Collide Gamer

Chapter 289 – Upgrades and unwanted Patches

Chapter 289 – Upgrades and unwanted Patches

It was the evening of Friday, around 23 o’clock, and John had just finished a day long grinding session and was just about ready to collapse. He had started at roughly 8 AM and had been running four Assaults of three hours each throughout the day.

Of course, that was three hours real time, thanks to Create I.D..’s time dilation, that was further changed to 3 hours 52 minutes. Almost four hours constantly spent fighting were pretty straining and actually about the best John could do. While he would have loved to knock the timer up a bit more and get himself even bigger rewards, he was held back by mana, mental exhaustion and other such tedious things as his bladder.

So, they had to take breaks between every Assault. Breaks that lasted around 30 minutes and were usually filled with John putting the Soulpotion in the living room and then summoning an enemy for Rave to fight while he himself rested.

Then he grabbed the Soulpotion from the living room again and went back to work. The only time he had seen Nia was in the morning if he had asked her where he could find her. She had just instructed him to leave the Soulpotion on the table, she would see it.

Worked for him, and as it was empty whenever he picked it up from the dinner table, it obviously worked for her too.

Even with breaks, the total of four Assaults John needed to finally get here had made this day the single hardest power-leveling he had done to date. At least during the one-month grind, he had to fight through weaker lower floors before getting to the actual hard stuff. Assaults were just hard all the time; the orcs adapting to his strategies certainly didn’t make it easier either.

But now he had 2 Skill Evolution Points and a new class level on the horizon, things were looking pretty good!

Of course, Gaia had to fuck him over in some way. ‘Midseason Patches are not nice,’ he thought. At least this one wasn’t going to have sweeping changes, otherwise it wouldn’t take just a few days. He found the 80% reduction interesting, however.

As that was the same number as his current Gaia Dependency Factor. ‘So, I am getting more self-sustaining?’ John thought. ‘Wonder how that works. Is part of my mana getting siphoned off at every waking moment? Is there something else supplying me? The inner workings of my powers are a mystery.’

Well, he already knew that the Soulpotion wouldn’t be affected by this, so he could still grind things out for Nia; he just wouldn’t go for experience in the next week. He would much rather get less loot, but have that loot be normal, than only a fifth of the experience reward that an Assault normally yielded. He would go clear some normal dungeons and see if he could get some interesting items off of them.

Also, he would need that class level. The patch announcement said nothing about that getting reduced by 80%, so that would be fairly easy to get at the very least. For now, he had Stat and Skill Evolution Points to spend though.

Stat Points were easy, they just went straight into Agility, as he had previously decided. That made his status look a bit more balanced.

Level 101 would give him Agility 50 and then present him with the question what to do again. But that was at least a few days off, so he could postpone that question until then.

The bump in experience needed came as expected as well. The requirement had almost doubled. With Assault he still would be able to get in at least one level a day, but that trend would be slowing down further and further until he had to find yet another way to break the system.

‘I will either find a way to level quickly or make one,’ John thought and moved on to his Skill Evolutions. First was the skill he desperately wanted to replace with something more useful: Arcane Explosion.

He absolutely did not want Spiral Mana Cage. Aside from the fact that it would leave him with the skill he was looking to replace, it was just crowd control. Worse yet, it was CC that he had to throw, meaning that it also would suffer from exactly the same problems as Arcane Explosions did, namely that it was a mage ability that needed him to spec highly into Physical stats.

Flash of Mana was interesting because it instantly did its damage. However, it also had a limited range, which he really had no use for. Jack wasn’t supposed to get close, and if he got himself another Spellcarrier, then he still wasn’t sure if he wanted a skill that dealt guaranteed low damage.

Arcane Echo, however, was highly interesting. Sure, a slow-moving projectile wasn’t exactly what he wanted, but if he went and thought of it in a bombing scenario, then it became way more useful. The rest of the spell was also good for several reasons.

First off, it specified ‘enemy’ so, just like Arcane Explosion, it wouldn’t hit his allies. Then there was the part about leaving an effect wherever it landed. Even if it missed, the skill would change the battlefield to his advantage.

It was like dropping a bomb that, if it failed to hit the enemy soldiers, simply decided to not explode and become a mine instead. The description failed to mention whether the Echo Point was visible or not, but that wasn’t all that important to John. The fact that it wasn’t mentioned at all, however, implied the former was correct.

So, he picked Arcane Echo and was done with it.

‘Over to Mana Ray,’ John thought. Replacing the old thing still felt a bit weird. It had been with him for so long. But, alas, the old must be replaced in the name of progress and granting John more clearing speed.

Out of interest, he also looked at the other skills he still could evolve. Possession was there, but as part of his toolkit relied on it being what it was he was unlikely to ever invest a point into it. Arcane Echo listed again and, in a mild surprise, so did Blink. There were also the elementals (save Undine) and Arcana Strike. He had no idea what would even come after a mana bombardment. A mana satellite canon?

‘So Tier 4 is the maximum I can reach, interesting. Also, it may be worth it to evolve Blink to see if I can get a skill that does the same but cheaper later on,’ it crossed John’s mind as he clicked on Mana Ray.

John blinked at the choices. Was there even one?

He had already established last time that Arcane Lance was a terrible skill that deserved to crawl under a rock. Its extra area damage was so situational that it would barely ever happen. That aside, he just got a better AoE.

While Mana Laser was a better Mana Ray, it didn’t even hold a candle to the thing that had replaced Arcana Strike in the options.

Shardbound was insane from a mechanical perspective. The damage numbers aside, which, according to evolution tradition, couldn’t be lower than Mana Ray, the applications were practically limitless.

Thanks to its variable mana cost, it would be able to fit into almost any situation. The fact that it could be aimed and shot later made it so that he could use it to lay traps. The amount of shards he could position was also anywhere between 1 and 100. If the damage scaled with the mana costs (which it should since the numbers didn’t), it was also something he could use as a long range finisher instead of his current pick of Mana Blade, which had a limited range.

He could use it for trap laying, for defensive positions, for burst damage, for AoE damage, as a singular strike or as a nearly undodgeable hail of raw arcane power. Aside from his summoning skills and Artificial Spirit, that thing sounded like the most OP thing he could get his hands on.

So, picking it wasn’t as much a choice as it was warranted. Only a fool or a meme deck builder would pass the objectively most versatile tool. With both spells acquired, John spent a moment to look at them with his skill menu and check their numbers.

Okay, its damage was slightly worse, but it was just level 1, so that wasn’t all that unexpected. It also cost 150 mana (or 25%) less, so he was still making a net gain on damage if he used it more than once. A bit of a sunk cost fallacy, admittedly, but as it levelled up, it would overtake Arcane Explosion in damage.

449 arcane damage per 100 mana. That was not too shabby at all. At 300 mana invested, Mana Ray’s old cost, that meant that it would deal 1347 damage compared to the 1274 Mana Ray did. So at level 1 it was already doing more damage, had a higher range and more versatility. This skill was idiotically strong. Using it would take some experimentation though.

John actually needed to run some numbers through his head to come to a conclusion on what he was going to use as his finishing move in the future. Between Mana Blade and Shardbound, he would prefer the latter, purely on the basis of being ranged.

‘Mhm, Mana Blade comes out ahead by about 1/3, guess being a melee skill does give it some higher damage,’ were John’s final thoughts on the matter. “Okay, I am done here,” he told the assembled girls. A bit of a needless gesture, they were all connected to his mind, but he still liked talking to them.

“Let’s call it quits for tonight and experiment with the skills tomorrow.”