Mage Tank
Author: Cornman8700
Chapter 164: Hickory-Smoked Skills
Three minutes passed wherein we were treated to increasingly unhinged solicitations for outdoor grills. The first was a simple affair that used a ruby chip and a fire weave to generate flames that “ruined raw meat precisely how humans liked it ruined.” This went on until we were being offered a grill the size of a small city which was “perfect for cooking large game or enemy civilizations.”
The prices were in chips, and out of curiosity, I bought a mid-range model called the Kill n’ Grill for 3 rubies. It had an auto-cook feature that allowed me to store freshly slain beasts in my inventory and have them butchered and prepared without any further work on my part. I added building an ‘outdoor’ patio within the Closet to The List so that the party could have a barbecue and some brewskies whenever we got a little downtime.
“Why is this necessary?” asked Varrin. I assumed the Ravvenblaqs already had their grilling needs met, so he wasn’t in the market.
“How does this one ‘cook’ dreams?” asked Xim, squinting at her interface.
“I’m getting the Super Smoker!” said Etja. “It has 36 different smoky flavors, perfect for preserving a wide range of meats and cheeses!”
“Sounds Gouda,” I said, shooting her a pair of finger guns. We were each being offered our own customized selection based on our preferences. Targeted advertising wasn’t an Earth exclusive, apparently.
“I am on the fence about the Fish Flamer,” said Nuralie. “An emerald is very pricey, even if it can make one fish feed an entire village.”
“
” said Shog.
“Don’t you take your food raw?” I asked.
“
”
“I see.”
“No super intrinsics?” I asked. “Also, earlier you said we had to stop at 1, but this is really 2.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m not used to this being a conversation. Usually, it’s just a one-sided attack on my character.”
“Can I look at both before making a selection?”
“Okay, then let’s see those Passives.”
This first passive invited me to double down on summoning, which was something I could start working toward without much effort. I’d observed the Mystical Summon spell during the Bugpocalypse fight, and I could slot it as an active skill anytime I wanted. I also knew there were summoning skills for every school, so I could easily snag Physical Summon. Grotto could use Animate Object, which would apparently count as a minion for me as well, assuming I was reading the ‘minions of your minions’ sentence correctly. It felt like that part was intentionally phrased to be as stupid as possible, but it was admittedly the kind of stupid I enjoyed. Either way, that’d take me up to a theoretical max of 5 Minions without much hassle.
Although, that would fill up all of my active slots, even with the bonus slot I’d just unlocked. I could grab a twelfth slot from an Expansion Delve and fill that with a Minion skill as well, allowing me to have a whole horde of flunkies at my beck and call. If my new summons were half as good as Shog, it would be a potent direction to move in.
The bonus to attack and defense didn’t look massive at first glance, but it was a bonus applied to a whole group of allies, so I expected it would end up making a huge difference. It was currently a bonus of 14 to attack and defense, and I could get it up to 18 by grabbing all the low-hanging Minion fruit as mentioned.
My other actives didn’t have much synergy with the passive, however. I didn’t have any skills that were useful for targeting Minions, aside from Life Warden, but I reserved that skill for protecting Etja and sometimes Nuralie. The resource discount was going to be useless unless I also found a way to swap some of my other actives for buffs or maybe healing.
Targeting a minion to get a half-price Explosion! crossed my mind, but Explosion! didn’t target a specific entity, just a specific point in space. I also wasn’t a complete asshole–despite what SC1 seemed to think–so I didn’t want to go the route of sacrificing summons for damage. They had feelings too.
The next passive was a lot more on brand.
This passive was laser-guided directly into my heart. At my current level, it would give me 600 HP, 120 health regen (after being doubled from my ring), 120 mana, 12 mana regen, 12 points of damage reduction against
, and 12 bonus damage to my spells. It would keep getting better as I leveled and was a perfect fit for my wreck-and-get-wrecked build. It was defense and offense rolled into one, with a focus on having an unreasonable amount of resources.
The cooldown reset was interesting, and would help me toss out Explosion! more often, but it wouldn’t be a major boon. I had a Physical Magic evolution that reduced cooldowns, but it wouldn’t do enough to make the spell viable for anything other than a big opening slam or finishing move. Not until I had Physical at a much higher level, at least. I could always look for more high-cooldown abilities to take greater advantage of the passive’s reset benefit, but the main draw for me was everything else the passive offered.
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I had no idea how the final option could possibly match up, but it did.
I felt a stab of pain in my tender heart when I read this passive since it meant I had to make a hard choice. One major problem with aura skills, like my Aura of Perseverance, was the range limitation. High-level fights tended to involve large distances, and being forced to stay within a hundred feet of my allies could quickly become untenable. The first sentence of this passive immediately solved that issue by making beneficial auras have a range of ‘yes’, so long as we were talking about party members.
The second sentence was a bit tricky, but it was the kind of tricky that could break things open. An effect that targeted my ‘allies’ did not target me, since I was not an ally to myself. A decent number of auras and effects only applied to allies, so anytime I took one of those I was making a judgment call that the bonus to my party was better than choosing a skill or evolution providing a bonus just to myself. If I took this passive, then with regard to auras, it didn’t matter. I’d get shielding from Aura of Perseverance along with my party members (no matter how far away they were), and “aura bonuses” that affected allies would also affect me. That would likely include my Leadership 10 evolution, which made all of my auras stronger for allies.
Finally, the passive made my attack and defense better for every aura I had up and was even itself an aura that gave a minor boost to attack and defense. It was a cute little double dip that I appreciated, allowing the passive to be effective even if you didn’t have any other auras. It would be shit, but it would still do
.
With Who Needs a Cleric?, Aura of Perseverance, and Auradilato up, I’d have a bonus of 20 to attack and defense. Attack and defense were strictly better than damage and damage reduction such as Thaumic Wall granted. Attack increased accuracy
damage, making attacks more likely to land and increasing their power when they did. Defense helped prevent attacks from landing in the first place and
reduced damage. Thus, Auradilato had the more potent bonuses for hurting and getting hurt.
I was already leaning away from Minion Menagerie since it would take a bigger pivot to make it work. Auras and Minions seemed like a solid combo, but I didn’t have room to get serious with both. The System was right when it said I needed to settle down and pick a path. My build was fairly wide, with summons, spell-slinging, tanking, and party buffs all competing. Grotto and Shog were great, but they could hold their own without more backup and would still benefit if I went harder into auras.
The choice boiled down to ethos. Did I want to make myself as strong as I could, layering on more health, mana, defense, and damage with Thaumic Wall? Or did I want to focus on the party while still snagging some decent buffs for myself along the way? I already had a strong preference, but decided to look over the active skills on offer before locking a passive in.
I frowned at the System’s jab, since my build was functioning entirely well, thank you very much.
This first choice synergized with the Minion passive that had been offered, and 2 hands probably meant they counted as 2 minions, which was cool. They had solid health, would hit people like a damn truck, and could probably grapple like a five-armed python. They were immune to mind shenanigans, which could definitely come in useful, but they wouldn’t be able to dodge for shit with an Agility and Speed of 1. Still, having 2 more bruisers on the field would be solid.
I’d taken some time during our week with Avarice to train with Etja and snag that final level in Mystical to bring it up to 20, and it was looking like that was a very good decision. Not only was it required by Hands of Thoth, but a quick scan of the other two skills showed that all of them were of the Mystical variety.
This one was less obvious, but Star of Helios meshed very well with Thaumic Wall. It took a whopping 100 mana, offset by Thaumic Wall’s grant of resources, and had a significant cooldown of 1 hour, also helped out by Thaumic Wall’s cooldown reset.
Even without all that, it looked pretty great.
First of all, it did damage from all 5 magic schools, which was something I didn’t even know was possible with one spell. It keyed off of Mystical Magic for all 5, meaning that it would lay out some serious damage, and it hit in a massive AoE with discretionary targeting. It was the best fuck-you spell I’d ever seen for groups.
Of course, that assumed my enemies would hang out for 30 seconds while I pummeled them with wave after wave of spell damage. Star of Helios couldn’t be countered (fucking righteous) but enemies could run away or–more likely–die before the spell was fully exhausted. That made it a bit of a gamble for its cost, which was the same as blasting out 20 Oblivion Orbs.
Thaumic Wall
help with the cooldown, but I hated the idea of having another spell that was only useful once per fight. Besides that, none of the spell attacks would be as powerful as a dedicated caster for the relevant school since I wouldn’t have any evolutions helping them along. I’d basically be locking myself into 5 AoE attacks for 20 mana a piece over the course of 30 seconds. I had to ‘evoke’ the Star for it to work, but I was betting I could do other things at the same time, like throw hammers, block, and teleport, so maybe it wasn’t as much of a downside as I thought.
I turned my sights on the third skill, eager to see what the System thought paired well with Auradilato.
Well, shit.
Ignoring the fact that Uno backward is
No U, it’s onU, the skill was outrageous.
Actually, no, let’s go back to Uno backward. Onu could open up other, more correct jokes, like “Oh nuuuuuuu!” as in “Oh, no, my spell!” OR it could be “on you” like “I take your spell and cast it
”
Maybe that’s all a stretch, fuck it I dunno. If the System’s only going to add flavor text to
of my choices, it should at least make sense.
Other than risking my interface being forever marred by objectively poor humor, the skill was awesome. It was an aura, so it would get buffed by Leadership and Auradilato would extend the spell DR to myself while also giving me another 5 attack and defense.
The redirect, however, was where it really shone. An enemy targets my ally with a fireball? Fuck them, now that fireball’s roasting their teammates.
get targeted by a fireball? I’m my own ally, so fuck that, the fireball’s roasting their
teammates. The enemy shoots the fireball at the ground nearby so they’re not actually targeting anyone? Fuck off, it’s targeting a ‘space’ inside my aura so now that fireball’s roasting their teammates’ friends and family! I’ll spare the pets, though. I’m not a monster.
The one drawback was how much of a mana sink the skill was. The mana reserve was big at 100, and it would tie up a fifth of my current mana pool indefinitely. Even so, that much spell mitigation seemed worth it, and it wasn’t a cost I’d have to pay repeatedly or that would continuously drain a resource like Aura of Perseverance. On top of that, I’d have to pay for 100% of the cost of any spell I redirected. I could see my mana pool dwindling rapidly as I turntabled all over our foes. Then again, what use is a resource if it’s not being deployed to utterly screw over the enemy?
The skill would also be useless against purely martial fighters, but meh. Those folks can just stab me until they wear themselves out.
Understandably, I had a tough choice before me.
Oh, not really. I knew what I liked. Ever since level zero, I’d wanted to boost my allies as much as possible while still being able to throw down. Auras made me stronger, they made my party members stronger, and they made my Minions stronger (a term I was going to absolutely wear out when referring to Shog and Grotto). I already had an insane amount of health and regen for my level, and Auradilato would give me a solid boost to both defense and offense while significantly increasing the viability of active auras.
Of course, I did not gleefully punch accept on the 2 skills until running it past everyone else. Predictably, no one was going to be mad about me handing out even more buffs, so it was a short discussion. I accepted the skills, committing myself to the auradin lifestyle.
Once that was settled, I only had to figure out my evolutions for Mystical Magic 20, Speed 20, and Intelligence 40.
Easy choices. No big deal.
I was certain my party members would have no strong opinions on the matter.
The prices were in chips, and out of curiosity, I bought a mid-range model called the Kill n’ Grill for 3 rubies. It had an auto-cook feature that allowed me to store freshly slain beasts in my inventory and have them butchered and prepared without any further work on my part. I added building an ‘outdoor’ patio within the Closet to The List so that the party could have a barbecue and some brewskies whenever we got a little downtime.
“Why is this necessary?” asked Varrin. I assumed the Ravvenblaqs already had their grilling needs met, so he wasn’t in the market.
“How does this one ‘cook’ dreams?” asked Xim, squinting at her interface.
“I’m getting the Super Smoker!” said Etja. “It has 36 different smoky flavors, perfect for preserving a wide range of meats and cheeses!”
“Sounds Gouda,” I said, shooting her a pair of finger guns. We were each being offered our own customized selection based on our preferences. Targeted advertising wasn’t an Earth exclusive, apparently.
“I am on the fence about the Fish Flamer,” said Nuralie. “An emerald is very pricey, even if it can make one fish feed an entire village.”
“
” said Shog.
“Don’t you take your food raw?” I asked.
“
”
“I see.”
“No super intrinsics?” I asked. “Also, earlier you said we had to stop at 1, but this is really 2.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m not used to this being a conversation. Usually, it’s just a one-sided attack on my character.”
“Can I look at both before making a selection?”
“Okay, then let’s see those Passives.”
This first passive invited me to double down on summoning, which was something I could start working toward without much effort. I’d observed the Mystical Summon spell during the Bugpocalypse fight, and I could slot it as an active skill anytime I wanted. I also knew there were summoning skills for every school, so I could easily snag Physical Summon. Grotto could use Animate Object, which would apparently count as a minion for me as well, assuming I was reading the ‘minions of your minions’ sentence correctly. It felt like that part was intentionally phrased to be as stupid as possible, but it was admittedly the kind of stupid I enjoyed. Either way, that’d take me up to a theoretical max of 5 Minions without much hassle.
Although, that would fill up all of my active slots, even with the bonus slot I’d just unlocked. I could grab a twelfth slot from an Expansion Delve and fill that with a Minion skill as well, allowing me to have a whole horde of flunkies at my beck and call. If my new summons were half as good as Shog, it would be a potent direction to move in.
The bonus to attack and defense didn’t look massive at first glance, but it was a bonus applied to a whole group of allies, so I expected it would end up making a huge difference. It was currently a bonus of 14 to attack and defense, and I could get it up to 18 by grabbing all the low-hanging Minion fruit as mentioned.
My other actives didn’t have much synergy with the passive, however. I didn’t have any skills that were useful for targeting Minions, aside from Life Warden, but I reserved that skill for protecting Etja and sometimes Nuralie. The resource discount was going to be useless unless I also found a way to swap some of my other actives for buffs or maybe healing.
Targeting a minion to get a half-price Explosion! crossed my mind, but Explosion! didn’t target a specific entity, just a specific point in space. I also wasn’t a complete asshole–despite what SC1 seemed to think–so I didn’t want to go the route of sacrificing summons for damage. They had feelings too.
The next passive was a lot more on brand.
This passive was laser-guided directly into my heart. At my current level, it would give me 600 HP, 120 health regen (after being doubled from my ring), 120 mana, 12 mana regen, 12 points of damage reduction against
, and 12 bonus damage to my spells. It would keep getting better as I leveled and was a perfect fit for my wreck-and-get-wrecked build. It was defense and offense rolled into one, with a focus on having an unreasonable amount of resources.
The cooldown reset was interesting, and would help me toss out Explosion! more often, but it wouldn’t be a major boon. I had a Physical Magic evolution that reduced cooldowns, but it wouldn’t do enough to make the spell viable for anything other than a big opening slam or finishing move. Not until I had Physical at a much higher level, at least. I could always look for more high-cooldown abilities to take greater advantage of the passive’s reset benefit, but the main draw for me was everything else the passive offered.
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I had no idea how the final option could possibly match up, but it did.
I felt a stab of pain in my tender heart when I read this passive since it meant I had to make a hard choice. One major problem with aura skills, like my Aura of Perseverance, was the range limitation. High-level fights tended to involve large distances, and being forced to stay within a hundred feet of my allies could quickly become untenable. The first sentence of this passive immediately solved that issue by making beneficial auras have a range of ‘yes’, so long as we were talking about party members.
The second sentence was a bit tricky, but it was the kind of tricky that could break things open. An effect that targeted my ‘allies’ did not target me, since I was not an ally to myself. A decent number of auras and effects only applied to allies, so anytime I took one of those I was making a judgment call that the bonus to my party was better than choosing a skill or evolution providing a bonus just to myself. If I took this passive, then with regard to auras, it didn’t matter. I’d get shielding from Aura of Perseverance along with my party members (no matter how far away they were), and “aura bonuses” that affected allies would also affect me. That would likely include my Leadership 10 evolution, which made all of my auras stronger for allies.
Finally, the passive made my attack and defense better for every aura I had up and was even itself an aura that gave a minor boost to attack and defense. It was a cute little double dip that I appreciated, allowing the passive to be effective even if you didn’t have any other auras. It would be shit, but it would still do
.
With Who Needs a Cleric?, Aura of Perseverance, and Auradilato up, I’d have a bonus of 20 to attack and defense. Attack and defense were strictly better than damage and damage reduction such as Thaumic Wall granted. Attack increased accuracy
damage, making attacks more likely to land and increasing their power when they did. Defense helped prevent attacks from landing in the first place and
reduced damage. Thus, Auradilato had the more potent bonuses for hurting and getting hurt.
I was already leaning away from Minion Menagerie since it would take a bigger pivot to make it work. Auras and Minions seemed like a solid combo, but I didn’t have room to get serious with both. The System was right when it said I needed to settle down and pick a path. My build was fairly wide, with summons, spell-slinging, tanking, and party buffs all competing. Grotto and Shog were great, but they could hold their own without more backup and would still benefit if I went harder into auras.
The choice boiled down to ethos. Did I want to make myself as strong as I could, layering on more health, mana, defense, and damage with Thaumic Wall? Or did I want to focus on the party while still snagging some decent buffs for myself along the way? I already had a strong preference, but decided to look over the active skills on offer before locking a passive in.
I frowned at the System’s jab, since my build was functioning entirely well, thank you very much.
This first choice synergized with the Minion passive that had been offered, and 2 hands probably meant they counted as 2 minions, which was cool. They had solid health, would hit people like a damn truck, and could probably grapple like a five-armed python. They were immune to mind shenanigans, which could definitely come in useful, but they wouldn’t be able to dodge for shit with an Agility and Speed of 1. Still, having 2 more bruisers on the field would be solid.
I’d taken some time during our week with Avarice to train with Etja and snag that final level in Mystical to bring it up to 20, and it was looking like that was a very good decision. Not only was it required by Hands of Thoth, but a quick scan of the other two skills showed that all of them were of the Mystical variety.
This one was less obvious, but Star of Helios meshed very well with Thaumic Wall. It took a whopping 100 mana, offset by Thaumic Wall’s grant of resources, and had a significant cooldown of 1 hour, also helped out by Thaumic Wall’s cooldown reset.
Even without all that, it looked pretty great.
First of all, it did damage from all 5 magic schools, which was something I didn’t even know was possible with one spell. It keyed off of Mystical Magic for all 5, meaning that it would lay out some serious damage, and it hit in a massive AoE with discretionary targeting. It was the best fuck-you spell I’d ever seen for groups.
Of course, that assumed my enemies would hang out for 30 seconds while I pummeled them with wave after wave of spell damage. Star of Helios couldn’t be countered (fucking righteous) but enemies could run away or–more likely–die before the spell was fully exhausted. That made it a bit of a gamble for its cost, which was the same as blasting out 20 Oblivion Orbs.
Thaumic Wall
help with the cooldown, but I hated the idea of having another spell that was only useful once per fight. Besides that, none of the spell attacks would be as powerful as a dedicated caster for the relevant school since I wouldn’t have any evolutions helping them along. I’d basically be locking myself into 5 AoE attacks for 20 mana a piece over the course of 30 seconds. I had to ‘evoke’ the Star for it to work, but I was betting I could do other things at the same time, like throw hammers, block, and teleport, so maybe it wasn’t as much of a downside as I thought.
I turned my sights on the third skill, eager to see what the System thought paired well with Auradilato.
Well, shit.
Ignoring the fact that Uno backward is
No U, it’s onU, the skill was outrageous.
Actually, no, let’s go back to Uno backward. Onu could open up other, more correct jokes, like “Oh nuuuuuuu!” as in “Oh, no, my spell!” OR it could be “on you” like “I take your spell and cast it
”
Maybe that’s all a stretch, fuck it I dunno. If the System’s only going to add flavor text to
of my choices, it should at least make sense.
Other than risking my interface being forever marred by objectively poor humor, the skill was awesome. It was an aura, so it would get buffed by Leadership and Auradilato would extend the spell DR to myself while also giving me another 5 attack and defense.
The redirect, however, was where it really shone. An enemy targets my ally with a fireball? Fuck them, now that fireball’s roasting their teammates.
get targeted by a fireball? I’m my own ally, so fuck that, the fireball’s roasting their
teammates. The enemy shoots the fireball at the ground nearby so they’re not actually targeting anyone? Fuck off, it’s targeting a ‘space’ inside my aura so now that fireball’s roasting their teammates’ friends and family! I’ll spare the pets, though. I’m not a monster.
The one drawback was how much of a mana sink the skill was. The mana reserve was big at 100, and it would tie up a fifth of my current mana pool indefinitely. Even so, that much spell mitigation seemed worth it, and it wasn’t a cost I’d have to pay repeatedly or that would continuously drain a resource like Aura of Perseverance. On top of that, I’d have to pay for 100% of the cost of any spell I redirected. I could see my mana pool dwindling rapidly as I turntabled all over our foes. Then again, what use is a resource if it’s not being deployed to utterly screw over the enemy?
The skill would also be useless against purely martial fighters, but meh. Those folks can just stab me until they wear themselves out.
Understandably, I had a tough choice before me.
Oh, not really. I knew what I liked. Ever since level zero, I’d wanted to boost my allies as much as possible while still being able to throw down. Auras made me stronger, they made my party members stronger, and they made my Minions stronger (a term I was going to absolutely wear out when referring to Shog and Grotto). I already had an insane amount of health and regen for my level, and Auradilato would give me a solid boost to both defense and offense while significantly increasing the viability of active auras.
Of course, I did not gleefully punch accept on the 2 skills until running it past everyone else. Predictably, no one was going to be mad about me handing out even more buffs, so it was a short discussion. I accepted the skills, committing myself to the auradin lifestyle.
Once that was settled, I only had to figure out my evolutions for Mystical Magic 20, Speed 20, and Intelligence 40.
Easy choices. No big deal.
I was certain my party members would have no strong opinions on the matter.