General: Ragnarok Renewal Discussion Thread I

This is an old thread, the new thread on this topic is here.


Note from Mods: This update has just begun testing so its very likely that it will be changed. It may never get on kRO mains, let alone iRO. If your only intention is to post here to complain about things, please do so in the Tirades thread. Posts made in THIS thread simply to complain will be deleted. Don't assume information here is correct, because it could very well not be.

On kRO on July 28th Gravity set up a new test server for their Ragnarok Renewal Project. The Renewal is a full scale re-balancing of Ragnarok. The plan is to make RO more accessible to users, and more in line with modern day MMORPG's. In addition, the new mechanics are intended so that they can easily add and improve on current game content (such as 3rd jobs) without destroying game balance.

Original Notice

Ragnarok Online Renewal Test Server Opening Notice (2008/07/24)

In order to collect information and test the new RO renewal, we will be opening a new Renewal Sakray Test server.


1. Users

The closed beta test process will have up to 500 participants.

2. Signups

Signups for the testing will occur between the 24th and 29th.

3. Schedule

* Closed Beta Test

Start Date: 2008/07/30
Server Name: Sakray Renewal Test Server
Participation: Accepted testers
Test Period: 2008/07/30 ~ 2008/08/27 (4 weeks)

* Open Beta Test

Start Date: 2008/08/27
Server Name: Sakray Renewal Test Server
Participation: Anyone
Test Period: 2008/08/27 ~ 2008/09/24 (4 weeks)

4. Connecting to the test server

Launch RO -> Select connect to free server -> From the server list select "Sakray Renewal Test Server" (Only registered testers will be able to do this).


For testing, the server will have 10 times experience and 10 times drops rate, and for testing various items will be sold from NPCs.

We hope to see many of you in testing!

- Gravity Ragnarok Online Development Team

The following is a list of currently known changes. This list will be updated as new information is found.

Base Stats

Strength (STR) *
- 1 point of STR increases status physical attack power by 1.2
- 5 points of STR increase status defense by 1

Agility (AGI)
- 1 point of AGI increases flee rate by 1
- 4 points of AGI increases your attack speed by 1
- 5 points of AGI increases status defense by 1

Vitality (VIT)
- 1 point of VIT increases your Max HP by 1%
- 1 point of VIT increases your recovery rate by 2%
- 2 points of VIT increases your status defense by 1
- 5 points of VIT increases your status magic defense by 1

Inteligence (INT)
- 1 point of INT increases your status magic attack by 1.5
- 2 points of INT increases your status magic defense by 1

Dexterity (DEX) *
- 1 point of DEX increases your hit rate by 1
- 4 points of DEX increases your status magic defense by 1
- 5 points of DEX increases your status magic attack by 1
- 10 points of DEX increases your status physical attack power by 1
- 10 points of DEX increases your attack speed by 1

Luck (LUK)
- 1 point of LUK increases your Critical by 0.3
- 3 points of LUK increases your status physical attack power by 1
- 3 points of LUK increases your status magical attack power by 1
- 3 points of LUK increases your hit by 1
- 7 points of LUK increases your flee by 1
- 10 points of LUK increases your perfect dodge by 1

* With bows, musical instruments and whips, the increase in physical attack power from Dex and Str are swapped, making Dex the primary damage stat.

Other Stats

Physical Attack Power (ATK)
- Shown in the status window as "status attack power + equipment attack power".
- Attack power gained by your own stats affect status attack power, and your weapon affects equipment attack power.
- Cards and equipment that affect or increase your attack power only affect your equipment attack power.

Magical Attack Power (MATK)
- Shown in the status window as "status magic attack power + equipment magic attack power".
- Magic attack power gained by your own stats affect status magic attack power, and your weapon affects equipment magic attack power.
- All weapons now have a unique magic attack stat which directly affects your equipment magic attack power when equipped.
- Cards and equipment that affect or increase your magic attack power only affect your equipment magic attack power.

Physical Defense (DEF)
- Shown in the status window as "Status defense + Equipment defense".
- Status defense is gained by your own stats, and equipment defense is increased by your current equipped gears and their refine rate.
- Physical defense directly reduces a targets attack power against you. Equipment defense however reduces damage more than your status defense.
- The difference in level between you and the opponent affect how effective your defense is at reducing damage.

Magical Defense (MDEF)
- Shown in the status window as "Status magic defense + Equipment magic defense".
- Status magic defense is gained via your stats, and equipment magic defense is increased by your current equipment and cards.
- Magical defense directly reduces a targets magic attack power against you. The reduction from equipment magic defense makes up a higher % of the total reduction.
- The difference in level between you and the opponent affect how effective your defense is at reducing damage.

Attack Speed (ASPD)
- Attack speed is displayed as a numerical value, which represents an attacking speed unchanged from before the renewal patch. As your approach 200 attack speed, your attacks become increasingly fast (max aspd is 190, representing 5 attacks a second).
- Attack speed varies from job to job, and is effected by the class of weapon equipped, your Level, AGI and DEX stats, and reduced when equipping a shield.
- Stats and and equipment that affect ASPD modify it by a direct amount instead of by a %. For example, Two-Hand Quicken will give you a flat +5 aspd.
- Equipping a shield reduces your ASPD by 5.

Accuracy (HIT)
- Shown in the status window as "Status HIT + Equipment HIT bonus".
- The base status HIT is 175, and is increased by your level, Dex and Luk.
- Your status hit and equipment hit affect your final hit rate equally.

Evasion (FLEE)
- Shown in the status window as "Status FLEE + Equipment FLEE bonus".
- The base status FLEE is 100, and increased by your level, Agi, and Luk.
- Your status flee and equipment flee affect your final dodge rate equally.

Final Accuracy
- The ability to hit or dodge a target physically is based on a ratio of the HIT and FLEE between you and the target.
- As your HIT raises above the targets FLEE, it becomes increasingly difficult to dodge. The opposite is true, if the opponent has higher FLEE than you have HIT, you will have difficulty in landing a hit.

Casting Time
- Cast time of all skills is now composed of two parts, a fixed cast time and a variable cast time.
- Fixed cast time cannot be reduced by any means, and represents the fastest a skill can possibly be cast.
- Variable cast time can be decreased via your DEX and INT stats, your base level, as well as equipment and skills such as Suffragium and Magic strings.
- The fixed and variable cast times vary from skill to skill, job to job. Certain jobs have different cast times for the same skill.

Critical Chance (Crit)
- Your critical rate is calculated the same as before, and represents a % chance to land a critical hit, affected by your LUK and current equipment.
- Your critical rate is reduced by the LUK of the target, and reduced if the target is a higher level than you.
- Katar type weapons double the effect of the crit stat.

Perfect Dodge (pDodge)
- Perfect Dodge is no longer shown within the status window.
- However pDodge works the same as before, perfect dodge is a direct % chance to evade a normal (non skill) physical attack.
- Perfect Dodge is increased with higher luck and specific equipment.

Perfect Hit (pHit)
- Perfect Hit is not displayed within the client window.
- pHit is a direct % chance to hit the target, regardless of your hit and evasion rates.
- Perfect Hit can only be gained via special equipment.

Character Leveling

Increased Weighting on Level Difference
- Players are rewarded for fighting monsters of their own level, as well as those slightly harder.
- When in combat a player or monster that is higher level receives a bonus to their hit rate, critical rate and damage, and the lower level one faces a penalty to their evasion, and physical and magical defense. The penalties increase as the level difference widens.
- If you are between 1-9 levels below a monster, you receive a bonus to your experience for your kills.
- If you are 10 or more levels below a monster, you will be unable to damage the monster.

- If you are between 4-9 levels above a monster, you will receive a penalty to experience gained from that monster.
- If you are 10 or more levels above a monster, you will be unable to receive experience.

- The inability to damage targets above 10 levels do not apply to monsters or in PVP. However, a large level difference (20-30 levels) could make it difficult or nearly impossible for a player or monster to hit or to damage their target.

- The following chart shows the correlation between player level and monster level. In this example, the monster is a level 50 monster giving 2000 base experience.



Experience Gain
- The experience table has been drastically changed.
- Because of wide-scale modifications to monster levels, monster experience, and the weighting of your own level, the amount of base experience required to level up has dropped drastically.
- For example, level 96->97 trans requires now 140m experience. After the patch, it will require 5.4m experience.
- At high levels (90+), the experience required has been cut to nearly 1/25 its original value. Monster experience is similarly changed, though generally monster experience for that level range is down only to 1/4.
- Job level requirements are roughly unchanged. However, monsters appear to give more job experience than base now.

Monster Arrangement and Re-leveling
- The spawn of most monsters across the game world have been widely changed.
- Areas are changed so that maps generally group monsters of similar level together.
- To accommodate this, the stats, skills, and level of most monsters in game have been drastically altered.
- The adjustment in zones is done in such a way that players should always have a place to level their class within their level range.
- Some zones have been adjusted to be high end, with monster levels appearing above 100.

- Current known monster sense information can be found here.

Skill Balancing

Acolyte

Heal
* The amount healed for has changed. Heal is now directly influenced by your magic attack power.
* The amount healed is no longer fixed, but is a range influenced by your stats and skill level.
* Modifiers that affected heal before will still work as they did.

Knight

Two Hand Quicken
* Two Hand quicken now increases your attack speed by a fixed amount.

Priest

Suffragium
* Now only reduces the variable portion of skill casting time.

BS Sacrimenti
* Now allows attacks to bypass defense of demon / undead monsters.

Turn Undead
* The success rate of Turn Undead is changed.
* On failure the damage of Turn undead is a holy attack influenced by your magic attack power.

Wizard

Meteor Storm
* The damage of Meteor Storm is increased.

Lord of Vermilion
* The damage of Lord of Vermilion is increased.

Storm Gust
* The damage of Storm Gust is increased.

Heaven's Drive
* The damage of Heaven's Drive is increased.

Blacksmith

AdrenalineRush
* Adrenaline Rush now increases your attack speed by a fixed amount.

Crusader

Grand Cross
* Grand Cross is influenced by both the physical attack power and magical attack power of the user.
* Grand Cross is reduced by a combination of physical defense power and magical defense power of the target.

Spear Quicken
* Spear Quicken now increases your attack speed by a fixed amount.

Monk

Occult Impaction
* Occult Impaction is influenced by (status + equip) physical attack power and the physical equipment DEF of the target.

Mental Strength
* Attacks ignore the users physical and magical DEF but all incoming damage is reduced to 1/10.

Alchemist

Acid Terror
* Acid Terror is influenced by (status + equip) physical attack power and increased by the VIT of the target.
* Acid Terror deals 1/2 damage on boss targets now.

Bomb
* Bomb is now influenced by (status + equip) physical attack power.

Bard

Impressive Rift
* Impressive Rift now increases attack speed by a fixed amount (per level).

Magic Strings
* Now only reduces the variable portion of skill casting time.

Lord Knight

Frenzy
* Frenzy now increases attack speed by a fixed amount.

Clashing Spiral
* Clashing Spiral is now influenced by (status + equip) physical attack power and the weight of the current equipped weapon.

Assassin Cross

Soul Destroyer
* Soul Destroyer is influenced by your physical and magical attack power.
* Soul Destroyer's damage is reduced by a combination of both physical and magical defense of the target.

Meteor Assault
* Meteor Assault is influenced by (status + equip) physical attack power.

High Priest

Assumptio
* Assumptio has been completely changed. Assumptio now increases your physical and magical defense by 200% for the skill duration.
* However, skills that bypass your physical or magical defense will ignore the effects of assumptio.

High Wizard

Stave Crasher
* Stave Crasher is influenced by both the users physical attack power and magical attack power.
* Stave Crasher is reduced only by the targets physical defense.

Scholar

Soul Exhale
* The amount of SP transferable with Soul Exhale has changed. Now you cannot give a target more than 50% of their max SP with the skill.

Mind Breaker
* The damage of Mind Breaker is now influenced by (status + equip) magical attack power.

Biochemist

Acid Bomb
* Acid Bomb is now influenced by the users physical attack power, the users magical attack power, and the VIT of the target.
* Acid Bomb damage is now reducable by a combination of both physical defense and magical defense of the target.

Equipment Changes

Some pieces of equipment have been changed for the renewal patch. In particular, most rods and some books now grant equipment magic attack power.

Rods

Rod - 30 Matk
Wand - 45 Matk
Staff - 75 Matk
Wizardry Staff - 82 Matk
Gentleman's Staff - 82 Matk
Staff of Soul - 85 Matk
Release of Wish - 90 Matk
Staff of Wing - 90 Matk
Staff of Recovery - 90 Matk
Staff of Piercing - 95 Matk
Arc Wand - 95 Matk
Mighty Staff - 100 Matk
Wand of Occult - 105 Matk
Eraser - 110 Matk
Dark Thorn Staff - 116 Matk
Survivor's Rod - 120 Matk
Staff of Destruction - 145 Matk
Lich's Bone Wand - 155 Matk

Books

Hardcover Book - 25 Matk
Giant Encyclopedia - 70 Matk
Sage's Diary - 90 Matk
Magic Tactics - 92 Matk
Ancient Magic - 95 Matk

* Other books do not grant any MATK bonus.

Also, please don't make this into a 'balance changes I want to see' thread. ^^; Keep it on topic!

More misses + slower attack speed = ???
More misses + slower attack speed + more dodges + slower mob attack speed = Ragnarok Online Tactics?

Holy f*cking crap. That what they were doing since the 13.1 patch and probably before.

Guess we can't complaint they're doing "crap update" anymore do we?

I'm happy to see them doing a major rebalancing of RO!

My only beef is that they want to slow down attacking...that's the one thing that's always kept me from newer MMOs. Those god aweful attack speeds where people attack...then pick their nose...then attack again. I play a minstrel and I still attack faster than speed characters in WoW.

I'm not too upset about them slowing things down. I mean look at it now, knights, snipers, mastersmiths already hit max attack speed without too much trouble. LK's can do it without a single point of agi. With the right buffs, any class does. If things continue, you'll see what you see on bad private servers, every character hits 5000 times a second for insano damage. The solution apparently is to slow things down a little, and build it up at a more respectable rate. A high attack speed character will still probably get up to the 170-180 aspd range without tooo much trouble, but its certainly not as easy to get that high anymore.

I like the bonus of shield-less characters getting an aspd advantage, gives a nice bonus for 2h weapon jobs.

Originally Posted by Akin

I'm happy to see them doing a major rebalancing of RO!

My only beef is that they want to slow down attacking...that's the one thing that's always kept me from newer MMOs. Those god aweful attack speeds where people attack...then pick their nose...then attack again. I play a minstrel and I still attack faster than speed characters in WoW.

Yeah, its what stopped me from enjoying WoW. If they do this, hindsight sages would become useless (unless they double the rate it triggers or something).

I'm worried about the fate of the archer class from all this.... Also I really really really HATE the changes to attack speed. Like Akin stated, it's still one of the few nice things RO still has, the characters attack quick.

Also, seems to me that if Gravity is putting all this effort into "Remaking" RO, that they've all put given up on RO2.

I just don't want to see my aspd be anywhere lower than the current ~120 range (sader/knight unarmed on a peco with no CM). I don't really mind if they make it hard to reach 190 though. All I can imagine now is a priest wearing a claw...

Originally Posted by TurrTurr

Also, seems to me that if Gravity is putting all this effort into "Remaking" RO, that they've all put given up on RO2.

I'm actually curious about this as well. These changes seem like a long term commitment to RO.

What they might do is adjust aspd based on the class. For example, thief classes are supposed to be known for their speed, so perhaps the hit in aspd they take is far less than, say, a knight. And like doddler said, 2h knights dont take an aspd like knights with shields do.

I am interested on how these changes would affect WoE.

No more insta AB.

- If a player is over 3 levels above a monster, the experience of that monster decreases by 50%. Each additional level difference reduces exp by 10%.

- For the most part, the game has been balanced to be slower paced than before. Players will probably attack about half as fast.

They effectively killed the Sage classes. I wonder how Sages will level, since they're almost useless in parties and soloing in high 90's will take forever, Sages by themselves are kind of weak to kill high level monsters.

As it seems the discussion has been moved here, so I'll repost the formulas. I did my best to figure them out, but no guarantee.

melee_atk = str + dex/10 + str/5 + level/4 + luk/3
bow_atk = dex + str/5 + level/4 + luk/3
matk = int + dex/5 + level/4 + luk/3 + int/2
hit = dex + level + 150 + luk/3
flee = agi + level + 100 + luk/5
SoftDEF = ((level+vit)/2) + ((str+agi)/5)
SoftMDEF = (dex+vit)/5 + level/4 + int/2
crit = 1 + luk/3

no idea about lucky dodge and attack speed.

Originally Posted by Philia Philis

- If a player is over 3 levels above a monster, the experience of that monster decreases by 50%. Each additional level difference reduces exp by 10%.

- For the most part, the game has been balanced to be slower paced than before. Players will probably attack about half as fast.

They effectively killed the Sage classes. I wonder how Sages will level, since they're almost useless in parties and soloing in high 90's will take forever, Sages by themselves are kind of weak to kill high level monsters.

You should read the entire post. Yes, based on *todays* monsters it would suck, but overall the rebalancing should make it faster than it is now.

Also if its anything like other games i've played with this setup, its only the killer that determines the penalty so it will encourage more diverse parties. A group of higher level players supporting a lower level killer for example to still benefit from a good mob.

one of the main things I liked about RO compared to other MMOs is the fast aspd... I like to watch the numbers fly by

also in the other thread there was talk about how these things might distroy battle priests which was the other thing I liked about this game, the freedom to push your character in a unique direction if you so choose

Originally Posted by Philia Philis

- If a player is over 3 levels above a monster, the experience of that monster decreases by 50%. Each additional level difference reduces exp by 10%.

- For the most part, the game has been balanced to be slower paced than before. Players will probably attack about half as fast.

They effectively killed the Sage classes. I wonder how Sages will level, since they're almost useless in parties and soloing in high 90's will take forever, Sages by themselves are kind of weak to kill high level monsters.

Also, they mentioned that they are adjusting the levels and spawns of most monsters in RO. The monsters you're killing now may have their levels increased so they could still be viable targets at higher levels.

any change is good, obviously ro doesnt want less players since its still a business, i dont think they will make changes that makes loss of $$. In time changes will be better for ourselves and put aside those elitists.

How is this rebalancing? This is revamping.

Originally Posted by Scrub206

welp thanks for helping me quit ro its been a pleasure!

It's making me look forward to it.

Pre-trans reasonably balanced -> trans kind of wtf/crappy -> trans now with retarded new skills + items that completely break mechanics (shit) -> this patch (something new, we'll see, but at least it shows they are changing something)

I think the only people who don't think the current game couldn't get much worse either like pvm a lot, haven't been to a major mvp, or don't like competitive pvp/woe and prefer one hit skills. This update seems to address a massive range of problems that RO had as it matured, and it also has started to balance the game around the way Gravity has been using the mechanics instead of how the mechanics were best used.

Wow.

I'd wish I could think of something else to say, but wow.

DO NOT WANT... I play RO BECAUSE of alot of the things they want to change. If I wanted to play a slower paced game that forced leveling on targets in your level range I have a ton of other, better made options. They are doing this to try and attract newer players but all it's going to do is actually put them into direct competition with all the newer games which is extremely foolish of them because they really can't compete. RO is still alive because it is DIFFERENT and now they want to make it more like the others