Pre-Renewal Skill Translations and Tooltips - Improved, Revised, Re-Edited and Commented by Sandalphon

[Sandalphon]

The last few years, I've been poundering a certain matter: Why is Ragnarok Online so difficult to get into for new people?
A few answers come to mind but there's one factor most people seem to agree on: Finding any sort of accurate information on this game is a nightmare. Basically, unless you're already in the know, it's really difficult to sort out good guides and databases from bad ones.

Nevermind the hundreds of guides made for defunct servers that were full of customs, even the "good" sources of information in Ragnarok are often divergent and dubious.

And so, I set out on a personal project: Improving the way this game is presented to new people. A daunting task, but one that must be accomplished. If we wish to see the game continuing to thrive as it enters its 3rd decade of life.

For starters, I begun by reaching for the lowest hanging fruit I could think: The in-game skill translations. Of course, although I call this a low hanging fruit, it was an enormous task nonetheless.
And so I present the community with my work, the initial release of my Improved Pre-Renewal Skill Translation and Tooltips.

These are "translations" in name only. I didn't care to look at the official, original or korean descriptions at all. My starting point was llchrisll's skill translation file for Pre-Renewal. From there, I compared the content of the tooltip against RateMyServer, iROwiki/classic/ and my own knowledge. But that's not everything.
I went and double checked the code for every skill, in order to make sure it was accurate. The damage formulas for every skill, the success chance of every debuff, what stats and gear work or do not work for a given skill, what other skills interact with, the scaling per level on skills, the whole works. Almost every single skill in Pre-Renewal was revised and compared against these sources to see which one was most accurate.

To my surprise, I found that all three could be wrong. And this happened A LOT.

If you trusted in-game tooltips, you were being lied to. Like, more than half of the time. When information was not incomplete, it was wrong half of the time.
You trust iROwiki? That's a little better but your understanding of the game was basically fanfiction compared to reality.
RateMyServer descriptions? Surprisingly they were the closest to reality a few times but they often had outdated descriptions that didn't match the game at Ash Vacuum episode.

But enough talk, it's better that I show you just how wrong everything really was. With pictures!

Bowling Bash is such a rich skill! There's so much to talk about! Any experienced player could write a paragraph or two about how this skill works. But the tooltip? Didn't even have any information about Skill Scaling per level? I'm sure we could improve this a whole lot if we tried...

Now this is more like it! It mentions a bunch of key aspects of Bowling Bash, such as how it hits twice, has gutterlines, how they can be removed and mentions the invisible cast time that so many people don't even know about. Not to mention I've fixed the line breaks, so that words are not cut in half. Just for this skill? Of course not, line breaks were done to every skill. I can't guarantee it will stay nice and pretty on different font but I did try to leave a little margin for error.

Next, let's take a look at a favorite of mine: Soul Breaker.

See? This is the sort of 'fanfiction' I was talking about. Literal lies present on this tooltip!

This is one of the tooltips I'm most proud about, and a perfect example of how I want to make information accessible to new players. Soul Breaker is a skill most people aren't really sure how it works, but with just a tiny page, you can quickly reference every single important fact about Soul Breaker. The colors make it so easy to understand!

Next, let's look at some example where iROwiki was completely wrong:

Okay, this is another poo one. No useful information at all. What do extra skill levels do? Let's check iROwiki:

Okay that makes sense, it IS a strip skill similar to Rogue's. Let's check the source code to be sure...

skill.cpp
 

case GS_DISARM:
			rate = sstatus->dex / (4 * (7 - skill_lv)) + sstatus->luk / (4 * (6 - skill_lv));
			rate = rate + status_get_lv(src) - (tstatus->agi * rate / 100) - tstatus->luk - status_get_lv(target);
			break;

Well well well, what do we have here? iROwiki is lying? More likely than you think!
The DEX difference does not matter in this case. Instead, Disarm cares about the gap between the Levels. After about 40 minutes of testing and making sure I got my facts right, I was then able to write the only accurate description for this skill that matches its current implementation.

So yeah, this pattern repeated itself a lot over the months. Some classes are worse than others. Going over Star Gladiator and Bard/Dancer skills was a huge chore. Some more examples:

And well, since you can never have too many examples, have a big collage of them.

This release includes everything I could think about that was relevant for Pre-Renewal:

-Base Classes
-Second Classes
-Trans Classes
-Expanded Classes
-Quest Skills
-Item Skills
-Homunculus Skills
-Guild Skills
-Mercenary Skills

Of course, I'm just a single guy and this is a huge file of text. There's no doubt typos, inconsistencies, and breaking of standards. I tried to follow llchrisll's translation formation but haven't done enough revisions to work all the problems yet. Still, it's ready to be used and tested. Let me know here any and all typos and mistakes you find!

skilldescript.lub

Edited September 14, 2023 by Sandalphon

[Sapito Sucio]

Great work! and thanks for sharing.

Just have in mind that, both rAthena and llchrisll's work are based on kRO formulas, which sometimes iRO doesn't follow at all

[shatowolf]

Awesome work mate. thanks for sharing this to community.

keep it up.

[xJohn]

Well, you could also include the Monster Exclusive Skills... for example: NPC DRAGONFEAR

[Sandalphon]

2 hours ago, xJohn said:

Well, you could also include the Monster Exclusive Skills... for example: NPC DRAGONFEAR

I have never seen a server just give them out as usable skills though, so their descriptions are usually not seen anywhere. I suppose that would be possible.