Chapter 73 – Hidden Challenge Part 10, Magic Shop

“Um… what happened to the other players that came here?”

“They’re still browsing, in a different realm that you. I have my guests separated so you don’t start brawls left and right. We can’t have people fighting in my shop now, can we?”

I nodded. That made a bit of sense.

Looking around the shop, there were all sorts of items here. Several health potions were tied together with a piece of twine. I picked it up.

[x5 minor health potion]

Price: 1 ticket

There were a lot of food items as well, ranging from small bowls of steaming soup to a giant vat of stew, as well as boar meat sandwiches and fantastical sushi made of fluorescent white fish meat topped off with a heavy cream. No wonder Meat Shield thought that something smelled good here.

To the side, there was cake, savory meat pies, and long skewers of some jelly-like meat.

I was intrigued, but I didn’t come here to waste tickets on food. I looked at the old ghost, who seemed to have begun snoozing while leaning on his cane. After tapping his rice hat, he began to stir.

“Er, um, oh, where was I…” the white bearded man mumbled.

“Do you sell any equipment here? Like weapons and armor?”

“Ehem, yes, but the selection is limited for the preliminary round. We’ll be able to restock with more items later,” the old ghost said. “Follow me, weapons and armor are in the back…”

The ghost let me through a curtain into another section of the shop.

Axes, bows, knives, swords, half swords, cannons, lances, maces, nunchucks, scimitars, tomes… this place’s selection was already enormous. I was more interested in armor though.

So the thing about armor in this game was that any class could equip any armor unless it was restricted to certain classes only. So technically, you could see a mage in full platemail. However, this became more rare as the average player level rose, because classes generally synergized the most with their own class’s equipment. And for higher level armor, there was a debuff associated with equipping heavy armor specifically if you were not a heavy armor wearing class.

For instance, a level ten mage with iron platemail wouldn’t face penalties, but a level 90 mage with mithril platemail would face some stiff penalties that could include intelligence debuffs or restricted mana usage.

But a level 90 warrior could easily equip level 90 mage cloth armor without problems. Not that they would want to, though… After all, most classes with access to heavy armor or light-heavy armor would use it.

I looked up my thief class to confirm what armor types I could wear.

Cloth, light, or medium armor. So the heaviest armor I could wear was medium armor, such as brigadines or chainmail. I also needed to make sure that whatever armor I chose didn’t inhibit my movement to the point that it was detrimental.

Right now, I had [Sorcerer’s Tattered Dark Robes], [Crown of the Forgotten King], and [Rain Boots] equipped. Sitting in my inventory were [Iron Platebody Set] and [Thief’s Hood].

Right now, all of my armor besides [Crown of the Forgotten King] was pretty shit and needed to be updated. Most of the stuff was bought on discount from Evelyn’s shop in Talos all those months ago, anyway.

The selection here was eye poppingly enticing, with rare armor that would be a pain in the ass to find in the regular game, on sale for tickets. I know I said before that stats didn’t matter all too much in Eclipse, so by that train of thought armor wouldn’t be that important either. But armor, especially good armor, could make or break a character. Good armor was a physical bulwark with high durability that could withstand a torrent of damage, without much input or need to micromanage from the user.

The only downside was that you needed to be able to adapt your combat style to the type of armor you were wearing. A heavily armored tank was not able to move or react as fast as an assassin wearing cloth armor. But on the flip side, a heavily armored tank could shrug off [Backstabs] that would kill other classes with ease.

As I already found out, a well equipped heavily armored shieldbearer could block most of my attacks from both my poleaxe and dimension ripper, reducing their damage to the tens instead of the hundreds I was used to when attacking unarmored targets. The only real way to combat them effectively was to get a melee range thunderbolt off, but that was a bit tricky to pull off.

Weapons were also very valuable, and a good weapon could go a long way. I was pleased with my adamantite poleaxe, which already held its own in many situations.

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But my robes and boots could be tossed easily, since they were really bad by all measures. The boots were only there for a small amount of insulation against thunderbolt recoil, since they had a bit of electric resistance, and the robes were just there for the 20 magic resistance that they provided.

I browsed some of the rare armors for sale.

[Mithril Platebody]

Rare

Heavy Armor

30 tickets

A fine set of chest armor, but my class couldn’t equip heavy armor without substantial penalties, and 30 tickets was well out of my price range for today at least.

[Mirror Cuirass]

Mythic

Medium-Heavy Armor

150 tickets

Also out of my weight class. And damn, these prices were exorbitant… seventy five two ticket kills for a chest armor. But it was mythic tier, so it made sense.

[Steel Thief Gauntlets β]

Rare

Light-Medium Armor

40 tickets

It seemed to be a β version of normal steel thief gauntlets, with a grapple function that was propelled by a mixture of engineering and magic, and costed mana to use. I had my eye on this item, since it could be used to reposition to higher elevation, which was something [Shadow] couldn’t do.

As I walked further down the aisle, a truly nonsensical weapon displayed on the wall and glowing with divine energy caught my eye.

[Poseidon’s Trident]

Divine

Polearm

10,000 tickets

10 premium tickets

“Shopkeeper,” I said to the elderly ghost. “What are premium tickets?”

“Oh, yes… premium tickets are tickets you can earn when taking down named marks. Usually they are rewarded for hunting world-level monsters like dragons.

“Gotcha.”

The trident’s tier was actually the same as my spring water potions, which was a bit strange but also made sense since they were both god related items. Maybe the tiers were not directly correlated with an item’s strength, like I was used to in RPGs. For example, Thor’s underwear was probably also considered divine tier.

As I continued to browse the armors, a more subdued item caught my attention.

[Reliable Brigandine +]

Rare

Medium Armor

3 tickets

It was a brigandine armor that was a bit better than its regular version, since this was a hidden challenge shop item and even regular items were available in their special plus version. This was an immediate upgrade to my chest armor that gave me a lot of physical bulk at the expense of a bit of mobility. It was a reasonable tradeoff. However, after doing the calculations earlier today, I decided to hold off on even a three ticket purchase until after the culling.

I put this item on my wishlist. With more physical defense, I could stand and deliver against physical damage users. And plus, this armor was considered a thief class armor unlike the robes I was wearing right now.

[Reliable Pants +]

Rare

Medium Armor

2 tickets

Another component of the reliable set of basic + armor, I put it on my wish list along with a few other items in the same set.

Maybe having a shield would be nice too. I could see people on the forums saying that thieves aren’t supposed to use shields, but I personally was never a stickler for basing my decisions on what was supposed to or not supposed to happen.

My philosophy was simple– if it works, it works. Results were king, and if a game somehow lended itself to healers using bows and mages using heavy armor, then I would jump on board as long as the strategies produced results. To hell with people on the forums who had preconceived notions of what was or wasn’t supposed to work based on their inability to see the reality of a situation if that reality didn’t conform with their past gaming experience and idea of right and wrong.

With a big mental middle finger to all those noisy idiots, I defiantly walked to the shields on display near the shield rack and checked out the options. But thieves aren’t supposed to use shields, shields are for tanks– Yeah, and I’m sure your mother wasn’t supposed to have you either stringcheeseboy69, but we all know how that went.

Chuckling and shaking my head in embarrassment a bit at my imaginary online jostling, I picked up a steel shield to see what it was like to be a shield tank.

Ugh, this was really heavy. I mean, I don’t know what I was expecting, seeing as how the tower shield was almost the size of a door. Not something that fit my playstyle, that was for sure.

If I were to use a shield, it would have to be on the lighter end of the spectrum, able to block a blow here or there, like the level 86 orc’s melee attacks from earlier which dealt about two hundred damage to me.

I’d need practice with it as well. Larger shields didn’t require too much finesse to use, but smaller shields were almost like weapons in the way they needed to be aimed to successfully deflect quick sword swings or projectiles like arrows. It wasn’t like I could just pick up a small shield and instantly have Captain America level shield control.

So smaller shields seemed like a bad choice as well, especially to pick up in this stage of a competition. But wait, maybe I was discounting large shields too much… After all, what kind of playstyle would emerge if a large shieldbearing polexe user had access to [Shadow] and [Love Whip]?

I decided to try it out. After all, quick swapping equipment seemed to be emerging in Eclipse Online’s meta, and the witch from the four man party earlier switched from illusionist robes to witch robes almost instantaneously. The devs might have to patch out quick equipment swaps in the future.

Maybe it was time to invent a tactic called shield swapping. I put the [Steel Tower Shield +] on my wishlist.

It was about time to leave, since the culling would be approaching soon and I needed to hand over a few tickets to Rosalia.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, old man.”

“What, you’re not buying anything?”

“I’ll come back later with more tickets, I promise.”

[Dimension Room.]

Tearing a portal through space, I stepped through and landed in the middle of the room. Meat Shield was perched on the sofa, watching television like usual while eating jerky. The channel was still set to KB broadcasting, which was doing coverage on wyvern movement in the east. I had also been following coverage of the monster coalition after their takeover of Talos recently. The monsters slowed their advance momentarily so they could properly occupy Talos and convert it into a monster outpost. I wondered if Evelyn relocated to another city, now that her shop’s city got taken over… well, technically she was a demon so maybe the orcs and goblins wouldn’t bother her.

I entered the hot spring, and found Rosalia not to be there. Not a good sign, but I had faith in her to pull through. I took three tickets from my inventory and left them on the stack of towels, which was conspicuous enough that she definitely wouldn’t miss them.

Sundown was approaching in about an hour, and I reread the rules. Fifty tickets for admission to the next round. Fifty tickets seemed like a cliff before, but after visiting the shop today, I felt that it was chump change now. Maybe the high prices just desensitized me, and I forgot how hard it was just to collect a handful of tickets.