System Learning

Two different levels surprised me. I tried to recall if I had seen it before. It was likely there and I just didn’t understand the notation being important. This answered some questions and asked new ones. “They don’t level at the same rate. I’m level 5 as a person I guess and then class level 2.”

I poked around the menu since that clearly had a purpose. “If I’m only a level 2 Astral Priest then I’m going to advance slowly, but it should imply that each of the levels I’ll get something new. So that’s encouraging, but what about these personal levels?” Digging through I found an interactable menu with stats. “Each of these gives me stat points to assign, so I can build wrong then.”

Thanks to the four levels I gained I had twenty points I could assign and everything had a flat starting value. Everything was just one across the board. But I wanted to know what these stats meant before blindly assigning things.

There were nine total stats I could dump into, some more clear than others: Strength, Vitality, Dexterity, Magic, Magic Attack, Mending, Spell Speed, Magic Defense and Tenacity. As I looked over the descriptions for each it became easy to understand how things worked.

There was a core stat for each of the roles that influenced their skills, abilities or spells and then there were secondary stats for improving more attributes. Dexterity, Magic Attack, Mending and Tenacity were role specific stats one for physical damage, a magical damage, healing and tank damage. Strength applied to all weapons dealing physical damage, so I guessed my bludgeon counted in that respect. Vitality and Magic Defense were for physical and magical protection. Magic would grow my MP pool it seemed, while spell speed was what it said, improved my cast times.

“I need to focus on my healing and spell damage, though I wonder how much the cast time would change. Do the stats have a limit? Do the levels even have one? But wait…” I flipped back to the abilities page, which I hadn’t looked at since leveling.

“A new spell…Celestial Intervention.”

‘Celestial Intervention – Creates a barrier to negate all damage equal to the magic damage potency. Can be applied to self or party member.’

“A barrier healer then, I had a feeling that might be the case. But nowhere does it say anything about it being modified by the Mending stat. Does that mean all of my healing is going to be based on my spell damage? This is certainly not the sort of healer I expected. They really are built around the idea of attacking and being proactive rather than reactive. Which would be scary for anyone. In a game I could get used to that, but when every fight is real and not scripted, this is going to be much more challenging.”

It’s no wonder the Astral Priests before me didn’t survive. Sure, if you built it in a solo build it could be pretty powerful, but the stat allocations would be divided up really badly. I should build towards a party focus, but if I was always alone then that just wasn’t going to be viable. Survivability would be more important for me. “Wish I could have some stat reallocation if I screw up, but somehow I doubt that’ll be possible. I’m going to have to live with my choices.”

There wasn’t much point to going back out to fight today. The stats could wait so I could give it a good consideration. There were already two or three different builds I envisioned without a clue which was a good idea right now.

But the notion of different levels from classes and myself had me pondering another question. “I know I have a class, but does that mean there are other classes I can be? I got the feeling I’m locked into this.” But why would they be separate? “Can I craft and gather? I wonder if the leftovers from the Ungaust could spot me some spare tools to use.”

Dressed, I stood up and walked out of the room. The main chamber looked far less busy now. Sunlight still beamed in from the windows, but it had a long shadow and softer color than before. The line by the front desk was thankfully empty.

“Sir Hero! Are you okay now?” I approached the two of them giving a polite bow.

“Much better now. Though I need to get all of the blood out of this now.” The under tunic and leather armor looked pretty bad. I didn’t even know if there was damage to the material with how much blood covered it.

“If you wish to use the Market’s quarters for the night we can see to cleaning it up.”

“You can do that?”

“Of course, for a small fee.”

“Speaking of, do you know the damage?” They both looked at me a little confused. “How much do I have left over after the healer treatment?”

“We will know by the morning.”

“That’s not making me very comfortable about your fees that are adding up.”

Both immediately started to go defensive trying to deny any ill intention. I’d dealt with enough scams on the internet to be more than a little cautious. “The fee for the healer was two silver. A room and cleaning services would be five copper.”

I had a gold coin from the King, which I wasn’t clear how far that would go other than just a best guess. It felt like the healer and room were going to eat into a lot of my money. “How far does a gold piece go?”

“It’s ten silver and one silver is ten copper.”

“Right. And can you estimate for me what the Ungaust will give me now?” She had refused to quote me anything the last time I asked.

“Between one to three gold depending on how clean the harvesting is and if any of the parts are in higher demand.”

“Very well, I’ll take you up on your offer.” At worst, if I got screwed over I did have the coin to cover things. But let’s pray they weren’t a bunch of con artists and I was just unnecessarily paranoid.