Introduction
Two weeks ago, I came across a Ragnarok X advertisement on my mobile. It was the #1 top-grossing game in the Google Play store, and the release date was recent on 18th June 2021. I visited the website and noted that it supports BlueStacks and Nox. I got to know these emulators because one of my friends used BlueStacks to play 6 MapleStory accounts. So, with Covid-19 and work from home as default from my desktop, I tried to install Ragnarok X with BlueStacks support. It has been almost three weeks since I played Ragnarok X daily, and I did not install it on my mobile phone yet. My online research for the best DPS class mainly points to hunters, but as I don’t want to be the majority, I decided to choose between Knight and Blacksmith, which I thought I was familiar with.
Background
Heck, I think I can write a few background paragraphs on Ragnarok! I played the original Ragnarok (SG/MY) with my brother back in 2000. Back in those days, I used OpenKore bot to level 99 Whitesmith, and we asked our parents to quickly finish dinner outside to get home by 7 PM to attend guild war (also known as War of Emperium or Woe for short). Later on, we created our guild named ‘Monkey and Bananas’. I still remember my brother logging his alternate Assassin character and critical hits the Emperium seconds before WoE ended to win a castle. Between this original Ragnarok and the later mobile Ragnarok X: Next Generation, I played the new Ragnarok Online on PC and a few private servers but got banned because of botting. The classes I played are Knight, Hunter and Priest.
How to Level Up Fast
Here are some tips that I learned mid-game. If I had known earlier, I would be a few more levels up, but that is ok, part of learning. If you are new to Ragnarok X, following all these will bring you off to a great start.
AFK Leveling
As mentioned before, I got banned a few times using bots, but the in-built AFK feature is a new to me. I was so excited that I inform my brother, and his response was the previous Ragnarok on mobile already had this feature. So pardon me if I sounded like a noob, but I will list some points on AFK leveling for novices embarking on a new adventure.
- Use the Request Party feature to look for an AFK party. To gain more experience, the bigger the party, the better because there is a Team EXP Bonus.
- As usual, choose a party with Priest, save you Zeny on HP pots and gives plenty of buffs even though Zeny is easy to earn and HP/SP pots are cheap.
- Swordman has Magnum Break (Fire) skill which is good against Earth monsters, but sometimes there is no party for Earth monsters, so remember to deactivate ineffective skills in AFK settings.
- Adjust the Auto Recover feature for auto-healing and SP recovery. I set 20% for HP because monsters like Pecopeco can stun and KO me. Other times I die is because I ran out of HP pots.
Daily Mission Board, Instance and COC Mission
The 10 quests from the Mission Board give a lot of EXP and Job EXP. So I would usually accept all of them together and meet all the NPCs one map after another to minimize the travelling time.
The MVP dungeon instances is a must-do. Even if you contributed the least damage or died in the instance, you still get rewarded with drops (e.g. armor) upon your party completion, which you can sell for Crystals (the currency used in Exchange Center). So always go for the Hard difficulty to get more valuable drops like weapons. Note that you can attempt multiple times, but only the first 3 completions will give you drops.
I don’t do COC missions until my 3rd week into Ragnarok X because I don’t understand the dailies and which ones are worth spending the time on. COC wants the player to deliver monster materials to them 10 times, but the good news is every item can be bought from NPC using Zeny, and they are not expensive at all. I can’t advise which 3 merchant is more valuable, but the Unit Price of these 3 types of coins in Exchange Center are as follow: Cat Hand Corp. Coin (1440 Crystals), Cool Event Corp. Coin (946 Crystals) and Kafra Corp. Coin (824 Crystals) – prices as of 12th July 2021. I am somehow not surprised, and I have opted to do Cat Hand COC since learning about the price because I haven’t gotten a single card drop since Day 1 to Lv.45! The only 2 cards I have in my inventory are from Old Card Album rewards.
Odin’s Blessing
My Odin’s Blessing bar had never reached full 10,000/10,000 before, at least not after I started AFK leveling with it in ‘On’ state. The main benefits are 5x EXP and 5x Drop rates. You can park your character or travel around in Prontera to complete Mission Board and COC quests to earn up to 600 Odin Blessing. The 10 quests from Mission Board will give you another 1,400 Odin Blessing, hence 2,000 Odin Blessing per day. It depletes very fast during AFK in a party because your teammates killing monsters will also consume your Odin Blessing, but of course, you also get the EXP and Job EXP.
How to Earn Crystals
Carnival Activities
Completing Mission Board, Instance, and COC missions will increase your Activity points to 100 and allow you to open up to 5 treasure chests. The 1st chest is worth 100 Crystals, 2nd chest 200 Crystals, and the last chest rewards you with 500 Crystals hence the player can earn a total of 1,500 Crystals daily. My character has not joined a guild yet but doing Guild Orders will also contribute to Activity points. If you can sell the rarer drops from instances, your daily Crystals will be more than 1,500 then.
Selling Instance Equipment
It is possible to earn crystals without cash top-up by selling dungeon instances equipment in the Exchange Center. I only begin to do instances (3 times daily) into my 2nd week of playing. The daily 30 minutes of Hard difficulty instances yield me many pieces of equipment on average 2 out of 3 rounds. I will sell them at the lowest Unit Price and tick to follow the lowest price. It is a matter of time all the equipment become saturated in the market, so I aim to sell them off quickly before prices drop further. As the price history of instances equipment is in a downward trend, I can re-purchase them cheaper a couple of weeks later if I need them.
Daily Sign-in Bonus
Players can also earn Crystals every Wednesday in the Daily Sign-in Bonus window. In addition, you can press the Make-up button to claim back-dated rewards that you missed up to 3 times per month.
Tips and Tricks
100 point Base for Secondary Stats Bonus
The ? in the Stat Points window says, ‘every 100 point increase of base stats will additionally increase your secondary status bonus.‘ So in the case of my knight, from 99 to 100 STR, there is a +24 P.ATK instead of the usual +4 P.ATK per 1 STR. There is no other increase in Max HP, DEF, Hit whatsoever.
Life Skills: Fishing, Mining and Smelting etc.
Let’s say you got new equipment drops from recent dungeon instances, and you wish to mine materials to upgrade/refine them. But, first, you should complete your life activities (e.g. mining and smelting) by utilizing your available Stamina before activating Odin’s Blessing for AFK leveling because you get to replenish 1 Stamina for every 1 point of Odin’s Blessing consumed.
For example, the player can buy the Advanced Pickaxe at 54,000 Zeny (3 times more than a regular Pickaxe at 18,000 Zeny) to mine faster, which saves lots of time. In addition, players can buy fishing baits from the Fishing Bait Merchant in Alberta to gain smelting materials.
Awakening Bonus
There are 4 groups of Awakening to make your character more powerful. For example, Upgrade Awakening Tier 1, during your adventures, you will undoubtedly upgrade and refine your amours and weapon to some extent, and if you met the so-called awakening criteria, you would gain Upgrading Effect Increase 10%. At my current Lv.45 Base and Job Lv.16, I have 0 awakening bonus activated. However, I can still level at a healthy pace as I feel that equipping your character with the right pieces of Armor, Accessory, and Talisman is far more critical.
Deposit Cards to Increase Stats
It is tough to get a card drop even if you AFK level 24/7, but the good news is players can get Card Album rewards. These cards are bond to your account, so don’t think about selling them in Exchange Center. Instead, the player can click and deposit the card or open the Academy Handbook to remove it. In addition, players gain various bonus effects when a different number of cards (2, 5, or 10) bond to form a sub-collection.
Swordman / Knight Critical ASPD Build
Yesterday was my 2nd attempt at Endless Tower, one of the activities in the Carnival where players need to clear enemies and advance many levels with a party. What I want to say is this critical ASPD build for hack and slash is very suitable when there is almost nil HP / SP regeneration (potions not allowed as well) for spamming active skills.
High Flee Not Possible
At first, I added STR, AGI and VIT with a ratio of 2:3:1 so that I can evade monsters, save on HP potions, and better survivability when AFK leveling. However, I noticed that I still get hit by monsters (same or lower level than me) more than 85% of the time, and I wasn’t attacking as fast (ASPD) as I thought I would be! So I googled and watched a couple of videos and learned that Ragnarok X is different from classic Ragnarok, and going pure STR is recommended vs hybrid. I then used the Magical Stone (free stats reset) to reassign all points into STR – a correction that I have no regrets till today. (But as I am peeking into other Swordman and Knight details in-game, I notice a few invested in Luck and a little into VIT, which makes me ponder is it worthwhile when adding 1 STR can be equivalent to adding ~4 Luck at higher level)
Swordman Skills
I am not a pro-Ragnarok player, and this is my 3rd attempt playing as a Swordman/ Knight class, but I will still like to share my thoughts on skills that I should have taken for my AFK leveling.
| Active Skills | Skill Points | Remarks |
|---|---|---|
| Bash | 10 | SP pots are cheap and Zeny is easy to earn. Some usefulness in PvE, but it helps in the first (Golden Thief Bug) instance where your ASPD is still very low. |
| Fatal Blow | 5 | At Lv.5, it decreases the target's DEF by 100 for 5 seconds and a 30% chance to stun the target for 2 seconds. E.g. Use Lv.5 Bash (shorter Cooldown) during AFK leveling to stun enemies. |
| Battle Will | 10 | Priority |
| Sword Mastery | 10 | Priority |
| Increase HP Recovery | 1 | Some video guide said to put 1 point for the 5% HP recovery and 6-sec healing. But my experience as a pure STR build when using Yellow Potion (14,000 HP + 30,000 HP after 5 sec) already over recover my Max HP. At base Lv.45 knight, my Max HP is only 31,926. |
| Magnum Break | 2 | 0, 1 or 10 points? I put 2 (shorter Cooldown = see more AoE animation) during my swordman adventure, and I feel it helps in PVE. While you are still hitting slowly, the Magnum Break somehow give you a sense of satisfaction as an AoE skill (so much true when you see Mages and Archers utilizing their own AoE skills) |
| Provoke | 5 | There is not so much use for PVE or instances because I do not have a strong armour set to tank. |
| Endure | 5 | Early in the game, my DEF was ~200 and the increase DEF by 100 is a huge plus. Like Magnum Break, you sit in front of your screen to see your Swordman cast Endure animation (self-buff) also give you a sense of entertainment. |
Knight Skills
After transcending into Knight job, I used the free and only in-game item Neuralizer to reset my Skill Points. Having allocated the points to all the passive priority skills, I still have 15 remaining Skill Points left. I planned to copy YouTube videos on ASPD/CRIT knight builds but to my dismay, using a Pecopeco as mount rental will cost 20,000 Crystals! Cavalry Training increases little ATK, and the mount itself is not faster than the standard given Poring.
| Active Skills | Skill Points | Remarks |
|---|---|---|
| Sword Speed Boost | 10 | Priority |
| Double Blow | 10 | Priority |
| Aura Blade | 10 | Priority |
| Cavalry Combat + Cavalry Training | 15 | In my opinion, not incredible considering a total of 15 Skill Points invested and 20,000 Crystals to rent a Pecopeco mount. However, I am whacking plainly (without Active Skills) during AFK leveling; the Cavalry Training being passive will always be in use. |
| Provoke + Endure + Steel Heart | 0 | A defensive skill set: Lv.10 Steel Heart will have damage received decreases by 40% for 12 seconds. However, I am more interested in skills that can help in AFK leveling. |
| Auto Counter | 0 | At Lv.10, it deals 8% of Max HP to all enemies units, so this is more for VIT builds. |
| Bowling Bash or Bash + Fatal Blow | ?? | It pulls 8 enemies, but I have been observing my AFK leveling for the past 3 weeks and noticed only surrounded by 3 enemies 90% of the time. The Cooldown of 20 + 4 seconds is also long. If not investing in BB, then I will take Bash and Fatal Blow. |
| Charge Attack | 0 | What did you say? Charge towards enemies in a straight line? Unfortunately, it will not be easy to kite enemies in Ragnarok X because maps are too congested with players. |
Training Course to Test Damage
Many equipment configurations, especially left/right Accessory and Talisman, complement your MVP instance weapon and armor. Do you know that there is a Training Course South of Prontera that lets player test their DPS? Players can also select different monsters based on element attribute and size, and the results even include individual Skill damage. For example, I compared 2 of the commonly equipped Tailsman in Ragnarok X – Elegant Incense (ASPD + Final Attack Speed %) vs Nostalgic Ornament (P.ATK + ATK %). I deduced that the lower Level 25 Elegant Incense produced higher DPS for my 2H sword Knight with just ‘Touch of the Sea Lv.2’ benefits instead of Lv.3 with Nostalgic Ornament.
Conclusion
Old habits die hard. I tried playing Gensin Impact on my mobile but did not like it, but when I installed Ragnarok X on my PC with BlueStacks, I instantly fell in love from the moment it launches into the character creation screen. With COVID-19 and work from home as default, I spent 90% of my time at my desktop during office hours and running Ragnarok X in the background combined with the AFK leveling was a godsend. I hoped my guide helped new Ragnarok X players as others helped me. This blog post is one of the easiest to write as I have so many Ragnarok memories. 15 years ago, I played Ragnarok with my brother, and maybe 5 years from now, I will embark on another new Ragnarok adventure with my kids. Sweet memories indeed!