It's been a full =10 years= since our CS181 group game together and messed around on an RO server to hang out while also doing "research" for our class project. In the midst of the I'm-sure-to-be-infamous covid/shelter in place quarantine, I decided to invite some folks to Rune Midgard once again, as a way to hang out virtually.
RO is still RO, and surprisingly (or unsurprisingly) still going strong, even 18 years after its initial release. But of course there's been a lot of changes and patches, even a complete 1st/2nd class skill rebalancing, etc. So while a lot of the general stuff is the same, there are a ton of things that are new as well, including the "Eden group" quests which help you level and get some very nice equipment, some helpful navigation systems, etc.
I chose NovaRO as the server to join this time around, as it seems to have a relatively good reputation, and offers 25/25/10x rates, which is around the cusp of what you'd call "low-mid rate". In other words, not kill one poring and become a god, but also not grind endlessly either. Myself and kotz managed to end our first play session at around level 88, though admittedly that's with the aid of the experience ring that increases EXP gain by 20% (valid for 3 days when you first start a char).
I've played a number of characters in my past RO "career" (if you could even call it that -- I've never been super serious into it, not like I have ever gone MvPing or anything like that). Most notably the acolyte/priest branch, since I love to support others. I wanted to do something different this time though, and remembered battle sages being an off-the-wall (if underpowered) build that I kind of enjoyed working towards last time.
Turns out that a good hindsight/autocast sage/sorcerer actually really really benefits from a soul linker, so I actually made the decision to.....dual client, and have a soul linker slave auto-following my sage around.
The whole point of the autocast sage build is:
- Whack things with books while simultaneously casting bolts on them
- Every whack with a book has a chance to trigger MORE bolts to automatically go off (lvl 1-3 bolts)
This gets more complicated once you hit the 3rd job class (sorcerer), but that's where we're at for now.
The Soul Linker can cast "sage spirit" on my sage, which makes it so that the autocast bolts are of max level instead of lvls 1-3, so that's actually pretty significant. The buff only needs to be cast once every 6 minutes or so. Eventually my hope is to marry the two characters in-game, so that the soul linker slave can also cast "kaahi" on the sage. Kaahi basically makes it so that every time you get hit by a normal attack, you RECOVER 1000 HP at the cost of 25 SP. So....yeah, you become an immortal god....
That's the plan anyways. Like I said, this is definitely an unconventional (read: underpowered) build, so we'll see how well it actually does in practice.
But anyways, off we were to get started....
In NovaRO you start the game in this weird map overlooking the city, where you can either start or skip the tutorial. I skipped the tutorial with my main account but actually had to do it with my slave account since it was my first character on that account.
Apologies for the half-hazard image capture quality, I'm experimenting with new ways of doing these. I actually just recorded a very low FPS (essentially a timelapse) video and took screenshots out of that, as it seems easier to do that and just extract the images afterwards, than to try and take screenshots while in the middle of playing.
It became quickly apparent that having my soul linker slave follow me around everywhere was.....a little more effort than I initially planned. You can autofollow another character, which works well enough, but as soon as you use a @go command to warp somewhere......you gotta type it in the other game window as well. Same thing with any NPC interactions, quest turn-ins, etc....
It was....something I had to get used to.
Here we are at the Stylist, trying to get some nice initial hair styling and coloring. I'd end up spending more time here later, but for now I was just waiting for my party mates to finish up the tutorial.
I found Lemm! Here we are, the 3 of us, in the 3rd floor of the "main office" in Prontera.
We mostly just followed the directions in the NovaRO leveling guide (which was an invaluable resource). One of the steps in that guide is to go to an NPC in Lasagna (yes, there is a town called LASAGNA now, it's home to a playable race of cat people. A lot has been added to this game....) and have that NPC teach you the "first aid" basic skill, and give you some EXP.
Funnily enough, this NPC also heals you for a ridiculously excessive amount as part of that conversation. Witness Seph getting healed for =5417= HP, probably enough to fullheal them by 50+ times over...
After that it was off to good ol Payon dungeon to go and hunt some Zombies and Skeletons for some early leveling!
While we were all waiting to get situated and group up at the dungeon entrance, some random priest/archbishop came by and decided to buff us all with all manner of excessive enchantments. I count 8 already in this screenshot??
So yeah, we proceeded to go through Payon dungeon, all glowy and fast and blessed and all that.
The leveling here is pretty fast, 25x is actually not very slow at all, so we were really making quick work of all of these enemies, even with my slave literally not doing anything as a Taekwon Kid besides following me around. Lemm would just auto attack things from afar with a bow, I would fire bolt/fire ball things to death, and Seph healed us from the back.
Funnily enough we didn't really need potions or to stop and recharge SP at all. Seph was healing us, sure (though a lot of the time Seph complained that my slave kept on blocking the way of healing my actual character, lol), but our primary source of healing and SP recovery was......leveling up. The levels were so frequent that the fastest way to heal or gain more SP was just to kill one or two more things and get restored up to max upon level up. xD
I'm not sure if this is a feature specific to the server, but every time you level up your character says a random canned quote. Since we were all leveling up pretty often, and often at the same time, this lead to a lot of text boxes popping up at the same time. Witness our party all marveling at our own powers:
Pro tip: I just looked it up and you can turn these off by using the @quotes command. The more you know...
Payon dungeon was old familiar territory for all of us, but there's now this whole "Eden Group" organization that apparently offers you a bunch of quests and free equipment and stuff to help you level. Here's the main Eden group office, complete with a mass of other players doing their thing:
Somewhere along the way I figured I should have some sort of "home base" city that WASN'T prontera or the eden group (e.g. super crowded with a million people milling about). Last time around in our CS181 adventures we somehow chose Morroc as a hometown -- this time I'm voting to go with Geffen, as it seems peaceful enough and it's easily accessible by typing "@go 2":
After receiving some more Eden quests the next step was actually to go back to Payon dungeon once more and hunt a bunch of Zombies/Skeletons/Poporings to complete the quests, then turn it all in for EXP. Here's us back at Payon Dungeon, this time with Seph buffing us with some sweet Increase Agility (increases your walk speed as well as the AGI stat).
At this point Seph had to leave us, so it was just Lemm, me, and me slave running around leveling up for the rest of the night. We half joked that Seph should just put their character on autofollow as well, and I'd just have a train of people following me, but unfortunately that would break as soon as we needed to warp anywhere. Oh well.
So besides EXP, the rewards for the Eden quests include a bunch of....really decent equipment actually, much better than any of the other random vanilla stuff you'd buy from NPCs at this stage in the game (we're not rich or anything, FAR from it). Look at this piece of armor which gives a very nice +2-- max HP and 46 defense, for example:
After that it was off to the 5 "mission boards" up on the top of the main eden office, where you can take hunting/item fetch quests to turn in for EXP. I don't think there's any penalty to taking too many quests, so......we just ended up with a ton:
Elder willows! That's a name we recognized. We derped around a bit trying to actually FIND the right map to hunt for them (pro tip: later I learned that the in-game world map actually has a very handy dandy "search for mob" feature that will just tell you....), but eventually we found them and started hunting them.
Of course often I would accidentally be stuck in chat mode instead of battle mode -- here you can see me spamming "qqqqq" to try to cast a spell, only to realize I was typing in chat. Oops.
We met our Elder Willow hunting criteria, and were going to try to get 10 Coco kills as well, except we saw this whatever-it-was-called pincer beetle thing and decided to try and mess with it. Bad idea -- we didn't do much damage to it and it ran up and one-hit all three of us one after the other. Oops! Party wipe xD
We took another handful of quests and looked through them, and saw....Cruisers! I remember those, from Lutie Toy Dungeon! That was our next stop -- we ran around bolting/arrowing a bunch of the toy soldier enemies (Cruisers) until we had enough for the quest:
I have memories of leveling in Toy Dungeon as a swordie, back when we were playing on a more low-rate server and the power level was wayyy lower. Ah, those were the grindy times, chugging pots to stay alive while auto-attacking myst cases....very different from now, even with a measly 25x exp rate, we were just blowing everything out of the water.
At this point we had hit jlvl 40+ so it was time to change to our second classes! My main char turned from magician to sage, Lemm turned from archer into Bard, and my slave turned from Taekwon kid into Soul Linker.
It was then off to the Orc Dungeon for our next quests -- hunting orc zombies and orc skeletons:
Lots more blowing stuff up with bolts and fire walls and such here. There was also a point in time where Lemm just sat there for a while trying to digest the bard skill tree, while I bolted anything that came near:
We amassed some pretty large crowds of orc undeads at some points....
Turning these quests in lead to some new Eden equipment! Like I said, pretty nice equips -- this one has even more bonuses than the last one:
Since we were at our second classes now, Lemm wanted to find an instrument to use instead of their bow. We ended up learning that you can buy instruments from a vendor in Comodo -- Lemm borrowed some 15k zeny from me to buy a guitar to whack people with.
Meanwhile I was using the Eden Staff. A hefty 150 MATK bonus is really nothing to scoff at here:
Eventually I'd want a book, though. If nothing more than just for the flavor of whacking things with books.
Also, finally, my soul linker slave (which up to this point had literally just been following us around) finally became useful, as they could now cast Bard & Dancer Spirit on Lemm (enables them to move faster while playing songs), makes it so their songs affect themselves, and they can even use skills of the opposite gender. They could also cast Sage Spirit on my main character, which of course meant that it was time to start whacking things and auto-casting bolts on them.
At this point we went back to Payon dungeon yet again. Our target this time I believe was the Munaks, which there were plenty of later in the dungeon. Funnily enough, whereas before both of us had been ranged classes (bow and spells), we now changed to melee classes whacking things with instrument/book respectively xD
Unfortunately Lemm decided to try his luck and try attacking into the massive swarm of Hydras in the lake area here. Notttttt a good idea, as you can see:
Of course, I didn't actually do much better: I sped through and ran into a huge mob of Munaks/Bonguns/Skeletons, and unfortunately my slave's Kaahi buff (which she had self-cast) had expired. Whoops.
That was fine though, we had accomplished what we needed to. Our next stop was Ghast Heim St Abbey, where we went to go hunt Wraiths!
Lemm had now learned some songs, and used "Assassin Cross of Sunset" which basically boosts the team's attack speed:
We went into the dungeon with a little bit of trepidation, not sure how dangerous the enemies were. But we needn't have worried -- we made quick work of the wraiths and other enemies. Lemm was actually taking them down really fast with Musical Strike, and at this point I had learned Free Cast, which allowed me to cast bolts while simultaneously attacking.
Here's us wrecking a bunch of evil druids:
At the end of that we got our next set of equipment -- I had the choice between a staff and a book. On the one hand, the book meant I would get bonus attack speed from my passive sage skill. On the other hand, the staff meant more Magical power. On the other hand.....whacking people with a book....
I ended up with the book :) Whacking people with books, here I come!
We decided to call it a night at that point. We're level ~88 and at this point I believe the next step is to start doing "Gramps" quests in preparation for rebirth. "Rebirth" is the mechanic where you reset your character back to level 1, but with bonus stats and you can choose a stronger version of your second class / advance to third job class. (So basically a new game plus?)
The idea here is to finish (but not turn in!) a bunch of high-exp quests before you rebirth, then use those quests to quickly skip most of the grind for getting your levels back up to where they were.
The "gramps" quests (named after the "gramps" old guy NPC) require you to kill 400 monsters of two types and you usually try to find a party to do them together with. I'm not sure how hard these are, we'll have to see what happens when we try to do them. My character is not entirely super useful at the moment and there are a bunch of enchants and elemental skills that I haven't really figured out how to use, so hopefully we won't end up joining some party that gets mad at us for derping around XD
It was a good session...we'll see how things progress from here and whether I can actually put this build together.....
