Chapter 5   – Skill Match

The road to receiving quests was a bumpy one. There was heavy traffic on the opening of a new server. In the history of Glory, when the second server opened, the incoming players exceeded the limit in the beginning village causing all the players to freeze. The people who had not logged on also couldn’t get online. From then on, on the opening of the server, Glory would temporarily increase the server limit in the village. The disaster that was the opening of the second server never happened again.

This time’s preparation for the opening of the tenth server was sufficient. The entering players were divided equally into every village. Although players could be seen as far as the eye could see, it wasn’t packed enough to be a problem. But receiving quests from a NPC was a different problem. Everyone looked for the single NPC to accept quests from and in a short moment, they had crammed together into a lump around him. Glory wouldn’t let bodies overlap or pass through others thus people formed ring after ring. The ones inside couldn’t come out and the one outside couldn’t come in. Many players were bouncing up and down energetically trying to pass over by going above other people’s heads. But at this point everyone was still level 0. Their jumping abilities were too poor and there was no way they could jump high enough. Everyone repeatedly bouncing up and down was truly a cute and beautiful scene.

In this situation, even the experts were helpless. Aside, Chen Guo was actually overjoyed with a face of “I knew it would be like this”. She looked at Ye Xiu and recorded his username: Lord Grim.

Within the constant shouting made by countless players, the situation slowly improved. How was it solved? They made way for a small exit path to let the players who had finished accepting a quest come out.

Ye Xiu commanded Lord Grim to take a few quests and began completing them one by one. Most of them were to let the players adapt to the controls and environment. The quests were all educational ones. Ye Xiu was certainly not that bad as to need such advice. After experiencing kill stealing, lining up, squeezing, etc. anyways the ones that were all people created problems, all of the quests that could be finished in the first wave were finished. Chen Guo also observed this process from time to time. Finally, these extremely simple quests unexpectedly took a full two hours causing even Ye Xiu to helplessly sigh with sorrow: What’s the point of an expert? In the vast ocean of people, experts didn’t mean anything.

“Finally done, I’m now Level 7.” After turning in the last quest, he had leveled up again. He turned around to Chen Guo saying this, but found that boss Chen had already fallen asleep. Yet her head still faced the screen!

Does she still need to test my ability to stay up all night? Ye Xiu looked down and threw his jacket onto Chen Guo’s body. He turned around and went back to his playing.

Looking at the panel, after completing the first wave of quests, Lord Grim already possessed 340 skill points.

In Glory, learning and upgrading skills required skill points. Different skills required anywhere from 10 to 50 points. Currently, if a max level, level 70, character finished all of the necessary quests, then it can have up to 4000 skill points. But this wasn’t the limit. The skill point limit was 5000 but the remaining 1000 skill points required a certain amount of luck and strength to obtain.

In the ten years of Glory, not a single account possessed 5000 skill points. Even the famous Battle God One Autumn Leaf peak account only reached 4840 points, still 160 points away. 160 points wasn’t a lot but it wasn’t few either. If a player used all of those points on a 50 point ultimate skill, then he could learn three of them or upgrade an ultimate three times. For a peak level expert, this was a huge advantage.

Therefore when taking these beginner quests, quests with experience and equipment rewards could be ignored but skill points were a must. Apart from this, those that rewarded attribute points were important too. Glory characters had four basic attributes: Strength, intelligence, vitality, and spirit.

Strength affected physical attack, defense, and increased maximum inventory weight.

Intelligence affected magic attacks, defense, and MP.

Vitality naturally affected HP as well as stamina.

Spirit affected the resistance to and duration of status effects.

The four main attributes naturally grew as the character leveled. Only after level 20, when players began changing classes, did the growth rate change. As for quests with attribute point rewards, those were fair game. Strength was strength. Intelligence was intelligence. For classes specialized in strength, you could choose to only do strength quests, but quests rewarding intelligence were also open to complete too.

This was also saying, if after growing as a specialized class, with a max level account that had finished all of the quests, the four main attributes would be at the exact same level. Therefore all these quests should all be completed. Afterwards, equipment could be used to raise the necessary attribute.

As a result, attribute points could not be ignored. After looking at the panel, he immediately let Lord Grim learn skills.

In Glory, players can do a class change at level 20. Before then, there was no class and any skills from any profession could be learned as long as there were enough skill points. This was also for the convenience of the players. After advancing to level 20 and finding an interesting class, all of the points learned before would be returned. But after changing classes, a player can only learn from his own class’s skills. He cannot become a jack of all trades.

Even though Ye Xiu had forgotten what quests to do and how to beat certain instance dungeons, his skills would never be lost. Glory was very balanced. Low-leveled skills also had their own function. Every person could assemble their own skill set however they liked. Though, the amount of skill points was limited. Under normal circumstances, 4000 skill points was nowhere near enough to max out all of the skills. 5000 points was also not enough so players needed to choose carefully.

With respect to choosing skills, Ye Xiu naturally had his own set. Although his One Autumn Leaf’s class was a Battle Mage, he himself had once been regarded as a textbook. How could he have only been able to play a single class? Inevitably, only those proficient with every class had the qualifications.

Ye Xiu almost without thinking, first went to the beginner skill tree and learned two level 5 beginner skills: Swift Run, Roll.

The beginner skill tree was something every class could learn skills from. The two skills Ye Xiu had learned were very convenient. These 10 skill points would let the character to move in two different ways.

Swift Run increased running speed. The skill had no cooldown but used up stamina. After the stamina was depleted, the player would return to normal walking speed. To recover stamina, a player had to either walk or stand still. Walking would recover it slowly, while standing still would be a bit faster.

Roll, as the name implies, lets the character execute a rolling movement. Rolling forward, rolling backwards, rolling left, rolling right, rolling slanted, rolling walking, rolling running, rolling whatever. It also had no cooldown but used up some time to complete.

Ye Xiu had mastered these two skills long ago. He also clearly knew which skills were practical to him at this stage of the game.

First was Sky Strike, a Battle Mage skill. Every class had this type of knock-up skill. Their characteristics were all the same. After attacking, the target would be knocked up. The higher the skill level, the higher they would knocked up and the greater the damage. This was a commonly used skill. Ye Xiu had originally been a Battle Mage, so he chose the Battle Mage skill Sky Strike.

After that, Dragon Tooth, another Battle Mage skill. It was a direct attack that would cause the enemy to be stunned. Ye Xiu also easily learned it because of his original class.

He then learned the Sharpshooter skill Floating Bullet, the Mechanic skill Machine Trace, the Spellblade skill Wave Splitting Sword, the Grappler skill Backdrop, the Ninja skill Shuriken, the Blade Master skill Guard, the Elementalist skill Electric Ring, and the Priest skill Heal.

These skills didn’t require a lot of points. They were all within 20 points. Lord Grim was also only level 7, so the number of upgrades he could make to skills were limited. So in the end, there were still some leftover points. Ye Xiu didn’t learn any more skills. To him, he already had enough to deal with any situation at his level.

But if this skill set that had been picked by peak-level expert like him was seen by ordinary players, they would definitely laugh.