T/N: Let me know if you REALLY want me to explain the game terms…
Eraha Online’s class-change structure was simple. Once you chose a race, that race’s racial trait bonus was always active. Yana got Wind, Kiran got Fire, Marr got Water, Terran got Earth, and Divar received modifiers for two attributes, Light and Darkness.
In truth, the modifiers weren’t dramatic, so unless you were the type who refused to forgo even sub–hundreds-place damage bonuses, most people just picked the race they wanted.
After choosing race and attribute at creation, you hit level 20 and could advance into a class. Back when Yeonjun was playing in earnest, there weren’t that many classes—about two per attribute.
Now… he scrolled down and opened the game overview on the website. Since his department transfer, one more had been added, making it neatly three per attribute.
Four tanks, four healers, five ranged DPS, five melee DPS, five magic DPS, five physical DPS. The balance reeked of a determination to make the ratios perfect. Of course, that was just the number of options.
Among players, which jobs counted as “tier-1 DPS,” “tier-1 healer,” “tier-1 tank,” and so on was long settled, and population per class was wildly uneven. Among them, Flamer—Yeonjun’s Fire-attribute, magic-type melee DPS—was, then as now, a 0-tier with no rivals for raw damage potential.
Naturally, being 0-tier did not only mean 0-tier in a positive sense.
[Server Board: (Ventus server)]
[Title: Top 5 classes to insta-kick if they crawl into your pug]
[Body]
5th: All classes
4th: Don’t hinder clears
3rd: Because balance has been adjusted,
2nd: There’s no reason to expel them.
1st: Flamer
Ignis pumped everyone full of Flamer-copium so you all forgot, but Flamer was never a class made for human players.
It’s magic DPS, so you melt in a few hits, but it’s melee, so even just dodging ground AOEs is hell-mode.
Other melee have enough base defense to self-sustain after a few hits, but Flamers—never mind that you melt like a perfectly seared ribeye— their damage cycle is f**king awful because it hinges on maintaining stacks.
To throw sword aura you back off to mid-range, then re-engage for burst, string combos, and constantly keep stacks from dropping—that’s the key but maintaining stacks while doing that spacing is seriously f**king hard.
It makes you wonder if they even intended anyone to play this; blink once and your stacks fall off and the first thing out of your mouth is a curse.
If the party has StH (Storm Haste) to buff you so maintaining stacks is easy, it’s a bit better, but otherwise, unless you’re top 5% rankers, most people can’t keep them up and let stacks drop.
In the hands of a god, it’s a crazy hybrid DPS no other class can match, sure, but for normal mortals below heaven-tier, stop the hybrid-DPS nonsense and play something else.
Even if one sneaks into a raid, it’s easier on everyone to toss them out like dirty laundry.
Unless you want to watch some idiot rub up to keep stacks and then die.
[Comments]
- True. Without StH, this isn’t a class made for humans.
- Look at rankers 1–10 all pairing with StH for buddy DPS—says it all… The class is incomplete without StH to begin with.
ㄴ Is StH synergy that impactful?
ㄴ More than impactful—since Traitor Malleus final chapter epic first clear, all but one top-10 raid teams run Flamer and StH bundled. Having or not having StH swings things too much.
- Did Ignis run with StH? Didn’t Flammer not have StH?
ㄴ They didn’t have StH, but they had WinB.
ㄴ Is StH interchangeable with WinB?
ㄴ WinB can’t maintain stacks, but it can give a damage-increase buff.
ㄴ Ah, so if you don’t have a Flamer, at least bring WinB along.
ㄴ Yep. Without even WinB, your damage potential drops off a cliff.
ㄴ Ignis kept stacks without StH—textbook of virtue…
ㄴ This is the problem when a single named player is too good—f**king devs never fix it.
- Thoughts on a friend leveling StH just to duo-DPS with your Flamer for hardcore?
ㄴ That’s basically a proposal…
ㄴ With that level of devotion, you should date them.
ㄴ Impossible without ulterior motives.
ㄴ Ha?
ㄴ Sadly, she’s a woman.
ㄴ Why is that sad?
ㄴ I’m a woman too…
ㄴ Ah…
Because its damage ceiling was high, it was correspondingly hard to pilot—and that only stoked Yeonjun’s fire. Challenges shine brighter the harder they are, and the euphoria when you pull them off is, needless to say, intoxicating.
The fact that he maintained legendary records without even running StH only made him an even more superhuman hero.
Storm Haste, a Wind-attribute magic synergy DPS (Damage Per Second), was said to be in high demand for hardcore once you’d leveled one, so it got “hired” often but for specific reasons.
First off, the leveling difficulty was really a pain in the ass. Being synergy DPS, it was understandable that its solo damage efficiency wasn’t great, but it was also a total paper fish. If a magic-melee like Flamer died this easily, how could a synergy magic ranged DPS be sturdy?
For Flamers, deaths had relatively clear causes e.g., you tried to keep stacks with melee combos, failed to dodge a ground AOE, and died. So if you prioritized survival over DPS, you could at least lower your death rate. Storm Haste had no such answer.
Truly no answer. If physical damage hit you without a healer, you just died.
To avoid dying, you either needed divine control to minimize all incoming damage by movement, or you plastered yourself with every survival buff and played a spoon-duel with the mob, panting and barely winning.
So it’s no wonder people say leveling StH to pair-DPS with a Flamer is basically a marriage proposal.
Well, anyway, I’m not playing StH, so who cares.
Yeonjun planned to advance into Flamer again this time. He wouldn’t go as far as hardcore, but he still needed to level, so it was better to pick what he was best at. With that thought, he entered the tutorial field with a new character whose customization was unremarkable at a glance.
(Nacht) Signiel Lv 1 (Beginner)
The beginner tutorial was so kind it made the era when Yeonjun started feel like face-planting on bare ground, and after doing the basic quests to level 5, it was about time to log off.
“What did I even do for it to already be midnight…”
It really felt like he’d done nothing.
Swallowing the urge to beat up the version of himself that had scolded Crayon, he quit the game and flopped onto the bed. As the PC powered down with logout, spun its fans ever more quietly, Yeonjun was soon left alone in silence. The monitor went dark, and in the studio the only sounds were the neighbor’s water running in the bathroom and the fridge humming. It was an unbearable stillness.
When he was young or at least when he’d just started college, if you’d asked him to picture himself ten years later, he’d have imagined a more respectable, fulfilling life than this: a girlfriend that others would envy, steadily preparing for marriage, the adults around him placing hopes on him.
With his academics and his brains, surely he’d make it into a major firm. Recognized at work, promoted quickly, scouting a newlywed place with his parents’ support at his back—unlike that flight of fancy, the current Yeonjun was nothing but shabby.
Dating? When was the last time he even had a girlfriend… If his memory was right, second year of high school. He’d poured freshman and sophomore years of college into games, put off dating until after the army… and then his parents’ situation blew up and his pink business shuttered right along with it.
When he passed OpenGames’ open recruitment, he did get asked here and there if he wanted to try blind dates, but fear won out. When the peace he had only just regained could shatter any time, there was no room to meet someone new and start dating. He told himself he’d start once he was more settled at work and sure his father wouldn’t relapse and then came the demotion. Naturally, dating fell far down the priority list again.
Smacking his bitter lips, Yeonjun wormed under the covers.
I’ll log back in tomorrow and clear more tutorial… First I need to think what to do when I get to work.
The routine was fixed anyway, but if he got suddenly seconded to another studio’s tasks, he might not finish his own, so mapping out the next day in his head beforehand helped. He lined up his schedule from clock-in to clock-out, then prepared to switch off thought.
Just as he closed his eyes and settled his breathing, a whisper he’d seen earlier popped into his head.
[Whisper/Dohaesal: I’m a real, real fan of Ignis too.]
A “real fan,” huh. What is there to hype about someone whose glory days ended more than ten years ago? The world was full of things to love in place of a bygone named player. He wasn’t ungrateful that someone still remembered him… but the burden weighed heavier.
He didn’t want to show what a shabby adult he’d become. He had no idea how old Dohaesal was, where he lived, or what he did, but sometimes, not knowing is a mercy.
If the person calling himself such a “real fan” were told that his idol had fumbled a gear swap, panicked, and jumped around in his underwear like some uncle—it would hurt. Thinking that, he felt it was indeed good he’d denied it.
Let’s just sleep quickly.
Before he sank into pointless late-night emotions and strange thoughts, he needed to fall asleep fast.
While Yeonjun was urging himself toward sleep, things he never imagined were unfolding in real time inside the game.
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