!
Did I mention how much I hate Lady Tanee? This is a shot of her skill 'Defender', which reduces ranged damage by too much. 999 Acid Bomb! Luckily she doesn't use it much, but still too much for my liking.
At least in the end, revenge is mine. 
I built a custom Lif AI that cuts down my tanee killing time considerably. Tanee tends to spend more time healing her minions and has an insanely long re-summon time on her slaves, so if one can kill or damage the slaves, she has a lower chance of teleporting, which gives more battle time before she teleports. Average Tanee kill time is down to about 20 minutes now!
I've been spending some time leveling my hunter at various locations. Party wise, Odin 2 and Thor 1 are great places to go, and solo, I tend to enjoy leveling in remote locations.
My damage on Kasa's isn't great but it's enough to do the job. Nice thing is that my hunter won't feel the Thor changes coming with 11.3, so that will be nice with the added drops.
Enchanted Peach Tree's aren't the greatest experience in the world, but what they are is decent money.
In 1h of hunting:
60k - 20 @ 3k Honey
280k - 40 @ 7k Royal Jelly
180k - 12 @ 15k Dead Branch
So roughly 520k zeny per hour of leveling. In todays economy on Loki, thats fairly big money. Not to mention that this is mostly casual leveling; if I really tried I think I could get much faster. Experience rate is only about 1.2m base per hour, which isn't really bad.
Lucky Get! 
Leveling on Strouf's is pretty decent. Mainly I do it when I get low on Crystal Arrows to level in faster places, but its not bad by any stretch. And you can get cool things like this.
Level Up! My hunter is now level 95~. My favorite solo spot is the Ninetails/Dragontail map near Payon. Its efficient, 2m-3m base per hour (faster than Stroufs/Mermen), and I get a pretty stockpile of royal jelly, dead branches and old blue boxes while I'm at it. The money isn't quite as efficient as Kunlun and its a bit more work to do, but its still pretty solid leveling.
The nice thing about leveling on this map is that its fairly easy to find Eddga. I don't think he's really a profitable MVP, but he's pretty easy to kill on my hunter. Just kite him around and double strafe till it dies.
Of course you can trap kill him, which makes it even easier. I've noticed he has a tendency to teleport if you are hitting him when the trap expires, but its fairly easy to avoid doing since the traps have a set duration.
Interested in snare solo killing MVP's I went around looking for easy targets. Unfortunately the White Lady and her assumptio makes my damage pretty poor. Luckily she can't even heal while she's trapped, so its an easy victory.
It seems I'm not the only one who appreciates the value of traps either, it makes some MVPs such as Moonlight Flower with her set spawn stupidly easy.
It would be one thing if snaring MVPs was only restricted to low level ones but as mentioned before, its clearly not.
Of course the risks are higher when the boss is stronger!
We took our first steps to running box parties recently. While wizard spawn camping is highly efficient, its competitive business on Loki and only a few classes can really benefit from wizards. Box parties are fairly rare on Loki still... but we hope to get some good ones running.
It does surprise me that something as abusable as the instant wizard spawns is still in the game though.
Our attempts are fairly amateurish at the moment and we have a hard time at finding the required classes within Alpha or Insur that are willing to go. Still, hopefully at some point we want our parties to look something like [this], [this] or [this] (nicovideo links).
We ran into Egnigem Cenia on the way down... quite a joke with a party of that caliber though.
A fair trade, right? Right?
We've been working on perfecting our earthquake tanking abilities. The priest here doesn't have ghostring armor on. A bit more work I think and we can get earthquake down to manageable duo range. We're thinking with the addition of mercenaries, it will make it very easy to do.
Of course countering power up earthquake is a bit trickier... Clearly we need to make sure it never gets a chance to use earthquake while powered up. Poor Lif!
Here's a little bonus... Mi Gao farming in Juno!
Lots of gao's, lots of fun. Unfortunately our party was ruined by a few players who basically feel that it was free experience for the taking. In particular a gunslinger kept trying to kill them, which prevented us from continuing. 
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Sakray 11.3 Testing
By Doddler on April 6, 2008 in category 'General'
As most people who visit the site likely know, I've been pretty busy working on 11.3 patch testing and working on my 11.3 guide. The guide has some pretty amazing information so I suggest anyone not overly familiar with 11.3 take at least a glance at it. You can check it out here. Its being constantly updated with new information as testing is done, and I'm really happy with the results.
Anyways, one of the most anticipated features of the new patch is of course War of Emperium Second Edition. While my character isn't really optimal for testing this, I ended up joining with a sakray guild to give it a ride.
The precasting hasn't really been done away with as much as I initially anticipated. Precasts have been moved to the very entrance of a fort, and while the rooms are rather open that players enter into, the addition of guardians give the defending team an advantage.
This is the main obstacle, the Fortress Gate. The first row of barricade blocks is an indestructible barrier, and will only be removed when the guardian stones are removed. Then the row in the back, the first barricade becomes vulnerable.
Taking the guardian stones is harder though than we anticipated. Taking one of the two stones wasn't usually an issue. We could usually push down one path fairly easily and take down the stone. Unfortunately once one is down, the opposing team only needs to defend the other stone for up to 5 minutes, when the destroyed stone can potentially be rebuilt.
We did eventually take down both stones at one point though. It was a rather smart move, we tricked the defending guild into defending one of the stones that we weren't actually rushing at. We destroyed the first stone while they were all scrambling to defend it, and as soon as it broke we snuck a recall behind the second stone and destroyed it quickly.
Unfortunately their defense was too much for us, and we were unable to breach the barricades. After about 8 minutes passed they had rebuilt both guardian stones, and we were back to square 1. After almost 80 minutes of attacking we decided we couldn't win, and looked for other prey.
These guys were probably our biggest obstacle initially. I think it was really because the fort we were attacking had 100 defense rating (they start at 100/100 rating), but there were a crazy number of guardians defending many of the forts. The guardians themselves are like Thor guardians without skills. They're really not that bad but the defending team can do a variety of things to make them considerably stronger, such as using Eske. This early into woe2 we didn't have any real brilliant ideas to take them down yet.
I'm not sure if higher defense rate increases the power of the guardians, but it certainly makes it so that there are a lot more of them. Having a bunch of these guys on the entrance makes breaking the opening precast a real pain.
For the most part the castle broadcasts were fairly handy. When ever a barricade or guardian stone is destroyed or rebuilt its broadcast to the map for them to see. Also when the guardian stones create new guardians its also announced.
During testing we found that some forts announced rather broken sounding text. Hopefully this is fixed before it hits mains.
On our first day we were all attacked by the GMs manually breaking the forts to get some test info and making sure things worked right. We unfortunately weren't able to kill the GM, although I hear some guilds managed to do so using a variety of interesting tricks.
The link flag system seems really good, I think it will really add a new dimension to defending these large castles. Check the 11.3 guide if you want more information on how all the links are set up, they're really quite handy.
Unfortunately like most things we tested on Sakray this patch there were some pretty glaring bugs. 
During my short stay at nameless island (and I say short because its currently broken and you can't return to nameless), I had a pretty good time. The place is pretty hard, and its definitely insanely mobby. You don't really so much need to mob, you just take a couple steps and its there for you. Its not quite the density of Juperos, although 2f in particular can come pretty close at times.
The monsters themselves are pretty hard, but with the right gears, I think that its definitely worth it. Its a step up dungeon from existing popular melee duo areas such as Ice Dungeon and Abyss Lake. The place looks really good for leveling, its no surprise the kRO player guides mentioned it was the best dungeon addition in recent years to RO. I look forward to spending time here in the future.
Since I was here solo, I had to rely on only resurrection to kill monsters. I borrowed blueness's priestess to do sakray testing. I'm not particularly fond of her 25 base dex, I've always been a dex freak of sorts so slow casting really gets to me. For killing I generally relied on resurrect bombing the undead monsters to get to areas I needed to be at for the quest.
This is technically cheating I think, I don't think they intended you to be able to complete this step of the quest from the ledge above. Its quite handy, because Hibram spawns within the room just to the left making it really hard to enter normally.
I did play with hibram just enough to know that he's a scary guy and moved on. His holy and shadow element grand crosses would have been the end of the priestess, regardless of her insanely high HP (13000hp).
The final step of the quest, where you have to reach this man. This was surprisingly hard, the priest has no real way to deal with necromancers so I had to spend a good deal of time pulling them away and getting lucky enough to land into the room with a teleport.
Even though he's a quest boss, he can still be killed with Turn Undead or offensive Resurrection. Makes it pretty easy, I killed him first try!
OMG spoilers! I suppose most people already know this secret by now. I managed to complete the nameless island quest on opening day. I'm lucky I knew you couldn't return to the island after you left, or I'd be stuck right now. Hopefully they fix this next maintenance.
Some of the other quests are fairly interesting as well. I think this is mainly because they maintain their gravity brand "WTF" style humor that keeps what is basically a really boring set of tasks from seeming too stale. The quests this time around I think are considerably more rewarding than past quests, and actually pretty interesting to boot.
This was kind of a cool scene from the Arunafeltz Peace quest. It marks the final quest in the Episode 11 chain. It also makes for a pretty nice screenshot don't you think?
I wonder who's bright idea it was to stick an NPC on Adumbla Grasslands (rachel field 03). This map is the mobbiest map ever, and I spent forever trying to get to Ishmael to complete the quest. I'll probably use this illustration for my quest guide, just to show how hard of a time I had with it! 
I checked out Anubis to see how they were. Anubis leveling gets a lot of hype, but I think thats a bit exaggerated. I think Anubis counts as a good leveling zone for priests, but its nothing special. The spawn of Anubis is fairly low, they can be tricky to find at times. I bet a priest could pull 2-4m exp/hr. Nothing amazing, probably more on par with soloing rates for other classes. Its balanced by the fact that Anubis is actually a fairly hard hitting monster.
I think the map is best used for characters that can kill lots of the small fry on the map. I guess if a lot of priests decide to make Sphinx 4 home then the pasana's and minos end up being worth a lot more exp due to taps on other players.
There's the icon for the status Critical Wounds. Its a nasty little guy now on iRO, dropping your healing effectiveness by 40% when used by Anubis. Lots of other monsters can use it too in nameless, with varying degrees of healing reduction.
Before and after shots. 2823 heal reduced to 1694. Pretty bad stuff!
The new equipment seems to be in, although oddly they're all using the wrong sprite illustrations (or more accurately, using the temporary art that was used before kRO gave them real illustrations). This is unusual because the iRO client already has all the art in it and only needs very minor changes to display the new items correctly. Heimdallr dismissed my report that this was incorrect saying its working as intended, but recent bugs with client crashes due to missing illustrations for the new god item pieces may make him rethink his position. I hope so anyways.
The mercenary system is in, and for the most part I think I'm rather pleased. They do have a pretty lengthy list of bugs, and the cost of scrolls and healing could use some tweaking, but I do think that they have some pretty decent uses.
I did happen to find the mercenaries considerably more useful on a priest character than any of the other characters I tested on. While it was fun to level with a mercenary on my TK, the ability to buff and support a mercenary works rather well. Healing effectiveness is reduced on mercenaries, but it still works well enough to keep them alive. Its also waaay more effective than using the pricey recovery items from the mercenary guild. As an added suck factor, aid potion doesn't even work on the mercenaries. Aspersio can also only be used on the mercenary if its your own mercenary, which made leveling in prison pretty fast.
The kill bonuses seemed useful, though I didn't really kill efficiently enough to make much use of it. If I was getting upwards of 100-200 kills with my mercenary though, I think you would really notice the effects.
There's an interesting and quite abusable bug with the mercenary's HP and SP buffs. When you get them, the mercenary fully recovers their HP or SP depending on the buff they got. If you teleport or change map though, the buffs are reapplied to the mercenary. This has the surprising effect of also applying the HP/SP regen. So if you get HP/SP regen buffs, your mercenary basically gains unlimited HP or SP regen. Handy thing to get for sure.
They're not without their bugs though. My mercenary somehow became permanently poisoned and I had no way to cure it. After I teleported it somehow became transparent, as you can see here. This was really annoying because it basically killed its SP regen, making it impossible to use any skills.
You can basically use the mercenaries just about anywhere as long as they're not the ones getting hit. I had the crazy idea to go to juperos to try to get rusty screws for one of the quests I was doing. It worked out surprisingly well, until a venatu decided to attack my mercenary, which basically killed it almost instantly. Mercenary suffers the same targeting issues that homunculus does, and when you attempt to use a skill on them it snaps to items and other objects instead of the mercenary. They're also stupidly weak in defense. 35-40 defense is alright on a player character who's packing a 30% race reduction shield and a 20% neutral element reduction garment. 15-25 defense on a mercenary with no reduction gears just dies to everything. Lancer mercenaries are a little better than the others but I definately wouldn't want anything other than maybe the level 10 one tanking anything they didn't have to.
Some things carry over from the homunculus system too, and end up looking really awkward and don't make a whole lot of sense when you see them. I doubt they'll change this particular one though.
Here's a rather odd one. The bow mercenary has a strange bug where when it uses a skill its head somehow becomes detached for some reason. Again something they're unlikely to fix before it hits main servers.
You notice the location used in the screenshot? I basically took a whole bunch of time, bought all the mercenary scrolls I could and took my mercenaries to fancy locale's to take screenshots for my mercenary guide. I traveled to almost every major city to get good background art for my screenshots. A bit weird isn't it? This one was taken in Payon near a building in the top right of the map.
Here's some of the other ones I took. The first two shots were from Rachel forts, the common shared one (I took them in the top right fort). The third picture shows the nameless island artwork, though the picture was taken from the left center rachel castle. Last screenshot is from one of my favorite towns, Ayothaya.
They also added in some lesser known features. This is a new pvp room manager that takes you to the 5 rooms that the GMs had previously used for USRC. The NPC will give you the option of spawning at one of two entrances, and are designed as much smaller rooms where two teams can use separate entrances to group and pvp against each other. These rooms don't have the number of people announced at the NPC, but I imagine they'll see a fair bit of use since most of the maps are really small in size and much better suited for PVP.
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Thinking of New Post Names is a Drag
By Doddler on March 23, 2008 in category 'General'
Randgris MVP competition has certainly been picking up since people are slowly catching on to the trapping technique. We still do pretty good for ourselves, mainly because teamed up with Insur, we have 24 hour coverage of her, and other teams just can't find the times. Still, we do lose from time to time, but its always a good time.
Competition usually results in bringing out the big guns though, and its always impressive to see how fast she dies.
Since we're on the topic of MVP'ing Valkyrie Randgris, I figured I'd reveal my little project.
Behold, a completed Crusader card set. The shoes kinda suck, but the card was pretty cheap and I couldn't find any decent boots to put it into. I would have put it in the greaves, but as you may know I broke all of mine.
Having holy element armor allows you to do exciting things, such as this! While trapping her is the tactic of today, I expect it will get nerfed, and its always nice to have a backup plan for the future.
On that note, we did some further testing related to Earthquake from MVPs. Due to some helpful tips from some players, I found that MDEF doesn't appear to affect earthquake at all. I updated the EQ simulator as well as added a helpful variety of defensive equipment people may want to bring to MVPs.
You know that part where I said the St. Patrick's Day event sucked? Turns out I was wrong. After finding a map with high enough spawn of snakes, it turned the event from a dud to an amazing opportunity. I busted out the heavy guns, and by heavy guns I mean a couple bubble gum (it was a gift!), and went about my merry farming way.
Bubble gum on those coins was crazy. I don't think I'd pay myself for the increased drop rate, but I think I did better using it here than one shot for some MVP.
My final stash. I never quite made the 1000 goal I had in mind, but I think I did pretty good.
I bought a new bow for my hunter. Many people under-estimate the Ballista, but I think thats a mistake. I found a cheap slotted Ballista selling for only 3m, so I decided to give it a shot.
Damage versus argiope using my double titan arbalest (it was the closest large monster to the AFK spot in alde!).
Damage with the +4 Kingbird (archer skel) Ballista. Its higher... its not much higher, but you have to keep in mind that the Ballista does the same damage versus all monsters, where as the Arbalest is only good versus large.
Double strafe damage with +7 Quad Hallowed Composite Bow on Frus. The damage barfly varied so its hardly worth getting multiple pictures for comparison.
Double Strafe damage with the Ballista. Its down a bit over 100 damage total... but its not bad eh? Considering the ballista is equally effective versus every monster in the game, its impressive that it can nearly match a quad carded element specific bow. People under-estimate the importance of weapon attack power in the bow attack formula. I doubt I'll see another ballista go for so cheap on the market, but its definitely a handy investment.
Likely because I'm a sadist of some kind, I continue to hunt Lady Tanee. I don't really think I would consider killing her fun. Its more of a experience in heavy frustration. Its not even rewarding really, her drops do cover most, but not all of my expenses. Each Tanee run takes anywhere from 20 minutes (really lucky) to a bit over an hour (really sucky). A Tanee card would certainly be rewarding, but considering the chances I'm not really holding out for one. I'm not sure why I subject myself to it. Maybe its the feeling of accomplishment that I can do something in RO very few players can do. Or something like that.
I certainly have a little bit to show for it though!
One last image, a Alpha guild screen shot after WoE.
As a last little treat, here's some interesting videos I found on nicovideo. Don't know how to log into nico? Check my last post.
- An ME High Priest soloing Cursed Monastery 3f.
- A jRO idol of mine, an LK player who spends his time doing stupid, crazy, but exciting things.
- A SinX 'full buff' MVP solo video (full buff means any and all buffs are fair game).
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Beelzebub Video
By Doddler on March 15, 2008 in category 'Random Stuff'
Here's a fun little video I found on nico nico video. The video shows Beelzebub summoned at St. Capitolina Abbey via bloody branch on jRO Loki server. In this video he's already changed forms to his larger, more grotesque form, and quite dangerous. Its certainly a fun watch! The Beelzebub was alive for aproximately 13 hours before it died. And yes, Capitolina is considered a town map, but you can DB/BB towns on jRO.
Note that to use Nico Nico you need to register. I plan on linking to these videos in the future so you may as well make a login! The site is Japanese but you can use this guide to know how to sign up.
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