Hope people read this part – especially for this page, though it is very long. So! Everyone who reads this should know already, this is page 15 of a chapter that is normally 26 pages. This is that moment where you are reading a book called David The Main Character, and David dies – and you realize you are only half way through the book. David’s probably not dead, or – probably not staying dead. We finally get to answer a bunch of questions, and we get to advance characters significantly- you’ll see what I mean soon, BUT! Something I do need to mention here and now is, thanks to the comments and different views I have modified a few things, and I want people to know a bit about it and why. I’ve mentioned this several times, but writing a story that everyone agrees with elements, is basically impossible. People will read things differently, even people who read it the exact say way, can have different conclusions. So, since I am mostly writing this by myself, occasionally getting input from friends and readers, I can suddenly learn a way people see things conflicts with mine. Often- it’s not really all that important, but I find it fun and interesting. So let me give my original concept, and how It’s changing- and how – it really doesn’t matter, at least not to the story as a whole.

So! This guy has been described as a Tank. This means different things in different games. This VR game is an RPG, and it’s an MMORPG, but its not specifically copying known MMOs. It’s using my thoughts on the direction I would want for the future in VR gaming. To date, my best experiences in games is D&D, both games and tabletop. I’ve played MMOs, I’ve played action adventurer games, turn based games, platformers, side scrollers, fighting games- none of them seem to come close to (my baby) D&D. I’m aware of the extreme tank and the MMO standard Tank where they give up almost everything for Defense. They can’t or barely can do damage, and are just a damage sponge for the healer to heal so no one else has to take damage. A tank to me, was described early on in the comic. Kaylin said “A giant dropped a house on him, and he walked out without a scratch an broke the giants leg in a single strike.” To me, a tank is very hard to hurt, you need to keep pressure on them, discover a weakness and exploit it. They can also deal out some massive damage. Not a lot of ways, just some really heavy hitting skills, possibly with longer cool downs, and their basic attacks would be strong, but not as hard hitting as a DPS focused attack. I see the gameplay working differently for types of tank builds. You could make an evasive tank, focusing on light armor, using magical defensive and agility increasing things to use with dodge, evasion, and “rolling with the punches” type skills where your agility is used as a Damage Reduction- and its all about timing for you. Perfectly moving- while keeping track of everything, this splits your stats a bit because, if you don’t see an attack coming, your defense here doesn’t matter. So Evasive tanks cant just do Dex build and Strength for boosting damage, they need things that improve their perception and senses and still needs constitution because you cant always just BE PERFECT, so you need to be able to take some hits. High AC tanks using heavy armors have lots of crazy options that are neat, weird, and usually have weaknesses, bigger weaknesses for bigger bonuses too. So their build allows them to be less focused on active defending and can focus on watching out for their weaknesses being targets to counter them, but their shielding, and parry skills would be very strong and open up opportunities in enemies own defenses.

That- was a long way of saying, he’s an armor tank, but he’s still got a cannon! The original plan was that his build along with some parts of his strategy, are countering both accidentally, and intentionally, Kaylin’s build. Kaylin’s combat tactics against most things are basically a Bleed build. She deals a small amount of damage (thought it doesn’t look that way since she’s mostly fighting things way weaker than herself) and cause debuffs, like bleed and poison. These do damage over time – DOT, and stack up to deadly levels rapidly. She uses that to weaken, and then uses assassination techniques to finish enemies off (mostly due to instant kill abilities not working over a set amount of HP or a percentage of HP depending on the skill). She’s not built to only work in one build though, she’s not a hyper focused build, so she can change up strategies with equipment swaps and using different skills. Not being able to deal those status effects though is a major issue. She would have to change things up. More on that later- in the comic so no typing here about that now, So what is changing? Well most of it still stands. I agree though with some that it’s probably not enough to call it there, and I had some other ideas when writing this. The implied training from a benefactor, being from an infamous Playerkiller group, and having access to things that shouldn’t exist, open up one of the old concepts I wanted to use but didn’t have a great place for- his armor is a surprise to Kaylin, because no one uses it anymore- or when she was playing. That particular armor, was nerfed. People found a way to take advantage of it’s strengths, without worrying about it’s negatives. He has a set of armor from before it was nerfed somehow. This opens up some new avenues, but it doesn’t change the overall outcome. If you read all this, I hope it was insightful and entertaining! See ya again soon!

PS! “Potion- won’t-” is referring to her trying to use her arm band to pull out a potion to heal with, but it won’t work- because her HP has already dropped to 0 without her even being able to register it.