FB: Chapter 111 – Loot

“The information you requested,” the information broker pushed over the stack of papers regarding the items I had gotten in the last battle.

The White Rose was useful as a high end item for a unique legendary plant based skill. Valuable, but not something I needed or wanted. The Tome of Lightning was the same as well. Lightning Barrage was a great skill, but I didn’t have room to specialize with such a skill. A lightning mage would have been a better choice for such an item, but I planned to trade it. Then there was the Iron Golem Figurine and Golem Crafting Manual, more items that I didn’t need.

The two amulets from Whiterose and the lightning mage were being saved for now. I had pissed off the dark god of the forest and the dark god of lightning. That brought up my count to five by my reckoning. It was their fault for sending their minions to fight me.

The sixth drop and the second one from the Lightning Mage was more interesting. A set of unique magic robes.

Unique Armor: Stunning Lightning Robes Of Enhancement
A flashy set of magical robes that enhance the caster.
+50% Lightning Damage
+10% Stun Chance
+10% Stun Length
+Drop on death
+Innate Legendary Skill: Stunning Aura

For a lightning mage this armor was really good. It didn’t offer any protection, since it was a robe and not actual armor. That was to balance out mages to make them weak to melee. The stun effect was quite powerful and something that wasn’t part of poison skills. Stun periods tended to be very short, but if you got a stun lock then it was quite powerful. The mage armor was very good for a stun focused build.

Two amulets to be saved for a later trade in, two tomes, one legendary item, and one unique piece of armor. Overall, it was a very good haul. I had no doubt that my Luck stat helped get so many drops off the NPCs.

Poison Absorption, Blink, Vomitatis, and Dice Roll were all special legendary skills that I needed a unique item to raise their rank. With the two tomes and the White Rose, I could probably get two duplication skill shards in trade, taking a loss, but it was necessary if I wanted to improve my skills.

Boosting Poison Absorption was an obvious choice to increase my rate of healing from self-poison. It was the core aspect of my entire build. Getting to this point took a lot of work. I would also be able to boost it up to Heirloom rank with just experience. That would be another 6% base increase in poison resistance over 100%, taking me from 103.9% to 110.68%. My base poison resistance was 85% due to the 15% boost from my Poison Expert title, with the Poison Absorption skill shard allowing me to break that limit. I would heal over 10% of the poison damage being dealt to me.

It was a bit more complicated since they were all skill shards I was leveling up myself, which gave a minor boost to the percentage effectiveness of the skill. The question was the second skill to look at upgrading to the Artifact rank.

Blink would just see the distance increase as well as the cost. It wasn’t something I was interested in upgrading at the moment. Keeping the cost manageable at 28.5 MP to my pool of 135.6 MP was fine. A bit more distance wasn’t that useful.

Between Vomitatis, my main attack and Dice Roll, an important Luck boosting skill shard, it was hard to decide. I was depending on critical poison damage, rather than actual damage. But the increased poison damage would heal me more. About 2.4 to 1.8 HP per second if I upgraded Vomitatis. The small personal boost was a headache to add in as part of the calculation. The cost of Vomitatis would also increase. The percentage impact on my food and water mere was the most concerning, rather than the small amount of MP.

Dice Roll would directly boost my Luck stat by a percentage at 2% per rank. With the personal experience boost, I was getting an extra 17.6% to my Luck from the skill shard. If I was able to get it up to Heirloom rank that would be a 24.12% boost. That was about an extra 100 Luck at the moment with my base Luck stat being 1,244 at the moment.

Even with my insane Luck stat, it still struggled against high level NPCs to a certain extent. But there were a lot of factors in play with such calculations and melee critical strikes always tended to be a struggle unless you hit a key weak point. The mega blade didn’t raise the chance of critical attacks. A weapon that did that would actually be better than Slice to have better synergy with my build.

Unfortunately, it was like the unique armor I had just gotten. Really good, but not precisely what I wanted or needed. Well boosting Dice Roll was too important to leave behind after everything I had invested into Luck. Now I would need to get way too much experience to level up all these skills. Even duplicator skill shards required experience to function properly, and I wanted to get those small percentage bonuses from using experience I had gotten on my own.

There was no rush at the moment. The Guild was stable, and no one wanted to fight me or the Guild at the moment. Looking into getting experience to boost my skills would be important going forward.

Looking over the information sheets from the broker, I flipped through them. Getting a duplication skill shard was possible through black market channels, but the cost would be hefty with the 3 to 2 trade ratio.

I didn’t want to do the math for the amount of experience needed if I wanted to upgrade my skills, but putting it around 400 million wouldn’t be a bad estimation. If I killed monsters over 10 levels above mine for 250 experience each, I would have to kill 1.6 million monsters. If I got my kill rate up to one per second that would only take 444 hours of straight grinding.

It was the way to make the end game difficult and create more prestige for higher ranked skills, without unbalancing the game itself. Getting unique Legendary skills wasn’t that difficult if one put in effort. But grinding up skills that were ranked higher than that was extremely difficult to get that extra bit of power. That was why it was very rarely done, even by the leading players.

Once you did that, you were committed to a skill. Most top players preferred a bit more flexibility with their builds so they couldn’t be as easily countered. While they lost out on that personal skill bonus, they were able to adapt.

Super guilds didn’t want to invest that much into one skill. It made more sense to raise up another Champion rather than trying to eek out a couple more percentage points on skills to maximize a build. While there were some who preferred their build, it could get boring fighting the same way all the time.

My build with different focuses wouldn’t be possible without my titles. Normally a person would only have two focuses with their build. More than that took a lot of planning and work. Still, it offered unparalleled combat flexibility.

Still, I had weak points. My Perception stat was highly concerning, but Luck had to remain my focus. It would only get better the more I invested into the stat with all the percentage boosts. Raising up my poison critical percentage and melee critical percentage was too devastating. And healing from my poison made my build very difficult to counter. The self-healing was the key to survive effects that might slowly reduce my health. Also, it reduced the need to use healing consumables in combat.

With my weight reduction skill shards, I could equip much heavier armor. I had seven skill shards devoted to reducing weight and a title. Cutting that number down by one or two, would be a big help in freeing up some skill slots, but that wasn’t going to happen.

I could free up a skill slot if I increased the rank of one of my Sample Poison skill shards up to Artifact. It was something I had overlooked for a while. I had just mentally blocked off both skill slots for so long and hadn’t considered them until I evaluated my entire build.

Getting the poison rainbow of skills was sure to lead to something interesting. Having eight skills that were called the poison rainbow was clearly a quest hook if I ever saw one. Increasing the length of the poison or reducing poison resistance were very useful effects.

It was tempting to look at lightning skills, but I knew that was foolish. Having a fourth focus for my build would be too unwieldly. Lightning didn’t synergize well with the rest of my skills. The stun effect was very useful and would be impacted with Luck. Well maybe stun lock and Luck would have some synergy with landing critical melee attacks, but not enough to consider changing things up. Luck would help anything dealing with critical hits. But it wasn’t like poison critical damage that would stack up over time and selfheal me. I could also apply poison and then run away.

Could I make it work? No, no matter how tempting it was. The MP costs would be too much. It was better to boost my poison attack if possible or Luck. I already had the unique legendary skill that boosted Luck and there were no duplicate unique legendary skills with different names, but similar effects. It was how Exponential was balanced in regards to unique Legendary skills, due to their increased effect compared to regular skills. They were unique. There was one for each effect, but only one could be equipped per person.

The other big problem was that I was too far ahead compared to other players. There was no player market for trading unique items at the moment. In time one would develop, but I was stuck with an amazing set of mage armor, that was pointless for me to wear.

In the end the best option would be to probably take another Sample Poison skill shard and look to upgrade them beyond the Legendary rank. Getting my poison critical chance up would be quite useful. It was around 53% at the moment. Half the time it would deal critical damage, which meant around 200 seconds to kill something that couldn’t counter the poison.

Poison critical attacks did 1% or did double damage whichever was greater. They also ignored half of a target’s poison resistance. At a certain point the calculations got way too complex. That was why I estimated things and knew how they worked. Like how around every 100 Luck increased my poison critical chance by around 1%. But there were a lot of factors involved in damage calculations. While everything could be worked backwards, it ultimately came down to what I preferred. A higher critical chance or improving some other aspect of my poison attack.

It would be something I would have to think about. Earning experience was the most important thing at the moment to improve my build and exchanging the items I had in the black market. What I really needed was a way to reduce my weight. Getting an extra 5% weight reduction, would allow me to free up another skill slot.

The problem was that I had to kill a million monsters while heavily encumbered. The best way to cheese this would be to kill lots of easy to kill creatures while being heavily encumbered. There shouldn’t be a requirement about the monsters actually giving me experience. In the past I had done this for efficiency.

There were a lot of low level monsters out there, I could kill while being immobilized by a massive set of armor. I would need an altar set up to get up to one million monsters. Going beyond to try and get 35% weight reduction and killing 10 million monsters while heavily encumbered, just didn’t seem possible.

Still, the idea was tempting. Weight reduction titles were useful, but not game breaking like other titles. Grinding one up wouldn’t be blocked by the programs QAI had running this place. If someone put in the effort they would be rewarded.

But if I was able to get 10% additional weight reduction from my title. I would be able to remove two Reduce Weight skill shards after getting a total of four at Heirloom rank. I already had two at that rank. I would lose 2.7% weight reduction, bringing me down to 86.22% weight reduction. While I might think about killing 10 million monsters, killing 100 million was completely impossible.