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Old 10-08-2003, 05:49 PM   #2
ChaosTheorist
Manshoon
 

Join Date: May 14, 2003
Location: Seattle
Age: 69
Posts: 163
For primary casters, you usually won't bother putting skill points into the Realm skills (Fire, Air, Mental, etc.); they'll rise just fine by themselves with use. Maybe put a point or 2 in early just to get the first circle yellow instead of red. Put your skill points into the Mastery skills (Wizardry, Divinity, etc.). Actually, they'll also climb fairly rapidly, but you want to keep pushing them so you can learn the spells as soon as you meet the profession-level requirements. This is especially true for the Bishop; push those Mastery skills exclusively. If you want your Mage or Priest to be competent sling/staff users, you can put skill points into those, otherwise use the points for whatever Realm skill is behind.

For the Rogue, the skills to focus on are Dual Weapons, Dagger, Stealth, Locks, & (optionally) Pickpocket. Dagger and Stealth will come up with use; you want to push Dual Weapons up as fast as possible to reduce the penalty applied to the offhand weapon. With your caster setup, you've got tons of Divine Trap/Knock-knock power, so Locks doesn't need to be pushed much.

WRT formation: with your party, I'd go 3x3--the 3 melee guys in front, the 3 casters in the middle. Once past the first few levels, your casters will spend the majority of their rounds casting spells, not flogging with staves or stones, so there's little advantage to putting them at melee range. If they're protected by the melee characters, you can stretch out the combats to cast until they're out of spell points, which will raise the magic skills faster. The key to raising magic skills is to cast every chance you get.
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