Ultimately, gladiator seemed to be a dead end, at least until he would be able to open up more ‘char:’ skills as he currently didn’t have enough to use. He had six available, but only two were unlocked to be freely used with any skill he desired. Those two were already in pretty important spots: polyglot and double learning. He wondered about using the ‘char:’ skill currently making double learning available to him permanently and applying it to allow any weapon. He wasn’t sure how the system would act once he became fully acclimatized to the world and whether or not he could still strong arm keeping the weapons in hand. The other ‘char:’ skills he had were locked to skills that he worried that he wouldn’t be able to actually practice or use and thus actively level them to skill level one to free them up. These were locked to a fifty percent boost to learning and three ‘char:’ skills in the believer job: enhanced magic, enhanced magic defense, and enhanced wisdom. How do you ‘do enhanced wisdom’ to make it level up faster? Joe ultimately became frustrated as he couldn’t figure out what he could do to increase their skills faster. Even double learning, while he had the specialist job equipped, only went up to two percent. He still had ninety eight to go! And that was with the insane amount of learning he actually did have and leveling that job to twenty. If he was getting one percent per ten levels… he would need a butt ton of levels!
In the end, he was left frustrated and very worried once he saw how poor gladiator was as a job and that he wouldn’t be able to freely use all his combat skills and weapons. I guess… I’ll have to seriously consider using the goblin king rings… that’s.. about the only useful thing right now.. but… Joe sighed at the thought and quickly moved up taking on the goblin king quite a few more times on his to do list. If he could get a half dozen rings and just unlock a couple weapons that way, it might be much more useful and better for his equipment than if he kept the gladiator job equipped, even in a secondary job. Which he did, securing another six rings that week as he was able to take on the goblin king three times during the week.
Even without the negatives of the gladiator, he really didn’t want to lock two sub job slots he had to two jobs: gladiator and a priest job. He would have to have one of the jobs as a priest job anyway, if he wanted to easily change jobs regularly, which meant he only had two slots to fill with jobs at the moment: the main job and one sub job slot. If he could keep both those open, then he could level two jobs per day, doubling his leveling efficiency once again.
He ended up choosing to level mercenary, duelist, soldier, horseman, and warrior as well on top of gladiator, getting all of them to level thirty easily enough, but he didn’t go into swordsman, staff warrior, thrower, axman, hammerman, maceman, and pugilist at all as it seemed to be jobs specific to a weapon whereas the others appeared to offer a more general combat skill. Despite that, they didn’t offer much at all, being as limited, in their own way, as the jobs that he ended up skipping.
The mercenary did let him use a sword, shield, bow and armor, but didn’t give him any way to use a spear. He did get another strange skill called bounty that appeared to allow him to pursue and make a job out of bounties.
Mercenary Skills
Sword: Able to wield a sword.
Shield: Able to wield a shield.
Bounty +: Gain extra experience and wealth when taking a bounty. Gain a bonus to skills, tracking, and actions need for pursuing bounties.
Bow & Armor: Able to wear and use armor and wield a bow.
The duelist ended up being exactly as it sounded, giving him skills to use a sword and buckler while basically being flashy. He gained a skill that increased his attack and attack speed as well as a bonus in one versus one combat and flourish. That last skill was a skill that was absolutely worthless and infuriated Joe to explosive anger when he read it, leaving him storming through the dungeon in utter anger even as he growled at the dungeon around him. It did take a bit of time to calm himself down as he finally let the idiocy go but he was becoming quite depressed and upset with what he was finding so far.
Duelist Skills
Buckler: Able to wield a buckler.
Fencer - Sword: Able to wield a rapier.
Attack +: A miniscule bonus to attack.
One on One ++: A tiny bonus to combat against a single opponent.
Attack Speed ++: A tiny bonus to combat speed.
Flourish: A skill to flourish your weapon.
Horseman and warrior, while not infuriating, were almost as depressing. Horseman let him use swords while riding a horse. His second and third skill were even more useless and depressing. The second was called rider and the third was called reins, which really made Joe wonder how any horseman could ever become a real horseman if the skill to use reins didn’t become available until level thirty, which meant, for most people, left them unable to use reins until they were almost forty years old!
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Horseman Skills
Sword: Able to wield a sword.
Rider: Able to ride a mount.
Reins: Able to use reins for your mount.
Warrior, like horseman, proved similar, giving sword, shield, and basic armor skill, in that order, every ten levels. Both jobs were crippling, to be honest.
Warrior Skills
Sword: Able to wield a sword.
Shield: Able to wield a shield.
Basic Armor: Able to use basic armors.
Soldier was interesting in itself as well, offering four skills but all were rather unimportant. Three seemed obvious, offering the use of the sword and a minor bonus to attack and strength. The last one, disciplined, was an odd one and he did take the time to study it a bit more carefully. This… could be amazing! Or a bomb… but the extra will power to accomplish a task to improve myself… especially… wonder if I could… find a convoluted way to make almost ANYTHING a self-improvement! Wow… greater discipline and will to focus and get it down… this… The more he thought about it, the more certain that it was a pretty amazing skill!
Soldier Skills
Sword: Able to wield a sword.
Disciplined +: Gain a ten percent increase towards will and an increased bonus to effort when effort is put towards self-improvement.
Attack +: A miniscule bonus to attack.
Strength +: A miniscule bonus to strength.
Scout proved to be a better job, on the whole, giving him three stealth skills and one garbled skill that left Joe very curious, now that he’d found the unique and powerful skill sub job that became available or unlocked with the gifted job. Another one… hmm… gonna have to find the unlock as well? Or something like that? He didn’t know what it was, but made sure to make note of it very clearly and boldly in his notebook in the section he'd set aside to keep track of these anomalies.
Scout Skills
Stealth +: A miniscule bonus to stealth.
Hidden: A skill to help create a location to hide from others.
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Camouflage: A skill to help in creating a disguise that blends in to the surroundings.
By the time he’d gone through these seven combat jobs, he was starting to become quite depressed by what he was seeing with the combat jobs. They did really give a good boost to his physical resistances, so he wasn’t complaining, but they were very poor. He was almost about to just count them as a loss and just use the decade and a half of training he’d gotten from home for his support as he’d done quite well with just that so far. Maybe he would do a bit more to try to get his physical resistances up, but other than that, the combat line of jobs were proving disheartening.
He therefore decided to try to open up the party line of jobs. He was a bit torn, wishing to look at the crafting jobs available, but that required time and resources, as well as some kind of home where he could set up tools and work. While he was almost willing to settle down and acclimatize to the world by naturalizing his stats to the current standards and losing his Earth stats forever, he was still on a deadline unless he chose to do exactly that. So, he decided to go for the party line of jobs as that at least helped the others and possibly even himself while also not killing his combat time in the mornings. Although… maybe I could use the afternoons for crafting? Joe considered this for a bit but again decided to maintain the source of his growth, freedom, and wealth: fighting monsters. So, he went with the party line of jobs, which opened with the first job, partier.
Partier proved interesting and very, very good! He was able to now create groups of two or three members, which was excellent, but still wasn’t exactly useful as he needed to be able to make a group of at least four, instead. He did get two other very nice things, however. He gained another subjob, now having three available slots to fill, and another skill called party communicate. It took a bit of time to fiddle with it and figure it out, but was soon able to send messages to everyone in the group, which excited Joe immensely until he realized it was limited to purely chat messages and everyone on the whole planet was illiterate!
Partier Skills
Grouper (2): Can make a group of two.
+1 Sub job: Secondary unlock for a sub job.
Grouper (3): Can make a group of three.
Party Communicate: Can send a text message to a party member.
Worthless pile of utter … Aahhh!! Joe’s anger at that proved even greater than when he unlocked and leveled gladiator, finding himself unable to contain himself. His anger left Garnedell and Zilnek very silent in their beds when he began shouting in the early evening back at their room in the inn. The boys had stood and stared at him silently at some point and when he found them all staring at him with fear and concern, Joe finally snapped back to himself and left both of them behind to walk through the streets in the early morning alone while also telling them everything was fine. It took quite some time to be able to calm down. Wandering the streets late in the night turned out to be pretty useless so he returned back to his bedroom. He wasn’t able to sleep, however, for a very, very long time.
Despite the utter disappointment, he was able to further his career in the Saga priesthood, able to unlock and level the Saga monk and chaplain to thirty, which gave Joe a very welcome surprise; he gained the change main job skill. Of course, Joe was excited to see this, and then became more depressed as he realized that he was probably unable to change his sub jobs as the skill specifically said main job. Despite his certainty of failure, he tried anyway, and found himself unable to change his sub jobs, a quick note in glowing blue popping up to let him know he couldn’t change sub jobs.