Unchosen Champion

Coop ended up analyzing his skill options while laying on a bench in the herb garden. A new stone path traversed between the herbs, making a scenic cut through for anyone skipping between blocks. The garden’s leafy green plants had already grown all along the trellises, making tunnels that shaded the length of the path. The temperature was notably cooler, in sharp contrast to the muggy humidity of the mangrove forest.

He had his arm over his eyes as he lamented the difficulty in deciding which skills to take. Living up to any image of a confident leader certainly fell apart when it came time to make a permanent decision that influenced his build. He turned into an indecisive child struggling to decide on a single toy because he wanted them all. Planning ahead was a challenging task when all he had to work with were his own conceptual ideas. If only he had a comprehensive and dynamic skill tree planner that would lay out the consequences of his choices.

He was on his own to make a coherent build that generated synergies with whatever he was offered. Admittedly, he already had a perfectly solid foundation and he was now far more flexible in his ability to select niche skills that had the potential to fill gaps in his kit. Just about anything would work at this point, but he still bemoaned the system’s lack of support.

The problem was in properly identifying the current and future gaps of his build. Was he even using his current skills to the fullest yet? He finally realized he had the ability to shield throw using Retribution, one of his original skills, after almost a month of using it daily. It was possible that he would learn more about any one of his skills and realize the solution to a problem was there the entire time.

Not to mention how greedy Coop was when it came to his build. His kit may have come together for grinding, especially thanks to his titles filling in for his lack of regeneration skills, and the sky was the limit when it came to his brawling ability, as long as he developed his martial techniques, but he wanted so much more.

He was missing strong burst damage outside of what he could muster with his own Strength for ending duels quickly, he was envious of Charlie’s massive area skills, he wanted crowd control, and he still wished he had active stealth. He’d also take a healing skill for fights where on kill regeneration was limited and more ranged attacks outside of throwing his weapons at things would be nice, though both were lower priorities at this point. He could manage with his current setup. The only aspect he was satisfied with was the mobility granted by synergising Salvation and Retribution, especially in close combat, so he wasn’t particularly searching for movement skills anymore. That was one checkbox checked.

The main concern that he was turning over in his head was due to only having six skills to select from this time. When he first received his class he remembered having a lot more choices, maybe 25 in total, then he hit level 25 and selected from around 12 skills. Now, with only 6 skills to select from, he was worried about slowly being pigeonholed by the system. Would it eventually give him a single skill and say, “take it or leave it?”

At least he recognized most of his current offerings as skills he was interested in during previous rounds. The area denial skill remained, the crowd control skill was there, and both of the passive skills that gave bonuses to Intelligence and Acumen based on his Mind stat were once again offered.

The first of the other two new skills was called Stygian Spirit. It would transform his mana pool into a unique resource of the same name. It sounded to Coop like he would be able to mana burn his targets by expending the resource, and considering his massive mana pool that seemed like it would be a formidable tactic. Unfortunately, its efficiency was determined by his Intelligence attribute, so it would be stuck at its base value until he also took the corresponding passive skill.

The second was called Void Drop which appeared to be a simple attack spell in the form of a very expensive air strike. It sounded like a proper burst skill, but its effectiveness was also based on his Intelligence, so he had the same hesitation about taking it immediately.

Even though all the skills would be useful to him, with the potential of filling a role that he was specifically searching for, they were all scaled by his Intelligence attribute in one way or another. With his massive mana pool, something like Stygian Spirit might still be useful even without it being efficient. The same went for the area denial and the crowd control abilities. He wanted to make this choice count, with the settlement event looming, so he was looking for something that could be immediately useful.

Coop figured that Void Drop would be the only active skill where he definitely needed Arcane Comprehension to give him Intelligence before he selected it, which sucked, because it was a ranged burst attack, fulfilling two of his desires in one. He mentally discarded it, and also ignored Clarity of Purpose, the bonus Acumen skill, even if it would benefit all of his damage by granting his attacks the ability to ignore a portion of his target’s defenses.