Everyone in Maria’s dungeon raid party was still eagerly analyzing their battle earlier, so Maria was the only one who went through their spoils.
She categorized and set aside all of the materials that were dropped by the boss monster and put away the various potions she obtained from the reward chest that appeared after her party defeated Barkas.
After doing that, there were only 10 items left on the ground that needed to be distributed amongst her party members. The first 3 items were skill books and, just like the [Dagger Storm] skill book she had obtained earlier, 2 of them were skill books that held advanced skills just like it.
Maria looked at the 2 skill books for a moment before setting them aside for her friends because they weren’t skills that she could use. The first skill book was for warriors, particularly swordsmen, since it was the skill [Sword Storm]–the advanced version of the [Sword Rush] skill.
The second book was a spell book for mages. It had the advanced spell [Inferno], which was the upgraded version of the [Hellfire] spell. Maria knew that Lilith would definitely love this one, so she set it aside specifically for her.
Maria couldn’t use this book because her [Hellfire] spell wasn’t the normal [Hellfire] spell. Hers was Paimon’s version, so it couldn’t be upgraded.
Finally, the last of the 3 skill books Maria obtained was something she was seeing for the first time ever.
“Combination Skill?”
Maria only muttered that, but the girls who had their eyes focused on the video playing in front of them immediately had their attention broken from the screen and directed towards her in an instant.
“Mary, what did you just say?” Lizzy quickly asked, trying to confirm what she had just heard her friend say earlier.
“Huh?”
“Did I just hear you say Combination Skill?”
“Where? Lemme see! Did we really just get a Combination Skill book from the boss?!”
The rest of the girls immediately chimed in and started gathering around her. Maria tilted her head in confusion and asked back, “What’s a Combination Skill?”
“W-We’ll explain it to you later. Let’s see the skill book first!”
“Oh my gosh, it really is a combination skill book!”
“Jackpot!”
The book in Maria’s hand was a Combination Skill book that had the recipe for [Thunderous Shield Crash], an advanced Combination Skill.
“It’s an advanced Combination Skill too!”
Out of the 3 skill books obtained from defeating Royal Guard Captain Barkas, this skill book was the most important one, though Maria didn’t know why because she didn’t know anything about Combination Skills. The reason was that she had never encountered it before.
Combination Skills were recently introduced in the newest patch of the game, so everyone, especially the frontline players like Lizzy, Sky, and the other girls in her party were actively searching for any information about them.
Maria had no one to blame but herself for not knowing about it. Usually, she would check the game’s forums for the latest information about the game, but it had been a while since she'd been on there because she was so busy dealing with her war against the Lycans and players.
Maybe if she played the game like a normal player and learned skills properly from her class instructor, she would’ve received word about the Combination Skills from the moment it was patched into the game.
To combine a skill, a player needed to go to their class instructor to do it, so even if you were living under a rock or were just playing Unitale casually, you would’ve already been informed about it a long while ago.
Maria had never once visited a priest class instructor after leaving the starting planet, Eur, so she never knew about these Combination Skills.
It wasn’t like there were no class instructors in her nation’s numerous cities and towns. As a matter of fact, every settlement in her nation had them! A few even lived right inside of her palace too! Maria just never went to them for anything, so she couldn’t learn about the Combination Skills.
Truly, a completely massive oversight on her part and it was her own fault because it never came to her mind to visit them. The only time she had ever visited and used the services of a class instructor was during her time on the starting planet, Eur. After that, she never visited them again, though she could probably pin the blame for this on Death because he was the one who substituted as her class instructor due to her unique class and the special situation where she was playing in isolation from the rest of the playerbase on planet Vanhal.
Well, it was her choice to go to Vanhal, so she was still at fault. Consuming Greed’s Soul and turning the entire populace of planet Eur against herself was also entirely her decision.
“Guys, this is huge! This means there’s a possibility we might get more of these Combination Skill books from defeating other bosses!”
“Hey, can someone explain to me what these Combination Skills are???” Maria demanded. She didn’t like being kept in the dark and, judging by her friends’ reaction to the skill book, it seemed that it was a jackpot or something.
Lizzy immediately pulled up the information she had on the topic and began giving Maria a brief rundown.
Combination Skills were generally more powerful than regular skills, but they came at a cost.
A player would have to sacrifice their pre-existing skills to produce a Combination Skill. The skills used in a combination will become unusable until the player decides to un-combine the skill.
Players were limited to having only 3 Combination Skill slots, but this limit could be increased to 6 by completing certain quests. No one had found any of these quests yet, so as far as anyone knew, everyone only had 3 combination skill slots.
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The devs didn’t divulge anything about the additional skill slots because it was the players’ job to find those quests. They weren’t going to spoon feed the players any information and, for all they cared, the players could just continue fumbling around with their 3 Combination Skill slots.
Since there were a limited number of slots, players had to be very careful in selecting what Combination Skill they wanted. However, it wasn’t only because of the limited skill slots that they had to be careful. Once a skill was used for a combination, its ranks and levels would reset back to 1 if a player decided to un-combine their Combination Skill.
Regaining all of your skill’s proficiency levels was extremely hard, so the players couldn’t just rashly combine their skills.
The damage and effects of a Combination Skill were decided by what skills were used in the combination. Instructors did have a few Combination Skill and Spell books for sale, but they weren’t too powerful since they were Combination Skills that only used 2 skills for their combination.
Since players could combine as many skills as they wanted, the Combination Skill produced would usually be better than the readily available one if the combination was successful.
Of course, players couldn’t just randomly combine skills because the process would fail if you combined skills that weren’t compatible with each other. Since it was still a new feature, it was pretty hard to know which skills worked well with each other unless you tried it out for yourself.
Players had to gamble with their skills if they didn’t want to buy the ‘mediocre’ Combination Skills from their class instructors. Producing better results than those skills requires a lot of experimenting and luck–especially, luck.
Some super lucky players would be able to land a jackpot skill after randomly putting some skills together, though most would fail and just produce a ‘normal’ Combination Skill or worse, they’d botch the combination entirely and just lose their proficiency levels for nothing.
The penalty for failing a combination was a proficiency level reduction of the skills used in the combination. Only max proficiency level skills could be combined, so this was another thing players had to watch out for.
Grinding skill proficiency points wasn’t an easy thing to do. It was mostly frontline players who were actively tackling the game’s Main Story Quest and those who were in the high-ranking guilds that had max level proficiency in more than half of their active and passive skills.
Having a blueprint like the skill book Maria had just obtained was definitely a godsend for the warrior and knight class players, since this saved them from having to experiment with their skills.
What more, this [Thunderous Shield Crash] Combination Skill used 4 skills in its combination process and not all of them were just normal skills.
Name: Thunderous Shield Crash Combination requirements: [Arc Swing], [Shield Rush], [Thunderclap], and [Vajra Body] Description: Encases the caster in an electric veil of armor that paralyzes enemies upon contact for 3 seconds and then rushes towards a targeted area, dragging along any enemies in the caster’s path and knocking them into the air before slamming them back onto the ground with a powerful lightning strike, dealing ((STR+AGI+VIT)+200% ATK) DMG
If more than 5 enemies are hit by the lightning, the caster releases a powerful electrical surge from their body, inflicting ((STR+AGI+INT)+100% M.ATK) DMG on all enemies within 5 meters of the caster Cost: 2500 Rage Cooldown: 60 seconds
“This skill is so amazing!” Cindy exclaimed.
It dealt damage and had multiple CC effects. The cooldown was reasonably short as well, considering it was an advanced combination skill, so a 60-second cooldown was relatively short.
“I guess we really hit the jackpot this time, huh?” Maria said, a little bit impressed and confused as to why the dungeon was being so generous.
Lizzy gave her a nod and said, “Yeah, since Combination Skills are the newest feature of the game, this book alone is probably worth more than everything else that the boss monster dropped! I’m just glad we somehow got it, since it should definitely be a rare drop!”
“Combination Skills… this really opens up a lot of possibilities for us…” Maria mumbled to herself.
“Yup, that’s for sure!”
The introduction of Combination Skills unlocked a variety of possibilities for the players. Combination skills only came to pass because it was the devs’ response to the playerbase’s many complaints about there being so few skill slots when there were so many skills in the game.
The devs didn’t really plan this out, but the game’s main AI, Zeus, did. All the devs did was present the players’ complaints to the AI and the AI found the solution.
Maria didn’t know this, but the AI was actually inspired by her when it came up with this Combination Skill update.
There were a few times in the past where Maria had combined her skills together and created a new skill that was and wasn’t listed in the system which had an incredible range of destructiveness and effects.
Maria wasn’t aware of it yet, but she was actually the pioneer of Combination Skills and the system only implemented the feature after it noticed that only Maria had figured out how to do it. It didn’t seem fair to the rest of the playerbase, so the AI wanted to change that in order to maintain a balance between her and the rest of the playerbase–though it was quite clear that Maria would always be ahead of the regular playerbase.
The complaints from the player base gave the AI an excuse to implement a patch that would balance Maria’s Combination Skills as well as introduce it to the rest of the player base.
Now, all combinations will be recorded in the AI’s data banks and properly listed in the [Skill Menu]. This allowed the AI to properly adjust the damage output and effects of the Combination Skills, so it wouldn’t be too broken like before when Maria was using them.
With the patch implemented, Maria could no longer arbitrarily combine her skills on the spot like before. The system was never able to put a penalty or limitation on her when she spontaneously combined and used a Combination Skill, but it can do so now and this somewhat nerfed her.
This was both a good and bad thing because now, all of her Combination Skills would be listed in her [Skill Menu], unlike before.
Since most of her combinations were spontaneous, like, for example, her [Sword Grave] combination skill, which she used in her first battle against Hecate and Ophelia where it ended up with her committing suicide, Maria was never able to use it again because she forgot what skills she used in the combination.
It was the same for her [Unholy Ruination] spell which she only used one time during one of her missions that Death gave to her where she had to exterminate an entire planet for him. The only Combination Skill Maria repeatedly used was [Nephalem’s Destruction Ray] because it was the easiest skill to combine.
Of course, with the implementation of the new patch, her Combination Skills would no longer be as powerful as before, but at the very least, she could start actively using them again because they would be listed in her [Skill Menu].
The girls finished admiring the skill book and now had to decide who to give it to. They weren’t going to put this on the list of items for the post-war auction because it was too important and all important items had priority distribution to the party members.
“This Combination Skill is leagues above the ones the class instructors are selling,” Cindy spoke up and said. “Since it’s so important, we should naturally give it to someone who needs it in our party!”
“Well, who do we give this skill to?” Maria asked as she waved the skill book around.
“This one's for warriors and knights, so I guess it should go to Lizzy or Sky?” Lilith suggested, to which Rafflesia nodded in agreement.
Sky then raised her hand and said, “I may be a warrior, but I don’t use shields, so I think it’s best that we give it to Lizzy. She’s the only one in the team who uses a shield after all.”
The other girls nodded at Sky’s suggestion and Maria tossed the book over to Lizzy, who immediately learned. Since she had the skill book, she didn’t need to go to a class instructor to combine and create the skill.
“Alright, since that’s over, let’s quickly distribute the rest of the items and continue with the raid!”