Gnomish cultist

You are a gnomish cultist; a munchkin mage whose sole existence was to function as a tutorial on how certain racial and advanced class builds just didn't mix. The result was an awkward amalgam of stats and lore that made very little sense. Unlike your traditional NPC brethren who became engineers and entrepreneurs, your future lay in spellcasting - and to add insult to injury, extremely ineffective spellcasting, at that. You grimace as you conjure up the list of stats you were ungraciously given:

Gnomish hexer
Level: 3
HP: 16
MP: 10
Melee attack: 3
Ranged attack: 3
Defence: 2
Magic Defence: 4
Agility: 2
Weakness: None
Special Abilities:
Smite - Releases a small blast of hateful energy at the opponent. 6 MP.
Mindread - Reads target mind, increasing own evasiveness from target by 10%. 7 MP.
Exhaust - Slows target by 20%. 10 MP.
Convince - Convinces target to lower guard, lowers target's Defence by 20%. 12 MP.

Any way you looked at it, it was a massive joke. Gnomes had never been known for magical affinity, and subsequently you had the magical abilities to match. Sure, you had a longer list of spells that most mooks your level could barely dream of, but what was the point when you could only cast them once before running out of juice? Adding insult to injury, one of them even cost more MP than you could actually afford. Whose bright idea was that?! you recall angrily muttering to yourself on more than one occasion. And worse still, because you were classified as a magic-oriented character, your otherwise-decent gnomish strength took a hit as well, having traded in your sturdy hammer for a weak staff.

As far as you knew, save for your poorly designed origins, you were as lackluster and vanilla as a generic enemy could get. Even the corrupted gnomes in the lost mining communities underground had some bite to match their bark as mid-game encounters. Among other cultists, you would never get anywhere, even while competing against the lesser acolytes, serving a dark, unspeakable deity whose name you could never pronounce properly. So you rotted away for as long as you can remember, in the novice town of Gritsheim - an abandoned enemy-aligned hamlet for heroes opting to start in the slightly less friendly badlands environment. You could never put up enough of an offense, and when players realized that your debuffing gimmicks weren't that amazing either, they quickly put an end to you. Even the elvish cutpurses didn't take you seriously, although they frequently died just as fast.

You peer out of the ruined hovel that you used as a sort of "home". The in-game sun had begun setting, meaning it was time for new heroes to investigate Gritsheim for the tutorial quests they would be given. You didn't actually feature on any of the required quests for item drops or mook kill counts, but inevitably someone would barge in before you had time to blink and ready your spells. Sure enough, you see a holographic disc shimmer into view, indicating the appearance of another hero, although it's too far away for you to recognize what sort of hero it is, much less whether you can get the jump on them...