Doddler's RO Journal
Viewing category: MVP
Beelzebub
By Doddler on June 9, 2008 in category 'MVP'
Also available on youtube. Ichig0 made a more... unabridged 40 min version which you can find HERE. I suppose that now that its over, I can link to the original strategy. You can find that HERE.
So there you have it! Overall I think it went pretty good. A few things went better than expected... he hurt the party far less than I really expected. Hell's Judgment never really killed anyone, and vampires gift, other than the nasty surprise when we found out that he gained massive HP by draining it from icewalls, was far less dangerous than I expected.
Some things went a bit worse... exile probably being the most notable one. While I anticipated having to deal with it, it became the hardest obstacle for us to overcome. Its worth noting that the tank never once died while tanking the MVP for the party... but after some time, he would get exiled, and then it would be over. You'll see it a few times in the video where I get forced teleported. We planned on dealing with this via icewall, but his draining HP from icewall was a rather unexpected effect.
The plan of having minstrel cover both lines with strings worked only if Beelzebub was standing in the right spot, which it turned out more often than not was not the case. A second strings, or maybe taking the time to better position Beelzebub would be required. Also, monsters spawning on us was a serious issue... our wizard was occupied with removing evil lands, and couldn't effectively kill monster spawns. Lastly, evil land draining the tank's HP was also unexpected. Since the tank can't be healed, anything that lowers his HP is bad... in the end I ran out of % items (ygg berries/green ales), but he died before I did.
I doubt we'll do it like this in the future unless traps get nerfed, until maybe the endless tower patch, but if we did, I think we could probably do it better. I'm not quite sure how yet, but I'm sure we'd figure it out. I'm quite proud of everyone that came out, everyone did a good job. 
Music for the video was:
Guardian of the Sacred Spirit - Clawed Apparition
Noein - Battle Collateral
Rebuild of Evangelion - Angel of Doom
Guardian of the Sacred Sprit - Stand, Brave Hero
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Bad Idea or Terrible Idea!?
By Doddler on June 6, 2008 in category 'MVP'
I'll tell you how it goes later!
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Yet Another MVP Post
By Doddler on May 18, 2008 in category 'MVP'
It goes without saying that MVP'ing is (to me) the most enjoyable aspect of RO. Its not without its flaws (much to the contrary), but I think it does an exciting job of bringing players together and coordinating them. WoE is a different style of coordination, something I'm not as much into, but both are nice. I posted the videos last week not to show off really (I'd be lying if that weren't part of it though), but to show how much fun it can be.
We've been doing a lot more Thanatos runs lately, which is pretty cool. Thanatos isn't a hard boss to deal with, I would consider him similar in difficulty to say, Kiel-D-01. Reaching Thanatos is a pretty hefty time-sink though, with runs usually taking 1-2 hours long. Its the only boss in RO that has such a hefty requirement to fight, but on the other hand its a one of a kind boss 'raid' type experience for RO, and I do enjoy it.
Thanatos himself is a bit of an annoying boss... I have nothing against his exile... I think exile can be properly dealt with. Its just that he has a high chance to teleport while attacking. Its so annoying! I don't really see why it exists as a skill... the map is fairly small and there are no obstacle monsters up there, it serves really no purpose.
A nice shot.
Enough of Thanatos shots though.
A bit ago an Ifrit appeared south of Prontera via bloody branch. It provided a good measure of ability; properly decked out my LK could tank him surprisingly well. On average I took 800-1200 damage from his physical attacks. Earthquake is a bit of a bit of an ugly thing to deal with.
We decided to try Ifrit head on without use of traps. If you're interested you can see our sign up form (here). The plan was to see if it was possible to defeat Ifrit in a head on battle with an optimal team. Actually this was more of my idea, no one else thought it was a good idea... most people simply went to indulge my crazy ideas (similar to the hibram runs, when he's so easily abusable with traps). 'I' think its a good time, but the opinions were varied across the board.
The sign up form is a bit inaccurate as our class composition changed last minute (we actually ended up doing the event a day early). I don't know who's idea it was to use biochemists as main damage dealer... but no matter, anything really works. We were a bit worried about what would happen when earthquake did hit.
The truth is that the real reason why I wanted to have a run where we tanked Ifrit isn't that special. I talk about how Earthquake makes high end MVPs nearly impossible, but having never really taken a shot at it I feel as though that position is a bit hypocritical of me. While we can assume what would happen, without the actual experience of doing it, I'm not in much of a position to complain.
So the results weren't that surprising, a bit better than most expected. His first earthquake downed the sniper, sac sader, and anyone who didn't have assumptio at the time, but I'd go out and call it 'survivable'. The mercenary idea didn't work as well as I had really planned... most mercs died to meteors or other skills before they got a chance to absorb earthquake hits, and when they did get hit by earthquake, they would only reduce the first hit- any hits after would be unreduced by their presence.
The real problem then came with Power Up. As some of you might know, Ifrit begins using earthquake when he's at 40% HP remaining. He doesn't use Power Up though until 20% remaining. Power Up is a really bad skill... I can tank Ifrit in Power Up, though it hurts like all hell, but the true kicker is that earthquake is increased by 3x along with his base attack. Power Up is what pushes earthquake from possible to impossible. Our 12 man party using blinding mist, sacrifice, Kaupe, and mercenaries completely wiped to his powered up earthquake. At this point I can't conceivably build a party composition within the 12 man limit that can survive a powered up quake from Ifrit.
There's plenty of things that could be done to balance earthquake. Having power up not affect its attack power would be the 'best' solution I think. Of course the attack power of earthquake could be reduced by 1/2 or 2/3, which would make the powered up version more on par with its non powered up earthquake. Maybe best of all would be to simply make the damage reducable... we're prepared to bring specialized reduction gears such as MDEF along if we thought that it would help. Unfortunately there's no real counter for the skill... there's no worth in taking more than 12 people to an MVP, and in future content such as the endless tower, it won't even be an option. I just want to know how Gravity figured players would deal with it. I've done my research and determined the best possible counters to the skill, but really without distributing ghostrings and GTB around the guild there's no way we could take out Randgris and Ifrit in a head on fight.
In the end, we got Ifrit down to 1.4m HP but lacked the means to survive his damage. After some time we simply decided to switch back to trapper and take him down the old fashion way.
Anyways on to more exciting things. Apparently my sniper is more useful for MVPs than he once was. Two rings? Thats right, one is the sexy 'Ring of Resonance'.
Having killed the MVP during double experience, I get a truly sick amount of exp from it. At level 87 and 88 when I killed it I gained over 100% experience (approx 21m exp per kill based on reward exp).
My sniper gear is beginning to make my sniper incomparable in terms of bow damage. Its pretty nice, with a bit more attack power I could attain a rank where my DS could compete against biochemist bombs.
With battle chant, the damage becomes truly amazing. 
So it was really expensive (26m) but I finally got my hands on one of the new shields. This shield prevents knock-back effect at the cost of additional damage received, but the trade off is well worth it.
First off, not being pushed back by mistress's JT makes the experience a lot better to deal with. Even if the shield is brutal, the benefit of not being pushed around or having to get to a wall to tank her outweighs the additional damage received.
Of course as you may have known from the video I posted its primary use is to kill the Ice Salamander Ktullanux. With the inability to be pushed around, his difficulty borders on 'very easy'. Not that there aren't ways to mess it up, but the whole process is so smooth, the only annoying thing is dealing with his obscenely high HP.
Fallen Bishop is generally a good time. I mentioned that he's probably the most trap-abusable MVP in the game, because he cannot summon minions when he's trapped. Still, I don't so much enjoy trapping MVPs when I feel its not the only way to deal with it, so I've been dragging the guild down to several runs.
The spear here is a Long Horn. Still no Hunting Spear. 
Finishing off one run that I didn't make a video of. We're still working on a strategy to take him down easily and effortlessly. The plan is to get it down to an art like we have Ktullanux. Its a shame that most of the guild doesn't enjoy doing Hibram though.
The recent morroc city Beelzebub was enjoyable in a certain "wow there's a lot of dead people" way.
Lots of dead people!
At times, I'm not sure if our own Beelzebub runs are much more successful though.
Hopefully in the future we plan on doing a trap-less head on Beelzebub run. If we do, I'll post the video online.
That's it for today!
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Fallen Bishop Hibram - Part 2
By doddler on May 15, 2008 in category 'MVP'
Also featuring: Epic Server Failure at 3:33. The servers have been doing this a lot the last two-three weeks, its surprising it hasn't been fixed...
Anyways, this is the second Hibram video (though our 3rd serious attempt). We attempted something a little different. Our strategy this time was tanking it on a sacrificed high priest with demon reduction gears, and use a sniper to keep clearing his minions to reduce the damage the tank would take.
I can't say it was any more (or less) successful than our last attempt. His high armor defense became a problem that prevented it from dying in any reasonable period of time. The strategy is sound, and the majority of our wipes were due to stupid mistakes (crusader running out of sacrifice range, crusader forgetting to renew sacrifice, tank losing assumptio). I'm trying to fit Signum Crusis in somewhere on the high priest build, which would make this considerably easier. High priest wasn't the best of tanks either, I think it would have been better to throw on high def and have the crusader tank directly. I opted for equipping holy robe instead of evil armor on the priest (afraid of his holy cross), but in retrospect 50% more damage from holy cross may be worth the complete negation of his own dark cross attack and most of the banshee skill damage, though I'm unsure if the current tank could survive the holy attack.
I hope you enjoy the slightly different style of video editing this time around, it took a bit more time to get done but hopefully the end result is worth it. Music this time is a selection of tunes from the game "Sengoku Rance". While the video running time is about 8 minutes, our run took approximately 40 minutes from start to finish (though the video features nearly all the footage of us actually engaged against Hibram), with about an hour to convince enough people to go.
Thanks for all the comments last time. Some of the suggestions I got from you guys last time were pretty good, and I may make use of them in the future. I'm not sure if I'll be doing Hibram again anytime soon, since I had to really crack the whip to get people to turn out ot this run. Apparently people in the guild aren't always fond of my 'crazy ideas' (hey, the tanking ifrit idea was solid, it really was!). They obviously don't know fun when they see it!
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