Doddler's RO Journal
A Lot to Do About Nothing
By Doddler on January 16, 2008 in category 'General'
I've been slacking on journal entries recently, so I decided I'd get around to making a new post.
Things have been going pretty well much the same as they were. Apparently the secret is out, and Aesthetic guild now knows how to kill Valkyrie Randgris, leading to very few runs without competition. Luckily for us while they certainly bring a lot of manpower (around 10-20 people at times), they certainly don't seem to be well enough prepared, because I don't think they've won a single MVP since they started showing up about a week ago. I'm pretty proud of our team to be able to compete, because I don't usually think of our group as being top geared or equipped players. But what we lack in gears, we make up with a solid team that knows what its doing. I can only be appreciative of Insurrection in dealing with us, since by all respects they don't actually need to share MVP times with us. Its been great working together with them, and I hope that its helped both of us.
Also lucky for us, is the fact that there is not yet any competition for Ifrit. Admittedly Ifrit isn't nearly as profitable as Randgris, due to the almost mockingly low drop rates on his valuable gears.
In the screenshot shown here, is us finishing up Vesper. It was probably our best vesper run so far.
We got two vesper core drops at once. Definitely impressive. While core 03 isn't the greatest, 04 is probably the most sought after core, and hopefully it will fetch a decent sum.
Dark Tychon was our wizard on that run, one who is the center of a lot of drama on Loki now. Tychon was the leader of the guild I'm in, Alpha. I'm not too certain what happened but he's no longer the leader, and recently he's put up an auction for Alpha's Brisingamen pieces. I don't blame him for being upset, since most of the guild mates seem to treat him pretty badly as of late, and we haven't taken him to any of our big MVP runs lately. Part of that is that his characters aren't particularly well suited for what we do (and I'm partially to blame here), but some people (Momaro) are really vocal against his participation. We have noted that perhaps we shouldn't call it Alpha guild mvp's if we don't fairly take guild mates a long. I guess thats rude to say, but I do hope he gets the mess sorted out, he's a pretty cool guy.
I was feeling particularly lucky, so I grabbed 6 magni caps off the market, in the hopes of making a high upgraded one. At +7 I switched to enriched elu.
Apparently my luck isn't quite as good as I was hoping for. 
We've been doing Thanatos boss runs fairly frequently lately. My LK geared up for tanking is a beast, and can tank fairly comfortably at least 10 angel monsters on me without needing pots if I'm getting heals from a priest. You'd think the snatchers (Dame of Sentinel) would be a problem, but since their regular attack range actually out ranges the maximum distance of snatch, as long as you tank them right they can't actually snatch you. Barring any disastrous pulls, we've gotten very efficient at getting up the tower and killing him. Our fastest run so far was about 35-40 minutes. Not bad at all.
Apparently Silly Bear is crazy. We've gotten two slotted fire armors so far from Ifrit. While they are rare, I don't think they're particularly useful. Silly Bear, who plays Soul Linker as his main character, appears to think that it could have a use on his linker for Kaite killing wizards in WoE. I always knew he was crazy.
A fan of the site has donated freezing snow powder to me for killing Ktullanux. Special thanks to Suiryu, we'll make good use of it. 
Leveling on LK seems to be going smoothly. It looks like as long as WoE goes smoothly this week, that we'll be getting an exp event next week, so I'm cutting back my leveling until then. Still, its a good feeling to destroy packs of high level monsters.
Its OCA time. I've gotten lazy, so I'm no longer screenshotting the albums themselves. Hope thats not an issue!
***drum roll***
Phen card pays the price of admission I think! I'm disappointed at seeing another thief bug card though, I think I have enough of those already. Too bad about venatu as well, since I actually found one the other day. Better luck next time I suppose. 
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Lord Knight MVP
By Doddler on January 14, 2008 in category 'MVP'
Something I've wanted to do for a while, was put togeather a compelation of some of my MVP efforts. The first such compelation is complete, and you can see the video hosted on youtube.
In the video I do teleport, but only to escape from earthquake. If I had ghostring armor I could survive the attack, but as it stands I have no choice to run. The bosses do heal if you warp away, usually at the rate of 10000 every 5-10 seconds, so I have to be diligent in returning to fight the boss or it will have recovered all the damage I dealt.
Anyways, enjoy. 
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War of Emperium: Second Edition
By Doddler on January 10, 2008 in category 'Random Stuff'
So after my last post I decided I'd make a new category, "Random Stuff", where in addition to my regular posts I could link to cool stuff. This isn't a regular journal entry, but just something I thought was interesting and wanted to share with people.
First up this time is a War of Emperium: Second Edition video, again recorded by kRO players and hosted on MNCast. It shows a siege mostly from start to finish, albet in fast forward. They start at the castle entrance, push toward each of the defensive stones, destroying them. Then they push toward the emperium, having to destroy 3 sets of barricades. Last but not least, they switch to defensive, and hold the last barricade against enemy attack until emperium goes down (the barricade also goes down).
I must admit, I'm really excited for this. WoE:SE looks like a strong refinement of the existing woe system. Gone are segmented castle rooms with warps, as they cause unnatural barricades and generate lag. I the other day learned that hitting too many things at once can cause server instability, and these massive precasts are what generate the majority of lag in war of emperium in present. They improved defensive team mobility, and instead of having a vulnerable emperium, there are a series of objectives that must be cleared in order for the emp to be approached. Gone are the days where a team would not invest in defense, the new guardians are the beastly monsters found in volcano thor, and you want them to fight on your side. This is no longer the game where you repeatedly rush precast and hope to win, this is a real war between full guilds. Its what WoE wanted to be, and its addition will serve to strengthen the Ragnarok Online and its community community. If WoE is considered a unique feature to RO that helps keep it popular and enjoyable among its players, WoE:SE will be more so.
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Crashing Good Time
By Doddler on January 9, 2008 in category 'General'
So today I wanted to issue an apology to people on Loki. Yesterday evening, around 8pm, doing with some guild mates what I usually do, testing all sorts of unusual things, we ended up causing serious server instability which caused players across the entire server to disconnect and broke the guild functions for several minutes. I have discussed what caused the problem with Heimdallr on the GM team, and personally we won't be doing it any more, but I apologize for problems we caused.
This is a real shame, because I initially wanted to discuss how much fun the tactic was. We dropped Orc Hero and Drake very quickly dealing damage in excess of 100k a shot, and is within all respects, a legitimate use of the skill. However, in certain situations, it appears as though the server side processing increases exponentially. I was aware of the possibility that all players on screen would instantly get disconnected if you did it too much, but I was not previously aware of the fact that it could drop the zone server. It sucks that one of us shelled out for a neutralizer to try it out too.
Unfortunately this also means we can't explain what we were testing out. Many apologies!
Anyways, on to our regular programming.
Leveling crusader is fought with many perils, but overall, its been going pretty smoothly. The limited HP and lack of any fast dealing skills makes it considerably slower than it is hunting on my Lord Knight.
Current stats of the crusader. Now that he's hit level 85, I've been toying with the idea of using the LK account to leech the crusader. The LK levels roughly twice as fast, so it means I could level both at once. I'm not a big fan of leeching, but its an idea I'm currently toying with.
So we've been continuing to do Ktullanux, much to the displeasure of some people who level down there. Ktullanux is hard, and he's even harder when you don't have a decent team.
This time as you can see here, we attempted to use a pure Beast Charge hunter. For those not familiar with the skill, Beast Charge is a skill hunters receive when they are soul linked by a linker, which is a combo skill used after double strafe. The kicker is that beast charge's damage is based on strength. The damage mod is impressive, each point of strength increases your damage by approximately 16%. A high strength high dex hunter could hit very high numbers. Unfortunately, I wonder if its really worth it. Our beast charge hunter hit Ktullanux for 14k-15k as you can see here, but sacrificing agility and maybe even some dex means that your high damaging hits come much slower than what even a normal hunter could do with 5k DS's.
One interesting thing we toyed with was actually using Eske to increase the damage on Ktullanux. Since it does not affect his magic attack power, and the tank should be safety walled at all times, it worked pretty well. When we were there with sniper, it boosted his damage by about 30% and did not negatively affect our ability to hold him in place.
So we got one of these from Ifrit. I'm unsure if the ring is overly practical in its usage, but it certainly a lot of fun to use. A member in our guild Silly Bear rolled on it using the DKP he's been hording. Word has it that he plans on making a character solely for use with the ring!
Ignoring the horded kafra shop items in the second screen shot that I got while they were cheap, its time to see what comes out of OCA's today.
**drum roll**
Maybe luck shines on me after all. Neither card is particularly useful, but they are still rare cards. The Dryad card however is valuable because it is required to make the Valkyrian Helm, which is sought after by many players.
One thing that I've become interested in is co-ordinated parties in dungeons, its one thing that I've wanted to organize or be part of. The following video is one that I wanted to share, that shows one such party in Biolabs dungeon 3f. While these characters are very well geared, I wanted to point out how well each of them plays their specific roles. They're like a well oiled machine, always coordinated, very few mistakes. I also wanted to point out just how much fun it looks.
Note that the video is hosted on MNcast, so it may take a moment for it to load. This is the first time I'm going to try embedding an MNcast video, we'll see how it works. Also if anyone knows the songs used in the video, let me know!
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