Chapter 39: The Players' Tactics

"Hey everyone, xX_ShadowBlade_Xx here >:D

New thread from yours truly. My last one logged our losses and casualties over the past few days, and as the numbers made painfully clear, our push has been brutal beyond belief. 😭😭😭😭😭

But every bit of it paid off! We have FULLY cleared out the kobold warriors that were swarming around Kobold Chief Kramo!

Just like we suspected: those kobold warriors do NOT respawn!

Actually, this goes all the way back to when we were hunting subterranean spiders — we noticed the ones near the entrance thinning out, and we had to push into the Spider Nest proper to find more. Even back then somebody floated the theory that mobs in this game might just stay dead. Meaning: we could farm the subterranean spiders into literal extinction!

If that's true, then this game's design is on a whole other plane from anything we imagined. Not the classic loop of farm mobs, make money, get gear, repeat — but a world where the players collectively drive the game's story forward, where everything we do permanently reshapes the game world. Farming spiders to extinction. Maybe even every BOSS being one-of-a-kind.

If the game really works like that, my wrists ache just thinking about it — because it means every single hour I'm offline, I might be missing major story beats happening in the game world.

Then again, gameplay like that is way more real, way more immersive. It's something all of us beta testers have already felt in our bones — Dungeon: The Eternal Kingdom is basically our second life.

Okay, enough gushing. Down to BOSS business. After several pushes, we've confirmed Kobold Chief Kramo's attack behavior.

Against a lone enemy, he generally goes straight to the overhead hammer smash. When a crowd swarms in close, he switches to horizontal hammer sweeps. His other attacks — including but not limited to kicks, bites, headbutts, elbow strikes, and body slams — do minimal damage and pose basically zero threat, so we're skipping those.

The real threat right now is that hammer. Smash or sweep, one hit is basically a guaranteed crippling; catch it on a vital spot — head, chest — and you're dead on impact.

The hammer's reach is also two meters — inside two meters, there is no dodging it. So no greedy damage: hit once, then run. Melee is at a massive disadvantage here, but we've got no choice, melee is all we have. Our short-bow players are, no offense, currently a team-killing liability.

From NovelPhoenix comes the author's published chapter, not this unapproved copy; reading the chapter there supports the person who wrote it.

With zero healing on hand, killing this BOSS is a race against the clock: put him down before we run out of bodies.

We could also grind him down slowly — current findings say Kramo's wounds don't heal after he disengages, which is refreshingly realistic. But if a straight kill is on the table, then as a matter of beta-tester pride, we want to beat him fair and square. Worst case, we can always wear him down after.

To take Kramo down clean, we're mobilizing every player who can fight — a seventy-man raid, split into two squads: the tank squad and the DPS squad. The tank squad feeds bodies into the meat grinder one at a time; the DPS squad attacks from every angle, rushing in for a hit during each attack window and then bailing at top speed. See the tactics diagram.

(tactics diagram)

Also, Kramo wears full armor — anywhere the armor covers, our attacks do nothing. Outside the armor, he's got scales — our hits land weak there, but at least they land. Probably.

That's the plan. We're heading out right now — wish us luck! :D"

While Sharlock was browsing the players' heated forum debate, the seventy-strong raid team was already on the move. And it wasn't really just the seventy — most of the players who couldn't fight had tagged along behind them.

This was Dungeon: The Eternal Kingdom's first-ever BOSS, AND a main-quest BOSS at that. Nobody wanted to miss the push — and hey, the game never said you couldn't spectate. Who knows, maybe spectating is exactly how you trigger hidden storylines or hidden quests?

And so, sparing the odd player still offline, everyone mobilized — the whole squawking, jabbering horde of them pouring out of the dungeon and toward the lonely figure of Kobold Chief Kramo.

Back in the dungeon, the only ones left were Sharlock, Blacksmith Goldmane, the little pixie, newbie trainer Moros — and the player 【Charlie】.

The player with 【Charlie】 floating over her head was out watering the flowerbeds, can in hand. This player had planted a whole lot of flowers — most of them gathered from outside — and Sharlock couldn't have named a single one, but the nectar and petals made perfectly good food for the little pixie.

"Is that life-skills player not going to the BOSS fight?"

Sharlock, watching 【Charlie】 among the flowerbeds, asked Bru about it.

"Life-skills players don't care much for combat or gear. If you put out some life-skill equipment — fishing rods and whatnot — that crowd might put in some effort." Bru continued: "This player comes to grind coins for food every day, and pays other players in copper to bring him back seeds and assorted subterranean plants from outside. So far, though, only a few flowers have actually taken."

Sharlock nodded at Bru's words, left the flowerbed life-skills player to his flowers, headed back to the dungeon core hall, and started scrying on the players' first BOSS fight.

He was pretty stoked to see how they'd do, honestly.