Doddler's RO Journal
Nidhoggur Solo
By Doddler on February 12, 2010 in category 'MVP'
I apologize for the lack of updates these days, full time work and other things have kept me from doing much in the way of updating on the journal. I figured I'd do something special for a new journal entry, so here it is, solo Nidhoggur's Shadow.
It's actually not that hard, as long as you know what you're doing. I used god items but I don't think it's really required, though you'd use a lot more supplies. He's relatively slow and spends a lot of time casting, so you can avoid a lot of the damage if you get out of range before his skills finish. Not using a shield makes it harder, but you more or less require the defense bypass of the Gae Bolg to do any reasonable damage. Lucky for me, my high max HP partially makes up for the no shield problem, at least enough to save me from dying to regular attacks. I do die, but not in any situation where a shield would have saved me.
I think he actually becomes easier as time goes on. He has a fairly fixed cast order, and as he gets lower HP he gets new skills on higher priority. The thing is that if you hit a monster while its casting from a range, it will begin chasing you as if it's casting was interrupted, and there will be no delay on the skill when it finishes casting, even if the skill is still casting. You can use this to your advantage by keeping him interested in casting his long skills and not using his annoying ones, like stone curse and sleep.
If you're not familiar with Nidhoggur, what happens is that when he goes idle (below 60% hp), he starts casting life stream, which heals him to full HP if it finishes. It takes two minutes to cast, so it's not a huge risk and gives you some time if you need it to prep. Also what happens is that every 3 minutes you get teleported into one of the side rooms with some monsters and a specific status. You can't leave until all the monsters die, so you have to be careful or he'll finish casting lifestream before you get back. The yellow room, which I got stuck in annoyingly often gives you sleep and chaos status, which makes your movement random, which is what the panacea is for.
The video is uncut, the entirety of the instance run is in the video. The total cost was 542 mastela 366 strawberry, about 15 wind converters and holy water, and a bunch of kafra shop buff scrolls. Please pay no attention to the kafra shop stuff in my inventory, I might have over prepared! Oh, and the total time from opening the instance to Nidhoggur dying was about 44 minutes, battle time with Nidhoggur was just over half an hour.
I died twice but had no exp loss due to insurance. What wasn't shown was me being killed by a duneyrr outside of the instance and losing 11m exp. Oops. :(
I finally borrowed a PS2 and played through Okami (Yeah I'm a slowpoke), so the music in the video is from the Okami sound track. In retrospect I'd like to have put the twin demon's boss theme in, since it's my favorite theme in the game (and best boss), but I didn't think it fit as well.
On an unrelated note, I haven't updated the journal much lately but I've posted a few videos to my youtube channel if people haven't been following there. You can find it here.
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WoE2 : 15/12/2009
By Doddler on December 16, 2009 in category 'War of Emperium'
Now that I got a new video card I can start frapsing again. It was a fun woe, too bad the ending sucks! It's kind of a shame, cause I thought we played really well. I guess that's the problem that happens when you go into siege with really only two teams, if one team is stronger than the other, they can follow the other team arround and block them from getting castles. We probably could have held the castle but we prepared poorly for the last minute push. Well, you can't win 'em all.
Sorry for the lack of a web streaming version. The music used is more Touhou remixes by Sonic Highspeed Omega.
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Break Down! Valk Time.
By Doddler on December 14, 2009 in category 'General'
It's been a while since I've done a full post, so I figured I'd get caught up on what's been up on Valkyrie.
We've been doing lots of endless tower as of late. It doesn't always go as planned though.
We've recently experimented in letting the paladin and champ do the mobbing and bringing along a sniper. I think sniper is an amazing class for endless because of it's mob killing capabilities. Usually the SinX is used for mobs where the wizard is ineffective (using EDP grimtooth), but there are a bunch of situations in the tower where that's not really possible and where sniper performs much better.
On the down side, there is an annoying bug where targeting a monster that is already dead causes you to disconnect from the game. That might sound like a non issue except it can happen quite often depending on your latency, and on a fast attacking character like a sniper, it can be a big problem. Hopefully they fix that.
In this screenshot, I'm hiding for my life! Somehow, Beelzebub can't see me.
Taking out Entweihen is easier now that we know what we're doing.
Even Naght Seiger is easy when you do him right!
This is from our latest ifrit run, haha. Things don't always go smoothly. 
This is the answer to the post a few weeks back. Charming Wink can't normally be cast on boss monsters. However, when it's autocast, for example, by using the Carmen Miranda hat or Aliza card, it can in fact work on bosses. It makes them follow you around for about 10 seconds and not attack you, while doing the heart emote.
This is the moment before everything goes wrong. The tank champion does not have 16k HP. 
Our guild finally managed to get the Satan Morroc quest completed after the GMs corrected a bug where the summoning of morroc could be broken and unusable for the remainder of the week by teleporting/relogging while talking to the summoning NPC. I'm not sure I need to say WHO was intentionally bugging the quest, but I'm happy we were finally able to do it.
Us fighting against the Wounded Morroc. Pretty standard party configuration and setup. Wounded morroc is pretty weak as far as the endgame bosses are concerned, but it is made harder by his full SP drain and inability to resurrect.
Morroc down! I wish I had made a video to show you.
During a spawn increase event in Ice Dungeon last month, I spent some time to get to level 97. For someone as lazy as me, that's quite an accomplishment.
I've been doing a fair bit of Lady Tanee MVP'ing. Still no card though.
I've been levelling my archer a bit. He's actually still an archer, since I got him to job 50, but he's still fun to play. Using a 99 mercenary is kind of cheating, but at least with the bow mercenary you get the feeling of fighting beside your mercenary than just being a slave to it.
Moscovia is kind of an under appreciated dungeon on iRO. Not many people go there, but it's good experience and the regular drops are worth a good bunch.
Of course, it can be dangerous some times.
War of Emperium has been fairly exciting recently. Although I was unable to participate this last week due to an issue with my internet connection. WoE1 has been really back and forth, trading hits with the other alliance. We've won some good fights, and pretty proud of the guild. WoE2 hasn't really been a strong point for a while though. Our WoE2 attendance is usually rather poor and we end up losing more head on battles with the Illegit alliance than we win. In the unique landscape of WoE2, that means that there's little risk of them losing their own forts, while it's difficult for us to make a hold. Because the fight is more or less just between us two, we have the odds against us. There's a couple independent guilds holding forts in WoE2 but Illegit seems to make it their goal to follow us and stop us from getting a fort wherever we go. And why wouldn't they, if we didn't attack, there would be no war for them. Anyways, it's not a very good situation.
Onwards to the New World! I've spent a lot of time in the new world, getting ready for the new episode and such. Part of that is catching up on the 13.1 quests.
The story of the new episode is actually pretty interesting. Gravity probably could do better on the translation side of things and aren't always the best at creating a natural quest flow, but they're better than they were in the past.
Levelling in the new world has been a bit of a past time for me these days. All kinds of cool things to find!
Balance Whip and Pinguicula Corsage at the same time. Lucky!
Not the smartest thing I've attempted. He can nearly one shot me with his sonic blow, but it seems if you stand diagonal to him, he'll be out of range to use the skill.
Victory. 
While the Tendrilion wasn't overly difficult other than a lot of pots, bowling bashing multiple monsters with reflect 10 up while using dual megs is unhealthy.
Anyone who`s spent any time in those fields would probably think this is crazy. Its incredibly expensive, but its the fastest way to get report pages for the new world report quest, and its somewhat profitable too.
Even with the huge expense of potting through the damage (have to use mastela fruit), it can still be profitable in valk`s current market with some of these items.
You know when I said fighting Tendrillion solo wasn't very smart? Well this is about as far down on the stupid end of the scale as you can go. His regular melee hits strike for about 4k damage, and his skills, they hurt.
I failed to kill him on my first attempt. I thought I had him, but that was until he two hand quickened. I was unable to outpot the massive amount of damage he was dealing.
The solution of course was to bring a helper that could remove two hand quicken. Gee-Gee volunteered to come down and help out.
We finally killed it after like half an hour of fighting. I hear high wizards can firewall him effectively, maybe that would be the better option.
Levelling in the new world has its advantages. There are a series of stat-food items that you can get by trading in monster collectable drops that can be used to increase you attack, crit, or hit/flee. They're not huge boosts, but they're free, and I have hundreds of them now.
I also built up quite a stockpile of expedition reports. The report quest is quite a pain in the ass... so I figured I could hunt the monsters, make a whole bunch of reports, and make a killing off of them. And that I did, I used one full set and sold the other reports at 10m a piece. Crazy.
Dealing fish on the black market. I told people in guild I would buy Marlin for 400k a piece, and apparently Wuzzle decided to take me up on the offer.
The marlin can be used to quickly boost your points with the Cat Hand, the kafra staff of the new world. Unlike the Kafra staff however, you have to earn the services you get through daily quests. One batch of fishing or mining nets you one point, and you're limited to one a day. Marlin is a rare catch from fishing that bypasses this limit and gives you two points.
With 200 Cat Hand points, I can now get everywhere from the new world. I now have warps to all the midgard cities, new world cities, and additionally, Juno. From Juno I can warp to Rachel or any Schwarzwalt city. It goes without saying that I now keep my knight saved in the new world.
Here's an interesting tip though, for those going to the new world. You don't actually have to travel all the way to the far right side of the map in order to take the warp, you can climb up the pillar next to it, which will save you a little bit of walking, and talk to Mukenro over the gap. Fun stuff.
The new quests are a bit easier than the old ones. I still wonder why gravity insists on doing the 'Wait for 1 hour' type requirements in quests. It's always a pain in the ass and doesn't really add anything.
Turns out the new monsters are a little harder than I went in expecting.
The Rata was a lot easier than Duneyrr though, and she happened to drop one of these. It's a pretty darn nice mace I'd have to say.
Our group preparing to do the Nidhoggur's Nest instance. It was some kind of nightmare to get everyone done with the quests to get in, but somehow everyone finished up in short order.
Nidhoggur's Shadow is a bit easier than I was expecting. He hits hard, really hard, but he hits slow. Against the bosses of old where death was quick and instantaneous, against a boss that takes 5-10 seconds to prepare his strongest attacks is almost like a joke. Of course, even a joke can go wrong, because he can one shot your members with his powerful attacks, he's just slow at doing so.
We've actually fought him twice so far. The battle is interesting in that every 3 minutes you are teleported to one of 4 rooms and given some kind of status effect based on where you are warped. Nidhoggur will start casting his full heal while you are trying to escape, so you have to kill the monsters in the room and return to fight him. We never really found this to be a major issue, the first time we were teleported just as he died, and the second time we killed him before 3 minutes. It's odd that the teleport trigger still occurs AFTER he's dead, but maybe they'll fix that later.
Yay.~
The Nidhoggur's Shadow Garb... definitely an awesome piece of gear. Hopefully we'll get more in the future.
To end off, this is a video of our first attempt against Nidhoggur's Shadow. As I mentioned, we get teleported to the side room just as it dies, so you don't actually see it happen. Music is a Touhou remix, Dark Phoenix's Shotshell album.
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Renewal - Hardrock Mammoth
By Doddler on December 9, 2009 in category 'kRO Sakray RE'
A fight against the Hardrock Mammoth after this Tuesdays changes to the new world monsters. Clogon, the Ranger asked me to come along, and there was an unassociated Bishop and a Sura there also. He still hurts pretty bad, but is clearly toned down from his stupidly high attack power pre-renewal. I was wearing an aqua armor when fighting him because of his waterball, and even then it probably did the majority of his damage. Such is how magic works in renewal.
Oh, the song is Spintronic's 8bit Headbangers. Heard it from the free game "Squid Yes Not So Octopus: Squid Harder". You should play it if you haven't tried it!
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