Doddler's RO Journal
Day 6: Day of the Kafra Shop
By Doddler on December 19, 2007 in category 'Noob Project'
So having been paid for my recent work I've done, and not having much time to dedicate to RO, I decided to spend a few bucks on kafra shop to make leveling a bit more entertaining. Its probably not the most respectable thing to do, but it means that I can get a little more out of the time that I play RO.
So I picked up some skill scrolls, some foods, and the angel wings. I must say, I absolutely hate the angel wings. They're ugly, they're annoying... but they boost attack speed by 3%, so I can't really ignore how useful it is.
Warning: Blessing and Increase Agi boxes are both addictive and rediculously expensive. Stay away from them, or you'll end up blowing too much money. Read the latest rant for my opinion on them.
So after a long period of time of selling immortal hearts, I finally got to the point where I can afford some elemental weapons. Atleast, a elemental weapon.
Oooh yeah. This might be a dead giveaway to both what server I'm playing on and what my character is, especially if that merchant I got the weapon from reads the site. 
Daamn sexy damage. Elemental weapon makes all the difference in the world.
In all honesty, I could probably move beyond doing minos for now, but the money is too good to ignore. I could go to high orcs, which is probably faster exp, but way less profitable. I'm actually considering doing ninetails, as the drop rate on obbs and dead branches is pretty damn nice. They're unfortunately a bit out of the way and hurt more than minos though, so I'll have to build up more before I can do those.
The current Rogue, in all his buffed glory. 177 aspd... sexy. Not bad for level 61! It won't be quite as good once I'm out of scrolls, but for now its pretty nice.
Total Game Time: 27 hours (not including vend time)
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Catching Up
By Doddler on December 16, 2007 in category 'MVP'
So of course leveling my noob character isn't the only thing I've been up to. Since I haven't posted an MVP post in a while, there's a lot of catching up to do.
After some organizing, planning, etc, we decided to hit some of the higher tier mvps. My LK nor bio aren't all that useful for this kind of thing, so I decided to hop on my hunter to help out.
Did you guys know I had a hunter? I guess I didn't mention him much here. He's level 86, and kills stuff pretty well.
Finding Valkyrie Randgris is a path fraught with dangers... scary, square-ish blob like dangers.
But we found Randgris, and we did somehow kill it after an hour of constant death. And yay, super sexy drops. Can't hate that.
Our party, on the way down to check out Ifrit. Double KO on sword guardian. 
Ifrit was a similar mess, a disaster waiting to happen. Ifrit makes Randgris look fairly easy in comparison. Still, we overcome the odds, and killed him.
And kill him did we ever do. Thats a cart full of rares, and a cart full of cash.
The last two days of MVPing with the guild prompted us to create some kind of distribution system for equipment. Its unreasonable to vend that many items and expect to keep track of items that haven't sold for weeks or months and who deserves money for them.
Having some friends who play WoW, after some consultation with our friends we created a DKP system that lets us distribute items as we get them, with little to no downtime. I plan to modify it to allow us to track expenses as well. You can find the page here.
So we decided to test earthquake damage again. As we figured, magic defence is mostly negligable in terms of reducing the damage. I'm starting to lean towards earthquake being a hybrid of physical and magical damage, in the same way that say, grand gross or soul destroyer is. A monk in mental strength takes reduced damage, about 30%-40% less, but it won't be enough to save him.
Overall its considered a regular magical attack, you can reduce it with immune, race shield and equipment, and if you stand far enough away, alligator card, horn card, and long mace. In spurt status, you can tumble earthquake, and Kaupe will block one single strike of three. Presumably you could use a crusader's sacrifice to take hits from up to 5 party members, although that sader most definately would only take one hit before dying. Ultimately in an optimal party with crusaders getting themselves killed for party members and two soul linkers, you could bring the number of hits from earthquake to only 1.
With 6 people being hit, as you can see most party members took roughly 1500-2500 per hit, for 4500-7500 damage after all three hits struck. In power up, earthquake hits for roughly 3 times the damage, killing most of our party members instantly (only I on LK could survive by using pots, due to having 16000hp). I can't honestly understand how gravity expects people to deal with this skill, on a monster such as Ifrit that has 8 times the power of orc lord, you just can't take the hits. Even GR is barely enough to save you. I think earthquake was way more balanced when it only did a single hit instead of 3... this is just unreasonable to expect people to do without godly gear.
Enough complaining though. We killed orc lord, and I'm last man standing. 
While looking for lord though, I poped a poporing by accident, and look what I found. I can't imagine a bot dumb enough to let an earing get picked up by a popo, but apparently it happens, and I'm richer because of it.
Thats not the only thing we checked though, we decided to test bowling bash in pvp. See, bowling bash is an interesting skill. Its not like any other blast skill... it takes one target, pushes him back, and anyone he bumps into gets pushed back, and it just cascades into a giant chain reaction.
Our problem we found durring testing of course was that the knock back wasn't predictable, players seemed to move in random directions. We still managed to get a chain reaction across 6 different people in a row after a few attempts though. Fun stuff. In woe, you could get this to chain react across dozens of closely packed players.
That is, if the skill weren't horrifically broken due to the bowling bash gutter problem. 
Back to MVP'ing though. Mistress has been pretty nice to me. I still didn't get that Gungnir that I wanted though. I have three Coronets though, and made one into a mistress crown.
Somehow, Shikieiki decided to multiply. One was no doubt a bug and not really there, but it is amusing none the less.
Gloom Under Night is fun. This party we were going to get to kill Randgris except EMan from insur kept killing our party by getting it to throw earthquakes at us. I can take joy in the fact that it took them another three hours to kill it after we left though.
So we went to gloom. No drops, but fun none the less.
Those bombs he leaves behind are way too much fun. Our entire party was eventually goaded into hopping in. Peer pressure is a bitch. Remember kids, don't try this at home!
I killed bapho again, and got this. No pictures from the mvp itself. As I figured, its not slotted.
I decided to upgrade my Jewel Crowns. Out of 12 of them, only 4 made it to +5. 2 made it to +7. Determined to take them to +8, I grabbed some enriched elu.
What the heck. Two bucks to break my gears, I could have done that without paying money.
God damn, enriched elu is a piece of crap. I think I've spent like $6-$8 on the stuff and every single time my stuff has broken. They should drop the price on the elu, cause its clearly not useful for what they're selling it for...
Its that time again!
**Drum Roll**
Holy cow, I think this is the first card I've gotten from an OCA thats actually covered its cost! I'm simply speechless.
aaaaand...
#@%@#%^@@#~$!
Thats 3 hornet cards from ocas now...
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Noob Project: Day 5 - It Just Keeps Getting Better
By Doddler on December 10, 2007 in category 'Noob Project'
So enough ranting, and back to our regularly scheduled content.
This last little bit I've been exploring all across midgard, having a little bit of fun durring the last little burst of time before getting job 40.
All over the place. Siromas are actually really good experience, although its less cool when they kill me because they stun me.
In the end since I saved in Einbroch still, I just went back to Porcellios.
Almost!
Yatta!
It was in fact tempting to continue leveling past job 40 to max out Envenom but in the end I decided it would be better if I changed immediately.
Off to the rogue job change!
Wow, don't piss off Mr. Smith! Luckly I got it pretty lucky for gathering quest. I did not realize however, how much I hated finding crabs on that damn map until now. Snake Scales probably would have been a lot faster if I actually killed snakes instead of anacondaqs, but I got 85 Venom Canine while hunting and sold them for 750z each!
The underground passage part was easier than I recall of it. I realize at this point that since all the monsters there give exp and drops, that one could seriously abuse the instant spawn abysmal knights if you had a high enough level thief. Just a thought~
Freedom!
Woooo!
Its sad but true!
So off to leveling/money making.
Not only are they alright experience for my level range, people pay an arm and a leg for these hearts! Apparently things deflated so much that they wern't worth nearly what I expected, but it was still a good deal. I got almost 200 which I sold for 1700z.
Stun; a rogues worst enemy. You can guess how this ended...
Not a fan of fighting minos yet. I perfect dodge them, and they're great exp, but in the odd chance that they hit me with thier earth attack (which happens roughly once every 5-10 minutes), there's a 75% chance that it'll one shot me. For the most part I just avoid them and hunt verits.
And there's the standings right now, without any buffs/aspd potion. Looking good! I maxed sword mastery right off the bat as rogue, as I think its one of my most useful skills available, and went gank 5 and stalk 3. I'll probably drop Intimidate in favor of maxing gank, backstab, and sightless mind, and I might even go back and max Envenom like I wanted to initially.
Total Game Time: 22 hours. I beat my 24 hour goal! While I guess this means my character is no longer noob enough for the noob project, I will continue to document his adventures as long as people want me to. 
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The Ranting, It Never Ends
By Doddler on December 10, 2007 in category 'Ranting'
The Ranting, it never ends
This is a bit of a continuation off of my last RO rant. The usual disclaimer goes here, these rants are where I speak my mind about various things, and there's even the ever so slight chance that I might say something insightful or practical. It may be just me venting. If pretty pictures are more of your thing, feel free to skip the rant.
1) Korea Ragnarok Comparison
Since I so often refer to differences between iRO and kRO, I've decided I will make a specific section comparing the two.
I've constantly cited iRO as being one of the more expensive RO's to play, but the truth is that kRO is the most expensive RO server, in some ways. It's very popular to play net games from an internet cafe in Korea, and I'm going to touch on that matter a bit later.
First up is a direct comparison in subscription prices. All prices in USD.
| Time | iRO | kRO |
| 1 Month | $12.00 | $23.92 (22,000 WON) |
| 2 Months | N/A | $45.58 -> $22.79/month (41,800 WON) |
| 3 Months | $32.00 -> $10.67/month | $64.31 -> $21.44/month (59,400 WON) |
| 6 Months | $57.00 -> $9.50 /month | $121.50 -> $20.25/month (112,220 WON) |
As you can see, iRO is in fact substantially cheaper than kRO.
However, kRO players aren't all play-at-home type. As mentioned earlier, Korean online gaming has made internet gaming cafe's incredibly popular, and a substantial portion of gamers play RO from one. iRO has attempted to service net cafe's (there used to be a net cafe section on the iRO homepage), but that style of gaming simply isn't popular here.
How it works is that Gravity licenses out access to major game providers (several providers in fact, it's why kRO has tabs on its login screen to change between host provider). These game providers sell access to their games to net cafe centers. The net result is that when you go to a supported net cafe, you access the supported games for free. That means that when you play at a net cafe, your account is always active, and you never have to pay the monthly fee (beyond what you pay for access to the net cafe). Gravity further encourages play from net cafe through a series of additional benefits.
First off, all net cafe players automatically gain 50% more exp, and 1/2 death penalty (dropped to 0.5%). There are additional benefits too, which actually depend on the service level you pay for from the location you're playing the game at. Stationed in every town is an NPC that will give your character special buffs (similar to stat food) that last for two hours. They disappear on death, although you can always return to the NPC to have them renewed. In addition they also sell specific kafra shop items depending on the type of service you get.
Silver Tier Service:
ALL STATS + 3, ATK/MATK +15
Ability to Buy Greed Scrolls from the Kafra Shop
Gold Tier Service:
ALL STATS + 6, ATK/MATK + 24
Ability to buy Greed Scrolls, Red Medicine, and Blue Medicine from the Kafra Shop.
Gold Tier Service + Additional Fee (unsure on the pricing here):
Option 1: ALL STATS + 6, ATK/MATK + 24
Option 2: STR + 8, AGI +6, DEX +4, ATK + 32, FLEE + 5
Option 3: INT + 8, DEX + 6, VIT + 4, MATK + 40
Option 4: DEX + 8, LUK + 6, AGI + 4, ATK/MATK + 24
Ability to buy Greed Scrolls, Red Medicine, Blue Medicine, and Authoritative Badges from the Kafra Shop.
The two tiers, silver and gold, are what you would pay at the net cafe. You do have the option to pay a small additional fee (it's not much, although I don't know how much) to gain the last tier of service. I also don't know the pricing on the kafra shop items, although the boxes are usually 0.01US to 0.10US per unit, maybe more for the medicines. Red Medicine grants +10% max HP for 10 minutes, and Blue Medicine grants +10% max SP for 10 minutes, both disappear on death. Also the + stats are the same type as foods, so using a food item will overwrite it.
I also want to touch on the Kafra Shop side of things. As you can see, kRO is rather different from iRO. I will highlight these differences further by comparing kafra shop items.
For fun, I will include jRO numbers as well. For basis of comparison jRO, the monthly fee for jRO is 1500 yen, or $13.45, also higher than that of iRO.
In addition, I will calculate Kafra Shop item costs on the most basic level, ignoring the bonuses you gain from purchasing large quantities of points at a time (they're mostly the same across all three servers anyways). kRO offers various packages, larger boxes being cheaper per unit. I can't list them all here so I will use the middle level box.
Durration items. Cost is listed by cost PER HOUR of maintaining the buff, ignoring the possibility of deaths.
| Item | iRO | kRO | jRO |
| Battle Manual | $2.00/h | $1.00/h | $1.34/h |
| Bubble Gum | $2.00/h | $0.82/h | N/A |
| Insurance | $0.40/h | $0.17/h | $1.25/h |
| Increase Agi | $0.94/h | $0.27/h | $0.68/h |
| Blessing | $0.94/h | $0.27/h | $0.68/h |
| Aspersio | $1.00/h | $0.36/h | $1.34/h |
| Assumptio | $2.70/h | $0.43/h | $2.41/h |
| Andrenaline Rush | $1.20/h | $0.43/h | $1.08/h |
| Wind Walk | $0.67/h | $0.16/h | $0.41/h |
| Status Food | $0.20/h | $0.10/h | $0.54/h * |
* Status food does not disapate on death on jRO, which justifies thier higher price.
Usage items. Items here are listed per use (unless listed otherwise).
| Item | iRO | kRO | jRO |
| Neutralizer | $15.00 | $10.61 | $13.44 |
| Enriched Elunium | $1.00 | $0.22 | $8.96 |
| Enriched Oridecon | $1.00 | $0.22 | $6.27 |
| Convex Mirror | N/A | $0.20 | $0.90 |
| Megaphone | N/A | $0.20 | N/A |
| Token of Sigfried | $0.15 | $0.30 | $0.67 |
| Kafra Card | $0.10 | $0.05 | $0.27 |
| Dungeon Teleport Scroll | $0.05 | $0.05 | N/A |
| Giant Fly Wing (per 10) | $0.33 | $0.15 | $0.45 |
2) My opinion, and lots of ranting
This list is particularly interesting, because it highlights differences in what management for different ROs think about the various items. For example, while iRO is consistantly more expensive for almost all items here, jRO has abnormally high prices on enriched ores. Another unusual anomaly is how cheap iRO prices the token of sigfried, so cheap that they are even half the price of kRO.
Some pricing makes sense, others don't. I'm surprised to see that after working it out, having bless and agi on your character for one hour is nearly as expensive as using a battle manual for a full hour. Also interesting but bothersome fact is that its actually cheaper to use +10 STR, AGI, INT and DEX food for one full hour than it is to buff yourself with bless and agi. For the entire price of subscription for one full month, you could have bless and agi for 5 hours ($0.80 for 4 status foods, $1.88 for bless/agi scrolls). In fact bless and agi are twice as expensive. What!?
One thing I havn't covered in these charts are the permanent items. jRO doesn't sell them, at least not directly through the kafra shop. They rely on tie in sales and campaigns to sell their specialty gears. However, one interesting thing I found when looking up prices is that kRO usually charges more for permenent gears than iRO does.
Now this does make sense. Its permanent after all. I think its fairly stupid that simple priest buffs for 1-2 hours are more expensive than nearly all permanent equipment sold in the kafra shop. I don't mind pricing on big ticket items, like enriched elu, battle manuals and such, but simple character buffs should not be so expensive. Their newer additions show much fairer prices. The status foods are in good line, and the dungeon teleport scroll boxes are a grand deal. Even their newer permenant gears seem better priced. I personally think they should make some adjustment to some consumable items, or do what kRO does and make large boxes (like boxes of 50 or 100 scrolls) substantially reduced in price compared to individual purchases.
3) What I want to see
kRO has these really cool packaged sets that I would like to see on iRO. They're so cool, I'm going to describe them here.
| Package Name | Package Contents | Cost |
| 1 Hour Package Type 1 |
|
$2.05 |
| 1 Hour Package Type 2 |
|
$2.05 |
| 1 Hour Package Type 3 |
|
$2.05 |
| 1 Hour Package Type 4 |
|
$2.05 |
| 1 Hour Package Type 5 |
|
$2.05 |
| 1 Hour Package Type 6 |
|
$2.27 |
| 2 Hour Package Type 1 |
|
$3.85 |
| 2 Hour Package Type 2 |
|
$3.85 |
| 2 Hour Package Type 3 |
|
$3.85 |
| 2 Hour Package Type 4 |
|
$3.85 |
| 2 Hour Package Type 5 |
|
$3.85 |
| 2 Hour Package Type 6 |
|
$4.43 |
And thats the package sets from the Kafra Shop. I like the idea of bundling up various items into a convenient package for leveling for a discount value (atleast I think its discount). I would feel reluctant to open a dozen boxes to do what one of those two hour packages does, but I wouldn't mind paying that price for them.
kRO has some other, nifty things on the kafra shop that I'm torn about. I can't really make my mind up on the rental gears. Some of them are cool, like the observer, a cool borg like eyepiece middle gear that lets you cast sence on monsters, or the rental balista, which is not as good as a specialized bow but its high attack makes it the ultimate all-rounder. Some of them are overpowering though, such as the rental excalibur (INT+10 LUK+10), rental combat knife (much like the existing one), and rental safety ring (DEF+5 MDEF+5). The cost is decent for them, most rental gears cost anywhere from $0.80 for a week with the observer, to $4-$5 for a week with the more expensive equipment. I don't really like the idea of non permenant items, but I do think they are better than permenantly handing out broken gears.
I always wanted to see the Rental Pecopeco Hairband on iRO though. The kRO version is $2 for 2 weeks, and it grants increased movement speed like the permenant version, but the rental version additionally grants +5% aspd and 5% faster cast. I only really wanted this for aspd on my agi characters, because I'll be entirely honest, I have a deep founded hatred for the other attack speed increasing headgear, the flapping angel wings.
Some things I like though. The kafra shop specialty hairstyles are nifty, as that they are entirely athetic, and don't affect game balance. The styling kit costs $3.00 for a hairstyle, and you bring the kit to a specialty hairstylist who gives you your new style. The new styles are as follows:
Male:
Female:
I'm not a big fan of the specific styles, although I must admit that the first female style looks nice.
Another interesting addition that they've done recently is the addition of monster mecenaries. Mercenaries don't exist on iRO yet, but basically they act as a controllable partner that assists you in leveling. A mercenary contract lasts 30 minutes, although unlike homunculus you can't have your AI cast skills automatically, they must be used by the owner. It can however be supported by regular skills. The regular mercenary system covers pretty well everything you really need, so the addition of monster mercenaries is simply a cool bonus where you can have a monster fight with you. I bet they're great for catching bots too.
The monster mercenaries are exactly the same for HP and stats as their actual monster equivilant. The details are as follows:
| Monster | Skills | Cost |
Disguise  |
|
5 Scrolls for $1.62 10 Scrolls for $2.92 |
Mimic  |
|
5 Scrolls for $1.62 10 Scrolls for $2.92 |
Alice  |
|
5 Scrolls for $2.17 10 Scrolls for $4.00 |
Although it is a bit unusual that Alice doesn't actually have heal, its cool to see monsters able to fight along side. According to some kRO posts they seem to be pretty useful and fun to use. I am a bit disapointed that they (atleast these ones) are kafra shop exclusive, but I wouldn't mind seeing them hit iRO.
4) What else could they do?
I gave this a bit of thought... most of the kafra shop items, aside from a few simply add convenience. kRO offers town teleport wings for midgard, shwarzwald, arunafeltz, and off contenent locations (separate wings for each). All RO's offer priest buffs, which again simply adds to the convenience of not having to pay for buff slave. I was thinking what else could they do.
Endow scrolls? Endow from a sage is kind of cool but I think 99% of all elemental endowing that goes on in RO are from slave accounts that hardcore players have made for convenience. Very rarely you'll actually get endowed from a sage or scholar in a party you're in. If Kafra Shops goal is convenience, why not offer elemental endow? That might feel like stretching it a bit but its an idea.
I want to throw out other ideas, but I havn't given this part quite enough thought yet. Maybe it will be the topic of a future rant.
5) Conclusion
Holy damn, I dragged that out for a huge length. Again I thank you all for reading what I have to say (I'm suprised you took the time to do so!), and any corrections, discussions, flames, are welcome. Again these are my own random thoughts on things, and shouldn't be taken too seriously.
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