jRO End of Year Conference

Gungho recently held an event called the ‘Ragnarok Conference and Party’, where they revealed their current plans to improve the game and future content they plan on adding in in the near future.

Issues that Gungho is currently in discussion with Korea to resolve

• Party Bonus: Gravity has stated that it’s unlikely they will be able to return the ‘tap’ bonus as it was before, but they are looking at ways to improve pair and trio parties.
• Level Difference in PVP/Siege: Presently fighting a higher level player than you will almost entirely negate your status resistance.  Gravity Korea isn’t making this a priority, as they feel the problem will go away as players reach max level.
• Magic Attack: Gravity is unlikely to change the magic attack formula.  They plan on correcting the discrepancy between physical and magical damage by adding in stronger magic attack weapons and equipment in future updates.
• Enchant Deadly Poison:  Presently players do not feel that for it’s difficulty to obtain it is very effective.  There are no plans to change the skill itself, but they are looking at providing some relief for the supplies required.
• Refining/Crafting as 3rd Job: Because job level has a large effect on crafting success, players experience lower success rates as 3rd job than as 2nd because of the lower max job level.  Gravity is investigating possible corrections.
• Strong/Ranked Weapons: Before renewal, weapons crafted with star crumb or crafted by a ranked blacksmith would always hit its target (but for low damage).  There are plans to improve the attack value granted by these weapons to make up for it’s lost bonus.
• Coating: An alchemist/biochemist’s coating abilities are very expensive to produce, but provide no protection against 3rd job divest and debuffs.  Gravity plans on either updating the coating skill or providing new skills to Geneticist that can be used as a counter for these skills.
• Melancholy: This skill increases damage of several skills such as Spiral Pierce, Shield Chain, and a variety of other abilities by up to 3 times.  There are plans to reduce this bonus to perhaps 1.5 times ~ 2 times.
• Spiral Pierce: The skill does very high damage, especially when combined with heavy weapons like the Cardo and buffs like Melancholy.  There are no plans to directly change Spiral Pierce beyond a nerf to Melancholy.
• Status Resistance: Players find that some of the stats for resistance are misplaced (Stone/Silence/Sleep) or are simply too easy to obtain (such as freeze immunity).  Gravity will look into possibly adjusting this.
• Reflect Damage: While both Kaahi and Reflect Damage are working as intended, the use of the two together is beyond what was originally intended for the skill.  There are talks of adding a cooldown to Kaahi.
• Dragon Breath: The skill will be modified to be reducible with fire resistance gear.   On the next questionnaire, there will be questions about if it should be classified as dragon or human type, and if it should be blocked by land protector.
• Damage Resistance: Some skills are not properly reduced by racial resistance.  In the example they gave, Cluster Bomb deals damage based on the users physical attack power plus additional damage based on their stats.  Only the part of the damage dealt by the user’s physical attack power however is reduced by resistances.  They will be investigating a fix to this.
• Disabled Skills: Once the current exploits or imbalances are corrected with the disabled skills (Masquerade: Gloomy, Lightning Walk, Strip Accessory, Burning Status, Arullo, Deep Sleep Lullaby), they will be re-enabled for use.  It’s expected that this will be resolved during January.

Future Update plan for jRO

• Siege Update: There are plans to provide new pvp or siege content that is intended to allow beginner guilds to step up before facing the biggest guilds.  The strongest guilds on the server will be able to participate in siege battles against other servers to win events for their own server.  The exact details of this system are not quite finalized but will be released early first quarter.
• Midgard Expansion
  • Bailand 6F: Players will be able to explore the Izlude undersea palace in this update with new monsters based off of Japan’s design suggestion.  This content was available only to Netcafe users in Korea, but it will be available to all Japanese users without restrictions.
    
  • Bio-laboratory 4F: Announced at the conference is the addition of floor 4 of the Lighthalzen Bio-laboratory dungeon.  The monsters will be ghosts of 2-2 transcend jobs, and while strong individually, they will have an advanced AI where they will work together to attack the players.
    
• New Original Stories: New original story quests for the Japanese Ragnarok are planned for second half 2011.  These includes updates to the Monster Side Stories, Acadamy Secret Stories, Strong Stars Stories, and new additional side stories for players to enjoy.
  
• Rune Knight Sprite Update:  The new sprite for Rune Knight characters will be available to players immediately after patching when they return from the conference.  For the next month, Rune Knight characters will also be able to dye their clothing for free.
  
• 21 New Monster Cards: While the card update was available to Korean users as part of the 14.1 game update, the cards will be added early during the first quarter of 2011 on jRO with the Dewata update.
  
• Dewata: The 7th localized map ‘Dewata’ inspired by Indonesian culture and folklore.  New food items such as ‘Nasi Goreng’ as well as other consumables and weapons.
  
• Malangdo: The Shipwreck home base of the Cat Hand, and island that has the shape of a cat’s paw.  Includes new minigames, a new equipment enchant system, and even new dungeons.
  
• Super Novice Update: Super Novices will be able to break past the level 99 barrier and level all the way up to 150.  They’ll receive 49 new skill points and be able to apply them to a variety of second job skills.
  • Super Novice New Skills: Faith, Holy Cross, Enchant Poison, Skid Trap, Flasher, Sandman, Freezing Trap, Sanctuary, Status Recovery, Impositio Manus, Gloria, Iron Fist, Summon Spirit Spheres, Absorb Spirit Spheres, Hilt Binding, Weapon Research, Axe Mastery, Earth Spike, Heaven’s Drive, Quagmire, Ice Wall, Frost Nova, Sightrasher, Jupitel Thunder, Fire Pillar, Water Ball, Sense, Magic Crasher.
• 2D Layer and Costume System
  • 2D Layer System: Allows equipment other than headgear to appear on your character sprite.  With this update, specific garment type equipment will be visible on your character sprite.
    
  • Costume System: The costume system is a set of headgears that can be made visible on your character without losing the functionality of your currently equipped headgear.
    
• Other Additions
  • RJC2011
  • Ragnarok Mobile Story
  • New Years Event

Sources:
http://www.onlinegamer.jp/news/20297/
http://www.4gamer.net/games/001/G000183/20101227001/
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