At the moment I am at Lvl 6 in the Priest Guild & have been offered the Oath of Scrolls trait. It offers a 20% reduction in magic damage BUT at the expense of a 20% INCREASE in damage from all hand weapons. Is this really worth it??? Right now ALL of my 6 team members have the Arcane Void trait from delivering the letter to Jathil. I'm not really sure I want to get either one of the Oath traits(Scrolls or Swords) if there is a penalty attatched to it. Could someone enlighten me on the good things about getting one of these two traits as opposed to NOT getting either one. These traits seem to fall into the category of what I call "Poison Candy traits" eg. they gift you & punish you at the same time. Traits that fall under this category as well are : Berserk, Boogreism, Fury, & Vampirsim.

It is a trade-off, to be sure.

Where do you take damage? From spells, or from weapons? Whichever one causes more grief, that's the one you should protect. For me, it's from magic, since I'm so armored up that no one can really hit me. So I take scrolls over swords.

I have had both, and I can tell you that I can't really see a difference in game play...

And if you are a trait gatherer like myself you can get both traits for the same character. They will then cancel each other.

Other than that you will not need either. But when your party has completed the game once, the characters will be so powerful that neither of them makes any difference.

From my (limited) experience I would say don't get Oath of Swords. The character who had that always seemed to be the one who got hit with some actually damaging magic attacks. On the other hand, I can't think of many monsters you have to fight (i.e., not Erasthmedor or Sphinx) that do excessive melee damage, so Oath of Scrolls might be worth it. I was wary after my OoSw experience and haven't ever tried it.

As noted above, it depends entirely on the character which (if either) of the Oath Of traits to get. My preferred character for soloing is a small Ninja/Assassin with a really high parry skill and not many magical protections, so Oath of Scrolls is ideal for him. My other fav is a Wiz->Pal->Rang->War->{Valk,Zen} who, until the very end, is all but worthless in melee combat but who has very high magical protections. I get Oath of Swords for him, since it's weapons that are his enemy.

Odd as it may seem, I give the Scrolls one (from the Wiz/Priest Guild) to my fighter and the Swords one (from War Guild) to my caster. The key is that my fighters are never big or powerful, but are so quick as to almost never take weapon damage...