novel-books Chapter 12 This is hardly worthy of being called handcrafted equipment?
Chapter 12 This is hardly worthy of being called handcrafted equipment?
Lu Yan bid farewell to Zhao Leiguang and headed straight for the base's intelligence hall.
A huge light screen floats in the center – [Blue Star Extraordinary Equipment Ranking].
The list is meticulously divided into categories based on position, rank, and country of origin. In the top twenty sections, the American flag and the Aurora Borealis flag alternate, with the red star logo rarely seen.
Opening the global weapons rankings, the top item is a composite longbow called "Gabriel's Sigh".
Location: White Eagle Empire.
Quality: Legendary (handmade to order).
Lu Yan opened the detailed panel, his gaze lingering on the basic attributes section for two seconds.
Physical Attack Power: 420-610
[Additional Attributes: Increases Anemo DMG by 15% and Attack Speed by 20%]
[Exclusive Term: There is a very low probability that shooting will trigger a miniature storm.]
"This dares to call itself the world's number one handcrafted equipment?" Lu Yan pulled up a chair and sat down, tapping his fingers on the armrest to create a rhythm.
Among the hundreds of top-tier accounts he had handled in his previous life, this kind of panel data could only be considered a substandard product during the initial development and transition period.
Leaving aside those god-tier mirror-level artifacts that break through the sky, even a barely usable finished physical bow has a base attack power of at least 900 to 1300, with the stats arranged as [percentage physical damage] stacked with [additional point damage], plus a [double damage critical hit rate] as a safety net.
The item that dominates the rankings in the White Eagle Empire has scattered entries and logical inconsistencies.
Combining wind elemental damage with attack speed might look flashy, but it doesn't actually maximize the pure damage output of physical damage stats. They have no idea what multiplicative stacking is.
Lu Yan withdrew from the list and accessed the equipment engineering database within the Dragon Guard.
After spending two hours studying the basic theories, he understood how this world was created.
The underlying logic is exactly the same as the item extraction and stitching system of the loot-hunting game from my previous life. Equipment consists of a "base" and "affixes".
To obtain a top-tier piece of equipment, relying solely on wild gear dropped by monsters is far from sufficient, as the attributes are often random and unpredictable—for example, the unique staff from yesterday had a useless attribute called "melee slash damage bonus."
Truly good equipment must be custom-made: select a high-item-level, high-potential blank base, and then use special tools to [remove] and [reset] the attributes.
The difficulty lies in obtaining the materials.
To obtain a specific high-level attribute, such as "increased maximum health", the blacksmith must purchase a large number of scrap items with that attribute from the market.
Put them into the decomposition table, crush and purify them, and there is a certain probability of extracting an engraved stone with that affix.
Once you've collected all the desired engraving stones, then you can use them to engrave on a good base.
Besides being extremely difficult to collect, there's also a very high rejection rate during the process of adding attributes. Adding a second attribute might overwrite the first; adding a third attribute might even completely ruin the entire base.
In summary: This is a "gameplay" that uses massive amounts of gold coins and top-tier equipment as bait, leading to endless spending and gambling.
Without substantial human and financial resources, one wouldn't even qualify to build a basic structure. The reason the White Eagle Empire was able to systematically assemble such a powerful equipment setup was due to the continuous supply of high-level equipment and rare materials from its several regularly occurring S-rank secret realms—a result achieved through sheer sheer volume.
Lu Yan touched his chin.
Probability? Repulsion? Scrap?
For Lu Yan, who has a grasp of the basic logic of equipment crafting and the aura that increases the drop rate of equipment by a hundredfold, this is not a problem. He only needs to spend time to obtain a large number of the fixed equipment he needs from the maps of various designated equipment.
He took out his phone and dialed Xiao Qianyu's number.
After two beeps, the call connected. The background noise on the other end was a bit noisy, like someone practicing at a shooting range.
"Lu Yan? What's wrong?" Xiao Qianyu's voice was crisp and clear.
"I...I'm short of money." Lu Yan said bluntly, "I need a lot of base materials and equipment. How about it, can you help me get them?"
After a few seconds of silence on the other end of the line, followed by a few whispers, Xiao Qianyu's tone became more probing: "That batch of top-tier C-grade secret realm items you handed over yesterday, even a small fraction of it would be enough for you to live on for ten lifetimes. What do you need so many of these for?"
"Let's build equipment." Lu Yan pushed aside the data board beside him. "I just looked at the global weapon rankings, and the longbow that the White Eagle Empire has at number one is really not up to par. I want to give our first squad a fresh set of gear. The frontline dungeons are for siege warfare, and going in with what we have won't provide enough firepower."
"Crafted equipment?" Xiao Qianyu raised her voice. She knew how murky this was. "Those old professors at the National Academy of Sciences, with billions in funding every year, waste tens of thousands of pieces of dark gold equipment, and the number of finished products they produce is only a handful. Are you sure you want to step into this minefield?"
"I never do anything I'm not sure I can do," Lu Yan said calmly. "I plan to make handmade weapons for Lin Chuxue, Zhao Leiguang, and Wen Yue first."
The noise from the firing range has stopped.
For a full half minute, only a faint static could be heard from the communicator. This matter involved far too many people, requiring the mobilization of national strategic resources, and the approval process had always been cumbersome.
"How confident are you?" Xiao Qianyu asked.
"It's twice as good as those shabby items at the top of the White Eagle Rankings, that's the bottom line." Lu Yan's offer was steady, accurate, and ruthless.
"Wait for me for ten minutes."
The call ended. Seven minutes later, the communicator screen lit up, and an electronic authorization letter with an official red header was transmitted directly to you. This was followed by a short message: [Chief Li's exact words: Give me as much as you want. Dismantle the original research team; all funding will be provided to you.]
Looking at the screen, Lu Yan chuckled for no apparent reason. Working with smart people is so much easier.
With funding and materials secured, the rest was purely a matter of brainpower.
Lu Yan locked himself in his dormitory, spread out three large holographic projection panels in front of him, and retrieved the professional data, skill cycle data, and existing attribute weaknesses of all members of the first squad.
Time is of the essence; the frontline dungeon will open in a week. It's unrealistic to have everyone change their outfits, so we can only focus on the key points first.
He set his sights on the three core members of the team.
The first one is the heavy armored warrior, Zhao Leiguang.
This two-meter-tall giant is the team's defensive line; if he can't hold them off, the entire backline will suffer. Zhao Lei's current epic build focuses purely on stacking health and armor.
Lu Yan typed rapidly on the keyboard.
Simply stacking meat will inevitably lead to death against high armor penetration mechanics; a different approach is needed.
He established a shield-based build framework. His equipment no longer focused on armor, but instead on shield enhancement, with the core affixes being: [Convert 50% of physical damage taken into shield value] and [Immunity to some abnormal statuses while the shield is active]. The higher the enemy's attack frequency, the thicker his shield becomes as long as it doesn't break the shield's threshold.
The second one is the archer, Wen Yue.
As a ranged physical main DPS, Wen Yue's wind-type skills have high-frequency attacks, but the damage per hit is severely insufficient. Previously, when facing the level 40 Insect Queen, she still had to rely on Lin Chuxue's spell cleanup.
"Composite longbows aren't pure enough. If we're going to build them, we need heavy armor-piercing ones."
Lu Yan sketched a heavily armored sniper crossbow model with an exaggerated structure on the projection. His attribute planning for Wen Yue completely abandoned fancy elemental additions, focusing only on extreme values: [Increased Physical Damage], [Attack Forces Ignore Target Armor Defense], [Increased Critical Hit Rate], and [Increased Critical Hit Damage]. He wanted to equip Wen Yue with a single-soldier cannon capable of penetrating infantry vehicle armor. Even Gabriel's sigh from White Eagle was utterly inadequate for this set of data.
The third one is the magician, Lin Chuxue.
Magic-based damage dealers have always been the most expensive to build. Lin Chuxue's dual-elemental burst damage is extremely strong, but her weaknesses lie in mana sustain and casting animations. The conventional approach is to add a mana-reducing affix. Lu Yan scoffed at this.
He spent half an hour searching through the materials library and settled on an extremely obscure term that was even considered to have side effects: [Soul Body]: Maximum health becomes 1, all health points are converted into shield points, and immunity to all abnormal statuses.
Then pair it with [Blood Mage]: All skills consume a percentage of health, skill cooldowns are removed, and health will not be reduced to 0.
Because it's a fixed team, there's no need to consider individual weaknesses or skill limitations, allowing them to maximize the potential of Infinite Firepower.
With Su Yunqing, a top-tier healer with an epic healing codex, Lin Chuxue could unleash those large-scale AOE skills that require long casting times like a machine gun.
Equipped with a one-handed staff fully buffed with [Increased Casting Speed], [Increased Range], and [Faster Casting Speed], it transforms into a mobile turret.