Dix was surprised that the first day of training involved so little actual training. And by little, he meant none. Instead his first whole day on Mantra was spent locked up in a room with an elf and a dwarf. While he had had a couple dreams that sounded similar in his life, the elf and dwarf in his dreams were female. And the day was spent learning each other, not learning about the infinite ways to die if you don’t have a single defensive skill.
“Damn it, boy! You need to have something to soak a hit, even if it’s just Iron Skin! I know mages with more defense than you seem to want. And for the last time, there is no gods damned Dodge skill, so don’t even try that bullshit again!”
Thunk’s yelling aside, they had actually made quite a bit of progress with finding skills that Dix thought might be useful for him. Some were even defense adjacent, although mostly passives that would get snatched up by Devouring Stride. After hearing about how the class options were divided between four archetypes, Dix had decided to try and acquire skills from each grouping in an attempt to force the system to give him the class he wanted. The fact that it also would make him into the hybrid he wanted to be had nothing to do with it. There were a number of problems with this approach, however.
The first, and probably most difficult problem, was between how Dix fought and the existence of tank classes. The vast majority of the tanking classes, meaning all but two, were more of the block or soak damage types, neither of which really fit with Dix’s highly mobile combat style. Of the two that didn’t fit that mold, one was the evasion tank monk. While some of the skills they used could be theoretically useful to him, the restrictions to use the skills were not something he was willing to meet. To use them he needed to go hand to hand, no weapons, and also not be wearing armor heavier than basic cloth. Those two things sounded like a death sentence to him. The other class that didn’t fit the basic mold was something he didn’t meet the requirements for the skills. The class was called Cursed One, and to get any of its skills, you needed to be cursed. A cursed weapon could get you the class, but to use it you needed to keep using that weapon. Jewelry was the common answer to the problem of how to acquire a curse of your own, but would limit the number of enchanted items you could have on your person, another restriction Dix didn’t like.
The second problem, which likely should have been the first major problem, but was pushed down the list by Dix’s vehement denial of almost all forms of tanking, was the number of skills a person could have. New classers were expected to have anywhere from twenty to thirty class based skills, with those with higher numbers being more likely to actually get the class they were aiming for. Many theorized that the difficulty in gaining more skills from a class before you actually got it, meant that you were not actually suited to that class. With Dix’s haphazard approach to gaining a class that might not even exist, they settled on a fair split. Or at least Thunk and Error did. Dix, seeing the variation in numbers of classes in each archetype, decided to weigh his skills similarly. That left him with four skills from tank and support archetypes each, and eight from each of the damage styles. Twenty four would have been the number they aimed for, but Error had an idea that, if it worked, would make a huge difference, but required one more skill. A crafting skill. Intrigued, Dix agreed to at least listen when the time came.
A third problem presented itself when Thunk and Error tried to teach Dix Mental Connection. With his strangely divided mind, they were having problems connecting to the correct sections. After a few tries left each of them reeling with emotions beyond their control, or the strange alien nature of his subconscious, they eventually managed to make the right connection. Some discussion afterwards led to the discovery that he wouldn’t really need to learn many other skills associated with Mental Connection if he could figure out how to forcibly connect different portions of his mind to his enemies. Apparently if they were disorienting enough to unsettle people of such higher levels, they were strong enough to be an actual mental attack against things closer to his own level. Notes were made to come back to the topic at a later time.
Almost unmentioned was the main issue of using a hybrid style in the first place. With a significantly lower stat count dedicated to a specific type of damage and combat his ability to hurt something would slowly start to lose out to their defenses. As a small portion of a counter to this issue Dix had agreed to train his stats to the maximum before he got his class. This would be particularly important at level zero, as later levels only added a couple of possible points of growth to each stat based on the highest level they had reached when the level was gained. If the maximum possible growth for level zero was ten points, and he only trained up to nine before leveling, then that last point would be forever out of his reach. Considering how he would be trying to stretch every single point he earned from level ups for the rest of his life, he needed to get as many “free” points as he could. Besides, he had a year before his deadline was up, so he had some time at least.
Finally the discussion got down to what he already had, so that they would know what he needed. At the moment Dix had eleven skills that were sitting in his class based section. Of those, five fit in magical damage, two support, and four for physical damage. There was a bit of a question about Enhanced Strike as it could possibly be a tank skill as well. Just because they were there to take hits didn’t mean they had no attacks. Neither of them were prepared to cover the magical damage section for the three more skills he needed there, but the two trainers knew a mage who could be persuaded to help. As for support, Thunk figured he had it covered. As a priest he had spent a lot of time in groups hanging out in the back with the other supports. During down time they had spent a lot of it talking and swapping skill information, so the dwarf had gathered a fair amount of information over the years. As for the other damage archetype, well, there were few people more experienced in physical damage than Error, so he would be in charge of that section. Surprisingly, he could also do tanking, as a large part of his assassination work had been trying to kill tank classes quickly. To do so, he had had to study each and every one before he could figure out a way through their defenses, leading to a fairly extensive understanding of how they worked.
The discussion bounced around quite a bit after that. Most frequent were the pros and cons of different classes, what their role really was versus what it should be, and how they were used and misused in groups. While Dix enjoyed all the humorous anecdotes, he realized that the discussion was mostly useless for him. He didn’t need to know about the classes, he needed to know about their skills. While the other two talked he started trying to think of what he actually needed from whatever skills he gained next.
The first thing he did was go over the fights he had against the rats in the dungeon. He had done fairly well once he got rid of his duster, but there were many things that could have gone better. There were a number of times where certain types of skills could have been very useful. As he went over the types of skills he wanted to have, he realized something. Nothing he was dreaming about was anything fancy, impressive, or could be considered a trump card of any kind. He was briefly concerned at this lack of powerful skills, but eventually he came to a different understanding.
He wasn’t trying to fill up his limited skill slots with the most powerful skills in existence. Powerful skills had high resource costs, huge amounts of time between casts, and were flashy as all hell, painting a giant target on your forehead. He didn’t want any of that. What he wanted were the most efficient, reliable, and easily used skills. Dix looked at the skills he already had and realized he wanted a bunch more just like them.
He wasn’t a big flashy kind of person, what he was was consistent. His pride wasn’t in doing great once, but in always being quietly competent at whatever he was doing. At his old work he wasn’t the guy who put up big numbers month to month. Each month he was somewhere between second and fourth. Not once was he ranked first on one of the monthly reports. But! Every year. Every single year, he took first in the yearly reports. And not by a small amount. He was consistently forty percent higher on all of his numbers than whoever took second. That was what he wanted now, and he knew just what he needed to get it done.
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Thunk had brought out a couple of books normally used for new arrivals that didn’t get such focused training. The books covered the defining skills of each class to give people an idea of what each class was really about, and how it did its job. As he grabbed the nearest of the books he focused on the argument between his two ostensible trainers. They were currently arguing about which types of monsters made the best pets for Tamers, which would have been an interesting conversation to listen to if they were talking about anything other than what foods to feed to which pets to make the worst gas. Apparently it was a common gag to play on Tamers, and had been upgraded to an artform worthy of coming to blows over throughout time.
Shaking his head in amusement at the childishness of the two older men, Dix looked at the book he had grabbed. Out of the four on the table, he had grabbed the magical damage one. Shrugging he dug into the content, looking for the things he needed. Surprisingly, the very first skill mentioned was one that he definitely wanted. Called Runeweaving, it was a wizard skill that helped with making runes faster, as well as modifying them. Right now he could whip up a couple of bolt spells pretty quick, or a wind blade in a few seconds, but that kept one hand out of commission while fighting. Runeweaving wasn’t a big flashy skill. It was a passive that just made all of his spell casting easier and faster. It was exactly what he needed. Grabbing some scratch paper from the table he noted down the skill and the recommended ways to get it.
Quite excited now, he started flipping through the book, searching out skills. His excitement quickly ebbed. The book was a strange mix of disappointment and amazing disappointment. He had a spell called Fire Bolt, so why would he want a skill that was exactly the same thing. Even reading the description didn’t help. All of the upgrades that it mentioned the skill got were things he was sure he could do with the spell once he could really modify the runes. As best he could figure, it was a skill for lazy, unimaginative, stupid, asshats. The amazing part of the disappointment was exactly how many of the spells he knew of were skills. The answer was all of them.
He did find a section that included some of the spells he knew of that could make them into skills that were actually useful. The Summoner class could turn all of the elemental summoning spells he had been gifted during his magic test into skills. For the first time, he saw actual benefits to making a spell into a skill. Summoners could not only keep their pets without a duration, they could also store them in various parts of their body or soul, much like he had done with his Risen, but the Summoner pets granted benefits. Resistances were the main one, but also a number of utility options. Waterwalking, waterbreathing, stat increases like Empowered gave, regeneration, the list went on. Each different element gave a variety of different bonuses. Looking through them all, Dix was impressed that just by summoning all of their different pets and storing them in their body, a Summoner gained a super Empower. With the right combinations of elements their physical stats would be doubled, they’d be tougher than a tank in plate armor, faster than most rogues, shoot elemental attacks from their hands and eyes, and fly. They’d basically be superheroes.
The down side was that the book wasn’t written in such a way that people would notice that you could do that, and what little his trainers had said about the class made him think they kept their pets out all the time. Dix could understand the draw of having your own army of pets to do battle for you, but was unsure it could compare to being a superhero. Maybe it just depended on how the Summoner felt that day. If it was him, he’d just rotate back and forth. You never knew when being a superhero would be more useful than having an army of minions to do your bidding, or the reverse.
Superheroes versus armies aside, Dix did find a couple good options for himself under Summoner. He was also actually rather tempted to just fill up all his skills with summons, and take Summoner. When they said it could cross archetypes, they were talking about the pets, but Dix was convinced they could do it even better with all of their pets stored. Before he tried going too far down the hybrid class hole, he decided he should ask a couple of questions of his trainers, or their mage buddy. If it wouldn’t work for him, maybe down the line he’d make a friend who needed help understanding how awesome their class could really be.
Moving on, he finally tracked down the Necromancy section of the book. He was quite interested in discovering what other skills the dreaded class had in store. Once more reality was a sad comparison. Necromancer was a rather loose class for a whole series of mostly atrocious skills. The class was more about using pieces of bodies to attack, than armies of minions. Quite a large section of the chapter on Necromancers was dedicated to the construction of abominations. Created from modified flesh and bone, these disgusting creatures were the shock troops of traditional Necromancers. Tank and physical damage combined, most Necromancers would have one or two of these monstrosities with them at all times to keep everything else off of them while they whittled down the enemy by manipulating the bodies of their abominations into ranged attacks. When the fight was done, they would add the bodies of the slain into their abominations. These sickening things were not Risen. They had no mind of their own, and were more puppet than creature. The book made it clear that raising the dead was actually pretty rare, despite being the thing most talked about concerning the class.
Amongst the rather disturbing chapter, Dix did find another skill that he would have liked to have if it didn’t go over his self imposed limit of two skills per class. Undeterred by his own rules, he wrote down the skill and its recommended learning methods, just in case he had an extra skill slot. It was the other half of a skill he already had, Touch of Death. Instead of stealing life, it stole mana. There were actually a number of other aspects of the skill that interested him as well, as it talked mainly about how mana worked. There were details on how mana interacted with the world, people, and souls. How best to move it from one place to another, the correct method to flow mana through your pathways, and how to absorb mana to speed up your mana regeneration. He hadn’t even known such things were possible. Realizing that the section was both incredibly interesting, as well as longer than he could take usable notes on, he surreptitiously tore the pages he needed from the book while Thunk was in the middle of a particularly loud tirade.
Necromancer was the last class discussed in the book, so Dix replaced it on the table and stole another. This time he had found the Support book. It was quite a bit smaller than the one for magical damage, but he was undeterred. He only needed two skills from support classes as he had Empower already, as well as, Mental Connection. With the ability to turn it into a form of mental attack with enough practice, training, and possible skill evolutions Dix decided it would fit in well with his skill set. With Mental Connection in mind, he quickly thumbed through to the section on the psychic crowd control guys. Unsurprisingly, the class was just called Psycher. According to the book, the class was powerful, but had a number of weaknesses. Specifically undead. Apparently dead things didn’t actually have minds controlling them, they were just corrupted souls, meaning mental attacks were useless. There was still one skill of theirs that Dix scribbled down. It wasn’t powerful to start with, but much like Mental Connection, it had great growth possibilities while still being useful from the start.
Dix was hoping that he would be able to regain his healing spells by copying the runes he needed from someone else, but figured taking a peek at the healer section wouldn’t do him any harm. He was wrong, it did a lot of harm, mentally. The section on healers, other than the rambling section describing the differences between priests, druids, and arcane healers, was the shortest he had yet run across. Priests were flat out given their skills by their gods before they took The Assignment, and druids had to go on some sort of nature based trial that sounded suspiciously like a drug fueled walkabout in the forest. Or Burning Man if they were near a desert. The only useful section was Arcane Healers, but all their skills were spells he had seen before, with a couple of small additions that he was uninterested in, and some barriers. They did have one other skill that actually interested him, but only if he could corrupt it into something useful. Arcane Healers learned through study and understanding rather than weird mystical powers implanting information in their heads. Because of that, one of their most used skills was Diagnosis. Essentially it was a skill for examining people to see what was wrong with them. Dix was hoping that he could use a similar tactic and gain a different skill, one that helped him spot weaknesses, and understand the anatomy of monsters. It was hard to kill some sort of rabbit wolf hybrid creature when you didn’t know where its heart, tendons, or arteries were. The scratching of his pen was a strange counterpart to the vicious, bloodthirsty smile on his face.