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The Gamer Chapter 1456 – 27 Days of Preparation 10 – Try and Select Perks again
🕑 Added 2023-06-12 15:52:40 +0000 UTC“Well, this is going to be difficult,” John stated his thoughts. The original battle plan was projected on the TV again. They had all taken too much damage to immediately go back in again, so they were strategizing while resources went back to full. “First, the obvious adjustment: Metra, start the combat by throwing Rex Magnar from the centre of the room.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” the First of Wrath agreed.
“Think the attack is on a timer?” Momo asked John. “33 seconds is an odd interval, but it could be it.”
“I think it’s triggered by tank swap,” John stated. “Would fit with the theme of the fight being focused all around coordination. What’s the opinion of everyone on it from what we have seen so far, by the way? Beatable?”
“Gotta be honest: I got slapped around,” Rave confessed. “Not even sure if I’d have managed to stay alive for much longer, regardless of the face full of poison I got.” She grinned widely. “It’s gonna be a challenge, but I think I can do this.”
“Same here,” Metra responded. “It’s going to be a bitch of a fight and I do love my bitches.” The First of Wrath cackled, as more straight-laced members of the assembly rolled their eyes.
“The seeking attacks will drain my mana. But, I believe it’s doable,” Undine gave her opinion, then looked to Gnome for a decision.
“Uhm… yeah, if I just… don’t do bad, I s-should be able to do this… I can do this!” Gnome forced enthusiasm into herself with a lovable double fist pump.
‘Let’s hope this morale sticks,’ the Gamer thought. They were only past the first wipe and there would be many, many more. The good news was that the fight did seem to be incredibly fair. The knights responded to verbal taunts and challenges, they remained focused on one target at a time, and the attacks they had encountered so far were clearly telegraphed. Nothing too crazy in the beginning of the first phase. “Alright, so here is our updated strategy. Metra faces the boss in the centre of the room and tries to keep staying with her back to the bottom right. Momo and I will be in the top right and bottom left, so we aren’t anywhere near the cone attack when it happens. Undine, you’ll be in the top left. The Poison Knight seems to be dealing the most damage, so you need to be closest to that battlefield. Everyone, as you fight your respective target, kite them clockwise. I want the spread to look like this, when we are getting ready for the tank swap.”
“If we do everything perfectly, the following sequence should play out,” John continued. “The tank swap begins and Amadeus starts charging his attack towards Metra. Everyone should get ready to dodge at this point. Since every knight you had on you will be changing targets, there will be a brief window where you can focus entirely on the boss. We’ll have to experiment whether it works better if we do simultaneous or gradual tank swaps and whether that influences the order of attacks at all.
“Assuming it does not and the sequence of cones is always light, poison, ice, metal, shovel, you need to time the aggro swap so the person you take the target from can dodge the cone attack and then move into the appropriate quarter of the battlefield. The knight will meet you about halfway, which should be back in front of the portal, and the cones should be where no one is really fighting.”
With the plan made, they moved back to intel gathering.
Important information gathered was numerous. First was the confirmation that they could indeed stagger their taunts. Amadeus started his sequence of cone attacks on the first tank swap. He did not restart nor repeat it if there were further tank swaps during its duration. As long as they timed it properly, they could indeed give each tank that one to two second window where they could use their individual ability to dodge the area attack. It was easier for some than others. Rave could Shift, Beatrice had Twist Position, but Aclysia and Gnome had a much harder time.
Aclysia, at least, could use Fortification to bolster her defences against physical attacks in combination with Shieldmaid. Each time she got hit during the 5 second duration of her Devotion Spender, she’d gain 1% bonus HP Regeneration for 10 seconds. A useful passive to recuperate her HP loss.
Gnome had no such luck, she just had to tank it. Thankfully, she was sturdy enough to take it all.
Day three, four, and five were all sacrificed entirely to trial and error of this fight.
Before John knew it, they were 380 attempts deep. A ludicrous amount, way higher than any previous boss fight they had gone through. A large part of this was just how quickly they wiped early on and that the walk back was, unlike other difficult fights in the past, miniscule. Still, three days spent only on learning the first phase was… frustrating.
It wasn’t exactly the special mechanics that gave them trouble. Those they handled well enough, because they were telegraphed fairly. It was all the little things that reality had that games didn’t that were difficult.
Each of the four knights had their own choice of weapon and their own style of wielding that weapon. Each of the four knights was stronger and faster than any one of them. Four superior opponents whose fighting styles had to be understood, whose rhythms had to be ingrained, and that each combatant had to be capable of switching too. They did not have the luxury of making mistakes. Undine’s MP bar was not forgiving enough for that.
It was on the morning of the 7th of the 27 days that John felt the general lack of morale. They didn’t speak at the breakfast table, which was beyond unusual. The half of the harem not involved in the fight stayed silent because they did not know how to handle the brooding faces. The other half was analysing their performance in the fight, replaying failures and hits that could be avoided over and over again.
There was no true Enrage mechanic to this Raid boss. They could take it slow and steady. A slow and steady approach required that they weren’t outmanoeuvred in their individual encounters. “Do you want to continue?” John posed the important question.
“What an unnecessary question,” Lydia responded, before anyone in the actual Raid team could. “Have you ever known surrender with this much time to spare, my loves?”
The single question was all the invigoration that was needed. Brooding around the table returned to determination. “She’s right,” John seized the moment, to drive home this feeling of renewed enthusiasm. “This is difficult and in that lies the ultimate reward. We don’t back off from challenges.”
“Yeah!” Sylph was the first to shout in agreement. The others followed, only to turn their voices into various forms of telling the eager wind spirit to stop heading towards the door. “What, I thought were going all whooot whoooot over here!”
“We’re still eating!” Metra told her.
“And we have a bunch of Perks to select,” John reminded everyone. Between the lewding and the experience from what enemies he had slain so far, he had reached level 595. More important was that, yesterday night, Metracana Master had maxed out.
There were a great many Perks that needed picking up, between the last level of Harem Gamer and his grand total of six Artificial Spirits. “Let’s start with me.” John didn’t even have to stop eating breakfast to open his menu. Aclysia and Beatrice were all too happy to keep presenting him with diced cheese, grapes, and other little treats. Even in those little motions, the returning energy levels of the Raid party were evident.
“Wow, those are terrible,” John voiced his thoughts out loud. “Terrible for a final Perk in a Class, I should say.”
“I concur,” Lydia stated, once she had a view of all of them. As per usual, the window was passed around the harem.
“If ya pick the right one, and then I remember ya, Imma break your arms,” Rave threatened, half-jokingly. The relaxed part of her voice was merely because she knew that he would never pick it.
He was too happy with all of them around, too deep in proving his love to them, and too attached to their daily affections, to remove them from his life. “Wonder how it would work with my familiars, though,” the Gamer thought out loud, looking around the elementals and the Artificial Spirits. “Is it going to cut the mental connection too?”
“You won’t find out,” Aclysia told him, her gentle smile belying the sharpness of those words. A hand played with his shoulder. On the other side, Beatrice did the same. Both seemed ready to grab him the instant he was going to lean towards that choice even jokingly. “Master,” Aclysia swooned warningly.
“I’m just theorizing,” the Gamer calmed her down, just as the window appeared back in front of him. “The only real choice here is ‘A Great Harem’. ‘All that matters in this World’ is interesting but, for one, there’s two of you here that still haven’t hit maximum.” He could say that flippantly because both of the women he was talking about were aware and unashamed of that fact.
One was Lydia, who was holding back the true depths of her emotions due to her loyalty to her nation. To have been absolutely in love with him would have meant she picked him over Germany, should the two ever come to blows. John did not plan for that to be the case, because he wanted her to make that choice as little as he wanted to pick between any two of his haremettes.
The other was Metra, who was just shy of maxing out. The explanation here was that he still refused the king title. While that was a bit petty and weird, emotions often could be. Metra wanted him to be a monarch, that was the version of him she would love the most or at least the one she thought she’d love the most.
It wasn’t uncommon for some members of his harem to fluctuate between 190 and 200. Even if all of them loved him deeply and he loved all of them deeply, there were bad days and days one just wanted to be alone in general. “It’s just too unstable,” he summarized his thoughts on the matter. “Great Harem diminishes the amount of time we need to have sex in a day which… eh.” He shrugged. It was a benefit, although not one they would pay too much attention to on most days. The actually interesting part was the Building upgrade. The Palace was already an extensive dwelling and it boggled the mind what a 10th Perk Upgrade of it would look like.
The selection was made. No way to test what the exact benefits were at this time. There was a flood of other windows he had to deal with, though.
That was actually pretty good. It was potentially insane, even. Fifty metres was quite the distance and 3% Charisma per person was an immense boon. Just having his usual attendants in the form of Aclysia, Beatrice, and Claire directly around him would assure a 9% bonus to Charisma. The only drawback was that Charisma was one of those Stats where the direct tangible difference was difficult to measure. Still, why not activate it when he was heading to a social gathering?
A difficult selection, for many reasons. The Master obviously tickled his sexual desires, and it wasn’t like he HAD to follow the offer of training them outside the bedroom. The Protector was the manifestation of the inclination any man had when it came to maintaining the security of what was his. Both of them, however, were not playing to John’s strengths.
As much as he roleplayed the Master in the bedroom and as much as he was the actual Master to his maids, the dynamic lacked the actual domination of a true owner. He did not want to introduce it either. He was happy to have his little horde of individual and sometimes headstrong women to call his own. To own them any more than he already did felt like he would be tainting what he had at this time.
Much like he wanted to be the Protector, he hadn’t picked himself a group of women that needed a man dedicated to that task alone. If most of his harem was made up of Lorelei and Delicia types, then perhaps he would have needed this. If he hadn’t decided to be a summoner, who provided support and coordination, leaving the front line to familiars, then perhaps he would have taken this. With most of those familiars being the haremettes he would be protecting and many of the remaining women being capable fighters in their own rights
The Lover was who he was. He wanted his girls to be the best versions of themselves. There was an argument to be made that he should be investing in things he wasn’t already good at, but this one resonated with him the deepest. Not needing a talk on the matter, he pressed the button and was left with only one window to check.
“Yo.” The word slipped out of John’s mouth before he could stop it.
“Yo?” His fiancé snorted with amusement. He slipped the window over to her. “Yoooo, that’s turbo busted!”
“I feel like you’re appropriating my gamer culture,” Lee complained.
“I’m one too,” the Gamer reminded, and Lee did the typical ‘I kinda doubt that’ motion with her left hand.
While John grumbled something about finding himself a sugar mommy to keep him clothed and fed as he gamed the day away, the rest of the harem read through the new addition to John’s emergency cooldown arsenal.
Gamer’s Body was, without a doubt, one of the strongest tools in his arsenal. The fact that he could not be incapacitated by any non-lethal wound was strictly ludicrous. To extend this benefit to the rest of his harem was incredible. Some of them would benefit from this less, like Eliana who healed from basically everything immediately anyway, others more, like Rave who was still flesh and blood. Fact was that all of them would benefit and that it would throw the enemy for a loop.
Fighting an enemy that did not bleed could be quite terrifying.
The power in the tenth Perk may have been low, but between the Equalizer Perk and this Overclock, that felt like a justifiable drop in power for this one specifically.
“On to the Metracana Master Perks,” the Gamer announced.
Comments
Funatic
Was a note to myself, fixed it for the public release
Cal
Hurrah for perk chapters, always fun! Quick question: is the "To be written" part of the Master Class choice sheet supposed to read that or was that a note to yourself? Feels a little lacking in sass if it is an actual note from Gaia.
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