[Adelie]

'Yep,' Nebula says. It's a little difficult for her, she imagines, since Nebula primarily plays her character as a ranged damager-dealer as well, but having an entire team of ranged characters doesn't really bode well for juggling aggro. Instead, she's picked up a broadsword and is doing her best job of cosplaying their usual paladin tank - down to the part where she jumps right into the fray.

'I've got some i-frames I can use for the first couple of attacks,' Nebula adds, deftly swiping at the boss for the paltriest little sliver of damage. 'So you guys can get set up - I think the first three I can dodge.'

[Adelie]

'Nice, thanks,' Chi says - not that she's the one who actually benefits from this, since her job is just to dump as much damage as possible on the boss. 'Spell-ups first. Did you two come up with a plan for trying to game the boss's attack system?'

'Sort of,' Aster says. He doesn't sound exactly confident, but he doesn't sound the other way, either. 'We're just going to dump everything we have and see if that works, then start paring it down.'

'That's really your strategy?' Chi wants to scoff at that - it sounds ridiculous. 'Isn't that a lot of mana?'

[Adelie]

'Eh,' Aster says. 'Might be a problem for Ven, but have you seen Mischief Managed's mana pool?'

Chi takes a moment's break from slinging successive water blasts - apparently the most effective against the stonedragon, from the information she'd compiled - to gawk at the party stats screen. 'Okay, you have got to tell me how you ended up with that much mana,' she says. 'If I saw that in a pick-up group, I'd think the other person were hacking.'

'Maybe I am,' Aster responds, airily.

'Yeah, right,' Nebula says, calling back from her current task of repeatedly prodding the stone skin of the dragon with her sword. 'I remember you talking about this before. Wasn't it some weird interaction between a few skills and a scripted item?'

[Adelie]

'Something like that,' Aster says. 'There's a few items that increase your mana pool by a percentage of your current mana pool, and there's also an enchanter-locked skill that I picked up recently that does the same thing.'

'Oh, boy,' Chi says. Just from that description, she's pretty sure she knows exactly what kind of 'weird interaction' is being talked about.

'Yeah, exactly.'

'Hey,' Ven interjects. 'I'm still confused. Is this some kind of weird math thing?'

'Pretty much,' Chi explains. 'When you have percentage multipliers, sometimes they're not coded correctly so you end up getting the percentage multipliers multiple times.'

[Adelie]

'It'll probably get patched soon,' Aster says. 'I think it only went unnoticed this long because no one else has gone this far down the skill tree for it.'

'Won't you get in trouble for abusing a bug, though?' Ven asks, a little concerned.

'No,' he responds. 'Not if you report it first. Support said it was fine to use until it gets patched.'

'Support has always been like that,' Chi says, with a bit of a sigh. 'I guess it's their judgement, though. They'll usually let you abuse bugs that don't have a huge impact on the game if you report it, as a kind of 'finder's fee,' but they won't do it for gamebreaking ones.'

[Adelie]

In the time it had taken them to discuss this, of course, the stonedragon hadn't sat around doing absolutely nothing while it got beat upon by a bunch of random humans. That being said - it's only particularly fast or active when you compare it to other rocks; it's only dangerous because it gets the specific bonus of never being able to miss.

The first attack, Nebula had tumbled out of the way. Not that she'd actually dodged it, because that would be even more of a game-breaking mechanical discovery than the one they were attempting to exploit, but rather, her tumble action had a few invincibility frames that she'd carefully timed so she wouldn't take damage.

[Adelie]

The second attack, Nebula had put up a shield instead - she doesn't specialize in shield skills and she's certainly not Ven, but she does considering herself an expert at picking up useful and frankly, somewhat overpowered, niche skills from a variety of different skill treess. A shield that blocks the first incoming attack in the next one second, no matter what it is, is incredibly useful and versatile, and she wouldn't have passed on that for anything.

For the third attack, she's got another invincibility frame lined up - this one barely more than a few milliseconds, tied to using the broadsword to block. Timing's perfect, though, and she scrapes right by that attack, as well.

[Adelie]

'Well,' Nebula says. 'My relevant skills are on cooldown right now, so you guys better chip in for the next attack.'

'I've got you,' Ven says, readying a shield. 'Hmm, no luck with getting him to not attack yet?'

'Not yet,' Nebula says. 'Did you finish your testing?'

'No,' Aster confirms, flipping through yet another spellbook before adding another debuff to the steadily-growing line of icons now sitting on the boss's health bar. 'Just a few more, though.'

'I'm surprised you've managed to get these to stay on so long,' Chi says. 'Did you reapply all the ones that wore off?'

[Adelie]

'Yeah,' Aster says. 'That's definitely not the problem, but I'm not sure what might be. But - well, maybe we just haven't hit the right one yet. At least it'll narrow it down, now that we know a lot of these don't work.'

'Cool,' Chi says, eying the stonedragon warily. 'Ugh, I hope this works. I don't know if we can beat it otherwise, and I'd really not like to spend three hours finding out if we can.'

A few more icons - one looking like dark-colored rain, another looking like a fish on a hook - appear on the stonedragon's health bar. Chi's not even familiar enough with these to remember exactly what those skill effects are, just by looking at them. 'You sure these are witch spells?'

[Adelie]

'No idea,' Aster says, casual as always. 'I'm just going through my entire spell pool at this point - some of them aren't witch spells, but some of them overlap in effects, so we might get a similar result.'

'I just hope it's not an interaction where it just has to be a certain number of spells,' Chi says. 'I don't think that's the case, but these things are always difficult to predict.'

'I just would like not to die, thank you very much,' Nebula chimes in. 'Next hit incoming, let's go.'

[Adelie]

'Ah,' Nebula says, a few moments later.

'Ah,' Chi responds. Maybe the timing's a little off, although she's never off when it comes to timing, but she waits another second before declaring, 'Well, I told you so.'

'I'm not even sure what counts as telling us so this time around,' Nebula says, backing off from the stonedragon a little. 'But hey, looks like our gambit worked.'

'Yeah, now we just have to figure out which debuff it actually is,' Aster says, sighing. 'And there's forty-one of them on him right now, so that'll be fun. I'll just let them expire, and we'll see when it stops.'

[Adelie]

'Sounds like a good plan,' Chi says, with a sigh of relief. 'I am so, so glad we at least managed to replicate this behavior,' she adds. 'Things should go smoothly from here-on-out, shouldn't they?'

It's not a bad plan at all, that's for sure. A few more rounds go by with little activity from the stonedragon - she's forgotten just how long some of these enchanter debuffs actually last, especially with some skill levels - while Ven meticulously preps a shield for Nebula, just in case.

It's important to be careful, after all. Finding out the correct combination of spells really doesn't help them too much if they then have to run the whole thing again because their tank died.

[Adelie]

The round after that, the stonedragon finally whirrs to life, snapping out with a vicious bite - which is promptly absorbed by the golden light surrounding Nebula's form. It still does some damage, of course - it would be disappointing if a boss-level monster could have its attack completely negated by a spamable shield - but it's a small enough number that Ven and Aster can actually heal her back up to full health.

'Okay,' Chi says. She doesn't bother to ask what spells wore off - she trusts her team to actually know what they're doing and to pay attention in the right places. 'We got it?'

'Narrowed down to a few options,' Aster says.

[Event posts end here]