At this time, everyone was in their new VR cabins getting used to everything. The maintenance was almost over and everyone was waiting.
When the time reached 6pm, the log in prompt became available. Scarlett immediately got on and turned on her live stream. Scarlett, being a beginner at streaming, was clearly not a good one as she never talked to the chat or really paid any attention to it. This didn't stop people watching her as everything she did was being emulated by millions of people around the world. She is essentially a living textbook guide for how a thief should play.
When Scarlett got online, she saw that everyone was already on and moving about.
"Will, catch!" Will turned around only to see a long staff drilled into his forehead. He and the staff flew for a while before tumbling off the trees and into the dirt. When he got up, he was smiling like an idiot because he saw the staff and its rank.
"You really did get a ledgendary staff..." Everyone was jealous.
"So what? it's not like he can use it yet." Will's heart shattered. He quickly checked out the stat requirements and his jaw dropped to the floor.
"How... how could you do this to me!" He began shedding tears. Everyone could hear the despair in his voice and honestly, while they wouldn't cry over it, they would certainly feel as if they had been led on.
Scarlett laughed and said, "Wouldn't you eventually be able to use it in the future?" Will pouted and put the staff away.
"Alright, it did drop some other stuff though." A skill book suddenly appeared in her hand. She threw it at Feng Yue who caught and checked it.
"This... A Paragon Skill?" While Feng Yue was raving for the new skill she created, Scarlett and Tyrant were checking the patch notes.
[Patch 1.02 - This is Dogma speaking to you, our players. We have heard everything you like and don't like about our game loud and clear so we are making a few tweaks and adjustments to somethings.]
[The first big point on the list was Skills. Some skills were very strong. Some skills won't have to most hitting power but are meant for support. We found that most people have relied on their skills in pvp while forgetting that normal attacks can still be used, creating a boring show where people are waiting for cooldowns. To remedy this, our teams have decided that your normal attacks will be buffed accordingly.]
[The assassin/thief classes are a skill heavy class. They rely on their skills and their momentum to ensure a quick kill. But what do most assassin/thief classes do when they run out of skills? They go into stealth. Then they play the waiting game. To make it so that assassin/thief classes have more options, we decided to make it so that normal attacks that connect add a buff to attack speed and reduce skill cooldown by 1 second on each hit. Not only that, the base normal attack damage has been doubled. We hope to hear your feed back on these changes as our intentions are to make these classes a more consistent damaging class in pve while giving an incentive to create some excitement in pvp.]
[Swordsmen, Knights, Beserkers and Archers will all have a 5% buff to their attack speeds and archers will gain a 40% damage buff to their base normal attack damage as it was just too low when players ran dungeons.]
[Caster classes won't see many significant damage buffs but we have fixed a bug where using Fire magic on a fire elemental will instantly kill you.]
[Skills Continued: The overall power of many skills may feel as though they have been changed. That is because we took a different approach towards the actual power of these skills. Instead of outright nerfing them, we now introduced a leveling system for all skills (item skills or regular skills) where you level them up through your use of the skill or you can infuse your exp into the skill and level it up that way. (Warning: The Higher the skills level is, the more your skill needs from you to achieve a higher skill completion.) As for how high the level of your skills can go... The sky is the limit.
That was all Scarlett need to see.
"Im going to the pvp arena. I want to get used to the changes." Scarlett said and everyone else also wanted to their own thing for a bit. After saying that, everyone split off into groups except Scarlett who was the only one to go to the pvp arena.
She went to her menu and clicked on the pvp arena tab and pressed teleport. Her vision went black for a few before a vast amount of people entered her vision. Scarlett blinked for a few moments before realizing that there were a lot more people than last time. 'Seems like many people had the same idea I had...'
She began walking while browsing her minimap and found the practice arena. Inside the practice, she found that each arena was around 50m by 50m and could be set to public or private. She set hers to private and had set her bots to have infinite health and to not move.
When she finished setting it up, she pressed start and was teleported into an arena and in front of her stood one of each class. She wanted to see how much damage she could do with normal attacks and skills now against different classes of different specialties.
Before she did anything to these bots, she went to her skills and began to upgrade using her exp. When she started m, she noticed that she could upgrade her normal attacks as well. She was a bit surprised but figured that it would only increase the damage of it by a little so she started upgrading it.
The first upgrade for the normal attack was only worth 10,000 exp and the second was worth 50,000 exp. Going to the 3rd, 4th and 5th levels was 100,000 exp, 1,000,000 and 10,000,000 exp respectively.
Suddenly... Scarlett saw that she was unable to use her exp anymore and in full panic mode at this time, she checked her level and saw that she was level 23 again. Her eyes widened in shock as she immediately regretted just spending her exp like this. She felt very stupid but was glad no one saw her at the moment.
She breathed all of her frustration out before getting ready to test her normal attack.
She started off against the heaviest and tankiest class, the shield knight. They were naturally a thief's bane on the battlefield or in the arena. In combination with their heavy armor, they also have a shield that can block projectiles. All together with thir base defense stats, they are really hard to kill quickly... normally that is. The bots are set to the average player level and at the moment, the level is 28. With her being only level 23, she will have a 25% damage reduction but she feels very confident in her burst damage potential.
Bloodmoon moved up to the shield knight bot and...
*puchi*
-195
The numbers shocked her. As much shock she was in though, this was not double the damage. But then she notice her completion percentage.
Slash Completion Percentage: 56%
Her brows furrowed as she tried to figure out how it was only a 56%. As she contemplated why this was happening, many others were doing the same thing. They all felt that Dogma's promises were not delivered and there was outroar amongst the casual players of their game.
Dogma eventually made a response to their disgruntled playerbase and said in quote, "We hear all of you loud and clear. Unfortunately, nothing comes that easily. The only reason your completion percentages were so high in the beginning was because the system was holding your hand. Now that the system is letting you all walk on your own, your real percentages are on full display. We get that you have a reason to be upset but instead of using all of your energy by typing angrily on our forums, you should try to get better at performing your actions and skills in game. Looking for instant success is not realistic. Our goal is for our players to have something to grind for. In this case, we are letting you have some motivation to get better at performing with your classes. You should all be encouraged by seeing your real performance. For example, let's say you had a 75% completion rate average and after our update, it went down to 30%, wouldn't you want to work back up to a 75% to keep up with everyone around you?"
"Now, for those of you who are wondering if 30% is bad or good... This is the average completion rate recorded by our systems. A good 67% of the players have reached or surpassed this threshold which is a lot higher than any of our development staff expected. That being said, there is no reason to not get better so as the average increases, so too will the difficulty of each and every activity and enemy. This is all we can say about the subject for now. Till next time..."
After saying this on social media, there were still a bunch of people upset about this new change but the older crowd actually agreed with this change. Guild Leaders ordered their members to practice as much, if not, more than they play. This eventually led to people gradually shifting to practicing in real life as well but that is for the future.
Right now, Scarlett has been practicing for 6 hours. Sweat beaded her forehead but a happy smile was on her face as she worked her completion rate to between 70 and 74 percent. Her progress would be astonishing to even the developers of the game as most of their compleyion ratings, while higher than the average, were not even 45 percent yet.
Scarlett decided to take a well needed break and logged off.
Back in reality, she realized that her body was quite tired. She decided that she would take a shower before going to bed and sleeping.
When she woke up later that day, she felt that her mind was clearer than ever before. It was like her sleep had immediately refreshed her. Just as she got up though, her stomach protested against her. She then realized that she hadn't eaten anything so she got up and went to the building's kitchen where she saw everyone eating food already.
"Mornin' Scarlett." Everyone told her good morning and she nodded in greeting while yawning and went to the fridge and grabbed the nutrient solution she asked her father to get for the house yesterday.
"We were waiting for you because we wanted to ask what that was exactly..." Aiden said and everyone nodded.
It took a while to realized what they were talking about but when she did she said, "It is a Nutrient Solution... uh... think along the lines of gatorade but way more effective." She took a sip and then said, "Also works way faster and does a lot more too." She then chugged the rest down before saying, "Meet me in the Gym in 15 minutes."While she was heading there herself, everyone's faces turned pale and Will who was the least fit out of all of them felt like his life was no longer in his hands. He silently said a prayer asking for any god he could to save him if the need arose.
Everyone looked at Will before making their ways to their rooms and changing to some workout clothes.
Right before they all hot on the game last night, Scarlett told them that their work lout clothes were already in their closets but they were very surprised when all of the sizes were exact. The thought of her suddenly being their enemy instead of a friend suddenly popped up and made them shiver and thank their lucky stars that she was their friend.
14 minutes later, the Moonlight Mercenaries walked into the gym and the sound of a punching bag being hit exploded, shocking all of them. They all looked to the right and saw Scarlett's back as she pounded away at the bag while circling around it. Her footwork was fast and agile and she never let the bag hut her as she floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee.
Suddenly, there was a ringing sound. Scarlett's phone was off to the side ringing away. She suddenly stopped. The bag came back at her but her quick hands blocked it from hitting her. She grabbed her phone and the the towel beside it and turned towards her audience.
Scarlett's face was red from exertion but she didn't look tired at all. In fact, it was only a warm up. She had on some long-sleeved active wear, unlike them as there's was short sleeved, and a pair of shorts over some leggings.
Her red hair landed on her face and she used her hand to move it out of the way. Her face was very pretty, yes... but her aura was very cold. Everyone was quick to notice this.
Scarlett eyed everyone of them up and down.
"Will, get on the treadmill." Scarlett spoke with the kind of attitude that wouldn't take no for an answer. Will and Everyone was shocked and they didn't really react. "What? Do you want me to throw your ass over there? Get a move on!" Her cold glare dug into Will's mind and he immediately snapped out of it ran over to the treadmill.
Scarlett's eyes shifted over to Feng Yue and Feng Ming, making them shiver. "You two are decently fit. You will participate in my workouts after a warmup. You should know how to properly stretch because if you don't, I will hurt you." This sent Feng Yue and Feng Ming into depression but they didn't dare to show it on their faces.
"Athena, I see you worked on making your body look desirable but you forgot that you need a foundation. A foundation is your balance. You will work on your upper body." Athena cringed hearing that she would be doing upper body workouts.
Cecillia stood like a deer in front of a car's headlights, almost trembling in fear of what Scarlett would say. Scarlett looked her up and down and studied her body like a forensic scientist investigates corpses.
"We will start you on weight bands and work our way up." Scarlett said a bit lost as for where she should start. Cecillia is a bit skinny but her chest made her seem... a bit fuller.
She then looked at Scott, who looked like he already worked out a bit but it wasn't quite up to snuff.
"What is this for?" He asked, slightly worried he would cross her.
"I discovered something while I was on the game. You should know what your average skill completion rate is, right?" Scarlett asked a question back.
"Yeah, it was a 42%. What about it?" He asked, slightly confused.
"Well, I found a way to increase your completion rates. You will understand after you are done. By the way, you will also be with me. Do you know any fighting styles or methods? Karate? Taekwondo? Drunken Fist?" The last one was a bit of a joke and Scott laughed.
"Just some military boxing." He said with a chuckle.
"Great! You will spar me when they are done with their workouts." While Scott was wondering what they had all gotten themselves into, Scarlett shouted out. "Will, run a mile, take a break for 8 minutes and then run another one. Cecillia, start on 5kg ankle and wrist weights and hop on a treadmill after you can get used to them. Athena, 10 reps of 50 kg's on the bench press. The rest, you will follow my routine. For now, stretch."
Aiden was officially scared now. He felt as though he wouldn't make it. While he wasn't as chunky as will, he wasn't too far off. He might pass out if they go too far. While he was doing this, everyone started their workouts and stretches. When workouts began, for Scarlett's 'disciples', they all wanted to curse at this fitness junkie. None of them had ever worked out so hard in their lives. Everyone had workouts accustomed to their size and build.
Feng Yue would do a bunch of on and off high intensity workouts. For Feng Ming, it was mostly the same except she added weightlifting to it. Scott, on the other hand, had to do all of that but with an occasional spar. He was also incharge of teaching Feng Ming boxing. He wanted to cry because he could see the intensity in Scarlett's eyes as she said this. It was as if he had done something to her and now she was back and she smelled blood.
At the end of everyone's workouts, everyone almost collapsed.
"My... my legs! I cant feel my legs!" Will said as her dragged himself over to the center of the gym.
"Good, that just means the my plans are working." Will glared at Scarlett's smiling face. Everyone pretty much felt the same as Will except they were standing...unsteadily.
"Alright, wait here. I need to get your cool down drinks." Scarlett said as she walked to the mini-fridge in the corner. She opened it up and inside of the door was a large supply of nutrient fluid. This wasn't the regular nutrient fluid that was on the market. Instead, it was something her father pulled some strings for with Grace to get for her and her friends. It is used by the military to recover from workouts. There are no side effects besides feeling a bit warm but other than that, it should be fine.
She came back with 11 bottles of nutrient fluid and after taking two for herself, she gave the rest to the other Moonlight Mercenaries.
"This..." Athena seemed to have realized just exactly she was going to drink as she looked at Scarlett im with wide eyes. Scarlett arched her eyebrows and asked, "Does your family also have military background?" Athena nodded.
"My father toured the middle east for 15 years before I was born. I had snuck some of this stuff from his office to have some and regretted not taking more of it." She said before she started doing what everyone was doing and chugged it down. They all immediately felt their bodies recovering as a comfortable cooling sensation covered their bodies.
Feng Yue, Scott and Athena closed their eyes as they felt something in their minds shatter. Their eyes opened in shock as they felt as if something that was blocking them from using the full strength 9f the minds was suddenly broken down by a later. A wave of energy went into their brains as a comfortable warmth replaced this feeling soon after.
"Congratulations, you have taken your first steps into breaking down your strength limiter."
3.1 - Changes to the Game/Limit Break