OathRO - A fresh 1x server with cool rebalancing and qol features. [Episodic]

[Nova]

https://www.oathro.com/?module=main

Launch date: September 23rd 2021

OathRO general info:
Episodic Progression starting at Episode 3.

US-based server with EU and SEA proxies available





Longtime RO player here writing another review for what I think is a very promising server. For the past 1.5 years or so, I've been playing a couple 1x servers off and on and decided to give OathRO a try a couple days ago. And I must say I was very pleasantly surprised. I've been mobbing wolves with my Swordsman and more than once I thought; "Man this feels nice." and "This is how it should be."
There are certain features on here that feel really good to play with. One of those features is the global 200% increased SP and HP recovery rate. This also affects passive skills like the Swordsman's Inc HP Recovery and the Mage's Inc SP Recovery skills. All classes will have (some of) their skills changed/rebalanced to make them better and/or more useful. As far as I'm aware, this includes buffs and quality of life improvements such as; decreasing the sp of some skills, increasing the damage of others and increasing the duration of buffs.

Here is an example of the finalized skill changes/rebalancing for several 1-1 classes and the Hunter class:

Swordsman:

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Acolyte:

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Merchant:

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Thief:

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Hunter:

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Do note that a lot of these skill changes go live tomorrow! So you might want to join in now to take advantage of that. 



Join the server discord for more info.


I'll list some more qol features since I think these are one of the most important things. After all, when you spend hours grinding mobs, these are the little things that add up.

Item drop beams.
Rare drops will trigger a little bell sound and a colored beam so that you can't miss 'em. Also that extra oompf.
There are different colors for different item classes.







Max zoom out.

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See through trees and vegetation.
Trees and leafs.

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No trees and leafs. 

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Monster HP bars.

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Clan System.

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Increased drop rates for low-level mobs.
For example a Poring drops its card at 0.04% while a Raydric will drop its card at 0.02%

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Big Party + Tap bonus, 12 max limit with a 15 level share range

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Stylist with 38 different clothes pallettes

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They also have the commands; @autotrade and @showexp and #main chat ingame.


All of these changes and qol combined make OathRO really nice to play on. While it is still technically a 1x server, the huge party bonus and the SP regen increase make it so that you feel a lot better than you would on a regular 1x server. From what I've seen so far, the owner knows what he's doing and is very open to input from the community. There's a good synergy going on there. I'm also very much looking forward to the things that Oathkeeper wants to implement in the future. The atmosphere overall wether it's ingame or on the discord seems very chill too. It's not uptight or full of chat rules that you might find in other servers. Since I've only been here for less than a week, I don't have much else to talk about for now, but will likely continue to update this thread as I get more familiar with the server and whenever new updates go live.

Definitely give the server a try if you want to! 

[Nova]

Reserved for more space if needed.

[GMSeiren-tRO]

That's an interesting website design and content, heh.

[Nova]

That's an interesting website design and content, heh.

[Nova]

The owner just added proxy servers for EU and SEA regions.



Previous:



Now:




Ofcourse, this is probably not accurate, but it definitely feels better. The proxies could give you a significant boost in ping.

[Oathkeeper]

Owner here. For sake of full disclosure, ping times listed aren't your end-to-end latency, but ping to the proxy server. That said, in some instances, the proxy servers can provide improved performance if your packets are being routed across inefficient or high traffic wires. We may add additional proxies to Tokyo and Sydney soon, so that you can more efficiently choose the route to get to our primary host site in Washington State (USA).

Still, we must obey the universal laws of physics and data cannot travel faster than the speed of light. 

[Neffletics]

The balancing changes are well-thought-out, and it's fantastic that another server makes the classic setting feel new again. I just hope they redesign their website because I thought I was on TalonRO's.

[euphoria]

Lovely server!
Feeling nostalgic with old payon.
Very friendly community, it's rare to find nowadays.

Looking forward for next updates 

[Shuchou]

Sucks to see this server being plagued with fake reviews about the player count and adjustments. Fishy how they hate on all other 1x servers but one server that's the most toxic and full of itself, makes you wonder if they are just alts logged in through a VPN. Good luck with the server!

[Shuchou]

RIP when you don't realize you hit reply instead of edit to you own comment

[neethree]

As a fan of the sort of niche builds around skills that no one in their right mind would take... what a nice idea. I hope the slow start allows them to filter in changes with more success than having the mammoth task of rebalancing RO in it's late state.  There's so many skills in the game that you just never pick up, it's nice to see that given some love. Some things you just look at and wonder wtf Gravity was smoking (slow poison, anyone?). God, I'd love to see agi wizard made more viable. Fire Pillar and Frost Nova are so almost there. Or dagger hunter. Blitz beat working with daggers would be wild.   I wonder if they'll implement the broken Rogue skills along the graffiti path?

Shame it's a 1x though, having a third 1x server spreading out an already tiny demographic more thinly...it'lll suffer from the same low-pop-hell of having to farm all your own cards at 1x rates because there's not enough of a playerbase to supply the market.  A 2x or 3x would be really nice to fill the server gap at the minute.

[Sairek Ceareste]

As a fan of the sort of niche builds around skills that no one in their right mind would take... what a nice idea. I hope the slow start allows them to filter in changes with more success than having the mammoth task of rebalancing RO in it's late state.  There's so many skills in the game that you just never pick up, it's nice to see that given some love. Some things you just look at and wonder wtf Gravity was smoking (slow poison, anyone?). God, I'd love to see agi wizard made more viable. Fire Pillar and Frost Nova are so almost there. Or dagger hunter. Blitz beat working with daggers would be wild.   I wonder if they'll implement the broken Rogue skills along the graffiti path?

Shame it's a 1x though, having a third 1x server spreading out an already tiny demographic more thinly...it'lll suffer from the same low-pop-hell of having to farm all your own cards at 1x rates because there's not enough of a playerbase to supply the market.  A 2x or 3x would be really nice to fill the server gap at the minute.

Everything has a minimum chance of a 0.02% drop rate as there was a bug in official servers that gave everything a +0.01% chance to drop, and this has been made into a feature into the server. Low level mobs have been further enhanced by level 1-10 mobs being given an additional +0.02% chance of minimum drop rate (so cards or a Guard [1] by a Pupa will have a 0.04% chance to be dropped), and level 11-20 mobs gaining a +0.01% minimum drop chance to 0.03%. With a couple of other exceptions for monsters close to that level 20 but have extremely important cards, the drop rate for them is 0.02%.

Because of this, despite the server being 1x rate, people haven't had to struggle too hard to find cards and supply them to the market. Hunting a low level card is something that may take a day or three (depending on how many you need), but you won't be stuck doing it for weeks—and that's assuming someone hasn't already been selling it.

[Nano]

This server is very cool. If you are playing it right now, you are cool too.

[Calvin1]

I've been playing this server fairly actively for the past few weeks, and I enjoy it for the most part.

Positives

I appreciate the amount of effort, thoroughness and transparency the admin has for the server. The server never has any stability issues, maintenance has always been run on time and as scheduled, and there has only been one random restart during my playtime so far.

Everything is very well-documented, from the thorough update logs and patch notes, to showing the server's financial details, to the breakdown of class distributions and amount of zeny on the server.

I appreciate that there are zero donation items, or any kind of reward system.

A lot of thought and community insight is put into balancing changes, and while they aren't groundbreaking changes, they do put a fresh spin on an old game.

I also like that dual-client is disabled, the beams when rares are dropped and the 0.03% card/rare drop rates for low-level mobs, such as Creamy, Vitata, etc.

Mixed

The community is mostly good and helpful, but there are strange characters and trolls. The server is mostly English-speaking, although I have noticed a lot of Brazilian and Filipino players, and the server is hiring a staff member who speaks Portuguese. From what I can see, it's largely the older population (people who have been on the server the longest) who bring about the most negative attention.

In general, there is a lack of staff online in-game. While the server is mostly self-policing and isn't of a size that requires a GM to be online at all times, it would be nice to see staff online more and interacting with the community outside of Discord.

NPC placement in Payon (main town) could be better. For example, the Promotions NPC is in Prontera, and when I was new, I came across this NPC to get Newbie rewards by chance. There's an Arrow Seller NPC in the top left of Payon, but it would make more sense to place this with the other convenience NPCs in the top area of Payon.

Negatives

The biggest issue with this server is the lack of growth. When I first started playing, there were about 80 people online and this number has largely stayed between 80-100 over the past two weeks, even with the Halloween event and release of 2-2 classes.

Outside of the Halloween event, there has been a lack of in-game events (events run by a GM). I can appreciate that there was a lot of detail and effort put into the Halloween event, but it doesn't require much effort to run an event in-game and interact with the community now and then, even if the prize is miniscule.

Closing Thoughts

Overall, it's a nice server, with a lot of potential and I am enjoying my time here. I think the community tries to help the server grow a lot, but there's only so much the community can do. You can see by the amount of reviews on RMS that people want this server to succeed.

Maybe less time put into niche content such as Halloween event comic strips and more time put into in-game events. I do think there should be Newbie rewards in place permanently, and that these rewards need to be communicated to new players.

[skyeang3l]

I agree that this server is super great. Has it's flaws but I think the GM is probably one of the best I've encountered on the RO scene in terms of friendliness and a general understanding of RO mechanics and basic game design principles. Really good for people who love the 1x gameplay but want a bit of a new experience.