Shining Moon and the Ragnarok experience in 2019

[evenbiggercat]

So I have been playing on Shining Moon for about 3 months now and feel like it is time to write a review for the server that gave me the coveted kRo experience. 

Let's start with stability, which I would rate at about 7.5.
Recently there have been a couple of crashes because of new updates, before this, the server was a solid 8.5 in stability for me, however I feel like it would be unfair to not mention the recent crashes. Though it should be said that the compensation Poring makes server crashes even enjoyable at some times. 

The community to me is a solid 10.
The server environment over all feels very welcoming. I found it very easy to talk to people. I also find it quite easy to form instace/bio 5 parties, even at sometimes inconvenient hours a couple of players will always pull through, which I think is great, especially in a server that can still grow its player base. Here I would like to also adress the "The server is dead there are 10 people in Fortessa" theory - guilds have their bases, where they can put and arrange NPCs to their liking and a lot of guild mates hang out at their respective bases. You can enter any guilds base through a command and check for yourself.


In this category I would like to include events, which there has been a surge of recently. I think their availability for even new players is great, in the invasion event for example, everyone was turned into a novice. Here I would also like to adress the controversy of the Exchange card event that I have seen and white knight the server I clearly love playing on a little bit 
The exchange card event started last week and lasted up until today. You can exchange 5 cards into an Exchanger Card Album, which contains every single card in the game. If I recall correctly and please correct my numbers if I am wrong, the chance of getting an MVP card is 1/528. With about 120 MVP cards available gunning for a particular card is impossible. Many people including myself got MVPs they ended up recycling back into albums, because they were not good cards. The controversial screenshot of about 10 MVPs must have been from a player who opened thousands of albums and grinded very hard in preparation, because some have opened hundreds and did not get a single one, but of course you can get lucky and win big.



Game masters would get a 10 from me.
Very attentive, very patient. In all my interactions I was met with nothing but kindness and I have no reason to believe any discrimination towards "plebs" is happening.


The economy is a 8-9.
The server economy is growing recently, there are staples of Moonlight coins and Moon coins always being sold, which you can get through playing and I have never once felt like I needed to donate to acquire anything and I have yet to donate. There are of course buyers who try to low ball or trick newer players, but I think that is a part of every server and this borderline shady behaviour has been called out by other players before.


PvP would be a 7-8 probably?
I do not really participate in PvP, but from what I know WoE and BG is still quite small, the people that do it do it frequently, but it would benefit from more players.


Class balance is a 9.
The "strongest" classes currently appear to be SE, SR and Ranger with Sura not falling so far behind. Because party play is such a big part of Shining Moon you can find a variety of classes in each party, with AB and Sorcer being neccesary. Parties have now also began looking for Minstrels and Wanderers.


Shining Moon can not give me what Ragnarok gave me when I first played it, but I genuinelly believe it can give me the best Ragnarok 2019 kRO experience there is. 
I am by no means objective and maybe my review is a little bit rose coloured, but I really believe this server can grow more and get better and keep us updated. Overall I just hope more people give it a shot and if you decide to, feel free to message me and I will help you get into it, so that we can stay addicted to Ro even in 2019.

[darkomega]

I have always wanted to try ShiningMoonRO (heard it from Mumbalance, or Munbalance? yeah I was NovaRO player like him too)
but I left Renewal RO for a very long time (after quit NovaRO).. and played Pre-Renewal all the time, til today

so I am very worried about gearing in Renewal (my experience gearing in NovaRO is very scary lol.. very hard)
any tips gearing in ShiningMoonRO? thanks!

[evenbiggercat]

For gearing you can always start with eden and airship assault (some ppl sell those gear pieces for 100k), but I personally did not do this. I had only eden gears when I started running old glast heim, because the party has a max of 12 and the instance isnt incredibly difficult you can join up with pretty much no gears. From there you can get the temporal boots and instance points will get you a nice armor (like the excellent dexterous armor) and a temporal manteau.

Ever since the introduction of 17.1 gears the price for magical boosters has gone down rapidly. You can also buy headgears with loyalty tokens that you get for daily log ins and if you level a character to 175 on 1x you will get 100 moon coins, which is 10 000 cash points that you can either spend on stuff like Mad bunny and rainbow scarf or sell for approx 70 milion.

You can do horror toy factory daily on normal mode it can yield up to 15milion per run. The recommended starter is rebel as it is not difficult or expensive to gear and it is recommended you start at a 100x, pick up bounty boards along the way, then switch through class mastery to a 1x and collect it so that it is easier to reach the 100 moon coins for 175. I think munbalance has some videos on this? Not too sure though.