FB: Chapter 31 – Second Altar

The next day I woke up in an inn in Lighthouse Town. From there I hiked to a spot on the beach a distance up the coast and then began building an altar. A similar set up to the altar I had in the Murk Swamp with a bit more height would be best. Once it was built, I would then lure in all the monsters in the sea onto the shore in large numbers.

The Fish Men had levels that ranged from 30 to 50, with their commanders and mages around level 60. I had no idea how quickly I would be able to kill them, but with a high point to fight from and Murk Barf, I was confident I could wipe them out quite fast. The Murk Zombies were highly resistant to poison, which was why this tactic wouldn’t have worked on them.

I would just use cheap ass fruits and take antidotes to heal up and wipe out hordes of them over and over. The main concern I had were other people who might be on the beach, but by the time people tried to figure out what I was doing and interfere, it would be too late.

Experience required per level started at 2,000 to get to level 2. After that it followed the formula of adding the previous level’s experience to the current level times 600. That meant to go from level 2 to level 3 required 3,200 experience and then 5,000 for the level after that. Once a person reached level 50, the experience to level up was capped at 766,400 per level.

I needed about 10.3 million experience to hit level 50 from level 30. That would mean 41,200 monsters ten levels higher than my current level. Most likely I would need to kill about 70 to 80 thousand if I had to guess. Over a period of ten days, that meant about 8,000 per real world day.

It was doable, but the lure wouldn’t be cheap and there could be interference. Thankfully Exponential wasn’t too packed yet and this was a high-level area. Right now the majority of people or the wave as I called it were around level 30, with the leaders were around level 40.

People tended to fight around their level, maybe a bit higher while they were in the wave of players to try and get ahead. The absolute level difference penalty made trying to hit above one’s weight class frustrating. People liked being able to mow down monsters quickly rather than struggle with every battle.

But unlike the Murk Swamp, the Sparkling Coast was not a hell zone. In time it would become one of the more popular zones to grind at. Another year from now, and the place would be filled with people. Hopefully there were limited people there when I showed up.

Before I had left Lighthouse Town, I had purchased a larger pack for 5 platinum with 40 inventory slots for general goods. I also purchased a second construction pack that would be able to hold 500 concrete blocks at once but slow my speed way down. Still, it was faster than moving them in smaller batches. That way I didn’t have to make multiple trips to build an altar. I had timed my arrival into the zone to be in the middle of the night for America, when people tended to log off.

There was a very heavy slow period from one in the morning until around eleven in the morning. While some groups and guilds grouped up by country, Exponential hadn’t been entered from around the world yet. Most players were based in the US. All this meant was that I had a window I could operate in and hopefully avoid any major hassles. I just had to wake up earlier than I normally would.

It was daytime in game, but that didn’t matter besides making the sand sparkle, how the NPCs acted, and some other minor details. My altar had been set up. I took out a barrel of blue cow blood. No idea what blue cows were, or why the fishmen type monsters loved the blood, but they did. There were many side stories like that if one wanted to dig. QAI really made it an immersive world. One could get lost in it forever if they allowed themselves to. Thankfully I already knew which details were important for this kind of thing.

I pulled open the cork on the side of the barrel and let it drain into the open spot I had left in the center at the top of the altar so the blood would be protected from the hordes of monsters. I looked around, no one in sight. Hopefully that would remain the case. The sea began to froth and then a horde of fishmen began to charge up the beach. Murk Barf.

I turned my head side to side, hitting a huge swath of them. I pulled out an ass fruit and began to eat it. Five blocks high meant, that the altar was above my head from the ground. While the monsters hit on the stone blocks with coral swords, I had paid for more sturdy and durable ones than I had used in the Murk Swamp for this very reason. Murk Barf. I finished off the ass fruit and then took an antidote and minor healing potion.

This kind of grinding was not cost effective with how many consumables I needed. I would hopefully break even if I was lucky. But the point wasn’t money anymore, it was level experience. I kept using Murk Barf over and over as quickly as I could while replenishing my bars with consumables. Even magic potions were needed since I was in continuous combat and Murk Barf used up a bit of MP.

The fishmen died and the experience flowed. The barrel of blue cow blood ran out after half an hour, so I poured out another one. Each barrel of blue cow blood cost 10 silver. I had placed orders ahead of time after my big payout when I had become Champion. A minor expense compared to how rich I currently was.

The monsters began to die and leave corpses behind, since they weren’t killed with a super critical attack. If the corpses had stayed that would have impacted the spawn rate and risked my altar. But what made this possible was that fishmen were also cannibals and their dead companions sent them into a feeding frenzy. That way they also didn’t build up a ramp of corpses up to the top of my altar.

After 10 hours of killing fishmen it was finally over. I removed the empty barrels, so there wouldn’t be any clues, but the altar once placed would only decay over time. The building materials couldn’t be picked back up and put into one’s pack once damaged. Also, the land around the altar was red and covered in fishman body parts and corpses. It was a complete mess.

I killed about 12,000 fishmen the first day. That was enough to put me at level 36. Even the commanders and mages had a rough time getting an angle at me near the center of the platform with ranged attacks. The altar was heavily damaged as well. The front had partially collapsed and been wrecked. A new altar needed to be built for each day, leaving behind monuments of carnage in their wake.

The second day I killed about the same number of monsters but only earned 1,300,000 experience instead of 2,400,000 I had the first day due to my increased level compared to the monsters. I only went up to level 39. It would get worse every day due to the amount of experience I was earning, decreasing as my level increased. Despite the impressive number of monsters I was killing, efficiency dropped way down if monsters weren’t at least 10 levels higher.

The third day only saw me bring in 900,000 experience and reach level 41. That put me on pace with the level leaders currently. But I wanted to get 9 levels on them for the upcoming Tournament of Champions. Also, that would mean one more skill slot, which was quite useful.

Skill shards were the key aspect of combat, boosting critical areas or providing critical defense. Thankfully one could put a pause on leveling to switch out their equipment to get the stat boosts they wanted based on the skill shards they had equipped at the time. Another one of those features that only the most build focused people would find out or worry about. The one downside was that overflow experience was shunted over to the skill experience pool due to pausing one’s level up at that last experience point before leveling up.

I had switched out my skill shards when it was time to level up to fill in all the slots with Gambler’s Commitment. That way all the extra stat points I could earn went to Luck. This wouldn’t always be practical, but with a massive altar to protect me, the strength of the monsters, and the weakness of the poison attacks, it was simple enough to switch out equipment right when I hit the necessary experience to level up.

It was an extra thing to pay attention to and it was also a big reason why Luck builds struggled the further you went. Altars were harder to make, since monsters would more easily destroy them, and there wasn’t time to switch out skill shards, but it was still possible. I was almost at that point, but not yet. So, I could still keep maximizing my Luck stat.

People didn’t switch out skill shards in combat since it took time. Each skill shard took five seconds to remove, which was a very long time in a fight. Switching out one’s main bracelet or weapon could only be done in a town. Since I was on an altar I could swap out skill shards, but it wasn’t practical in a place like the coliseum.

There had been some attempts in the past to switch out builds in the middle of combat, but it just took too long and tended to be sub-standard to just focusing on a single method of combat. The only reason to replace skill shards was to get the bonus stat points in the stat a person wanted when they leveled up. I needed to ensure that everything went into my Luck stat. My poison crit chance was also increasing as my Luck stat went up. Once it hit 100% all the poison damage I did would be either doubled or 1% of total HP, whichever was greater.

Every 100 Luck increased my poison crit percentage around 1%. That meant I needed 10,000 in my Luck stat to max out my poison crit chance. Well, it would be a bit less than that since the base chance of a poison crit was 1%. Still, it was close enough for me to use it as my mental model to understand my stats at a higher level, rather than trying to work out every single number.

While it might seem like the double damage was the best, the 1% damage was much more useful for killing really tanky monsters and people. This meant that any target would die after 100 seconds unless they had some way to heal if my poison critical was maxed out. This ignored their Luck and resistance, but it was a good way to think about the end goal for my build.

Since poison critical attacks ignored half of a target’s resistance before deciding if it was double damage or 1% of the target’s health, critical attacks countered the primary means to stopping poison damage. That was what made this build so insidious. Boosting Luck to counter the critical damage, still allowed the poison to land, and once Luck was high enough it was very hard to counter. As long as I could poison a target and avoid death, I would win no matter what and I knew it was incredibly frustrating to fight against. The avoiding death part required me to boost my own poison resistance over 100%. The biggest challenge was getting to that point where it would begin to steamroll everything against it.

Also, the biggest consideration for this build, was the fact that critical attacks allowed a player to bypass the absolute level advantage, killing enemies much higher level. With poison, they just needed to be hit and then I could focus on running away and surviving.