With Don’s arrival marking a good stopping point, Geria had swapped over to learning with the Ji instead. Given her own addition of a sword, Deyana had decided to spar with her, and it had very quickly become clear that the other girl both had martial arts training, and that it was not with polearms.

The stance she took to start was simultaneously something that would make it fairly difficult to push her, but the point of the spear ended up way out of the way, and let Deyana step around the side, sliding the thinner blade into the way just long enough to flick it into Geria’s defenses before stepping away.

“You can swing that around a little more, and keep the head between you and the target. That’s more important than almost anything. I shouldn’t be able to get in on you without taking a hit.”

It took a few more tries and explanations, but she was fairly quickly able to get Geria into decent form with the Ji, and a quick explanation of how the spike would work was enough there. Towards the end of it, Don spoke up.

“You keep saying that the spear is better than the sword, so why are you using a sword?”

It took a moment to put her thoughts into words, but she did have an answer. “It’s a bind-efficiency thing. No matter how many binds you have, there’s a limited number of slots there. Obviously, putting a primary weapon in one or more of the slots is powerful, but with my own experience being primarily with swords and knives it’s better, for me, to use them primarily for defensive things instead.

“I have this,” Deyana continued, sheathing the sword and summoning the lightning staff she’d also made to her hand, “in the binds, and it can act as a polearm. But besides the current situation, I tend toward using my bind slots for defenses and keeping offensive stuff on my person. More armor than weapons, I guess. I’m not a tank player proper, but I can act as one.”

LJay had walked in some time in the middle of her explanation, and nodded once. “You shouldn’t, though. Doesn’t fit your style.” He turned to face Don. “And from the fact she was explaining, you new or t-three?”

Don got a weird look on his face for a moment, but then it was gone. “Tier three, I think. That’s like, one-twenty to one-fifty? Mostly light Reds, and I’d done a dark red or two.”

LJay laughed. “If you’re talking levels, definitely t-three. Any guild in this area, and most in the world as far as I’m aware, lets you do t-two, t-one at level one-thirty or better. It’s not about your level, it’s about how well you’ll survive. Seems harsh, but it’s better to have newbies disappointed than losing twelve hours of progress multiple times in a row and just giving up.”

Don looked skeptical. “Don’t higher levels make people more likely to survive?”

“Absolutely not,” Geria said, then blushed as everyone turned to her. “Well, mostly... It can help if the reason you’d be dying is running out of mana, but that’s not really the usual way to die. Inattention, failure to get out of the way of something telegraphed, bad adaptability… much worse issues, especially after we start including mana transfer from supports. Healers. Whatever you want to call them.”

“When the hell was someone supposed to tell me that?” Don asked, “because this is the first time I’m hearing any of this and I’m only trusting you ‘cause I know you’re alliance top people.”

Deyana knew the answer to that, and seeing the awkward expressions of Geria and LJay, decided to step in for them. “They weren’t supposed to tell you at all. Either you figure it out on your own or you’re… assumed to be better at following a guide than at playing the game.”

She was understating it, actually. Back when she’d run a guild, anyone who didn’t make the connection before they hit level eighty was out. It was much earlier in the game’s life cycle, so level eighty was considered on the upper end of things at the time, took much longer to reach, and more of the people who made up the front of the levelling pack were more accessible, but it almost hadn’t affected the guild’s membership in the grand scheme of things. Cadire had never gone above level forty, and even they had figured it out without issue.

The biggest problem was that the people who usually made up tier three tended not to think for themselves very much. Which was, in some ways, fair. Just not dying was somewhat of an achievement in a game where, without armor, you’d die from a level five goblin in five to ten hits, maximum, as a character of almost forty times its level. In other ways, it meant that there was a significant portion– honestly, a majority– of the playerbase who would essentially never be able to handle content that they were, necessarily, undergeared for. Unless there was a significant reason for them to look at their strategies (and, by the very standardized raid compositions that Tier three teams often made, they didn’t think that there was), then very few of them would realize how to fight against enemies that were more powerful.

It did occasionally come to people’s attention when someone new was levelling, hit tier three, then was immediately pulled into tier one, but most of those got written off as favoritism. Tier two, in her experience, was the people who hadn’t intentionally figured it out, but had somehow either lucked into the right mindset or consistently shown enough initiative that they were expected to be able to handle any issues that tier one hadn’t noticed or run into in their earlier explorations.

“Wait, so you just… let people sit in tier three? Nobody levels or gears out of it?”

“They can gear out of it,” Geria said, then went silent for an awkward second, leaving Deyana to pick it up.

“If they change their gear, usually. What did you have before you reset?”

“Bow a lot like this one but less… fiddly. It just works, really, which is so much better. Standard defensive set with nullify energies and redirect physicals. A few kinds of attack arrows, a quiver that makes nonmagicals, warp walk pants.”

LJay nodded again, once. “That’d do it. No way to deal with one-face shields, can’t avoid a teleport assassin, zero perception sets, no plan for huge physicals–”

“Now hang on, that’s the tank’s job!”

“And if the adds collapse a building on you?”

“They don’t do that!”

“They do if you give them the time to organize, and in a t-one or t-two raid, you do. We can’t just run through at full speed, slaughtering everything, cause that would run us right into the traps that y’all just read about in advance. Even with being careful like that, there’s shit like the ogre we ran into with Novsha that dropped that rune that’s such an issue. Contact-based Nullify Barrier. Sure, if your tanks are prepared for it, they can have something else ready! But there’s only so much you can have on you, and variance in defense becomes important. If she hadn’t had… delay and redirect?”

“Absorb proper. I was specialized in it.”

“That, instead, we might not have wiped but we would definitely have gotten close.”

“It’s why people think there’s more linebreaking at the front than there actually is,” Deyana said, “Because sometimes the DPS is the one with the right defensive scissors to the enemy’s offensive paper, so while they’re specced for damage the raid gets more use out of them taking a few hits, instead.”

It would have been better to let him figure out a lot of that on his own, if he was going to, but she had to admit that jumping him forwards like this would be useful if he could pick it up quickly. Occasionally a short push like this was all that was needed for a player to shift their tier, and it was a known downside of the open secrets that occasionally someone who could have been good got trapped in the easy thinking of tier three.

Not that it happened often.

Novsha had been party to it before; people who got handed enough information to start looking into designing their own frontline build, only to get smacked down over and over by thinking they’d figured out some invincible trick nobody else got. The real trick, in her opinion, was just finding people whose particular weaknesses were covered by your own strengths and vice versa until you had a web that was extremely difficult to do anything about.

That was the theoretical purpose of the DPS/Tank/Support trichotomy even in tier three, but that idea oversimplified the reality to the point of being difficult to plan with.

Don looked like he wanted to argue more, but he eventually just shook his head. “I feel like everyone should know that.”

Deyana, Geria, and LJay all exchanged dubious looks, but none of them met Don’s eye.

“Uh, sorry though, LJay. I don’t really know what sort of thing you need, or how and how much you’re hiding, so… I didn’t make you anything.” Deyana redirected.

“’s no problem. Ly- Geria’s been keeping me updated IRL, so I’ve got a set for our levels set up. It’s no shield tank, but…” he reached behind him as though grabbing for something, then pulled out a tiny, strangely proportioned dagger. It confused her for a second, but then Deyana laughed.

“Gotta fit through doors with a sword you can bind?”

LJay smirked. “Well, I figured we’re trying to show off, so…”

He let the shrink enchantment drop entirely, revealing the comically-large buster-style sword in its full glory. Almost a foot across and five-and-change long, it was a ridiculous monster of a thing in a style that very few people would ever use.

It also showed off a hell of a lot of skill if he could manage it.

“Got the defenses to match?”

“Don’t really need it, given the stupid level difference, but the sword’s got absorb and convert on lightning, fire, and light above a threshold, then I’ve got a chestpiece with null phys.”

“Lower weight, inertia bidirectional?”

“I might have splurged just a little.”

Deyana just raised an eyebrow at him.

“I may have gotten Compensate Inertia, wielder only.”

Geria covered her mouth, turning to the side and shaking slightly, while Deyana snorted. “Leaning all the way into it, huh?”

“Hell yeah! Th’fuck else am I gonna get to do somethin’ stupid as this?” He lifted the sword in one hand, edge parallel to and pointing at the ceiling for a second before the tip started tilting back towards the ground and he brought the whole thing down. “Oof. Lower weight, not none.”

“LJay…”

“No shit.”

“You’re using that?” Don squawked. “Like, actually using it? What the fuck?”

Deyana was fastest on the uptake. “We’re trying to go unrecognized. Would you think that’s a tier one raider?”

Don’s conflicted face told her he’d picked it up, at least.

“I’ve got a place picked out if y’all’re good. Got a quest for it at the DMQ, too. Green-yellow portal break up in the highlands, they want a party to do dust collection.”

“Green break? Aren’t there a lot of people there?” Deyana asked.

“There’s a teal break in the area. I checked the lists and it’ll just be us and some guildless rando.”

“We should go, then. What did you list us as?”

“Our names, but private. Levels anonymized to ten on us and completely on the other two. Make the guilds think there’s no point.”

“Thanks for that. Let’s talk strategy on the way, cause there’s no way we’re able to do what Geria and I have been doing. Gonna have to do actual party strategy and everything.”

LJay chuckled. “Good luck! I’ll listen, but that ain’t my job.”