Thanks for keeping RO alive + Tero's wacky modding adventures

[xsicho]

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! 

[Tero]

It's funny that every time I say I'm done I still constantly make small tweaks, mostly still to monster skill use rates and stats.  Something I've been looking at lately is monster sizes, which are all over the place and make no sense 95% of the time.  For example, Dullahan is Medium size, while Loli Ruri and Bloody Murderer are Large size.  Okay, that kinda makes sense, they are bigger than Dullahan.  But wait, Argos is Large size.  Is that because it's comparatively large for a bug?  I mean, sure, it's huge for a spider, but it's much smaller than Dullahan.  It's also smaller than Mantis, which is considered Medium.  Rocker, Metaller, and Ashhopper are even bigger and are still Medium.  Argiope is Large, even though Centipede, which uses an edited version of its sprite, is only Medium.  Giant Hornet is Small, even though it has the word "Giant" right in its name.  The list goes on and on.  It would be impossible to ever get them to be totally consistent, but I think it's getting a little better.  I'm sorry Knights and users of Size cards if this disrupts your farming.

 

On 10/25/2024 at 5:16 AM, xsicho said:

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.

I'm glad to hear you've been enjoying the topic.  I will note that in Ragnarok time, 10 seconds is an eternity.  I actually once had a boss (Lost Dragon) that had a 10 second cast skill, not even intentionally, but because I didn't see it when it was editing its skill list.  This boss then became absurdly easy to solo by simply running around, waiting for it to try to cast that skill, beating on it for 8 seconds, then dodging the skill and repeating the process.  Of course, it would help if the skill was interruptable (then it would at least fight back), but that super slow charge bar is still basically a "come hit me" indicator.  Generally, peak human reaction time is around 120ms, but in Ragnarok the network latency time plays into this because the boss starts casting when the packet is sent, not when you receive it.  Generally though, I tend to use around 700-1200ms as charge time on spells I want to be fairly reactable, and 500ms on spells that you can avoid if you're really paying attention.  Lower cast times are basically only for skills you can only dodge if you're already moving or hovering over the "Back Slide" / "Time Slip" key.  But that's fine, you're not supposed to be able to dodge everything.  A key element of Ragnarok's success in my opinion is that it's only semi action-based.  You can dodge some stuff, but not everything, you're still definitely going to be hit, which makes both your skill as a player and your build and equipment vital to success.  In a lot of games where skill has a very large impact (generally where almost every attack is potentially avoidable) gear tends to be kind of irrelevant, or at least you only care about offense, and they just don't have the endless replayability that Ragnarok has.

 

This is actually a good segway though because it lets us talk about Boss Design, which is actually something I've never really talked about until now.  My server has over 100 bosses, and I've pretty sure I've tweaked the skill lists of all of them a few times, so I guess I can talk about some of the bigger changes to bosses and a bit of how I generally try to design them.  For starters, one change I've made pretty much across the board is that bosses have far longer cooldowns on their minion summoning skills.  In base, many of them can cast these every few seconds, so killing their minions is almost a total waste of time, but on my server these cooldowns are much longer.  For most bosses, the cooldown on their minions is 60-120 seconds, depending generally on how hard their minions are.  This makes killing them pretty viable, especially if you're planning to facetank the boss.  A couple bosses have faster minions, but they're generally very weak.  Dracula can call his bats every 20 seconds, but they're so wimpy that you can actually abuse "when being hit" cards to farm them.  Another skill that a ton of bosses have in their lists, which is in most cases outright gone is Teleport.  Of course, they still have their Rude Attack teleport, but many other bosses can Teleport every 20 seconds or so, which is unspeakably annoying, because you spend 2 minutes finding them again, hit them once, then they just do another teleport.  A few bosses can still do this, generally with a cooldown of about 2-5 minutes, but most can't.  There are a couple skills like Crimson Marker and Wrath of the Sun, Moon, and Stars (which seals teleporting and works on bosses) that you can use to counter the ones that can still do it.  Most bosses also can no longer cast Heal, but a few still can.

So what about the skills bosses can use?  In most cases it's still kind of similar to base, but with a few additions and deletions here and there.  For the bosses that are totally original, it's generally just based on what I think they should be able to do.  For example, let's take a random look at Anglerfish, which is an original boss.  Here's a quick look at his skill list:

His mob is 2 Tacnu, on a 2 minute cooldown.  Tacnus are kind of scary upclose fighters.

His standard spells are Lightning Bolt, Thunderstorm, Chain Lightning, and Holy Light.  He can cast all of these near-constantly and he has high INT, so this is much of his offense.

He also has level 8 waterball, though his waterball is actually interruptable.  Obviously, high level Waterball is something you really don't want to be hit with since it hits like 100 times.

His melee attacks are Bleeding, Critical Wound, Blood Drain, and Jupitel Thunder (although Jupitel is a spell, he only uses it in melee range).  These are less threatening than his spells so melee is a good option when his mob is down.

He has Static Field, which is a new spell that was mentioned earlier, this creates damaging electric zones on the ground that can paralyze you.  His cooldown on this is pretty short too, so you may have to move him if he spams a lot of these.

He has Wide Confuse, which is annoying, as this makes it very hard to move around.  You probably want some way to heal this off or be immune to it.

Finally, he also has Reflect Shield, though it's a low-level version and on a long cooldown.  Obviously, you have to be pretty careful when this is up.

So what's the general idea on how you deal with this?  For starters, Lightning Armor is pretty strong.  It both protects you from most of his spells and gives some defense against Water Ball.  If you want more elemental defense you could take additional lightning or water defense, or just MDef in general.  His physical attacks aren't that scary if you can get rid of the Tacnus.  You probably also want confusion immunity.  Then you just attack with strong Earth element stuff or criticals or something, though you may want to be careful of EDP in case he puts reflect shield up and you instantly delete yourself.

This is sort of my boss design philosophy in a nutshell.  The idea is that you want to know what a boss does, then create a setup to counter that.  Since RO gives you so many options to work with, there's almost nothing that's insurmountable with all the tools at your disposal.  As such, I basically never worry about whether or not a boss is "too hard" because I know someone will find a way to do it.  Worst case there's always boss cards, which can generally turn you into a god with just 1 or 2 of them.

 

Wow, this got surprisingly long, and I haven't even gotten to new skills yet, of which there's a couple.

 

For starters, there's a bugfix.  Here's a fun experiment.  Play a Rogue and equip a bow.  Run away from an enemy, then take a shot at them and use Back Slide.

Assuming you clicked directly on them without moving anywhere else first, you'll slide TOWARDS the enemy!  What is this "Front Slide" madness?!  We only slide back around here!

 

The problem here is that the game doesn't update the user's facing direction when you attack.  This is easily fixed by adding this code to unit_attack, unit_skilluse_pos2, and unit_skilluse_id2 (probably somewhere towards the middle of the method, after the validity checks)

// make the user face the target
if (src != target)
	unit_setdir(src, map_calc_dir(src, target->x, target->y));

You now properly slide away from your target after attacking.  I can't believe it took this long for this glitch to be found.  Bow Rogue really is that bad, I guess.

 

Onto new skills.  For some time, I've felt that a few classes were a little low on skills, but at the same time I didn't want to give them a ton of new stuff because I didn't want to adjust the balance too much, so it took some time to come up with an appropriate adjustment.

 

Lord Knight now gets Trample.  This is a skill I was looking at for a long time.  I like that it counters Trap cheese, but I also really don't like the idea of Paladin having it.  Paladin is already almost unkillable and having them running around deleting your traps would almost certainly be too oppressive for Hunters.  Surprisingly it took me a long time to come up with the rather simple solution of just giving it to Lord Knight instead.  It's still a good skill, but it doesn't mesh nearly as well with what Lord Knight wants to be doing, they typically just want to use Berserk and rush the Emperium, which of course prevents you from using Trample since you can't use skills during Berserk.  LK is actually deceptively less tanky than you'd think a lot of the time without Berserk, especially where magic is concerned, and Trample has cast time and is even uninterruptable, so you're probably going to have to commit at least some of your build to this if you want it to be effective.  I think it's probably best for Blade Beam LKs who might be running Uninterruptable Cast anyway, but that's sort of a niche build and it could probably use the help.  Also, I love how the Peco does a little stamp when you use this skill.

 

Speaking of Paladin, they now get Prestige, which is renamed to Divine Will (and has a somewhat weaker effect).  Paladin is a funny class in that it got an absolutely massive buff when I first started working on the game via the reworked of Pressure, and I've had to gradually scale back their power to prevent them from being a master of all.  As such, while other classes kept getting new skills, Paladin kind of fell behind and now has among the lowest total skill costs of any class, which is the main reason they get this new buff.  Divine Will gives you a small boost to VIT Def and a chance to dodge spells.  This is a Royal Guard ability, and of all the third classes, Royal Guard probably has the least skills that I've ported over, mainly since I find a lot of their skills really boring and the ones that aren't boring give massive boosts to sustain that Paladin absolutely shouldn't have with the Pre-RE Def formula.  Even this skill is maybe kinda pushing it, but it's buried pretty deep in the tree so you're probably not getting it on Magic-oriented Paladin, so it primarily exists to make non-magic Paladin a bit more bulky against spells.  Also, the most interesting thing about it is that at level 6+ it becomes a party-wide spell, and I always find team buffs to be interesting.  While Paladin kinda doesn't care about getting some flat VIT Def, to a class like Wizard this could be pretty big.

 

Champion also now has a new skill in Full Throttle.  On base, this is a skill that everyone gets, but here it's limited to Champion.  It's actually an even better skill than in the base game, it retains its "heal to full and get boosted stats and move speed" effect but with no downsides whatsoever, as the rebound debuff is eliminated.  Instead, it has a totally different drawback.  To use it, you have to be in Fury Status, which it removes, and you can't cast Fury again while it's active, so no Boosted Asura for you (unless you're using Combo Asura and lol Combo Asura).  This also means there's an inherent limit to how often you can get the heal, since it has to wear off before you can cast Fury again and thus recast it.  This might give you some incentive to only use the level 1 version, which gives almost no stat boost, but doesn't last very long so it's a more reliable heal, though the big stat boost on the level 10 version is also appealing.  Either way, it gives Monks something else to do besides combos and Asura, which has always been a challenge.  Oh, speaking of Fury / Critical Explosion, it also now shows a status icon that shows you how much time it has left.  I've been going through the game and fixing most of the statuses that didn't have this by swapping them to unused EFSTs.  Very tech-savvy users might know that Fury's original EFST, despite not having any description, is responsible for the colour change that accompanies Fury's animation, though I ensure that you still get this by also sending Fury's EFST in status_change_start. 

 

This also finally allowed me to fix Bard / Dancer's Up Tempo not displaying the quicken afterimage.

 

Last, but definitely not least, we have Whitesmith.  I've long felt Whitesmith was one of the most dull classes in the game, and while the new skills have helped a lot, I still felt it was missing something fun.  For a long time, I've wished Blacksmith could use more of the weapons it can forge.  I'd like the class to be able to use 2 Handed Swords, but this is not attainable without Client Modification.  Even if we give them a sprite file for using 2 handed swords, they will always use their Attack2 animation for this weapon type, which is a punch, so it will never look good.  Maybe you could make a spear animation for that, but hey, if they already have a decent looking Punch animation, why not let them use Fist-type weapons?  Fist has always felt like a bit of an underappreciated weapon type because even though Priests can use it, they basically never want to, but a Brawler like Blacksmith might get some use out of it!  Since it just uses Attack2's animation it looks perfectly fine with no adjustments too.

Of course, the second I decided to let Whitesmith use Fist Weapons I knew what the new attack had to be.

 GET OVER HERE!

This is a heavily reworked version of Mechanic's Knuckle Boost.  Obviously, the biggest change is that it now pulls the target towards you, which is a cool effect that nothing else in the game currently has.  Besides its obvious PVP uses, I think this is an interesting way to increase Blacksmith's tanking skills, since they can now pull enemies towards them that might try to target backliners.  It's also quite deliberate that the pull effect isn't optional - this isn't intended to be a godlike kiting skill or replace the function of Cart Cannon, it's primarily to get enemies in range for a melee beatdown faster.

On a technical level, you might notice that the pull effect isn't instant, it occurs after the damage.  Most skills that do knockback actually inflict the knockback before the damage, but in this case this would cause the actual projectile to visually miss, which is very lame, so here the pull effect is a "timerskill" that occurs 200ms after the damage packet.  There's also a bit of a weird issue where this attack normally locks the Whitesmith into a strange hammer animation that they can't directly attack out of, which is why the skill does 2 hits, with the second being a normal attack packet.  It took a deceptively long time to get this skill working properly, but I'm very happy with the result.

 

Well, that's it for now.  This is probably the end of major skill changes, though I say that every time.  Still, there's now not really any classes where I'm unhappy with their skill selection, which is a good feeling.  It took a long time to get here.

Edited November 20, 2024 by Tero

[xsicho]

On 11/20/2024 at 12:28 PM, Tero said:

I'm glad to hear you've been enjoying the topic.  I will note that in Ragnarok time, 10 seconds is an eternity.  I actually once had a boss (Lost Dragon) that had a 10 second cast skill, not even intentionally, but because I didn't see it when it was editing its skill list.  This boss then became absurdly easy to solo by simply running around, waiting for it to try to cast that skill, beating on it for 8 seconds, then dodging the skill and repeating the process.  Of course, it would help if the skill was interruptable (then it would at least fight back), but that super slow charge bar is still basically a "come hit me" indicator.  Generally, peak human reaction time is around 120ms, but in Ragnarok the network latency time plays into this because the boss starts casting when the packet is sent, not when you receive it.  Generally though, I tend to use around 700-1200ms as charge time on spells I want to be fairly reactable, and 500ms on spells that you can avoid if you're really paying attention.  Lower cast times are basically only for skills you can only dodge if you're already moving or hovering over the "Back Slide" / "Time Slip" key.  But that's fine, you're not supposed to be able to dodge everything.  A key element of Ragnarok's success in my opinion is that it's only semi action-based.  You can dodge some stuff, but not everything, you're still definitely going to be hit, which makes both your skill as a player and your build and equipment vital to success.  In a lot of games where skill has a very large impact (generally where almost every attack is potentially avoidable) gear tends to be kind of irrelevant, or at least you only care about offense, and they just don't have the endless replayability that Ragnarok has.

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.

Quote

This is actually a good segway though because it lets us talk about Boss Design, which is actually something I've never really talked about until now.  My server has over 100 bosses, and I've pretty sure I've tweaked the skill lists of all of them a few times, so I guess I can talk about some of the bigger changes to bosses and a bit of how I generally try to design them.  For starters, one change I've made pretty much across the board is that bosses have far longer cooldowns on their minion summoning skills.  In base, many of them can cast these every few seconds, so killing their minions is almost a total waste of time, but on my server these cooldowns are much longer.  For most bosses, the cooldown on their minions is 60-120 seconds, depending generally on how hard their minions are.  This makes killing them pretty viable, especially if you're planning to facetank the boss.  A couple bosses have faster minions, but they're generally very weak.  Dracula can call his bats every 20 seconds, but they're so wimpy that you can actually abuse "when being hit" cards to farm them.  Another skill that a ton of bosses have in their lists, which is in most cases outright gone is Teleport.  Of course, they still have their Rude Attack teleport, but many other bosses can Teleport every 20 seconds or so, which is unspeakably annoying, because you spend 2 minutes finding them again, hit them once, then they just do another teleport.  A few bosses can still do this, generally with a cooldown of about 2-5 minutes, but most can't.  There are a couple skills like Crimson Marker and Wrath of the Sun, Moon, and Stars (which seals teleporting and works on bosses) that you can use to counter the ones that can still do it.  Most bosses also can no longer cast Heal, but a few still can.

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. 

Quote

 GET OVER HERE!

This is a heavily reworked version of Mechanic's Knuckle Boost.  Obviously, the biggest change is that it now pulls the target towards you, which is a cool effect that nothing else in the game currently has.  Besides its obvious PVP uses, I think this is an interesting way to increase Blacksmith's tanking skills, since they can now pull enemies towards them that might try to target backliners.  It's also quite deliberate that the pull effect isn't optional - this isn't intended to be a godlike kiting skill or replace the function of Cart Cannon, it's primarily to get enemies in range for a melee beatdown faster.

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!