YMMV / Ragnarok II: Legend of the Second

• Broken Base: Even the most loyal players of Ragnarok have honestly had it with the constant bugs and exploits being in every single patch. While bugs are an unfortunate fact of life in MMORPG's (and video games in general) and always have been, the fact that there are bugs that have existed since the game first launched and have not once been addressed, as well as the fact that new content is constantly being released almost every week with an obvious lack of polish, has lead players to believe that there is little to no testing being done before the patches go live. It has lead to several players petitioning Gravity for a public test server. You know things are bad if players have to plead with a developer to let them volunteer their time and energy to test patches before they go live. Presently this is no longer the case, but that's due to the game losing its development team outright, so it could hardly be called an improvement.
• Difficulty Spike: The OG difficulty spike was the Culvert of Abyss, where while the Rockstar Heroes could be cheesed by provoking them then deliberately resetting two of them to take them on one at a time and the Golden Robberbug could also be cheesed by destroying its eggs to prevent them from spawning swarms of adds and resetting it to get rid of its Attack increase from the eggs being destroyed, Mini Mongi was incredibly dangerous even if they were exploited to destroy the speakers that buff them before starting to fight them for real, Aromine has nothing to exploit in the same way as those before her, and Ratmaster Kremp was unstoppable to the point of being effectively unbeatable with a pick-up group without resorting to exploits to prevent him from even attacking. Of course, that was in the past. The modern game has two major difficulty spikes, the first being the Darkwhisper, the first non-instance map where it becomes impractical to operate without a party or refined equipment due to that being the exact moment that common enemies start to deal overwhelming amounts of damage and not taking a whole lot in return. Forgotten Payon serves as the second, immediately after the Darkwhisper, and amplifies the problem to the point that even with fully refined equipment you can still get laid out if you're careless, even when taking enemies one-on-one. And this is after most of the mobs in each area were made passive, they used to all be aggressive, which just made it even worse. Jawaii Ocean Island is even harsher than Forgotten Payon (and also has the same case where all the mobs used to be aggressive before several were changed to be passive instead), but by that point the stage has already been set. The Silent Corridor and Assassin's Sanctum are also significant hikes over the Darkwhisper which precedes them, but due to Cazar equipment (the main draw of them) being made obtainable from NPCs and mostly outclassed by Eddga equipment (which can mostly be dropped at a respectable rate from common mobs in Forgotten Payon, with Priests and Monks getting screwed for some undecipherable reason due to their armor being dropped by a mini-boss that can severely buff its attack on top of there only being two per channel and them being on a long respawn timer), there's really no reason to bother with them during normal progression.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Eremes Guile. Yes, that Eremes Guile. He's back.
  • The Queen of Destruction, despite (formerly) being a candidate for That One Boss, was popular enough just in sheer character design to not only have a summonable pet of her (not to be confused with the Monster DNA system; she's a vanity pet), but to actually prompt the devs to create a costume◊ based on her outfit, along with a costume based on the Dimension Immortal◊ for male characters.
• Game-Breaker: Embus of Ruin. In theory, it's just a pet that freezes things. In practice, however, it's capable of locking even bosses into place unable to do anything and can make even Ratmaster Kremp killable by nothing but pure spam. As of late, the power of Embus has been coming to an end, with a recent update blocking pets altogether in PVP, and one incoming that will make bosses immune to various locking effects, precisely the sort of thing Embus of Ruin relies on to break bosses.
  • It has been patched as of November 2013.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Non-Korean playerbase was at least enough to keep overseas servers alive while it shut down in its country of origin. As of 2016, the only known official server is managed by a company called Warp Portal in USA.
• Goddamned Boss: Anubis, out of the lot in Osiris' Tomb (along with Set, Gregorshema, and Osiris himself, who are not examples). The only reason for this is that he doesn't have an element like the others, meaning there's nothing to exploit for double damage which amounts to making the fight take twice as long as any of the other bosses. He also summons several tornadoes, but since they can't knock you down they're nothing more than an annoyance. Of course, that was in the past, and now he's been given an Earth element to put him on the level with the rest of the bosses. Nowadays the title can really go to basically anything that likes to spam unavoidable stun effects.
• Good Bad Bug: Not long after the Embus Game-Breaker was patched, one of these was discovered for Ratmaster Kremp involving resetting the fight before he wakes up (without also resetting his HP), while circumventing his damage reduction with the Crecentia's 'Raw Tilt' ability. Of course, now another game-breaking bug has even the Goddamn Bats in raids having the same HP as bosses, making most raids basically unplayable.
  • Using a stunning move, or a monster summon that stuns, on either Queen of Destruction or Dimmension Immortal as the opening attack, will prevent them from applying their Invulnerable buff to themselves, negating the need for the MacGuffin needed to remove it. The reason for this is, despite them being bosses, they are, strangely enough, not immune to crowd control effects.
  • The bosses in Osiris' Tomb have an Enrage effect that comes up when the fight drags on too long that increases their speed by 300% and attack power by 600%. The bug comes into play with the fact that half of that doesn't work, as even when it triggers there's seemingly no change to the boss' attack power, allowing you to take as long as you need to to get rid of them. Very helpful when fighting Gregorshema at a low level for the quest that involves taking him out.
• Scrappy Mechanic: While the Master Levels received an overwhelmingly positive response when they were first revealed, after they were actually implemented, players realized just what a sheer grind fest they were when they went live. To put things into perspective, it takes tens of thousands of Master Points to get another skillpoint. Monsters in Dayr Desert, the mobs that are worth the most master points, are worth about one MP each. One. And it gets worse: If you die, you lose ten percent of your total master points instantly. You can lose thouands of those points you just spent hours, if not days, grinding. A lot of players swore off raiding entirely just because they are that terrified of dying and having all of their grinding be in vain just like that. This entry is somewhat outdated, but Master Levels are still the point in the game where insane levels of Power Creep starts to set in.
  • Also horrible is the Honing system, which to cut it short is a way of adding stats to items that is literally nothing but RNG. The quality of items (represented by stars) directly impacts the stats you can get from Honing, and are decided on adding the item to your inventory. It cannot be improved in any way, you just have to get another copy of the item if you want to try to get one with more stars. Next is the Honing Polishes themselves, which even if you use a 100% Honing Polish, that will only guarantee the advertised stat on one line, with the other two to four (depending on whether the item is green, blue, or purple, with them having two, three, and four other lines respectively) being a complete crapshoot. It is possible to change one line with a cash shop item, but not the first two lines (which determine the prefix the item gets), and on top of that this is exceedingly likely to make that line weaker, so in attempting to change something like WIS (universally considered to be a dump stat) to VIT, you might end up reducing the line to being insignificantly low anyway. That's not even including the existence of Gold Hones from other players and Honing Oils, both of which can increase the stats derived from Honing, the former requiring another player to have set up a shop and the latter having the 10% Oils be cash shop items, and the superior 15% Oils not even being in the cash shop, so that they're even harder to find.
• That One Boss:
  • Pre-Advent of Valkyrie, it was Ratmaster Kremp, a parody of Master Splinter. Sporting a mountain of around two million HP, his durability is just the tip of the iceberg. His combat routine involves calling his best pupils, Leo, Miki, Donna, and Raffi into the fray, along with vicious area of effect attacks prone to wrecking people. The Hard version in fact is notorious for his difficulty, being regarded as borderline impossible to take down in a straight fight. Nowadays pretty much everything past the Darkwhisper counts, particularly the things which have completely untelegraphed Ao Es that can easily cause a oneshot thanks to the game's worthless sense of balance.
  • An earlier example, and not quite as infamous, is Fury Jeiwatch in the Hard version of the Fortress of Sandstorm (Already That One Level on its own). The main thing about him is his Scalp of Death technique, which leads to him very easily pulling out about 8,000 damage in one hit. At the point in the game where you're likely to DO the Hard version of the Fortress of Sandstorm, even the Tank is probably going to fall at that kind of damage. The intended strategy seems to be changing Fury Jeiwatch's target when he uses Scalp of Death, but in practice it usually boils down to just trying to kill him before he kills everyone on your team first.
• That One Level: In order to get to master level, you need to be level 50 in both job and class level and it is required to do a quest. The master level quest is infamous for being ridiculously hard and without the proper raid gear, buffs, or even the Soulmaker's Cure spell, chances are that you will ripped into shreds by 6 ridiculously powerful foes within seconds. And what makes it more annoying is that if you fail the master level quest, you'll be forced to start all over again.
• Woobie Species: Noels. If their backstory as a species isn't enough, the Rite of Passage involved in their Coming of Age ceremony makes the player character want to find a way to abolish the practice altogether. It even drove Roshia to Go Mad from the Revelation.