Dragon Slayer Quest
"Our powerful Order of Knights protect the land by hunting the most cunning and evil of beasts... draco draconus, Dragons! The secret of our power is our ancient armor. When one first dons the armor, it is merely metal... however, our armor gains great might as we feed on the spirit of the fierce dragon. Every great Dragon we defeat makes us more powerful. If thou have in thee the will to battle such dangerous beasts, take the quest of the DragonSlayer and join us." -- Galanoth, Head of the Order of DragonSlayers.
The DragonSlayer armor is available at Yulgar's Inn for 300 gold with a level requirement of 5.
To become a DragonSlayer, one would have to accept Galanoth's DragonSlayer quest to slay Grimfang. If you switch your class away from Dragon Slayer (such as to become a Vampire Slayer), you can still return to Galanoth in the future to regain your status as a Dragon Slayer.
Initialization
To kick off the quest, you would have to fight a random monster (see below for description) and then pass a dice roll of 50 with full Luck bonus (ie. 1 Luck gives you +1 to the roll). If the roll succeeds, you will encounter Grimfang in one of his three forms:
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Note that Grimfang does not have "dragon", "drakel" or "velociraider" in its name and is thus not affected by Dragon Blade.
Characters will meet Grimfang as a Young Darkness Dragon up to level 25. Thereafter, Grimfang will be a Plasma Dragon Soldier until level 50 and finally a Darkness Dragon after level 50. Personally, I would recommend trying to complete this initial quest below level 25 so as to meet the young darkness dragon as it has low life and is still relatively easy to beat. This is because the Plasma and Darkness Dragons would already be quite strong compared to your character and you would be meeting it only after surviving through the equivalent of one Random Adventure battle.
Random Encounters
For subsequent levels, you will first have to fight a series of 4 random monsters with only 3 rests in between. The monster you face is the equivalent of going through a Random Adventure battle. This means that your character should generally be able to handle the monsters that are encountered and the difficulty will only start to rise at very high levels (90+) as you might meet monstrosities like Carnax, Megogg(2) or Rapid BURP(3) for any one of the four random encounters
Boss Battle
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After completing the series of battles, you would have to check if you have found the dragon boss by making a dice roll with a luck/5 bonus based on the requirements above. If the roll is successful, you will face a dragon boss of a random type.
Some of the generic dragon types can be found at the Bestiary: Dragons of AQ.
DragonSlayer Stats
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DragonSlayer
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Skill Breakdown
1. Dragon Strike (5 MP)
An all out slash attack that does double damage to Dragons, Drakels and Lizards. (1.2x damage to normal monsters)
Against Dragons. Dragon Strike's 200% damage is a very powerful attack which has damage capabilities comparable to if not better than MAF and Canine Warrior. This is especially significant when you consider that this is just a level one skill and low levels do not have access to such strong high level armor. On the downside, WereWolf Form would still be able to do more damage than Dragon Strike... but that's a reason why it's rare.
Against Non-Dragons. This is a weak skill, but still generally useful if you have yet to reach a level where you can buy the better multihit armor. This is a DragonSlayer armor after all.
2. Dragon Fire (50 MP)
Unleash the magical fire breath of Dragons from your fingertips. It is capable of doing up to your level +4 points of damage.
This is a five hit magic attack which adds INT bonus to each attack. Poelala's magic-enhancing ability would probably also increase the damage of each hit. An approximation of the damages is shown below:
base random total Initial Hits (x4) 1 1 1 to 2 Final Hit 4 clvl 4 to (clvl+4) For a warrior, this does not look very attractive as the damage would still only be around 8-112 at level 100. However, for a mage, this is wildly different due to the Int bonus being applied five times, giving a final damage of 8-207 at level 100. Although the damage range seems to be very large, it is usually much closer in practice (somewhere along the lines of 28-187) as the five hits will even out the extreme values.
The problem with the skill as compared to the existing fire skill, Solar Incinerator is the lack of bonus to-hit. This essentially means that the skill will not be hitting for its full value most of the time, especially against monsters with magic defence greater than 30.
However, bearing in mind that the skill is also available for lower level character, let us look at how the damage would be like for a level 50 mage. Assuming an Intelligence of 80, such a mage would do 8-112. This is very comparable to Cosmic Blaze which would do 12-93 damage for 60 MP and has no bonus to-hit as well.
To optimize the damage potential, you might want to wield a DragonHand or Guardian Blade so that you will either get a Guardian Dragon special or be able to use this skill.
Against Dragons. Dragon Fire does elemental X damage and can probably been seen as an average source of damage against dragonkind. While other spells can probably do better damage by using elemental weakness, Dragon Fire can probably still be seen as a very mana efficient way to dish out some decent damage.
Against Non-Dragons. This is strong and will get stronger as you level. With a high Intelligence, this skill will outperform Solar Incineration in many situations, especially since its damage continues to grow with each level even after Int has long been maxed out. A warrior would appreciate it less due to lower to-hit and Solar Incinerator would probably still be the better choice for them.
Note that this skill does not charge up the Lv10 Call Forth Fire Dragon skill.
3. Aimed Fang Strike (5 MP)
This nearly unblockable technique gives you a bonus of +100 to hit DragonKind. (+15 Against normal monsters)
Nothing much to say about this skill. It might do well to have a little damage bonus when fighting DragonKind but as it currently stand the only use might just be when you are desperate for a hit (such as when both the dragon and yourself are almost dead).
4. Armor Bonus
Increases defence! +5 vs Melee, +5 vs Magic and resistances reduces all elemental attacks from Dragons to 92%.
5. Freeze DragonKind (75 MP)
Freeze your scaley opponent along with a chilling strike from your blade. Unresistable against Dragons that do not like the cold!
A 100% chance to freeze DragonKind, this is a very useful tool to have to implement Freeze-Burn tactics, which is to first freeze the monster and then use a fire attack to make full use of the monster's temporary 200% vulnerability to fire. It would also be very useful to keep the DragonKind at bay all the time as you pick off at its life slowly.
Using an Ice Katana (or a weapon with no special) when you want to use this skill would ensure that you will always get the freeze.
6. Poison Dragon (100 MP)
Engulf your Dragon foe in a cloud of poison that will last 12 rounds dealing 5% life per turn. Uses guest spot.
Used at the start of the battle, this skill would leave the dragon with only 54% life at the end of 12 turns even if you do nothing for those 12 turns. Against dragons with low life, this would be insignificant as other guests such as Summon Skull or Summon Pixie would probably provide better damage or more useful specials. However, it is insanely powerful against high life dragons such as Trigoras and UMAD.
7. Dragon's Blood (55 MP)
Strike your dragon-kind opponent and steal 50% of the damage you dealt to increase your health!
55 MP is probably a rather high price to pay for a skill which has no damage bonus. However, with a high damage weapon the amount of life healed is very significant and can be useful if you have survival issues when fighting the dragon. If you have no problems fighting dragons, the use of a multi-hit armor or even Dragon Strike would probably work out much better.
8. Summon Draykwing (15 MP)
Summon the loyal Draykwing to fight by your side. Cast the spell again to release him. He breathes fire that will even hurt fire Dragons!
A very weak guest with low damage but very cool looks. The Draykwing does elemental X damage against DragonKind but fire damage otherwise. As it currently stand, I can find no use for the Draykwing except the cool factor.
Note that this skill does not charge up the Lv10 Call Forth Fire Dragon skill.
9. Armor Bonus
Increases defence! +5 vs Melee, +5 vs Magic and resistances reduces all elemental attacks from Dragons to 82%.
10. Call forth the Fire Dragon (0 MP)
Call forth a massive Fire Dragon to unleach fiery terror upon thy opponent. 33% Fire Damage (Min 100).
This skill requires charging and starts out at 60/90. When the charge reaches 90, the Fire Dragon can be summoned at no MP cost. After the summon, the counter drops to 0 and you would have to start charging again. Each charge requires you to make an attack with a special attack of DragonSlayer (except for Dragon Fire and Summon Draykwing).
Logging out or visiting Yulgar's shop would return the charge counter to the initial value of 60 though.
Against Dragons. This is no different from a Guardian Dragon (elemental X damage) that you can summon at will once it is charged up. A useful skill to have but takes an insane number of turns to charge up.
Against Non-Dragons. This is like a Guardian Dragon (except being fire damage) but can be much much more powerful as the damage is multiplied by the monster's fire resistance. For example, if a monster has 200% fire resistance, Fire Dragon will deal 66% of its life in damage. That is huge especially when you are up against a tough cookie like Carnax. As most monsters weak against fire would have at least 100% in ice resistance, you can make use of the freeze ability of Ice Katana or Mogleets to push the fire resistance to 200% before using this skill.
Conclusion
Personally, I find the DragonSlayer armor and class to be rather well-designed.
The only gripe I have with it is the initial dragon you have to fight. As the armor is available at just level 5, the first dragon that must be slain to get the class title of DragonSlayer should just be a lower-level dragon such as a Young Fire Dragon. From then onwards the dragons can be assigned with increasing levels as the DragonSlayer level increases. This would make much more sense than to have the initial dragon be the most powerful dragon you would have to slay on route to level 10.
Summarising the skills, I find that three skills (Dragon Strike, Dragon Fire and Summon Fire Dragon) are very useful in a lot of situations, especially against DragonKind. Two other skills (Freeze Dragon and Poison Dragon) also have very good situational use. Dragon's Blood is also moderately useful in certain more specific situations. That is already six useful skills out of the eight attack skills and some of those are very useful against normal monsters as well.
If the two defence bonuses could get a slightly better boost and Summon Draykwing could be made useful, this would be a very nice armor to possess and use.