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That's quite a scientific discovery for me on reaction times. I've tried adjusting the numbers down a bit and my friends have told me it felt better. Some of the skills I've left high cast time (5 seconds) but changed their level scaling though, such as adding level 11 LoV and level 11 Storm Gust for bosses with maximum AoE (just like level 11 Meteor Storm). Since I've already turned fire pillar into X shape (5 instances in one cast) for players, your thoughts made me changed the monster version level 11 into randomly casting 20 instances of fire pillar over an area of 31x31 cells (using random function on dummySkill placement to +n,-n on x and y) Turned out more chaotic than I thought but feedbacks on it were fun since my friends see the cast bar coming up and they either pray the pillars don't drop on their feet or stop moving immediately just to not run into one. On both of these, it won't instantly kill the player if they've amassed enough mDEF as I've scaled all their damage down. Make players get hurt but not die and have them able to pump pots to resist is what I'm going for. Teleport's also something I've deleted from bosses. My friends have had enough trauma with finding a Mistress and having her TP immediately. I don't want players using Convex Mirror to search for MVPs all the time as well so it's something that must be done. Minions are something I've debated with myself a lot on how to make them work and I've honestly made most bosses use the map enemies (as I've rescaled them to match the levels of the map) as minions, but since I've categorized them, I've had almost all of my bosses summon 2 melee, 1 ranged, and 1 caster at a time with 30 seconds of cooldown. Why 4? I've made Flee and DEF penalty start at 5 mobs instead of the normal 3 and leaving the minions alive will start dropping your defenses, especially when other map mobs start swarming the player if they don't have enough clear skill. Hey! That's something I've done with my Paladin! I gave them something called Divine Chains that pulls all enemy within a 7x7 range and apply "Stop" on those mobs for 2 seconds (MVP for 0.5s instead) just because they're the tanky fighter class in my iteration. Merchants are more of a summon fighter but that's the difference in our design... but that's an interesting specialization of Knuckle Boost to make it something different than other skills. It also gave me some thoughts on whether I should add some kind of knockback to Alchemist's bombs... Well that made me rethink about the skills I've already reworked! Thanks for the update on your server anyways! It was a fun read!

Thanks again for your stories, it was a fun read. I'm wholeheartedly agreeing with you on the topic of monster skills and took an almost similar method to you. To me, RO powercreep has grown to enormous levels later in its lifetime and I liked Pre-Renewal speed of fights so I tried my best to scale everything back there, including enemies. I also wanted my players to interact more with the game aside from just spamming attack, so enemy and their skills' changes are changed to reflect that idea. I've modified most player skills to deal lower damage already, I changed most enemies' skills to be players' version to take that effect as well. This is layered with another change I've done to every enemy in the game that I use. I categorized all enemies into either Melee, Ranged, Caster, Special, and Boss. Melee ones are the standard ones with the highest amount, their ATK is average and most of their skills are low levels, they don't cast often, but their cast time are really low. I've mainly assigned ground targeted skills to them, borrowing from C3 and C4 such as Ferus using Rune Knight's version of Dragon Breath. Casters on the other hand, have skills that can still devastate players if you allow them to cast. Early game, Elder Willows will take 7 seconds to cast a level 7 fire bolt at you, Poison Spore will cast Venom Dust or Venom Swamp at you, Harpies will try to cast Lord of Vermillion, etc. Bosses are a mix of both and will have 10 second cast time Lightning Land, alongside 3 second non-cancelable level 3 sonic blow. Why 3 seconds? Because I want my players to be able to react to it. Mages have their safety walls, Tanks have their stuffs, Flee-based classes also have their defensives, I also have shoes that provide a 5s cooldown body relocation called Snap Dodge. Your SG and SL changes are inspiring. It's the classes I have not touched at all and have told my friends that it'll take at least 3 months for me to try and change them into a playable state if I'm able to think of how I will change them. For now they're both in the backlog of classes to work on, even further back than Doram Summoners (since I already have a concrete idea of what to turn the class intro) but my friends are having their hands full with all the new-old classes they can play with so they don't bother asking about these two classes. Personally I was even thinking of changing soul buffs, baking them into the base skill somehow at varying levels. Holy Light damage is based on Heal skill level, Knights 2HQ can just also work with 1H Weapons, Wizards can just have a self buff to increase the costs of their skills but skip gemstone costs, things like that. Then I'll probably just take SL 3rd and 4th class skills to bake into it, make it 3 branches of builds they can play with, Esma builds that do basic stuffs, Eswoo from Soul Reaper be a soul harvest build that relies on collecting soul points, doing lower base damage and higher with souls, and then the rotation path of Soul Ascetic of using one skill into another into another on every enemy as the highest damage, hardest to play thing. All in all, thanks for the report!

3rd classes (and 4th classes) are some of the most weird directions Gravity has pivoted into, turning the game into something else. But it's inevitable with all the power creeps they have given to classes. But since we're talking about things from renewal, Katar GCs are mostly spamming Rolling Cutter to AoE -> Backslide to move since it doesn't reset RC counter, then throw CRS on single targets like you've said. They've even add a new skill in 4th class to use the RC counter to do AoE damage. Nonetheless, some other good things they added to the class that I've picked out is using skills from Cloaking status. Skills do 1 hit of damage if used normally, but if you're cloaked, it does 2 hits or more damage instead which fits the shadow assassin archetype perfectly. Another interesting thing for Assassins Gravity did is in the 4th class imo. is the Shadow Scar buff/debuff which fits into a more AutoAttack oriented class that Thief used to be. It's a buff that grants 5% chance to apply a stacking debuff on an enemy, making them receive more damage from all sources. This means even against MVPs, if you have enough time and pots, you can eventually take them down from all the Shadow Scar the enemy had, and this skill is truly unappealing to just normal mobbing since they die fast enough before you can apply lots of Shadow Scar. I've scaled the debuff down to make it match the damage from my server, and made Assassins have an option to go for Autoattack builds, stacking buffs, debuffs, the autocasted envenom to poison, etc. or just go the skills build ranging from Rolling Cutter stacks build / Pure damage skills that can use both Katar and Daggers build / Cloaking skills build that deals less damage if used normally but scaled to a higher damage if used from cloaking or hiding / the weird weapon blocking counter slash build. My server's Assassin is truly a damage character, and following what you've did in yours, I've scaled their base HP down as well to balance the damage they're given. Your point of Advanced Katar made sense. I'll need to recheck that skill and SB scaling. Agreed, which is why it's always fun to read what you've shared with me in this topic.

Thanks for the compliment and for continuing the project. It was another fun read. I agree wholeheartedly about not making envenom another bash but I'm extremely avert to DoT that doesn't scale, which RO is notorious for, thus I've made normal poison (and most other percentage damage from Status) do no damage, make it applicable on bosses so that the -DEF part works on all enemies, and give envenom a 5% chance to be autocasted on physical attack just to provide some sort of a startup for Autoattack rogues/sins to have something to play around with. With that said, what I'm trying to do is basically scaling everything down in a Renewal server to match a Second Class sort of damage percentage/pre-re damage percentages (standard of 700% DPS with tissue calculations of 7 attacks per second on a 193ASPD character so skills with no casts go lower than that, 1s cast time gets that, 2s gets a bit higher, etc.) yet still providing all classes with their C3/C4 active skills for diversity. Your Crit Chance / Crit Dmg rework for Katar sounds interesting. Personally I have never thought about Katars to be OP in renewal due to the amount of damage multiplier Dagger skills get in renewal / skills crit / etc. but I'm seeing your point. I've made a card that says /2 Crit chance but every crit that goes above 100% yields 1% to crit damage (limit to 1) and it's one of the most used card for any classes that can play a crit build when I playtested with friends, but Assassins katar crit benefitted the most from it. But all in all, I can't wait to see everything of yours come together. Again, thank you for a good read and more inspiration! RO is such a fun thing to play around with and seeing the code changes whatever happens in game is such a good feeling imo.

In battle.c if (sc && sc->data[SC_AUTOSPELL] && rnd()%100 < sc->data[SC_AUTOSPELL]->val4) { int sp = 0; uint16 skill_id = sc->data[SC_AUTOSPELL]->val2; uint16 skill_lv = sc->data[SC_AUTOSPELL]->val3; int i = rnd()%100; if (sc->data[SC_SPIRIT] && sc->data[SC_SPIRIT]->val2 == SL_SAGE) //comment out this line to remove spirit requirement i = 0; //Max chance, no skill_lv reduction. [Skotlex] //reduction only for skill_lv > 1 if (skill_lv > 1) { if (i >= 50) skill_lv /= 2; else if (i >= 15) skill_lv--; } Just comment out the "if (sc->data[SC_SPIRIT]" to make it like you always have the sage link.

I disabled all the expanded classes in my server through not allowing people to class change into them. Simple as that. You can change the level cap through source modification of map.hpp. Edit it to any number you want and then work on the database parts (job_exp.yml and statpoint.yml) There's a guide out there available but simply, you need to add a new skill ID into skill.hpp, add how it works into skill.cpp, if it has damage values, also add it into battle.cpp, then add the new skill data into skill_db, then also modify your client files to allow players to read up on that skill description and skill tree values.

First, imma yoink that life-recovery tech on assassin from you if you don't mind. I'm only working on a server that hosts 10 friends. Next, I agree working on servers got me thinking about implementing new skills to the classes so let me share some that I've worked on. Blacksmiths: To me, Blacksmiths are outdated with the smithing skills with new unique weapons I've created and with Gravity's own making of newer skills, cards, and more. I was thinking on the methods to reimplement something that will fulfill a blacksmith's fantasy of forging stuffs so I took the supplementary damage buff of Magnum Break and create it into a new skill in itself. This skill applies a percentage of weapon damage as extra elemental damage (in MB case, fire). Blacksmiths can forge any of the four main elements on their weapon, providing a buff to themselves. I'm still considering whether I should make it self-buff only and give party buffs to alchemists instead, but it's a fun buff skill to me. Assassins: I always wanted poison archetype to work but with how MVPs cannot get poisoned (and enabling that isn't good since it deals percentage damage), I've racked my brain a ton. The conclusion I've arrived is three skills. First, I've changed Venom Splasher to be a time bomb that recasts itself at nearby enemies if initial explosion kills the target. Next, Poison React now always retaliate with envenom, which upgrades to Venom Pressure. While that didn't sound new at all, the third thing I did for them was creating a new buff that increases attack damage against poisoned enemies. If enemies cannot be poisoned, they instead, are applied a new debuff taken from Shadow Cross C4 skill Enchanting Shadow that applies stackable percentage damage taken. This means the skill works as a poison skill, and also works outside and provides more damage. There's so much more idea and it's so fun to rework/redesign the whole game to match your imagination and I cannot wait to read more (and maybe steal some of your ideas) for my server.

Hello! I'm trying to get the effects related to their skills such as DK's Servant weapons, Abyss Chaser's dark balls, etc. onto other classes when using those skills. They current showed up as monk's spirit balls and I've been looking around the source code / grf files but I've found no relation or clues to where I could modify those classes to use those effects instead of monk's spirit balls. If any help or clue could be provided, thank you very much.

Your journey was a really fun one. I'm using my free time to create and adjust things as well and this topic has been inspiring to make me keep my own notes on my adjustments and it's such a blessing to be able to read how someone is having fun with just server customization.

Was able to use a debugger, found out that I accidentally add some MATK calculations after the final calculations causing overflow and the server to crash in battle.c!

Hello! There's a certain problem with my server that I'm working on currently, namely the topic. I've been customizing and playing with source modification for a while now and have now faced this serious problem. I've carefully tested and tried and narrowed the crashes down to enemies using skills that cause BF_Magic damage on players causing the mapserver to crash. There is no error log. The server compiles with zero errors and everything and I've butted my head with fixing this problem for days now so here I am asking for anyone with more insight to help. And the sad fact is that I cannot undo far enough that the server doesn't crash. It worked fine last weekend and when I opened it up to test this week, it somehow started crashing and I've no backup. I don't know what happened or where did I coded it wrongly and I don't want to change every enemy to use something that's not magic damage, but if it comes to that, I'll do it since this server is only for my small group of friends (<20 players) to just enjoy a modified RO. To further clarify: Problem: Mapserver crashes with no error logs every time mobs uses a skill that causes magic damage to players. Any skills, targeted, ground targeted, if it causes damage, mapserver crashes. Possible problems: Maybe damage calculations caused an overflow somehow, somewhere? My battle.c or skill.c is somehow messed up somewhere, thus I've uploaded it if you guys wanted to see it as well. Things I've done to test: Changing skills that caused the crash from BF_Magic to BF_Weapon or any other type makes the skill runs fine and does damage accordingly. Testing with non-damaging skills like provoke, the skills work fine. It's not a problem on the client or effects, when skills cast when tested with BF_Weapon, the effects showed correctly. Player casting skills onto enemies worked fine, doesn't crash the server, calculates damage correctly. All items are unequipped, still crash. Changing fire bolt damage to the least minimal I can through skillratio values, still crash. Changing the mobs to see if a mob was bugged, crash, any mobs, casting any skill that causes magic damage = crash. I cannot use GDB because it only runs on linux to my understanding. Changing maps, still crash. Thanks for the help in advance. I'll try to go through any suggestions or ideas anyone has.