Chapter 358

Raiding the Star of Hegon (II)

While Cain and Senna were inspecting the potential prospects for the raid group, Emma and others were currently sighing at the sight. After Rick had taken them to rummage through items, he then took them to the ‘brain’ of his entire empire: IT Department. It was a bit of a misleading name, however, since the group was mostly composed of mathematicians and number-crunchers.

The point of the group was to break down the items, titles, bosses, dungeons--everything inside the Towers into statistical numbers. They were min-maxers, essentially, and were in charge of finding those tiny little gaps that pushes a build forward, or makes an impossible boss... possible.

Ever since getting the boss’ description from Emma, Rick had employed the entire room of people--80 or so in total--with trying to break down U’nul mathematically.

“Man, you really have a lot of money,” Emma commented while the rest nodded.

“A lot may be underselling it,” Rick chuckled lightly. “Anyway, come. Luther,” he called out toward the man leaning over a wide desk. The man seemed to be in his forties, was tall and had broad shoulders and seemed more like a tank than a bookworm. “You never met the main team, right?”

“Ah, no, no,” the man fixed his glasses and smiled somewhat nervously. “It’s--it’s an absolute honor!”

“Luther here is one of the main gears of the engine,” Rick explained while the man shook hands with everyone in the group. “He’s been mostly breaking down the first phase of the fight.”

“Right, yes. Would, would you like the presentation, Sir?” he asked Rick who signaled toward someone else to start setting chairs in front of a large projector.

“Yeah,” Rick nodded. “No need to rush it. We’ve got all the time in the world.”

“Alright,” the man nodded while walking over and connecting a laptop to the projector, ordering some younger people to start handing out large folders out to the group.

“Khm,” clearing his throat, the man loaded up the projector with the 3D rendering of the arena. “The boss’ first phase, in my opinion, is mostly a healing check. However, this is predicated on the fact that the raid is extremely mobile on the individual basis.

“With how the Violent Eruptions spell works, and how far apart individual Aluni are, for the cleanest possible Phase 1, I recommend dropping turret-style classes. Additionally, because of the necessity of Pylons in the remainder of the fight, the best option is to destroy 3 of them--preferably by the mobile and hard-hitting classes. It would be best if there’s a way to manually ‘cheat’ the boss into marking specific people, but as we aren’t certain that there is, we can only stack the raid properly.

“While the mobile casters, preferably, are dealing with that, the rest of the raid will all be stacked on a single Pylon, as closely as humanly possible. The damage to the entire raid will be constant, which is why I recommend bringing at least two raid-wide Blessers. With the stacking buffs they provide, the damage can be lowered as much as 18%, which can, in the long run, save individual Healers upwards of 68,000 Mana and over 30 casts. These numbers, though, reflect the median--meaning that they will likely be lower in the real-time situation.

“An important factor will be the Tanks in the fight. I know it will sound strange, but we recommend bringing three Tanks to the fight--not just for the first Phase, but overall. Though, in a perfect vacuum, the fight can be done with just two Tanks, it leaves little room for error, especially in the later parts of the fight. Due to the nature of the fight, the optimal grouping should only have one dedicated spot healer. Because of this, they will be there only for absolute emergencies--for the most of the fight, Tanks would need to survive off of the AoE heals that reach them as well as their own, personal healing.

“While we ran many simulations that included 2 spot healers, we’ve come to the conclusion that it’s both safer and, numbers-wise, better that the spot healer’s place is taken by the third Tank. The third Tank will not only deal more damage, but you may also elect to bring some of the more unorthodox, supportive Tank builds like Aura Paladins. Most raid groups don’t like them because they can’t Main Tank for too long, and even off-tanking is sub-optimal. They play more like quasi-Tanks hybrids which just don’t do nearly enough in the free runs. However, in these types of scenarios, their Auras can be really beneficial.

“Alongside the two Blessers, if you choose to bring an Aura Paladin, you will have persistent, if not visibly noticeable increase in survivability. The main crux of the first Phase are the random markers and the Pylons’ radiating damage. For the dealing better with the AoE, we have uncovered another hybrid build from a Class found exclusively in the Australia--Cryomancing Barbarian. Well, that’s how people call it--the official title for the Awakener is ‘Chilled Battle Mage’. As the name suggests, it’s mostly ice-oriented class, but what makes it stand out are its notoriously uneven stats. They, as well as everyone else in the raid group, take in the range of 30% less Fire Damage, but take double damage of Lightning type.

“The issue is that they are a completely immobile, low-damage, low-utility Class. Outside of the raid-wide damage reduction, they’d best be used actually for soaking raid-killing skills, since they have 5 spells in total that either prevent or temporary stop them from dying. Similarly to the Aura Paladins, most raid groups ignore them because of how specialized their Utility is. However, we recommend experimenting for at least a few runs.

“Otherwise, the best way to deal with the boss’ Fire Damage are Resistance Scrolls, but even so many years later, we only have 32 Fire Resistance Scrolls in the treasury, of which only 8 are raid-wide. However, even if you elect to use the Scrolls, our recommendation is to not use them during the First Phase. While everyone has cooldowns, we suspect that, with some practice, the First Phase won’t be the obstacle.

“Also...” the man suddenly began looking uncomfortable and awkward, as though what he was about to say was utterly insane.

“Go on,” Rick nudged, seeming to know what the man was about to say.

“We... we recommend... khm, we recommend dropping Mrs. Senna from the raid group,” Emma and everyone immediately arched their brows.

“Elaborate,” Emma interjected before others could say anything. “She’s our highest damage dealer.”

“Y-yes, it’s--it’s nothing against Mrs. Senna, of course! She’s absolutely brilliant and unmatched! It’s--it’s the boss,” Luther stumbled over and pushed onto the next image which had the detailed list of numbers of who dealt the most damage. As Emma said, Senna sat on the top, followed by Jamal and Daniel. “Most of Mrs. Senna’s damage, unfortunately, is what we call ‘false-flag damage’.”

“What’s that?” Jamal asked.

“It’s damage that technically registers in the Tower’s system,” Luther explained. “But doesn’t actually go through--well, most of it, anyway. Mrs. Senna’s main form attack are her Weapons--but, we have noticed that very few weapons ever make contact with the boss. After breaking down the numbers, we noticed the discrepancy with the boss’ HP--which almost perfectly matched not only Mrs. Senna ‘false-flag damage’, but several others. Most of the fire damage, too, is considered ‘false-flag’. We have estimated that the boss has somewhere in the range of 93% pure Fire Resistance that cannot be lowered further by Fire Penetration.

“As such, this... this is the actual DPS chart,” Luther pushed for the next slide which showed a completely different picture. Of all people... Ethan actually sat on top, followed by Daniel, Sigmund, one of the Mages that Rick had procured--Ayla-- and another outsider, Finn, before coming to Jamal. “The--the reason why we recommend dropping only Mrs. Senna, is that Mr. Jamal can switch from dealing physical damage to Starlight, which made up some 98% of his total damage, actually. Similarly, the reason Mr. Ethan dealt more damage than Mr. Daniel despite being weaker in terms of levels, stats, and gear, is that most of Mr. Ethan’s damage is pure shadow, while Mr. Daniel mixed in more physical damage.

“However, while they can alternate their strikes, Mrs. Senna has no such option--as you can see, she dealt even less actual damage than Mr. Kramer. In terms of percentiles, over 99% of her damage is physical. It’s not only that, however--the boss does take physical damage, but the key point is that the weapons need to make direct, heavy contact with the boss--that is, however, difficult, since, from the recordings and several hundreds of recreations, we have noticed that Mrs. Senna’s weapons either got blunted or outright melted before ever hitting the boss in most cases.

“If you still wish to bring her, there is a possibility,” Luther quickly added, as though afraid they still thought he thought Senna was too weak. “But it is in the purely utility form. Because Mrs. Senna can control weapons of varying sizes, it’s possible to use her as a mobile carrier--meaning that she can be used to circumvent the need for mobile classes. However, numbers... numbers don’t like dropping either a Healer or Damage Dealer purely for utility. But--then again, numbers are just numbers. They can’t truly account for how much her utility saves in terms of healing or helps with DPS uptime. Only if we had several recorded runs would we be able to extrapolate some rough numbers.”

“...” the room fell quiet, eerily so, and Luther didn’t dare break it. He’d ran numbers on his own several dozen times simply because he wanted them to be wrong. He, as well as everyone in this room, knew that Senna was, by many, considered by far the strongest member of the raid party and, in extension, the strongest person in the world. Suggesting dropping someone like that from the raid group... was baseline insane. However, after sharing his findings with Rick, the man encouraged him to keep at it--and thus, today arrived.

“We’ll do 2 runs with Senna in purely utility role,” Emma suddenly broke the silence. “If we can’t seem to meet the DPS or HPS quota, and the clear reason is the lack of raw output, we’ll switch her and the immobile classes out. You said that her weapons melted before touching the boss, no?”

“Y-yes,” Luther quickly nodded.

“Would it be possible to circumvent it in any fashion?”

“That--I... I don’t know,” Luther shook his head. “Our knowledge of Mrs. Senna’s class isn’t extensive. Whether she has means and ways of overcoming it... you will have to ask her.”

“Well, even if she doesn’t, Cain does,” Daniel yawned. “He said he won’t fight, but that doesn’t mean he’ll completely ignore us, no?”

“Dunno,” Emma shrugged. “I’ll ask. Don’t expect too much, though. He’s gotten back into his lazy form. I saw him store an entire fridge into his inventory the other day since he couldn’t be bothered to stand up once in a while.”

“Yauza...”

“Yep. Anyway, thank you, Luther,” Emma smiled gently at the man. “We’ll bring you some more numbers to crunch in a couple of weeks. And Ricky, make sure to pay the man.”

“Please,” Rick rolled his eyes. “There’s a reason everyone in the world wants to work for me. I pay in castles and not gold.”

“... spoken like a true rich fuck,” Jamal said. “We need to teach him some humility. How about we stop feeding him items to sell for a year or two?”

“P-please don’t do that! Almost 40% of our annual revenue are item sales!”

“Just 40%? Goddamn, what kind of a fucking empire do you run that even the ultra-rare items we feed you can’t account for 50% of the revenue! Rather, just how much are you even fucking earning?”

“Uh... a... a few trillion, maybe?”

“... fuck you. I want my pay to be doubled!”

“Shut it. You’re living in a castle for free.”

“Don’t fuckin’ care! I wanna brag about being a millionaire, too!”

“You aren’t one? Fuck, just how much do you spend?!”

“You guys are?! Fuck you!! Why am I always the one buying, then?!”

“Because you invite us out by going ‘let’s go drink guys, I’m buying!’?”

“Fuck you! I ain’t buyin’ no more!”

Luther’s awkwardness fell back for a moment as he looked strangely at the group in front of them. Some of the most terrifying men and women in the world, he realized, were still, well, men and women. Just like the rest of the world, he’d bought into the mythology. Not without a reason, however--after all, all he needed to do was recall back the recordings of their many Guardian Battles. They were myths, as far as the rest of the world was considered. Even the next-best Guilds seemed light years apart, let alone most of the world’s population. And yet, there they were, fighting over a couple of million dollars while the cost of their equipment was likely in the high tens of billions...