The Only Thing I Can Upgrade is Strength chapter 24

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I had become level 5, so it was time to think about a class. Well, past time perhaps. “How do you even get a class?” I remembered that classes could come from many places. Sometimes there would be a temple involved, if classes came from the gods. I didn’t know whether there were gods- not to disparage Kantrilla, but nobody had told me anything except that there were blessings presumably from them.

“You learn it,” Kantrilla replied. I didn’t find that terribly helpful by itself, but she continued, “Either on your own, or with someone to train you. Usually you go to someone with the class to learn from them.”

“You can gain a class on your own? How does that work?”

“I don’t know. Most people don’t do it that way. However, it has to be possible because otherwise nobody would have classes. It’s apparently more common in class advancement, since there are less people qualified to train someone… Did your parents not teach you about this stuff?” How could they have taught me about it? My parents were from Earth. I had only been brought to this world a few months prior. “Ah… sorry if I brought up something bad.”

I shook my head. It might seem like my parents were dead or something, but that was me, probably. “It’s okay. I grew up in… a remote village. We didn’t know much about the outside world, and there was very little… natural experience there.” This was mostly true. If you considered a remote village to be another world, and the ‘outside world’ to be this world. As far as I could tell, there was completely no ‘natural experience’ there. At least, it hadn’t resulted in levels, and I didn’t seem to have brought any with me- though that could be explained in several ways.

—–

I had thought about classes some before, but it hadn’t mattered too much. The only ones I really knew existed for sure were Cleric and Barbarian. Since I wanted to find something suited to me, I went to look for Sgar. Something that worked well with a high Strength would be best, and even if I didn’t necessarily want to be a Barbarian, Sgar would know more about the right types of classes. “What are good classes that benefit from Strength?”

“Oh?” He raised an eyebrow, “Finally level 5?”

“It hasn’t been that long, really.” Kantrilla was only level 6 and she’d lived in this world for 20… ish… years. A few months for one level less wasn’t bad, even if leveling got much more difficult. Granted, she obviously didn’t go out and fight monsters much… but I was still missing 20 years of natural experience gain.

“I guess not. You just started… very underleveled.” Sgar stroked his chin, which caused his biceps to flex. Or maybe he just did that for fun… “One of the best classes for getting value from Strength is Barbarian, of course. Even so, it’s good to balance things wisely. Constitution, Toughness, and even Dexterity are important for barbarians. As for mental stats… they’re not so important since we don’t rely on mana much. It’s not worth distributing any points to, but that doesn’t mean we can afford to avoid thinking. Those that don’t think just die easily. As for other classes, anything from the warrior classification benefits greatly from Strength. Barbarians, Paladins, Rangers… the list goes on. Even the Archer class needs a lot of Strength.”

“Archers need Strength? What about Dexterity?”

Sgar shrugged. “As long as there aren’t terribly adverse conditions or very fast enemies, Strength is more important. It’s not easy to pull back the string on a good longbow. If you can, then it doesn’t matter if your opponent is wearing plate mail or a dragon, because your arrow can pierce him. Well, dragons are a bit of an extreme example- you’d need a very powerful bow and sturdy arrows for that to work. Dexterity still matters, but if you don’t have enough Strength you can’t hold the bow steady while drawn anyway.”

“Can we go over some of the classes in more detail?”

“Of course. This is an important decision. It’s a real pain to change a class later… it’s much less time and effort to get it right the first time.”

—–

In the end I narrowed down my choices significantly. It was important to find a class that didn’t rely too much on attributes other than Strength. It was impossible to find any that would be useful with only Strength of course. At least, not among combat classes. If I wanted to go into heavy labor, I could be a Lifter… and I would be very good at it. It hadn’t occurred to me that there could be classes for such mundane things… but it wasn’t like the entire world revolved around fighting monsters. Just a surprisingly large part of it.

For classes useful as an adventurer, I needed classes that increased natural growth for the most important supporting attributes, other than Strength. For example, Barbarians grew quickly in Strength, somewhat faster in Toughness and Constitution, and just slightly faster than without the class in Dexterity. Their mental attributes grew more slowly- though Sgar admitted that could be due to them not even trying to train them.

Paladins were primarily melee fighters that used magic- mostly healing, protection, and enhancement magic. They relied on a balance of both mental and physical statistics, though high Strength was important for carrying weapons and using heavy armor. Strength was the most beneficial attribute, but the others were still important. The training speed in them was not particularly quick, which is why the weaker attributes would usually end up with more points distributed to them. Unfortunately, I couldn’t do that, so any such class was out of consideration.

In the end, there were a number of classes that could work. Barbarians were heavily into Strength, but a class such as Soldier was well balanced and could work as well. The Archer class was an interesting idea- if things went well I would have no need for Toughness or Constitution- but that required finishing off every enemy at long range or having a front line with me. Not that I would suddenly become incapable of fighting in melee, but if I wasn’t training my Toughness and Constitution, I could get into a bad situation. There were classes like the Ranger who focused on both melee and ranged combat, as well as other useful skills. Unfortunately, the more utility a class had, the lower the attribute growth usually was. In that case, something like Weapon Specialist was better, as it focused more on the purely combat aspects. I briefly considered a magic based class, but with only a high Willpower, I wasn’t particularly suited for any of them, and my Strength would be wasted. The exception was Cleric, who would be the more magical side of a paladin. In that case, my mental attributes would grow naturally better on their own, ignoring my physical stats. I would have to train them, but Strength would be trivial. Sgar mentioned that there were probably more niche classes that he didn’t know about, or possibly some that hadn’t been discovered or were forgotten. If I continued to train in a certain way I might pick up a class naturally, but my growth would be slower until that point, and I might not get quite what I wanted. In that case, I would have to change to something I picked anyway. The whole thing certainly left me with enough to think about for a while.

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