[armakh]

1. Ok, I agree and disagree with Fung on this one. I definitely like the fact that you can increase your skills through daily practice. This is one thing that really separates Wiz 8 from other games, and I like that. And on my own grounds, I think that practicing can be very very abused. But I also think that some spells were put into the game for the very purpose of allowing practice, spells such as mindread, charm, shadow hound. For my own playing, I'll practice spells when I have extra time, like waiting for Antone to finish a custom piece, or when I am entering an area I know will be tough. For instance, I will go to the Trynton mana fountain, and keep on trying my spells until I get all my good party buffs up to full str. The added bonus of this is practicing my divine realm with my valk and sam (I'm running 4-way valk, sam, monk, nin) with remove curse. As soon as I get all my buffs up, I'll leave and go where I need to go. That is practicing with a purpose, and IMHO, the kind of thing the developers wanted, or maybe just a tiny bit of abuse. But my ideology prevents me from "power training." Just the way that I work, and my opinion

2. I agree-a decently-developed bishop, for my gaming style, is the only caster that I need. And this helps me to have more room for hybrids *grin* I definitely disagree about hybrids not having much going for them. Monks with their MA are awesome. They may not do as much raw damage as a berserking fighter, but they always go first, get up to 18 (usually at least 10) chances at a critical for about 15-30 damage each hit, and they usually do about 150 damage per round. They also knock out a lot more opponents than my fighter does, and often early in the round to prevent attacks. In my 4-person party, my valk's cheat death has come in very useful. I'm not that big on lords and valks in general, but the polearm bonus is really nice, and I don't have to worry about saving my valk when she's low on hp-also very nice. And having secondary buffing characters that don't have the low hp and stuff of pure casters is invaluable. There's something to be said for the jack of all trades-master of none character. On paper and put one-on-one, a fighter may outdo a hybrid, and a bishop may outdo a hybrid. But in terms of value to a party, I think the opposite is true. Ok enough rambling.