SS-Grade Unique Options

Unique options had grades of their own—not stars from one to five, but a ladder running from F all the way to SS.

In a sense, the rates could be even more vicious than the class gacha.

The raw chance of hitting the final grade was actually higher than pulling a five-star. The reroll cost, though, was a different animal entirely. For anyone who had already chased a five-star class, filling one to three stars wouldn't be all that difficult. Even so, the expected price still climbed past the hundred-million-won mark.

"What kind of options are good?"

People fell over themselves to recommend.

At 0.01 percent, the expected rate was one success every ten thousand pulls.

"Is there no auto-roll for this?"

Fortunately, there was.

I decided to just start spinning. The first star. A reroll cost a thousand won—cheap enough that it felt like I was rolling for free.

"Ooh. This is neat."

F-grade, D-grade, C-grade. I skipped them without so much as glancing at the option. What was the point of checking what had come up? I was never going to use those grades. I only needed to look at options worth keeping.

The viewers had already sat through class pulls at a hundred thousand won a spin, so they watched this part with hardly a flicker of interest. They were only waiting to see when something would finally pop.

Had that been about four thousand rolls? The first S-grade unique option appeared. On average, an S-grade was expected around the thousandth pull. This one had taken quite a while.

A unique option was a tattoo you were born with. A class stayed with you for life, and the option driven into it was the performance that proved what that class was worth. The awe came out of me on its own.

"Damn. This is stupid good, right?"

I hadn't played all that many games, but even I knew how broken it was to get 77 percent stronger. The option had a condition stapled to it, sure, but in practice it applied to every skill I used. The chat seemed to feel the same way.

Though, on reflection, their agreement seemed to be a slightly different species of agreement.

I'd heard, before I started rolling, that even the same option at the same grade could come with slightly different numbers depending on the class's grade. Apparently the size of that "slightly" depended on who you asked.

Hmm.

Had I just force-fed the red pill to the hundred thousand people who had somehow ended up stuck watching me? No—by now the audience had climbed past a hundred and fifty thousand.

People already knew a gap existed between grades. Five-star users stayed hidden behind a veil, but plenty of players had managed to snipe a four-star, and an option at that level felt like a disparity you could live with. Sniping a three-star wasn't terribly expensive either. Anyone serious about Haven pulled a three-star as their baseline before they even started.

The difference between three-star and four-star. When you considered how obscene the money gap was, accepting an inborn difference of thirty or forty percent felt understandable enough.

But a five-star was nearly twice as strong as a four-star. The figures were 40 percent and 77 percent—a gap of 37 points—yet set side by side, that was close to double.

A hollow feeling rolled in. People understood. Five-star was king. Of course, knowing that didn't change a thing.

That wasn't the problem.

"I'll pass on this for now?"

The first star's unique option started spinning again. If there was any comfort for the people watching, it was that regression to the mean was finally doing its job for real. I rolled nothing but unique options for nearly two hours. 15,148 times. Counting only the thousand-won cost, that was fifteen million won.

"Didn't even cost that much."

My luck had been good, too.

A damage option—one of the tier-zero class unique options everyone talked about—had come around again.

"I'll go with this?"

I locked the option in.

The first star filled.

"Heh. My luck was kinda bad this time, though, right? It was supposed to show up within ten thousand rolls, and I went way past that."

I said it to viewers who had lost the power of speech in the face of those overwhelming numbers, and a scorching response came roaring back.

Watching that reaction, I became certain that playing with the stream on was the right call. I could spend money all day and still have no idea what was good and what wasn't—no way to tell whether I was spending it properly. When the reaction hit instantly, I could know for sure, and spending the money was fun besides.

"Then shall we head straight into the second?"

Borne along by all that enthusiastic support, I rolled the second star. A reroll there cost ten thousand won. If the same situation as the first repeated, pulling an SS-grade unique option would run me a hundred and fifty million.

"The second one's fine too. It doesn't cost much, so how about I take a shot at a special option?"

There were, people said, a few established formulas for pulling unique options. In a way, that was only natural. Simply hitting an SS was the highest priority, but ordinary users sitting on three stars couldn't help agonizing over which option to slot into each one as they filled them. You could see it in the reroll cost alone, which jumped tenfold every time a star was filled.

Usually the first star went to damage. Loading every star with some flavor of damage option would be the true ideal, but the price climbed with every star, and sooner or later a moment of compromise arrived. Fail to lock damage in first, and your efficiency could end up cut in half. The orthodox play, they said, was to slam an SS-grade—or at the very least an S-grade—damage option into the relatively cheap first star, no exceptions. It was also the most efficient thing you could do.

The second star was a matter of taste. The expected cost there followed the same shape: about ten million won for an S-grade, and somewhere around a hundred million for an SS. If a damage option appeared, you took it. If not, you slotted in whatever utility the class needed. Among mage options, the tier zero was reduced mana consumption.

"I'll try sniping reduced mana cost."

It was an option famous for refusing to show. They even said the odds got worse at the higher grades, which only made me determined to pull it. There had to be a reason it was so rare, and countless mages had already proven as much with their option write-ups.

How much could trying it even cost? The money wasn't the issue. I'd simply been pulling nonstop since the class gacha, all day long, and the fatigue was starting to settle in.

"I'm getting tired, though. Today I'll only pull through the second star and end the stream."

Even with auto-roll, it took a long time. The second star, though, was kind to me.

"Oh."

The option surfaced right around the time my eyelids had begun to drag. My energy had fallen off so hard that all I managed was a dry, clerical little breath of awe. The people watching with me, apparently, were not in the same condition.

I didn't entirely understand it, but I was satisfied.

"I'm ending the stream for now."

I was too tired to enjoy any more of it. I cut the broadcast while the aftertaste was still sweet.