The discussion that followed was surprisingly helpful. For once the elf and the dwarf were actually taking the entire enterprise seriously, instead of joking around. There was a lot of back and forth on what exactly was a basic skill in Dix’s mind, and eventually they broke it down through a whole class. For some reason, they chose Barbarian. It was in part because it was at least a tank class that was being considered, but also because they’re skills were rather simplistic, making it more difficult to actually determine which skills would be considered the basics or foundational for the entire class. A magic swordsman was easier to figure out, as all of his skills were based on the foundation of swords and magic. Find the skill that manages how he swings a sword, and the one that controls how he first learned to use magic and you got it. Barbarians, on the other hand, were all about hitting things hard and getting hit back. There was no finesse, nothing that stood out as any sort of pinnacle skill that you could trace the line back to the beginning. Simply brutality and strength.

“Look, we all agree that Frenzy is the base skill that leads to Rage, but wha-,” Thunk was trying to get a full sentence out without being interrupted, but failed again.

This time it was Dix that interrupted, “Oh sure, I agree, but I still don’t understand why the hell they are Barbarians and not Berserk-”

“Ugghhhh, not this shit again. Look, they evolve later, and can take a bunch of berserker classes. But they don’t all go the berserker route, so it can’t be the base class. All of the other classes from Barbarian are just as brutal and unrestrained in combat, but they don’t rely solely on their Rage. That’s what makes Berserkers. They don’t really have any control at all once a fight starts. The rage hits, and they red out. After that, all skill uses are driven by instinct, hate, and rage, no control at all. And just like in your Earth legends, yes, they will sometimes turn on their compatriots. The nice thing though, is that one of the things all Berserkers are required to have is a kill switch. It’s built in with Mental Connection, so their team can shut them down if they turn on them.” Error had gesticulating wildly during his explanation, entrancing Dix with his ability to wave a mostly full mug of ale around without spilling a single drop.

A loud belch rang out from the priest, before he butted back into the conversation. “Thanks, Professor, but we’re still trying to find where the Naked Fighting originates from. It’s either Iron Skin, or Barbarian Constitution. Still can’t figure why they hell anyone would want to fight naked.”

“They aren’t naked, they have a loincloth,” Error was quick to point out.

Dix immediately asked, “That’s the medieval G-string right? Can’t wait to see some lady Barbarians rocking that getup.”

The dwarf jumping up to wave his arms in Dix’s face was unexpected, but the booze had been helping the unexpected along for a while now. “No no no no. You do NOT want to mess with female Barbarians, they fuck like they fight. It’s terrifying.” His eyes were wide and frightened, like a man staring back at a horrifying memory. “The last time I slept with a Barbarian I barely survived, and that was only because my mana out lasted her stamina by about five minutes. As it was, I couldn’t walk. If the Knight hadn’t been there for backup, I definitely would have died.” This shocking statement was met with several seconds of stunned silence and stares before it was broken by raucous laughter. All three men were pounding their fists on the table and wiping tears from their eyes.

Amidst the laughter you could hear periodic comments that just set them off again.

“Oh, please tell me she was an Orc. The sight of a huge girl using you like a dildo - hahahaha!”

“The knight was an orc. Her fists filled the hole well.”

“What was the Barbie?”

“Barbie? HAHAHAHA! Oh, oh my god, soooo not a Barbie. She was a Draconian!”

This final comment seemed to break all three of them completely, even though Error had no idea what a Barbie was. It wasn’t the comparison to a doll that was funny, anyways. It was the image of a huge Orc woman, an even bigger Dragon-like humanoid, and Thunk the dwarf. No wonder the lucky bastard barely survived, thought Dix.

Eventually they all settled down, and got back to business. Barbarian was dismissed as a possible class, Dix fearing the loss of control would lead to his death. The benefits from the possible evolutions of Rage didn’t outweigh the problems. Dix asked a question that had been bothering him, while the other two tried to think of another class they could dig into. “How many tank passives can we feed Devouring Stride?”

Error looked up from the book he was flipping through. It was one of his many notebooks on different opponents he had faced over the years. Well, he had faced them, but they were normally looking the wrong direction to realize what was about to happen. “Tank passives? I only know of one.”

“Only one? How is that possible? There should be a whole bunch. With the way the description reads, it should snatch up anything pertaining to any kind of motion the body can do that is a skill. Tanks, even the big armored ones, should have a number of passives that would fit in that description.”

“What are you talking about? The description just says movement skills, nothing else.”

With the booze keeping emotions high, it was no surprise when they both got angry. When they turned to glare at each other for lying about the skills, Dix remembered something and pulled back. “Wait. Some of my skill descriptions have changed since I got to Mantra. Normally as I learned more about them. Check your description again.”

Error was still irritated. He’d had the skill for years and this pup presumed to teach him about it. He wanted his help to find new skills, but this was too much. Checking his skill description, and finding it unchanged, he fired it off to Dix, saying, “See, movement skills only. Nothing else.”

Dix compared Error’s description to the one on his own skill, skipping the flavour text and warnings, zeroing in on the variations, now totally unsurprised at the differences in the meat of the skill. The elf was a little odd, and about as bad at dealing with the presence of people as Dix, but he was still a decent sort. He wouldn’t be this upset if he had been lying.

Devouring Stride is a movement skill, and will consume any similar skill.

All sub skills work in conjunction for movement.

Error’s skill description only mentioned similar skills, not nearly as comprehensive as his own. The second part just said movement, further leaning into the hint that it was all about locomotion rather than anything else. By contrast, Dix’s version specified all types of movement, and the main portion stated the skill would consume any skill that was even related to movement. Smirking a little at getting one over on the elf, he sent his own skill description off to be compared, although he added Thunk to the link, also dumping in Error’s skill description for him.

Devouring Stride is a movement skill, and will consume any skill related to the movement of the body to grow in strength.

All sub skills work in conjunction for all types of movement.

It took Error only seconds to spot the differences. While he was contemplating the reason behind it, the description of his own skill changed to match that of Dix. Shock coursed across his features as he dropped back into his chair. His voice came out soft and surprised as he muttered, “It changed. He was right. By the Gods, it changed.” His mind spun in frantic circles as he tried to understand how vastly different his skill would be now. Dix’s previous statement about tanks having a bunch of skills they should be able to learn suddenly made sense. Leaping to his feet he snatched Dix up into the air before the man could react, his level enhanced speed and strength making the feat simple. He nearly screamed into the man’s face, “Do you understand what this means?” He immediately dropped him back into his chair, then, laughing uproariously towards the ceiling, he proceeded to prance around the room like an overexcited two year old hopped up on pixie stix.

Thunk was still trying to understand the differences between the two skills when Dix turned to him, asking, “I’m assuming he’s happy about this?”

Thunk snorted, and laughed. Suddenly his eyes widened, and his whole body froze as he spotted the differences. His words sputtered out of his mouth, not quite able to make a coherent sentence. “How what this all any but move.” He stopped and closed his eyes to focus, and tried to calm himself. He was a priest of Balance, not a giddy school girl who’d just had her first kiss, he told himself. Taking a deep breath he turned to Dix and said, “MOVEMENT!” Realizing what he had done, he groaned and sank back into his chair with a hand over his eyes to the music of a singing man recently driven mad by the freedom from his death sentence, and the laughter of the man who freed him.

After a minute or two, Dix gave up on them helping him again anytime soon, and instead dug back into the books that Thunk had brought. With both the tank and physical damage books available, he decided to start with tanks, as it was the shorter list. There were a number of different options, but the majority were some variation on the idea behind a Knight, just done a little differently. Only if the main focus of the class was different enough did it get its own name. The section on Knights reflected this, as there were a great number of different ways to enhance the class through the inclusion of different elements, skills, or magical abilities. All of these changes would eventually lead to their own evolutionary differences, but in the beginning they were all Knights. The book listed a number of different evolved classes and excellent starting points for people looking to grow into them.

The dividing line was pretty simple. If the basic idea of all of your skills on how to tank damage was based around heavy armor and the probability of a shield, then it was a Knight. It didn’t matter how you acquired the armor or shield if the end result was the same. Conjured armor and shield, or made by a blacksmith, the idea was still to let them take the damage instead of the person using them. Barbarians got around this by being different enough that they couldn’t possibly be a Knight. They didn’t have heavy armor and a shield, they just had a ton of health, and were pretty tough. Paladins, an evolved class from Knights, still had the armor and shield as the staples of their existence, they just added some priestly skills on top for flavor. The closest one Dix could find to being a Knight, but actually having a different class name was the Cursed One.

He was still intrigued by the class, but had no intention of handicapping himself to get any of its skills. That didn’t mean he couldn’t study it to better understand why it was so different from all of the variants of Knights. At first glance it seemed to be mostly the same idea as a Paladin, but curses instead of holy magic, sort of a Cursed Knight. It was the skill variety that seemed to be the difference though. Flipping back and forth between the two classes, Dix finally figured it out. Cursed Ones did have a couple of skills for armor and shields, but it was a very small number, less than twenty percent. By contrast, fully a third of the Paladin's skills, at a minimum, were armor and shield based, meaning it was a Knight first and only a Paladin after it evolved.

Looking closer at the Cursed One, he was actually disappointed that he couldn’t grab any of the skills. In a way, they reminded him of Summoners. In that, if someone read between the lines, and figured out how to modify a couple of the skills with tricks from Siphoners, their potential for unfathomable power was staggering. The trick was that a couple of the curses resulted in permanent changes to both their target and the Cursed One. If the reason behind the permanence could be understood, then combined with a Siphoners ability to steal stats, resistances, and attributes, something some of the other curses could already do, their potential for growth was unmatched. Shaking his head at how many options he found for unlimited power just by skimming through a couple books, Dix moved on.

Knights had a bunch of passives that they needed to really help with their armor that he was quite interested in. If he could gather a bunch of them for Devouring Stride it would really help him in combat. None of them were game breakers on their own, and would only supply small benefits, particularly as he had no intention of using heavy armor ever, but with several of them combined together along with the bonus from the Stride it would make a hefty difference. They also had a defensive skill that went against all of his carefully thought up reasoning on why he shouldn’t get anything with long cooldowns, high resource costs, or that made him a target. A skill he still wanted. It wasn’t an attacking skill, it was defensive. More of an emergency button than anything else, and if he was ever going to take a skill that went against what he wanted, it would be one that was designed to save his life. The rest of the skills he would gather would be great for fighting things around his level, or a little higher, but everyone needs something that can keep them alive long enough to run like a bitch when something goes horribly wrong.

The rest of the tank collection didn’t really have anything that particularly struck him as necessary. Sure, there were more passives he would be trying to snatch up, but no actives that seemed all that desirable. He would have to discuss it with Error, or find a few actual tanks to talk tanking with and see if they had any suggestions for him. On to physical damage classes.

With two enhanced skills and his movement skill, for a total of three skills, that would leave him with five more skills from the physical damage archetype. As the most open to skills of the different archetypes, Dix was really hoping to make major adjustments here. He was mildly surprised how much space he had in his build for skills from this group considering most of his damage had so far come from the skills he already had here. Then again, he didn't have a lot of spells that he could use to boost his magical damage until later in the day before, support didn’t exactly do damage even though Empower was a fantastic boost, and even if the one skill he was counting as a tank skill actually was, it was still only one skill.

The reality of the situation was quite different. Almost all of the physical damage archetype classes had a very similar problem. They were almost always dependent on a specific weapon type. Swordsmen, Spearmen, Bashers, Brawlers, the list went on and on. Dix didn’t want to be shoehorned into any specific path, even if it was a specific weapon. He wanted freeform, and most of these were the exact opposite. He was amused to see Rogue and Ranger as available options, but both Thunk and Error had assured him that while both classes had things he would probably like to have, Error would teach him everything he actually needed, and the rest was overwritten by his Enhanced Throw and Shot.

Tamer looked and sounded like a lot of fun, but with his Necromancy he didn’t exactly need another pet. It did have quite a few differences though. For one, it only allowed a single combat pet at low levels, something that didn’t change at all until it evolved, and even then only with one class line. However, that one pet was capable of learning, growing, leveling, and developing skills, things his Risen couldn’t do. Although the Risen had the bonus of being able to be changed into a different type to adapt to a given situation. There was also the food comparison between the living pet that could get buffs, and the dead ones that didn’t even need food. He debated it in his head long enough to look through the rest of the section on Tamers before abandoning the idea. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the class, it had a lot of phenomenal skills that he could really see himself using, but he already planned on another pet in addition to his Risen. Adding yet another would bring him to a total of seven if Raise Dead didn’t add more as it leveled, which seemed utterly ridiculous if he couldn’t use them all to boost himself to absurd power levels.

While most of the sections on the classes of the physical damage archetype turned out to be surprisingly disappointing, there was at least one he found that he liked the skills from. One skill in particular looked to synergize quite well with what he was trying to do with his build, and the second would just be an all around excellent addition, even without its bonus synergy with the first. The requirements for getting the class would be more than a little disturbing to most people from Earth, but Dix wouldn’t be too terribly bothered by it, although he thought he had a work around that would be much more fun.

Having finished the last book, Dix was only a little disappointed. He had figured out a general plan of where he wanted things to go, although he was missing a few pieces here and there. Specifically two skills from tank classes, and three from physical damage classes. It just meant he would need to get a little advice from a currently ecstatic elf.