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MY NUMBER ONE RULE IN CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT:
Figure out ahead of time what skills you want to end up with and with what skill
level. Remember, you have about 700 points, before stats, total per
character. By doing this your focus will be stronger, and you will not
waste time working on skills that you realize later that you cannot afford to
have. My self and many others have had this problem.
MY NUMBER TWO RULE IN CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT:
Another point, when choosing weapon skills, using a dexterity intensive skill
could be a problem by lowering your strength too low for effective combat.
Your intelligence will approach 100 which only leaves 125 points between
strength and dexterity. Since a high strength is much more important than
a high dexterity (don't want to get killed by a single blow from a tough
monster, do you), a dexterity insensitive weapon might not be a good idea.
You mileage might vary.
Here are the steps, Leopold recommends in order to be a Grand Master Mage. The
most important step that a training mage has to conquer, is to keep their bank from
becoming empty. The reagents needed to train properly in mage training are VERY
expensive. I suggest the following steps, based on current Magery skill.
Magery
|
Spells to Cast
|
Money Maker
|
| < 50 |
What you have 50% -25% chance to cast. |
You should start out with 50 Magery as a new character.
Doing otherwise will simply spend A LOT of time and money getting up from 0 to 50. |
| 50-60 |
4th, 5th and 6th circle spells. Pick the ones with the
lowest regent cost. |
Mining / Tailoring. Mining is best for strength gain
(which is hard for a mage) but Tailoring makes slightly more money and also works on
combat skill up to medium level |
| 50-70 |
NEW NEW NEW
Gate from scrolls. When you fail with a scroll, it does not go
away!!!!!!! |
Escorting with scrolls. Bring Thulsa
Pride the regs and blank scrolls, and he can make you a lot of gate
scrolls. |
| 60-70 |
6th circle and an occasional 5th circle spell. |
Same as above. Perhaps some adventuring by coming to
common spawn spots. Keep a look out for those nasty PK's and thieves. |
| 70-75 |
6th circle spells and an occasional 7th circle spell. |
Same as above. If you want to start early, try your
hand at some escorting. See Leopold or a member of the Inner Circle for runes and
escorting instructions. Escorting the wrong way will cost more time that it is
worth.
Also, at 72 Magery, you can try you hand at tailoring in Wind park. A very huge
leather bearing creature spawn area. Also lots of bears to fight which will improve
fighting skills into the 80's. |
| 75-80 |
Gate, Flame strike, and an occasional 6th circle spell |
Dropping all other methods except for Escorting! This
will raise your Magery, pay for itself and make a hefty profit. This is the time that I suggest getting a house to practice Magery
and Magic Resistance. Walking in Wall of Fire is the fastest way to get this skill
up to around 55. |
| 80-92 |
Gate, Flame strike and an occasional 8th circle summoning |
Escorting, Escorting, Escorting. Don't forget to fight
your summoned elementals. |
| 90-100 |
8th circle summoning and an occasional 7th circle spell |
Escorting, if you are not RICH enough already! |
A tip brought to use from Vanessa:
Create a UO Hot Key (or how ever you wish to do it) which will meditate and then
immediatly cast one of the 8th circle summoning spells. By doing this, you
will be able to get 4 meditates and 4 summon attemps per minute (assuming you
have the mana). Also, by doing the meditation attempt first, if there is
not enough mana, you will not get your previous meditation disrupted. Thanks
to Vanessa for this great tip.
Another possibility would be to work on Inscription scrolls instead of the tailoring /
mining route. This has a benefit in that it is more magish and raises Intelligence
to Inscribe scrolls, then to sew woman's clothing and mine for ore and make ingots.
The down side is that is it much less profitable.
I found that when I was working on Inscription, I make enough money to pay for
Inscription, but very little left over for mage training. The most profitable route
is to sell scrolls to other players. The going rate it to charge 5 gp's for each
mana point that the scroll in question takes to cast. For example, energy bolt is
6th circle and costs 20 mana. 20*5 = 100 gp's for one scroll. Note:
scroll prices to players is dropping because of the new skill, meditation. The mage shops
will only pay you a small fraction of this amount, but you can unload a lot at a time this
way.
Suggest skills
These are the skills that I am going for, not necessarily the best ones in all
situations. Remember that there is a 700 pre-stat-modified skill maximum.
Skill
|
Level
|
Use
|
| Magery |
100 |
Your Goal |
| Meditation |
50+ |
Speeds up Mana regain |
| Magic Resistance |
50+ |
Lets you stand (or stay back) toe to toe with those nasty
spell throwing critters.
Use fire field to 55, fireballs to 60, lightning to 75 and energy bolt
to 100. |
| Tactics/(any) weapon skill |
90+ |
When you run out of mana or regs, you need do
something. If you want to be a tank mage, bring this up to 100. I choose Mace
fighting because it uses all Strength and I wanted to Strength to rise and my Dexterity to
fall. |
| Hiding |
65 |
Closes backpack to thieves and helps when you get into
trouble. |
| Wrestling |
50+ |
Reduces the chance of getting struck in combat which reduces
the chance of disrupting your spell. I would choose this only as my combat skill, if
it didn't do such a small amount of damage. Be careful of intentionally raising this
skill too high. Later on, it is hard to not make it rise by accident. |
| Evaluate Intelligence |
50+ |
It aids in your spells penetrating
your opponents Magic Resistance. |
There are some other nice skills have too: Inscription, Tracking, Alchemy, Item ID,
just to name a few.
A TRUE mage (like Thulsa Pride) will have the following skills:
100 Magery
100 Meditation
100 Eval Int
100 Magic Resist
with, (for non-spell interruption)
100 Wrestling and
100 Tactics
That leaves about 100 points to spend on something else! Down fall is
no other combat skills and no dexterity. Perhaps adding fencing or swords
would be a good idea too. For the record, Thulsa's other skill is
Inscription. Another option would be to add Spirit Speak and Neromancy.
I apologize if this page has too many numbers and a lack of roll playing information
for you true diehard roll players out there. I am always torn between doing the
right thing which is role-playing 100%, and doing the numbers game to save time
and not dying.
Because my time is so limited and being a macro monster is partially illegal and quite
lame, I compromise and use a lot of numbers and tables to advance my character so that I
can better enjoy the playing time that I do have.
Non-Mage Training Guide
(yet to be formated, so don't bother me :-))
Well, i started my char with 50 magery and 50 resist. I wanted to get up to 72 magery in order for Wind to be accessable. I was going for about 70 resist (not too much, cause most fighting will take place in town, usually.....)
Here are the skills i wanted to train:
- Healing: Just getting health real low (5-10 HP, preferably 5) off polar bears, then once at about 50-51(I think, whatever 10 pts below what it actually takes to cure), drink lesser poisons and attempt to heal. You wont be successful, but will gain skill. Once you get to 60, just heal poisoned
ppl.....
- Parrying: Fight hinds in Hind Valley to about 30, fight polar bears to about 70 (you can fight earth eles too at about 40-50). Once at about 70, fight stone gargoyles in desert. Terathins are also great skill gain
(Terathin warriors)
- Maces/Fencing: Fight hinds to 40, timber wolves to about 60, then polar bears to 90 (they work in mid-90's too, but pretty slow.) Once at 90, fight terathins and eles, and stuff in desert.
- Anatomy: Macro, macro, macro, before you gain any other skills. Cause it will drive your intel up about 50-60 pts. Then do maces/fencing to raise dex/str and drive intel back down.
- Tactics: Comes naturally with fighting.....
Ive kept a journal with all this somewhere, ill try and find it, and then tell you exactly what I did.
Before I made the char, i planned out his skills like you told me to. heres what I planned for:
- 75 magery (enough to Gheal and recall without fail.)
- 100 resist (never gonna get there, but i planned for it)
- 100 tactics
- 100 fencing
- 100 anatomy
- 100 parrying
- 100 healing
That would produce an excellent town fighter, who could rock in town because spells do no damage in town. He could also hold his own outside town due to his high resist. Mages would have problems beating him because of high dex and GM fencing. I myself have killed about 3 GM mages (1 noble, 1 illustrious, and 1 noble lord) just with my current skills. They rely completely on magic but because of so frequent hits, they have a tough time. And if they are tank mages, my parrying helps a lot. In total, ive killed 14 chars who were also mages capable of casting fs. That gives you a nice idea of how good a char like this can be. And inside town, phew, downright nasty. Helps if you ride a horse too......
Plan for:
- 100 str
- 100 dex
- 25 intel (enough to heal and recall almost back to back)
Sincerely,
The Reputable Ishan (damn daemons......)
This page last updated
Friday, February 08, 2002 12:39 -0500
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