The MOD Plays! #2: Equipment and Builds

by Horonaim

One of the first questions that new players ask begins with “What build.” I will be speaking from the perspective of a magic-wielding character; i.e. a Yaojing.

There are three (3) types of armor in the game; Heavy, Light, Magic (terms may vary in official release). The Heavy armors have high defense and little of anything else, the requirements to wear them are high Strength and some Dexterity. Light armors have middling defense and high elemental defense, the requirements to wear them are middling Strength and Dexterity. Magic armors have a bonus to the magical attacks and very low defense values, the requirements to wear them are low Strength and middling Intelligence.

Now, as a Yaojing I have a choice of casting spells or transforming into fox form and using melee attacks. Then there’s my pet, currently a Plum Blossom Cat (I will post screenshots of my cute little pet later), who will most probably be attacking with me.

A full Strength, middling Dexterity, and low Intelligence build is possible, but then again most of the Yaojing skills require “wands” (in quotes because some wands are actually swords or martial arts weapons) or unarmed. Wands have a small Strength requirement and a high Intelligence requirement. Bearing that in mind, if I go for the heavy armors I will not be able to use my skills to its fullest. I will be stuck with little to no Intelligence so I will not be able to wield any high-level wands. I personally do not like this build.

Now, I can aim to wear the Light armors. With this build I can actually wear Light armors and wield the most powerful Wands available for my level. The drawback is that I will not have any Constitution at all. I will be stuck with Constitution 5 way beyond level 70. While this is a viable enough build I do not particularly like being stuck with no Constitution in a PK-enabled game not to mention the battering I get when I try to tame a new pet. The good news is that I have decent physical defense and high magic defense. This is something to think about.

The third option is to aim for Magic armors. With this build I can wear the magic armors appropriate for my level and use the most powerful wands available for my level. I have enough stat points left over to put into either Dexterity or Constitution. The weakness of this option is that I have very little in the way of defense. I may have a respectable amount of Hit Points, but I have paper-thin armor. The flip-side is that my magical attacks are incredibly strong. This is the route I took with my current Yaojing. I rely on my pet to keep monsters from attacking me physically, but note that players will probably ignore the pet and go straight to me.

Mind you, this is because I am playing a Yaojing. If I were playing a Yaoshou, which I have at level 3 at the moment, I would be looking at how much to put into my Constitution since I will be aiming for high strength (for the armors) and middling Dexterity (for the axe and hammer weapons).

So this is my suggestion to you dear reader: When you enter the world at 1st level and level up, do not add to your stats immediately. Wait until you are in your race’s main city, go look for the Tailor and Ironsmith, and take a survey of what stats you will need for later in the game. Figure out what you want to be able to do and pattern your stat builds around that.

The MOD plays! #1: Installation, display settings, and dial-up

by Horonaim

When installing the game you will be asked twice whether you want to verify the files. The first time is when you are about to install; the installer will prompt you if you want to verify the integrity of the installation files. The second time is after the installation is done, when the installer prompts you if you want to verify the installed files. If you, like me, prefer to verify file integrity then the only drawback is that installation can take around 45 minutes on a Pentium 4 2.4 GHz, 512 Mb RAM computer. If you’re ok just going ahead and installing without verification, it will take about 15 minutes tops.

After several days of waiting to be allowed external access to the internal test server I finally got to log in. My video card is a NVIDIA GeForce 6600 (256 Mb) and I set the display settings as follows:

For the inquiring minds out there, this level of detail already exceeds that of what I get when I log into RF Online.

Just like GM NocturnalSun has posted, the game works fine on dial-up. I am testing this with a Bl@st card and a Bayan-Tel line. I will be able to tell you more about performance once I encounter a denser population in-game. So far the performance is comparable to when I log into the RFO-Ph Omicron server even at peak times.