Chapter 3: It Was Poorly Optimized

Guild Vapor Trail was not having a fun day.

Being one of the guilds featured in Fantasy BattleWorld’s Road to World First competition meant spending most of their day attempting to do something nobody had done yet.

In this case, that meant defeating the third boss of the latest raid, The Demonic Pits of Aggragorin.

Thirty-one times they had attempted to defeat Middle Lord Katharin.

Thirty-one times Katharin had killed most, if not all, of them and emerged triumphant.

Every wipe was expensive. Repair materials, flasks, consumables, and other enhancements all had to be replaced. The only reason the expense wasn’t completely impossible was that Vapor Trail spent the months between raid seasons stockpiling supplies, improving equipment, and training replacement members for those who eventually discovered they could no longer endure the repeated failures necessary to succeed.

So it wasn’t completely impossible.

Just mostly impossible.

Hax McGee, Guild Leader of Vapor Trail, sighed.

To be honest, he estimated they needed gear at least twenty-five levels higher before Katharin would become reliably manageable.

Unfortunately, they needed to defeat Katharin to get access to the gear that would make defeating Katharin easier.

It was the MMO version of the chicken-and-egg problem.

You needed the gear to reliably beat the boss.

You needed to beat the boss to get the gear.

And then there were the real-world problems that came with these races.

Thousands of viewers watched each guild’s attempts.

Hax did his best never to read the chat. Partly because he was very busy during the fights, trying to maximize outgoing damage while minimizing the kinds of mistakes that turned avoidable damage into dead players.

Right now, they were still at the point where if one or two members went down, everyone unconsciously accepted that the attempt was over. Their already microscopic margin for error had disappeared.

Better to throw yourself off the edge of the battlefield and reset than spend another five minutes pretending the run could still be salvaged.

More than once, Hax had ordered his team to keep fighting anyway. Even a doomed attempt had value if it gave them another minute of practice on a phase they eventually needed to execute perfectly.

The people watching, though, wanted to support a winner.

Vapor Trail always put up a donation link during the Road to World First stream. By the guild’s estimates, viewer donations covered roughly forty percent of the cost of competing.

Sponsors covered the other sixty.

Any prizes they won for successful First Kills would be substantial.

The gear awarded for a World First kill, and for placing well in the Road to World First competition, was significantly better than the boss’s normal drops.

Better still, the cash prize for a successful kill usually went straight to the players as a bonus.

After the most recent unsuccessful attempt, Hax turned toward one of the few people in the room who wasn’t angry about yet another failure.

Martin had been brought in specifically not to be part of the raid team, but to advise it. Tell them what had gone wrong. Point out when someone couldn’t handle a particular part of the fight, or when fatigue had started turning normally reliable players sloppy.

Yesterday, Martin had told him they were actually going backward on the boss. Everyone was too tired. Tiny mistakes were creeping in, one after another, until they added up to inevitable defeat.

Hax had wanted to keep going.

He had also known Martin was right.

So he’d called it for the day, told everyone to go do something fun for a few hours, and ordered them to get plenty of sleep.

Tomorrow would be another day.

So far, tomorrow looked suspiciously like yesterday.

“All right, Martin. Where did we go wrong this time?”

Martin van Bijsterveld looked up from the combat logs he had been staring at.

“The usual. Tiny failures that cascaded. Half a second too slow on a tank aggro swap. Two-tenths of a second late on a movement that threw one of the healers slightly out of rhythm.”

He glanced back at the logs.

“The fire phase is ... formidable.”

Hax nodded. “Yeah. We thought we had the movement nailed down, but somewhere around the third fire phase we got out of sync and started taking a lot of theoretically avoidable damage.”

Martin understood what Hax meant by theoretically avoidable. At this point in the raid’s lifecycle, the movement had to be practically perfect. If you moved even an eyeblink too late, you were going to regret it.

So were your healers.

Martin pointed at one section of the log.

“Mortis had to pop Take You With Me during that phase because he was half a second behind. Even half a second of fire was enough to...”

Martin stopped.

He looked at the log again.

Then again.

Hax frowned. “What?”

Martin didn’t answer. He seemed trapped in a loop, scrolling up and down through columns of raw numbers.

“Reflection. No damage cap. Timed burst.”

Hax wondered if Martin had finally lost his marbles. There were probably enough loose ones scattered around the room already that a few more wouldn’t make much difference.

Martin straightened.

“How many Doom Knights do we have who can reliably survive until the fire phase?”

Hax thought about it. “Uh ... thirteen, I guess. Five in the main team and eight more on the bench.”

Martin’s attention had already returned to the logs.

“Get them.”

Hax blinked. “Them?”

“All of them. Every Doom Knight who can reliably reach the fire phase. Put them in the raid and make sure every one of them has Take You With Me optimized as high as possible.”

Hax started to protest. “Martin, we can’t completely rebuild the raid composition on a whim.”

“Trust me. I found the key.”

Martin pointed at the combat log.

“Take You With Me has no damage cap. The Doom Knight doesn’t die until the ability resolves. Every point of damage taken during that window gets reflected.”

Hax stared at him.

Martin continued.

“When Spinning Fire starts, send the healers as far away as they can get. Every Doom Knight stands right next to Katharin. No more than five meters away. Let the fire target them. Then they all activate Take You With Me.”

Hax’s expression slowly changed as he began to understand what Martin was proposing.

“Martin ... they’ll die. We’ll wipe!”

Martin shook his head.

“Death is not important to the victory condition. Send the healers away. Far and fast. Keep them out of the fire. As long as one healer survives, you win.”

Hax finally understood.

During the Spinning Fire phase, Middle Lord Katharin randomly placed red circles beneath players’ feet. A second or two later, each circle erupted in a massive blast of fire, doing catastrophic damage to anyone still standing inside it.