Frost Armour

The mana cost of Ivy’s plants turns out to not be all that bad, especially since a lot of them can be reused. Ivy quickly learnt that spending mana early on to grow plants that can be used throughout the fight, and taking control of them only very sparingly is a really good strategy to let her regenerate and conserve mana, especially since they seem to last at least as long as the fight takes.

The mana cost of Ivy taking control of plants is high if she does it for any extended period of time, but using it only for a couple of seconds to disrupt or strike out at an enemy is easily justified and pretty cheap in the scheme of things. Our resident healer just got a hell of a lot more powerful. We’ll need to do some testing at home to see how many she can take control of at once.

For now, we focus on getting through the skeletons dungeon to see if my hunch on the Skeleton Overlord loot is correct. It doesn’t take all that long for us to get through everything, and we do a quick search for any hidden rooms in the dungeon. No such luck, and we push through to the boss room. I use observe as the boss does its spawning animation of getting up from the coffin.

I’m happy to see that my hunch was right. The loot table has indeed been switched up, from the mostly necromancy themed loot before, to now mostly ice themed loot. I’m particularly interested in what that glaciate ingot could be, it has a very similar name to the material my palace is made of, so I’m wondering if there could be some relation.

Shrugging the question off, I rush into action, my girlfriends following close behind me. We utilise a strategy that we’re well used to by now, with Mia doing her best to distract the Overlord and keep it off balance, while Skylar and I deal damage. Mia occasionally rakes her swords across the boss too, and Ivy uses her new plant based powers to add to the offence.

We make quick work of the Skeleton Overlord. This dungeon isn’t one that we particularly struggle with at this point. We’ve run through it so many times that we have our strategy pretty much perfect. Small optimisations come with time, but they hardly matter in the scheme of things, when we can already deal with the boss so effectively.

We gather up the loot and exit the dungeon, satisfied with our performance. Once we get inside, Ivy and I plop down on the couch, while Mia and Skylar have to take the time to strip out of their armour. I’m lucky in that it just takes one quick tap of a button to switch between my battle equipment and my comfy pajamas, or my birthday suit. Hopefully my battle equipment is about to get a substantial upgrade. I open my character sheet to spend my statpoints first.

Well I suppose a lower scaling increase is to be expected. My endurance was scaling better than my intellect, and to have endurance outstrip intellect scaling on a battle mage build would be super unbalanced. The statpoints allocation out of the way, I decide to look through the loot that we got from the skeletons dungeon.

Along with the undead bones and teeth, I also got the boots of frost from the common category. I got all the armour pieces from the uncommon category but only the chestplate from the rare category. That means that I’m only missing the ring and talisman to complete the set. I also didn’t get anything from the epic or legendary categories.

I start to try on the armour. I’m a little worried about how the gauntlets will interact with my system, as I have all my hand slots filled up already, with my axe and the two rings that I’m wearing. As I put on the gauntlets, a window pops up informing me that I can still wield weapons and wear rings, but I won’t get any of the bonuses that enchantments provide.

That’s a handicap but not a major one at the moment. My axe’s enchantments haven’t been anything game changing or fight winning. If I find a better weapon that has much better enchantments, that could be a huge problem down the line. But at the moment, having the full set of armour equipped is too attractive, so I choose the gauntlets over my axe in my hand slots.

The active enchantments on the armour I’m wearing are much the same as the other two armour sets that we’ve begun to collect. Resizing, comfort, light weight and more manoeuvrability. The other enchantments aren’t active yet, due to the set being incomplete. The armour still provides much more protection than my battle jacket and jeans did, so it’s a definite upgrade regardless of the rest of the enchantments. The pauldrons are apparently just for decoration and don’t actually do anything special, but the rest is very useful.

The long list of skills I have, the updated equipment list, the higher health and mana bars, the largely increased regen and the multitude of high stat values is making me really happy to look at. I hit the button to switch between my battle equipment and my pajamas. “Hey wait! The XP requirement went up by 500XP this time, not by 200!” I exclaim as I see it, frowning.

“It had to happen at some point love, levelling has been really easy lately.” Ivy chuckles. “Yeah I knoooow, that doesn’t mean I have to like it.” I grumble with joking annoyance. Ivy boops me on the nose. “Behave darling.” She orders simply. “Yes ma’am.” I giggle happily, opening the window to spend her statpoints.

With a very handy bonus to her health regeneration, her character sheet is looking pretty good too.

With the levelling and loot and armour examination done, Ivy and Mia go to the kitchen to work on lunch. Skylar checks on Dave and I refill the kittens’ food bowls. Sol and Luna watch me curiously as I do so, and they both meow at me once I’m done. It very much comes across like they’re meowing in thanks. I step away from the food bowls and they begin to eat happily.

At lunch, the conversation turns to how we’re progressing in power. “We’ve still got a ways to go, but we’re doing well.” I lay out. “Doing well? We’re smashing it! And with the armour we’re finding, we’ll be able to outmatch them in no time!” Mia exclaims enthusiastically. I smile at her enthusiasm.

“Don’t be so sure love. Remember, you’re only level 60, and that person we saw was like level 150. There’s still a substantial power difference between him and us. And we don’t even know if he’s the most powerful person here we’ll have to contend with.” I remind her. She waves dismissively. “We’ll get there. Without my father holding me back, I can do so much more now!”

“What do you mean?” I ask. “I can actually help out now. I was getting sick of sitting on the sidelines and just watching you fight, but I don’t have to do that anymore!” Ivy rubs Mia’s back gently. “We still have to be careful though honey. We can’t just go rushing into things. Last time we did that, it didn’t go very well.” The healer voices my thoughts.

I cringe internally, wishing that I’d never put us through going into the city. “I know. We’re strong though, and we won’t let that happen again.” Mia says confidently. I exchange a look with Ivy, slightly worried about if Mia’s handling this well but deciding not to speak on it.