As mentioned before, Sylvester was a good team lead. He had stroked egos, dangled the carrot, showed extra care for better player. All of it was routine though. He could do that in his sleep. He had been leading cannon fodders into dungeons for years. He had the psychology part down to dot. Now to reel in these fishes.
"I have good news. In the next fork, the chance of elite rabbits appearing is quite high. You should be knowing that we can loot items from the corpse of the monsters of elite level or higher, right? It means we have very high chance of getting better weapons or even a skill book."
Yep. Majority of the talk outside the dungeon entrance was about looting the monster corpse. Till now, monsters just evaporated when they died and drops entered inventory directly. But higher tier monsters corpse would remain behind for some time. No one had calculated in this game yet. If they had done, they had not bragged it in any posts or vids. Tried and tested belief in all the games till now was that loots taken from the monster corpse were better. In few games, they took players who had high luck attribute just too loot the monster corpse. In few games, the skill gather was used to collect items from the monster corpse. So higher the level of gather skill, better was the yield. As there were only few instances of elite monsters dying, no one had any theories on which one is right in this game. As this game liked to kick the players when they were down, the probability was some weird rule would be in place to calculate the monster loots.
As Sylvester painted wonderful world, the players in the team looked franatic, even though they knew the chances were few. Other than Artha, these players had already entered the dungeons before with other teams and had died before reaching this level. So even if they died now, they didn't have any regrets. But...the greed has no limit. If possible they wanted to kill the elite and get the loot. The coins, the equipments, if they were lucky, a skill book....Sela silently switched her record function. She already had few dozen maps of this dungeon as each team would take different fork at each section. She had plans. Or else she wouldn't waste her time and her XP in these dungeons. As a good tank, she got paid extra from the team lead on the sky later on. If there were big mishaps, then the compensation money was even more. Still...if she didn't have plans, she really didn't want to die more frequently.
Sylvester continued, "However, path from here is not completely known, so we have no idea how many monsters will be there. So we have to be always alert and be ready. Please follow my orders. It gives us more chances to survive. If you don't follow my orders believe me the outcome would be detrimental." He kept the stick portion of 'carrot and stick approach' vague, allowing the imagination to fester. All clamoured to declare their wholeheartedness, including Sela and Artha. Empty words, anyone can use them.
"Artha, you are already level 5. So you have AoE(area of effect) spell, right? Prime it and use it when I say. Also have you MP potions on ready, you may have to spam your primary spell often. Don't worry, Little Moon here will be incharge of your health." Little moon was Moonlight on the lake, the other healer. Artha just nodded, like an idiot and gaming addict. It was after all his moment to shine. And if he chose the place correctly, he could be safe from these monstrous rabbits.
" We will take first right fork. So as soon as we enter the fork, I want you to use your AoE spell. This will take care of any bunnies in the beginning, so that our tanks can move forward without worry." This was the first step in Sylvester's plan. It was wrong in so many ways that even a noob like Artha caught them. Can't be helped though. He hadn't used AoE spells before in the dungeon for them to see the effect, so using up some mana before engaging against the monsters was better. The only loser would be Artha who would be using more MP potions, but, who cares? Did you see other players crying when their weapons durability decreased drastically that they had to use backup weapons? Was a potion costly that repair charges? For goodness sake, majority of players chose to become apprentice at blacksmith just to save few coins in repair. That's how costly the repair charges were. Compared to that few potions were not much. On the flip side, the restriction trade of potions was still in effect, so each player had very little potions. Win some, lose some. No one cared if Artha had enough potions.
Artha nodded and got ready. He had used to AoE spell today, when the members of the guilds had gone on rampage, to take in the XP, or else nothing would have been left for him. So he was not a novice, using it for the first time. But the profiency was definitely low.
However as he had no leaning towards fire, water or air, his AoE spell was Sunbeam. It covered lots of areas but damage was a bit less. The Nitpicker in him liked this spell because he could technically decide the areas to hit if he had enough proficiency.
After Sela remained him, he had kept his battle log on and kept floating near upper right end of his transperent status window. Bunnies thankfully never jumped from that height. Right now. So that corner was best place to keep the log on. This was one of the tricks he had learnt from others. They used it to learn many things. But Artha was not interested in those till now, yet followed the procedure. And this would help him here. Any damage done to monsters by his spell, there would be a log and he could tell how many monsters were present out there. Apparently he now found one of the uses of keeping the battle log always open.
Artha used Sunbeam at the place Sylvester showed. Then the tanks moved in. Under their care the swordsman and the thief ventured.
Just as guessed, Artha didn't catch any monsters with AoE spell. Negative is good though. All could enter.