The Nettle Tea Chronicles

Cassandra

When their fifth attempt at defending [Áine] failed once again to too much damage thanks to poor decisions, Cassandra threw her hands up in exasperation.

"We need a better system." Mellody sighed. "Evie and I can keep up the AoE healing all day long, but it's not going to work out if we still take too much damage anyway."

"Has anyone noticed a pattern to the safe spots?" Firo asked.

"Nope." Bisky said.

"I can confidently say that they are almost always toward the middle of the area?" Zoe offered.

"I'll second that." Caoimhe said. "Any time I move to fight by the wall, I never see any nearby for me to use once I move off."

"Fiona? Aleister? That true?"

"Yeah." They both said in unison.

"Okay…so do we designate the ranged and healers as the ones distinctly chasing the safe spots, or do we condense and fight away from the edges of the tower?" Cass asked.

"Are there any benefits to fighting near the edge?" Mellody directed the question to the melee.

"I've knocked a couple enemies off with knockback effects, but otherwise, no?" Caoimhe said, sounding like he was trying to think of any other upsides.

"It's kept some of the mobbing minimal." Zoe said. "Because the enemies need to climb up and can only really attack once they've made it up, it reduces some of the mob damage."

"Do we think that's significant?" Mellody asked.

"It could matter in the long run." Caoimhe said. "But generally speaking, I think it'll be less damage than the AoEs total, but more random."

"Great." Cass sighed. "Tanks? You think you could try to aggro more of the mobs for damage control?"

"Maybe?" Fiona said.

"Obviously, we could," Aleister began, "but we'd need the DPS to be on top of things. If we take the aggro, it would congregate the enemies in two spots, which is going to make us get overrun or outnumbered much quicker."

Scattered groans and sighs sounded as everyone tried to think of an easy solution to their current problem, which was followed by a much more defeated groan from Firo. "We haven't even seen real mechanics yet." He whined.

"Well, we know the basics of what we have to do." Cass said, trying to get her head around it all and digest it. "Right now, ultimately the melee are taking too much damage from the trash mobs and dying because of it. So really, our only option is to adjust to make the tanks take the brunt of the trash and hope we can focus them down fast enough while fighting for the safe spots."

"If you want us to voke everything, we're going to need to stay closer to the middle." Fiona said. "We don't have the range to cover the enemies from the edges, so we have no choice but to wait for them to come to us."

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

"So this really is just going to be a fight of us getting surrounded and attacked from all sides."

"Yup."

"Bring it on."

Firo's declaration made everyone chuckle, or at least the mood had brightened a little. Everyone took up their positions on the tower's roof and Bisky triggered the start of the fight once she confirmed everyone was ready.

The early part of the encounter was chaotic thanks to the sheer number of effects on screen, but it was at least somewhat predictable. There would always be a ton of AoEs, and enemy mobs would climb, jump, or fly to the tower's roof. Dealing with both things unfortunately required the healers to really be on top of everything, because there were constant sudden spikes in damage, even with the tanks trying to mitigate to avoid the bigger spikes of damage.

Each volley of AoEs was easy enough to deal with individually, but it was their constant presence that was draining resources. By the fifth round of AoEs, their conceived plan was coming together.

Fiona and Aleister had taken up the 3 and 9 clock positions respectively, trying to pull as many of the enemy mobs toward them as possible. There were a couple stragglers slipping through the cracks at the 12 and 6 positions, but Bisky and Firo were on top of them, while Nyx and Caoimhe paired up with a tank to try to shred through the mobs as quickly as possible to avoid letting them build up.

"Yo, these mobs must have a broken crit rate or something."

"They've got something, alright." Cass agreed with her cohealer. The tanks were doing their job admirably, and were using their mitigation tools well, but the spikes in their HP drops were still not normal, even accounting for the number of enemies.

"Oh, hang on a sec. Let's see…" Fiona said, then popped [Armored Stand], a skill that prevented crits for ten seconds.

Like magic, Fiona's HP stopped dramatically sling-shotting around, steadying out.

"I'd say crits confirmed." Mellody said.

"But what do we do about it?" Cass asked, doing her best to balance her AoE healing against the magic volleys and the spot healing against the mob damage. It required her to be constantly switching targets, and was difficult to keep up with long-term. They really needed to come up with a better plan.

"Other debuffs?" Aleister suggested.

"I gotcha." Zoey said, triggering a burst of poison smoke around Nyx's position that would slow enemies affected by it.

"Anything that helps soften the spikes, go for it." Cass said.

She was impressed in the following minute how well their party cooperated. With minimal communication, the DPS were taking turns with AoE debuffs to try and control some of the damage spikes. And while it wasn't anywhere near as reliable as Fiona's [Armored Stand], it was enough to prevent any sudden damage spikes leading to accidental deaths, like the ones that had led to the earlier wipes.

The group was able to stumble their way through a few more rounds of the magical barrage while the enemies continued to surge onto the platform. Even with the tanks and DPS focused on thinning the enemy crowd, they weren't quite keeping up with the speed at which the enemies were appearing, but they were able to stop the group from being entirely overwhelmed.

In the end, it was enough to squeak by into the next stage of the fight. The adds that were attacking began to slow, allowing the DPS to gain some ground against the mobs. The volleys of magic continued, but a second safe spot seemed to open up, although it was just as randomly placed as the first.

"What's next?" Aleister asked, still stuck under a ton of enemies.

"Don't look now, but we're surrounded." Cass said, taking note of the situation around them. The enemies may have stopped alighting on the tower, but they weren't backing off. Instead, the enemy had taken to the air and formed a dome around the tower.

"Oh, what the hell is that?" Bisky asked.

"I don't like it." Zoe said, just in time for the vast majority of the enemies flying around them to begin glowing with magic.

"Great." Mellody said.

"Dodge!" Firo called, and the party scattered. Firo and Bisky remained focused on the adds on the platform, but the crowd was down to single digits. The tanks hit some extra mit, hoping to simply outlive whatever damage was coming while keeping the mobs in place. The melee ran toward the center a bit more to try to get more equidistant from any potential safety.

A few of the flying Fae suddenly glowed brighter than the rest, a clear signal of a coming attack. Cass clicked [Daylight's Glow], a party wide mitigation skill to help with everyone surviving, as well as [Sunlight Healing], a party wide heal over time spell that would hopefully help keep everyone alive for the next 20 seconds while she may be unable to get spot healing out.

Red AoE markers began appearing on the ground in lines that arced across the entire floor. While the magic that was used varied, each attack came in quick succession, with a marker popping up for a second or two before vanishing only for the attack to fly across the spot a moment later.

The intervals were quick enough with just enough of a gap between the warning and the attack itself that dodging became very tricky.

"Shit." Bisky muttered, after getting clipped by one of the AoEs.

"That's a burn." Mellody said, "I got it."

True to form, Bisky had gotten clipped by a giant gout of flame that traveled across the field and was left with a hefty [Burn] debuff, giving her damage over time. As expected, now that these AoEs were meant to be avoided, they punished getting hit. And the burn effect was a hefty one, leaving Mellody struggling to keep Bisky alive. Cass quickly threw a single target heal-over-time spell at Bisky to assist.

But Bisky was only the first to get hit. Zoe was clipped next, by a lightning spell that gave Nyx the [Shocked] debuff, a paralysis variant that made her body freeze up randomly. It would make dodging the rest of the AoEs much harder, but healing her up went fine.

Fiona and Aleister both took several of the AoEs right at the start, hoping to take the attacks to hold the mobs in place. On one hand, Bisky and Firo did successfully kill the remaining mobs while dodging the onslaught of lines. On the other hand, both tanks had been completely inundated with debuffs. They lived thanks to their mitigation skills mostly, but they were both under a couple DoTs each, plus a variety of other issues.

Cass closed her eyes and sighed. "Fiona, Aleister, just die."

Mellody cackled in response, but agreed. "Yup, that's the spirit!"

"How we feeling about this run?" Fiona asked.

"Not great?"

"Awesome." Fiona whooped and immediately beelined to the edge of the tower.

"Fiona?"

"We gotta see how things work, right?" He said, and moved to jump off the edge. There was a moment, right before Fiona leaped, where she just stopped dead. "Fucking Shocked…"

Cass snickered to herself, fighting the urge to make any of the obvious and bad electricity-based puns that Caoimhe no doubt already had lined up. But that second's hesitation was enough for Fiona to recover and leap off the edge of the tower.

Cass took a second to make sure she was set to avoid the next couple AoEs before glancing at the party read out to see Fiona's status - which was wiped out with 0 HP.

"So?" Mellody asked. "Death wall?"

Fiona's mic clicked back on from apparently being muted, just so everyone could hear the laughter. "No." He said, struggling to get enough breath to speak.

While Fiona was trying to get out the words, the minor distraction was enough to cause both Caoimhe and Cass to get clipped by AoEs. Unfortunately, Cass had messed up her reading of the AoEs, getting one step ahead of the warnings. When she got hit by the first one, she quickly tried to readjust only to get clipped by a second and dropped.

She immediately turned her camera toward Mellody, hoping to see a quick resurrection spell headed her way, but Aleister was standing next to her, fully healed without any debuffs.

"Ah."

"Sorry, Evie! That was awful timing!" Mellody said, laughing.

Things quickly spiraled from there, with Mellody's healing not enough to keep up with everything. In the end, the group wiped to what must have been a phase transition, which had all of the flying Fae blast their magic at the tower in full, doing unavoidable raid-wide damage.

As they were reloading into the sequence to start over, Fiona was finally getting the laughter under control.

"So, Fiona, care to explain?" Cass said, mildly annoyed that the distraction had caused her to die, sure it wasn't her own fault at all.

"Sorry, sorry." Fiona apologized. "So, when I fell, it wasn't an immediate death. But I got completely dogpiled by a bunch of enemies that took my HP to zero in no time at all. It just looked hilarious."

"...if you say so." Cass shrugged, the sentiment shared by most of the rest of the party as well.

"So, what's the plan?" Firo asked.

"We do it again, but cleaner this time." Bisky said simply.

"We didn't get to see what was after that big last attack, but so far the fight is simple, just not easy." Zoe said.

"Yeah, for now it's basically just shred the adds and dodge things." Caoimhe agreed.

"Then let's get to it, yeah?"

"Yeah!"