Theoretically the Strongest Class
In Haven Online, death is real death.
Haven is another reality, a world lived in by roughly as many NPCs as there are people on Earth, and Windy had put real weight on the value of a life. She had no desire to watch endlessly resurrecting users treat Haven World lightly, or turn it into a playground where they vented their feelings.
In an ordinary game, you die and you come back. Plenty of them impose no penalty at all; at the harsh end, you drop a few items and that is the whole of it. Haven does not work that way. Death is death. It is not death in the real world, but the character does not return, and every bit of money and time sunk into it vanishes with it. If that is not death, what is?
It is still a game, of course, so a single life does not strip you of everything. If it did, Haven could never have held this kind of popularity, no matter how much it felt like a second reality and no matter how many god-tier systems it had bolted on. Hardcore mode is the one feature players flinch from in any game.
Up through level 30, you can still die and resurrect for free at a temple, the same as in other games. After that you get exactly one free resurrection, and from then on you pay a revival fee scaled to your class grade and level. The official excuse is a donation to the god who granted you a new life. The sum tracks the influence you wield inside Haven, so the higher your class grade and the higher your level, the more carefully you have to treat dying.
There are abuse cases, too. Even under level 30, a user branded a criminal can be made to pay several times the normal revival fee. Complicated stuff like that, though, I will set aside.
For all those reasons, anything meant to keep you alive costs a fortune. Potions, especially. The potions you could scoop off the roadside in other games go for shocking prices in Haven. You can get them as a chance reward for clearing a dungeon; I myself picked up a single lowest-grade health potion, and even that would sell for about twenty thousand won. A lowest-grade potion that, over ten seconds, restores one percent of your health per second. Ten percent, total.
A high-grade health potion that fills sixty percent of your health in three seconds runs past thirty million won. Supreme-grade health potions are practically never listed, for much the same reason as Supreme Holy Water.
The moment you cross from health potions into mana potions, the price doubles. I do not really know why. I understand health potions punching a hole through the sky. Resurrection is so dangerous that demand climbs while supply stays thin, and the price blasts through the ceiling. But mana potions? Why?
You almost never die just because you are out of mana. Recovery is not good enough to let you cycle skills forever, but it is also not so bad that an empty bar locks you out of them entirely. To be precise, mana regenerates at a flat ten percent per minute. Combat does not roll on without a break, so it sits on an awkward border: some people call it adequate, others call it short.
For me, it was endlessly short. So I bought some.
"Seriously. Why are mana potions even more expensive?"
Intermediate Mana Potion (30)
A lowest-grade mana potion restores 30 mana and costs fifty thousand won. A low-grade restores 100 mana for three hundred fifty thousand. An intermediate restores 250 mana for three million. From high-grade up they restore a percentage rather than a flat amount, so I did not buy those. Right now, the intermediate looked more efficient.
My mana pool sits at exactly 245, so one intermediate mana potion brings all of it back within five seconds.
I grumbled and bought them anyway. There was no reason not to. Recovery potions can only be obtained as dungeon-clear rewards, so the sale price climbs without limit, but money spent on a chance to hunt in comfort is not money wasted. And in a situation like this one, spending three million won to get past a crisis was pure profit.
Grrraaaah—
The moon bear boss thrashed. The burn does not stack, but that is only a side effect. The base damage of Fireball alone is plenty brutal. Every time the slow wore off and it tried to take a step, I threw an Ice Arrow and followed it with a Fireball.
Exactly two intermediate mana potions.
The moon bear boss went down.
"Damn. Three-star's pretty nasty."
It had not been hard. It also had not been as easy as I had thought. I had expected it to be over in a flash.
"Think this one's gonna roll four-star?"
"Whoa."
In an instant, I was level 5. They had not been lying when they said a difficult boss hands out a mountain of experience.
The chat filled with the same talk you get around a field boss.
Sweeping a dungeon alone is its own crisp hit of vicarious satisfaction, but a field boss is a fight a crowd shows up for. Dominating one of those would be a thrill all its own.
"A field boss? That does sound fun."
The viewers were fully heated, and the mood caught me too.
"One sec..."
But sometimes you have to take a breath.
"There are still a ton of moon bears left. Be a waste of EXP, right?"
The boss was dead, so the exit had appeared. I ignored it and went looking for the moon bears.
"Hey, little guys. Where are you?"
The experience was simply too sweet. I could not help it.
While Kim Siwoo wandered the dungeon, finishing off whatever moon bears remained, the community boards lit up with another heated debate.
It was a meaningless debate, really. Every back-and-forth rested on a single assumption: Kim Siwoo's wallet is unlimited.
Which meant the Dragon Words Mage was doomed to be a flawless class with no weaknesses, and even the side arguing against it could not find anything to push back with. In truth, the same law applies not only to the Dragon Words Mage but to every class of four stars and above.
Spend money, and you get stronger. Spend more money, and you get stronger still.
Pulling a four-star is already a problem, but the upkeep after you pull one costs even more. So much more that users who lucked into one still end up quitting. Money matters that much. None of it applies to Kim Siwoo, so the class is broken without limit.
So instead of hunting for weaknesses, the thread veered into running hypothetical simulations.
In low-level dungeons, monsters that attack from range are rare. One or two at most. That many can be sniped with magic, so anything dangerous enough to deal real, direct damage has to be raid-scale or larger.
Piece by piece, it was not as if there was no way at all.
Sure enough, Haven's users let out a sigh of admiration.
Call it the joy of discovering that even the Dragon Words Mage, which everyone had thought perfect, had a weakness after all. Everyone was satisfied, right up until someone threw cold water on it.
In the end, the what-if had only one conclusion.
The debate fizzled out, and when word came that he had left the three-star dungeon and gone into a four-star, the boards went quiet again.