Chapter Two #2
My Afflictionist run was easily some of the most fun I ever had in the game.
I once had an especially broken build with Afflictionist as my main class and Hexer, a debuff specialist, as my subclass.
Afflictionist stacked tons of DoTs onto my targets while my Hexer spells stacked other debuffs, including a debuff that caused enemies to take more damage from all sources the more DoTs they had on them.
All I needed was a tank to keep aggro and a healer to keep the tank alive, and then my DoTs would make quick work of even the game’s hardest post-endgame boss.
Just the fact that bosses weren’t outright immune to all status effects made the game so much better than most of its competition on its own.
If I was going to be stuck with my choices for life this time around, then I definitely wanted to do something debuff or DoT-focused again, but I wasn’t sure what.
Maybe a hybrid build?
Hybrid builds were typically weaker than pure builds, but they were also more fun and—in my opinion, at least—had more flavor to them. More style.
Like the Pirate class. Sure, to be a meta min-maxer, you could go with Pirate/Thief for a build that capitalized on the strengths of both for insane DPS based on the value of loot held in the inventory and total amount of money stored, or you could go Pirate/Musketeer to become an agile, long-range sniper who was almost impossible to pin down.
But a stylistic hybrid would be Pirate/Necromancer. Two classes that didn’t synergize at all but just felt and looked cool together. It was such a popular combination for pure aesthetic reasons that people even nicknamed it the Davy Jones build.
Maybe I’d do something like that. Considering that I could fully clear the game even with total meme builds that were objectively garbage, I wasn’t worried about not being strong enough at all.
Oh, hey, the last snail just finished roasting.
[Congratulations, you have leveled up!]
[Level 1 -> 2]
[Health: 50 -> 60]
[Mana: 10 -> 12]
[3 Attribute Points Gained]
I went over to pick up the dropped loot while thinking about how to invest those attribute points. It didn’t matter much at my current level, but every point would have a serious impact on whatever class I chose once I hit level fifteen.
If it was like one of the countless stories I read exactly like the situation I was currently in, then I would dump everything into luck for the sake of getting lucky.
But luck in this game—in this world, just influenced critical chance and some skills. It didn’t do anything like increase drop rates or special encounter chances.
The luck-maxed Assassin/Samurai build that I ran once was really fun, though. I was able to get my critical chance up to almost a hundred percent and my critical hits were insanely strong.
But that build was laughably weak the very few times it failed to crit. On a crit, it was a hydrogen bomb. On a non-crit, it was a coughing baby.
Well, for the time being, I figured I’d hold onto those attribute points rather than spend them. It wasn’t like they needed spent right away. There was no downside to saving them aside from temporarily being a little weaker than I could be.
Anyways.
Time for more grinding!
An hour later of roaming around the first floor of the dungeon, killing every snail I saw, and I was feeling pretty great. I leveled up again, collected more drops, and was getting more and more comfortable in my new body. I didn’t feel tired at all!
Now, sure, I could have proceeded deeper into the dungeon to encounter new enemies or rush for the boss, but I was more than happy to take my time enjoying the start of my new life with some classic grinding even if that meant I’d be setting myself up for being over-leveled relative to the rest of the dungeon.
I also switched to killing snails without relying mostly on fire damage ticks once I killed ten of them that way, letting me kill ten mostly via blunt damage from the torch.
That meant I unlocked three different skills in the general tree.
//Lesser Enchantment: Poison
//Type: Magic (General | Active | Scaling)
//Stat: Wisdom
//Cost: 3 MP
//Cooldown: 5 seconds
//Causes the next Damage-dealing attack, skill, or spell used to inflict Poisoned that deals 2 Poison Damage every 3 seconds for 15 seconds.
//Spark
//Type: Magic (General | Active | Scaling)
//Stat: Wisdom
//Cost: 4 MP
//Cooldown: 2 seconds
//Shoots a spark of flame toward the enemy to deal 6 Fire Damage.
//Power Bash
//Type: Martial (General | Active | Scaling)
//Stat: Strength
//Cooldown: 10 seconds
//Puts extra strength into your attack, dealing 8 additional Blunt Damage.
Those were my rewards for finishing off enemies in specific ways.
They were meant to give players some simple, low-level variety before getting to pick a class.
General skills were never that strong, but every class had access to every general skill, so even purely martial classes could still cast some magic if they wanted to.
I was happiest about the enchantment spell.
With that, then assuming I got to inflict Burning with my first attack with the torch, I’d be dealing five points of damage per tick which meant I reached a new breakpoint for most early mobs.
A snail, relying purely on Burning damage, took fifteen seconds to kill.
With the enchantment inflicting Poisoned on top of that, the time-to-kill was brought down to nine seconds.
Yeah.
I knew it.
I loved DoT builds too much.
Sure, they were almost always weaker than builds that dealt all their damage upfront, but I didn’t care.
They were fun. If I was going to spend the rest of my life with only a single build, then I wanted it to be one that revolved around DoTs in one way or another.
It still had to be something new, though.
Even with all my hours, there were still class combinations I never got around to trying since I loved to do as much content as possible every single run.
That meant a single playthrough typically lasted around two hundred hours for me when excluding all the earlier ones I did to try out all the classes.
With how many classes there were, that meant it’d probably take me until beyond the grave to do a full run of every combination…
and that wasn’t even taking into consideration different ways to build each combination.
It was no good. I already felt myself getting way too excited just from thinking about all the possibilities I could try out.
Theorycrafting new builds was one of my favorite parts of the game, and now I got to do it in a real world!
Of course, that did mean if I messed up, I was stuck with it, but that was alright.
All that meant was that I couldn’t mess up.