It was genuinely confusing how low-powered the abilities it had returned were. They were still absolutely penultimate and ultimate abilities, but…
Well, it wasn’t adding up.
Creative Reinforcement, the penultimate was… fine, if nothing else, allowing the user to make their creations more durable for thirty seconds with a base cooldown of eight minutes. Eight minutes, on a durational durability boost.
Much more of an issue was the ultimate, Become the Weave. A forty minute cooldown, it gave the user a thirty second window where their body and everything on it counted as a psychic creation, even for the purposes of dismissing and resummoning. It would end if all other psychic creations were destroyed, and if the user didn’t have a body at the end of it, it would dump them out form wherever their awareness was centered– which would either be in the location of the last one destroyed or somewhere between them if multiple creations were destroyed at once– with their shields deactivated for a minimum of ten seconds.
Perhaps the worst part of the entire confusing thing was that they were definitely carry ults. That meant that the AI had agreed with them, at least when it came to the role that it would be serving.
If it had given ults that fit a different role’s strengths more, she’d be less bothered, at least. It wasn’t unheard of for someone to create an awesome midlaner while trying to build a fairly middle-of-the-road carry or diver, where the AI had given them a strange-seeming set of ultimates that changed how it played. Instead, it had decided that they’d had the right idea– but way more of the right idea than they’d thought.
Nathan was working out how to play it near the dummies, a starter sword in his hand. He’d placed one copy at the absolute outside of his range, floating there as a marker at first before he started to spin it around him in a huge circle.
It was honestly fairly impressive-looking, keeping the six sword-copies in the center moving and cutting at the respawning targets while the seventh moved independently, but it certainly wouldn’t justify…
Wait.
Nathan had just stepped forward, and the floating sword behind him, as well as all the others, had moved in sync. Was he just managing them relative to himself, rather than in an absolute manner?
Probably, actually. Arrows had a number of flaws, but they did make a concerted effort to make the more unrealistic aspects fairly intuitive, particularly when it came to magical area or control effects,
Which meant…
Jade waited until the sword was behind him, swinging around towards his view counterclockwise, but not quite within it. “Hey, Nathan!”
He spun around to face her, but her eyes were glued to the sword-copy.
A thirty-meter range didn’t sound like much, especially when ATR had plenty of hundred-fifty-plus meter guns, bows, and spells.
But when it came to rotation, it was also an enormous radial multiplier on the fairly quick action of turning around.
The sword whipped around, significantly faster than any motion it had gone through before, entering his view at the time it would have anyway, while the ones he could see took a bit of time to catch up.
“Yeah? Wait, what’s that look?”
It was a fair question, and she couldn’t have actually answered him completely anyways. Amazement, horror, amusement, and disgust, at least, were warring with her better judgement.
There was no way that that was balanced.
And that thought brought her up short.
Balanced. The AI. Granduon had put out in a press release that the AI wasn’t aiming for perfect balance, just checks and powerful weaknesses to anything on the absolute strongest end.
“Preconceptions on speed.”
He narrowed his eyes. “What do you–”
He cut himself off… and she could see his eyes and track the sword around the outer edge of the circle he was defining. “That shouldn’t be there. Unless, of course…”
He spun quickly this time, gesturing with his free hand, and five of the six swords he’d been using shot off, as fast as an arrow, each one stabbing through one of the five targets in front of him.
He laughed, though Jade mentally categorized it as more of a giggle.
Not that she had much room to talk, making a similar sound herself, just more stifled.
“That’s just not okay,” she said, watching him repeat the process as soon as the targets respawned, this time not even bothering to group them and instead just aiming each one through the target clockwise from the last one they’d hit.
Nathan seemed to agree with her. “That’s a fucking passive ability? In what universe?”
“It… only has one active ability you can realistically combine it with. And you can break them if you hit at the wrong angle…”
“Yeah, the one active ability that’s already in the kit. And the breaking thing…”
He hit a target again, this time with a single sword moving even faster than they had been before. Both the sword and the target shattered, but Nathaniel had a replacement in the air before the pieces had even landed.
Nathaniel shook his head, pinching the bridge of his nose.
“I don’t… Swords aren’t even like…”
She strongly agreed with what he was feeling. “You don’t even need to know how to use whatever weapon. Just counterpick whatever gets through their defenses best.”
“I’m disgusted with us for even coming up with this.”
Jade smirked. “Well, there is one benefit to this whole thing.”
“Yeah?”
“If it works, we can lane together.”
He bit the indie of his lip at that, looking slightly off. “I… I mean yeah, but if we’re looking for a team then…”
She had to think about it for a minute, but the thought was obvious, if not the easiest thing to explain. “I… Well. I have an idea of how that could be… less of an issue than if…”
“What do you mean? Starting with a carry/support duo is just going to make a ranger more difficult to find, and you need a whole team, right?”
“Well, yes, but… that girl you were talking about earlier. She could manage two full-sights, right?”
“Not exactly common.”
“But she could flex ranger-carry, right? Which would mean…”
“You want the whole team to be able to flex?”
“Double triangle, if possible.”
He blinked, then scoffed. “You’re nuts, you know that? Plus, it’s not like we’ve even asked her.”
“D’you think she’d say no?”
He froze at that, then scrunched up his face strangely. “Probably not to the carry thing, at least. But she’d probably usually secondary mid.”
“Three ability sets for a reason,” Jade said, “and I’m getting more set on this the longer it goes on. I need to build a support set, at least.”
