“You look like your mother was Miss Piggy and your father was Spiderman!”
As playground taunts go, it wasn’t particularly good. Nor was it all that accurate; Boartles looked like an unholy cross between bristly, wild boars and some gigantic beetle: short tusks, six legs, gleaming black chitinous armor that made archery difficult, and a large Y-shaped horn that really was more dangerous than the tusks. There was nothing at all spider-like about them unless you considered beetles and spiders to both be bugs.
Even then, having Spiderman as a father wasn’t that biting of an insult.
But since that statement was tied to Gabby’s use of the Taunt ability her Threat Generation skill provided, it did the trick. The Young Boartle angled its charge toward her instead of me. I was of mixed feelings about that. Even though I knew the young Tallemaja was older than her avatar appeared (just as I was older than my avatar appeared), it still felt manifestly wrong to be letting a monster charge an apparent nine-year-old girl while I stayed in the background.
Suddenly, I had far more sympathy for the gate guards and their attempts to keep us from the wilds and ruins outside the populated areas of town.
Nevertheless, I took careful aim, lining up the aimpoint that the skill guides provided and then leading the Young Boartle slightly before letting loose with the second arrow. The arrow lept from my bow and landed with a solid thunk in one of the monster’s fleshy legs. Due to the chitinous armor, a more damaging body shot was impossible unless the beast reared up and exposed its belly and chest. My arrows would just bounce off—or worse, shatter. Maybe someday when I could afford a better bow and some better arrows … or when my Archery skill leveled up enough to give me a special ability or two … I’d be able to penetrate that armor.
From somewhere off to the left, a shout rang out: “Be strong, Gabby!” It wasn’t just an encouraging platitude; one of Abigail’s primary skills was Inspirations, a form of shout-based magic that provided short-duration buffs to the target. That particular one was probably her “Endure!” inspiration, boosting an ally’s damage resistance. That was something especially useful for any tank, particularly a low-level one whose low Defense attribute and newbie armor weren’t yet up to the task of fully protecting her.
Gabby braced for impact, and staggered when the monster plowed into her wooden shield, but though the Young Boartle had to be at least two or three times her weight, she held her own against it, even managing to get in a counterstrike with her wooden sword. Chips of dark brown chitin flew from the horn, showing that the strike was a telling one. The Young Boartle’s primary weapon, the Y-shaped horn it used to lift and flip it’s opponents as well as knock them down with a swing of its head, was weakened. Perhaps Gabby’s attack didn’t do an awful lot of damage to the monster’s health bar, but that damaged horn might snap off if the monster attempted to use it in an attack.
As she groaned slightly from the pain of the impact, a cooling blue light settled around her; Tabitha had finished casting her Minor Regeneration spell. It probably wasn’t the best choice for a healer to start with; after all, it only healed about five damage up front and another fifteen or so over the next several minutes rather than doing a more noticeable amount all at once. Those numbers would increase somewhat as Tabitha leveled up, but for now it wasn’t that impressive. My own Mistshard, in healing mode, could restore around seven points of health with my current attributes and spell level. Granted, it had its drawbacks too, such as travel time to the target and a longer cooldown, but neither Tabitha nor I would be able to do any burst healing if things went poorly. In the meantime, potions would be everyone’s friends.
THUNK—Tamakotz’s heavy strike hit the Young Boartle on its chitinous flank. While Tabitha was casting her spell, she had directed her earth elemental pet into the fray. With it’s taunting ability temporarily turned off so that Gabby retained the monster’s focus (and thus worked on improving her Armor Proficiency and Shield skills), Tamakotz was pretty much a minor player on the field, but at least his stone fists were a little more suitable for the combat against an armored foe than my arrows or Abby’s daggers.
Gabrielle continued to keep the monster’s attention and continued to keep her shield in the way of its attacks as Abby cast another spell. This time she was using Wind Dart, the spell granted by her Elemental Magic skill. And after that, she would be relegated to using her twin daggers for the rest of the fight. Because her mana regeneration was still low and she lacked the Meditation skill to speed up its recovery out of combat, we had worked out that she would only use one or two inspirations and one regular spell per fight, unless things started going poorly. That way, we only had to stop to rest after every third or fourth fight rather than after every single one.
Likewise, I mostly focused on Archery. Sure, I did have Meditation, but I also had a smaller mana pool since I hadn’t put that many points into Willpower yet and none of my primary skills boosted Willpower when it leveled the way Abigail’s Elemental Magic skill did for her. Plus, at our current development, Mistshard was more useful as an emergency secondary heal than it was as an extra damage source. True, it wasn’t that much more useful, but it was better than nothing.
I did keep Elionne Embrace active on everyone, but since it’s duration was an hour, it didn’t need an awful lot of recasts. The Young Boartles we were hunting probably didn’t count as elemental light or elemental dark damage sources, but if we stumbled into a fight with another Rosewhip, some of its attacks almost certainly counted as earth damage. If nothing else, keeping the spell refreshed was some experience for my Spellcasting skill.
The Young Boartle fell quickly, the final blow being one of Abby’s daggers stabbed through an eye when it became momentarily stunned from the combined pounding it had taken from ramming into Gabby’s wooden shield and Tamakotz’s stone fists.
* * *
We continued fighting and training like this for the next couple days, slowly building up our skills as we developed our teamwork and coordination. We could have gone more quickly, but a few things held us back.
First, we didn’t stray too far from the city walls. Assuming the world was similar to other game worlds, the further we got from the city, the tougher the “newbie mobs” got. Judging from our past experiences with the Rosewhips—especially the oversized one that Abigail and Gabrielle had encountered on their first day—the assumption seemed to bear out.
Sure, the game didn’t exactly have zones and zone boundaries the way older games did, so we weren’t really in a “level 1 to 10 zone.” And presumably, it wasn’t like the difficulty was going to continue increasing with distance from Echeirn. For one, it wasn’t the only place possible to start from, so the difficulty would necessarily decrease again when approaching another starting settlement. But also, even in those zone-based games, most of the zones along the normal paths of travel would be lower-level. The really dangerous areas were quite off the beaten path. Not that that necessarily mattered much to us right now. At character levels three and four, working toward five, a “level fifteen” area or zone would be just as inhospitable as a place ranked “level thirty” or “level seventy.”
Since we didn’t venture too deeply into the wilderness and ruins west of Echeirn, not only were the monsters we fought relatively easy, but they were also not generally encountered more than one at a time. That, of course, meant that a lot of the time we weren’t fighting but looking for fights.
Or looking for places for me to raise my Gathering skill. Mostly, we didn’t hunt those out, but rather stopped to Gather from what we came upon. Nevertheless, that did slow down our combat practice even though raising my Gathering skill would help level me up.
We also talked a lot, getting to know one another and strengthening the bonds of friendship that had formed on our first day. Granted, a lot of that talking was while walking around looking for monsters to fight, but we usually started and ended each day with just hanging around in town as well. Half an hour here, an hour there, it added up to a lot of time—time that could have been spent more efficiently if leveling had been our only driving focus.
And finally, Abby got tired easily. Due to an unspecified health condition, her IRL stamina was particularly low. Even if in reality she was doing nothing more strenuous than lying in her FIVR pod, mental fatigue set in much sooner for her than it would for others. Gabby always logged out when her sister did.
On the second day of working on leveling, we had misjudged the distance we had traveled from the gate, and had to look around in the menus for an option we knew had to exist: fast travel. While modern games were on the pendulum swing away from the instantaneous access to everywhere that had been the recent norm, it stood to reason that if we had a respawn point to return to after death we would also be able to willingly return to that point, even if only infrequently.
We finally found it one of the sub-areas of the Social tab. It looked like ECHO was striking a balance between promoting—some might say forcing—exploration and allowing for convenience. It was still weighted heavily toward exploration since there were plenty of restrictions on fast travel, but there were at least a few nods toward player convenience.
Every player was initially bound to one fast-travel location. For us, it was “Echerin Flower Square,” where we had first entered the game after leaving the tutorial instance. Players could freely change where they were bound to, so long as the location was bindable: that meant certain points of interest, like town plazas or instance entrances; certain personal buildings or structures like shops and guild halls (presumably also ships, otherwise Lex’s decision to sail with that pirate from beta might be problematic); and so on.
Of course, until guild halls started becoming a thing, low-level players like us and, frankly, pretty much every other player even if some had made it to level five on the first day, most likely wouldn’t have anywhere to change our bind spot to.
Then, at character levels 5, 10, 25, 50, and 100, players would gain access to additional bind spots, eventually being able to fast travel between six different locations. We could tell this because there were five extra lines marked as “
Granted, by the time we get to level five, we wouldn’t be anywhere near needing a second bind point, but if they all had individual cooldowns, having a second bind to the starting square might not be a bad idea. Part of the “weighted heavily toward exploration” we discovered was that the fast travel cooldown was eight hours.
Not that inconvenient if traveling back to town to log out for the day, but it wouldn’t be terribly useful for those wanting to frequently resupply or turn in and pick up quests.
* * *
“Okay, Sis, those strips of Willow Bark should be dried now. If you take them off the rack and set them aside, we can start drying some of those mushrooms instead.”
Since the twins had to log out after only four or five hours of play, Tabitha and I played together doing various stuff in or near town rather than hunting monsters to raise our combat skills. The first day, we had talked some more and did several errand-style quests around town. The second day, I had showed her the areas outside the eastern gate where I had solo hunted and practiced. There, we spent a lot of time with me just gathering various plants and fungi from the semi-abandoned parks and overgrown farmlands, leaving the developed and maintained farms and parks alone. The third day, I was helping her with Alchemy, using the materials we had gathered the day before.
Her starting-level alchemy kit was both fairly simple and relatively impressive. It came with several components. First was a small, earthenware mortar-and-pestle kit. This was used for grinding herbs and other materials. Another piece was a small, bowl-sized bronze cauldron mounted on chains hanging from a tripod. It went with a mysterious device, looking a bit like a hotplate, that emitted heat without any obvious source of fuel. The kit also came with a collection of five tiny brass spoons with the largest being comparable to the smallest plastic measuring spoon I used when baking cookies out in the real world. Finally, there was also a wooden rack holding twenty glass vials looking very much like test tubes from the chemistry class I had to suffer through all those many years ago. If we took a vial from the rack without putting anything in it, the vial disappeared in a minute or so and another appeared on the rack. It was things like that that really made it clear that this was a gameworld rather than a real world.
We tested it later, after making a healing potion, and the glass vial disappeared after the potion was consumed. Sure, I had probably seen that effect with the potions I had used in the tutorial fight, but I had been a little occupied then and hadn’t been paying attention. The disappearing potion vials had two really huge benefits that shouldn’t be ignored, however. First, a player’s inventory wouldn’t be cluttered up with empty potion vials. More importantly, the inevitable litter wouldn’t be left lying around in the wilderness and instances. Granted, that did mean the vials couldn’t be saved to be reused or repurposed, but that was a small price to pay.
I set the dried Willow Bark aside and took a small handful of mushrooms out of my inventory. When I had collected them, they had simply been called “Unidentified Mushrooms.” If they had still been unidentified, using them for Alchemy would probably have been a bad idea—it would be hard to recreate an effect if we didn’t know what the ingredients were. And with mushrooms, that could be very dangerous. These were no death caps nor avenging angels, but who knows what sort of other toxic mushrooms existed in a world where elves and ghosts and elementals spirits and Beastkin existed as well?
The mushrooms were no longer unidentified, however. One of the group-support skills that Gabrielle had taken for a secondary skill was Identification which allowed her to get additional information when inspecting items or equipment. It was still low-level, so she didn’t get a lot of information, but since the mushrooms were gathered from a low-level area, she was able to get at least some data on them. Instead of “Unidentified Mushrooms,” they were now listed as “Variegated Mushrooms,” which wasn’t a whole lot of help by itself. But, critically, some of the additional information she had identified included “edible” and “may have medicinal uses when refined.”
So, we were refining them.
It might have seemed a little odd that I was helping Tabitha with her Alchemy—after all, she was the one with the skill, not I. However, she gained some skill experience from directing my efforts. Maybe not as much as she would have received if she had done all the work herself, but since she wasn’t sitting idly by and just telling me what to do, she gained the benefit of both her work at the mortar and pestle as well as mine on the drying rack. So maybe it wasn’t as much experience as possible, but it was a faster rate. That seemed like a good compromise.
Also, my Gathering skill’s experience bar ticked up slightly itself.
Perhaps working with the plants I gathered and seeing how they were used contributed to knowing better ways to gather or harvest them? I certainly would be doing things a little differently when gathering willow bark, for instance. I had noticed that the longer, thinner strips from smaller branches dried quicker and more evenly than the shorter, wider, almost square-shaped strips from the trunk. They weren’t sorted any differently in my inventory, so they weren’t likely any different other than size and shape—that is, no different effect when used to craft something—so there seemed no reason to not adjust my gathering methods.
With the willow bark all completely dried, Tabitha took a break from turning some sort of leaf into powder. It wasn’t one that I had gathered but one that the potion-vendor had sold her. Apparently, it was the base for those truly vile beginner health potions. Hopefully, Tabitha would be able to make something less bad-tasting with some of the other components I had gathered, but I didn’t have my hopes up: a mushroom-flavored beverage wouldn’t be any better than one that tasted like wet dog smelled.
After washing the mortar and pestle thoroughly, she started to grind the dried willow bark. The slightly off-white powder it turned into reminded me of crushed pills. When my twin was younger, she had a very hard time taking medicine, so any time she needed to take a pill, my mother had ground it into a powder and mixed it up with applesauce to partially mask the bitter taste. Lex had then gone a couple years with not being able to eat applesauce normally, since she was always bracing for the bitterness of a crushed pill.
Shortly, while the mushrooms were still drying, we started to experiment with the components, seeing what we could make. Even at around a week since launch, the typical guide and cheat sites didn’t have much more than what was already released on the official site or discussed in the official forums. And even there, crafting was severely underrepresented.
Basically, that could be chalked up, in part, to just who was playing right now. With the cost of purchasing a FIVR pod being prohibitively expensive for even middle-class families, those with unfettered access were generally either lucky lottery winners like my twin and me or other forms of the idle rich. Lottery winners tend to be few and far between and the key word in “idle rich” is idle.
As Tabitha and I were discovering, even basic, low-level crafting was a lot of work—and it required a lot of work before even starting since the raw materials would have to be gathered. Sure, some like that basic medicinal herb could be purchased from NPCs, and later there would probably be players who gathered resources to sell to crafters, but at the moment neither would be sufficient to support a beginner crafter. A lot of the grunt work would have to be done by the crafter or her group of friends.
For a lot of the people playing, real work at this level was done by people their family paid so that they didn’t have to do it themselves: gardening, sewing and mending, cooking, and so on….
Most of the others who purchased their own FIVR pods were likely the hardcore gamers and adrenaline junkies. For them, the draw of the game was not in menial craftsmanship, but in group-scale combat and the race to be the first to do something: the first to clear a dungeon, the first to make it to some far-off location, that sort of stuff. With the way the skill system worked, dedicating one or more skill slots to crafting would diminish their combat potential. Sure, there were likely some who sought to become the best at certain crafts as well—especially considering the fifty thousand essentially random people who won a free FIVR pod—but at this stage of the game, people seeking to become the first and the best were focused on doing just that. They weren’t spending time writing up guides that might give someone else an edge up on them.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
And pretty much everyone else playing was renting hours in a game center. At a couple hours or so a day, they just didn’t have time to discover enough to write guides, not even by crowd-sourcing the discovery and experimentation process.
All that would change, of course, the further ECHO got from launch and the more accessible pods and gametime became. Some information was already out there, but it would grow with more time and more players. Right now, there were just the starts of bestiaries, atlases, spell trees, achievement lists, and screenshot galleries. There were also already basic guides and some theorycrafting on skill builds to mimic traditional classes like warrior and healer. While still basic, there were already lists of recommended races for certain roles, at least for those players that weren’t going to stay human.
Ghosts, like Tabitha, were high on the recommended list for healers or mages since their reduced threat range and gain could make them less likely to accidentally pull aggro off the tank. However, elves with their free spell and passive boost to MP regeneration—especially Na’Dine, the high elves, who traded a lower base HP for a higher base MP—were generally more strongly recommended. Even one of the human subraces was considered at the same tier as Ghost, mostly because Ghosts and Undead in general had a lot of negatives to balance their other strengths.
Tauros, like my character, weren’t even high on the list for tanking builds. Dwarves of all sort topped the list with several varieties of Golem and one Undead (the Zombie) above any Beastkin.
In fact, Beastkin were barely recommended for anything in the available proto-guides. The fox-based Vulpix made the list for spellcasters since their Hidden Nature boosted Brilliance and they had a passive boost to spell power the way Tauros did to damage reduction. In theory, they could do a good amount of burst damage as a mage, but the mana-draining effect of Hidden Nature was considered too heavy of a downside to rank them higher. Even with me serving as a mascot for the company, Beastkin—especially Tauros and the equine-based Ruiterix as well—seemed likely to remain a perpetual minority as people flocked to humans and elves or followed a min-maxer’s guide to a starting build.
Sooner or later, all those resources and more would expand, and the next wave of players would be taking their guidance from a variety of online forums and guides. But for now, we were in the early stages. That meant, like chemists of old, putting two or more things together in different ways and seeing what happened.
Throughout all the mixing and grinding and drying and experimenting, we chatted off and on, interspersed with companionable silence. Tabitha, like me, had flat-out purchased her pod, though also like me, she was a bit vague about her background.
Our real-life backgrounds, that is. Over the past several days, we had chatted rather extensively about books we had read and games we had played. Tabitha had been an avid reader, even if she hadn’t read to a stuffed animal, and there was a lot of overlap in the stories we both had enjoyed. She was maybe a little more fond of harder science fiction where I had mostly dwelled in fantasy worlds, but we both shared a love for Middle-Earth, Pern, and Valdemar.
Still, as a devotee of science fiction, she had always been more into the “how” of hard science fiction than the “why” or “what.” Perhaps that’s why crafting interested her so much, even—or especially—when the guides to crafting didn’t yet exist.
“Even if there were guides, Sis, I wouldn’t use them unless I was really and truly stuck,” Tabitha said. “And that’s more for puzzles or 100% completions than for something like this.” She took the smallest of her spoons and scooped a level spoonful of the resultant off-white, finely ground powder into the diminutive cauldron. “That one Cydoru game, I had to give up and look up solutions to three of the puzzles, and even then I needed a walkthrough for my second playthrough to get the 100% completion. My save had only been 93.4%.” She pouted, then shrugged and filled the cauldron halfway with water and set it the whole thing to heat, stirring occasionally. Meanwhile, I nodded in commiseration and swapped out a set of dried mushrooms for another handful from my inventory.
A few minutes later, Tabitha poured the contents of the cauldron into three glass flasks. The resultant potions were relatively unimpressive—aside from the fact that they were potions and not just simmered tree water. They still just looked like simmered tree water, though. Unlike a stereotypical healing potion, which would be red, these potions were clear with just the faintest hint of a cloudy white color to them.
It seemed that production crafting skills, like Alchemy, also allowed the crafter to know what it was that they had made. With Gathering, I usually knew what it was that I had gathered and what it could be used for, sometimes even with flavor text, but then there were things like the Unidentified Mushrooms or even the Mountain Blue Typha whose description had only stated that it was [Unrefined].
“‘Diluted Weak Basic Health Potion,’ huh?” Tabitha softly sighed. “That’s a lot of negative prefixes.” Almost immediately though, she perked up. “But, hey. We did it, Sis! We made a potion! On our first try, too! Now it’s just a matter of making them better.”
“Diluted?” I asked, “Wouldn’t that mean too much water or not enough powder? How much does it heal for?”
“Ah, the full description is this: ‘Diluted Weak Basic Health Potion: Heals 0-2 damage and may provide temporary relief from mild aches and pain. Crafted by Tabitha.’ Hey, it left you out of the description, Sis!”
“Well, you’re the one with the Alchemy skill and did all the work on the potion. I just dried things out for you. Speaking of which….” I took a moment to swap out a set of dried mushrooms for another small handful of variegated ones from my inventory. “There. Anyway, maybe try using a bigger spoon of powder in the next batch?”
She did. And it took up to using four spoonfuls of the largest spoon in her set, roughly a real-world teaspoonful of the powdered willow bark in total, until the potions crafted lost the ‘diluted’ prefix. A non-diluted potion, simply a Weak Basic Health Potion, had an expanded range of healing 1 to 5 damage. It still wasn’t particularly useful compared to my current maximum health of over sixty, but it certainly was better than nothing, especially since it still stated that it may provide some relief from pain.
It did take a lot of attempts before we finally reached that level, however. The first successful Weak Basic Health Potion was on our fourteenth or fifteenth attempt. I had lost count. A little over half the attempts had resulted in crafting three of the diluted potions and the rest created items simply called “Failed Potion Attempt.” Those items disappeared in around a minute just like an empty vial did.
* * *
Finally, nearly a week after the first player had made it to level five on the first day, our party of four had all hit that oh-so-lofty milestone. Of course, since level was determined by skill use, we didn’t all reach level five at the same time.
I was actually the first of us to make it to level five since two of my four primary skills didn’t require combat to level up, so I had been working on them a little when we weren’t all together. Sure, I did stop to gather plants as we looked for fights, but I also put in more concerted effort on the other side of town, looking for more components for Tabitha to use in Alchemy.
While my other such skill, Gymnastics, could be leveled up in combat—at least by those who spent more time in melee combat that I did—its increases mostly came from practicing while no one else was around. Basically, I experimented with tumbles and handstands and various jumps and leaps while moving from gathering node to gathering node. Given my rate of falling down or bumping into things and getting hurt, it would have been too embarrassing to practice in the group.
Practice, however, was paying off. The skill was up to level 5, giving me five more points of Charisma and two more Agility. Even more important than the attribute increase, however, was those skill levels were really necessary for getting me to character level five. Going from level one to level two only had taken three skill levels. Going from two to three and three to four each took an additional five skill levels. Going from four to five required having skills increase seven more times, for a cumulative total of twenty skill levels. If I had still been dithering about what skill to take, I would have been waaaay behind the rest of my group.
Tabitha was next to level. Even though all her primary skills were related to spellcasting, she had just kept reapplying Minor Regeneration to herself while she had been working on Alchemy. When I was assisting her, I was used as another target for the spell. Consequently, she had got a lot of practice in.
Gabrielle, despite being the focus of every attack any monster made to our group, was actually the last of the party to reach character level five. This was mostly because her skills increased somewhat asymmetrically. Threat Generation and Shield were fairly high, but her Sword skill was lagging somewhat. Her Armor Proficiency skill was increasing slowly, as well. Perhaps that was because she didn’t have much that was really armor rather than clothing.
When that skill hit level four, a pillar of blue-green light—the same color as Abigail’s—rose from Gabrielle signifying that she, too, had leveled up. We quickly finished the current fight and all returned to the town via fast travel. It was earlier than normal, but we wanted time to take our skills, distribute our points, and do a little shopping before Abby grew too fatigued to continue. Any of the loot drops we had collected that didn’t look like something useful to us had been sold, and pooling it together would give enough to help upgrade Abby and Gabby’s equipment … and get them each an outfit from the same shop Tabitha had taken me to on the first day.
Gabrielle, true to her earlier stated intentions, took Enhanced Health (E/E) as her fifth skill. Because none of her primary skills boosted Brilliance and she had put no points into that attribute any time she had leveled, Gabby didn’t have a secondary skill to choose.
Abigail, who had become quite convinced for the need of Meditation, nevertheless didn’t take it as a primary skill. Instead she promoted Spellcasting from being a secondary skill to a primary skill, consequently surging ahead of the rest of us in the race to level six since her new primary skill was already level five whereas the rest of us had a level zero skill for our newest.
Abby had been torn between moving Spellcasting and Acrobatics to the primary spot. Even though Acrobatics would have boosted her Agility and thus her ability to do damage with her daggers, she had decided that she wanted to focus more on her support role than her damaging role.
That and since Spellcasting was a pure-Brilliance skill, moving it to primary boosted her Brilliance enough to gain a new secondary skill slot, giving her two new skills to choose. One of those, of course, was Meditation (W/E), but she also took Improved Boon Duration (W/W). It was a skill that Tabitha had as a primary skill, but since almost all of Abby’s support abilities were short-duration, it suited her very well also.
As for Tabitha, even though she had been patiently waiting to be able to use her wand, she took Mana Efficiency (W/W) as a primary skill instead. Like Gabby’s Enhanced Health, it was a skill that became available at character level five. Besides being purely Willpower, and thus indirectly increasing her mana pool as it leveled up, Mana Efficiency would reduce the cost of spells by a percentage, equal to the skill’s level—up to a maximum of 50% cost reduction. Other than raising Willpower, the skill itself wouldn’t be much of an immediate benefit, but Tabitha was looking at long-term needs. Not only would reducing the cost of her spells effectively further increase her available mana, it might make spells that were otherwise too costly to frequently cast more accessible. Besides Restoration Magic, her other school of magic was Summoning, and those spells were all very mana intense.
After spending her unassigned AP into Brilliance, she did have enough of that attribute to unlock a new secondary skill slot, so she was able to get Wand Use (R/B) anyway.
As for me, I had determined to not sit on an empty skill slot waiting to figure out what I wanted this time. I had also opted to not just impulsively take whatever caught my fancy at the moment, either.
Instead, I had done a little research on the website and forums over the past few days looking at those rudimentary guides and suggestions. Rather than choosing a school of magic like I had considered earlier in the week, I had decided to stay primarily focused on my role as an Archer with crafting secondary. My two spells were nice, and I would continue to use them at need, but I wanted to be a bit more focused and skilled before I branched out and diversified too much.
Besides, since I had two spells even without a specific magic skill, it seemed likely that I could probably pick up another spell or two here or there from other achievements or quests.
So, to support my role as an Archer, I took another of the skills that became available at level five: Perception (R/L). It was actually a rather broad skill, rather than narrowly focused. In the main, it conveyed a bonus to “notice hidden things.” But rather than being purely anti-stealth like Detect Hidden (L/W) or only influencing the ability to land critical hits a la Vital Point Knowledge (A/W), Perception also aided in noticing concealed resource nodes, which aided my gathering, helped in crafting, and functioned like a rudimentary version of tracking and trap detection. I figured it might also be useful when combined with my Empathy perk.
Truthfully, I did choose it mostly for all the various things that fit under the umbrella of the skill rather than just to support my Archery, but combined with my slowly-leveling Stealth skill, it would definitely help if I ever needed to assist my group by scouting ahead.
When I hit level four, I had assigned my five AP as two into Agility, two into Willpower (for the increased mana, even if I wasn’t using it much currently), and one into Charisma (still quote-unquote “playing to my strengths”). At level five, I did basically the same, but only put one point into Willpower. That last point went into Brilliance because, with the earlier points allocated and the points granted by Spellcasting and Gathering leveling up, I was only one point away from a new secondary skill slot.
Unfortunately, that hadn’t been planned out ahead of time, so I didn’t have a huge amount of prior thought into what skill I should take in addition to Perception. Well, that’s not exactly true. I had considered a lot of other skills in the evenings when I was deliberating on what to take for my fifth primary skill, and I had arguments for and against many of them, weighing the pros and cons until I had settled on Perception.
Any of the skills I had been considering primarily because of the attributes they were tied to weren’t realistic options for a secondary skill which wouldn’t boost attributes when they leveled. Thus broader skills like Athleticism and Acrobatics were out. I also wasn’t yet ready to branch out into crafting things myself even if I did assist Tabitha with Alchemy, so Cooking, Weaving, Enchanting, and the obviously-helpful-for-an-archer Fletching were also out—for now. For similar reasons, other resource-gathering skills like Mining, Farming, and Gardening were low priority.
I had strongly considered Threat Mitigation before two very good reasons to not take it had come to mind. While it would be useful to help ensure that I didn’t draw the attention of monsters away from Gabby, I didn’t really consider it a great fit for a primary skill. That was a skill that was mostly meaningless for times when operating outside the group because a solo player would always be at the top of their target monster’s threat list. Perhaps the skill would synergize with Stealth, perhaps it wouldn’t, but even though I did have a dedicated group now, I didn’t really want a skill that I could only level while in a group. The other reason was that I was a Tauros. Because my racial ability, Hidden Nature, boosted my Defense attribute, there might come times when I would need to act as a very temporary off-tank. Making it harder to gain threat worked counterproductive to that contingency. Granted, I hadn’t needed to use the ability since the tutorial, but who knows what we’ll encounter in the future?
And because I had decided to try and keep my focus on Archery rather than expanding my magical repertoire, the “easy choice” of picking up some magic, like the water version of Elemental Magic or something more obscure, like Phantasms—a form of illusion magic based on Charisma and Willpower—was something I forced myself to not consider. That also meant I had a ready excuse to not take the version of Dance that provided group buffs like Tabitha had suggested a few days back. It wasn’t magic per se, but it was close enough.
But even though I wanted to keep my primary focus on Archery, I also didn’t want to take a too-narrow skill like the aforementioned Vital Point Knowledge.
That didn’t leave much more than things that impulsiveness might make me take without putting sufficient thought into it, like the Modeling skill I’d have a difficult time leveling. Even if the experience in modeling armors for the game’s site had been surprisingly fun, where would I make use of it in the game? The dress shop? Wouldn’t that end up turning too much into a part-time job rather than part-time playing?
If I had taken a magic skill instead of Perception, I could have taken one of the assorted skills that casters took to further support their spells, such as the Improved Boon Duration that both Tabitha and now Abigail had.
Because I had spent several hours looking over the skill lists and reading discussions online, I did have several skills I could have taken instead of Perception. So I circled back around and took what had ended up as my number two choice: Leadership (C/B). It was very much a group support skill and not even tangentially related to Archery, which had been why it had lost out to Perception in the first place.
Taking it had also undermined my arguments against magic or dance, but we’re allowed to be a little inconsistent, right?
But it wasn’t a group-only skill. If I picked up a form of Summoning in the future or otherwise gained a pet or companion—Jasmine had said that there was a way for AI assistant faeries to join us in game—the skill would assist them. Likewise, if I were to do something like an escort quest in the future, the boosts from Leadership would affect the NPCs I was working with. Further, it was strongly based on Charisma which willy-nilly had become my secondary focus after Agility (and due to my Little Sister title and Empathy perk, was actually higher than Agility was).
Leadership let me “provide assorted benefit to up to 4 (+skill level) party members and allies.” I got to choose two benefits to start with and could choose an additional one every five skill levels. Leadership did have two considerable drawbacks, however. The first and most obvious was that the boosts I could choose generally would only affect other party members and allies; that is, Abby, Gabby, Tabitha, and Tamakotz could all get a health boost if I chose that benefit to use, but my own health wouldn’t increase. Boosting movement speed was one of the exceptions, probably because its usefulness would be rather curtailed if the rest of the party ended up moving too fast that the Leader couldn’t keep up with them.
The second wasn’t so much a drawback as it was a trade-off. Unlike Abby’s Inspirations which were (so far) single target and short duration, the benefits that Leadership provided were without set duration and affected everyone if they were in range, and Leadership began with a fairly significant range of fifty meters (it would have been lower, but since my Charisma was already somewhat high, it had boosted the range). The balance there was that each Leadership benefit I maintained reserved a percentage of my mana, making it unavailable for other uses, like spells or other active abilities. Fortunately, almost all the benefits, including the two I chose, were toggles rather than something that were always on.
I started with the basics. While some specialty benefits were available to be selected right away, I took one that boosted health and one that boosted mana. Each provided an increase of 5 points or 5%, whichever was greater, and each would reserve 10% of my own mana pool to keep it active. At least that’s what the basic descriptions had said. When I took the abilities, they displayed as providing an increase of 6 points or 6%, perhaps because my attributes were high enough to scale the benefits upward.
Speaking of abilities, both Archery and Gymnastics had reached level five and allowed me to select an ability. Spellcasting had also reached that level, but it didn’t grant a new modifier until level ten.
For both Archery and Gymnastics, I could select between a passive ability and an activatable ability.
For Archery, it was the choice between Long Shot and Arrow Regeneration that Sunrise Sparkle had mentioned in the tutorial. Long Shot did half damage at double range, but cost five mana to activate. Arrow Regeneration provided a passive 10% chance for any arrow used to respawn in the quiver once shot. At certain skill levels, it provided an additional 10% chance, capping out at 50% at Archery level 100. That would be a long time in the future, but even the modest initial chance helped to slightly offset one of the problems with archery: arrows were consumable and could be broken or lost. Furthermore, an archer had to gather up any arrows shot after each fight.
As for Gymnastics, the choice was between Mesmerizing Routine and Graceful Landing. The first was an active, with a cost of 2 stamina per second. The second was a passive ability.
Mesmerizing Routine: [Ability] Perform an energetic gymnastics routine (involving jumps, tumbles, and dance-like movements) that has a chance to Mesmerize a number of targets (up to Gymnastics skill level) who view the routine. Mesmerized targets are considered Pacified and Immobilized for the duration of the routine.
Graceful Landing: [Ability / Passive] Add Gymnastics skill level to Agility for any landing from a jump or fall less than 125% your height.
Never mind that Mesmerizing Routine would put me quite literally in the spotlight and had the potential to be even more embarrassing than the cheer routine Michelle had developed for me for Spirit Week during high school. Since Endurance was an attribute that I hadn’t put any points into and hadn’t been increased by any of my primary skills, the activation cost for the ability was just too high. At best, I’d get about ten seconds out of it. Though ten seconds of what was effectively a stun could be very situationally effective, it didn’t quite work with my current build. Maybe if I had chosen to focus on daggers instead of Archery, I could have made use of it as an effective gap-closer….
So, just like with Archery, I chose the passive ability. Graceful Landing was something that likely wouldn’t come up very much—especially since my avatar was relatively short, so the effective range wasn’t that helpful. In essence, I’d have a bonus when jumping or falling a bit less than six feet. However, I did have a bit of a “cheat.” If I used Hidden Nature prior to jumping or while falling, my height would increase by a bit more than double and thus I’d be able to land more safely from a jump or fall of nearly twelve feet. That was rather impressive even if it was a bit weird to think of that massive form being graceful.
There were a couple of other minor changes to make since my class level had also finally gone up, and once that was completed, I reviewed my character sheet.