Doddler's RO Journal
Quest to Rune Knight
By Doddler on January 9, 2009 in category 'kRO Sakray RE'
So I guess posting the Rune Knight video with no explanation or follow up wasn't a great idea, so here's the follow up! The video generated a lot more discussion than I was expecting too.
Before I go any further there was a few people wondering about the BGM in that video. All the BGM was added after recording, and all of it was remixes found off an older RO remix album by Scinicade titled 'Innocence'. If you can find it, its pretty good if you like that kind of remix, I've used his music in a couple videos so far.
I'm not sure if I mentioned I was leveling a knight before, I think I did... last I played renewal I got a knight to the level 95 range and stopped. With the release of Rune Knights though, I figured I'd have to go all the way and try 'em out.
While playing on renewal though cool things like buffs, endows, and unless I want to farm for them sp items, are out of reach for regular leveling. As such, running around and relying on constant skill usage didn't seem like the fastest leveling plan. For that reason, my knight (and following rune knight) were agi based two hand quicken builds.
Additionally I caught word through a series of videos on Ragnagate that Frenzy was an amazing leveling tool. Along with the change to allow spiral pierce to be used with a sword convinced me to trans before changing to rune knight.
I'm not sure when this happened but apparantly low level monsters hurt like all hell now. Lucky even the default novice falchion allowed me to kill most of the monsters I wanted without taking more than one hit, but it was a bit of a suprise. Hopefully they fix it!
And I changed to Lord Knight.
While critical attacks are slightly less effective now, they used to be amazing. Luckly they're still useful, but not quite as broken.
More critical action. And yeah, thats a Violet Fear. :)
It seems like I wasn't the only person running around critting monsters to death either, everyone is doing it!
It turns out frenzy is as amazing as everyone said it was. Using a +5 double beast soul gain violet fear (don't think I'm lying when I say I'd kill someone if they make that weapon on a real server) and a deleter armor, I was able to keep SP for buffs and frenzy.
Unfortunately I ran some issues with hitting monsters. Even with 60 base dex on a 90+ lord knight, if I didn't maintain spear dynamo up, I had troubles hitting the monsters in my level range. Its much harder to perfect hit, or even perfect dodge for that matter in renewal. I guess that makes crits even better right?
And level 99 at last. 
Off to the incredibly well hidden job change NPC.
Boom!
And I'm Rune Knight. When you become a 3rd job you keep your 99 aura until you level it seems. That didn't take very long though since leveling 99->100 took only a fraction of the experience it took to 99 initially. It ramps up pretty fast though.
Frenzy leveling in Niflheim with a little help from Skidoosh. There's a number of places you can go from 99->110 for leveling, between Niflheim, Ice Dungeon, Kobolds near Rachel (yeah, kobolds) and I suppose magmarings and gallions are good too. I chose to do Niflheim though, since Aspersio owns.
Thats a really long picture isn't it... Anyways since its in my list of pictures I figured I'd go over some of the client enhancements that have been periodically popping up during renewal. This particular one is probably fairly self explanatory. The bar to the right of the icon indicates remaining time. Well it doesn't really. An interesting design choice, the bar counts down from 2 minutes remaining (around there), and if there's more than 2 mins remaining it shows as full. My guess is so that you always know when a skill is going to end (the bar is hard to read if it represents say 30 minutes), and so every bar represents the same period of time. It is a bit annoying when you use a skill that lasts a short duration like 30s, but you always have an idea of how much time is left.
Its a pretty nice feature though, probably my favorite new client feature so far.
Here's another feature. Note here in this screenshot the paw icon blocks out all the skills. That means I'm currently in aftercast delay and can't currently use skills. When the icons disapear, I know I can use skills again.
In this shot you'll see that only one skill has the icon. Thats because Ignition Break has a 5 second re-use delay thats separate from its aftercast time. This icon shows how long it'll be before I can use that particular skill again.
Another pretty handy feature. Not sure what I think of the paw icon, its a little confusing, but it gets the job done.
This is actually from the same screenshot, but its the new visual effet for ignition break. Personally I think its centered a little high up on your character, like a giant pillar of fire is shooting out of your head, but its pretty neat.
Ouch! The skill itself appears to be an upgrade of Magnum Break (hence the name). Odd that Magnum Break isn't a prereq. Anyways its a fire element skill, which limits its usefulness a bit but its a decent element to be throwing around in woe and it has a pretty large blast radius.
This here is the Storm Blast rune skill. Yeah, its the same visual effect as Raging Thrust and yes, the damage does suck. Hopefully they fix it up to be useful. The runes in general are pretty awesome, I mean they're basically skills that are usable for no SP cost, though they are limited by the cost of creating the runes (of which you can only cary a limited number of each) and preparation time. In this case, this rune isn't very good.
Here's the Crush Strike rune skill in action. No visual effect at the moment, though the damage is alright. If I had to guess I'd say its just a flat out single hit instant casting skill for 1500%-2000% attack. There is a re-use delay on the rune though, and the drawback is pretty tough.
As the skill says, when casting Crush Strike it broke my weapon. I haven't tested the skill with an unbreakable weapon yet though.
Still, leveling seems to be easiest when frenzy is involved. For this, the Giant Growth rune is pretty impressive. The rune not only gives you a hefty str bonus, but also gives you a chance to activate 3x damage on your melee hits. This chance as it turns out is pretty good, probably around 10% or so.
When the Giant Growth 3x damage activates on a critical hit while in frenzy, massive damage does occur. Admittedly this was before the critical changes so I'd probably only see like 12k crit instead of 17k, but its still sexy!
While there's not much to show in screenshots, the other two runes I really enjoy using is Vitality Activation and Abundance. Abundance rune gives you 60sp every 10 seconds for 3 minutes, which is an amazing boost. While you can't go absolutely crazy, it definately makes constant skill usage possible. Vitality Activation actually kills your SP regeneration and reduces SP regen from potions by 50%, but boosts your HP regen and HP potion recovery by 50%. The cool thing about this though is that you can use the two in combination, still getting 60sp every 10 seconds as well as improved HP recovery. Can't recover SP with Abundance while in frenzy but I guess thats to be expected.
Anyways thats it for now! Thanks for reading. 
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Back to Renewal
By Doddler on January 5, 2009 in category 'kRO Sakray RE'
Sorry I've been too busy for an update lately. I was going to do a big renewal post, and I still plan on doing so, but for now, here's a quick video I made of my Rune Knight. Unfortunately aspd is a bit bugged atm so I attack a bit slower than I'd expect with a character of my agi, and some of the skills are bugged and/or have no visual effects. Hope its interesting!
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The Arrival of Satan Morocc
By Doddler on December 19, 2008 in category 'General'
I'm posting this about a week later than I was expecting, but now that I have a free moment, I figured I'd get on with it!
Valkyrie war of emperium continues to be exciting. We continue to perform quite strongly... while we still maintain a bit of an advantage fort wise, the battlefield is evening out resource wise as we conceed some of our forts to the enemies and they hold economy castles. The longer this goes on, and the more the supplies even out though I'm starting to see more and more that many of our members are very skilled and are a large part in why we've been doing so good. Its still interesting that we remain competative though, because even with this, we've never functioned as a single unit, we are always defending at least two separate forts at a time. Its exciting even with these odds to face off against guilds that are able to go all-in against us.
I've still been making siege videos, but I haven't been uploading them here on a regular basis. If there's any demand I might start making a WoE video playlist like I've done with my other videos.
Maya Purple card is hax!
So as people already know, episode 12 arrived about a week and a half ago. While main servers go the update flat out, what they did on the free server was have a two week early access event. Players who purchased the poring key would be able to access the new content two weeks before the remainder of the server. Obviously things like the new drops, cards, etc aren't restricted but the new maps quests and systems are. Well, its a decent plan, I don't have anything against it. The key is only 200 points anyways, which is somewhere in the ballpark of $1.50 now. With lots of things to do, I didn't waste time to get the key.
Obviously it would be pointless to partake in the Satan Morroc update without ever actually saying hi to the big guy himself, so I set out to do so.
It turns out he was less happy to see me than me see him, thats for sure.
I spent some time in battlegrounds since they're actually pretty fun and the rewards are also nice. We spent most of our time doing Tierra Canyon, since a fact of the matter being that Flavius is too hard for the players on Valkyrie server (the guardians are much too strong). Tierra isn't too bad though, I disliked its direct approach at first but I'm starting to get a feel for it and despite its quick pace it is always exciting.
The map itself has also been very impressive... in fact I think the two bases in Tierra canyon probably sport some of the best visual design of a map in Ragnarok in recent history. RO has not always been known for its impressive scenery, but when you see them, you might think differently. Recent map work such as this, the new world and the new cities really impress me with the looks. I guess you can still make an old game look good.
The Croix food depot in Tierra Canyon. While not quite as impressive looking, its still pretty good.
I did just enough matches to get my battleground spear as a reward. Its a pretty sexy weapon!
Clearly no episode 12 post can be complete without a trip to the endless tower.
To be honest I wasn't too sure how well we'd fair. We had some trans characters with us, but Valkyrie is still a new server, so good gears are still a bit on the rare side of things. Somehow though we ended up pulling a really well balanced party, and ended up doing suprisingly well.
Out of everything we managed to pull off, I never expected to be able to clear floor 80 and defeat the Fallen Bishop. The bishop represents a huge step in difficulty from the lower bosses, and while this screenshot might make it look like we had an easy time, it truely wasn't. Our party wiped a total of about 4 separate times here, and I must admit I even had life insurance on a hotkey since I didn't want to lose experience at level 96. Still, the act of defeating him represents a huge achievement, and most certainly the first Fallen Bishop kill of Valkyrie server.
Overall, endless tower was a very exciting time. It was also profitable... the list of rare items we obtained is too long to really include it in this post. Key things we got though, were several cards (red ferus, lava golem, and something else), spikey band, fortune sword, 2x s1 rings, and the big catch of the day, a hunting spear from the Fallen Bishop. Oh yeah. 
Setting aside some of episode 12 content, I decided to make a priest character to assist in doing Abyss Lake leveling. Previously I had just relied on the guild account to do so, which while it worked, meant that lots of times the account would be in use or it would be taken out of the dungeon.
In the end I decided the easiest way to do that would be to hunt for items for iro's repeatable exp quests. While I do have some criticism about hte repeatable exp quests, mainly that it not only encourages botting of the turnin items as well as the purchase of zeny to literally buy levels, they are fairly convenient if your plan is just to leech a character. Realistically the exp turnins are much slower than actually leeching a character and probably more designed to supplement leveling rather than use them to level another char, I didn't have much of a desire to make a character to leech the aco. Not many people hunt the bacillus exp turnin, so I spent some time here to help get the priest to job 50.
Hunting dragons is not always without its risks, and there are always a bunch of angry monsters waiting to get in your way.
This is how you hunt for stone bucklers!
Oh yeah.
My current stockpile of shields! I might upgrade them, might trade them for something else, I guess we'll have to see.
And in closing, bio3 is a really scary place when there's no one around to clear it. 
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The Really Really Long Catch-Up Post
By Doddler on December 5, 2008 in category 'General'
Its been a really long time since I've done a journal post hasn't it? Screenshots are going back to the end of october! So I guess I'll start there, and do a big catch-up post.
We'll be starting with the halloween invasion event. Aside from a guest appearance by Mr. Beelzebub, it was a fun time.
At the time of the invasion most of the server's players were fairly under geared for the job of taking out necromancers, but I think we did ok.
It was fairly epic experience for a buch of level 80 characters to be throwing down necromancers, thats for sure.
Elsewhere in prontera, Beelzebub was having his way with the locals.
...Ouch.
Of course I had to try, right?
Many people had presumed the GMs had removed Beelzebub, but word has it that a valiant group of players, hiding in a corner of town battled Beelzebub for several hours before he fell. I wonder who that could be, that defeated him? 
Some screenshots we had of an older woe... I think it was November 3rd? Was the first of the epic fights we had against Inertia to take a woe2 fort back.
Even as early as the start of november we've been doing crazy things like this. Valk shields are quite the amazing piece of gear, and its none too hard to get them either. Of course in the end we had to kill 18 valkyries to get our first shield...
Another shot at Orc Lord's Earthquake. This time, we were prepared.
Our party was even capable of killing RSX... though he's nearly faded by the time I took the screenshot. The trick is to hover above 50% and only take him into EQ range once his power up ends. Then you never have to worry about his powered up quake.
In our quest for epic tank gear, our quest took us from odin's temple and the hunt for Odin's Blessings to Abyss Lake, searching for Stone Bucklers and magni's caps.
Hydrolancer isn't so bad when you've got the people for the job!
Seal quest rolled around on Valkyrie mid November, and I managed to snag myself a ballista. I'm kind of disapointed, since I'm in desperate need of an ice pick, but its not a bad catch. I'll probably end up breaking it slotting it if I ever get any zeny.
First Solo kill of Pharaoh using an Ahlspeiss. Remember, don't try this at home. He hurts like hell without a shield!
People will tell you you need assumptio to level in thors. I think thats a lie. Armed with my trusty odin set and heavy stone buckler, I was able to tank Kasa's without the use of assumptio. It sure sucked when I got clashing'd when pneuma went down, dealing 10000-12000 damage, but its not something that couldn't be survived. Thats why we bring tank characters right?
Of course it doesn't always go right. 
So in my need for a Raydric garment I spent a fair deal of time hunting in the Chivalry. Its not cheap, but hopefully it will pay off if I end up getting a card. I probably spend more time killing AK's than raydrics, but an Abysmal Knight card wouldn't be a bad deal either.
After a while I finally decided that its just way easier to spear boomerange the AK's than to tank them. Takes a while longer but its easier on my HP.
Sometimes piercing is fine too.
I'm sure you noticed that the pierce in this screenshot is higher than the one a few above. I decided to test out one of the rental items from the kafra shop, the Baphomet Horns.
These Baphomet Horns. In a way I think I support the rental items. The Baphomet Horns aren't any stronger than the ones you obtain from completing the sealed shrine for example (actually its worse), but in a temporary, kind of pricy kafra shop form. I don't think its bad they allow players access to late game gears in rental form, it makes it easier to play catch up on main servers, which is a good thing. Its less of an issue on valk though, when no one actually has these end game gears. Well it would be really expensive to rely on the rentals!
Yay, slotted helm.
So I made my leveling spear with the help of my guild. SP has always been a bit of an issue, and this spear fixes that!
A cool view!
Just watch that damage fly off! And yes... I am wearing a nekomimi cap to tank Ktullanux. Don't laugh!
More valk mini hunting! Interesting angle.
I've only ever killed a single rideword on my knight, and this happens. Why isn't it a raydric? Well, at least its worth something, sold it for 1.4m.
Did I ever mention just how much I enjoy the Kiel Hyre quest? I suppose its worth mentioning again. Its a pretty awesome quest. Its got interesting characters, it actually flows reasonably naturally for a quest with a good sense of direction, which is something that RO has historically had a serious problem with, and its rewarding. What more could you want?
Our questing spree took us to Thanatos Tower for the Dandelion's Request. Its another quest which I enjoy, though the requirement to go to Thanatos Tower 4F is pretty rough for most players.
A line that you might see used again once Satan Morroc is ressurected on iRO.
Like Kiel Hyre the Dandelion's Request has an interesting showdown and some pretty interesting characters. Its not actually hard but its still fun. Lin and Kidd are actually re-occuring characters, and the pair take a leading role in the Morroc Investigation and New World Expedition in future game updates. Its pretty neat.
When I did the quest I followed Kidd's route, since I think as a story it flows better. Doing Lin's route separately helps improve your appreciation of the two-sided nature of the quest. Its almost a shame its going to be removed, though clearly it makes sense. How can you attempt to stop Satan Morroc's ressurection when he's already been ressurected?
My reward for finishing the quest. Yay for ugly masks?
So I've decided Dark Tychon is probably the luckiest bastard on the server. An MVP card already... quite suprising!
No one is getting past me.
War of Emperium has evened out a fair bit since last time I posted about it. The split woes has really made things much more interesting, its almost a shame they didn't do it at an earlier time. We're down to about 5 woe2 econ forts in our guild, and two econ'd woe1 forts. Its clear the scene is getting more competative, which is always fun.
Barricade battle!
Stepping outside of a castle in woe usually ends up like this. I know you guys like the site but its a bit much! 
My current WoE equipment. Yeah thats pretty hax stuff... even by main server standards!
Ktullanux killing with two hindsight sages as killers. It went faster than I expected but, I can't say I went in with very high expectations!
Rachel Sanctuary status as of a week or two ago. It will probably open before the end of december.
The guardian drop squad! It was actually trapped at the time but yeah.
I think this trip is the first time I've ever actually seen anyone else inside volcano thors, guess other players are starting to get up to the range where they can do it. It didn't really help that the first time I saw someone I was dragging 4 imps from our leveling area and winging. Oops! The threatened to send in screenshots and get me banned for mob training. How kind of them...
More people in the guild being stupidly lucky...
...This is going to hurt.
Bio3 leveling is fairly fun, if a little dangerous. Root killing is pretty effective I think, and fairly safe when you manage to get all the really angry stuff like snipers away. Unfortunately bio3 is a very ugly place and when you're the only one down there no one has done any mob control.
Oh yeah, all solo! Time's are certainly changing on valkyrie.
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