The Nettle Tea Chronicles

Cassandra

Cassandra was very ready for her Saturday. While she had plans to go out shopping with Zoe on Sunday, her elaborate plan to not leave her house for the weekend had been reworked to just be Saturday.

She went to bed at a normal time and woke up the same time she always got up for work - a little before 7. That was fine, given she still got plenty of sleep. Once she was up and finished with her morning routine, she dumped herself onto her living room couch. Her apartment was basically just a living room, bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom, but she was happy with how she had managed to make it feel very like home over the couple years she had lived here. So long as she ignored the size.

Her living room consisted basically of an area rug, a nice couch, a TV that was too big for the space, a small coffee table, and a bookshelf with nicknacks and other collectibles that blocked the view of the books behind them. Honestly, as she laid across the couch with her feet up on the far arm rest in soft, comfy pajamas, she really didn't have many complaints.

She idly flipped through a food delivery app on her phone to order a fast food breakfast - mostly for the coffee drink that came with it - and flipped on her TV. She browsed through the various streaming services and YouTube until she found a show she felt like watching and put it on.

What a perfect, lazy morning.

By the time noon rolled around, Cassandra had had her fill of lazing about on the couch while catching up on weekly series that she followed. It was time to be at least nominally mentally active. She gathered up the trash from her breakfast, which had been discarded on the coffee table until then, and tossed it in the bin in the kitchen before padding back into her bedroom and her PC.

She hit the power button and settled in. Typically, when she played most games, Cass preferred mouse and keyboard. She had gotten used to them over the years since picking up PC gaming, and felt that she was at home and effective using them.

But, she had grown up playing consoles, and there was still a certain ease of use to controllers. And on lazy days like this one, when she wasn't planning on doing anything too difficult in terms of content, laying on her bed with the monitors rotated to face her with a controller in hand was her move.

Thankfully, Mag Mell was designed with controller support in mind. Sort of. It was 100% supported by the game, but the controller support was clearly second to mouse and keyboard. To be fair, she couldn't hold it against the devs too much, given MMOs typically just had more buttons to press than controllers were made for. And while the game's UI was absolutely gorgeous, it was also entirely designed for a mouse.

Even when playing with a controller, some of the UI needed to be interacted with through a faux mouse cursor controlled by a joystick. All in all, it was absolutely the worse way to play the game - but it was playable.

So long as she didn't try raiding with it. That would certainly be a nightmare. Although, she was also sure some people out there did it.

Once she had the game up and running, Cass snagged her little mini wireless mouse and a compact bluetooth keyboard to use from her bed. She had also gotten quite adept at using her thigh as a mousepad for the 2.5 inch long mouse.

She clicked over to the Clan's chat and tossed in a quick message;

{Evie} : Anyone for some dailies?

And then waited a bit. She wasn't in a rush to get things done, and she also knew that Zoe wanted to get some of her dailies done as well. In the meantime, she figured doing an inventory clean out and maybe selling off a bunch of old gear was in order.

Cass could admit - to herself, at least - that she was a bit of a hoarder, thanks to other games. Mag Mell's [Fae Glamour] system was a very convenient one when it came to reskinning gear. As long as she had picked up a piece of gear with a particular design, she could utilize said design within the system. Other games, however, required the player to keep older pieces of gear on hand to use their appearances.

Those styles of systems had trained Cass to hold on to old gear that had lost its usefulness ages ago. As it was, every few months, she had to go through her inventories and clean it all out or they would overflow with useless crap that had piled up. And, despite how easy it was to do the clean out, it took oodles of time.

So, she went to work while keeping an eye on the other screen with the chat for a response. It didn't even take a full ten minutes before she noticed the movement of new on-screen text.

{Caoimhe} : Not me this time. Out with the family.

{Firo} : I'm around.

Cass chuckled as she saw the two responses come within seconds of one another, then put her inventory management on the backburner to type out a response.

{Evie} : Have fun, Caoimhe. And happy to have you, Firo. I know @Nyx wanted to get some dailies done today too, so hopefully she'll see this. Then we just need a tank, I guess.

{Nyx} : I'm here. What's going on?

{Nyx} : Oh, yeah, I'll brt.

{Fiona} : I'm on baby duty for most of the afternoon so Sam can sleep. Probably for the best I don

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{Fiona} : 't try to play. -_-

{Nyx} : lol

{Evie} : No worries. Do your thing.

{Firo} : If we're just doing dailies, I have a tank friend that can prolly fill. Lemme msg him.

With the makings of a plan in place, Cass popped into the voice chat to wait for the others while she continued to sort stuff to sell to NPC vendors. If she was going to get rid of a ton of junk, at least she'd get a tiny bit of gold for it that way.

{Firo} : Hey @Bisky, mind if I invite a friend to the server?

{Bisky} : How dare you? How could you even ask that? What a jerk, having friends besides us.

{Bisky} : Yeah, go for it. Everyone here should have invite privilege.

{Firo} : We do not.

{Evie} : Sure don't.

{Bisky} : What? Hang on…

Cass chuckled, watching the [Invite People] button on the chat server go from grayed out to clickable.

{Bisky} : Now?

{Firo} : Got it. Thanks.

>>> {Sylvia} has joined the server!

{Firo} : Hello friend.

{Sylvia} : Yo o/

There was a double chime in Cassandra's ears as Firo and his friend both joined the chat. And she nearly laughed as a third chime went off with barely a beat between them as Zoe hopped into the chat as well. The sounds also coincided with messages appearing in the game saying 'Nyx logged in'. Firo had already been online.

"Morning." Firo said, sounding somewhat tired still, despite having been on the game since before Cass had logged in. It was still earlier in the morning on the west coast, though.

Cass said "Morning", but Zoe responded with a full-on sing-song "Good morning" worthy of a movie princess. There were some scattered chuckles at the dramatic greeting, which was a sign of good humor at least.

"Good morning!" Firo's friend was the last to offer the greeting. Sylvia's voice was friendly and clearly sounded more awake than Firo's.

"Nyx, Evie, this is my buddy Sylvia. He's a great tank, generally a pretty good guy, and much more a morning person than I am." Firo said.

"It's nice to meet you." Cass and Zoe echoed one another as they spoke together.

"Nice to meet you both, too. It'll be nice to get dailies done with some people to chat with instead of through solo queues and in silence for once. Thanks for letting me tag along." Sylvia said.

"Of course." Zoe said. "So long you aren't a shit tank, you're always welcome."

"Well, feel free to judge me, then. I think you'll find me to be quite capable."

"Good to hear. So you won't need me to babysit you, then?" Cass grinned to herself.

"I assume that you're the healer for the team, then, Evie?"

"Yep. I play Radiance mostly, so we really should be more than fine." Cass started closing the myriad inventory windows she had open while organizing, prepping for the actual gameplay to come.

"Neat. Go spec yourself for more damage then - I play Blade mostly, so if I do my job well, I should dodge most of the damage." Sylvia said.

Cass shrugged to herself. "Will do. Firo, you're gonna have to start the party since you're the link between us."

"Oh. Right." Firo yawned, the sound clearly coming through the chat. It prompted Cass to yawn too, and she was pretty sure she heard at least one other come through the chat as well. "Invites coming out."

When the party invite popped up on Cass's screen, she quickly joined the party then opened a [Fae Circle] back to [Falias] so she could visit her [Dedication] trainers. While she was making the trip as quickly as she could, the group was chatting about their thoughts on each tank type, and how each fit into various types of content.

The general consensus was that a [Plate], the heavily armored front-liner like Fiona, and [War], the magic-flavored heavy tank, were the two most reliable when it came to survivability, as their boosted defenses made them a reliable sack of HP.

In contrast, [Ravager], the tank [Path] that relied heavily on HP manipulation through either huge health pools with [Zerker] or the [Lifesteal] effects of the [Plague] were the most unreliable. Of course, that was assuming the player behind the character wasn't familiar with the content they were running through. A well-played [Ravager] would outdamage the other tanks by a fairly wide margin, assuming they could actually manage their HP to stay alive.

And finally, the group largely agreed that a well-played [Fencer] could basically do it all. [Blades] and [Reavers] were dodge-based tanks that relied on movement and dodge skills to stay alive while pummeling the enemy with attacks to keep their [Threat] high. It required solid game knowledge of enemy attack patterns to reliably dodge attacks while saving their damage avoidance skills for attacks that weren't capable of dodging.

It was a very unique type of tank that could only really function in an action-focused battle system like Mag Mell's, that allowed players to actively avoid most of the damage with movement.

Once Cassandra had made it to [Lugh's Courtyard], she quickly hit her [Take Flight] skill and flew off to her trainers' location. She had just enough flight time to land neatly in front of [Rena of the Inner Radiance], the trainer for the [Radiance] [Dedication]. With a few quick inputs, she got herself set up for a more damage focused version of her [Path] that she often used while leveling solo.

Thankfully, a few months after the game's initial launch, the devs had added a loadout style system to the [Dedication] trainers, allowing players to save and swap between various skill sets that they had saved previously. It was immensely useful to be able to swap general setups quickly for situations just like this.

"Alright guys, I'm good to go." Cass said, once she double checked her skills and gear set ups.

"Perfect. Let's get in there." Zoe said.

"Queueing us up." Firo said, sounding a bit more awake now than he had when they first gathered up.

Most of the repeatable daily content was designed for small parties like theirs, whereas most of the content for large parties was set off as weekly goals. This meant that it almost didn't matter which of the daily activities Firo put them in queue for as they would all be pretty much instant, as soon as the game set aside an instance for their party.

Cass smiled when the popup message to get them into the instance popped up on her screen.

[Routine Quest : Monster Hunt]

[Routine Quest] was Mag Mell's descriptor for daily repeatable quests, while the [Monster Hunt] quest would drop the party in front of a random [World Boss] in an instance that they would need to take down. It would be a fun way to start things off.

As her monitor transitioned into a black loading screen, Cass stretched her arms out and up, ready to get to play the game in a not-so-serious setting for a while.