Recently Level Up! has released their newest MMORPG, RohanPH and Filipino gamers have been flocking to it ever since Closed Beta. RohanPH serves up some common and unique game features that has captured many Filipino gamers' attention, ranging from your basic human knight class to your very unique Dragon race known as "Dekans". RohanPH also has a "refining system" on which players can manipulate the stat requirements of the items to benefit their stat build, this is one of Rohan's features that makes it unique. Instead of basing stat builds to the requirements of their equipment, players can do the opposite, which in term gives Rohan's classes different "builds" that does not rely heavily on equipments.
















Now we know what Rohan has to offer, lets focus on what it FAILED to offer. To start things off, RohanPH's tagline: "Vengeance is always an option", you might think that this is a hardcore PvP (player vs player) game, but it's not. How can you say that a game is PvP based if there is a penalty on attacking other players in open space? Rohan has a built in system on which a player's damage is REDUCED to a certain percentage when attacking other players, aside from the player's defense, so there are TWO variables that is reducing a player's damage to each other. Some Rohan fanatics might argue that Rohan's "Assassination Mode" paves the way to a hardcore pvp system, it doesn't. Rohan's pvp feature "Assassination Mode" on which players name is hidden and killing other players without any penalty comes with 2 disadvantage, first you have to pay a large sum of in-game currency to change and go back to "Assassination Mode", second is you can not be invited to other parties. In other words, if you you randomly attack a player alone, chances are your mediocre damage due to the game's fixed reduction will barely scratch your victim's HP and most likely other players will gang up and kill you instead. If you ask me, Rohan is more like a "controlled" pvp environment instead of an open space hardcore pvp game, the only place you can really get some good action is in Township Battles (guild wars),other than that pvp in other places boils down to a bore, and believe me, I've played ample amounts of games that claims to be a "PvP" game, and Rohan isn't one of them.

Rohan also offers an ample amount of quest and a system that updates you to the location where you can start your quests. Although Rohan offers a ton of quests, majority of them are just repeats with a different or same reward. Quests taken from the human starting map is the same as the quest taken from other race's starting map, which means same monsters to kill, same xp reward but different item. This wouldn't be a problem if other race can't visit each others starting map, but they can, so imagine taking the same quest from 6 different maps, killing the same mob and completing 6 quests at the same time. Aside from recycled quests, some quests that sound simple enough to do requires you to run long distances then go back again. Distances from simple quests wouldn't be so much pain if the reward was worth it, but most of the time you can combine better weapons/equipments than the reward from quests.

Aside from the "PvP" system and quest system, one major flaw that drew me and Reema away from playing Rohan any further is the game's obvious favoritism towards the Dekans or "Dragon" race. Never have I played a game wherein almost all class skills are rolled into one without any consequences, usually when game developers do this, the race that has the power/skill of all races have a major weakness, this does NOT apply in Rohan. If you look at the skill tree of the "Dragons" they have everything the other races have to offer, high defense and high damage or fast attack speed (they can manipulate their weapon into either slow but painful, or fast but consistent) they can heal others or themselves, transform and they even have invisibility! This all-in-one race has the ability to sacrifice percentage of their Health, amplify it by a certain percent and deal it to the enemy! Even after sacrificing their Health for damage, they can heal themselves so it really doesn't matter because their ability to manipulate their Health and Mana makes them almost invulnerable in the hands of a pro-gamer. The Dekans might have benefited from the game's design but one race suffered from it, that race is the Dhan or "Assassins". These two races are the favorite ones in Rohan international because their skills are made to kill other players, so it would seem. These "Assassins" are supposed to be player killers, and their skills do prove it, the only problem is, majority of their skills are BUFFS! Never, and I mean NEVER have I played a game where the "Assassin" class has such a limited supply of offensive skills! Dhans have so many buffs that their mana pool can barely accomodate them without the help of mana potions. The lack of offensive skills and stun skills makes it even harder for an "Assassin" to kill someone, I mean the only way you can kill is to attack your enemy, with normal attacks, you just have to make your character attack an enemy and watch them die or run. If your enemy decides to fight, all you have to do is watch. There're no buttons to press because your skill are full of buffs and buffs can't damage your enemies, if they run, just watch your character chase them, because Dhans can't stun or root their enemies, buffs don't do that, do you get my point?! Also...remember the fixes percentage deduction when attacking other players? Let's just say Dhans specialize on LOW but fast damage, the only way you can deal massive damage is through critical damage, but that's random. So, low base damage + fixed game reduction + enemy armor defense...if you can't follow where I'm going with this then, good for you, haha!

To close things up, I would like to clear out that we haven't played RohanPH, but we played Rohan International even before we knew that there was going to be a RohanPH. All pictures used are our personal experience from Rohan International. You might notice the Dhan's armors are a bit low level, that's because I refuse to post pictures of our high level armors for the fact that my character looked like a gay ballet dancer.

I hope you enjoyed my first post at our blog, I plan to review unusual MMORPGs that failed to reach the lime light in my future posts, for now I will leave you with this funny pic of me and Reema way back in Rohan International.