Doddler's RO Journal
Vision of Okolnir
By Doddler on January 31, 2008 in category 'Random Stuff'
This is one of those things that has nothing to do with my RO Journal, but I really wanted to talk about a little. Appologies for the bad picture, its ripped right from the video.
Vision of Okolnir is the new god item quest so to speak. Its unique from the old god item quest, in that its a trial that an entire guild must endure in order to create the godly equipment. The requirements to enter are steep. The guild leader must fully assemble the pieces of the god item he wishes to create (Aesprika or Brynhildr), bring his guild fort to a high enough econ level, and then organize 20 people to attempt the trial. There's a time limit of 1 hour to complete the test, and failure means you'll have to try again the next day.
I've uploaded a video of korean players completing the trial, and its a joy to watch. You can find the video here or here (use the first link of possible, to help conserve bandwidth). Details about the dungeon progression can be found on irowiki here. Special thanks to the great player who took that video and his guild, although I don't honestly know who they are (just found the video on mncast). If you can't play mp4, use VLC Player, its well worth it.
I took some care when translating it, because it was hard for me to figure out what they were refering to in the original text. The term "Okolnir" is the planes that exist after the battle of Ragnarok. Vision, or the other translation for the term Illusion, likely refers to the fact that you are experiencing something that has not yet come to pass.
Anyways, having watched the video possibly more than I should have, I really got a feel for what the dungeon represents. The design, the progression, it all looks supurb. RO has never looked or played this well on any level. Its an amazing piece of work, and a great example of what an end-game dungeon should be like. The only shame is that only a handful of people will be able to attempt the trials.
It seems that my facination with the WoE:SE game update just keeps growing and growing as I learn more about it, and I hope you too are excited 
. Since its possible that iRO may get WoE:SE in the near future, maybe I could convince some people to invite me if they were to do the quest, I would love to take part in it.
On a completely unrelated note, having been a bit bored with existing loading screens and being the future game update fetishist that I am (is that alright to admit?), I compiled some of the recent kRO loading screens into a pack to use for iRO. If anyone feels like using them, although I doubt anyone does, its fairly easy to use. If you don't use a skin, just extract the skin version into your RO\skins folder and in game switch your skin (alt-o) to future loadscreens. If you do use a skin, just download the image only pack and drop it into your currently selected skin folder. If you get sick of them (which you surely will!) just delete them or change skins.
Future Loadscreens - Skin Version
Future Loadscreens - Image Only
(I included the thor loading screens too but they won't display since iRO has a max of 11 loading screens)
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Double Exp Downtime
By Doddler on January 30, 2008 in category 'General'
Sorry guys for not making any posts in the last week. How can I be posting durring a double experience event? 
This last week had a lot of time in Thors. In particular, I did a lot of leveling on my crusader in 3f parties, leveling on my LK on 1f, and a bit of a mix as I used my LK to leech my crusader.
We organized a sizable floor 3 hunting party several times during the week. I can't say it was really efficient; with 10 people each person pulled about 5m exp/hr. If it wern't double experience, it probably wouldn't be worthwhile. I've got a bit to say about party share exp for large parties but I'll save it for a rant sometime.
We attempted to bring down a Mental Sensing party to increase our experience rate. We unfortunately we did not actually know that the skill doesn't work on boss type monsters; there are actually no normal monsters on floor 3 of the volcano. That made our efforts pretty worthless. Amusingly enough even the GM team showed ignorance on this issue... a party member submitted an inquiry and they said that they would test to see why we weren't getting bonus exp. We now know that it doesn't work on boss monsters though.
The general form of the party is that the main party would remain mostly stationary, and I would pull monsters back for them to kill. This particular time I pulled back a particularly impressive mob, Ifrit!
... So we killed it.
Leveling lord knight at kasas is fun, particularly because mobs like this can be killed. It takes a crapload of pots, but its quite rewarding to be able to off a group like that. Of course I lose exp doing this, but can you say no to good fun?
I do enjoy killing mobs of kasas, but mobs of sword guardians are still slightly out of my league. At least I can take the barrage of spear boomerangs from them to get at the kasas I want to kill.
So my LK finally leveled up!
Behold, the coveted secret lord knight build! Its not really anything special. Now 96/64. 
MVP'ing was still part of our repitoir this week, mainly because mvps are worth an obscene amount of exp, and I'm always a fan of getting a few mil exp plus valuable drops.
Taking Thanatos head on isn't actually all that challenging. Once his mob is mostly dealt with, he's really kind of weak.
Of course, killing him with a party is surely much faster.
Of course, killing MVPs isn't the only thing I did in my spare time. I hunted ghostring for a little bit, determined to get my hands on one of those cards. No luck I guess. My LK isn't particularly well suited for the job.
My hunter on the other hand is. Damn I love sandman traps. 
Also in the lineup during the week was testing. You might not be able to see him, but there's definately a dracula hidden there.
A little known fact is that armor defense is reduced when you tank multiple monsters. Killing dracula is dangerous not because his familiars hurt, but because those familiars cause a punishing penalty to your defense rate. When I kill him on my biochemist, I take twice as much damage from his hell's judgment, instantly killing me if I'm personally tanking his familiars when it happens.
But no sites seem to have info on this reduction. Most players argued with me that only vit defense was reduced. I recall seeing some numbers when this feature was first introduced back when comodo patch was added to the game. The comodo patch if I recall correctly stated flee would be dropped when you have more than 2 monsters on you, and also that defense would drop in much the same fashion. So I went to Dracula, a convenient source of a huge mob, and tested.
The results were actually about what I expected. You can see the numbers as follows:
17 Monsters: 509-873
14 Monsters: 458-707
11 Monsters: 420-627
9 Monsters: 370-528
1 Monster: 227-328
The numbers listed are damage I received from Dracula. Quite clearly there's a linear reduction. Based on the numbers I remember seeing from back at the old comodo patch, my final conclusion is that both armor and vitality based defense is reduced by 5% for every monster on you above 2 (in the same way that flee gets reduced by 10%).
No OCA's today, sorry!
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Bio MVP and Friends
By Doddler on January 24, 2008 in category 'MVP'
Sorry for the late update, things (double exp) kept me from writing an update recently.
The other day we decided to tackle the biolabs MVP. I like to think my strategies for mvps are a bit on the crazy side, and this time was no different. Most people actually call me crazy, but thats another story.
Basically, the Biolabs MVP is a powerhouse of physical attack power. Well maybe the MVP itself isn't, but the mob is. Its likely impossible to fully tank the mob at once. A strategy for defeating the MVP would then have to overcome this hurdle. My idea, would be the use of ankle snares. Even on boss monsters, the snare lasts the minimum duration of 5 seconds. We would run the MVP, along with its mob, through a field of traps to disable it.
But how would we kill it? Given the setup we've created, the mvp would have to die in roughly 5 seconds. Not even a biochemist can do that damage that quickly. But several biochemists can. I coded quickly a custom homunculus AI that would automatically cast acid bomb on the boss while it was in range of the player, and distributed it to 3 separate biochemists that would be our killing team. This would ensure bombs would fly as fast as physically possible. Auto-Bomb in strings is an amazing thing. My own biochemist would be equipped with the Mjolnir for extra oomph.
So how did it go? I say it was a messy learning experience. On two separate occasions, the MVP was dropped below 10k HP, but by that point we lost the ability to deal the killing hit. I have to say that the trap plan was fairly well, and auto bomb was fairly effective in dealing the damage at the speed we needed it to. There were two oversights however. First, we didn't account for the high wizard in the mob. Even while trapped or disabled, the high wizard MVP will still throw painful magic spells at our party. The MVP itself never made it to us before the biochemists were dead, the wizard killed them before that happened. Second, the use of homunculus auto-bomb relies on the survival of the players homunculus, which goes back to the high wizard problem. It doesn't take much to drop a homunculus, and once you stop bombing, its over. I'm fairly certain if we had a means with us to deal with the wizard, we would have had victory.
I'm interested in trying it again in the future. The High Priest MVP is probably a pretty harsh one to start off with because of its superb healing abilities, but I think next time we go down there, we'll be much better prepared.
Biolabs isn't the only MVP we've been working on though. Thanatos is fun to hunt, and our trips are considerably more successful. I only wish he would drop something other than greaves and legion plate. 
A youtube video exists of our last Thanatos mvp run, which you can find here. One of these days I'll find a way to get fraps to record my own voice conversation, since the dialog may seem slightly... one sided without being able to hear what I say.
Counter Attack !? Thats right, I figured since I had it, I may as well use it. While counter attack is limited in use in that you have to be facing the proper direction for it to work, and can't counter any skills, it may still have its uses. After some testing, I found out that attacks that are countered do not reduce the number of hits remaining on a safety wall you're standing in. I tried it on Ktullanux, which was quite effective. Just got to watch out since counter attack has shorter range than many MVPs.
Thats it for today, sorry for the short update.
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Hocus Good Time
By Doddler on January 18, 2008 in category 'General'
So having given it some thought, I worked out the average cost of getting an MVP to spawn, in accordance to the average profit from getting each MVP with hocus pocus. The numbers wern't pretty, but that didn't stop me from resetting my sage ot hocus build. Don't ask why, but I felt like doing it.
I don't know why the 's' got cut off in my scribble though.
Did I ever mention that LoV looks cool? It also looks incredibly painful to be in, its a shame it isn't actually incredibly painful!
The best one, full guillotine fist as a sage. Way too much fun.
Unfortunately, we burned through 4000 yellow gems and didn't get a class change to summon an mvp (roughly 8m worth of yellow gems). I really wish they would adjust the skill to some degree, thats pretty harsh. The success rate should be 0.03% from my understanding of the skill. I'll probably hold off hocus'ing until the next batch of high level mvp's come out to help drive up profitability of spending millions on gems.
Finding a minstrel willing to come to thanatos tower is hard, its probably the only limiting factor to us being able to go up frequently to kill him. Anyone have a minstrel on loki?
This screenshot here describes a failure to coordinate. In a perfect world, all monsters would be on the tank, and people would coordinate to kill those monsters and support the tank character. In a less than perfect world, the tank holds the monsters and the remainder of the party dies to additional monsters that they've pulled. We've been doing much better with practice, but we probably need a few more runs to get it going well.
While being uncoordinated for thanatos is one thing, lacking coordination for Randgris can lead to disastrous results.
As some of you know, gravity has changed the Valkyries in Randgris's mob so that they no longer drop shields. Or atleast, thats what you're lead to believe. Randgris spawns with a mob of normal valkyries that have full drops, including valkyrja's shield. However, should her initial mob die, she'll replace it with a bunch of ghost type valkryies, which have no drops.
Attempting to turn knowledge into profit resulted in this screenshot. I guess we just don't have the coordination yet to properly pull this off. In the time we took to kill two mob members, we could have killed the two valks on the map twice. And its a joy to know that when you kill two of her mob members, that she summons 3 more, making her just that much harder. The main issue really is that when she recalls her mob, which happens every 30 seconds or so, its hard to tell which one you were killing.
So I've been working on various looks for my LK. While my biochemist sports the instantly recognizable, stylishly ugly hahoe mask + sunflower, I don't have anything for LK. Until now. Behold, the wonder that is diver goggles + angry snarl! 
No comment. Just no comment at all. 
So I've been lucky again, and have more ocas! What kind of exciting things lie inside?
One out of three ain't bad! Tarou also has some uses with combination with cramp card, so I suppose I can't complain about 2 of them.
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