[D'sP] Mixing Skills - Chapter 430

Doyle has gone through a few cycles of fox testing on the second floor. Not much has changed with the fox, but he feels like he is close to something. This called for more testing!

Fox instances had been released once a day, but finally this last fight didn’t provide him enough inspiration to go off and test things. Doyle spawned another fox instance and released it. ‘Hmm, at this level, the two Mana skills are as synchronized as they can be. In fact, on the deeper floor, the foxes aren’t as capable of using the skills together.’

Which, admittedly, isn’t that strange. After all, Extend Edge is only four levels higher than Wind Blade when the fox is level one. However, that difference only grows larger with each floor deeper. So, of course, it would be harder for the foxes to use them together.

In theory, Doyle could just go and buy up the skill level of Wind Blade. Except, he felt there was something to the level difference at a lower character level. The extended edges needed to be a higher level. While there wasn’t a way to test another ratio, something felt right about five to one. A thing that didn’t feel there even when the skill levels went up by the small amount that happens when the fox is advanced to level three.

There was something that needed to happen below level three. It was something that likely had happened to the original fox that entered the dungeon. In fact, Doyle was willing to bet it caused what was originally a normal fox to turn into a razor fox. Which raised the question for why the razor fox pattern didn’t already have that step accomplished?

Doyle turns to Ally, but she is in the middle of a call and this wasn’t that important. Maybe the fox had just been a failed evolution, but the system didn’t want to give Doyle an incomplete pattern? It didn’t matter as Doyle now had infinite tries to get it right.

Though as he considers this, one possibility raises itself. So far, Doyle had been testing a level two fox. What if, that was the problem the original fox had? Well, not the specific level, but rather that it got the skills at a higher level than would allow a full synergy.

He considers how to make this work, when something he got from a path comes to mind. Though Doyle forgets the exact wording and so pulls it up.

{

Monster can be created or released from a farm at any lower level down to the monsters minimum level for a reduction in cost equal to what percentage the reduction in level is compared to the floors minimum level with a minimum cost of 1

}

Doyle’s core dims, it was more complex than he would prefer, but it had the answer he needed. If the skill levels at character level two was too high, make a lower level fox. Sure, he could have gone and placed it on the first floor, but he wasn’t completely ignorant to the chaos his change had caused for the town.

The original fox instance was pulled up and the two foxes replaced with a pair of level one foxes. Then Doyle spawns a copy of the instance and settles back to see what happens.

A six person party are the ones to stumble into his test. Doyle had seen them separately, this seemingly a group doing a shakeout run after reorganizing. The change to the party lineup likely coming from the fact that their previous teams hadn’t managed to beat the boss.

They approached the second floor forest with care, wary of what they might find. Not quite relieved when they noticed it was just the foxes. From there, they cleared the floor easily enough, though the foxes felt odd to fight. They didn’t seem as strong as the reports and yet also felt more powerful? It was odd and they planned to report it.

Doyle didn’t care, he had seen everything he had wanted to see. A level one fox with a five to one skill level ratio was just right. The wind blades molded around the extended claws. And while the foxes fired them off like normal wind blades, Doyle had seen that it wasn’t instant, that the blades weren’t detached.

He turned back to the last floor and created a level one razor fox, not caring about the discount. ‘Use Extend Edge and Wind Blade, but don’t fire off the blade.’

Once the fox follows his orders, Doyle zooms in on the claws.

Around the claws are a field of clear power. Well, if you’re just going by the visible spectrum, there is nothing to see except at the edge. Doyle could see the Mana extending off of the claws. Except, right at the edge, the wind blade overlapped. Which was not how it had worked before.

No matter how close the two skills might have gotten previously, they only ever touched and not a step further. Now, the overlap wasn’t by that much. In fact, a human, even one that can see Mana, would probably only see it as touching. Doyle, though, could tell the difference.

Shame that he couldn’t simply order it to make the skills overlap more. Well, he can order it to do that. Shame that the fox didn’t know how to follow through and actually do it.

Instead, Doyle focused on having the fox use the skills over and over. To activate them close together, attempt to summon more wind blades, strive to hold it all for longer. Then he summoned in two dozen more foxes because even if he didn’t mind waiting, doing so simply because the fox needed to regen Mana was annoying.

Not that it matters if he summoned even a hundred of them. A hundred kobolds from the 17th floor is an amount easily missed. Nevermind the fact it wouldn’t even be 100 kobolds. Though as Doyle tries to calculate how cheap his level one foxes would be, the wording of the path effect confuses him for a moment.

After that, things click once he thinks about it from the perspective of a level 100 monster. Each level reduced would then be equal to the cost being reduced by a single percent.

Which means with the floor minimum level of 29, each level down is a tiny bit more than three percent. Or put a different way, a level one fox was going to cost about three percent of its original cost. And all of that math simply to prove that the system likes to round up as the foxes still ended up costing two points despite the actual cost being 1.48, which in theory should round down.

So yeah, at the cost of 4 kobolds, Doyle can support a hundred foxes. Which could get a bit silly. The saving grace for any delvers is that lower level monsters, especially at the point that the cost reduction got this silly, we’re not going to be a threat.

Oh sure, if Doyle stacked up a few hundred foxes and dropped the entire mass of them, that might do something. Except he already had four point goats. And at that point, the monsters would do a better job just fighting.

Doyle shakes his core and turns back to the foxes he had recently spawned in. A quarter of them are set to practicing, though Doyle isn’t paying too much attention to them, instead focusing on their Mana pools.

Once the first group uses another fourth of their pool, Doyle sets the next quarter to practicing. And a further fourth is used, another quarter starts practicing. Then finally, after the first group is down by three-fourths of their pool, he sets them to rest and gets the last quarter practicing.

At this point, Doyle realizes this cycle isn’t perfect and so begins to summon in groups of 25 foxes until there are always foxes practicing their skills. Which meant he ended up with a decent number of foxes as they took much longer to refill their Mana pools than to empty them, despite the fact that they are taking their time to properly practice the skills.

And with that, Doyle can sit back, watch them practice, and offer suggestions when he sees something.

‘Try summoning the blade on different claws.’

‘Can you overlap multiple blades on the same claw?’

‘What happens when you focus the Extend Edge skill on a single claw?’

‘Cut at the ground using the blade without firing it off.’

And many more, including some suggestions on Mana flow. A tricky thing for most to suggest, though Doyle can cheat in giving the advice as he can directly see inside his monsters. It is so much harder when someone can’t see the Mana flowing through the person they are instructing.

And through this all, the foxes slowly got better on an individual level. Slight changes that didn’t quite spread so much as get discovered over and over. And through it all, Doyle got to observe the limitations of a dungeon monster.

After all, unlike a normal creature, they can not gain a level. Their skills are stuck at where they started. Limited to a certain ceiling, which they could only ever approach.

However, within this, there was much room. Parts of a skill that started out smooth would become rougher as they improved in other areas. Not always for the better, but even if growth was restricted, at least change wasn’t.

Oh sure, Doyle had seen similar things to this with the bosses. They would practice while no delvers were around and do phenomenal. Only for even basic things to become flawed when facing delvers.

This balancing of a skill, on the other hand, showed something else. It revealed the value of certain aspects. Some foxes ended up focused on Mana control while using the skills. That was a relatively cheap trade until it reached the natural level and jumped in price.

Other foxes tried to make their extended edges more solid. More real. This, while possible, seemed to take gobs of knowledge to accomplish, dropping most other things related to the skill in question.

However, there were some limits on retraining their skills. Well, limits on top of the fact that Doyle couldn’t figure out how to adjust the way they spawn in. It seems the skills of a pattern are more set in stone.

Oh, and there wasn’t a good way to force the monsters to move their skill in a certain direction. Maybe a boss can do it, but the normal non-sapient monsters were not good at getting inspiration. Even when Doyle had a fresh group of foxes mirror one another as exactly as possible, down to having them in their own featureless small rooms, they would end up having their skills change seemingly randomly.

If they changed at all, that is. Doyle could only shake his core. A hundred foxes and only a few showed any variety beyond getting slightly better. Which wasn’t even new to him.

After all, Doyle had experienced this way back at the start with his sling using kobolds. They had needed time to “max out” their ability to use a sling. So Doyle focuses back in on his intention and works to develop a fox that better combines the two skills.

Or rather, after a quick test of copying one of the foxes by moving it to a lower floor and making an instance, multiple foxes. Because of course creating a copy of an instance doesn’t get around the fact that new monsters seem to come in with default versions of their skills.

To accomplish this, Doyle began rapidly cycling through foxes. If they didn’t show any changes or changes in the wrong direction, he would just replace them with a new fox instead of seeing where they would go. There was something with the two skills overlapping and he was going to find out what.

Testing The New Toy - Chapter 429

Plant Growth - Chapter 431