Is it just me, or does Red High seem to employ Rubberband difficulty?

It's really strange. So I transferred over the cape and gloves from my Mech over. I was expecting to finish the Red Leaf dungeon much faster, with a range of up to 23k, up from ~20k. For some reason I seemed to take LONGER to clear the dungeon. Did a few runs with the more powerful gear, and barely finished off with a minute left. I then took off some of the gear, lost about 27 weapon attack. I ran out of Warrior Elixirs from NLC, so I lost a net total of 39 weapon attack before I re-entered the Red Leaf dungeon.

So what happens? The exact same dungeon, I'm clearing it FASTER. I just got off with about 4 minutes left, meaning a 6 minute clear time, compared to the previous 8-9 minute clears.

Add in my Mech and Mihile, who had crap for scrolled weapons, are clearing the dungeon faster than my Bucc with clean gear more or less.

What the heck is going on here?

I know it goes by level tiers, (Not sure what, When i started RLH on my 192 phantom everything was already 200,) But I dont know if wep attack has a factor or not.

Thats some mario kart pomegranate goin on right there.

Did you have either of the survival stages that contributed to a longer time? (i.e. Nurses and Assassins)

Interesting, i thought rlh was level-based, since at 19x i was missing every now and then, but could their other stats be based on range? Hmm

O.o uh...not..sure what to say here other than it takes me 5 minutes on average to clear the dungeon at 168.

Red Leaf High has so many variables. As Untradeable pointed out, it scales based on your character's level. In my opinion, the low level scaling is ridiculously easy and fast, but once you start clearing 4th job and beyond, it only gets much harder.

There's also the randomization in what stages you get; two of them which force you to stay in the map for a set amount of time (60 secs with nurses, 120 secs with assassins). I typically clear the mob stages (bellflowers, undead) faster than "mini boss" stages (Kyrin, Dark Lord, Boss Kumi, etc). Then, of course, how fast you click Boss Kumi to put it your friendship points, and entering portals to advance.

Yep.

Edit: Oh, and let's not forget the crush stage (Mar, Laya, Shumi). One of the 4 options you choose lets you advance, so it might take time to get the "correct" option. :l

That doesn't match my experience.
My main, which is the best equipped, has the easiest time and the fastest clears.
My 18x bishop, who was consistently running out of time, got much better once I upgraded its gear. Now it can even clear with the two time-wasting stages, if I'm efficient with the other stages.
Both that bishop and my 18x paladin do a lot better when I buff them (mostly Echo and MW32) than when I don't.

Edit: Oh, and let's not forget the crush stage (Mar, Laya, Shumi). One of the 4 options you choose lets you advance, so it might take time to get the "correct" option. :l

Er, What I do for that is stand next to them and spam NPC Chat button until it works. It's seriously faster than anything else.

Er, What I do for that is stand next to them and spam NPC Chat button until it works. It's seriously faster than anything else.

Yes.

On the nurse stage I just avoid the brown haired nurse. On the assassin stage I stand in the middle with tornado. @_@~

I guess I may just be getting a string of terrible stages then. I'll keep testing with and without my major +attack gears (gloves/cape/rings). Maybe I need to get much stronger gear so the damage difference is even bigger so I can get definite results. I have no strong potential lines like +6%/+9% STR. X_x

Also, thanks for the NPC chat tip, Untradeable. I'll be spamming that button like mad at those stages.

Mostly those 2 timed stages contribute to slow runs... Phys. Immunity (Spirit of Rock, Postulates with Balrog) and Seduce (Mu Gong) can also be a peach, especially if Mu Gong is a late stage and has powered up enough to kill you in a few hits.

Mostly those 2 timed stages contribute to slow runs... Phys. Immunity (Spirit of Rock, Postulates with Balrog) and Seduce (Mu Gong) can also be a peach, especially if Mu Gong is a late stage and has powered up enough to kill you in a few hits.

Is it just physical immunity? I did RLH on my main for long enough to get the cheapest totem, and I vaguely feel like it -- a mage -- also encountered the problem of occasionally doling out nothing but 1s at Spirit of Rock. I could be misremembering, though, since I also leveled two non-mage characters to 70 recently.

Is it just physical immunity? I did RLH on my main for long enough to get the cheapest totem, and I vaguely feel like it -- a mage -- also encountered the problem of occasionally doling out nothing but 1s at Spirit of Rock. I could be misremembering, though, since I also leveled two non-mage characters to 70 recently.

Spirit of Rock has both Physical and Magical Immunities (he can only use one at a time, though).
I think Postulates with Balrogs only has Darkness (Blind), though, not Physical Immunity.

Yes.

On the nurse stage I just avoid the brown haired nurse. On the assassin stage I stand in the middle with tornado. @_@~

I hate these timed stages. Makes you go so much slower. Imagine having to deal with that with 15 characters

Nurse stage = use Dark Sight/Infiltrate, spam CSB/SSK or just plain jump around. I simply hate this stage when it's like... the 10th or so. You simply have to pot every hit you take.
Assassin stage = stay afk for 2 min while sitting at the top of the room. There's no point in killing anything because it makes no difference in the timer and killing them wields you 1 EXP anyway

EDIT: about the time needed to clear all the 12 stages: well, I can safely say that it can be pretty easy even if you don't have a lot of gear if you have a high DPS move.

For instance, I can clear it easily (i.e. I don't need to transfer over equips) with some of my chars that use only a CZak, TT medal and a statless weapon whereas I've had pretty bad times with my Bishop, BaM, DrK (and I think my Jett as well, but I haven't really tried that 'cause it's 10x so it has some lower level equips on it all the time but it barely clears it with only a minute to spare) that used that same setup.

I mean, it's so much easier to make it through with a Sair spamming RF than with a struggling DrK with DI/Sacrifice while having the same level of equips on both of them.

The scale of the difficulty is rather easily defined.

The mobs you face will almost always be equal to your level rounded up to the nearest 5. (e.g. - a lvl 122 will usually get lvl 125 mobs. a lvl 130 will get 135)
The damage and toughness of the mobs is scaled according to the Stage number. In other words, it will take you a lot longer to kill a Spirit of Rock at stage 10 than it will at stage 1. Nurses hit you harder in later stages numbers too.
Stage 6 and stage 12 will always be one of the 4 pillars. Every other room is random.

It's very difficult to compare run times with a small sample size. My Corsair can sometimes run through in 6 minutes. Other times he can't make it at all. It greatly depends on whether or not you get hit by things like Seduce at Mu Gong, or weapon cancel at Spirit of Rock. My whole run can be ruined if I get nailed with Blindness at Postulates With Balrogs and I don't have an All-Cure. But I can say that beefing up my gear made a huge difference. I don't find any evidence in the 400+ runs I have done (10 characters every day since the beginning plus 60 keys I have bought) that the mobs scale to your gear and stats. They simply scale to your level and your room number.

I'll take more sample runs then and check. At the moment though, having crappier gear doesn't seem to cripple me that much from completing runs. Maybe having a stronger range gives the enemies slightly more HP, maybe it doesn't. I'll try and find out though since I'm pretty much using this event to cap my Brawler, so it's Red Leaf High everytime I log on.

Easiest way though is if I were to borrow STR gear from a guildie/alliance member in Bellocan, given having 0 +STR% gear and having at least +100% STR should make things noticeable enough to blatantly declare if Red Leaf High does a soft rubber-band difficulty scaling or not.

Spirit of Rock has both Physical and Magical Immunities (he can only use one at a time, though).
I think Postulates with Balrogs only has Darkness (Blind), though, not Physical Immunity.

Oh yeah, it's just Blind. Weakness (no jumping) can also be annoying, esp. when the next boss is standing somewhere high up. Or is the nurses.