Doddler's RO Journal
Viewing category: MVP
Ifrit MVP
By Doddler on July 20, 2008 in category 'MVP'
Get the video in higher quality AVI format here.
After our run-in with Valkyrie Randgris, I came to the conclusion that Randgris could be done with 12 people. It could be done with a lot less if you didn't magically need to conjure a full party of players for the sole purpose of absorbing earthquake, but it is possible. When Endless Tower comes along, we'll be able to down Randgris at very least I think. Having done Randgris and Beelzebub without traps, there's only one boss left, Ifrit.
I didn't really want to do Ifrit. Randgris was a struggle with 12 people, and ifrits earthquake hits for nearly 50% more than Randgris. We could bring more than 12, but since 12 is the limit in the Endless Tower, and no one in their right mind could convince more than 12 players to go to an MVP on a regular basis, we stuck with 12.
Anyways surviving Earthquake simply comes down to mechanics. When we fought Randgris, we observed that her Earthquake has a base attack of around 210,000 to 228,000 damage per hit. In a 12 man party this becomes about 17,500 - 19,000 damage (times three) that you need to properly reduce. For party members, simply the use of Assumptio, Horn Shield and 2x Alligators will result in an average damage received of 4,812 - 5,265 a hit. Few classes can hope to survive this, but the tank can without too much difficulty survive the approximate 15k damage, and as long as one priest is alive (or we used Kaizel), the party can get back on its feet in surprising speed.
Thats an interesting point of high end MVPs in RO; it doesn't really matter if people die because of how fast they can get on their feet, the only way to completely wipe to a boss is really for the tank to die.
Anyways, we already knew of Randgris's Earthquake, and how powerful it was. However, Ifrit is in a completely different league. When he starts using earthquake, its not so bad. On average EQ has an attack of 120,000 damage per hit, which in a 12 man party means 10,000 damage per person. With proper reduction, I think this is manageable. Indeed in our run few people actually died to this attack. With Assumptio, Horn, and 2x Alligators (pretty optimal gears if you're running on the cheap), you take about 2750 / hit, for 8250 total.
The problem comes when he uses Power Up. The 3x attack power combined with EQ is pretty devastating. It augments his earthquake to approximately 360,000 damage per hit... approximately 65% stronger than Randgris's Earthquake. This means that on Ifrit, you're looking at having to absorb 30,000 damage per person. With our gears listed before, you're looking at about 8,250 damage per hit, or approximately 24,750 damage over 1 second. I think thats pretty unreasonable.
We knew it was unreasonable too, which is why we planned on using sacrifice from a paladin to absorb the first 1-2 hits on the tank, making it so he survived the final hit. Unfortunately we encountered something we've never seen before.
Generally when people think about earthquake, they think that if you have 12 players on screen, it does constant damage across the three hits... unfortunately that turns out to be not true. What we found was that if a player dies from a hit of earthquake, they don't count as targets for further hits. Let me illustrate how this snowballs into a losing scenario for the party.
First hit of Earthquake: everyone takes about 8000 damage. Three dies.
Second hit of Earthquake: With three less people, the remaining 9 take 10,666 damage. Six more die.
Third hit of Earthquake: With only 3 people alive, they take 32,000 damage. No one lives.
And thats exactly whats happening in that screen shot. Note the damage the fire pillar takes: The fire pillar having no reduction to damage shows the total raw damage of Earthquake. Generally our sader could absorb the first two hits for the tank, but its downright impossible for anyone to live 32,000 damage.
Anyways we did kill it, by the sole virtue that Ifrit sucks at healing himself and we could repeatedly throw ourselves at him. I don't really see how they expect people to live that though. As I've maintained before its fair until bosses use Earthquake in combination with Power Up, and then it becomes unreasonable. We attempted to use Ghost armor on the tank too, but it resulted in the tank taking 55000 damage from his fire-breath. Switching would work but I can't really think that Gravity expects high end MVP'ing to be a game of how fast the party can resurrect itself when everyone dies every 20 seconds.
Two of the people in this screenshot were dual cliented, and weren't involved inthe killing of Ifrit! 
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Randgris MVP - Part Deux
By Doddler on July 11, 2008 in category 'MVP'
Apparantly I've been had! While I specifically advertised last time that we would do Randgris with a 12 person party last time without any god items or 'godly' gears of any kind... we ended up going with an 18 person party, and I find out that among party members were using 2x Meginjards, a GTB, and atleast one ghostring. Not what I intended.
So here is round two. I took a pack of Alpha players (and one Peco Whisperers), and formed a complete 12 man party, to head on the MVP. No God items where used, only 12 players. Technically we had a ghostring for use on a priest but we didn't really need it. We didn't even have an Angeling card, some of you may remember how a few months back I made a +7 Legion Plate of Paladin (Archdam Card - grants holy armor with the crusader armor set), which while I didn't reveal its purpose at the time, it was build specifically for... this. Considering the set itself was quite cheap to manufacture compared to angeling, I think it did pretty well.
We specifically geared party members with ranged reduction (horn shields, alligators, long mace, noxious garment) and HP gears... the only two things that really help against earthquake. After doing this MVP run, I think I have a new-found respect for Earthquake... its not quite as broken I anticipated, and our party survived it fairly well (though there were some deaths). I think as we get more advanced gears in which to increase max HP, survivability will be easier. I still don't see how we could do Ifrit in a 12 man group, but I'll have to work out the logistics of that some other time.
I want to thank everyone that came along, regardless of how crazy our scenario may be. At least we've proved that the Alpha Guild will still be at Randgris even if traps are gone entirely, and that it can be done without godly gears.
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Randgris MVP
By Doddler on July 10, 2008 in category 'MVP'
Funny enough, we never did get to try round 2 of our Beelzebub No-Trap run, but here we are doing Valkyrie Randgris instead. As some of you may have noticed from the iRO change logs, the GMs have been tweaking boss monsters to make it less practical to trap them. Ultimately their final goal will likely be to make the MVPs only doable by tanking (though I'm not sure how they'll stop icewall-gfist).
While a noble goal, one that is surely an attempt to get players to play the game the way it was meant to be played, many of us are still spiteful. I personally don't have any hard feelings over this concept, and in fact would welcome it with open arms (trapping is pretty lame anyways), if it weren't for the fact that many of us rightfully feel that some obstacles, namely the skill Earthquake, are simply too powerful. Anyone who's spent any real time playing with the earthquake calculator probably has a good idea why. In a full 12 man party, expecting everyone to be able to survive 15k-20k damage is a bit much.
I felt that nothing is going to happen if we sit around and wait for the GMs to make it impossible on us, so I decided to take the opportunity to show them. In particular, I scheduled a No Trap Randgris run with the guild, and invited the iRO community manager 'Heimdallr' to spectate. Insurrection and Alpha together are the strongest MVP'ing guilds currently on Loki, and I felt that our performance would give the GM's a decent bar in witch to gauge performance, and perhaps they could see for themselves if it needs changing. So with this in mind, I wrote up a strat for the event, and tried convincing players to join.
Perhaps it was because people were a little confused over the concept (since realistically I didn't expect much to come of this), but we ended up getting considerably more attendance than we had planned for. This had the unfortunate side effect of making it easier than expected and made the show I had planned a little less effective, but I guess its not that big of a deal. I counted 17 people total in attendance, though I could have counted wrong. This effectively means we'd take about 30% less damage from earthquake.
The fight itself started off quite smooth. We ended up setling on a Champion killer, with additional DPS in the form of Sniper and SinX. We easily dispatched one of Randgris's minions to make it easier, and while her constant spear boomeranging (one of the anti-trap fixes) was annoying while trying to move it into position, we managed to get it tanked pretty well how we wanted. The fight was quite easy at full HP, and only really started getting tough once she hit the 30% mark.
For those that aren't familiar with Randgris's AI, when she hits 30% remaining HP, she'll use Power Up (3x atk), Agility Up (3x dodge), Two Hand Quicken (2x aspd), always in that order, followed immediately by Earthquake. Let me say she's like a completely different monster at this point. We anticipated that she would do this and planned on using Dispel to remove the buffs, but due to the unfortunately disorganized nature of our party, it more often than not caused Randgris to switch and rampage among our people.
With our numbers Earthquake didn't kill people so much, but it was quite a strain on our party. Personally I was being hit for about 2500-3500 a hit, so 7500-10000 total damage. If we were in a small party, people would have been dropping. I don't think it would be enough to fully wipe us, but the problem with Earthquake isn't so much how much it hurts, its the frequency. Randgris will use earthquake every 25 seconds... which might sound like a lot of time, but when people are dying, scrambling to get back up, rebuffed, and start dealing damage, its pretty rough.
Luckily due to Sacrifice and a lot of HP I never personally died to earthquake (10000 damage is only 1/2 my HP). I think our sac paladin was cheating too and using Ghostring cause he never died either and he was saccing me. The thing that killed the tank (me) most often though was probably dispel followed by a powerful attack. It was considerably harder to deal with than I expected. Randgris's incredibly high attack power while in Power Up meant that if assumptio dropped, I would be taking 30000 damage from her Brandish Spear and similar from her Pulse Strike and Sonic Blow. I probably should have been packing more Def than I was though.
In the end, we did win. It was a battle time of approximately 15-20 minutes, and only one (semi) wipe. I did better than I personally expected, but I may attribute that to the higher number of people we brought along.
So what did I learn? First off, the GM changes were pretty nice, the lack of Valkyrie healing while tanking the boss is certainly nice. Earthquake isn't quite as bad as I expected it to be from Randgris. Of course I would probably say different if we had just the intended 12 person party, but party organization broke down pretty bad so we may still have been able to do it. A 12 person party I think is a bit much for an MVP though of Randgris's caliber though, and while I'm not quite as offended by Earthquakes power as I was before, I do think that it needs adjustment. Its not just Randgris afterall, Earthquake is a deterrent that makes MVPs like Orc Lord, Baphomet, and RSX waaay harder than they should be. Maybe gravity always intended Randgris to be a 12 man afair, but being spoiled by years of exploits in killing the MVP means its drops are no longer worth the effort of that many people.
Also, While Randgris's earthquake hurts, Ifrit is considerably stronger, with his powered up earthquake doing about DOUBLE that of what we encounted today... not to mention he uses it more frequently too (20s delay versus 25s delay). So yeah, I do think it needs to be changed. Personally I would want it to be brought into range so that its balanced at Ifrit for a 8-10 man party. Unfortunately I think my original statement still stands... when an MVP is using Earthquake in Power Up, the skill is doing well, 3x more than it should. An assumption based on the fact that a 12 man party is taking about 28000 damage total per person from an earthquake under the current calculations. I stand by my original statement that the proper fix would be either to prevent Power Up from affecting Earthquake damage, or to halve its attack.
Who knows if it will ever be changed though. I do hope so though, because I think its power is one of the leading deterrents from dealing with the current high tier MVPs in a legitimate (no bug abuse) fashion.
Note: Sorry about the lack of video... I would have had one for you but fraps was crapping out on me and only recording at 5fps so I had to stop.
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More Crazy Ideas
By Doddler on June 16, 2008 in category 'MVP'
It seems as though I wasn't satisfied enough with our performance at the last Beelzebub no-trap run, so I'm back to the drawing boards for a new plan. A little different this time around, but hopefully not TOO different. The use of two tanks, a single killer under marionette control, and everyone more or less within range of the MVP. The red area on the ground is the area of effect for Pulse Strike, I stands for icewall, P stands for pneuma. Pretty self explanatory!
I feel that the difficulty last time was caused mostly because our killers were unable to actually hit Beelzebub. I factored into the plan that we would use Quagmire to make it easy, but in practice the wizard had too much to do and we had too low of a level of quag. So this time, marionette control will be my fix. If I get enough people to give it a shot, I'll post another video online.
I had a few people ask me specifically how I made these diagrams, so I figured I'd go over it.
- Take a blank grid... I used a pre-made one but you could make your own (I used this one: Link).
- Color it how you want it to look like, just fill in the boxes (Link).
- Rotate. I use the free program Paint.Net for all my image work, but I'm sure you can use whatever you want. (Link)
- Add sprites. I took the sprites from Ragna no Nani Ka char sim for mine (Link)
And that's it! Sorry about infrequent posts lately, but work has kept me from doing anything too exciting in RO. I did get approached by a certain someone who got me a new kRO login, so its possible that the kRO free server posts will make a comeback. Gravity is opening Requiem tonight which I might end up taking a look at, but I probably won't post about it here. Until next time~
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