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Voting closed: January 14, 2012, 06:17:21 pm

[Girlinhat]

Yeah, a lot of the early quests (G1 and whatnot) are based on a slower gameplay where you care about the NPCs more.  Used to be Tir was the only area, and you'd get to be really buddy-buddy with the local NPC.  Later quests (G9 anyone?) are more about spamming dungeon runs and going to the bathroom during the cutscenes.

[Ibid Straydrink]

What's the name of the black knight-looking fellow in Tir who spits a lot and wants to bed the healer? Me and him were close chums on every character I've ever rolled, and I eventually took to trying to dress like him. 

[Girlinhat]

Wants to bed...  hmm, you sure you're not talking about me?

Although apparently you're not very chummy, if you don't even remember his name!

[Ibid Straydrink]

Wants to bed...  hmm, you sure you're not talking about me?

Aren't you a girl in a hat..?

Although apparently you're not very chummy, if you don't even remember his name!

It's been like 400 (in-game) years!

[majikero]

The knight is Trefor, who likes the healer, Dilys. I think Dilys has some issue with men.

[Seriyu]

She does, it's covered in a later generation quest.

[Seriyu]

DUNGEON RUN WWOOOOAAAAHHOOOHOOHHOHHOOH

With us today is myself (Mobliz) and Ozythesage(OzyTheSage). The dungeon is Ciar intermediate, which while mostly fairly straightforward, does have one particular, very interesting enemy.



The snakes however, as seen below, are not it. They are very fast for the amount of HP they have, however.



I'll be honest, most of the monsters in the dungeon are single aggro snakes. However, they come in different colors, which count for the "seperate enemy aggro" rule, which can make things a little hairy at times.



Now heeeere's the interesting enemy. Rat men! The rat man's gimmick is that, well, being a rat, he plays some tricks. For instance, USUALLY, when he says "Prepare a heavy blow." he will load smash and run at you. But occasionally, he'll not load smash, and just run at you with a normal attack, which if you're trying to counter a smash, with a normal attack, you'll usually get smacked and comboed because he has a very fast attack speed. This was particularly troublesome when sharp mind was still in, which would occasionally fail to identify a skill. You failed to identify a skill! He's standing still! Is it counterattack or windmill? Who can say! Hit him with an ice bolt, don't risk it. I have no idea how people in the korean (I think?) servers deal with them, because sharp mind, and skill bubbles in general don't exist in oversea servers. Maybe just magic spam.



Of course, most of this doesn't matter if you just tank them with windguard, or attack from range, so they weren't a huge problem. They threw me a few curveballs though, I'm not ashamed to admit it.



On to the boss. Like most ciar bosses, it's a golem, with a load of metal skeletons. Since this was intermediate, the skeletons were lightly armoed, which gives them a very small chance to activate heavy stander or natural shield. I don't think mana deflector is included.



Now for the boss, the golem itself. Golems are notorious for being one of the harder boss monsters for melee people to deal with, because they have both stomp and windmill, both are very dangerous, and the work in fairly different ranges. This particular fight started out with an attempt at millwalling, but it kinda went nuts when my windmill lagged and gave him time to smash ozy up a bit. I decided to just rush it and smash him to death, while ozy provided long range support. Ozy lasted riiiight up until the end of the fight, when the golem got past me and managed to kill him. Sorry bout that.

Also of note is that Ozy is handling himself very well, so good on you for that too!

Good times.

[Skyrunner]

Ratmen? In Korea, there -is- Sharp Mind, so that's how.

Usually the ratman is dead before he can feint though. >.>
Smash or Magnum Shot. Usually Smash. Or Windmill, before it was nerfed to remove its invulnerability. Oftentimes, the simple regular attacks finish ratmen off. With two broad swords, hit-hit-hit-hit-dead.

[Seriyu]

Maybe it was the japanese servers that don't have sharp mind. Or maybe I'm making things up. It can be tricky to a new player that's in out of his depth, but if you're overleveled and two shot him, yeah he's nothin. Most things are at that point though.

[Skyrunner]

Without min-maxing (or rather max-maxing, which is how Mabinogi rolls xD) you can't tackle the harder dungeons, like the level 1000+ Shadow missions, because they have protection and defense up the whatever. Really, they're SOOOOO hard to kill, and they have tons of HP too. D: I think that was a bad decision on the Mabinogi devs' part. Instead of working on different play, they just increased the stats and left everything else the same, including the character models.

[Seriyu]

Iunno, the shadow monsters do have pretty good AI, I've seen em cancel a normal attack and load smash when I load defense, it can honestly get pretty hairy. I'm not a fan of them just loading up on protection on anything they want to be hard though, I'll give you that one.

[Skyrunner]

I think that AI is pretty much shared along all the "smart" monsters. Think of the Golem, who thumps the ground just to make sure you're dead, negating Play Dead actions, or other humanoid monsters, like ... Ratman

Gargoyles are relatively smart, too.


Anyways, often criticized is the protection/defense loading up evident the harder you go. Dungeons like Kiar Hard Mode are impossible to do without max-maxing. :3

[Seriyu]

So, stuff to go over today....

Basic melee combat, hopefully helping ranged fighters understand the basics they need to function well, and helping understand what the hell those melee people are doing anyway.

Melee combat in mabinogi is pretty intimidating and in depth, which is why I don't mind seeing newer archers and such making some simple mistakes. For the most part they're doing fine, but there's one inparticular that bugs the hell out of me...

If there is an enemy rushing at you, you hit a defensive skill hotkey. We'll go over defensive skills and which ones you should be using later in this update. Don't try to beat their attack, in the worst case scenario they're going to get an entire combo off on you and probably kill you. Hit a defensive skill hotkey, counterattack, defense, or windmill. Everyone should have those three on their hotbar somewhere, preferably in an easily accessible place.

What skills should you use? One, if you don't have a shield, you should probably be using counterattack mostly. Don't be afraid to use defense, it's still a fine defensive skill, but the effectiveness is greatly diminished without a shield and one of the primary things you should be trying to do in a melee fight is preventing serious damage to yourself. Note that if counterattack is cooling down, and you don't have time to switch to your weapon set with a shield, or you just don't have one, defense is still an excellent skill to use, and much less of a crapshoot then trying to land a windmill. It'll still reduce damage significantly.

Two, if you DO have a shield, you should be using defense. Having a shield increases the defensive abilities of defense pretty well. Do note that against higher end stronger enemies, even rank F of defense with a shield isn't gonna be enough to stop all of their attack, but it'll still cut it down pretty nice, and more importantly, I think it'll prevent wounds. Still, on stronger and stronger enemies, you should be moving more to counterattack. Why use defense over counterattack? Counterattack drains stamina, prevents you from moving, and more importantly, unless you've got a huge rank of it, you'll do more damage with the subsequent combo opening defense provides then the counterattack damage in almost every situation.

Three, if an enemy is approaching from an awkward angle and your'e dealing with another monster, whether in melee or range, IMMEDIATELY load windmill and attack wildly with it. Make sure your cursor is in windmill range, you'll know when it's not when there's a little x below the arrow in the circle. Even if both of them are fairly close, it'll likely hit both, knock them back, and give someone some time to get over there and help out if they can. Which leads into then ext point...

Sometimes, not often, but sometimes the melee fighters will be dealing with something dangerous enough that they can't realistically pull themselves away from the monster they're fighting to help someone else. To use a semi recent dungeon run as an example, the black ship rats hit pretty hard and moved very fast. There really wasn't a realistic situation where helping other people out was possible, unless someone was transformed, and even then it'd be risky. Even if someone ran towards an ally to windmill some rats off them, the rats they were fighting would almost certainly catch up, and in a worst case situation, kill the melee fighter and leave the ranged person to deal with the new rat that's now that much closer.

IIiii feel like I've forgotten something but maybe not. Anyway there you are. Now stop trying to beat a normal attack with a normal attack, and stop making me proverbially shake my fist at the screen every time it happens.

[Ozyton]

If you're like me you'll spam your counter button and end up having to wait for a cooldown while an enemy is about to punch your face in.

If you can shoot fast enough hitting them with a basic ranged attack will give you enough time to take a few steps back. With counterattack you will get some distance between you and the enemy, but you become stunned after countering, meaning that as soon as you're able to move the enemy has gotten up and is charging you once more. Sometimes it's better to just rapidly fire volleys of arrows in hopes that you will raise their knockback meter enough to push them back. Or if you want to risk it you can load Magnum Shot, which will pretty much always knock enemies back quite a bit, and since they are probably very close to you the aim will rapidly reach 80% which should be enough. If not, just hope you're quick to hit the counter button =p

As for bows themselves, short bows load skills slightly quicker, allowing you to fire in quick succession, while longbows have a longer range, allowing you to aim quicker. How fast you aim is based on the skill you're using and how far within maximum range they are. An enemy at a short bow's maximum range will take a while for a short bow to aim at, but since they're nearly at half longbow range aiming will be very quick for long bows. Magnum Shot among other skills will not take your Ranged Attack's aiming boost into account. Support shot aims at 130% speed (but I don't think it's affected by Ranged Attack? I would check if I could get ingame) so you could support shot when they get close, then windmill them away for more melee damage. You'll be using bare-handed damage for all your windmills (and counters?) if you have your bow equipped so it may be better to get your ranged attack skill higher and just use that.

On a final note, sometimes when you are far from your enemy and you have already attacked them, they will be out of range. Trying to load a skill will cause you to run towards them like a fucking idiot. If that happens you want to hit spacebar so you aren't attacking/targetting them, so they can come to you. You want to do this because even while aiming at enemies out of range your accuracy will increase. So if you aim for several seconds with a Magnum Shot while they are out of range, as soon as they enter range accuracy will be at maximum, allowing you to hit them instantly. If somebody know how to do this without having to deselect the enemy with spacebar, please tell me =<

[majikero]

Just to let everyone know, I hate the random item in a box thing in online games. They have the yukata mini in the latest random box thing in the cash shop.


Anyways, back on melee combat. Melee combat is like rock-paper-scissors. Block beats normal attack, Smash beats Block, normal attack beats Smash, Counter beats normal attack and Smash, Windmill beats everything if you do it right. That's the most of it. Not sure about lance combat and fighter skills though.

Never really use range though, 5 charge firebolt usually kills anything without Mana Deflector. If they survive, shoot another. Why am I the only mage here? I'll give you all the basic spellbooks and a wand if I have to.