FB: Chapter 115 – Goblin Horde

I was off on my own. My honor guard was off improving their skills somewhere else. I didn’t need a team for what I was doing. I was going to try to level up my weight reduction title. That meant killing at least a million, hopefully ten million, monsters while heavily encumbered.

My skills had been rearranged to be focused on Luck, since switching them out during combat had been a hassle last time. The only skill besides Luck boosting that I kept was Poison Aura. That was more than enough to kill all the goblins that kept rushing at me from the Goblin Tunnels. I could handle switching out one skill.

I hadn’t used this place before, for a couple reasons. The first one was that the goblins would only get stronger over time. The more that were killed, stronger goblins would come up from the depths. They also started off at a very low level. So, it wasn’t a good spot for grinding experience, since there was only a small sweet spot where the monsters gave experience, but weren’t insanely difficult compared to a person’s build and level.

The other reason was that there was a range of goblins. They were also a bit smarter than other monsters at their level. They had teamwork that only got better the higher the level they were. This kind of variation made grinding incredibly annoying since the monster composition could change and render an effective altar completely useless.

But if I wanted to mindlessly kill millions of monsters, this was the place. Goblins just rushed forward, since I had used goblin nip to lure them in mindlessly. It wasn’t that expensive, but quite effective. Wave after wave ran at my massive fortress of armor, then fell over dead. The goblins had lesser goblins burst out of their corpses and attack.

The entire gimmick of this enemy was the relentless hordes. While the zone where the Goblin Tunnels was still located inside the Human Empire, it was at the edge. Once the wave of players got here, they would be too high level for the base goblins. Then once they started fighting, they would realize how annoying this place was.

Unless someone rushed straight downwards and got trapped in the tunnels, the entire battle was more annoying than dangerous if you knew what you were doing. As for preventing corpse build up there were a series of timed fire traps set up around me. They activated every five minutes, and were specifically set up to consume corpses with very low damage flames.

Normally such a trap would be used to prevent a necromancer from using corpses in a battle. It was also a great way to keep my surroundings clear so more goblins could rush to their death. There was no counter for the number of monsters killed. I could only guess and wait until my title went up. Since the monsters were more than 20 levels below me, I got 0 experience per kill. One couldn’t become powerful by killing weak monsters.

The goblins were rushing into this cavern from four separate tunnels. This room was normally a trap room one would fall down into from a higher level and goblins would swarm the player or players. Now I had turned the trap room into a grinding room.

There was a fun fact that if a person had over 100% weight reduction, they would be able to float and take less fall damage. It was a popular myth in game that if someone achieved 200% weight reduction they would be able to float through the air and even fly.

That might be the case, but a person would have to invest a considerable amount into weight reduction. The highest I ever heard of was around 140% that was done to see what would happen by a streamer. You could get some impressive jumps and enhance your speed if you knew how to adjust your movement to kick off more horizontally on the ground.

It was popular because titles often had some hidden effect. There were people in my last life who wanted to kill enough monsters to find this hidden effect. Even if I thought it was quite boring standing around while monsters killed themselves in my aura.

I wanted to go the opposite direction. I wanted to use up less skill slots for weight reduction, since it was already taking too much. Investing into Luck or poison would be better choices. There were more than enough melee fighters out there. But a Luck and poison combination synergy was much stronger. I had only adjusted my build since the mega blade was too useful for giving me staying power in a fight.

Right now, the weapon was safely put away in high level NPC monitored storage along with the mage armor. I might die out here and didn’t want to lose my unique items if I did. Whatever program QAI had set up to control the goblins had more leeway than other areas in terms of adaptability.

Thankfully my lure was working strong, otherwise I would have been besieged by ranged attackers. But I was noticing that goblins with greater poison resistance were showing up. Once the poison resistance got too much I would switch over to another aura skill.

While the goblins were highly adaptable, they only had so much adaptability. There were probably some hidden adaptability points that were used. When faced with a threat, the program controlling the goblins would counter with the best adaptation possible while also ramping up the level of goblins that were attacking over time.

There were countless of these unique twists to various zones all over Exponential to keep things interesting for players, rather than just mindless slaughters outside of the beginner areas. I had no doubt there was a lot of lore behind the goblins, but it didn’t interest me in the slightest, since I already knew their gimmick.

Switching out weapons, a lightning aura formed around me. The damage was less than poison, but it had a stun effect. The resistance the goblins had been building up was now completely useless. The strength of my attack came from my absolute level advantage against them. Their levels were increasing, but they would reach level 80 at most before I left here to log out.

Each day I would kill about 100,000 goblins. That was a full 18 hours of grinding, with a 1 hour set up and 1 hour extraction time. Do this for 100 days, I should kill 10,000,000 monsters while heavily encumbered.

While it was a bit of a gamble since there was no information on the title above killing 1,000,000 monsters while heavily encumbered, it probably existed. If it didn’t then a program would create the next title in that title track.

That was one factor that made Exponential so engaging. The programs running everything would adapt in response to player actions. Players would rarely be punished in a out of game context unless they broke some very specific rules. A good example was telling NPCs they weren’t real. Or talking to them about Earth to confuse them.

While I had no confirmation on the title similar to the slayer title track, the progression was much more obvious, with the number of monsters that needed to be killed going up by a factor of ten for each increase in the title. If someone were crazy enough to kill 100 million monsters while heavily encumbered, I had no doubt they get a higher title than the one I was aiming for.

Eventually the time investment wasn’t worthwhile. I was so far ahead of everyone else, using this time to get a very high rank weight reduction title was a good use of my time. While being ahead of others was great for killing people, it also made trading or forming a team much more difficult. Using this time to make my foundation even stronger was the best choice.

It might be boring just standing around while goblins ran at me and killed themselves, but it was the simplest way to improve the title that I needed to reduce the number of skill shards I was using for weight reduction.

I still wasn’t entirely sure what I would use the freed-up skill slots for once I got stronger. Using regular skills instead of unique skills was frustrating, but there weren’t that many more unique skills that I wanted. The poison rainbow was tempting, but ultimately those skills beyond Black Salamander Poison stacked up damage and weren’t part of the calculation for critical poison damage.

If I wanted to deal a range of damage and status effects then they would be useful, but then I might as well become an Aura Paladin. While there were no classes in the game, certain skills stacked well with each other. A popular build was an Aura Paladin, stacking up aura and aura boosting skills. Combined with some melee skills so they could survive, they were annoying to fight, but not much more than any other focused builds.

Their strength came from stacking up a range of damage. It was a good strategy against low level mobs, but against similar leveled opponents, those that could attack from range, or other counters, the build struggled. Stacking up different types of damage with my poison damage wasn’t useful to my core way of fighting and dealing damage.

I was focused on critical poison damage in combination with Luck to heal myself and kill anything I ran into. That was the overpowered aspect of my build. Getting a high resistance wasn’t easy, but once I had that and could absorb poison damage, which was when my build became overpowered. It also scaled well since critical poison damage was also based on Luck.

Every future level would allow me to get 17 stat points in Luck, having a Luck skill shard in place for those 16 free stat points and then another stat point across all stats. With my percentage Luck boosts that was around 22 points of Luck, or another 0.2% increase in poison critical chance.

If I focused on leveling, then I would need to get around 200 levels to max out my poison critical chance. I wasn’t sure what would happen if it got over 100% since that had never happened. There was a chance nothing would happen, or there might be a unique effect.

That wouldn’t happen for a long time, since I needed experience to rank up my skills. Before I went beyond level 120 I wanted to maximize out my skill shards, getting them up to Heriloom rank with enough experience to have the possibility of making them a Divine Skill.

Perhaps that was what the poison rainbow would give. A Divine poison skill. The poison rainbow was passive in terms of effects. But that quest wouldn’t be simple. I had looked into the monsters. They were a pain to get to and I would need a master alchemist at the minimum to safely extract the poison. Then there were all the Sample Poison skill shards I would need to level up to make sure that the poison rainbow skill shards all benefited from the small personal experience boost.

I had time to think as the goblins kept rushing at me. I switched out my skill shard to Fire Aura. The goblins began to burst into flames instead of being shocked to death. I also took another MP potion. That was the other bad thing about this strategy. The sheer cost in MP potions. Aura skills used up a lot of MP and MP didn’t regenerate in combat.

I didn’t even want to think about the cost. I had the funds, so I was going to use them. Better than sitting around. If I could pay for an advantage to get stronger, then I would take it. There had been growing complaints about this, but QAI hadn’t done anything.

Consumables were an exponential scale of expense but linear in terms of effects. If someone wanted to throw money around like I did, then they were welcome to do so. Consumables were the main method to take currency out of circulation. If they got nerfed, then it would crash the entire economy. I also had no doubt that QAI had done a lot of analysis on the subject.

It wasn’t the best way to have game balance, but it gave people costly life saving measures. It also put incredible pressure on the financial resources of guilds. If one didn’t manage their costs, then they could quickly go bankrupt, since the price of consumables scaled up exponentially in terms of cost while only linearly in terms of power. The higher one climbed, the less useful they were, unless someone was willing to spend a lot of money. That was a major reason for staying at level 120, to maximize my ability to kill things with the use of consumables.