Doddler's RO Journal
Viewing category: General
The last two months
By Doddler on April 2, 2009 in category 'General'
So I figure I really should be doing updates more frequently. The funny thing is that I've cropped the images for making this post a few weeks back but always kept putting it off. Well I guess I might as well get on it! We're back to Valkyrie server again, for february~march.
Just two random, sort of scenic locations.
Those wondering about my attempt to gather valentines day rings, wonder no further. I didn't win. Didn't even come close! Thanks to the few people that gave me rings though.
To be honest I'm not exactly a fan of how Taekwon Master became the top leveling class, but I have no choice but to go with it. While others may enjoy their thor level 1, we enjoy our thor 3f. Ever since iRO changed kasas and salamanders to use shield reflect at low HP, the skill rarely becomes a problem. With miracle, the TKM can kill them quite fast.
Oh oh! Respawning monsters unfortunately is always a problem.
Ouch!
Another pull gone very wrong.
Thor's isn't the only alternate spot to get experience, the Crack of Dimension is pretty good. Of course, the real reason for going is for diabolus manteaus and diabolus rings, items we've failed to get so far.
As you'd kind of expect, Taekwon Master is probably the strongest role for this type of leveling as well.
Curse my bad luck. 
Sealed Shrine has been a sort of a rare pass-time that we sometimes get around to doing. Its pretty fun, though the first part feels almost like its there just to slow you down from getting to the boss rather an actual dungeon of sorts.
Mini dark illusion! Having soul linkers along is amusing sometimes.
While I didn't get any screenshots with baphomet, we did get one of these. The doll went to Writhing, who used it to get the massively attrocious looking Gigantic Baphomet Horns. Well, at least the stats are good!
Endless Tower is something that in all honesty I'd like to do much more often than we do right now. It's always a fun time, though it can be a little hecktic on the upper levels.
Another lots of death screenshot.
It might not look like it but there's 4 hydrolancers and their mobs in there!
And our trip comes to an end due to an angry fallen bishop.
The new iRO headgear to come out is pretty appealing. While the box events are a bit too frequent for my liking, I definately enjoy the design on the new headgears... It looks pretty awesome with the robo eyes and the iron cain. I'm impressed that headgears of this visual callibur are available only on iRO.
So I've been told that I don't do enough posts with MVP's in them. To fix this, the remainder of the post will contain nothing bug MVPs.
This particular fight with Satan Morroc was pretty interesting. Unfortunately we never got a chance to see the fight to its conclusion because some of our members eventually had to leave. Next time we'll get him!
We've also been periodically taking on Valkyrie Randgris. While there's still a bit of a learning curve because lots of our members haven't done this kind of thing before, we did eventually kill it.
Here's a movie of our randgris run. I appologize for the quality, I was testing out how well Cam Studio recorded for a real MVP run. The results were satisfactory, though there were some issues saving the file that caused the video to blank out at some points. Also you can enjoy an unintentially amusing windows crash.
Spoilers for the previous movie. 
So what else have I been killing? We'll I'll show you! Rest assured that I won't be doing this kind of posting in the future, so bear with me this one time.
That's quite a bit isn't it? Out of all of those, Lady Tanee is quite possibly the hardest to do. Thank goodness for Convex Mirrors though!
So that's it for today. Hopefully I'll be able to update more frequently than I have been.
-View Comments (23 comments)
Fallacious Okolnir - Valk Server
By Doddler on March 17, 2009 in category 'General'
This is actually our second successful attempt of Okolnir and making the godly item Asprika, and our fifth total attempt, but its the first one I've actually taken the time to fraps, so it gets special mention.
The musical choice this time around is Kamelot. I've had people tell me its an odd choice, but I wanted to use them as a throwback to the original okolnir video from the kRO guild Red Mirage that we've looked to for so long.
The video recording is a bit of iffy quality, and I apologize for that. I played at 1024x768 and had fraps set to record at half size in order to get it working at decent quality (I usually play at windowed 960x600 resolution... a bit odd). The half size drastically reduces the visual quality, but its the only way I could actually record fraps in RO with my system setup.
Unfortunately I guess I had video sync off because what you'll see is that as my actual system performance degrades (when there's a lot of action on screen), the video actually speeds up. I guess this is cause lower game frame rate = less frames being saved per second, and when you play that back at normal speed it looks like it goes much faster. Its not really noticeable till the second half of the video but just keep in mind that I didn't intentionally speed it up. I did intentionally do part of the frus/skogul part in slow motion, because I felt that the speed-up didn't do the part justice.
Anyways hopefully there's enough there to enjoy still!
I didn't take any pictures of our last run but I have pics of the runs before it so I'll go through them.
Our gathering for our very first run.
Unfortunately there's a bit of a learning curve when it comes to controlling so many monsters. On our first attempt I was unable to avoid damage from the frus's firewall, which rendered this portion nearly impossible.
This is an example of how not to do the temple portion! Monsters shouldn't be in the party.
And that's time up.
Attempt #4, go!
The mystic garden is probably the single longest portion of the hour long trial. The true enemy here is the maze itself, as its restrictions are rather brutal. I've come to learn that the different colors have different 'styles' of restricting the paths. When the maze switches to red, nearly all the sections can be accessed, as its sort of arranged in a bit of a spiral paturn.
The maze unfortunately is prone to some serious 'icewall' style bugs, where a cell should have been made walkable but your client doesn't seem to think so because you weren't on screen when it changed back. This is frustrating, though recently we found that it can be used to your advantage. If you icewall on a cell where one of the flower barricades appear, when the icewall vanishes, those cells become walkable, even if there are flowers there. You can see we accidentally do this in the video.
The wandering path through the sky is none too difficult, but it is slightly time consuming. With only 18 garden keepers, a 90% drop on crystal keys, and 20 players in the party, you can see where the problem occurs. They respawn rather quickly, 3 minutes, but every minute counts.
The battle of Piamette. The initial stage, where you require to get 6 players caged, and then free them is much easier we found when you assigned specific positions to players for capture.
The actual fight with Piamette is pretty simple. She has 3m HP, and at 60% HP she summons 3 minions. These minions have only 500k HP, but as they lose HP, they begin to use hell judgement and dark blessing (coma effect). Your two options on this fight are to forgo AoE attacks to take down piamette directly without harming her minions, as they don't use their dangerous attacks at full HP. For us however our AoE killers are the strongest in party so we usually try to kill them. This usually is a smooth process because dark blessing is harmless when you have sacrifice from a crusader. Unfortunately for us in the video, the sacrifice crusader died just prior to dark blessing, which caused all kinds of problems.
Normally it's not that messy!
The temple portion of the quest is actually pretty easy if you know what you're doing. All three of our failed attempts ended at this stage as we attempted to figure out some kind of way to handle the hordes of monsters.
In the end we settled on an icewall separation of the party, and dragging the monsters onto a mental strength champion. This works surprisingly well as you can see in the video.
After the Skogul and then Frus are dispatched, you have to take care of the Garden Watchers. These are much scarier, but the concept is generally the same. We used the stairs here because it was easier to keep a separation between the tanks and main party, but it also limits the effectiveness of meteor storm, which works best in open areas.
Once the Wish Maiden appears, the concept is really the same as the previous two, except with a lot more dying. Wish Maiden uses some dangerous skills that can kill the players on the other sides of the icewall if left in idle so we try to keep her tanked as much as possible. Neither the champion nor my LK are proficient at taking damage from a monster of her strength though, but with two of us she generally stayed focused on one long enough for the other to get back on their feet.
Making good time! The run we recorded in the video was cutting it much closer, with only about 3 minutes remaining.
Words of wisdom from the wish maiden after completing the Okolnir trial.
And there it is, the creation of the Asprika. 
Pretty nice garment if I do say so myself!
Thanks to everyone who participated on each of our runs, it was a good time!
And I can't help but drop a quick plug here, if you're interested in doing things like this, play Valkyrie with a decent levelled character (70+ at least) and willing to be active with vent and make at least one woe a week, drop us a line in our guild recruitment forum and maybe you can get involved. 
-View Comments (11 comments)
Valentine's Ring Event!
By Doddler on February 21, 2009 in category 'General'
A bit of an unusual post, but we're organizing a last minute push to try to get enough rings on the iRO Valk server to win the Valentines Ring event. Any females level 75+ on the server interested in giving me their ring box? Its really quite easy, near the prontera fountain. I'll accept any ring donations (mail or PM), but if you want I can pay up to 200k zeny for people who send rings (I'll send zeny back if you mail the box).
Thanks to everyone for their support. 
-View Comments (4 comments)
Catching Up on Valkyrie
By Doddler on February 5, 2009 in category 'General'
I have a big pile of pictures, stretching all the way back to, as you can see Christmas, that I figured I'd catch up on. So lets check out whats been going on on Valkyrie Server.
The christmas event brought upon many things, including the Lucky Box event. While I do have my reservations about how the whole thing was handled, the fact of the matter is that the quest unleashed a monster amount of bloody branches on the server, which for a short period of time made is pretty dangerous to go anywhere.
Ifrit summoned in a PVP room. We decided that the lack of death penalty made it worthwhile to attempt to take him down.
Ouch!
I missed the moment he died, but it was the first Ifrit kill on Valkyrie Server.
There were a few other fun things that came from the branches. I never noticed it before but doppelganger attacks REALLY fast in two hand quicken.
Taking on the Valkyries.
Even Beelzebub is afraid of us!
One of the strangest thing I've seen to come out of the bloody branch, was White Lady fighting Thanatos. I guess her sanctuary hit him because he's demon race and he got a bit angry, and they just went right at it. White Lady didn't have a chance.
War of emperium remains entertaining as always. I'm not sure why all my woe shots are from the same perspective and always showing us losing, but I guess thats the only time I remember to take screenshots.
Things are a bit more even now, and we almost always have a good fight.
Battlegrounds runs quite frequently on the server, as many people have a lot to gain with the BG rewards. Most of the time though players do Tierra because of the speed of the matches, most people don't do Flavius. I guess the problem is that most people can't handle the guardians. Its not so bad if you're smart about it, as you can see there's lots of ways to do it.
The most common way is just to put them on the ledge. This is kind of cheap and its really easy for the other team to screw up since they can pull guardians out of the corner.
Random shot of the christmas outfits. I always like the alternate outfits, even if they weren't really useful.
Of course I haven't spent all this time without getting levels. For the most part I did my leveling in Volcano Thor.
Its seems really out of place for fire monsters in volcano thor to drop icecream, but the Snowier card does not discriminate. The snowier cards I got were a really nice investment, as I could level in thors with a very minimal zeny cost. I must admit I use the life potions from the kafra shop to keep the costs down, but ice cream just makes the deal all the much better.
Bow Guardians might be the most annoying monster for a melee character to try to take out, ever.
I never actually use bowling bash down there but it makes for a good screenshot!
Almost there...
Level 99.
Of course keeping with tradition I had to pull it off while killing an MVP. I decided to do orc lord since it was the best I could probably solo.
Stats and equipment at level 99.
Off to valhalla to transcend!
Back to 1/1 novice again.
I decided to use a couple of the newyears envelopes to get some quick levels after transing but as you can tell, it turns out they only give base exp. Level 22/1, oops!
Yeah, its kind of cheating, but I had some mercenaries left over from the lucky box event, so I figured I'd give them a spin. The Bow one isn't too bad, she's quite weak defensively but at least she does siromas well.
After much leveling to job 50, I'm a Lord Knight.
And an incredibly sexy Lord Knight at that.
I also had a fencer mercenary from the event, so I decided to take it down to Anubis. Damn does this guy ever kick some ass.
Once I got over my mercenary fever I took myself down to Abyss 3f to hunt for stone bucklers. Its not a safe place down there though...
And, inevitably, back to Volcano Thor.
We decided to head back and do a couple more bloody branches we bought from the market. Gloom Under Night is a pretty hard hitting boss, but it seems that its a lot easier if you put the minions to sleep with a hunter's sandman trap.
Ouch!
While hunting bathories with a friend, I had this message pop up. It suprised me, I wasn't aware that we had gotten the last piece required. Good stuff though! 
After a few hours in bathories, my friend actually got the card we were looking for.
I didn't actually find the card I was looking for, but I did find one of these...
Next we needed an armor to put the card in, so we went to odin to kill Skeggiolds. Of course, we had to kill the Valkyries we came across.
Armor complete!
What good is an evil odin's blessing? Why, its quite useful in the crack of dimension.
We partied there with a Taekwon Master, using heat to take down the monsters. It was pretty good! We didn't find any of the rares we were looking for, but we did find a Skin of Ventus, a Nemesis, and two Bloody Eaters. Maybe next time we'll have better luck with rares.
Somehow, monsters that use Grand Cross/Darkness and also using the skill Magic Mirror can hit themselves with their own skill. Combined with the fact that the skill causes them to lose their current target, they take the reflect damage as an attack and end up actually killing themselves. Really strange!
Thats it for this time, hopefully I'll do posts a little more regularly after this.
-View Comments (16 comments)
View Previous Entries | View Next Entries