My eyes blinked and I was suddenly in an empty, sprawling plain. It was beautiful and I looked around for a few minutes. With my gawking at the scenery out of the way, I thought about the map. It quickly popped into my mind and I sighed out loud. This setting did not track at all with what I was told by Suzie or what I had read myself in the developers' blogs. I had to look at the menu and look at where I was. All I could see was a hazy view as if all of the world was covered in a thin mist. Looking closer, what seemed to be a dirt paths was a dull lavender and gray path with translucent white globs of ooze everywhere. It did not look very dangerous, but I was not going to go over to touch it. It was just unsettling to me. When I saw that I was in an entirely different world, I was upset. "Shit! Where the hell am I then!?" I said as I bit down on my thumbnail in distress. I looked again and saw that the "world" I was in was the Spirit Realm. It was pretty self explanatory. It was where all of the spirit NPC spawned in. As time went on, I checked more. I saw that I was one of them. I was a blade spirit.
There were too many skill trees to max out, so a Player wanting to put points in everything would be a jack of all trades and a master of either one to the detriment of all others, or none but competent in all the basic skills. For example, there were five disciplines: Reach, Power, Speed, Durability and Magic. Reach was the stat that determined how far you could impact and enemy from with your weapon form. Power was the damage output stat. You definitely wanted your hits to do more damage to enemies. Speed was how fast the wielder of the weapon could strike with it. Going faster meant more opportunities to strike. Durability was a really important one. It determined how much damage a weapon could take before breaking. For the Players, it influenced the HP pool we had. Magic was for all of the buffs and special effects one could equip to the weapon to make it truly unique. Magic definitely never hurt anybody when fighting strong enemies. Each perk on the tree had five stars to players to put skill points. Once a star was lit up, the next perk would be unlocked for allocating.
As that was the case, it would take a long time to fill up. I took 5 skill points to fill the first star and 10 more for the second. The third needed 25 stars total. 45 was required for the fourth star. Of course, the fifth star was where all of the game breaking skills were hidden. That was why you needed 70 total stars to unlock it. Given that there were five disciplines, that meant you needed 350 skill points to unlock 5 star skills in each one. Each level only gave 1 skill point. Things were set up to reward the Players that could go the distance. At level 1, the player was given five skill points to allocate. Since it was the first week of the game's big release, there was a perk of having an additional ten skill points. That meant I had fifteen points to allocate in my skill trees. I was really starting to look forward to it. Being able to bypass a whole 10 levels of effort right away was a bit comforting. That also unlocked some perks for me right away if I wanted to put them in certain disciplines. I could also put 3 points into each of them. There were benefits to that as well. I had to choose what to invest these points.
Going for the even split was not a waste, especially in the early game. Each skill point boosted the disciplines. They also all stacked on each other. That was why they ended at 70. Even then, you could do herculean feats for your character. That was for endgame though, unless you stat dumped into one. Then it would be mid game. Of course, at that point, you would be a massive glass cannon. For Power, it was 2% more damage to armed combat. For Speed, it was 2% chance to critical hit for double the base damage. Reach made the blade 1% longer. For the Durability, it was 5% more HP. Magic boosts increased the mana pool by 5%. Putting 3 in each could benefit me in the early game. That was an additional 6% to damage and critical hit, 15% bigger HP and MP pools, and 3% longer blade. I supposed it was as good a start as any. It was not what I was expecting, but I could give it a shot. I would be forgoing any bonus perks for at least 2 levels, but it was still the early game and I could get there in no time with the amount of time that I was already willing to sink in the game.
