Zoe

As Zoe navigated Nyx through the streets of [Falias] toward [Lugh's Courtyard], Cass chattered amiably in her ear. As the only two left in chat, their talk had turned toward more random things. Cass mentioned a TV series she had just started, and asked Zoe if she'd be interested in watching it together. Zoe had a movie she'd been wanting to see, but kept putting it off.

The conversation flowed as easily as it ever did, and Zoe was enjoying what could ostensibly be considered an online date, although they hadn't said anything about it. But she still liked the view of Nyx and Evie walking the streets of the digital city together, regardless of it. Cass must have too, given they were both making a bit of effort to stay side by side.

As they neared their destination and the training dummies that Nyx could test her new weapon on, Cass cleared her throat and asked, "So, Zoe, what's your dream effect for Weird?"

Zoe honestly had to think about it. "For Knife? I'm not sure what I want that wouldn't be entirely broken."

"What if it was broken, then?"

Now that - that Zoe knew. "Something that makes my combos more interactive. Maybe alter some of the skills in the middle of the combos with extra effects or something."

Cass snickered. "You always want things to be more complicated, don't you?"

"When it comes to gameplay? Hell yeah, I do. I'm here to press buttons, not to left click over and over again. And I want to feel like there's some skill involved, you know?"

"Sure I do. That's why I play healer."

"You say that, but healing is dreadful outside of really hard stuff. It's so easy."

"Ah, see, but in those situations, I like to play with my party and remind them who has the power to choose whether they live or die."

Zoe rolled her eyes. "Uh huh. I'm plenty aware of that, thanks." Cass had jokingly let Zoe die on more than one occasion to prove a point, complete a joke, or otherwise bend to Cass' whims.

"Honestly though, yeah, healing kinda sucks in easy content. That's why we don't do it often." Zoe could practically hear the shrug. "But more importantly, I really do like how intense healing gets in the harder stuff, plus it's really fun in PvP."

"You really are a masochist, aren't you?"

"How you figure?"

"You just said you like healing in PvP, which I assume refers to the way that literally everyone and their mother dog piles the healers to remove them from the field first. So you like being a prime target for everyone."

"...Fair enough; you're not wrong." Cass chuckled. "It's one of the reasons I like that spec for Hallow so much. It simultaneously makes me a massive target, but incredibly difficult to deal with."

"I can respect that." Zoe said.

"Of course you can. Look at the way you play Athame."

"We're both anti-meta weirdos, huh?"

"Yup. And damn proud of it. Now let's see what your knife does." Cass said as they approached the little section of the [Courtyard] set aside for the training dummies.

"It's an athame, remember. I don't really expect a lot from the Knife side of things…" Zoe said, as she equipped the weapon, and dropped the [Invested Effect] from her gloves that gave her an extra poison to [Invest] her new weapon.

"Well?"

"I'm going, chill." Zoe chuckled. "I needed to equip and invest the damn thing."

As Nyx approached the dummy, she drew the weapon. It was definitely a unique styling, and looked almost like the weapon was fashioned from bone, although it was likely to be an ivory similar to [Áine's] staff. The very base of the pommel of the knife featured a closed red rose, while the tip and one edge of the blade were tinged in a deep scarlet, as though it were bloody.

"Damn, that looks awesome." Cass breathed. Zoe agreed; it really did look great, even though the ivory and scarlet coloring of the weapon clashed horribly with her darker colored outfit.

"Well, let's see what it does. I can't believe there isn't a damn tooltip for this."

"Maybe it's really just that cool?"

"Doubt it." Zoe said as she tentatively began her basic attacks on the dummy. Without anything to go on, she really needed to be methodical about testing things.

"Anything?"

"Not yet." Zoe said, trying to watch for any changes. She had gone through her five step attack animation four times with no apparent changes before she moved on. She didn't want to use any cooldown skills yet, so she only moved into her basic combo skills, [Cut], [Slice], [Dice], and [Eviscerate]. The four skills made up her filler combo, which during general gameplay she typically wanted to avoid using while focusing on her better skills.

When she hit [Eviscerate], there was a silvery flash in a color she recognized immediately as [Áine's] Fae magic. But there was not any other noticeable effect beyond that at first.

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"You've got a buff." Cass said, which drew Zoe's attention to her status bar.

[Fae Trickery] : Your actions are warping space and time itself.

"Unhelpful description." Zoe muttered as she read it.

"It's got a 1 with it, so I imagine it stacks?" Cass offered.

"I assume so. And Eviscerate triggered the visual effect, so I would guess it's combo finishers that trigger it." Zoe said.

"Make sense."

Zoe didn't respond, instead rotating through a second round of her filler combo. Once again, there was a silvery flash when [Eviscerate] landed, and her [Fae Trickery] stack went up to two. The description didn't change, though, so she simply went through it again. Once again, when her finisher landed, she gained another stack of the buff. However, at three stacks, the buff changed.

[Time Trick] : Your repeated actions have warped time and space.

Zoe snorted. "Still massively unhelpful."

"Sure, but look at the knife." Cass said, which once again drew Zoe attention away from what she had been reading and back to her character. The weapon in Nyx's hand was glowing slightly crimson, and the rose on the pommel was now in full bloom.

"That's cool." Zoe said, moving her camera around for different angles. "And whatever the buff does, it doesn't seem to have a cooldown attached?"

"You're still in combat with the dummy, so it might go away when you exit combat?" Cass offered. Zoe imagined that was true, given many similarly stacking effects based around combat functioned that way. Or they would at least decay over time outside of combat. "So? You going to go another round?"

"Yup," Zoe said as she began the fourth round of her filler combo. This time, when she hit [Eviscerate], the silvery flash of magic resolved into a silver, shadowy copy of Nyx, who repeated the animation of the entire four hit combo, still targeting the same dummy. Zoe's mouth fell open as she watched the shadow of herself run through the full combo, each hit doing damage to the target. It wasn't as powerful as her actual attacks, only around 60 or 70% she guessed, but she was still impressed.

Cass whooped loudly over the chat. "Hell yeah! That's a raid level drop for damn sure."

"No kidding." Zoe said, "but it's not new. Just FYI."

"Huh?"

"That repeat effect isn't new. There's, I think, two knives with a similar repeat effect. Mind you, the animation playing out with the Fae magic? That's new. But the repeated damage effect isn't. Although this does seem to do more damage. I think the Time Knife effect was only 50% of the damage."

"Okay?"

"And this was like 60 or 70, I think." Zoe continued. "But also, there's no max level knife with the effect yet. So this is still really awesome."

Cass let out a breath. "Oh, good. I thought you were about to say that it isn't worth it."

"Oh, no, it is." Zoe said, slowly coming to grips with her new weapon. "I always loved the effect, but never grinded for the Time Knife because the effect is super cool but the weapon itself is unusable at our level. And I didn't want to get used to it."

"What do you mean?"

"The effect is almost exactly what I wanted, in a slightly different way. Watch." Zoe said, then began to build up her [Fae Trickery] count again. When she had [Time Trick] prepared, Zoe clicked [Dark Dance] first, the skill that allowed her to continuously use finishers and skip her combo requirements until she either took damage or moved. Except against a training dummy, neither of those were likely to happen.

Zoe hammered in every single finisher she had access to. It was something she could never do in a real fight, but used every cooldown finisher she had, then looped through [Eviscerate] and [Death's Dance], or two non-cooldown finishers a few times before she stepped a little to the left and ended the [Dark Dance] effect.

As soon as it registered that her combo was ended, [Time Trick] triggered, and replayed the entire finisher loop. She had taken around 45 seconds worth of finishers, and her silvery copy repeated every single one.

They hadn't even finished when Cass blurted out, "What. The. Fuck." over the chat, which made Zoe grin.

"This really does change everything about my dedication." Zoe said with a huge grin as she watched her lengthy combo play out. "It gives me an entire new layer of complexity. [Time Trick] triggers on every fourth finisher, repeating that finisher, and the combo leading up to it. So now I have to be conscious of which combos I use and when, because a 60% percent damage amp is fucking massive."

"What the actual fuck, Zoe, that's actually broken." Cass laughed.

"Yeah. Yeah it is." Zoe said, not even trying to cover for the ridiculousness of her new toy. "There are other Invested Effects of similar power on other Unique gear, too, so I don't feel too bad, but yeah. This one is definitely stupid powerful for raw damage."

"And that's not even it! That stupid dagger has other effects for other dedications, too, right?"

"Oh. Oh, yeah, right. I guess there's still a bunch of testing to do."

"Well don't just stand there, then. Get moving." Cass said, pushing her on.

Zoe didn't need to be told twice. There were quite a few other [Dedications] that could use [Athames] as a weapon, but there were really only two that Zoe was particularly interested in. She immediately swapped over to [Dirge], the poison and damage over time focused spec of [Shroud] to see what [Weird] did with it.

It took her only seconds to see a change on [Dirge]. [Debilitating Pierce], the [Shroud's] [Dedication Skill] that reduced the target's outgoing damage by 15% had an altered skill icon, adding a silvery outline around the knife that appeared in the image. It stood out very prominently amongst the otherwise darker color of most of the [Dirge] skill icons.

The skill's name had changed to [Fae Debilitations], and had a new clause added to the effect. In addition to the normal [Debilitating Pierce] effect, it also had a new effect that immediately ended all of the damage over time effects on the target, and dealt their total damage immediately.

While not as eye-catching as the [Knife] effect, it was still a very solid change. It would deal a ton of damage, and allow the [Dirge] to immediately begin reapplying their DoTs, skipping the need for weaker filler skills while waiting for their DoTs to tick down. The new effect had an internal cooldown, separate from the [Debilitating Pierce] cooldown of 120 seconds, so it wouldn't be able to be used constantly, but it was still a great tool to have in her arsenal.

Then Zoe ran Nyx over to the [Tenebrae] mentor and swapped her [Path] and [Dedication] over to [Athame]. As soon as it was done, Zoe started auto-walking Nyx back over to the training dummies while she set up her new equipment loadout with her new weapon. Once it was ready and she closed the menus, there was no obvious change.

"Nothing obvious yet." She reported to Cass as she took over manual control to continue Nyx walking toward the dummies. In preparation for her testing, she hit the button for [Permeate], the skill that allowed her to store a single [Hex] in her weapon while moving. It was her favorite skill for the class and the one that allowed her preferred style of play. It let her be mobile while keeping her global cooldown moving. She didn't need to engage, and was essentially able to efficiently act while running around.

It took her less than a second to notice that once she had her first [Hex] stored with [Permeate], the colors for the actual skill icon for [Permeate] didn't wash out the way skills did when they were unusable. Instead, it had turned into a silver and scarlet version of the skill.

Zoe squealed in absolute delight.

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