Chapter 984: One Shot [II]
Following Ethan’s instructions, everyone quickly switched their specializations.
One thing caught him by surprise, though. Victor hadn’t changed into a Shadow Priest. Instead, he’d somehow assembled an entire set of cloth gear loaded with Strength. Ethan genuinely had no idea where he’d found it all.
Normally, cloth armor came with Spirit or Intellect. Strength cloth was one of the strangest item types in the game. It was rare, but not because people wanted it. Most players considered it complete junk, and when something was both rare and useless, it usually disappeared fast. People either disenchanted it or sold it to vendors the moment it dropped, which made it even harder to find on the market.
The reason was simple. No caster in their right mind needed Strength. If you wore a full set of Strength gear, your spells lost all scaling benefits and relied entirely on their base values. But Victor had never been particularly concerned with what other people considered reasonable. Even his staff was stacked with Strength.
"Victor... are you seriously planning to beat people to death with that thing?" Ethan asked, staring at him. "You had a perfectly good ranged class, and you turned it into melee?"
"This guy’s insane," Leo said before Victor could answer, gripping his iron staff. "He was halfway through the hidden Holy Priest questline and just quit. Nearly gave the rest of us a heart attack. Now he runs around smacking things with a stick and insists he’s a melee fighter."
Victor spun the staff casually in one hand and grinned. "Keep talking. Once I finish the Battle Mage quest chain, I’ll be able to convert Intellect into Strength. I’ll heal and deal damage at the same time. Then we’ll see who’s copying who."
"Yeah, yeah. You’re amazing," Leo replied with a snort.
"Alright, enough," Ethan said. "Let’s sort out positions."
The moment he spoke, the chatter stopped. Everyone was curious how he planned to handle this fight.
The first part was obvious. Both tanks had already switched to damage builds, which meant Ethan intended to tank both bosses himself. Quite a few people glanced at him. His gear glowed with multicolored effects, and his level sat at 124. Some privately wondered whether he could actually survive what was coming, but no one voiced the concern.
At worst, they wiped once. That wasn’t a big deal. Surviving was only half the problem anyway. The mechanics were the real challenge.
If the bosses got too close, they enraged. Debuffs targeted random players. Ground effects constantly forced movement. Positioning would determine whether the raid succeeded or failed.
"You already know how the marks work," Ethan said. "If you get one element, stay away from players carrying the opposite one. For the first ninety seconds, everyone stacks and burns the bosses as hard as possible."
"When the debuff phase starts, spread out immediately. After the marks go out, players with the same mark group together. Two groups, fifteen yards apart."
"Melee stays behind the bosses."
"Ranged and healers stay at distance."
"That’s it for now. We’ll see what happens once we pull."
His explanation was brief and straightforward. Then he stepped forward.
This was Normal Mode, a forty-player raid. Including Ethan, there were forty people present. Victor, Leo, Markham, and the rest exchanged glances. They trusted Ethan, but what they found difficult to believe was that those instructions were apparently the entire strategy.
Ethan noticed their expressions and smiled to himself. ’They think I’m testing this. But I have no intention of testing anything.’ He planned to clear the encounter on the first attempt.
The strategy came from much later in Ethereal’s lifespan. Back then, players would simply gather enough levels and brute-force older content. Random pickup groups with mediocre gear could clear encounters that once required perfect execution. This raid, however, wasn’t nearly as weak as it looked.
Ethan scanned the group. Their levels were relatively low, but their equipment was not. With their current gear, most of them could easily match the damage output of ordinary level 140 to 150 players.
The entire strategy depended on one thing: a tank capable of holding both bosses simultaneously.
When the demonic hounds entered their shared enrage state, there was a trade-off. Their attack speed skyrocketed. Their attack power skyrocketed. But so did the damage they received.
If Ethan remembered correctly, once the two hounds touched each other, the enrage granted three hundred percent increased attack speed and three hundred percent increased attack power. At the same time, they took three hundred percent additional damage. If the tank could survive the punishment, the bosses effectively turned themselves into glass cannons.
The raid quickly moved into position after receiving their assignments. Ethan nodded slightly. Their execution speed was solid.
What he didn’t realize was that these weren’t ordinary players. They were the backbone of the Renegade Alliance. Every major raid opening started with them. Each of them regularly led raid groups of their own. After learning encounters, they’d return and guide the rest of their guild members through the content.
Originally, today’s run had been intended as a learning attempt. But there wasn’t much to learn from Ethan’s approach. Even so, nobody complained. They had been stuck on this boss for far too long.
Everyone wanted to move forward and see what waited deeper inside the dungeon. In fact, if Ethan hadn’t shown up today, they were already considering giving up temporarily. The encounter was simply too difficult at their current level. They could always gain a few more levels and come back later.
After all, nobody had cleared the dungeon yet. There was no rush.
Most of them had already finished their weekly lockouts elsewhere. Their cooldowns were spent, their other raids were done, and they had little else to occupy their time.
Life in the Northern Frontier Region was almost too peaceful. The Renegade Alliance had no serious rivals. Even finding people to fight in PvP had become difficult.
Wherever they went, they mostly ran into familiar faces. People greeted them. Waved at them. It was hard to attack someone who was smiling and saying hello.
The Alliance followed a simple rule: don’t start trouble.
But if someone else did? They would pay for it.
That principle had been established by Ethan when he founded the Alliance, and it had remained unchanged ever since. It was one of the main reasons the Renegade Alliance enjoyed such a strong reputation.
Anyone caught abusing weaker players simply because they wore the Alliance tag faced investigation and expulsion. But if another guild picked a fight first, the response could be overwhelming. The entire Alliance might mobilize. Raids would be wiped. Guilds would be hunted down.
That was the Renegade Alliance of the Northern Frontier Region. Ethan’s guild. The guild he technically led, despite leaving most of the management to others.
Without Victor, Leo, and the other veterans, it never would have grown into what it was today. And those veterans were fiercely loyal to him. That loyalty had forged the Alliance into something few organizations could match.
Seeing everyone ready, Ethan activated his transformation. His unique Bear form appeared once more before the raid.
"Ready?" he asked. "Pulling."
"Ready!"
The response came back in unison.
"Two healers on me," Ethan said as he glanced over his shoulder. "I’d rather not die."
Standing among the ranged players were the two assigned healers. One was Kiara, another druid. Her character name was Heaven’s Dawn.
The second was a priest Ethan didn’t recognize. A female player. Character name: HoldMyHandPlease.
Ethan couldn’t help staring at that name for a moment. ’That was certainly a choice.’
Kiara simply flashed him a dimpled smile.
The priest, on the other hand, looked noticeably nervous.