For starting choices, there was nothing for Chan Si to choose for her monstrous character. All monstrous characters would start the game the same, as a demonic larva at the depths of the Monster Queen's nest, in the center of the Ravaged Lands.

The Monster Queen was not an existence any player had met - she had seemingly left an endless nest of eggs from which monstrous players and npcs alike would sprout from and immediately travel away from, seeking experience to grow and evolve.

One couldn't even give their monstrous character a name until their first evolution!

For her humanoid characters, however, she had three key choices. The first would be their race; although race had nowhere near the same impact as it did for monstrous characters, and no evolution would occur, there would still be various minor bonuses available to each of the different humanoid races.

The second was of course class, and this was the most important choice! It would totally define many aspects of her play.

The third choice was background - this was mostly for role playing purposes, but notably would unlock certain non-combat skills and [Skills] depending on the choice. While any of them could be learned later through other means, Chan Si's early plans meant she wanted to select good money makers so she could buy great gear for one character, who would then be able to farm for the others.

There was technically also a fourth choice, starting location.

Each race, class, and background had a unique starting location, and you once you selected the race, class, and background, you could choose to select which one's starting area you would be in.

Chan Si wanted her starting areas to be relatively close together if possible, but she wasn't willing to sacrifice the importance of the other three choices to make it so. Walking to meet in a single spot might take a while, but it was the easiest thing to do even after accounting for the dangers and time, compared to filling in missing key components of her other choices.

It was clear to Chan Si that she should pick her four classes first, then pick the backgrounds she felt had the best potential, and finally choose her character races for whatever would best support her other two choices.

Since she had a specific strategy of piling all the best loot onto a single character and the rest would get scraps, she wanted her main character to be a class that could take the most advantage of overpowered gear. Although it was true that any class could use any gear, certain classes could more easily ‘get away’ with having less powerful gear than others.

In any MMO, even this super advanced one, classes could be relatively split into one of three roles. Tanking, DPS, and Healing. This was a matter of specialization, as although certain classes might be able to take on multiple roles, realistically they could only ever specialize in one. Subclass and gear would make a bigger impact than class choice on which role one was best suited for, but class was still important - a tank focused class with a healing focused subclass and healing focused gear would never be as good of a healer as a healing focused class with a healing focused subclass and healing focused gear.

Of course, someone might still decide to make that choice, as a healer who would not as easily die if left on their own was a big advantage!

As always, it was about advantages and disadvantages.

Sure, Chan Si could create an on-paper ‘optimized’ party with one tank, one healer, and two DPS. With her ability to coordinate them, she would be even better off than others with such a composition. But Chan Si's goal was not to be optimized, it was to break the game, and optimizing was only useful as far as it got her there.

If she did things like everyone else, even with the help of items, the AI controlling the system would too easily account for things, and she would never be able to break through.

She needed flexibility, numerous abilities and effects to choose from with each of her characters, so that in combination with items she would be able to overload the AI.

However, she also did not plan to fully abandon good party composition. At the very least, she planned to create one pure DPS.

This would be her main character.

Her reasoning was thus: Regardless of anything else, the main character should not be the healer.

An overpowered dedicated healer wouldn't be able to do anything if the tank kept dying in one hit.

So the healer was out.

So why not the tank? While she could give the tank all the best gear and thus have them never die, wouldn't it be pointless if her party's killing speed was too slow? She would never be able to reach her goals quickly enough, and miss out on innumerable opportunities as a result.

So it was her DPS that needed the best gear. If she could kill everything quickly enough, who cared if the tank wasn't the best tank, and the healer wasn't the best healer.

Of course, she realized there was a potential problem here as well. If that was really how things worked, then everyone would play DPS characters, and why would anyone want tanks or healers at all? Just rush at everything with more dps, bigger dps, bigger numbers, more more more!

It was a basic trap only total noobs would fall into.

Yet still, Chan Si was certain of her choice to make her main character pure DPS. At all times she would support the character with the best items she could find or buy, even if they weren't DPS items. For most groups this would be an unthinkable waste - why put the tank and healing items on a pure DPS?! Do you even know what the word ‘pure’ means?! Put the tank items on the tank! Put the healer items on the healer! You idiot!

But Chan Si had the advantage of perfect coordination. She could put the best items regardless of purpose on her main character and adapt her overall party strategy on the fly, nearly effortlessly.

GTO allowed the changing of gear in the middle of combat, but one would need to go through the same effort one would changing gear in real life - sheathing a weapon and pulling out the new one would be easiest, but for something like getting in and out of armor, it might take ten minutes! But because of Chan Si's perfect coordination between her characters, she could drastically lessen the time it would take for a character to change gear, so long as she used her other characters to help.

She estimated even the bulkiest armor wouldn't take her dedicated efforts more than a minute to take off or put on, and that was the worst case for her. Nobody else was capable of this strategy, even a particularly clever group of trusted guild members, at best they might reduce the time to three minutes.

Not worth it!

She even had a greater advantage. She could coordinate trade menus between her characters to hotswap unequipped items almost instantly. Even if her main character was about to die, as long as she had another character nearby, she could limit the losses of her most precious resources.

Thus she planned to cycle items quite frequently, and thus her main character dedicated dps would simply wear the best items regardless of what role they were intended for. She could overcome the weakness of making DPS her main character, without giving up the advantage.

There was just one weakness left.

She might be perfectly coordinated and capable of feats others would not be, but her plan was still convoluted. She knew from her education it was better to do things the simplest way possible. She would not over-rely on the item hot swapping, it would merely be one tactic of many.

Which was where her second class choice came from.

While she had yet to settle on which DPS class to select, she knew exactly one of her other classes. It would be a utility class known as the Dark Weaver. Dark Weavers were a very strange class, the closest class to ‘balanced’ between Tanking, DPS, and Healing. This was because they did not cast spells, but instead made ‘weaves’, each weave having minor effects on their own, but chaining together weaves in a certain order would unleash powerful AOE effects that could help tank, deal damage, heal allies, or do several things at once.

It wasn't a popular class, because its solo play was really difficult, and its group play was poorly optimized. Usually balanced classes would be heavily gear and subclass reliant to define their actual role, but most gear didn't affect weaves, and the Dark Weaver subclasses only added different kinds of complexity to the class instead of specializing it. While there were powerful Dark Weaver players, they were only good at GvG where the density of enemy players would exceed anything in PvE or even regular PvP content.

So why did Chan Si feel she needed to play a Dark Weaver? For one, the lack of gear reliance was actually a good thing. Dark Weavers were the least gear reliant class in the game, and she didn't plan anything different in that regard.

Most importantly, however, was that a Dark Weaver could form a reliable core of her combat strategy. The primary weakness of Dark Weavers was how slow the build up of their weaves were. Combat would often be over after unleashing only one or two aoe effects. In GvG content, Dark Weavers would need to be protected by a reliable line of tanks while they formed their weaves. But once they had enough, they could chain new effects off old weaves, turning the battlefield into a cascade of AoE after AoE, grinding away the enemy advantage.

Chan Si had no need to engage in GvG content, but she did need to farm!

She needed to farm a lot!

And what better way to farm than an endless cascade of AoEs?

For most groups, they would rather run a dungeon or do a quest instead of farming a large number of ordinary mobs, but Chan Si had a goal those players did not, she wanted to break the game. By making the core of her strategy involve a large amount of reliable, multi-effect AoEs, she would be able to optimize drop rates, increasing the time efficiency of obtaining rare drops, which in turn would decrease the amount of time she would need to take to find items with unique effects.

Plus, when it eventually came time to break the game, AoE effects would no doubt help her in doing so.

With the Dark Weaver sorted, she also had a rough idea of another class she wanted. There were many classes dedicated to the summoning or command of ‘pets'. ‘Pets’ were a general term for a player commanded NPC who would fight on part of the player. The best thing about classes that commanded pets is that pet capabilities didn't rely on items, just like the Dark Weaver. They could still use items to supplement their pets, however.

Most pet classes fell into one of two strategies. Either they used their pets to tank while the pet user would hang back and provide DPS, or the pet user themselves would tank while the pets provided DPS. Healing pet masters existed, but they were very rare, as pets could easily be resummoned if lost; any healing pet master would be part of a large team and focus on healing others and resummoning lost pets. There was no class that provided pets that healed others to any reliable degree.

However, a healing pet master class is just what Chan Si planned to use! She would rely on the core of the class abilities to create tanking pets, and the pet master themselves to heal them.

Why not let the pets die and resummon them? Simply, too expensive! Reviving pets was costly, and she wanted all her money to gear her main character. While she could use a summoning class instead and only pay in mana, summoned pets were inferior to permanent pets in all aspects, including be harder to control. The advantage was easy and costless reviving of dead pets, but Chan Si had other plans!

Pet classes were further divided into single pet classes and multi pet classes, which were exactly as they sounded. Single pet classes got a more powerful pet, while multi pet classes had more flexibility. Chan Si's choice was obvious, she wanted a multi pet class, to best take advantage of both her intelligence, and of the Dark Weaver's AoE effects.

Multi pet classes were further split into 2 pet classes, 3 pet classes, and swarm pet classes. 2 pet classes focused on synergy between the pets, 3 pet classes focused on pets with simple but reliable skills, and swarm pet classes were about never-ending hordes of pets. All swarm pet classes were summoning classes, so Chan Si would not choose them. That left her choice between 2 pet classes and 3 pet classes.

It was not a simple choice; a 3 pet class would best allow the advantage of the Dark Weaver to shine, and the reliability of the 3 pet classes meant she would not have to place all of that classes focus in commanding the pets, and could more easily use the character for complex tasks. Meanwhile, the two pet classes all had very unique abilities attached to pets, and more unique abilities would increase her chances of breaking the game.

What to choose, what to choose?