Elona+ Experiments

Allies:
- Poison resistance is unnecessary, enemies cannot stack poison on enemies like they can on you and no enemy deals a significant amount of poison damage.

- Bleeding resistance is also unnecessary for the reasons listed above, not to mention it's rare to find on items.

- Mind, nerve, nether, and fire are the most necessary resistances to give allies to prevent magic from killing them.

Notes: Their skills seem to raise randomly, not sure the cause of this. Just walking around in dungeons seems to be enough to raise entirely unrelated skills. Pickpocketing seems to raise rapidly on both my and Isca the Fallen Angel.

They also gather materials for you seemingly based off of their respective gathering capacity. Not sure if it's whenever they walk over a gathering spot or if it's just based off of time spent in a dungeon.

Gene Engineering:
- Human type enemies cannot give body parts to anyone else. If a recipient has greater than or equal to the number of specific body parts than the donor then they cannot give them body parts. Most creatures have limbs based on their race, with mutants being the only notable exception, so you can reference species to determine what you can get from which enemy. Mutants grow limbs randomly, except for 'Body', so they can provide body parts that would otherwise be impossible to acquire. Using mutants requires more work, luck, and time than should ever be spent on a game.

- If a donor has skills that a recipient does not then they can give them. Once again, nothing complicated. If you're looking to acquire specific skills on an ally, which you should be as they promote stat growth and other benefits, then just look up an easy to acquire enemy that has that skill.

- Not sure how donors with higher levels affect stat growth on recipients. Will go to Derphy and experiment on slaves.

Food:
- Why bother. After initial gains the benefits of food diminish so rapidly that they become irrelevant. Even with perfectly cooked +20 hand of murderer steaks, there were no noticeable gains to strength. Unless you enjoy farming and ranching, spend your time earning platinum instead to train skills. This will lead to faster stat growth.

- Only exceptions are foods that provide massive stat gain hexes, such as putitoro. Not because they directly give stats but because they enable other methods to give you stats.

Gods:
- Yacatect easily the best general early game God to worship. The extra money makes progression a lot easier, faster, and safer. God weapon 'Kaneituuhou' lets you see invisible enemies around when Nightmare Pumpkins are becoming a problem. This changes impossible situations into easy to handle situations quickly. Once you're established you can switch to any other God that better suits you.

- Advisable to abuse Yacatect's bonus to investing while you can and get every shop in the world to at least rank 60. If you have the money, at least rank 110. Invest 50 option takes the tedium out of clicking a thousands times to do this. This makes acquiring rare scrolls, potions, equipment, and rods a lot easier. Getting godly furniture is still difficult but you can sit back with your stack of blessed potions of potential not worrying about that.

Haven and Hearth

This video represents the best representation, explanation, and exploration of Haven and Hearth I've ever seen even after years of play and involved in the community. If you're interested in survival games with huge, lasting consequences then I'd strongly suggesting watching this video.

Mabinogi Update: Dream

The dream update for Mabinogi comes with a few nifty little things: new character cards based on life skills (Master Chef and Treasure Hunter), new dungeons, new peaca dungeon boss, an event with daily free rebirths, permanent weekly free rebirths, free premium services for the event, a bunch of bug fixes, and a new mobile app for Mabinogi.

Whether or not this update will come to the US Mabinogi will be seen. Even if we don't get the daily rebirth event, I hope we get permanent weekly rebirths. That would be excellent!

Update July 17th:

In an interview the Mabi development team revealed a bit more about what the dream update is bringing. Some of the high points are: hacking compensation, explanations of the new character cards, revamping dungeons, revamping textures, Mabinogi smartphone app, iOS Mabinogi, archery renewal, and in the future a reworking of spirit weapons.

Hacking happens and it sucks a lot; the devs want to make it so that if you are hacked you can get your items and gold back so that you don't just lose everything. The goal is to improve your experience and this is a great step towards that.

The Master Chef card comes with r1 cooking, finally, and access to tons of new recipes and ingredients as well as a special new ability called festival foods. It looks like a lot of these new features are tied to the Master Chef card but the basics will be available to everyone.

The Treasure Hunter card gives bonuses for exploring Iria. Excavating will provide special, unique treasures and Treasure Hunters will even be able to restore artifacts. They may even be getting special drops from Iria dungeons.

Dungeons are out of date and everyone knows this. The current system for passes is limiting, boring, and makes people avoid dungeons when they can. The revamp will be using the Hard Mode system as a basis to improve dungeons as a whole.

A lot of old textures are still around and just sort of meshed with the newer ones. If you want an example just compare Lemona Moon Armor with Thames plate and you'll see a world of difference in texture quality. The revamp will be to update old graphics so that they fit more with the new look of Mabi.

The Mabinogi Smartphone app is a bit confusing and I'm worried that I read a mistranslation of it, so if this is wrong I'm going to change it asap, but it looks like there will be assist characters on smartphones that can play with normal players. This lets you help your friends and even yourself by playing on your smartphone on the go.

Macs are finally getting Mabinogi. Some people may rejoice and finally stop using bootcamp. =)

The limitation of archery has always been the miss chance and this has made archery very suicidal to use at times. Since the combat update will introduce a natural lucky evasion chance, archery would normally be severely nerfed from this, so the archery renewal looks to fix these balance issues and make the class more viable and fun.

At some point spirit weapons may be updated in some way, shape, or form. Even the devs have no clue how they will improve them just yet.

Have fun in Mabinogi everyone and I hope these updates are as exciting to you as they are to me! Look forward to guns, magic crafting, and a bunch of other skills in the next few weeks too.

Mabinogi Black Dragon Raid Boss

The Black Dragon Raid Boss is a butt and is likely to kill you a whole bunch!

But there are ways to fight him that allow you to take minimal casualties.

Things to Bring:
- 100+ HP Potions (Even if you don't use them all)
- 40-60 Phoenix Feathers
- 40+ MP Potions
- 10+ SP Potions
- Bandages?

Raptors: How to
- Raptors are a very strange enemy and you cannot apply standard combat practices to them.
- They are multi-aggro.
- They have a stomp attack that ignores mana shield and hits health directly.
- Their knockback gauge is 3x as large as a normal enemy so even attacks that normally always knock an enemy back won't work on them!
- However, this means that you can hit a raptor like 14 times if you're using knuckles.
- Do not use skills such as Hailstorm, Shock, or Blaze on them.
- They heal non-wound damage almost instantly.

But this is all 100% okay because your job as Support is not to kill the raptors. Don't try to kill he raptors! Pull the raptors away from the boss dragon and hold them in combat to the side so that Assault and everyone else can do what they need to do.

Bards and Healers: A love song
- Bards can be one of the most handy users on the battlefield thanks to Enduring Melody and Battlfield Overture
- Everyone is constantly hurt so use party healing for maximum mana efficiency
- Keep your parties open and stay right next to the dragon boss so that you're doing some actual good.

If you're not in a full party or you're too far away to do any good, why are you at the raid at all? Support your fellow millitians or the Black Dragon will escape.

The Black Dragon
- He has Advanced Heavy Stander
- If you are under his front claws you'll take ~500 damage
- He has a ground pound attack that hits enemies in front of him.
- Defying physics, the dragon can swivel around to any new angle at any time
- It's hard to pin his hp but every 25,000 appears to be 1% so he's probably in the realm of 2,500,000hp
- Not that it matters, he heals hundreds of thousands of hp every few minutes.
- Archers, stay under his belly and rapid fire on him. If you can, avoid going out of his sides or being under any one of his legs
- Mages & Alchemists, stay under his belly and charge advanced magic to hit him with. He moves constantly so you will need to be fast
- Melee, when the dragon is about to fly up windmill. Windmill breaks him out of his flight animation and keeps him from doing his flying attack.
- Assault needs to be attacking him constantly. Even with a full server on the dragon you can fail to kill him because of how fast he heals.

This has been a very basic guide to fighting the Black Dragon raid. Good luck everyone!

Mabinogi Commerce Guide

[IMAGE]

Commerce 101

Commerce is one of the most dynamic and beautifully simple systems in Mabinogi. The game of commerce is all about profits and if you're not earning profits then you're commercing wrong.

The first step that you should always take in commerce is to gather as much information as you can. It only takes a minute or two to hop into the moongates for Tir Chonail, Dunbarton, Bangor, Tailteann, Emain, and Tara to see who is paying the most for your time. Multiply the quantity of goods that you can carry by the profit (green number) to see how much you will earn from a trip. This little detour will increase your profits for the rest of the day.

However, commerce is dynamic; prices shift constantly and excessive trade will change how much profit you are earning. Repeat your information gathering every day before you begin to commerce and if you notice your earnings drop off at any point then change routes.

No one town will always be the most profitable and no one route will always be the safest. Stay alert and watch prices carefully to make sure that you're in the know about where to trade and which routes are best.

Your time is valuable so measure which destinations will give you the most profit over the shortest period of time. There are handy charts here to help with that!  

Raise your level commerce rating in towns to earn discounts, unlock goods, and generally improve your profits. You raise your rating with a town by selling goods from that town a lot.

Commerce Mastery

There is a skill that earns you more gold, experience, and ducats per trip: Commerce Mastery. This skill increases your profits by 1% for every rank up to a total of 15% at rank 1.

This handy little skill does not show you that it is earning you anything anywhere except for the final profit screen. You train commerce mastery by earning profits through commerce. Split your sales up to level commerce mastery faster. [IMAGE]

While commerce mastery is nice, it is not necessary and probably not a wise investment of your AP until you have ranked a few combat skills. Unless you're already confident in your ability to handle bandits, don't bother with Commerce Mastery just yet.

Bandits

Bandits are a nasty lot that will steal your goods and harass you until you hate commerce. The solution is to keep your eyes out and watch for bandits whenever you are commercing.

A good merchant almost never spawns bandits. Even if you can handle fighting bandits, they are a huge waste of time. Most trade routes are only a few minutes long and a bandit fight can drag out for as long as 3 minutes. This means less profits. If you want to fight bandits then go bandit hunting through the Wanted Board. [IMAGE]

Sometimes there are nasty little bugs that can make bandits worse than they should be. Sometimes, when you spawn bandits all of the other bandit markers become invisible to you. You cannot hear or see them and the imp will not warn you about them. You can still spawn them by getting to close to them though. What this means is that you're going in blind and you're going to have to fight dozens of bandits.
You can fix this bug by map transitioning. It is advisable to do so if you notice that bandits are spawning out of nowhere.

Bandits will increase in difficulty as you increase the value of your cargo and the distance from the cargo source. Longer, more valuable trips will spawn stronger enemies. This should be taken as a general guideline and not a hard and set value.

Newbie Bandits: 2,000 Ducats or less cargo
Trained Bandits: 2,001 to 20,000 Ducats
Hardened Bandits: 20,001 to 50,000 Ducats
Veteran Bandits: 50,001 to 200,000 Ducats
Master Bandits: Towards the end of trips worth 200,000+ Ducats

It is up to you to know your limits with bandits. Different builds and strategies will work better on bandits than others. If you're consistently losing goods to bandits, try a level down and see if that helps at all.

You can spawn more difficult bandits than normal if you spawn them near the Smuggler. The smuggler is only around from 10pm to 6am in-game time every day. You will only be told the smuggler's location if you have a Life Talent active.

Routes

All numbers are recorded in seconds. Every 60 = 1 minute.
Foot movement speed is the same as humans, carts are 110%, elephants are 134%, and wagons are 188%.

Not all routes are equal, some routes are more dangerous than others.

Safest routes: Lake Abb Neagh, Tailteann, Sliab Cuilin, Dunbarton, Gairech Hills

Why: These areas are open and big. This lets you spot any bandits well ahead of time and go around them. There are almost no locations for bandits to hide behind such as forested areas or large rocks.

Dangerous routes: Blago Prairie, Corrib Valley, Dugald Isle, Sen Mag Plateau.

Why: These locations are either cramped or have a lot of places for bandits to escape your view. This often means that you will accidentally run into a bandit or that even if you spot them there will not be room to go around them.

You'll Probably Die on This routes: Osna Sail

Why: Osna Sail is the fastest way to go between Bangor and Emain Macha but it is cramped and there are a lot of hostile spawns there. Not only can you usually not avoid bandits if you see them, wolves will quickly aggro you and distract you from the bandits.

The Smuggler

The smuggler's name is Byrun. Byrun has a price chart separate from other towns and often pays more for goods. The catch is that any goods sold to Byrun lower your rating level with the town you bought the goods from equal to 2x the profit of your sale. If possible avoid selling goods to the smuggler until you have spare town rating you can afford to lose. You do not earn gold from trading with the smuggler.

The daily trade good will not lower your merchant rating with a town. The next item sold after the daily trade good is multiplied in value by 1.5x. You can only do this once per in-game day.

Towns will display the value of items of the smuggler if you have a Life Talent active and the smuggler has spawned. Notifications will also run across the top of the screen listing the smuggler's location and the daily trade good.

Bandits tend to be stronger than normal around the smuggler and even low value goods from nearby can spawn master bandits.

The location of the smuggler changes every in-game day. You can find where he is with handy charts such as this one: http://wiki.mabinogiworld.com/view/Smuggler#Locations

General Tips:

• Bandits always aggro 2 at a time.
• Bandits can only begin aggroing you when you have moved. Standing perfectly still at the start of an encounter is a great way to charge magic, alchemy, puppets, or archery skills.
• Bandits will only steal goods if they disappear with stars.
• Bandits normally only flee once they have 5 stars. They can flee with fewer stars if you're low on goods.
• A bandit who despawns with any stars at the end of combat will have stolen goods.
• Goblin Bandits will blindly rush at you by default. Defend or Counter them if you can.
• Human Bandits pause before they rush at you and will often load Windmill and Smash.
• Goblin Archer Bandits do an insane amount of damage and wound, will not pause, and are faster than you if you are human. They aim very quickly.
• Imp Bandits love to circle you, spam bolt spells, and generally be obnoxious. These should be your priority targets to kill since they have very little health and do the most damage of any basic bandit enemy.
• Giant Bandits use knuckles, so they have a 5 hit attack. They generally do low damage unless they crit. Giants will do nothing for a very long time, standing right beside you. If you windmill giants they will attempt to basic attack you when they get up. Normally you can leave them be while you kill other enemies.
• Boss Human Bandits are identical to Human Bandits but have a lot more health and do a lot more damage.
• Boss Ogre Bandits have a huge amount of health, damage, defense, and protection. It is almost impossible to kill these enemies by yourself at times. If possible, never let this enemy hit you; instead keeping them at bay with high knockdown rate skills such as firebolt, counterattack, smash, etc.
• If all else fails, bandits will leave you alone once they've stolen ~30% of your goods. Any that you spawn after that will just leave once an encounter starts.
• Lost goods can be recovered by bounty hunters. You'll get some ducats back in the mail. 
• Bounty Hunters will always spawn Veteran and Master bandits.
• Merchants with bounty hunters accompanying them probably want to be the ones to spawn the bandits.

More Mabinogi Instruments

New instruments! Mabinogi will be getting a miniature grand piano, violin, and cello.
What? You're worried that they're going to be gatchapon only like the Electric Guitar? Stop worrying, they're not. You can get these instruments in-game. That means adorable tiny pianos for all.

So far the prices for Pianos are 5,000,000 ducats and Cellos are 100,000 ducats. This means that they are available through commerce and can be bought at the trade imp in any Uladh town."They have also added instrumental dyes to the Ducat Shops for 100k each."

Korean players will be getting these first and even having an event for them:
"[KR Event] On May 18th players loging in will receive a free Violin."

The update will come with new wigs, new pets, new items all around but come on, nothing is as exciting as getting one of those pianos.

Get ready for more musical mayhem in the game named after the bard's song. <3>

Source: MabiData

Candy Box!

Lets talk about games: Candy Box!

This post is high in spoilers and spoilerific posts aren’t for everyone. If you’re not cool with being spoiled then just know that it’s a neat little idle-game that has lots of cool features and some neat ascii art.

Here is a link: http://candies.aniwey.net/

- Spoilers -

Candy Box is an amazing little game by Aniwey that is much more than a simple idle game. As you progress into the game features become unlocked and you are given the option to do much more than wait for candy to accumulate. Initially you only start off earning 1 candy per second, with the option to eat all of your candy or to throw it onto the ground 10 at a time. Once you have accumulated 60 candy you unlock the ability to buy lollipops from the new merchant and at 150 you can buy your first sword, which opens up the ‘Quest’ mini-game.

Questing and candy will continue to unlock options for you. Once you have completed your first quest you’ll be given a nifty little key, a map, and if you happened upon a chest, a pair of seven league boots. These tools open up the lollipop farm, which allows you to grow lollipops for free, open up the Swampy Swamp which has a frog with riddles for prizes, and lets you adventure more quickly, respectively.

The lollipop farm starts slow but grows rapidly. Starting at 1 lollipop a day, once you have planted enough lollipops you can earn as many as 100 per second. It’s like compound interest and it happens before you know it, so buy lollipops early on and build your farm up because you need millions of lollipops to buy all of your upgrades.

As you continue to quest and unlock features you’ll open up wishing wells, new merchants, and the forge

where you can turn your sword into 1 of 3 different special swords: Sword of Life, Sword of Fire, and Sword of Summoning. The Sword of Life has life steal on hit, Sword of Fire has fire damage on hit, and Sword of Summoning summons monsters every time you kill an enemy.

Progress in the game is fast if you’re proactive. Clearing a run through of the Castle Entrance can earn you 17,000 to 19,000 candy at the cost of around 10 major health potions, which are cheap and quick to make once you have unlocked the cauldron. You can make a batch of 10 major health potions for 1,000 candy and 1,000 lollipops in 20 seconds, no more or less, with the cauldron.

In short it’s less of an idle game and more of a game that if you get stuck or have to go, rewards you for playing anyway. The art is endearing ascii and quite clever at times. Puzzles can be somewhat frustrating if you’re not sure what to think but there is lots of information available if you get stuck.

Check the game out at: http://candies.aniwey.net/

Game Dev Tycoon and Piracy

Official Data from GreenHeartGames.com

Sitting here staring at these numbers for the percent of people who pirated Game Dev Tycoon as opposed to buying it is both alarming and appalling.

The general sentiment amongst pirates is usually that you pirate because it's a big company doing evil things that you disagree with. If not that reason then it's because you have no other way to get the game. We all know what we're getting into when we snag a stolen copy of something and we know who it effects -- the game publishers and developers.

Then there is this travesty. A small indie game developed by some actually pretty rad dudes. The developers and publishers are one in the same in this case, a pair of brothers. They put the game out for a reasonable $8, or $7.99 to be more accurate, and even put out a pretty banging demo. After that, mostly to see who was actually paying for the game, they even released the game fully cracked on some pirate sites, not that it had any DRM anyway. The cracked version had a different meta data name than the paid version, which is how they got this data. Nearly 95% of everyone playing this game stole it from a tiny developer who cannot afford these losses. That's low.

A day in the life of Game Dev Tycoon

Piracy is nothing new and hardly novel. Discussing it is practically moot as, as stated before, everyone is familiar with the consequences of piracy and have stated that they don't care by continuing to do so for their own reasons. While pirates are familiar with the dangers of piracy to themselves, they perhaps don't think about the dangers of piracy to companies though. Ya, big publishers aren't going to be hurting from your actions but small companies will be. These start-ups are how gamers escape the use of damaging and invasive DRM, terrible pay-to-win games, and the ever growing $5,000 to play facebook games. They do not thrive from the thousands of people who might play their game, they thrive by selling the game to you.

It is not too late, of course. People can still go out there and buy games like Game Dev Tycoon. If you don't, no one is going to break down your door and scream at you. An indie company that tried to give gamers something that they wanted will just go under. That's all.

If you're not familiar with any of this mess then you should check Game Dev Tycoon out because it's pretty spiffy.
http://www.greenheartgames.com/game-dev-tycoon-free-full-torrent-cracked-download/

Note: The above link is not to a cracked version of the game.

Mabinogi Music Skills

So while I work on pictures for the puppetry guide, by which I mean 'get some poor sap to sit there while I trip them with my wires over and over again until we find the maximum distances for attacks', Mabi has been getting some updates.

They're not out yet but they look good.

For those that aren't familiar with the combat redesigns, there were going to be a lot of changes to the fundamental combat mechanics of Mabi. The goal seemed to be to make stats relevant where they were no longer. Lets face facts here, minimum damage and balance stopped mattering when you realized how easy it was to get 300+ dex.

These changes inevitably nerf Fighters, make Alchemists less terrible, and rebalance Melee, Lancers, Mages, Archers, and Puppeteers. In my opinion Puppeteers got the better end of the deal out of everyone but we'll see when the actual update comes out.

The one skill set that is unanimously agreed upon to be crapped on is Music. The rebalance cut out music buff and instead just changed that to extra duration. That is crippling for Bards.

This new update is a music based one though. Bards are getting a few new skills that look superb. These include Sing, Chorus, and Encore. Sing lets you use a Microphone, a new musical instrument, and r5+ it looks like it lets you use the skill without having an instrument equipped. Chorus increases Play Instrument success rate, performance effect, and even reduces cool downs. Encore looks to be the least useful of all of the skills because it resets musical cooldowns but were there any musical cooldowns that really needed to be reset anyway?

Taken from manaherb.tumblr.com

Sing especially looks like it will open up bard skills to everyone as you don't need to be bogged down by a bulky instrument to pull off a quick buff to whatever you're doing. The number of dedicated bards is unlikely to decrease due to just how good moves like Dischord are but this will definitely open music up to a lot more play styles.

Souce: MabiData

Mabinogi Puppeteer Guide

 I’ve never been content with any of the guides or explanations for puppetry that are currently available. Simply put, they regurgitate information that is readily available on the wiki that does not help in practical matters. Puppeteers need to know how to actually fight, defend themselves, and handle a variety of situations. Practice helps but there are core concepts that you need to understand.

One of the most difficult aspects of the puppeteer is that you need to have high spatial awareness to fight effectively. Puppeteer skills gain range incrementally as they rank up, so your exact ranges will change as you progress as a puppeteer. You have three primary ranges to keep track of: A circular radius around your player, a circular radius around your puppet, and a straight line from your puppet. Your puppet’s abilities rely on these radii in order to effectively fight.

The best advice that you will ever receive: get either rank 1 Pierrot or rank 1 Colossus right away. This will provide the largest overall bonus to your damage and make you the most effective at combat. After that focus on getting Control Marionette to rank 5 so that you have all of your puppetry skills unlocked. Act 7 and Act 6 are arguably the two best offensive skills to raise first but no one is going to yell at you for training skills that are more useful to your immediate situation.

Puppeteers benefit from both Dexterity and Strength as both add +1 max damage for every 3.5 Str or Dex and +1 min damage for every 5 Str or Dex. Your puppets receive 70% of your Damage, Critical Rate, and Balance so your Strength and Dexterity benefit your puppets as well.

Two excellent life skills to train on the side are Refining and Mining. They coincide well, don’t require too much work or AP, and add a fair bit of dexterity and strength. Combined these two skills cost 141 AP. Two excellent combat skills to train on the side are Smash and Windmill. For Humans and Giants these two skills cost 360 AP, for Elves 315 AP. As a puppeteer you will be supporting your puppet physically often and even fighting without your puppet at times, so it’s imperative to have some ability to fight. Ideally you want to have all Melee skills so work towards that goal when you have the AP to.

Puppets struggle when dealing with ranged foes. Their range and speed just cannot compete with an archer or a mage that has a chance to charge up their magic. These foes are going to get free hits on your puppet. Rather than take this quietly use your Puppet’s Snare and Wire Pull to punish these foes.

Wire Pull and Puppet’s Snare are simple enough that they do not need a long explanation. Wire Pull takes a moment to take effect and then drags the enemy to you while dealing a lot of damage. This puts the enemy into your puppet’s range. If an enemy moves out of range, the skill will go off but do nothing. Puppet’s Snare activates immediately, does damage over time, hurts your opponent, and has a long stun. Puppet’s Snare is great for leaving an opponent open for attacks from allies. Puppet’s Snare also blocks explosions from suicide bombing enemies like Sulfur Spiders and Lost Sahagin! Both skills interrupt and break through all other skills. Some enemies, such as Golems and Goblin Bandits, are immune to Puppet’s Snare. There is no comprehensive list for immune monsters.

 

Act 1: Inciting Incident

 Wiki Article

-          Can stop Smash

-          Is blocked by Defense and Counterattack

-          Utilizes the radius around the player

-          Hits 1 target

-          Stuns enemies

Act 1 teleports the puppet immediately to anywhere that its target is as long as they are in range. If an enemy reaches your puppet before your attack is launched, it can still attack your puppet. To use Act 1 properly, position your puppet behind you. This is an excellent defensive skill when fighting 1v1 and can even be used to handle multi-aggro.

( Picture Example )

Works great after a Basic Attack or Act 2. At lower ranks its stun time is inefficient at holding an enemy off, so utilize Puppet Snare or Windmill to protect your puppet and yourself.

 

Act 2: Threshold Cutter

Wiki Article

-          Breaks Defense

-          Attacks 3 times

-          Utilizes the radius around the puppet

-          Hits 1 target

Act 2 is essentially the puppeteer’s smash. It’s slower than a player’s smash so it is only useful for 1v1 combat. If a target is hit into deadly, they will be knocked out of your attack but you will continue the animation. Should this happen, immediately unsummon your puppet to prevent damage. Act 2 is very useful for holding an enemy or boss in place.

Best used as a First Attack or if the enemy is using Defense. At lower ranks it may just be better to Smash the enemy yourself.

 

Act 4: Rising Action

 Wiki Aticle

-          Can stop Smash

-          Breaks Defense and Counterattack

-          Utilizes the radius around the player

-          Hits multiple targets

Act 4 is like Act 1 but with a longer cooldown time and no stun time. Act 4 tends to knock enemies back really far and will hit any enemies that are close to the player. The catch is that Act 4 has a smaller radius than Act 1, which is a big deal. At lower ranks, Act 1 is far superior to Act 4 at blocking enemies. Act 4 excels most when enemies are grouped together. Just like Act 1, if an enemy reaches your puppet before your skill goes off, the enemy will successfully attack you so it is best to position your puppet on top of yourself.

Act 4 can be used defensively similar to Act 1 or in conjunction with Act 6 for maximum damage.

( Picture Example )

 

Act 6: Crisis

 Wiki Article

-          Can stop Smash

-          Breaks Defense and Counterattack

-          Utilizes the radius around the puppet

-          Hits multiple targets

-          Can miss if targets move out of range

A more appropriate name for Act 6 is ‘The Best Setup Move in the Game.’ Act 6 is terrible for defending yourself and you have better moves for pulling enemies out of Defense or Counter. Instead, if you’re in a crowded room with enemies spread out, use it to pull enemies into one spot. Enemies hit by Act 6 will stay on the ground for a second, allowing you to use Act 4 or Windmill to great effect.

Arguably the best First Attack but you have better options for offense and defense otherwise. Be cautious if enemies are too far spread out.

 

Act 7: Climactic Crash

 Wiki Article

-          Can stop Smash

-          Breaks Defense and Counterattack

-          Utilizes a line from the puppet, limited by the player’s radius

-          Hits multiple targets

-          Can hit twice if target is knocked back into the line

Act 7 is just a beautiful attack that deals an insane amount of damage. Always try to aim Act 7 from the side of a player rather than directly in front of the player. The reason for this is to prevent the player’s radius from canceling Act 7 prematurely. Due to its charge time it’s best to use this attack as the first attack. It is advisable to unsummon your puppet after using Act 7, as Act 7 breaks your connection with your puppet, puts them a fair ways away from you, and often puts them right next to enemies.

Act 7 is a great First Attack if enemies are in a line or are simply too spread out for Act 6 to be effective. Nothing really combos well with Act 7.

( Picture Example )

 

Act 9: Invigorating Encore

 Wiki Article

-          Can stop Smash

-          Breaks Defense and Counterattack

-          Allows your puppet to fight without your control

-          Requires a full spirit gauge to use

-          Utilizes the radius around the puppet

-          Hits multiple targets

Act 9 hits and aggros all enemies around it and gives your puppet its own AI. Have a strong Act 1 and Act 2 for this as your puppet will try to use these skills on its own. While in this mode your puppet recharges its skills faster and deals more damage. You can take control of your puppet again with your Control Marionette skill while still enjoying your extra damage and faster skill recharge.

Act 9 is the most painful skill to train and actually is not great on its own unless you are effective in combat without your puppet. It’s advisable to get it early primarily for training purposes and to only start using it after you have started picking up other combat skills such as Melee or Archery. Otherwise keep your puppet on its strings with Control Marionette.

There is no appropriate or inappropriate time to use Act 9. Bring it up whenever there is a tough battle that would benefit from extra damage.

Project NT

Perhaps a new Fantasy Life
Your first question is probably what is Project NT? Good. You should be asking that and I like you more for it. Project NT is a game by ThingSoft under Nexon that bears a close resemblance to the 2003 game Mabinogi. It has updated graphics and looks to have strong interactions between the player and the world beyond just combat.

So what can you do in Project NT? To be entirely honest, no one is sure yet. Not only is the game not out for beta testing but any information that is available is in Korean which makes it hard to get your hands on. Don't worry though, Nexon already grabbed the rights to publish this in the US and Europe so we can expect releases at some point.

For sure we will be able to:

• Build villages, economies, schools, etc. etc.
• Grow and even remove towns based on our activities
• Have interactive, skill based combat* 
• A unique and strange skill development system
• Have immersive relationships with NPCs
• Use non-combat skills to produce goods and interact with the world

* We'll see whether or not this is true. Sorry for the skepticism.

"Project NT is the codename of ThingSoft's upcoming cel-shaded Anime themed MMO. The game features Pokemon battle related system. Every time you kill monsters there is a small chance of you capturing them Pokemon style. There are no classes in Project NT, instead, your skills are determined by the monsters you come across. You can learn new skills by fighting different monsters and use skills by summoning monsters into battle."
- MMOsite.com

A big concept behind Project NT is that the game devs cannot keep up with the never-ending demand for new content by players. No matter how large the development team is, they cannot crank out new content as quickly as players can consume it. The solution is to essentially crowdsource it. Players make their own villages, shops, businesses, etc. etc. and other players interact with them and help them grow. It'll be like playing the Sims with friends, but in an MMO and with strong RPG elements.

"The game will also allow players to create their own maps, villages, personal space, economy and even fulfill political ambitions!"
- MMOculture.com

How they'll pull this off is hard to say. If I had to venture a guess, I'd say it'd be through instances rather than trying to predict how large of a world they need in a static environment. If you've ever played an MMO before then you know what an instance is. An area generated for you on demand rather than existing beforehand. Some instances are permanent, such as Homesteads in Mabinogi, or non-permanent such as raids in World of Warcraft or RP areas in Guild Wars 1.

Now your next question is, if you're into the whole Fantasy Life thing anyway then why not just play Mabinogi Heroes or Mabinogi 2? The answer for that is simple: these are not fantasy life games. Mabinogi Heroes, also known as Vindictus, is an Action RPG with no non-combat roleplaying elements to it. There's just fighting. Mabinogi 2 is similar, especially with its nickname being Mabinogi Arena. Players literally just spend the game fighting monsters in an arena or watching other players fight in an arena. Not the same type of game at all.

My apologies for bringing up Mabinogi so heavily, it's just that most MMOs and games in general steer away from the whole non-combat thing. Everything is fighting monsters 24/7 or making gear to better fight monsters. Sometimes these games spice it up by including fighting players too. Aside from Ultima Online and Mabinogi there just haven't been many alternatives. Shroud of the Avatar looks promising though and that's another game that you should keep on your list of games to check out.

More updates as information becomes available.