Doddler's RO Journal
Crusader Crusading
By Doddler on January 6, 2008 in category 'General'
One aspect I really think is interesting in RO is that a players worth and equipment mean a lot. You only ever have to go through being a noob once, because as you get any sort of money or gears, your future endeavors are easier. While there are certainly pro's to the other side, such as WoW where many of the equipment is character bound, I enjoy how... malleable your account is. Your wealth becomes the power to equip and create your characters, and that can easily be exchanged or swapped simply by buying and selling gears. You aren't restricted to playing a single high level character, instead you can create and adapt a series of characters that you can use how you like.
This used to be a detriment to the game, but I think that as the economy is stabalizing at something more reasonable, its becoming easier than ever to poke your head into this unusual game environment. While it might take you days to get to second class the first time, its always considerably faster the second time. And in my case, its a lot faster the 11th or 12th time. 
So the story here is that I wanted to make a tank character. During our MVP runs, I usually play hunter, which while I feel that I'm probably one of the best at the role I'm given, there's honestly half a dozen people that could do what I do. So I wanted to play a character where I would feel valued or my participation would be desired. Priests seem to grow on trees, and while those trees are sometimes out of reach, we hardly have a need for a new priest. Afterall, I have access to a friends high priest when he left, and I can simply use that. Momaro plays a mean scholar, and he does his job well, so no need there. We have main killers lined up at the door waiting for a shot at Ifrit and Valk, so maybe I'd have to look elsewhere.
But tanking the hardest bosses, its something we have a room for improvement. My Lord Knight is a good tank, and to a reasonable extent he can tank Ifrit using liberal usage of potions, the LK is really more of an attacking character, not a defensive one. He can't however tank Randgris due to her heavy holy element attacks, and future bosses such as Beelzebub require something more than just high defense. I envisioned a paladin, who is both immune to status effects, could guard and resist attacks using guard and defending aura, heal himself and others, and use resistant souls to bless others with a seriously hefty 25% reduction in damage from demon monsters.
And so, Entaris was born to fill the role of my vision. I had previously started him as a Grand Cross sader, but then I realized that perhaps GX isn't the fastest way to reach my goal, and decided to remake as a pure combat sader, with the goal of blitz leveling to trans.
So on January 4th, 4:25pm Entaris was remade.
Unlike my previous attempt at making a crusader, this one would be pure str/dex, made for solid leveling. Crusaders don't get much in the way of attack skills, so I would have to make due with Bash.
Novice grounds is super easy these days, just find the nearest spore. Once swordsman, I killed Wolves until level 30.
From 30 to 53, it was all hill winds. I love these guys, they have a fairly high exp to HP ratio, which makes them optimal for the kind of leveling that I'm doing.
In this screenshot, its me achieving job 40.
Under two hours from new character to job 40! Damn nice. 
My character upon changing to crusader. Similar to last time, except a lot more str.
Even as a crusader, F. O. E! ... wait, maybe I shouldn't be using internet memes here. But even as a crusader, Hill Winds are optimal leveling till about 60-70. In optimal conditions I received about 1.5m an hour base experience.
Crusaders are pretty damn huge. I thought my LK was big and bulky, but my crusader appears to be even larger. Atleast I stand out. 
Did you notice the close confines in this screenshot? Damn those Drosera can be annoying sometimes!
But one can't keep doing hill winds to 99, so my plan continued, with a change of pace.
Step two of the project was clock tower High Orcs. High Orcs are another type of monster that have a high Exp to HP ratio. While they take two bashes, they're nearly as easy to find as hill winds and provide nearly double the exp. The downside is that you can't abuse the inn's HP/SP regen features in clock tower, so you become reliant on potions (I used fresh fish), and SP items (ranked blues... lots of them). On average it was 3m/hr base experience.
Sometimes, I think I have the best of luck in all the worst places. A card is a card, but it would be better if it was a good card!
High Orcs used to be the end game leveling for some players, but I have plans beyond here. What might you ask, would be faster than High Orcs?
You didn't even have to guess did you? My LK has been fully geared out for Thor for some time, so I figured I'd try it on my crusader. From the very beginning I planned to have enough dexterity to hit them, so that leveling here would be possible. While they take some 16 bashes, about half my SP, the leveling is a step above high orcs in terms of rate. The nice thing about thors is that I can make use of the Inn to recover my HP/SP for only 5k zeny. Of course I use a hefty sum of whites and I do bring royal jelly for SP (sometimes you can't JUST kill two kasas), it tends to work out.
Experience rate for Volcano Thor on crusader is roughly 4m - 5m/hr, without battle manual. Over the course of one hour, I burn approximately 1300-1400 white potions, and 120 royal jelly. Total expenses is roughly 2 mil for one hour. Its expensive, but the exp pays off I think. Before I began I was aware that it would be expensive to blitz level a character in this way, so I've been stockpiling zeny, having nearly 70m in my name before hand. I still have 60m at this point, but I have more levels to go!
And my crusader, in leveling mode. Not bad for 48 hours after creation, roughly only 12 hours of game time. A weekend well spent I think. 
I apologize for having such a wordy journal entry, I'll try to make things more interesting and have more pictures next time!
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Big Show MVPs
By Doddler on January 3, 2008 in category 'MVP'
So over the last few days, I've been doing a lot of the harder MVPs with Alpha. Its a good fun time, I must admit. While we've mostly been doing Valk and Ifrit, it is also fun to hit some of the other challenging MVPs face to face.
This here isn't really an MVP shot, but it is on our way down to Ifrit. With all the TKM's down there, you'd think someone would clear that bottom right portal!
First up: The Memory of Thanatos. A twisted tale of a man who sealed away the greatest demon and paid the price.
Thanatos is actually quite easy really. His mob is pretty strong, but you can kill all but one to make him quite weak. He can't even heal himself, only the Dolor can do that for him, but you can kill the Dolor in his mob. He two hand quickens at low HP, but you can just dispell it away. When he switches to holy element, he becomes even easier.
However, what thanatos lacks in power, he makes up in annoying. He constantly uses Exile which is a forced teleport on the tank. Even if you can counter Exile (fiber lock or ankle snares can disable him long enough for the tank to get back), he has a stupidly high chance to simply teleport away. More than half your time fighting Thanatos will simply be trying to find him after he constantly teleports. The only saving grace is that he has low HP, which means you don't have to keep up the game of cat and mouse for very long.
An easy victory.
No good drops durring any of our runs though on Thanatos.
Second up is Detardeurus. He's a pretty heavy hitter, and with shield reflect he's tough to take down with regular physical damage. Atleast you'd think that way. His shield reflect is only level 5, which puts asura and EDP-Sonic Blow out of the question, but it doesn't do enough back to stop my bowling bashes. My LK is primary killer on Detar, using bowling bash with a holy endowed dragon killer. In this shot we had a second tank to hold his hydrolancer minion. Its not a requirement though, I can tank both him and his hydrolancer without too much difficulty. Overall I still end up using about 150-200 whites, which is usually made up in item drops.
Third up is the great Ice Salamander, Ktullanux.
I always liked the story behind him. The high priests of Arunafeltz ended up in a panic when the chosen one to become the pope had a twin brother. In order to conceal the truth from the people of Rachel, they decided they would seal away the boy. To the north of Rachel in a magical frozen cavern, the priests took with them the magic eternal fire from Volcano Thor to the master of the place, Ktullanux. They charged him with protecting the boy and threatened to use the fire to destroy his domain should he refuse. Ktullanux agreed and the boy was sealed in ice benieth a magic barrier. The magic torches themselves became part of that seal, and remain in the cavern as a constant reminder of his promise.
This is his speach when you use the freezing snow powder to put out Thor's fire. Apparently Ktullanux takes his promises very seriously and decides he will kick your ass for putting out the fire.
Luckly for us, we are well equipped to deal with the ice salamander. Our strategy here is simple. There are a series of points on the map where stormgust will not knock back. We use these points to safety wall tank him. Our scholar tanks the mob, with the use of Kaahi to constantly replenish HP without the need of a priests heals, and using indulge to constantly recover SP needed to both recover SP of other players and support Kaahi. Ktullanux makes heavy use of Dispell so the tank needs to be constantly assumptio'd. He uses Agi Up fairly frequently, but its nothing Dispell of our own can't take care of.
Ktullanux also uses a strange skill, Random Elemental Attack, which strikes the player for a high powered attack of random element. This attack is unpredictable and in many cases can be strong enough to one shot one of the hardest tanks. Its for this reason we make heavy use of safety wall.
On our first trip, we made use of EDP sonic blow to kill it. I think it worked pretty well, and faster than using sniper. It is however, several magnitudes more expensive.
Second run we used sniper as killer. Overall I think it went pretty smoothly. Survivor Manteau both trips!
Even in death Ktullanux wishes to honor his promise. While I figured Dragons were more the honorable type, I suppose Ice Salamanders are too.
And thats all for today.
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Alice For The Win
By Doddler on December 29, 2007 in category 'General'
I'll explain the top picture shortly.
I decided to continue on my endeavor to make the shield for my Alice card. Behold, my plan B.
The plan is to take a series of cheaply priced stone bucklers from +4 to +6, and use enriched on anything past that.
Of the 5 stone bucklers, only 2 made it to +6.
One down...
One to go...
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!
At last, Its mine.
Of course, naturally I went out to test the damage I would receive with the shield on.
Which brings us to our first picture, soloing Dark Lord on LK, something I've been looking to try for some time. Coma is scary and I couldn't keep his dark illusions dead long enough but I came out alive.
Here's a nice shot of mobbing skeggiolds.
We attempted to take on Ktullanux as a team later, which didn't go so well. Our strategy was fine, as you can see the scholar was holding the MVP on a cell where he could not be knocked back by SG, I tanked the mob separately, and a priest would re-assumptio our main tank as soon as it dispelled.
Lacking in our calculations were other players. It seems that there was a naruto-sounding named ninja that thought that maybe by repeatedly killing the mob off of me, that it would help, but it didn't, it caused us to die painful deaths for over an hour and a half. Also missing was an actual killer. We had presumed that a SD sinx could hurt ktullanux, but it turns out an SD sinx doesn't have a hope of hitting him.
So we eventually gave up. We didn't even summon him, a party had previously left it cause they couldn't handle him.
I feel pretty lucky now, but these guys will have ot wait till later. Behold, the helms obtained from many Valkyries.
However, that doesn't mean I didn't want to avoid chancing things. I was looking for a new pair of tights for my hunter so he could 2 shot TI monsters, but the market for tights is apparently pretty slim. Then it hit me, that I could simply make slotted tights myself.
2 of 8 A class armors at Payon slot enchanter. Not a bad deal. It averages out to 1.8m for s1 tights, which is a bit pricey, but not bad.
I did break one of the tights going to +5 though. Whoops!
My hunter (no buffs at all), with all new Tights of Wild Cat, giving me +25 atk at the cost of 5 armor defense. I figure that if monsters hit me, its going to hurt no matter how good my armor is, so I may as well kill them faster in the process.
Ooh yeah, thats sexy.
I also convinced some friends in guild/vent to come out for some Odin 2 leveling. Odin 2 happens to be one of the best place for a hunter, the exp is quite phenomenal.
Omake:
I'm sorry to say I haven't gotten any new OCA's! So I'll have to settle to a shot of my LK being killed by an Esked Wild Rose. 
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Continuing Enjoyment
By Doddler on December 23, 2007 in category 'General'
Back for another installment of journal action. Todays issue is action packed, I guarantee.
Before I begin, I wanted to touch base on the MVPing topics. I've had a few people ask, and even a few people stalking us wanting to know what is our secret to success. It is a wonder how the party I mentioned in my previous mvp post could have killed it.
I must admit my selfishness here, and I apologize for this, that for now we aren't letting the secret out just yet. I'm sure it will happen eventually, we have enough people involved that the word will spread, but lets be honest, I'm happy with there being only two Randgris/Ifrit parties on Loki at the moment. The other team, Insurrection, does it by insanely stacking a champion and asuraing it. Our method probably has more in common with the old icewall/ME trick, although harder and certainly requires a lot more active involvement. Only thing I'll say is that its a trick that has been in the game for about 4 years now.
Anyways, back to our regularly scheduled program!
So on a whim, I decided to start a crusader. After giving it some thought, I decided I would make a GX build. Grand Cross is a tough skill to use, but I figured it would be fun to try.
How do you level a character who has no strength? Well, its pretty simple.
Bashing hill winds from level 20 to 54 when I hit job 42. Overall, it took about an hour and a half to do, going back to the inn for buffs and SP when I needed it. It took some tough gears to do, but I'm built for it. Having no strength is a bit of a limitation, but using the pirate dagger, picky armor, bloody shackle ball, quad boned pike, and earth endow, makes for roughly 1700-2000 bashes. Its usually 3 bashes, or 2 bashes and one regular hit. A borrowed Maestro ribbon helped pretty good to keep SP under check too.
In all honesty, doing the crusader test took longer than it did to build the entire character. The quest sucks pretty bad, I wasn't a fan of it at all. Spelling mistakes, poor directions, its hard to tell what you were supposed to do at all.
...Is it just me, or does the crusader leader have no pants on? He freaks me out.
So what does a new crusader do?
The answer is exactly the same thing as before, bashing hill winds.
Well I did finally get GX, which was pretty fast. Unfortunately I ran the small problem that I was worried about, and thats that bashing hill winds is better and more efficient than anything I could do with GX at my level.
It does let me do stupid things like this though!
So apparently hiding behind the trees and spying on Kingdom of Loki became a popular pastime for our guild. Its amusing to see none the less!
So finally I scrapped togeather enough cash to get an Alice card. It wasn't that easy, but it was definately worth it I think.
There she is!
Unfortunately I ran into a rather rough issue, where I do not actually have a proper shield to put it in. I hoped it would be easy but... apparently its not. The initial goal was a +9 stone buckler, who's value should be 40-50 mil or so.
$Q^!@#%&^*^!!*$%^$!%
Seriously, I havn't had one, single success with enriched elunium. Apparently getting people to pay cash to break their items is a common pastime at gravity HQ. I wouldn't complain if enriched elu didn't cost a bloody fortune to use.
There was actually a fourth attempt, but I forgot to take screenshots of it. I've blown practically the cost of a +9 stone buckler and havn't even gotten a +8 one using enriched elu. I'm willing to settle for a +8 stone buckler of royal guard but... I have to get one there first. 
Its that time again, and more so than usual. My luck fails in every other aspect of the game, how bad can it be?
**drum roll**
Apparently, my luck continues to fail. Thats 2x argos now too... 
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