The MMORPG is a genre of games where large numbers of players get together to battle larger-than-life foes, leading to a very cooperative experience. While some allow players to also fight each other, I tend to avoid games that focus on the player versus player aspect, like Lineage II. And while I have played, and enjoyed, both World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV, the second of which being the one I play most right now, I will always hold dear the memories of my first MMORPG; Ragnarok Online.
Ragnarok Online is an interesting game to talk about since no two players have the same experience with it. And that is because Ragnarok Online is an ever expanding game, implementing new classes all the time and even classes beyond what you can normally choose. This is because of the unique way the game explores classes.
You do not pick your class upon character creation. Instead, everyone starts as the Novice class and you can tweak your stat points a bit to favor the class you want to take or just start out balanced. Initially, the game only featured a single set of jobs you could get, but this has expanded over time. Initially, you play as a Novice until you get enough experience to advance to job level 10, jobs levels being different, and often slower, than your character’s overall level. Once you leveled up as a character, you would receive stat points you can allocate however you wish between six statistics, but job levels granted stat bonuses to relevant statistics and skill points to be spent on class related skills.
Upon getting to job level 10, you could then job change to one of the initial six classes; Swordsman, Magician, Archer, Merchant, Thief, and Acolyte. This list would eventually get more classes added to it, but this is what is called the ‘First Job Class’ change. Initially, these were the classes you would remain as, featuring a raised job level maximum to 50 and improved skills, like Swordsman getting various sword skills while Acolyte gets healing and buffing skills.
What’s more is you could eventually go even beyond these classes, eventually. Upon hitting job level 40, you can take a quest to become an advanced class. Most people, however, wait until job level 50 as being at 50 when you take the quest skips a lot of steps, sometimes even getting you bonuses, like free equipment. For example, my favorite class, the Acolyte, can become the Priest, featuring further improved healing and buffing skills, or the Monk, who trades furthering their healing for bare knuckle fisticuffs.
But don’t think that just because a Priest gets healing skills means they must be a healer. The true beauty of Ragnarok Online comes in how you build your character. You could choose to be a healer, what we call a ‘Full Support’ Priest, but you could also choose to focus on anti-Undead skills, like Turn Undead and Magnus Exorcismus. Or you could decide to forsake your magical heritage and just grab a mace to beat dudes to death.
This is because all classes feature a variety of abilities. For example, Acolyte doesn’t need to put all of it’s points into specific skills to become a Priest. You only need to be job level 40 or 50 to become a Priest! But certain skills will be locked without the prerequisite number of ranks in the required skills. For example, if you want Turn Undead as a Priest, you need to get the Ruwach skill as an Acolyte. This gives you access to Lex Divina (Lex Diving on iRO, which is the international servers) as a Priest. Put three ranks in Lex Divina. Now you need to get the Resurrection skill, which, to get that, you need one rank in Status Recovery and four ranks in Increase SP Recovery. This unlocks Resurrection. Put one rank in Resurrection and, finally, you have access to Turn Undead. This system does, however, allow you to ignore skills you don’t want.
But how does this system allow you to become a Battle Priest? Simple. Several Acolyte skills are intended for use as a Monk and several are most clearly intended for Priest, but you can also use these same skills on either class. Do you want a powerful Heal on your Monk? You can! Want to take very little damage to Undead and Demons as a Priest? You can! Want to beat Undead and Demons to within an inch of their life with a swordmace (Yes, it’s a thing and it’s GLORIOUS)? You can! This means that the Battle Priest is possible, though it will only really shine against Undead and Demons. And it seems like Gravity clearly had such builds in mind, as Priest gets one skill that might stand out as odd. Mace Mastery, which increases your hit rate and damage with maces. You could also take skills like Impositio Manus, which increases the attack of your target for a minute, summoning magical shields to protect yourself, or even make your weapon Holy element for a few minutes.
And there’s even more! When you hit max level (Character Level 99 and Job Level 50), you can then choose to either undergo a third class change or transcend your mortality to become a demigod. Not really. Undergoing the third class change will make the Priest become an Arch Bishop, but it’s more beneficial to transcend. Why? Because you get reset to level 1, only with far more stat points, and some other benefits, like 25% more HP and SP, increased maximum job level for second class change, access to new ‘Transcendent Only’ equipment, and new class skills for second job.
We’ll use Priest again. Upon transcending, you become a level 1 High Novice. Become a High Acolyte, then the High Priest. High Priest gets all the same skills the Priest does, but it’s maximum job level is 70, which means a lot of extra skill points, as opposed to Priest’s 50, and it gets new skills, like Assumptio, which doubles the defense of the target, Meditatio, a passive that increases the power of your Heal, your maximum SP, and how fast you recover SP, and Spiritual Thrift, which lowers the SP cost of all skills by 20%. Moreover, you can then class change to 3rd class, which you don’t miss out on, allowing you to add these brokenly powerful skills to the ones available to Arch Bishop and giving it access to Transcendent equipment.
Moreover, gender of your character isn’t just cosmetic. Males and females can get different job classes, though this only applies in the cases of the Bard and Dancer, which’re job options for the Archer, with Bards being only available to males while Dancer is for females. There is also the Ninja, which can become the Kagerou class as a male and Oboro as a female, but these classes get very similar skill sets, minus three skills, Kagerou getting three offensive skills while Oboro gets more supportive skills. Other than those three skills, the rest of the skill set is identical between them.
As you can tell, there’s a lot going on with this game. It also feels far more like an MMORPG, as dungeons are not instanced and all bosses will spawn in the world, allowing all nearby players to join together to fight them. And if you deal the most damage, you will be the MVP of the battle, earning yourself a number of bonus items that only you get. However, when last I played, enemies, and thus bosses, drop all their items on the ground instead of loot being instanced to each player, so you need to act fast or that item you wanted might be taken by someone else.
The game, however, is pretty aimless when it comes to an overall goal. You can travel from place to place, fighting the various monsters and bosses, but that’s about it. The entire endgame is just spent building your character up to be an unstoppable beast, by gaining equipment. But that’s not all you can do. There’s also an upgrading system for your gear and the card system.
Upgrading your gear is a relatively simple process. You get the weapon and you get it’s materials for upgrading, then either goto an NPC who can upgrade gear or get a Whitesmith (Called Mastersmith in iRO) to do the upgrading for you. Every weapon has a weapon level, or rank, attached to it. All gear can be upgraded to a maximum of +10, but depending on the rank of the weapon, it can goto a certain level safely without risk. For rank 1 weapons, it’s +7. Rank 2 goes to +6, rank 3 to +5, and rank 4, and all armors, can goto +4 safely. Anything beyond these numbers risk failing the upgrade and, if you fail, you lose the materials and the item in question. So if you get an armor to +8 and then fail to upgrade to +9, you lose your +8 armor. This means you should be careful about how much you upgrade, deciding if you really want to risk your equipment.
But rank 4 weapons don’t mean they’re the best thing ever. Sure, all special weapons will be rank 4 and rank 4 weapons are typically the most powerful, especially when upgraded, as they get more attack per upgrade than a rank 1 weapon would get. But there is a tradeoff for this power and this comes in the form of card slots.
Card slots come on certain weapons and is usually the inverse of the ranking system, where low rank weapons have more slots than high rank weapons. Using Priest as an example once more, Priest can use maces, rods, books, and knuckle weapons. I usually focus maces on my Battle Priest, so we’ll use those, since they’re what I’m familiar with. The mace family has three weapons that typically come up when it comes to slots. These are the Chain, Mace, and Stunner. The Mace is rank 1 and can have 4 slots, Chain is rank 2 and can have 3 slots, and the Stunner is rank 3 and can have 2 slots. Most rank 4 weapons have either no slot or 1 slot, with the Golden Mace being the only exception, coming with 2 slots, but it’s, while rank 4, even weaker than the Stunner, though it does deal 10% extra damage to Undead and is indestructible, except during upgrading attempts, making it still very useful, but also a lot rarer than, say, a two slotted Stunner.
With these slots, you can put cards into them. You get cards by fighting monsters and, once a card is put into a slot, it cannot be removed from the weapon. Most enemies in the game has their own card, including the bosses, so you can expect the bosses to have the best weapons, and best cards, in the game. Though that doesn’t mean lesser creatures don’t have good cards! A good example is the Abysmal Knight, or Knight of Abyss in iRO, who drops a card that increases all damage to bosses by 25%. Abysmal Knight is just a regular enemy, albeit a tough one, so he’s easily farmed. Also, this card goes into a weapon, so depending on the weapon you’re working on, you can put a lot of these cards into a single weapon, giving it a great amount of power. A +10 Chain with 3 Abysmal Knight cards in it can be a fantastic weapon for bosses, as a Battle Priest. Even better, these bonuses also apply to your spells, so you’ll often see casters, like Wizards, using low rank, four slot weapons to get the most out of their spells.
Due to this system, you often will run into players who carry a ton of weapons and armor for specific situations, like armors that’ll resist certain damage types better and swap gear out as necessary, or weapons that deal more damage to certain species or elements. Blacksmiths can even make super strong weapons, without slots, that have innate elements. Since these weapons have no slots, you’d typically have someone make the best weapon in a typing for these purposes, like Stunners for maces since that’s the best you can have made. Thus getting you access to things like a Wind Stunner, Water Stunner, and the like.
Some people may also want to point out that you can buy these weapons, so why am I putting so much emphasis on being careful about upgrading? After all, you could just buy another Chain if yours breaks, right? Not really. You may notice that every weapon and armor will have a number in brackets next to it’s name. For example, the Chain comes in two flavors, Chain [2] and Chain [3]. Chain [2] is a two-slotted version of the Chain, which can be bought in shops, while the Chain [3] is the three-slotted version and can only be acquired, normally, by fighting monsters or through other players, whether by trading for them or buying them from player-run shops. With this in mind, the Chain [2] is almost worthless for these purposes, as an outright better version of the weapon is out there.
I should also note that I’m approaching this from the mindset of official-esque servers. Many private servers do feature a mall where you can buy the Chain [3] instead of the Chain [2], but such servers also feature higher drop rates, so you could still farm them for free. But if you are on a private server where that is an option, go ahead and use the mall.
So while the game has no true end goal beyond getting to max level, it also features one of the most robust and customizable equipment systems I’ve ever seen. This leads to the entire community getting excited when new areas and dungeons and monsters get added, as it’s not just a matter of new gear at the end. The cards are what people look forward to most, since almost every single enemy has one and they can have great potential. Of course, not every card is good for every job, as Bacsojin, one of the game’s bosses, drops a card that increases the effectiveness of all Healing skills cast by the wearer by 30%, but also increases SP consumption by 15%. Such a card is absolutely useless on most classes, except for High Priest and above, since they get a passive that decreases all SP consumption by 20%, so their bonuses outweigh the downside to the card.
Moreover, some cards also have special interactions with other specific cards. Such as Dark Lord, another boss, when combined with the Dark Illusion card. These cards fill the Headgear and Footgear card slots. Dark Illusion, normally, decreases your maximum HP and SP by 10%, but reduces casting time by 10%. Dark Lord, however, gives a 10% chance to auto-cast Level 5 Meteor Storm when you take physical damage. But when combined, Dark Illusion will then reduce casting time by 20% instead of 10%, then reduce it even further by an additional 10%, while Dark Lord will increase your maximum HP and SP by 20% and reduce cast time by an additional 10%. This means your total stats will be HP and SP up by 10%, casting time reduced by 40%, and the chance to auto-cast Level 5 Meteor Storm. While the cards are powerful on their own, they get even stronger together.
I mentioned private servers before, which might just be the biggest weakness to Ragnarok Online. The private servers are usually a better way to experience the game. Sure, you can play on the official servers without paying a subscription fee, but free players get 50% lower EXP, drop rates, far less storage, a raised death penalty, no access to many special areas, and they don’t get access to all nine character slots. I think you only get 3, if that.
Private servers, however, are free and do not feature any of these limitations. In fact, they can feature custom assets, like additional NPCs who can reset your stat and skill points, teleportation NPCs, new areas, new monsters, new classes, and more. Moreover, a lot of players don’t exactly love the Renewal updates the game got, so pre-Renewal servers exist for the people who want to play the game without things like third classes and when the level maximum wasn’t above 99.
Speaking of, servers can also change maximum levels above 99, though this usually only happens with the higher rate servers. What do I mean? Private servers also tend to offset the grindy nature of Ragnarok Online by increasing the experience gain and drop rates to something higher, using terms like ’25x’, which means the experience/drop rate is 25 times higher than normal. And by normal, I mean 25x the base rates you get as a subscriber in iRO, not as a free player, who get nerfed experience and drop rates.
Private servers are also split up between their various rates. Low Rates are usually considered to be anything at 25x and lower. Mid Rate is 26x to 150x, High Rate is 151x to 10,000x, and there’s even Super High Rate, which is anything higher than 10,000x. There’s even special servers based entirely around PVP, called PK servers, where anywhere outside major cities, you can be killed by other players, though said servers also tend to put certain limitations on this, like anyone of the Novice class cannot be attacked. I remember playing one server that had a Jedi custom class, and the moment I class changed, I got killed by a random Assassin player, because Assassins have an invisibility skill, who then got his face rocked by another player. Why? Because a lot of the players consider those who pick on the freshly class changed players, and thus still low level, to be cowards.
So if you opt to try Ragnarok and want to look into the private server scene to lessen the grind, keep on the lookout for these things. Some things will be welcome, like healer NPCs and teleporting for free, but some, like the PK servers, might be something some players might want to avoid.
So, I’ve been praising this game left and right, so you would expect me to give this game a high recommendation. But the thing is… I can’t. I can’t even recommend it at all due to it’s systems being very old. All of it’s mechanics are nearly the same as when the game first came out and while there is a new version of the game, Ragnarok M for mobile, I cannot recommend it either. And this is as someone with a large cell phone. The game just feels stuck in an age passed, which can be charming, but better games have come out. The only reason I can recommend it is if you want to mess around with the class system, and even then, I can only recommend doing so on private servers. The limitations on free accounts for the official servers are simply too numerous and too severe. They made a game that was already a grind feel even worse. Ragnarok Online may be the quintessential grinder MMORPG, but it’s also a relic of an age passed.
Low Recommendation
The Professional Protagonist 