The opening hours of 2012 cult classic Dragon's Dogma are seared into my memory, and not because I played the RPG to death. I mean, I did play it to death, but there's a much stupider reason for this. See, I also replayed this game to death – seven times in a row, in fact, with the catch that these replays only covered the opening act. Gripped by min-max obsessiveness – which I've since kicked out of my brain like one would evict a tenant that cooks meth with their doors open – I continually made new character after new character trying to optimize the game's class system and its attached stat growth. I was terrified that I'd be cursed with a sub-optimal character – truly a fate worse than death.
When you level up in Dragon's Dogma, you get stat boosts based on your assigned class, or rather, vocation. Fighters get more health and attack, dextrous Striders get more stamina, and mages – this will sound far-fetched – get magic attack and defense. Advanced vocations yield more skewed stat boosts, meaning you could live as a Ranger for a while to power-level your Stamina and then become a Warrior who can run a marathon in full plate armor. With this in mind, I cycled through Fighters and Striders and Mages, Warriors and Rangers and Sorcerers, painstakingly laying the groundwork for the God King of Space build to come.
