~~~~
Endless Fantasy
Online, Fuchsia Server, Rose Blade Guild, Chat Log:
[Guild]
[Mantaro]: That last match was ridiculous. I think they took our healer down in
one hit.
[Guild]
[BallinBro]: Blame that Tonemaster video. Ever since he showed off his Strength
build, the whole meta has been nothing but big weapons and big damage.
[Guild]
[Mantaro]: Well, I’m starting to get sick of it. I hate how I can’t down them
after a minute of constant hits, but they can kill any of us in two or three.
[Guild]
[BallinBro]: That’s just the meta bro, what else do you expect on ranked?
[Guild]
[Mantaro]: A touch more variety, maybe? How about an Intelligence or Wisdom
caster, outside of healer or support. Maybe a Dexterity build or a full-on
Endurance tank?
[Guild]
[BallinBro]: lol, when’s the last time you saw anyone playing a pure Dex build?
[Guild]
[Mantaro]: Good point…But what about the rest?
[Guild]
[BallinBro]: I think they had like one guy in the back with a bow, but he was
probably a hybrid build…Oh, there was a spellsword…no wait shit, that’s a
hybrid build too.
[Guild]
[Mantaro]: This is so dumb.
[Guild]
[BallinBro]: Well, what can you do? Change the meta? Wait for a balance patch?
[Guild]
[Mantaro]: **** it, I’m going to change the meta. See you in a week.
[Guild]
[BallinBro]: What?
Mantaro is
offline.
~--~
“Mantaro” sat back in their computer
chair. Before them were three monitors. On the center screen was a fan-made
character build calculator for Endless Fantasy Online. On the left was a web
browser opened to the game’s Wiki, and on the right was a video playlist going
over the history of the game’s meta. They grumbled with frustration, two hours
of theorycrafting had led them nowhere so far.
They had settled on making a new
meta Dex build but quickly ran into numerous brick walls. Investing all your
stat points into Dex gave you speed and evasion, but that was about it. You
wouldn’t have the damage to compete with the Str builds, and if they hit you,
that was it.
According to the history videos, Dex
was popular at the game’s launch. Mainly for noob crushing with great speed.
Once the meta settled, it quickly fell out of favor thanks to the
aforementioned low damage. Basically, to get that high speed, you’d need to
spend so many stat points that you’d have almost nothing left over for any of
the other stats. If you didn’t spend all those points, the return on investment
wouldn’t nearly be worth it and would be better spent in other stats.
In layman’s terms, 50 (out of the
max 100) points in Strength would be worth every point. The same amount in
Dexterity would not (besides, you’d need to put 70 points in Dex to get the
maximum movement speed). Plus, Str gives you bonus defense, while Dex only
gives you a bonus to evasion. The problem with evasion was that it was all up
to chance. It could reduce the damage you take to zero, it could also reduce
the damage you take by half, but most likely, you’d just take full damage.
Defense, on the other hand, reduced the damage you take by a flat amount.
Mantaro groaned again; relying on
evade wouldn’t be enough. If they wanted this Dex build to work, they’d have to
think of something else. Besides, the real problem with the Dex build was
damage. Strength increasing your damage was obvious, but Dex’s relationship
with damage was a bit more complex.
Dexterity did increase the damage of
ranged weapons, but ranged weapons have also proven to be niche at best.
They’re still used, but never in dedicated builds, only in hybrids. Even then,
you’d only see one or two ranged weapons users per ten people. They were only
there to fill holes in larger groups, and they would only use the weapons half
the time.
The real problem with ranged weapons
was that, because of the game’s mechanics, they were situational weapons. Most
fights were done up close, and the game’s mechanics didn’t lend themselves to
kiting or keeping your distance. As a result, ranged attacks were used for only
three things: the opening volley in an ambush, supporting someone else in a
melee fight, or shooting down a fleeing foe. None of them are guaranteed to
happen in a fight, and all three usually implied you were on the winning side
of a fight. Hence, if your ambush failed, if you were being ambushed, or if you
were the one losing, ranged weapons would be worthless.
There were a couple of melee weapons
that scaled off Dexterity. However, they had poor damage even at high
investment because they were tied into the game’s critical hit mechanics.
Critical hit chance and damage also scaled off Dex. With some additional
investment in the Luck stat, you’d have damage competitive with the Strength
builds. Alas, critical hits were also up to chance, and that competitive damage
assumed you could reliably crit. To reliably critically hit, you’d have to
spend so many stat points you’d be left a complete glass cannon. Your damage
would be incredible, but you’d certainly go down in one hit.
Mantaro resisted the urge to slam
their head into the table. Everything seemed to point to the fact that Dex was
a poorly balanced stat, and the only way around it would be to wait for the
developers to fix it. However, that would be an admission of defeat, and
Mantaro was far too stubborn to call it quits after a couple hours.
They quickly skimmed the Wiki again,
flipping through every page related to the Dexterity stat they could find. To
their surprise, there were many Dex skills they had never heard of all over the
Wiki. However, they quickly realized that all those Dex skills were locked
behind a high Dex requirement. Which was sad because a lot of them sounded
excellent. Mainly the support skills, which were full of temporary damage
reduction and a handful of evasion buffs.
Mantaro reread the skills several
times and got to thinking. If one were to string together all of these skills
in the proper sequence, you’d basically be untouchable. Sure, each defensive
skill was temporary, and there would be plenty of vulnerable moments here and
there, but it was like a dance. If you got all the steps right, it’d be a
beautiful display of skill. It would be really hard, but it just might be worth
it.
As Mantaro thought about it, they’d
been narrowminded concerning the Dex builds. They always thought you’d have to
pick either a glass cannon critical hit build, a full-speed build, or a ranged
build. Since they all rely on Dex anyway, mixing and match two or all of those
might be an option. It’d just take some theorycrafting and testing.
This would undoubtedly take a few
longs nights to get it just right. But, Mantaro had all the time in the world
right now. Besides, who wouldn’t want to be the one to discover the new meta?
~--~
Endless Fantasy
Online, Fuchsia Server, PvP Matchmaking Lobby #274, Chat Log:
[Party]
[Mantaro]: Alright, it took all week, but I’m ready.
[Party]
[BallinBro]: What do you mean?
[Party]
[Mantaro]: That Dex build, remember?
[Party]
[BallinBro]: You were serious about that? Are you trying to get kicked from the
party?
[Party]
[Mantaro]: Don’t worry, I was testing all day yesterday. I should at least do
well enough to not get kicked.
[Party Leader]
[RuckDaKing]: What’s this about a Dex build?
[Party]
[LeetPown]: ******* noob.
[Party]
[Mantaro]: Don’t worry about it. I’ve got all the numbers worked out. Worst
case scenario, I’ll play ranged support.
[Party]
[LeetPown]: lol, **** noob here thinks he can play a Dex build. Go back to
practice league *******.
[Party Leader]
[RuckDaKing]: Give me a minute.
[LeetPown] has
been kicked from the party.
[Party]
[BallinBro]: Who the **** was that?
[Party Leader]
[RuckDaKing]: Just some random troll, ignore him. Now about that Dex build you
failed to mention to me before?
[Party]
[Mantaro]: Just watch and be amazed. Glass cannon crit builds will be a thing of
the past, and so will meathead Str builds.
[Party Leader]
[RuckDaKing]: I swear if you cost us this match with your gimmick build…You’re
on farming duty from now till the end of next month.
[FlowerDappa] has
joined the party.
[Party]
[FlowerDappa]: Hey guys, am I late?
[Party Leader]
[RuckDaKing]: Just ready up.
[RuckDaKing] is
ready.
[Mantaro] is
ready.
[BallinBro] is
ready.
[FlowerDappa] is
ready.
The match will
begin in 5…4…3…2…1…
~--~
Mantaro swept through the
battlefield the second the match started. So quickly, in fact, that his own
party members thought he failed to load into the game. The map they were
playing on was a classic 4v4 battleground that launched with the game. It was
medium-sized and based on a small farm. A huge barn dominated the center of the
map, while two farmhouses on opposite sides served as the starting point for
the teams. The rest was animal pens and cornfields, perfect for ambushes.
The goal of this map was simple,
take out the enemy team. Each player got three respawns, so once you died four
times, you were out. The last team standing wins, and if it goes to time, the
team with the most total respawns left wins. If that was tied, they’d go to
sudden death, but Mantaro was confident it wouldn’t come to that.
Mantaro zoomed about the map before
hiding in the cornfield. He took one peak out and saw the enemy party. Three
Str characters in heavy armor and weaponry, plus one guy at the back who looked
like an Int character in light armor. The common logic in most competitive
games is to always take out the support first, but Mantaro had other ideas.
Instead, they’d test the waters, see how this party reacts.
Mantaro pulled out a crossbow from
their inventory, specially crafted for the new Dex build. They took aim and
fired at the closest Str character. The bolt hit true and did moderate damage,
and the other party immediately went on the defensive.
“Ambush already?” The guy who was
hit exclaimed in chat while the support character healed him. “Wait, that’s it
just one bolt?” They quickly realized no follow-up attack was coming.
“lol, what an idiot,” another of the
Str guys stated in chat. Their character had bright orange hair, which stood
out quite a bit. “Probably some Dextard fishing for crits. I saw where the bolt
came from. I’ll deal with him.” The orange-haired character pulled out a giant
battle-axe from their inventory and charged the cornfield Mantaro was hiding
in.
‘Hook, line and sinker,’ Mantaro thought
in glee. They moved just enough that their relative position was obvious,
drawing their foe in.
“Got ya,” orange-hair announced as
he swung his axe through the cornfield. Alas, none of his blows hit Mantaro,
who was much further back than they initially guessed.
“Over here,” Mantaro fired another
bolt, which hit true, before swiftly retreating again.
“****** Dextard!” Orange-hair
charged further into the cornfield, axe raised for another attack.
“Idiot, you’re overextending,” one
of his teammates pointed out, but orange-hair failed to listen.
“Can’t get away now,” orange-hair
finally caught up to Mantaro and brought his axe down on the Dex character’s
head.
“No, actually you don’t,” Mantaro
triggered their evasion skill. For the next six-second, their evasion was 100%.
Not realizing this, Orange-hair activated his strength-boosting skill to secure
the kill but wasted it as every hit failed to connect. “For my next trick,”
Mantaro used a dodge-roll skill to get behind orange-hair before switching to a
pair of daggers and slashing from behind. Two slashes were made, one of which
was a critical hit, orange-hair went down to about half health.
“Idiot’s getting himself ganked,”
one of orange-hair’s party members pointed out as the group moved to aid their
ally.
“That’s my cue to leave,” Mantaro
triggered one last skill, a Dex ability that boosted their running speed for a
quick escape.
“You’re not getting away,”
orange-hair tried to follow, but the difference in movement speed was night and
day. Mantaro was more than twice as fast now, and orange-hair only succeeded in
keeping the distance between himself and the rest of his party very wide.
As the rest of orange-hair’s party
rushed into the cornfield, Mantaro’s party emerged from the barn, having seen
everything since the critical hit. RuckDaKing led the charge, popping his
offensive skills to take out the support as quickly as possible. The Int
character went down quickly, and the fight turned from 3v3 to 3v2.
“****,” orange-hair turned to see
his party getting shredded. He spun on his heel and charged after them, but he
never made it. Putting his back to Mantaro was his last mistake. The Dex
character used one last skill to double his crit chance and damage and attacked
orange-hair with a flurry of daggers blows. Orange-hair took three hits before
he managed to turn around. On the fourth hit, he went down.
The rest of the match went about the
same. Orange-hair spent the rest of the game trying to focus Mantaro. Alas,
that single-minded focus led to him regularly overextending and getting caught
out and killed. He was the first to use up all of his respawns and was out of
the game before long. Once it was down to a 4v3, it became just shy of a
slaughter in Mantaro’s team’s favor.
~--~
Endless Fantasy
Online, Fuchsia Server, PvP Matchmaking Lobby #274, Post-Game Chat Log:
[Party Leader]
[RuckDaKing]: The **** was that build of yours? Sure that was a pure Dex build?
[Party]
[Mantaro]: Certainly was. There are some good Dex abilities people constantly
overlook. Those plus switching back and forth between ranged and melee make for
a dangerous combination. Just takes a lot of practice to get the skill rotation
down.
[Party]
[BallinBro]: So basically ‘Get Gud?’
[Party]
[Mantaro]: Exactly.
[Party]
[FlowerDappa]: Mind linking me to your build?
[Party]
[Mantaro]: Give me another week to perfect it. The forums are going to explode
when that guy who tried to focus me starts bitching about how, “Dex builds are
so OP, pleez nerf.” Let me see what counterplay springs up before I start
spreading the word.
[Party Leader]
[RuckDaKing]: Until then, wanna go terrorize the ladder with something they’ll
never see coming.
[Party]
[BallinBro]: Gold rank, here we come!
~--~
Thus began the reign of Mantaro’s
new Dex build. The forums would both sing the praises of and curse the
existence of the new fleet of Dexterity characters till the game’s death. As
for Mantaro, they were simply happy that there was a little more variety in
Endless Fantasy’s ranked PvP ladder. Strength builds finally fell out of favor,
but hybrid builds and other pure stat builds rose in droves. It was perhaps the
golden age of experimentation in the Endless Fantasy’s metagame, and it all
started because one person got sick of seeing Strength builds.
~--~
A Primer on
Endless Fantasy Online:
Endless Fantasy is a fantasy/sci-fi
MMORPG with both PvE (Players vs. Environment) and PvP (Player vs. Player)
content. Players begin as a blank slate character with balanced stats, which
they can build however they chose to fill a variety of roles. Unlike most
MMORPGs, Endless Fantasy does not have a class system. Instead, a player’s role
and abilities are determined by how they increase their stats.
Players start at level 1 with 10
stat points to spend in any of the seven stats, Strength, Dexterity,
Intelligence, Endurance, Wisdom, Charisma, and Luck. Each stat starts at a
minimum of 5 and raises to a maximum of 100. On the road to the maximum level
of 70, players will acquire a total of 100 stat points to spend, including
their initial 10.
Each stat is straightforward in its
purpose, having both a primary and secondary benefit. Strength primarily raises
physical damage and slightly increases defense. Dexterity increases speed and
but also influences critical hit chance and damage. Intelligence improves magic
spells but also increases the mana pool (resource for casting spells).
Endurance raises both defense and maximum health. Wisdom determines one’s base
mana pool but also influences magical defense. Charisma is unique because it is
an out-of-combat stat that affects a fair share of minigames and features.
Finally, Luck influences critical hit chance and damage, as well as influencing
all chance-based interactions.
While the game’s world is massive
and ripe for exploration, its PvP features have grown significantly in
popularity in recent years. The competitive game modes range from 1v1 duels to
4v4 or 6v6 group skirmishes and massive 20v20 battles. Among them, 4v4 and 6v6
skirmishes are the most popular, as they are the easiest to form groups for.
While the game’s free-range build system does
promise infinite build variety, like most games, a competitive metagame was
formed around the most successful builds. The best builds are paired together
into the most efficient team compositions (ex. 4 person teams consisting of 2
damage dealers, 1 tank, and 1 healer/support), forming the backbone of the
game’s ranked matches.
The game’s ranked matches are
divided into several tiered competitive “ladders,” starting with Practice
league for new players and ending at Mythic league for the best players in the
world (The rest in order: Practice, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Mythic). Newly
infamous player Mantaro and his friends were initially Silver league, the den
of most average to above-average players. However, riding off the success of
the new Dex build, all of them reached Gold league in a couple days.
Despite having first released in
20XX, the game is still going strong and sees the occasional surge in
popularity and growth. It seems that this Endless Fantasy may live up to its
name after all.
~~~~
This is a story purely born of personal preference. I've always wanted to write a video gamey/MMO/competitive gaming style story, mainly because I'm not fully satisfied with all the ones I've seen on the market. I've read plenty that are good stories, but are not quite true to life in the video game aspects. Then there's the vast majority where I'm certain the writer doesn't actually play video games, or at least modern video games.
Hence we have this story that strays closer to what I wanted. To be fair, the outsider/secret expert/underdog who discovers that an underappreciated ability/skill/weapon/etc. is actually amazing is not an original concept. In both stories about video games and stories in general. However, my goal was to walk through the character's mentality and how they connect the dots. They know its bad, but the key is determining why and how to work around it. Or the pieces to make something work were always there, they just needed to complete the puzzle.
This sort of thing is not uncommon in real life games. Heck, it happens in trading card games all the time, especially those with eternal or legacy formats. For example, many years ago Magic the Gathering's Modern format had a new deck rise to success called "Death's Shadow" based around the titular card. All the cards in the deck had existed for years, it just took the right person to figure out how to break it.
Same is true of other card games like Pokemon and Yugioh, they have communities dedicated to older formats (basically recreating the experience of playing the games when they were fairly new). Until those communities formed, the top decks of those formats were considered to be overwhelmingly the best with only so much competition (Haymaker in Pokemon and Goat Control in Yugioh). However, as people have gone back to those formats and played in them more, new decks have emerged that are equal or superior to the old ones. If you're at all curious, there's dozens of videos and articles on these sorts of things, just look up Yugioh's Goat format, or the history of Competitive Magic the Gatheirng, etc.
That went longer than I expected...Ramble over...
Until next time, Read, Comment and Enjoy
~~~~
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