Doddler's RO Journal
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. 
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Valkyrie WoE 2009-02-22
By Doddler on March 2, 2009 in category 'War of Emperium'
While this woe video is a bit over a week old, I figured I'd post it up here for everyone to see while I work on a newer, larger post. It was a pretty good woe all around, though it doesn't compare to the epic battle for Luina that occured last siege. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to fraps that one.
Anyways, enjoy!
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Beelzebub Vs White Lady
By Doddler on February 27, 2009 in category 'Random Stuff'
By popular demand, bloody branched White Lady battling Beelzebub to the death. And yes, I did run out of cool music to put in my videos. Suggest some cool stuff similar to what I've been using!
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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. 
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