Doddler's RO Journal
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Life on Valkyrie
By Doddler on October 16, 2008 in category 'General'
Probably the most unusual mail I get in game!
So its been a bit since I posted so I figured I'd image dump and talk a little bit about whats going on.
One thing I wanted to bring up is of course WoE, and more specifically, how amazing it is. I didn't get any shots during woe itself yesterday unfortunately, but it definitely is great. When I played on Loki I usually skipped woe because it wasn't really much fun, but since we've been woeing on Valkyrie I feel that it is different. Both the Valkyrie Guild and the Inertia alliance have some very skilled players, and fighting across such a vast battlefield with the guilds on such an even playing ground (most of us are similarly ungeared), the war becomes as much about logistics and organization than it is about manpower. We're basically pulling what amounts to a 10 castle defense, and while we weren't perfect on our defense, as we lost one fort entirely and had econ broken on two others, we managed to land punches back and push them onto the defensive by seizing their forts at random and also captured the enemy's primary econ fort. It was a great time, and I look forward to future woe battles on the server.
That said, the level of coordination required to properly get players to where they need to be is nothing short of a monumental undertaking, and I saw similar levels from Inertia as we had ourselves. Part of it is that there is no recall... though I'll say right now I think woe would be better without the recall skill. Still, in the Valkyrie woe of today, with our guilds seemingly fighting battles on 2, 3, 4 or more fronts in different locations, using recall would amount to nothing but suicide, a victory in one location but a loss in many others. It works when you have one fort to attack, or one fort to defend, but not in our current setting.
Breaking a ragequit fort. 
Counter Attack... unappreciated as an attack skill, but also unappreciated as a defensive skill. While you can't counter skills, if you have a decent enough attack speed you can basically negate all of a targets regular melee damage.
$$$
Not quite so cool. 
So because I'm unfortunately far too lazy to make a sage slave and I think that goes for probably everyone else in Valkyrie, I conscripted a scholar to make some converters for me. Its all part of my master leveling plan.
OOOOOOOOHHHH YEEEEEEEAAAH
One shot on High Orcs at my current level of 79 (though the one shotting of orcs rocketed me quickly from 72). The weapon right now is merely a +8 triple smashing pike. Overall I make enough from drops to continually fund my potion use. When I first started I needed to use dex and bless to even hit and kill them efficiently, and at times I even used assumptio scrolls to make the potion use reasonable, but now I level there using only str+ food as the kafra shop. During the exp event, with a manual it can hit 6m exp per hour solo. Not bad. 
Of course I can't help but kill bosses. While I have to compromise for something more reasonable to solo, there's always something worth killing. Personally I don't fully understand the removal of the Deviling card, especially since what I would consider its superior counterpart, the Ghostring still exists in game. I think making it a monster drop only would have been fine. Oh well.
Power Up Orc Hero is scary. It only lasts 30 seconds though, so you can just wait it out and go back to killing.
Counter attack tanking is pretty cool.
Dracula is an all-trick MVP. While none of us can even take his hits, it doesn't take a while lot to be able to completely avoid those hits. His strongest attack, Hell's Judgment can be negated at short range with safety wall, and at range with pneuma. You can see how it works here.
Of course it goes poorly if someone forgets to pneuma the person tanking the bats. Luckily it wasn't a full wipe.
Pharaoh is much the same thing as Dracula, except without the piling up on the boss. His dark blessing removes all the HP of the tank, but as long as you have safety wall up it shouldn't kill you (although sometimes he combos with a magic attack right after, which is just mean). Its not really practical to do, but I'm certain we're the first on Valkyrie to do it.
Even Tao Gunka! Not sure why you would kill Tao Gunka for anything other than his card. Gemmed Sallet is kind of cool, but binoculars are totally owned by the existence of the robo eyes on the shop.
Speaking of the Kafra Shop, I must say I'm happy with how gravity handled the upgrade situation on Valkyrie server, by greatly reducing the cost of enriched ores to 30 points. Its a smart business decision, as I'm sure people will be willing to pay for the improved rates, but most importantly, I think that the new prices are in some respects fairly affordable, which means your average joe will be able to make use of them. Personally I'd like to see some of the other shop items become more affordable, in particular, the buff scrolls, but its a very nice step in the right direction.
Anyways that's it for today, stay tuned for more Valkyrie stuff in a couple days.
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Looting Drama on Valkyrie
By Doddler on October 6, 2008 in category 'General'
So I was leveling in Orc Ladies, trying to get my orc lady card, when I stumbled across a Knight, which I believe was the leader of the guild RageQuit, Jambalaugi. I had probably 6-7 orc ladies following me, so because I didn't want to drop the monsters on him I turned around and bowling bashed them. He did the /heh emote, and ran up to me. I was confused for a second, until I noticed that an Orc Lady Card was on the ground. I attempted to pick it up, but apparantly I wasn't close enough and it wouldn't let me pick up the item. He managed to grab the card, and immediately ran off screen and logged off.
Its pretty low to loot someones card, but for one of the major guild leaders to be looting cards, thats pretty bad. I haven't been able to PM him because he logged off immediately and hasn't logged back on.
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Valkyrie Server Open
By Doddler on October 6, 2008 in category 'General'
I'm presuming that by now everyone has heard of the new free game server that iRO has opened, called "Valkyrie". While the mechanics are a little trickier than that of a normal server, it does seem to be an exciting direction that gravity is taking RO. For that, and a variety of other reasons, I finally decided that I wanted to get involved.
For now, that means that Renewal testing will take a back seat. We (me and those who are playing with me) are pretty well complete most of our testing anyways. I'll probably head back onto the renewal server when they add in 3rd jobs, which according to a very recent Gravity developer interview, would probably be sometime before the end of October. Until then, there will likely not be any new posts related to renewal.
So back to the Valkyrie server. Gravity's final decision to modify rates of the main servers and open Valkyrie at 100% rate is something I never really expected. I had just presumed the server would open with relatively reduced exp rates like other free servers. It was unexpected, but probably one of the best decisions they could have made. I think that the current mechanics positions iRO in a good position to attract a strong crowd, as well as absorb players normally leaning towards low rate private servers.
Its current setup is not entirely without complaints, like personally I don't think that their current Kafra Shop setup is really priced in a way that would be optimal for encouraging purchases (as its the only way for them to generate revenue with the server). For the most part though, I'll address them in a separate rant that I have planned.
Anyways on with the show! I unfortunately lost my screenshots of the opening week, so the story starts at level 36 I guess it was, when we first obtained an emperium and went on to try to capture Nidhoggur and Valfreyja realms. We were very lucky in this regard, as we were the first guild to organize on the server. We cleverly used quest experience rewards to rapidly fuel the guild to level 2, using the Nile Rose and Curse of Gaebolg quests. The guild is lead by Dark Tychon, originally of Loki and original leader of Alpha which I'm a part of, and the new guild is simply called "Valkyrie".
We initially targeted the WoE2 realms mainly because we anticipated that the only way we would likely be able to achieve a multi-castle defense would be to rely on the strong guardians these forts provided. Generally the larger size of these forts made it a bit easier to capture as well. For those unfamiliar with the process, when a fort is unoccupied, it is filled with various relatively difficult monsters, and usually 2-4 MVP monsters.
Breaking an emperium is a surprisingly difficult prospect when your highest level melee characters are level 50-60. On average the emperium took about 10-15 minutes to break, but in some cases where we were short handed it took even longer.
By the time WoE started on Wednesday, this is what the war standings looked like. Even though Memoria Impact all but disbanded and had no members on to defend during woe, we weren't actually able to break either of their undefended forts due to the powerful monsters and the guardians.
I didn't realize you could clif snipe bash, but apparently you can!
It feels like the rogue test all over again. There's this awesome set of wigs available in the kafra shop that grant improved movement speed (basically agi up effect), and also allows the use of hiding. The wig is pretty amazing, though its a bit strange that it allows hiding.
The emperium is not always a safe place to be. If you couldn't warp most of these monsters away, it probably wouldn't be possible to clear these rooms.
This emperium took over 15 minutes to break!
Don't see this very often. 
This is me wishing I had some kind of ranged attack!
Apparently someone hates me. I'm not exactly sure why though, he refused to elaborate. Only person I think I've ever directly attacked on the site was the knight that db'd me on iris when I did my noob leveling there, but I was pretty sure I hid his name. I'll hide his name here too (poorly), but those who know him will probably know who he is.
I made it my personal goal to get a Thara Frog for myself. The map ranges from dead empty to a couple of people depending on the time of day. I spent an obscene amount of time here (on the level of days), but I haven't gotten a card yet.
Closer to a card, but not quite...
One thing I noticed this time around that I didn't before was that lots of the lower level weapons have their own sprites. You generally don't see them later on because most specialized gears don't get sprites. The one on the left, my swordsman is using a Two-Hand sword (though I'm cool enough to use it in 1 hand apparently), and the female swordsman I think is using a katana.
Magnum Break might have a use afterall. It would be more useful if it didn't have such an immense SP cost though. 30 SP puts it at higher than both brandish spear and bowling bash. Its not a bad skill, but it is pretty poor for the cost.
Ouch. Gathering quest items is not without its risks!
Finally Knight!
Well its not the Thara Frog card I was hunting for, but its a step in the right direction.
I found out that you need a steel in order to make a Claymore from the Knight guild, so me and Tolrin, who makes no effort to conceal the fact that he's the first monk on Valkyrie (job 50 no less!), went and hunted golems until we got them. The combination worked well, he dodged the golems, and I could provoke them making them weak to melee damage, making the whole process painless and much faster than either of us could do on our own.
One small issue I have with the exp turn-in quests, is something you might find obvious here. This NPC is clearly in the middle of absolute nowhere. I'm sure that if Gravity hadn't specifically told us the map and coordinates of this turn-in NPC, we probably wouldn't have a clue he even exists. Don't get me wrong, I think the turn-in's are cool, but without anything to direct players TO these quests, its probably unreasonable to assume new players will be able to partake. Maybe some kind of quest-board in town which tells you of nearby quests for your level? Wouldn't even need to be just turn-ins, it would be a cool way to direct players to start many of the quests available in RO.
Anyways I made my claymore, and got a couple exp turn-ins in the process. I made two, and decided to upgrade both and stop when one of them broke.
That didn't take much... broke going from +1 to +2.
I decided to try my luck with my Two-handed sword... not much luck here either.
Even boots, breaking all over the place. To date, I haven't gotten a single piece of gear to the 'safe limit'. My estimate is that success rates on armors and level 3-4 weapons is about 75%-80%... which still means that only 40% of your gears will make it to +4.
I know the whole idea is to increase sales of enriched elu and oridecon, but I just can't justify the cost. When the item I'm upgrading is very valuable, and the chance of failure is very high, I can justify paying the current prices for enriched elunium. But I can't do the same for upgrading an item to the safe point. At 150 points (about $1.50) per enriched on the Valkyrie server, you're talking about nearly $6 to 'safe' upgrade a single piece of gear to +4. The cost of upgrading a level 1 weapon to the safe point will cost you almost as much as an entire one month subscription. You just can't justify paying that amount.
As I was discussing with my guildmates, if the enriched costs were say, around the 30 point mark (or maybe even as high as 50), I'd probably be packing all +4 gears right now.
Saturday woe came along, the first real woe on the server. Seeing our fort advantage going in (we held 15 forts at this time), the other 4 woe capable guilds formed a temporary alliance to attack us.
Our strategy was one of a 10 fort defense. Our guild pushed hard for guild experience so we could obtain Guardian Research before WoE started. We split up and watched our assigned castles, and when one was threatened we would move in to defend. We lost Syr (Valfreya 2) early on before we could get guardians established, but managed to reclaim it. Our organization fell appart near the end when we pushed attacks on various WoE1 castles, and in the end it cost us Andlangr (Niddhoggur 2), as we didn't realize until it was too late that it was under attack from Destrado.
We had a lot of fun skirmishes Syr and various other castles. We definately had the advantage in defending I think because of the guardians, but we still lost two of our WoE2 forts, though we reclaimed one of them. A perfect 10 fort defense really isn't possible when you have only 16 players available against a formidable group of foes. Even though we have the advantage in terms of territory for now, we've only held the castles for a few days, and without any really special drops or cards, the battles were mainly decided by party composition and just raw levels. I was particularly impressed by the Inertia guild's performance, as their guild seemed to stick together and fought well as a group, a level of organization and team play that we failed to achieve this time around. Technically Destrado came up as the real second winner of this woe, with now 7 castles in their posession, but its my personal opinion that they got their forts only because they were breaking forts while we were skirmishing with Inertia.
Anyways woe was a very refreshing change from what I'm used to on Loki. We came out with only 12 forts at the end, still a decent number. I expect alliances to shift constantly as the number of forts become more evenly distributed and as more woe capable guilds join the frey. I think as Valkyrie server gains population, woe will become more interesting.
I'm pretty sure this is a bug... I mean I guess if you walked really close to it it might hit you but...
As time passes, the guardian stones slowly produce more guardian soldiers. After a while, it begins to look rather scary. The guardians, for how strong they are are slow and rather stupid though, so without players actually defending the fort, it just takes a player with some good kiting abilities to get the guardians off the stones to eventually bring the fort down. Ultimately the fort pictured here is Andlangr, the Nidhoggur fort we lost.
This was an embarrassingly frequent occurrence in woe. Right now many player are very heavy in the flee, but few of us are high enough on dex to counter them. Luckily for us Baldur here had such an abysmally slow break time that after what must have been 8-10 minutes of him constantly hitting the emp, some of my guildies came by and saved the fort.
Of course its not just Baldur that has trouble breaking the emp... I think the fastest emp breaker in our guild has a break time of about 8 minutes.
Off the war topic now, this is a particularly angry forest. If the camera is directly overhead, you can't see any of the generals at all. I wonder how many unsuspecting players ran into that.
I found a Mystic Frozen during my travels to various far off lands, so I has PureForge, the first (and only) ranked forger on the server make me this fancy pike. It feels bad using it without upgrades, but as I mentioned earlier the increase in attack power somehow isn't worth the $10.50 it would cost in enriched oridecon to get it to +7, and I have no intent on breaking it with regular refining (though I hear level 1 weapons rarely break).
I haven't actually mentioned my build have I? I decided I would go Bowling Bash / Pierce, hybrid STR > VIT/AGI/DEX > INT. Without access to any real decent gears such as racial shields, and lacking the SP regen to constantly use skills such as pierce, I want to be able to switch to a two hand sword and melee monsters at a respectable speed, but at the same time having the flexibility to switch to a pike and shield in cases where it would be more appropriate. It might not be an effective build for a player who's fully decked out and have solid finances at their back, but I figure its probably as strong of a leveling build as I can get without being pure agi.
I keep going back to Thara Frogs, since at some point I'll have to be killing High Orcs to level. Sometimes you find bots like this, that are fairly obvious in their workings. Actually I think almost all bots that level are obvious... generally when I see someone new I have some communication. Usually this is non-verbal, like a funny emote, or just moving around to see how they respond. While I'm aware some players may not respond directly, its usually fairly obvious.
The GMs here are doing a bot check on me. While response times vary, this time it was a mere 20 minutes from when I submitted the bot report to when I spotted the GMs checking out the bots I mentioned. Bots are crafty enough that GMs spend a lot of time just removing the novice bots that you see in game, so the GMs generally don't have time to do patrols. Instead they usually rely on player reports to pinpoint where they should be looking. All bots I've reported have been removed in a short period of time.
How you make the report is important though, but you don't have to take too much of your time to do it. Take screenshots of the bot, and try to show shots of you trying to communicate, or it doing something particularly bot like, like getting stuck on an npc, looting etc. Generally just walking up to a bot and saying "hey you there?" or something less obvious, like I asked a TK player if he needed anyone for Kihop. When they don't respond, but still attack and use skills, screenshot it. Zip screenshots together, write a short paragraph about the bot, where he is, what server he's on, and why you think he's a bot. A report as simple as "I was leveling in east comodo caves (cave_dun03) on Valkyrie and saw a bot called Legolas there. His movements seemed rather unsual, he didn't respond to my chat and he would pick up any items I dropped on the ground", along with a related screenshot would probably get the GMs to own him pronto. Some bots, like obvious bot vendors generally take a while to investigate and the vendor probably won't go down for a couple hours, but don't be discouraged. You don't have let the bots win.
Nereid double KO!
Counter Attack, a knight classic, good for taking out monsters that hit harder than you want them to. A seriously underused tank skill too, because every attack countered is an attack that you don't have to take. A shame you can't counter skills though.
I was killing Orc Ladies, again hoping to get that card needed for my Anti-High Orc weapon. Do you know what the chance of getting wedding dresses from orc ladies are? I was pretty sad when I found out.
Sometimes though, I get what I'm looking for! 
Thats my Knight at his current level without any buffs and his very ghetto gears, lots of which came from the guild supplies.
So far I must say Valkyrie has been a very fun experience, being able to level up and play with many friendly players. I'm expecting that the Valkyrie server will continue to grow into a very large server... already it has a higher population than any of the 3 premium servers. Anyone interested should come join us... there's not much to lose, and it won't cost you to try!
Stay tuned for more Valkyrie fun!
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A real post!?
By Doddler on August 6, 2008 in category 'General'
A real post? Who would have thought!
So I decided I would 99 my Knight and trans him. The reasoning behind it is fairly simple, and that's that my existing Lord Knight is hefty on the attack power, but a teensy bit lacking on the HP/Vit side. To be fair he has 17500hp and 65 vit but to use an LK as a real tank you have to do better than that!
I actually started this Knight, Sir. Aegis a long time ago. Sir Aegis is a name of probably one of my most respected players from jRO Baldur, who played a LK and Sniper (the sniper's name was narukagami.rebirth). I decided I'd take the opportunity to get him to 99 during the last exp event (these screenshots are pretty old eh?).
Nearing the end the last 30% was made just a slight touch easier.
It wasn't cheap, thor leveling solo is never cheap, but I did it.
And you thought you could get through an entire post without a video, didn't you!? Too bad! The whole transing with a mercenary works really well if you prepare properly before hand. While it was technically 2x exp, I got to level 50 before the mercenary expired. Sexy times.
Epic props to anyone who can identify the song this time. Its from one of my favorite console games from a good number of years back.
Yay.
So the plan was to make a 'tank' LK. Naturally though having an LK that can tank but not kill makes leveling suck pretty harshly, so I decided I would comprimise and go with a pure CS build.
Getting to job 50 by bashing hill winds with 1 str wasn't the easiest thing in the world, but ut was acceptable.
Yeah, it was something like that. Just lots, and lots of that.
Clashing Spiral level 1 is fast casting, low SP cost, almost no delay, and 1 shots hill winds. It was a pretty fast way to level.
It probably wouldn't be possible if I didn't prepare before hand, but I took the time to craft myself a +4 Kingbird Hunting Spear before this whole ordeal. Its a pretty amazing piece of weapon.
One shotting monsters across the board is what CS is good at, so it makes leveling fairly quick. The biggest drawback of Clashing Spiral, of all things is the very rough modifier based on size. Since CS is based pretty much only on weapon weight and your % modifiers, you really notice the size mod. The skill basically does 1750% on small monsters, 1400% on medium monsters, and only 1050% on large. There's not much you can do to compensate for that difference either.
For the record, I maxed VIT first.
People generally presume CS has poor damage output but it can be fairly strong if you have magic strings. You probably won't kill anything PVP or boss wise without a bard, but it can still be a useful skill.
An Odin Blessing hunting party. The size mod helps damage on skeggiolds, since they're small. There's probably better killers but the exp/hr is pretty amazing. Well, base exp anyways.
This is a bit random, testing an odd bug where monster's won't teleport. Apparantly its used on kRO when they weren't aware of the trapping exploit. Durring testing we got it to work a few times but it was too unreliable and reliant on surroundings to be really useful.
Somehow, for some reason, I still hunt Lady Tanee. The value of killing it isn't getting better, and the expenses (bombs) just keep getting worse. Still, its something to do thats challenging that I can do solo.
It is nice to finally take her down though.
I had organized another no-trap Valkyrie Randgris run. We had fully assembled and moved to Odin for the Valkyrie spawn. Unfortunately we encountered an Wasa MVP party coming to compete, so players in the party decided to drop the event. I'm pretty disapointed we didn't just go ahead with it, as it seems pretty stupid that we abandoned doing the MVP, but I guess thats life.
The gears used to tank Randgris. Its not my Paladin though! The armor is +7 Legion Plate Armor of Paladin, which grants holy property armor when used with the crusader armor set, which is fully present. The shoes are pretty bad though!
And a bonus screenshot. This is what wasn't recorded on camera at our no-trap ifrit run. Wipe to guardians on 3f entrance.
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