The Gamer Chapter 288 - Hella Wise (Patreon)

“Finally, I just hope my assumption is correct…” John said and, after weeks of grinding, dropped the last needed points into Wisdom, pushing it to 250.

‘First off: nice, actual numbers, and second off: geezus that is quite the jump,’ John thought, looking at his character sheet.

So now he had more than enough mana to run Spellcarrier without worry. To run the calculation, John had 9,84 mana, for the ease of calculation he just pushed that up to 10. Thanks to Elementalist reducing the cost of his elementals by 20%, they were taking 2% of his mana regeneration each, instead of 2,5%. Their effective cost, therefore, was 10% of his regeneration or 1 mana per second in normal numbers.

Not only was this bonkers cheap (he was semi-certain that Gaia was going to nerf him on that front once the next patch rolled around), but it was still going to get cheaper. The goal to get the summoning skills to be completely free (for which level 20 would be needed) was still his current class objective.

Added to that were the artificial spirits, taking another 2% of his mana regeneration. Then he finally got to Possession.

Thanks to Jack having the One of the Hive attribute, the base Possession cost him no mana or Possession Slot, so that was something. Spellcarrier always costed at least 2 Possession Slots, however: one to create the Spellcarrier condition and another one per kind of spell the Possession target was able to cast.

Each Possession slot cost John 1 mana to keep up, which had been taking quite the toll on his old mana regeneration of around 5,5. With roughly 10 (8,8 after deducting the percentage reductions), this prize was way more agreeable. John still wouldn’t use Spellcarrier whenever he could, at least not for the moment.

Fact was that it was fairly rare that using a skill from another position than his own was both required and more effective than just giving the same mana to his elementals. With the exception of Arcane Explosion, none of his spells were particularly great when equipped to Jack, or other objects, in the first place.

Mana Blade had the drawback of having its size and damage scale evenly. When in melee that wasn’t a problem, but if John wanted to use the thing as the sparrow’s talons, then they would deal either next to no damage or be gigantic enough to draw all attention and siphon off a fair chunk of his mana.

Sending Sylph over was the more cost-effective solution in pretty much every situation.

Mana Ray, on the other hand, had such a huge range that whatever John needed to hit through Jack (or any other proxy for that matter) needed to have an even bigger range to make that necessary. That situation hadn’t even happened yet.

Only Arcane Explosion was good, because it turned it from a grenade that had to be thrown into an airstrike. It also did miniscule damage against single targets; to cut even on damage with Mana Ray, Arcane Explosion had to hit three targets.

‘So, I really need to get spells that actually make it worthwhile to use Spellcarrier,’ John thought. It was beyond the shadow of a doubt that being able to fire spells from a sheer infinite amount of positions in and of itself was strong. Strong enough, in fact, to compromise his next skill evolutions to fit the needs of it.

Up next was the question of where to allocate his Stat Points from now on. He had patched one hole, an urgent one in fact, for now, but it wasn’t like he could just continue dumping his points into one stat and never have problems. Better spread it out a bit now that he had met his goal. After some consideration John came to three options.

First, and the most unlikely one, was to get more Charisma. While he could need more relationship slots (he currently only had 1 left), the question was: who for? The only other women in his life right now was Nia, and he didn’t intend to add her to his harem.

Why he, the primary advocate for the removal of monogamy in his own little world, was of that mindset was quite simple: Nia was part of the Illuminati, one of whose founding members was a certain god of knowledge with four horns.

There were many things John could stomach, but not such a blatant invite for the Horned Rat to meddle in his business some more. Between having the Horned Rat be able to give him quests, loot and spying on him through Momo, that was really the last thing he wanted.

Would he sleep with Nia if given the chance? Absolutely, she was super hot. Her porcelain skin was flawless, and her curves, although subtle on her lithe body, stuck out on the right places. Would he add her to his harem? As was mentioned, no, that was not his goal.

Therefore, Charisma could wait.

Second was Intellect. John’s mana regeneration was insane, but the same could not be said about his mana pool. At 1480 mana, it was hard to justify using more expensive spells or do some fight winning terraforming. Also, thanks to the synergy upgrade he had gotten from Intellect and Wisdom, he regenerated 3% of his maximum mana per minute.

Not only did that mean that he was actually going to increase his mana regeneration along with his mana pool (although the increase was marginal in comparison to getting more Wisdom), but that number would probably go up as well once he hit 250 Intellect.

That was far down the road, however. Very far, indeed. Baring another increase of Stat Points per level, he would need 25 levels to get the 150 points required to get there. Another thing was that he was currently artificially propping up his mana pool through Momo, who had lots of it that was ready to go around thanks to Mana Battery.

Then there was the third option, a stat he had barely raised ever despite being his third highest at the start of this whole ‘having powers’ thing: Agility. John wasn’t affected by the lack of his physical stats very often.

That was mostly because he had made the decision to keep at least Endurance moderately high due to increasing the maximum capacity of his Mana Protection. With high defences came the advantage of living long enough to have his reinforcements arrive before he could take any really threatening damage.

How long would that remain true though? Echo of Destruction made it so his physical stats were pretty high in a prolonged engagement, but if he kept Agility where it currently was (in the gutter), then that would come to bite him in the ass eventually. He wasn’t going to become a physical main class, he was too far down the magic tree to do so, but there was no reason why he should keep himself at a level where a level 30 thug had the potential to snatch his purse and outrun him. 

Just because he had Sylph as a failsafe didn’t mean he should be useless himself.

So, raising Agility to 50 would be a fairly smart move, as far as he was concerned. It was a rather cheap investment as well, needing only 24 more points since he had 1 remaining right now. That was exactly what 4 levels gave. Sadly, it didn’t coincide with level 100, but not everything could be even.

Agility seemed the way to go for now. John put a point in there and felt a little change. That was the great thing about raising lower stats, it actually was noticeable. When he put a single point into Wisdom, there was barely any progress to his mindset, even if his mana regeneration still continued to grow without any diminishing returns.

That out of the way, John finally got back to grinding.

The increased mana regeneration indeed made the dungeon a smidge easier. Having more mana freed up meant that they could build their fortifications with greater liberty. John had learned that his old tower-like design was simply too outdated for current content and the lava simply wasn’t effective against the orcs.

Unlike the beast-minded Bugpanthers, the orcs knew to use their terrain more than just instinctively, and just as John kept experiences from his last encounters with them, the orcs seemed to keep their strategies in dealing with him.

The digging strategies reduced over time, as the monsters learned that it was a sure-fire way to get crushed underground with no hope of rescue or escape. Instead of trying to dig into John’s fortress, the orcs thus assaulted the second-best target for their digging strategy: The lava trenches.

The orcs would carry a frontal assault with a big force, keeping most of John’s forces bound at the gate, and then have a contingent hack away at the basin that kept the lava in position. To further occupy Gnome during these moments, the orcs actually launched small-scale digging assaults as well.

This multi-front approach lead to John having a lot of relatively easy kills, but at the cost of his lava trench, which was incredibly costly to create, being drained and slowly spilling down the hill, thus creating a bigger area for the orcs to assault next time if John wasn’t willing to invest the mana.

Thus, with their enemies’ new strategy and the Battery Pig’s ramming capabilities in mind, John overhauled the design. For a start, he got rid of the lava trenches. Effective as they may have been in the past, they didn’t fulfil their purpose in this set-up.

Instead, what he got was a crust of spikes that covered the area around and the base of the walls. They wouldn’t keep a Battery Pig from breaking through, the creatures had a complete disregard for their own safety, but they would at least damage it while also keeping orcs from gaining a secure footing from which to climb the walls from.

Even if they tried that, John left little holes around the whole thing for Undine to simply flush them off from. The Warhogs would fall in their attempt and land on some rather uncomfortable ground, making the spikes more effective yet again. The despawning of their corpses also made some rather macabre strategies on the orcs side impossible.

Up next was putting a roof on the damn tower. A slated, octagon shaped ceiling that prevented the enemy archers to shower them from a distance. If they wanted to get a shot in that meant anything, the orcs now needed to get closer and aim directly at the gap between roof and railing, which wasn’t the best of targets.

However, the orcs soon adapted to these changes and increased the diversity of their climbing strategies. Undine couldn’t be everywhere at once, so John halved her workload by creating a wide rim around the upper part of the tower, also raising it higher in the process.

That rim, which doubled as a walkway in the tower, had a simple purpose: create a shadow underneath in which Siena could lurk freely. The nightmare elemental didn’t like being delegated to simple guard duty, but with the enemy assault consisting of a literally endless supply of fresh soldiers, she had her claws full enough.

With that change, the orcs then went ahead and got more invested into correctly assaulting the main gate, which John soon changed to be up a small staircase to give Aclysia the height advantage. They tampered with their strategy again, John responded, it was an ever-shifting meta.

Throughout all of that, one crisis popped up after another. Battery Pigs threatened to collapse the now much grander structure whenever they broke through the walls. When John was getting halfway comfortable with his current situation, the orcs dug up one of their old strategies and forced him to respond with the similarly outdated solution, opening him up to other threats in the meantime.

The fighting was fierce, it was continuous, almost four hours of on-edge, raw danger. John had the upper hand; he created for himself a hand that was hard to lose with. Basically he was playing with minor cheat-codes, allowing himself an advantage he shouldn’t have had.

The game’s engine, however, was ready to respond by throwing every last bit of difficulty at him that was possible. Eventually, John came to the conclusion that this was a game that was so rigged on both sides that it was impossible to win if he didn’t exploit whatever opening was given to him.

It was awesome.

If these were what Assault would continue to be, a constant push against waves of enemies that tried to outsmart him, then this was a challenge that thrilled him.

‘Bring it,’ he thought with a wide grin. Everyone else in his party was also having a great time. Aside from Gnome, who was getting stressed by the constant demands put on her as the main construction mage. She didn’t complain at any point, however, as, even though she didn’t directly enjoy it herself, John did.

And the experience would only make them all stronger.