Chapter 353

13 Days (IV)

Emma sighed, tossing another red-gleaming, super-majestic-looking blade into her inventory with none of the fanfare someone should display after obtaining a fairly rare item. It was great by most metrics--true--but it didn’t have the ‘factor’--a stat, or a special effect on an item that makes it go from a simple stat-stick that just increases the floor of her prowess to an item that pushes her over into the next layer and level. She had become quite after after having her behind torched that she was lacking--lacking in the ability to withstand more than just raw damage.

While she could survive several lethal hits in a row, and even outheal long, dragged out fights through the passive leech of her Awakened Class, she struggled exponentially in the fast-paced, high-octane fights with no downtime. U’nul was a fight, after all, that didn’t have the downtime necessary for her cooldowns to come back up in addition to the fact that she took far more damage than she could heal. It was the first fight where she required dedicated spot-healing throughout, something that has never happened before.

Even if, in the past, she got into jams that required others to heal her through, she was mostly self-sufficient in that she only required emergency heals rather than a dedicated healer. She wanted to go back to that point--wanted to find something that makes her self-sufficient again. If she did that, she’d release one of the healers and allow them to focus on the rest of the raid instead. The aptly named Blessed Blade of Corkfire wasn’t it. It was similar to her current weapon, with roughly the same stats, but with no x-factor.

Looking to the side, she saw both Senna and Jamal frowning deeply. Apparently, their rewards weren’t much better either. This was the eight dungeon they’ve cleared in the last five days, and outside of a minor upgrade of armor for Senna, they hadn’t looted any good items. And it wasn’t as though they were running basic, run-of-the-mill dungeons either. These were the hardest the Tower had to offer with clearly the best rewards.

If, with all of this, they were still struggling to find meaningful upgrades... was there another path, perhaps, lying in wait? She was half a mind to ask Cain for help at this point, but knew better not to. Though he hadn’t said it out loud, she knew the man perhaps better than she knew herself. She could read him as well as a sign blaring in her face--this was their fight, from start to finish. He would just be a bus-rider, effectively, likely there to ensure nobody met their untimely demise. But because of this, she also suspected there was something else to just gearing up and finding incremental upgrades to basic numbers.

“Nothing, huh?” Jamal spoke out, as the smoke from the fight cleared up, with a corpse of six-headed, forty-feet long snake lying lacerated in a pool of toxic-green blood.

“Nothing,” Emma replied, putting away her weapon. “I’ve been thinking--what is our main wall with the fight?” she posed a question.

“... main wall?” Jamal thought for a moment. “We can’t survive long enough, most-likely.”

“That’s what I’ve been thinking, too,” Emma said. “But it isn’t the sort of survivability that simple stats can make up for. The more I’m thinking about the ebb and flow of the fight, at least on paper, the more I realize that most of the damage she deals is in staggers, or outright needs to be immuned. Now, we look at the pylon mechanic as the sole way of immuning damage, but what about personal immunes? We need pylons for the raid-wipe mechanic, but outside of that, we can just stack on one for the entire fight while whoever gets marked gets out of the raid and uses a personal immune.”

“She’s still a major DPS check,” Senna chimed in. “If we can’t burn through her 2nd phase quick enough, we’ll all end up dying.”

“I’m not worried about our DPS,” Emma said. “The reason why our DPS tends to be low is because we’re all too worried about just surviving. One thing both Kramer and I need to do is free spot-healers. Both of us need to find a way to solo-survive most if not all of the fight. This way, every healer we bring can full-focus on healing the staggered damage and the temporary bursts. In addition, DPS won’t have to care much for their own Health and can just focus on doing as much damage as possible.”

“You’re still yanking on the hypothetical,” Jamal said. “Lots of ifs in there. Firstly, is it even possible for Kramer and you to become self-sufficient? Tank damage is no joke.”

“Want me to be completely honest?” Senna suddenly spoke out, her tone awash with depth and reservation.

“Of course, honey,” Emma said, somewhat confused by the tone. “What’s up?”

“We need to skip the boss 3rd phase completely,” she said. “Notice that the transition into that phase is tied to the energy she amasses by attacking, and not her Health. ‘cause, honestly, if we get into 3rd phase, no way in the hundreds of fucks can even 10 Yukis heal through that damage. We’re talking damage equivalent to thrice of all of our health bars combined... every tick. The only % point transition is at 5% when she goes berserk.”

“... yeah, probably,” Emma sighed, having realized something similar herself. Third phase, by being reached naturally, was simply a ‘you failed’ mechanic disguised as something that can, theoretically, be battled through. “That would mean, however, we’d need even more DPS in a raid... which would strain our healers even more.”

“I wasn’t done with the honest part,” Senna said.

“Oh.”

“We need two tanks, two healers, and everyone else needs to be DPS.”

“... say what now?!” both Jamal and Emma exclaimed at the same time, horrified.

“With how boss’ health scales, and from what I’ve noticed,” Senna said. “It’s somewhere in the range of 800,000 to 1,000,000. It’s actually on the lower end of the last five-six Guardians we fought, probably the lowest by some margin. Ignoring the first phase, depending on how fast her attacks seemed, we have about 40-45 seconds to kill her before she naturally transitions into her third Phase. I know it sounds insane, but following the pattern of her attacks and mixing in skills, that’s how quickly she’d likely generate 100 energy. We won’t get to see all of her attacks in that phase, it’s just a pure, raw, DPS check. I--”

“No,” Emma quickly interjected, surprising Senna. “That’s wrong.”

“No, we can do it.”

“It’s not the question of being able to do it,” Emma sighed. “The reason why we are struggling with the boss to begin with is because we relied on just stat-checking our way through for the most part. Plus, I actually don’t think she has a real Health Pool, not in a normal sense, anyway.”

“What do you mean?” Senna asked.

“I think it’s dynamic,” Emma said. “As in, whether we had ten people or six hundred people in the raid, there wouldn’t be much difference. Unlike prior raid bosses that had fixed Health Pools, this one seems... arbitrary. As in, you’re genuinely supposed to take a certain length of time to clear her Phase. Plus, if it was just a simple stat check, Cain would have just come with us to kill it.”

“... yea, that’s the part I’m hung up on too,” Senna sighed after a momentary silence. “The bastard always likes the fights where he gets to show off his DPS. Yet, he’s sitting out. He always sits out when he wants to teach us a lesson.”

“I don’t think the boss is designed to be beaten by having six-seven amazingly strong and talented people with others being just kind of average or above. It’s the first one where individual mechanics make or break the run. Spatial awareness, optimization of doing enough damage while still dodging, surviving, and being in tune with the rest, keeping a careful track of many things at the time and using the pre-determined timers to your advantage while still being required to react to moment-to-moment things... it’s as though the boss is the amalgamation of most other Guardians we were fighting, only with all their mechanics rolled into one.”

“Yeah, I noticed it on myself,” Jamal said. “My usual DPS dipped to shitters ‘cause I couldn’t just mindlessly focus on swinging my sword around. Everyone was performing poorly compared to their standards, even you Senna. When I saw that you were struggling to maintain the numbers, I knew we were fucked, DPS-wise at least.”

“That’s my point,” Emma added. “I think, in order to kill her, everyone needs to be able to perform at their peak... while doing everything else, at the same time. We got by on Yuki’s insane healing, you two’s and Daniels beyond broken damage, and Kramer and I being largely capable of self-sufficient tanking. However, that’s no longer enough. More so than anything else, we got spoiled by Yuki.”

“Yeah,” Senna said. “The other ‘top healers’ we got can’t even pull half his numbers.”

“It’s not just the numbers,” Jamal corrected. “Most of it is in the panic overhealing. They don’t know when it’s the good time to let us take some damage. They see a health bar dropping, and they immediately jump to heal it. Not even a knack against them, they got dragged from doing some basic dungeon healing to needing to heal high-end Guardians. I’d shit my pants too if I was dragged from a middling party into this hell from nowhere.”

“This will be a collective effort, no doubt,” Emma said. “And we’ll gonna have to find ways to optimize how we play both individually as well as part of the group. First we focus on the basics--finding items, skill combinations, consumables, anything that can prevent our deaths. To deal damage, we need to survive. After that, we’ll go into the raid and test how far we can push, while slowly learning the fight. It’s gonna be easier since C’ will be there to save our asses, but I’m pretty sure he’ll relentlessly mock us for each failure, so we won’t be able to just mindlessly fail and try again.”

“Ah, he will. I can already hear him,” Senna sighed. “’Mu ha ha ha, what was that? Did all the light blind you? How can you be so bad? Even if drunk, half-dead, and high on cocaine, I’d still perform better! With my feet tied up and my right arm missing, too!’. Shit, I’m getting angry already...”

“Pfft, ha ha ha,” Jamal and Emma burst out into laughter; if anyone could do an impression of Cain, it was Senna. She had both the voice and the mannerisms pat down. “Alright, alright,” Emma said after calming down. “Let’s move on. Claya had secured two more dungeons for us. If we’re late, she’ll yell at us again.”

“Let’s go, let’s go. I really don’t like her yelling at us. Feels like back when I was a kid and I got a bad grade at school and had to tell my mom,” Jamal said.

“Yup,” Emma nodded. “So, hurry up.”

“Going, going...”