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Post by Lanstro on Jan 28, 2006 14:44:19 GMT
Well, half a year ago, I started writing this guide for Celyia and the AA webpage, only for RL, disinterest and Celyia seemingly disappearing to get in the way. I figure it's still possible that this is of some value to someone out there, so I'll post what i have so far written.
Disclaimer: this is in no way complete, proofread, does not possess an internal coherent structure, is unformatted, etc etc
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Post by Lanstro on Jan 28, 2006 14:44:55 GMT
Introduction
Ancient Anguish (AA) allows us to all create multiple characters. I believe it is an essential part of enjoying and learning more about the game to at least try out every class. AA boasts five races and eight classes (9 including adventurers), giving a choice of 40 unique combinations. If you’re getting a little bored of your current character or just want to play the game through a completely different slant, this will guide you on your way to finding the combination that you’ll enjoy creating and playing the most. This guide will walk you through some basics generic to all classes first. I’ll explain the mechanics of the stats, skills and abilities systems – it’s hard to analyse the classes without first knowing what each attribute does and how they compare to each other. Then, a detailed look at every class will follow – I’ll discuss what each class is good at, what races are good for each class, and fun things unique to certain combinations.
This guide is aimed at the newer players of the game, to give them a feel of what each class is all about. It is also a reference guide for intermediate players, to supplement the sometimes sparse AA official helpfiles on some of the most basic facets of the game.
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Post by Lanstro on Jan 28, 2006 14:46:23 GMT
I. Stats
AA has a fairly simple system of stats. We all know that they are Strength (Str), Dexterity (Dex), Constitution (Con), Intelligence (Int) and Wisdom (Wis). Not any one stat is completely useless for any class, but some are just a lot more useful than others for certain characters. I’ll give a much better explanation of what each one does than the in-game help files.
1 Strength
Strength is generally speaking needed for any character. It determines a few essential things:
Almost all weapons have a minimum strength requirement. How much damage you deal upon a successful hit. Strength determines how much you can lug around in your inventory. Success for smashing doors, chests, etc (in conjunction with the amount of weight you’re carrying in the inventory). Indirectly affects how quickly you gain weapon skills – it’s a widely held belief that harder hits gain you skills faster than softer hits.
As you see, it’s a stat for grunts. Almost all characters would rely upon physical damage as a substantial source of their damage, and strength is a huge part of the equation for the physical damage you will deal out. Another thing to note is that many of the high end weapons in the game require 16 strength – a character with a maximum strength less than that would miss out on many fun weapons. Notable characters who don’t need so much strength are non-alteration mages, necromancers and shapeshifter drakons. They deal the majority of their damage with skills that are unrelated to strength.
2 Dexterity
Dexterity is another skill useful for every class. It affects:
How much your physical attacks hit their mark, and how often you get hit back How well you dodge How often some mage spells hit, notably acid arrow, flame dart, magic missile, fireball and venom spit The success rate of a ranger’s strike ability Accuracy with various shapeshifter abilities (though not enough experience with those to be 100% sure about this). Accuracy with a bow, and thrown weapons Dodging various traps and avoiding falling off bridges around the MUD. Some weapons (rare) have a minimum dexterity requirement. Also indirectly affects skilling rate – the more you hit, the faster you’ll skill. This is especially noticeable at low dexterity, when raising things like two handed axe, two handed sword, etc. Hypothetically, if thieves existed, more dextrous ones would hypothetically steal better, and more dextrous characters will be harder to steal from
Dexterity is great, for every point of dexterity, you hit more often and get hit less. Or conversely, if what you’re hitting loses a point of dexterity then the same benefits apply. I highly recommend carrying around a boomerang for all characters – the benefits from having just one more point of dexterity over the opponent are very noticeable.
3 Constitution
Constitution is a no brainer, it gives you more hit points. It:
Gives you 8 hit points for every point of constitution. Speeds up (slightly) your natural hit point regeneration rate. Determines how much you can drink and eat. Determines how vulnerable you are to poison.
The more constitution you have, the harder you are to kill, and the more you can eat and drink – adding up to how good you are at taking damage. Anybody who plans to do a lot of tanking would need a character that has 15 or more constitution. With that being said, constitution isn’t quite as important as strength and dexterity for a fighting character, especially if you’re just going to bash in parties a lot.
4 Intelligence and Wisdom
Intelligence and Wisdom are similar in some ways, and different in many others. I’ll list what they have in common first:
The higher of the two determines you spell points pool. As with constitution, it’s 8 hit points per stat. They both have an effect on the rate your weapon skills go up, especially noticeable when your skills are high and don’t go up very often any more. The higher of the two determines your spell point regeneration rate (again, almost unnoticeable). Necromancers’ ritual lists are determined by the sum of their intelligence and wisdom – both stats are equally important to them. The intelligence + wisdom sum also determines the ability of lower level characters’ ability to tell how injured something is – that is, while a smart cookie can see the difference between ‘slightly hurt’ and ‘seriously wounded’, all a new character would see is ‘battered’. Some (rare) weapons have a minimum intelligence + wisdom requirement.
Attributes unique to Intelligence:
This is a very important attribute for mages, almost all of their spells’ effectiveness depends on the value of their intelligence. Shapeshifter Drakons also appear to do more damage with more intelligence. It plays a small part in enhancing a paladin’s smite and harm damage. It plays a part in the accuracy of a fighter’s evaluations of equipment. Hypothetically, if thieves existed, intelligence helps you notice them. Hypothetically again, there are unconfirmed rumours that smarter hypothetical thieves would steal better.
Attributes unique to Wisdom:
Wisdom is very important to clerics – it determines the success rate of their prayers, their effectiveness, and what prayers they have access to in the first place. For rangers with bonded wolves, wisdom determines the maximum size it grows to. For rangers who tame their wolves wild, wisdom determines the max size of the wild wolf they can attempt to attempt. For paladins, quite a factor in their damage from their spells. For mages, rumoured to affect the effectiveness of the Power Word: Heal and Power Word: Harm spells.
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Post by Lanstro on Jan 28, 2006 14:48:07 GMT
II. Skills
AA operates under a fairly straightforward skills system. Every single skill is a weapon skill, determining how good you are with that class of weapons. The amount of skill you have in a particular type of weapon determines how well you can wield various weapons – that is, a big bad two handed axe requires at least 70 skills in it for you to hit consistently with it. Your class is the largest influence on how fast you will skill with various weapon categories – raising marksmanship with a ranger is a breeze, yet a paladin can’t even use thrown weapons or bows.
I’ll discuss every one of the 17 weapon skills, their general pros and cons and ‘weapon progressions’ I like to use for them, and also the high end choices for each. I’ll list what classes raise the various skills fastest, it’ll be assumed that fighters raise every one fast. Marksmanship, Two Weapon and Unarmed will be treated separately as they’re quite unique to the other 14.
1 Axe
Rating: D
Attack Type: Chop, Pierce for picks and stalactites
Fast for: Ranger
Viable for: Cleric, Paladin
Uniques: None
Pros: Common, easy to get, dwarven mining pick is good to dual wield
Cons: Low damage, boring
High End Choices: The two above are the only high end choices – stalactites are very heavy but seem to hit marginally harder than the picks.
Skill progression:
0 – 15 ‘A pickaxe’ from Nemaset the dwarf in the park (use attack crush for this), or a small worthless pick from the scythe camp. 15-30 Bigbladed axe from Ravel Village. 30-45 Sharp Axe from Guardian of underground forest. 30-100 Stalactite from Star Caverns. 60-100 Dwarven Mining Pick from Dwarven miner.
2 Club
Rating: A+
Attack Type: Crush
Fast for: Cleric
Reasonably fast for: Rogue, Shapeshifter, Paladin, Ranger
Uniques: Krakadoom, Stone Smasher Maul, Onyx, Destructor, Hammer of Gralain
Pros: Common, big damage
Cons: Heavy, bad parry
High Ends: The hjem is very popular, but inferior to the other high clubs. Krakadoom is still probably the most damaging weapon in the game. A word of warning about the Stone Smasher Maul – when you first wield it, it’ll look great - +1 strength and giving you bone crushing messages all the time: unfortunately, those messages aren’t real bonecrushes and only do about 8 damage. The Destructor is only really good for dwarves.
Skill Progression:
0-20 Fishing poles from Salty John, ‘Hammer’ from random hobbits in Hobbitat, frying pans. 20-30 Gnarled Club from Delair. 30-60 For clerics: mace of crushing from Drow Caverns. For everyone else, long-hafted sledgehammer from underground forest, or Warclub from Anasazi. 60-100 Heavy Jewel Encrusted Mace (hjem) from Orc Mountain. 70-100 Huge Warhammer or Krakadoom from Frost Giant Steading, Destructor (for dwarves) from Blor’s Hideout. Stone Smasher Maul from Massive Stone Giant.
3 Curved Blade
Rating: B-
Attack Type: Slash
Fast for: Rogue
Viable for: Ranger, Paladin
Uniques: Sword of Sethic
Pros: Decent mix of damage and parry and lightness, dual wields well
Cons: Rare, mediocre damage
High End Choices: The katana has pretty nice parry, and the sabre does reasonable damage, but neither are exceptional. I haven’t played around with the only unique – the Blade of Sethic, from another quest area. It is two-handed and from all reports nothing special.
Skill Progression:
0-20 Snickersnee from orc minions. 20-30 Shiny Scimitar from nomads area down south. 30-50 Long Katana from underground forest. 50-100 Katana from Zhammar. 60-100 Orcish Sabre from Delair or Drakhyra.
4 Exotic
Rating: A
Attack Type: Differs. Elemental orbs good with everything.
Fast for: Ranger
Viable for: Paladin, Cleric
Uniques: None
Pros: Nowadays very common, very good to dual wield, easy to hit with, extra damage against certain NPC’s
Cons: No high-end single wielding choice
High End Choices: The orbs are the only choice for the high end. They come in two flavours – fire and cold, and both ignore enemy armour when determining damage dealt and chance to hit. Fire orbs do exceptionally good damage against frost giants, while cold orbs do extra damage to some select NPC’s around the game. The armour-piercing property make these extremely good off-hand weapons when raising another skill, the Two-Weapon skill.
Skill Progression:
0-20 Weeding hook from Nepeth. 20-30 Dual wielded weeding hooks. 30-100 Elemental orbs, then dual wielding elemental orbs.
5 Flail
Rating: B
Attack Type: Crush
Fast for: Cleric
Viable for: Paladin.
Uniques: Morning Star
Pros: Decent damage, high-end ones easy to get
Cons: Heavy, uncommon
High End Choices: Morning star gets a very nice bonus when hitting humans, and does reasonable damage anyway. The vicious looking flail is just your average high end non unique.
Skill Progression:
0-20 Iron Shackles from Drow Caverns. 20-30 Light Flail from Delair. 30-50 Heavy Morningstar from underground forest. 40-70 Ball and chain from Ravel. 60-100 Vicious looking flail from Scythe camp 70-100 Morning Star from Zhammar.
6 Knife
Rating: D
Attack Type: Pierce
Fast for: Ranger, Paladin, Rogue
Viable for: Mage, Necromancer, Shapeshifter, Cleric
Uniques: Shadowspawn, Gemmed Rondel Dagger
Pros: Extremely common, light, easy to dual with, raises very quickly
Cons: Very little damage
High End Choices: The nailfile is heavy and not easy to get. Its damage isn’t exceptional, but blows all the other knives out of the water. Stone daggers are incredibly good against the stone golems, but fairly useless apart from that. The Main Gauche doesn’t do very good damage but it has very nice parry.
Skill Progression:
0-20 Rusty knife from newbie ship, or anything you like. It all raises very fast anyway. 20-40 Elven dagger, Sai, Whittling knife, anything around that level. Rondel dagger and Gemmed Rondel Dagger are pretty good here also. 40-100 Gigantic Nailfile from Zhammar. 60-100 Stone Dagger from Tharanack, Main Gauche from flaw.
7 Longsword
Rating: A+
Attack Type: Slash
Fast for: Paladin, Ranger
Viable for: Rogue, Cleric
Uniques: Starblade, Bloodred, Pendragon, Evil Blacksword, Diablo, Sword of Virgis
Pros: Extremely versatile, fairly common, very good balance of parry, weight and damage
Cons: A little less damage than the other A+ weapon classes, hard to dual
High End Choices: There is a wealth of choices at the high end. Starblade is very good for a tank, especially a rogue – high parry and +20 to all your resistances, and also a free light source. Exquisite rune swords are very common, do solid damage and parry reasonably well, fine broadswords sacrifice some of this damage for better parrying. Pendragon has a bonus for human wielders and the good aligned, and is only good for those. Outstanding sword is one of the most damaging non-uniques in the game, but comes with mediocre parry and is very heavy. Diablo does nice damage and has very nice parry, but seems to be way slower than usual weapons for raising your skills. The Sword of Virgis isn’t easy to get, does average damage, but does come with a nice +15 Longsword skill.
Skill Progression:
0-40 Dark Longsword from Drow Caverns. 30-40 Golden Sword from Fub’s. 40-100 Diablo from Proud Knight. 40-60 ‘A longsword’ from all over the place, silver longsword from Neville. 50-70 Rune sword from Zhammar and Vorpal Blade from the lich. 70-100 Exquisite rune sword from Burnham and Proud Knight, Starblade from Star Caverns, Pendragon from Nepeth, fine broadsword from Scythe camp, Sword of Virgis from Amazons. 80-100 Outstanding sword from Brunswick.
8 Polearm
Rating: B+
Attack Type: Slash, Chop for Poleaxes
Fast for: Paladin
Viable for: Ranger, Cleric
Uniques: Awesome Scythe, Orcish Poleaxe
Pros: Solid damage
Cons: Rare, hard to dual wield
High End Choices: The poleaxes are one-handed, while the scythes require both hands. They all do pretty good damage.
Skill Progression:
70-70 Hoe from paladin estates. 70-70 Halberd from Stronghold. 70-70 Huge Halberd from Scythe camp. 70-70 Orcish Poleaxe from Delair, decent scythe from Scythe camp. 70-70 Awesome scythe from Scythe camp.
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Post by Lanstro on Jan 28, 2006 14:57:21 GMT
9 Rapier
Rating: A-
Attack Type: Pierce
Fast for: Rogue
Viable for: Paladin
Uniques: Sword of Gilian, Crystal Blade
Pros: Very good at disarming and parrying, powerful uniques for tanks, pretty common, very good to dual wield
Cons: Lower damage than other A category weapons
High End Choices: All three high end choices have very good parrying abilities, with +2 dexterity from crystal blade and +2 constitution from Sword of Gilian. They’re very good for dual wielding or tanking with as a rogue.
Skill Progression:
0-10 Stick from Tantallon sewers. 10-20 Turquoise dart from Ravel. 20-30 Sewing needle from Andeli. 30-60 Thin rapier from Neville. 40-60 Silver rapier from elven tombs. 60-70 Very fine rapier from Nepeth 70-100 Jeweled Dwarven Rapier and Sword of Gilian from Tharanack, Crystal Blade from Zhammar
10 Shortsword
Rating: C
Attack Type: Pierce or Slash, roughly equivalent
Fast for: Ranger, Paladin, Rogue
Viable for: Cleric, Mage, Necromancer, Shapeshifter
Uniques: Blade of Losoth, Ebonblade
Pros: Very common, decent to dual with, raises quickly
Cons: Low damage, boring
High End Choices: The wolfblade is really the only high end choice. You can insert a gem into it, which gives it a little extra damage and makes it a free light source. It has reasonable parry, does reasonable damage, but is nothing exciting.
Skill Progression:
0-20 Wooden sword from Nepeth, Slim sword from fairy ring. 20-40 Worn sword from Fort Vaugn, Blade of Losoth from Drow Caverns. 40-70 Plain sword from Fort Vaugn, Quality Shortsword from Marika. 70-100 Wolfblade from Start Caverns, or if dual wielding Wakizashi from Zhammar or Blackened Gladius from Knight’s Retreat.
11 Spear
Rating: C+
Attack Type: Pierce
Fast for: Shapeshifter, Ranger, Paladin
Viable for:
Uniques: None
Pros: Decent damage
Cons: High end ones are rare, and in general they’re mediocre
High End Choices: Golden Trident is your only choice, but at least it does pretty good damage.
Skill Progression:
0-20 Well used hay fork from Nepeth. 20-50 Quaker Trident from Star Caverns. 50-70 Marlinespike from Lighthouse, Diamond spear from Monolith. 70-100 Golden Trident from Amazons.
12 Staff
Rating: B+
Attack Type: Crush
Fast for: Cleric, Ranger
Viable for: Mage, Necromancer, Shapeshifter, Rogue, Paladin
Uniques: Glimmer, Staff of Azakath, Glimmer, Oaken Staff, Tetsubo
Pros: Common, fairly versatile
Cons: Damage somewhat lacking
High End Choices: For mages still learning spells, Glimmer is the single best item in the game. Azakath and Tetsubo are also good for those mages and necromancers with the skills and strength for them. Carved staff and white iron stick are decent when you can’t find those uniques. Tetsubo is the only real choice for fighter-types, but it does pretty good damage.
Skill Progression:
0-15 Crooked staff from Belob. 0-100 Glimmer from Alton’s Caverns (for mages). 15-30 Old staff from Drow Caverns. 30-50 Snake staff from Drakhyra. 40-60 Pine staff from Academy, Elven Quarterstaff from Elven Defence Forces. 50-70 White iron stick from Ravel. 60-100 Staff of Azakath from Mount Kresh, Tetsubo from Zhammar, Carved Staff from lizard village.
13 Two Handed Axe
Rating: A
Attack Type: Chop
Fast for:
Viable for: Ranger, Paladin
Uniques: Great Mithril Axe, Rakar
Pros: Reasonably common high ends, very nice damage, best damaging non-unique in the game
Cons: Slow to raise, especially at low skills, heavy.
High End Choices: Crescent does very good damage, as does Mighty Battleaxe. The two uniques are roughly the same as these two. The top 4 axes are all roughly the same.
Skill Progression:
0-40 Bronze Axe from Ilderia. 40-60 Woodsman’s Axe from Music Man’s Manor. 60-80 Wicked Half Moon Bladed Axe from Carcera. 70-100 Mighty Battleaxe from Chaos Tower, Crescent and Rakar from Frost Giant Temple, Great Mithril Axe from underground zombie area.
14 Two Handed Sword
Rating: A-
Attack Type: Slash
Fast for:
Viable for: Paladin, Ranger, Rogue
Uniques: Elvenheart, Powersword
Pros: High damage, reasonable parrying
Cons: Heavy, rare, slow to skill, especially at the start
High End Choices: Elves and half-elves obviously should wield Elvenheart – making a puny character one of the highest physical damage dealing. Shadow sword does exceptionally good damage, and Powersword isn’t much worse.
Skill Progression:
0-40 Sword of Frost or Stone-Cutter sword from Giant’s conference. 40-60 Large Sword from Frost Giants’ Steading. 60-100 Shadow Sword from Razar, Elvenheart from Fort Vaugn, Powersword from Asvyan’s Domain.
15 Unarmed
Rating: E
Attack Type: Crush. Some Shapeshifter forms, like cats, have slash as marginally superior
Fast for: Shapeshifter, Ranger, Rogue, Paladin
Viable for: Mage, Necromancer, Cleric
Uniques: Brass Knuckles, Slap Gloves, Reflective Bracers
Pros: Um…it’s free….and at least you do some damage whenever you forget to wield your weapon
Cons: It does even less damage than knife, if that were possible
High End Choices: …as if
Skill Progression:
0-100 What do you think?
Unarmed is unique in that there’s only two ways you can raise this skill – hitting stuff unarmed with it, or wielding something in the off-hand, to be attacking with a fist with your primary and something else in the secondary. The 3 uniques give you various stat boosts – but even with those your damage is quite low. There’s simply no reason to raise this except boredom, or if you’re a shapeshifter. Related intricately to unarmed is the brawl ‘skill’. You gain these by training with Trough in Tantallon, for a small fee. You must wait increasing amounts of time in between each lesson, with 10 lessons in total. Higher brawl skill also makes your unarmed damage much better.
16 Marksmanship
Rating: A
Attack Type: N/A
Fast for: Ranger, Rogue
Viable for: Everyone else but paladins
Uniques: Crossbow, Silver Longbow
Pros: Can be used concurrently with other weapons, extremely high damage, useful for everybody
Cons: Very heavy to carry around, some NPC’s really dislike having things thrown at them
High End Choices: Varied, read below
Skill Progression:
0-20 Catty from Willim. You can only get this at level 5 or below, so if you plan on getting a head start on marksmanship, get your hands on one before you hit level 6. 20-100 Crossbow from Hermit. The only other ‘pure’ marksmanship weapon in the game.
Marksmanship isn’t like normal skills, in that there’s only 2 weapons that you actually ‘hit’ with to get skills with – the catty and the unique Crossbow. Otherwise, you get skills in it by throwing various thrown weapons, or by using a normal bow. These other options allow you to get skills in Marksmanship ‘on the side’ while actually wielding something else – that is, you only have to be throwing a boomerang every so often while wielding a big axe to get marksmanship skills every so often. It’s a very useful skill to have a bit of proficiency in, just for the occasions when you’re using throwing knives or boomerangs, you only need 20-40 to do OK with throwing weapons.
Various thrown weapons can also be acquired in the game, this is a rough ranking according to how much damage they do:
Dart, barbed dart, boomerang (Sanal), roses (Amazons), bolas, shuriken, throwing knife, hurlbat, well-balanced dagger (Drute’s tombs), runes (Frost Giant temple), flasks of oil, javelins, hunga-mungas.
Darts do about 2 damage and hunga-mungas about 37 at 100 thrown weapon ability. If you don’t have 100, you’ll do less. Thrown weapons generally have very consistent damage, especially hunga-mungas.
As far as I know there’s no ‘progression’ as such with the thrown weapons, so if you can afford to throw around throwing knives at 0 skill and ability, there’s no reason to use darts instead.
Bows are the other way you can raise marksmanship. It’s hard to hit consistently with bows unless you have decent dexterity and high marksmanship skill. The damage dealt by your arrows depends on the quality of your bow (obviously) and your archery ability. The bows, in rough order of quality, are:
Fine, hand crafted bow (Marika), short bow (rangers), elvish bow (Listhalia), silver longbow (non-unique, Lelyia), fine short bow (Brannon), long bow (rangers), fine long bow (Brannon), Great bow (Drakhyra), Dark bow (carcera), Silver longbow (unique, Lelyia)
Bows range from about 15 max damage to almost 40 per arrow, and are some of the highest damaging weapons around. Once again, there seems to be correlation between the quality of a bow and how well you hit with it, so if you can get a dark bow at 10 skill, there’s no reason not to use it. Also, the quality of the arrows you use seem to only affect how often they break, not the damage. Archery ability also plays a big part in the damage you’ll deal out. I’ll discuss archery further in the abilities section.
17 Two Weapon
Rating: A
Fast for:
Viable for: Ranger, Rogue, Paladin
Uniques: N/A
Pros: Very nice damage, fun to use, good to raise multiple skills with at once
Cons: Extremely slow, especially for non fighters.
High End Choices: The most damaging weapons to dual wield are: elemental orbs, the high end rapiers, orcish sabres, dwarven mining picks, high end shortswords. The most damaging of the lot is dual fire elemental orbs, and the most versatile is Crystal blade with an orb.
Skill Progression:
There’s no progression as such. The first skill from 0-1 is usually the hardest to get – just grab a light weapon which you have high skill in (70+) and wield it in your off-hand and hit stuff until you get that skill. Then, hire a mage to cast enhanced skill on your Two Weapon skill, and go from there – always have enhanced skill on it until you get about 30 or 40 and it’s not so essential.
For non-fighters, I highly recommend first raising exotic to about 50. Elemental orbs are excellent in the off-hand, doing nice damage, and more importantly, the armour piercing property means it hits more – making your Two Weapon skill go up faster. For non-fighters, this will be a very long and hard road – expect up to 2 hours per skill. To not get bored, try using a knife in the main hand, an orb in the off-hand, and throw boomerangs and barbed darts at whatever you kill. You can potentially skill in 4 disciplines (5 if you don’t re-wield fast enough) and that might keep you interested. Raising it with a friend also helps immensely.
This skill only really starts to shine after about 50 skills, when your off-hand starts to hit reasonably often. However after that, it starts doing as much, if not more damage, than the big normal weapons – Krakadoom, Crescent, etc.
People are still unsure about whether it’s better to start off with an easy weapon in the off-hand at low two-weapon skills or if that matters at all. What is apparent is that you only get Two Weapon skills when your off-hand lands a hit, and presumably like other weapons, the harder it hits the more it advances your skill. Your level of Two-Weapon skill determines how often you even get to attempt to use your off-hand in an attack – that is, someone with 0 skill almost never swings their off-hand weapon whereas people with 100 do it every round.
Thus, to raise this skill quickly, it’s important to hit as much as possible – making boomerangs and Crystal blade and their dexterity modifying effect very useful, along with elemental orbs and their armour piercing. Having bolas as a ranger, and utilising trip to its full as a rogue also help immensely. Needless to say, fighters should berserk while raising this. As mentioned before, for the first bunch of skills, enhanced skill is almost essential for non-fighters.
Also, since your ‘attack’ style can at times dramatically affect the damage you deal out, when dual wielding, use two weapons with the same attack style – two piercing weapons, two crushing weapons, etc. a special note about elemental orbs. They do equal damage whatever ‘attack’ mode you’re using, which is also part of the reason they’re so popular as off-hand weapons.
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Post by Lanstro on Jan 28, 2006 15:04:06 GMT
III. Abilities
Separate from ‘skills’, AA also has a set of ‘abilities’, most of which you can’t actually actively raise. I’ll separate them into ‘directly combat related’, ‘sometimes useful’ and ‘fun (impractical)’. Every race gets a different base amount of abilities, and I think your class also modifies your starting abilities (especially paladins, who get a substantial poison resistance bonus). Some abilities go up with stats and levels, others you have to go out and raise yourself – rather like weapon skills.
1 Combat Related Abilities
These are the four resistances – fire, cold, magic and poison, the two defences – block and parry, and the two marksmanship abilities – archery and thrown weapon.
The resistances are quite important for anyone doing heavy tanking or fighting magic users. I prefer the extra 20 resistances from a Black Robe to the extra armour class from Strangely Patterned Cloak because while a mob doing 30 damage with a physical hit instead of 20 won’t kill you, an unexpected 60 damage spell from a magic caster can surely knock you out.
Fire and Magic are the most important, followed by cold, and poison is almost useless. This is due purely to the inordinate amount of monsters on the game that use fire attacks.
According to GhanimX, dexterity affects cold, fire and magic resistance. Fire and cold resistance are also modified by constitution and wisdom. Magic resistance also takes into account intelligence, while poison resistance goes up with strength and constitution.
There are many pieces of equipment that give resistance boosts. The most commonly used are:
Light Body: Black Robe from Nepeth, Magic Surcoat from Stronghold and Weird Looking Blue Robe from Ebonbane Manor. These all give substantial boosts, while having reasonable armour class anyway, and are always well worth wearing, in my opinion.
Weapons: Starblade from Star Caverns gives a nice 20 to all resistances boost as well, extremely handy. To a much smaller extent, so does wolfblade.
Heavy Body: Armour of Gaius from Geographic Society and Dragon Platemail from Lizard Village have slightly less comprehensive boosts. Star Armour from Star Caverns gives minor resistances.
Shields: Wigwog Skin from Easthaven is fairly light, has decent block and comes with some small resistance bonuses – good to use as a shield, or just wear for extra resistances for characters who don’t need their off-hand.
Jewellery: Medallion of Night from Drow Gardens and Silver Pendant from Floral Being area. Random Rings from Zarkan, Garnet ring from Drute’s Tomb. These are light and essentially bonus equipment.
Generally, I prefer to use the above equipment to get myself at least +40 to my resistances when I’m tanking. Keep in mind however, the resistances are completely useless unless you are actually killing spell casters.
The defences play a large part in how well we use those defences. Dexterity plays a large part in how well we block or parry, and now that we can level above 19, additional levels also affect defences – unlike resistances. Some characters quickly have gotten 100 blocking or 100 parry after this change.
Only one item instantly raises a defence skill as such – the Shield of Gralain from Gralain’s tombs, which gives +10 blocking to dwarves and +5 to humans. It’s pretty heavy and despite the +10 blocking, is probably still worse than the other high end shields.
Otherwise, there is no real way to affect your blocking or parrying skills, apart from class-specific skills, which I’ll discuss later.
The marksmanship abilities are the damage modifiers for our thrown weapons and bows. They go up randomly when you’re using a bow or thrown weapon, and not that quickly (but definitely a lot faster than real weapon skills). Archery can only be raised when using bows, but there is a bit of a lazy way to raise thrown weapon. In the Scythe camp, there is a throwing dagger game that allows you to throw about 30 knives every reset, each one having a small chance of raising your thrown weapon skill. On average you’ll probably get 2 points per reset. As you probably already know, these two abilities don’t go up or down with deaths or levelling.
Note that you can actually in the same round, make a physical hit with your real weapon, throw a knife, cast a spell or use some special class ability, wield a bow, nock an arrow, shoot it, unwield the bow and rewield your weapon all in one. This strikes me as rather silly, but it is technically legal and is quite useful for dealing out a lot of damage very quickly.
Also note that quite a few high end monsters are rather unappreciative of having arrows shot at them or knives thrown at them, and will ‘turn’ to attack you instead of your tank, if you’re using them while bashing.
2 Semi Useful Abilities
I put into this category charm resistance, climbing, swimming, searching, the languages, trade and traps.
Charm Resistance, to the best of my knowledge, can only be gained from easy treasure hunts that feature satyrs, wood nymphs and the like. Also to the best of my knowledge, it’s only useful in those treasure hunts. It goes up when you get charmed by them and eventually break out of it. When you eventually get 100 in resistance, those treasure hunts are much less annoying (but then you’ll be so high level you won’t even run into them any more).
The Languages don’t have much practical use, but certain areas and quests and items require proficiency in various languages to understand. If you need a boost in a certain language, ask a helpful mage to cast magic mouth or comprehend languages on you, or get the ring of tongues from the Academy. Humans generally end up with 100 or almost 100 in all languages, Orcs are bad with Elvish, and vice versa, and so on. Your languages go up with intelligence and wisdom, and funnily enough, deaths. Therefore, an elf who dies a lot can even have 100 Orcish.
Trade helps you get higher prices when selling and lower when buying at certain shops, most notably Hobbitat, but its effect isn’t large enough to make a practical difference. It goes up with strength, intelligence and wisdom. Unlike languages, the temporary boost in trade ability seems to be lost over time.
Traps is an ability that as far as I know, can only be gotten by using fine tools from the fence in Neville to ‘disarm’ treasure hunt chests. Higher ability in traps presumably increases your chances to successfully disarm these chests and avoid damage. It goes up pretty slowly, and is of course independent of levels and stats.
Climbing and Swimming are two movement-related skills. Several areas have a minimum climbing or swimming ability requirement before characters are allowed to get into them. You can temporarily raise these two abilities by buying appropriate potions from Shanni in Nepeth. Similarly, many pieces of random treasure hunt items give you boosts to these two. If thieves existed, they’d probably have thieves’ dens, which would probably have various climbing-enhancing pieces of equipment. But that’s just speculation. Logically, strength and dexterity determine how high these are. Generally speaking, the less you’re carrying, the better you will climb or swim. Some rivers are almost impossible to swim out of when loaded up with equipment, similarly for walls and climbing. Some walls are also much easier to climb if you unwield your weapon.
Searching rounds out this category. This is used for finding, guess what, hidden objects and ahem, people. Not that any of the classes can hide, no, not at all. Many items have a minimum searching ability requirement before they can be found. Silver amulets from the Tantallon magic shop raises this ability temporarily. Intelligence and Wisdom modifies this ability.
3 ‘Fun’ Abilities
There are also a lot of abilities that simply have no practical use. They all work rather like weapon skills – independent of stats and levels, and go up when you use them. These are fishing, prospecting, weaving, first aid, pottery, tossing and seduction.
Fishing is one we’ve probably all run into. Buy a net or fishing rod from Salty John, find a nice stretch of water and fish away. The fish range from little carps to sharks to giant squids (which are worth 9000 or more experience). You’ll have to beat the fish to death, then you can treat it like ranger meat – can be salted, cooked or eaten raw. The squids don’t turn into Calamari rings. Fishing nets seem to pull up smaller fish than poles, but you can get more than one at a time, and also various random items, like puzzles, trash, and potions. It’s something interesting to do while waiting for the Atlantis or Lizette, or while just chatting
First aid is raised from using bandages from Drakhyra. Unfortunately, these bandages are inferior to normal medicinals as they fall off the second the bandaged person enters combat.
Tossing is from the fun dwarf/chicken/cow etc tossing game down in Scythe camp. It’d appear strength and dexterity and timing govern how well you toss the critters. Try it out, it’s a bid of sadistic fun.
Pottery is gained from moulding things from clay. The clay can be obtained from Hopkins’ area. You can mould all sorts of things, ‘crush’ it, and start again. Every bit of clay can be used several times before it dries up and becomes useless.
Weaving actually can be raised in three ways. First, find Fae in Arcadia, who will teach you the basics of weaving – up to 29 skill. Then, the slow way to raise weaving further is by mending fishing nets with fids. Otherwise, get spider silk from the freaky spider area and weave rings out of it. There’s a possibility that weaving ability actually makes some Drowgar spells better – those that involve weaving, like spider armour and spider pack. When you have ample silk, this skill goes up quickly – the problem is getting hands on the silk in the first place – the area producing it has a maximum level requirement.
Seduction is raised when being…affectionate to various orcs in Drakhyra. There’s no real use for it, but while your tank’s busy buying lambs at the tavern, you might as well have some fun with the dancing girl, eh? It goes up pretty quickly.
Prospecting goes up incredibly slowly and is incredibly brain numbingly boring. You raise it by finding Dubo near the ranger camp, getting a prospecting pan and spending hours sitting around waiting for gold – rather like a real prospector, I’d imagine.
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Post by Lanstro on Jan 28, 2006 15:11:14 GMT
IV Defend, Aim and Attack
These three things are rather trivial for most characters, but I’ll quickly go through what they do. The various defences will be given a much more in-depth treatment.
Attack sets the attack style you will be using with your weapon(s). I’ve already set out the attack type you should use in the skills section. Some weapon classes, like staves, are only able to do one type of damage – crushing damage. Thus, they’ll do a lot less damage if you set your attack type to something like chop, or even just leaving it at random. Others, like longwords, can do all of crush, pierce, slash and chop, and this doesn’t matter quite so much – though of course you should still set the correct one.
Aim is simply where your character will attempt to hit. Most people aim for the head, and change the aim when fighting things with helmets – various guards, etc. Note that some monsters don’t have heads and will automatically change your aim to body – if you like to always aim at the head you’ll need to change it back after the kill.
The defences are much more interesting – while some classes are restricted to only one real option, some have important choices. I’ll just go through how each one works.
1 Dodge
Every character can use dodge. For shapeshifters, mages and necromancers, it’s either dodge or nothing. To see an indepth analysis of dodge for mages, refer to my mage guide. For practicality, only mages and shapeshifters with more than 15 dexterity can use it to any degree of success. Its big advantage is that it’s free – you don’t have to buy any fancy equipment to use it.
Dodge (to the best of my knowledge) is based solely on 3 things: your opponent’s dex, your own dex, and the amount of weight you’re carrying. So how do we maximise dodge’s effectiveness, and to what extent is it ‘worth it’?
Generally speaking, a character with 15 or more dexterity carrying little in their inventory, fighting a monster with a black eye from a boomerang, can dodge it pretty well. When I say ‘pretty well’ I mean that overall you’ll save hit points, compared to if you just used defend none. This is despite that when dodge does backfire sometimes - ie ‘x monster predicts your attempt to dodge!’, and you get hit harder than usual.
It’s a lot better versus more trivial monsters, and extreme high end monsters are very good at hitting you even if you’re highly dextrous – Illarin, Iannis, etc. Here are some ways of affecting the 3 factors in how well dodge works:
1. The opponent’s dex
There’s only so much you can do about this. If you’re indiscriminately massacring everything on the mud, you’re not going to skip a few high dex kills just because you can’t dodge them as well.
The easiest way you can impair the opponent’s dexterity is through the humble oak boomerang. This item is a mage’s best friend for under $300 a pop, and its –1 dex penalty to the opponent quickly adds up as time passes.
Related is the barbed dart from the dalair weapon seller. I personally don’t bother with the way it breaks all the time, and that the seller is dead half the time, that it’s not as convenient as the boomerang. However, if you’re admirably keen with these things, then –2 dex on an opponent is huge.
In most circumstances an oak boomerang is all you can do in this field… make sure you have one or more at all times.
2. Your own dex
This of course is also something that is largely unchangeable. Your race will determine the amount your dexterity will max out at, so your race is probably the largest factor overall in determining whether you use dodge or none.
3. Your own weight
This is the part you have most control of. To dodge reasonably well, you need to absolutely minimise the amount of stuff you carry – ideally a weapon (or none at all for shapeshifters), a pipe, and a golden amulet. And that’s all. The only things you should allow in your inventory must be worth their weight, if it will gain you either more experience, money or skills. Otherwise it’ll just cause you to take more damage for no good reason, and is thus inefficient.
The essentials are obviously
1) Your weapon and 2) Your pipe.
If faced with 2 roughly equal weapons, take the lighter one if you’re going to be doing some dodging. Now feel free to add to that any weightless items that are neat or help – of note is the leather sheath or black scabbard – adding to leg protection for no weight addition. Of course, extra stuff like hooded falcons, pet snakes and whatnot are weightless and do nothing, so feel free to get them if you like them.
Next are the items you’d probably get despite the fact that they hamper your dodging.
Namely
1) Golden Amulet 2) Good Zarkan rings.
Golden amulet provides some protection to every single part of your body for the cost of 1 weight – ‘Only the best piece of armour in the whole game’ – Lunger, mid 2004. The same sort of argument applies for the Zarkan ring.
Following this are the situational items. These are
1) Black Robe/Magic Surcoat 2) A runed breastplate 3) Robe of Turkey feathers 4) Sturdy ring.
1) A black robe or magic surcoat depends on whether or not you’re fighting magic hurling monsters – if you’re even only occasionally taking one on, by all means it’s worth it.
2) A runed breastplate, at last checking, weighed one, gave +20 to two resistances, and evaluated as ‘good’ for the body. If that is still the case, and you can get your hands on one, then go for it.
3) The robe of turkey feathers depends entirely on whether you believe that the rumours concerning it. As the robe gives you a blue aura, which some say means the robe actually gives you the spell effect of blur, either higher armour class or dodging. I’m on the side that thinks the rumours unsubstantiated, and as such wouldn’t take the robe. If you do believe the rumours to be true, then by all means take it. Otherwise, it’s not worth the weight for its protection.
4) The sturdy ring is the same idea. If you believe it lets you do more damage, go for it.
I’m sure I’ve missed a few important items. If it’s going to make you more experience/skills/coins than the experience/skills/coins you’re going to lose by taking more damage by it reducing the effectiveness of your dodging, then take it. Otherwise, chuck it in a trashcan.
Remember, every extra item makes quite an impact in the long run.
Now you ask – how am I going to carry any of my stuff around? Mages, refer to my mage guide. Dodging drakons should drop their containers while in combat, to minimise their inventory load, then pick the containers back up when leaving the room. Have a nice alias system for streamlining this process.
2 None
Some classes simply take more damage from dodging (due to its chance of failure) than if they stood still and took the hits, and have no other choices. These are some mages, necromancers and shapeshifters.
Also, fighters who want to use their new fury ability are forced to use defend none.
For a discussion of whether dodge or none would work better for you, refer to my mage guide.
3 Parry and Riposte
Parry and riposte are similar skills – they both utilise your weapon to deflect incoming blows. As such, generally speaking, only bladed weapons and some staves and spears are good at it. These defences are available only to fighters and ah…alternative fighters. With these new levels, the ability can easily go above 100, and coupled with alert combat, my alternative fighter gets 100 (+139) parrying ability. This makes for an extremely good way of preventing damage altogether.
Riposte is less likely to succeed in preventing damage than parry. Every time you do parry, however, there is a chance that you’ll counter-attack, a free hit. Virtually nobody uses this ability, as the increase in damage taken in not using parry far outbalances the increase in damage dealt in the occasional free hit. Also, alert combat raises the riposte ability significantly less than the parrying ability (about ¼ as much).
Its pros are:
No additional weight of a shield Your off-hand can still be used to wield a second weapon, or wear Wigwog Skin for extra resistances – or even a two-handed weapon It’s generally regarded as superior in success rate to block
Its cons are that your primary weapon hugely determines these defences’ effectiveness. Most people feel they take too much damage if their weapon’s parrying is below ‘splendid’. Some of the most common and damaging parrying weapons (this is definitely not a complete list of them, just the best ones) are:
Absolutely perfect: Crystal Blade (+2 dexterity), Sword of Gilian (2 constitution) Nearly Perfect: Jeweled Dwarven Rapier, Very Fine Rapier, Starblade (+20 to all resistances), Bloodred, Sword of Virgis (+15 Longsword skill for females), Fine Broadsword, Vorpal Blade, Wolfblade, Elvenheart (+4 str for elves, +3 for half elves, extra healing powers), Powersword, Katana Splendid: Thin Rapier, Blue Steel Rapier, Exquisite Rune Sword, Rune Sword, White Iron Stick, Main Gauche
As you see, it’s dominated by longswords and rapiers. As rogues commonly use these two weapon types, and have alert combat, parry is absolutely essential to use. If you’re newer to the game, stay with the absolutely or nearly perfect weapons at first. As you get used to getting hit hard, the ones below don’t seem so bad. Generally speaking, harder hitting weapons have worse damage than their better-parrying equivalents.
4 Block
Block is available to paladins, fighters, clerics and rangers. For paladins, the shield is almost essential, whereas experienced clerics and rangers can usually do well without shields. I recommend newer players take full advantage of this good source of damage reduction.
Block’s effectiveness depends heavily on how good your shield is. This is especially so for paladins’ turtle ability – the better the shield, the better boost to their blocking ability.
The advantages and disadvantages to block are:
Shields tend to be quite heavy – at least 2 or 3 bottles weight. This used to be pretty important, but with the extra carry ability above level 19, it’s not quite so critical. Unique shields however, tend to be pretty light or weightless. Also, a 2-3 weight shield certainly mitigates more damage than any other 2-3 weight piece of armour (say, a helmet). With these new levels, 100 blocking is attainable by higher-dexterity characters, and makes it almost comparable to parrying in effectiveness However, your off-hand is taken up, and so you can’t dual wield or use two handed weapons One point of flexibility is that your main weapon can be whatever you like, and it won’t affect your blocking
Sometimes it’s better or more fun to pass on the shield. Usually, this requires you to have very nice other equipment to pull off, otherwise the extra damage taken from the lack of shield is hard to offset. With the right equipment however, the extra damage output is much more fun than the decrease in damage taken.
Rangers also spend part of their time not getting hit at all – hiding behind their wolves, making the blocking less critical. Refer to my ranger guide for that.
The best shields are:
Nearly Perfect: Polished Silver Goblin Shield (weight 4), Fancy Shield (weight 4, better block bonus than silver goblin shield) Splendid: Flying Shield (weight 1), Very Good: Wigwog Skin (weight 2, comes with +10 cold and fire resistance), green shield, black shield, spiked shield, dwarven shield (all weight 3), Shield of Gralain (weight 4, but it comes with +10 blocking for dwarves and +5 for humans),
5 Berserk
This is fighter-only. It increases a fighter’s chance to hit, and damage dealt by each hit, significantly, all for free. I’d estimate the total damage increase to be between 50 and 100%. A lot of players are of the opinion that fighters should just be berserking all the time – tanking, bashing or soloing. This is mostly the best choice, but sometimes berserking through everything isn’t the best choice, that’s up to you to find out.
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Post by Lanstro on Jan 28, 2006 15:16:05 GMT
V The Classes
This is the meat and bones of this guide. I’ll give a general description of what each class’ abilities are, how they tend to be played, what they’re good at, what races are good for them and general tips on how to get ahead with them.
1 Cleric
Learning Curve: Low Damage Dealing: C Damage Absorption: A+ Soloing ability: A Bashing ability: B Tanking prowess: A Famous clerics: Zordax, Defarge, Bazhi, Cailet, Nine, Hektor
Class Abilities
Clerics’ unique powers are their prayers: they get increasingly powerful prayers as they raise their wisdom. Here’s a table of their prayers:
Wis Prayer Cost (sps) Effect 2 Light 10 Holy symbol becomes a light source for about 10 minutes 3 Cure 20 Heals 15-30, more on others 4 Wound 25 Deals about 10 damage 5 Detect 20 Detects if something’s cursed, pretty useless Purge 20 Reduces potion tolerance in another player, you’ll use this one a lot Tolerance 20 To find out how bad the tolerance in another player is 6 State 20 Find out about a monster’s alignment and weak points and other information Transform Varies Transforms water into various types of alcohol. Not 100% sure it’s at 6 wisdom. 7 Slow 25 Cures poison slightly 8 Uncurse 75 Uncurses items, not that many items are cursed, and most of those come from Zhammar. 9 Fix 50 Heals 30-85 or so, you’ll be using this one a lot. 10 Cold 20 Adds 15-35 to cold resistance for about 15 minutes. Fire 20 Adds 15-35 to fire resistance for about 15 minutes. 11 Turn 50 Something useless 12 Dispel 25 Similar to cold and fire, for magic resistance Waterwalk 40 Not too sure it’s 12 wisdom. Allows players to walk across water. Purify 50 Better version of purge, but damages the recipient 13 Hammer 40 A damage spell that does about 30 damage 14 Curse 100 Curses an item – a cursed item can’t be unwielded or removed. Mostly used in player-killing 15 Bless 50 Gives equipment a nice boost in quality Disinfect 85 Fixes up diseases, plagues, etc 16 Neutralize 100 A better version of slow 17 Cleanse 120 A better version of purify 18 Destruct 100 Deals some damage to every undead in the room, better clerics do this better. This is only really useful for some treasure hunts with multiple undeads in the same rom. 19 Heal 180 Fixes all things wrong with a player, including pinkies.
Defensive abilities
Clerics are most well known for their healing prayers, which on average all heal more than 1 hit point per spell point. They also get a range of prayers that increase their resistances, and bless, which increases the quality of their armour. This makes clerics perfectly suited to tanking.
The line of prayers related to purge are essential for other characters to remove their tolerance. Tolerance is the effect of potions becoming less and less potent as you use more and more of them. You can’t purge yourself, so seek out another cleric via ‘who class’ to offer to ‘swap purges’.
Offensive abilities
Clerics also have offensive prayers – but these are generally quite inefficient compared to equivalent mage and necromancer offensive spells. However, wrath is still very useful to grab some equipment with after reboot. Once you’re geared up, vast majority of the time, your spell points are better spent on healing spells.
Skills
Clerics are very good with clubs, flails and staves. They also get longsword and polearm skills acceptably quickly. All of these are fairly high damage weapon classes. This makes them also good bashers, as any tank appreciates extra healing, higher resistances and solid damage. These same qualities make them very good at soloing as well – as long as you fight monsters within your abilities, you’ll simply outlast them.
One special note for clerics is the mace of crushing – this 30-70 skill club is excellent for all clerics as it comes with a bonus to-hit for clerics, highly recommended when raising club.
Races
These qualities, along with a reliance on wisdom, makes dwarves the long-time favourite class for clerics. Their high wisdom and constitution makes them very effective punching bags, the high strength letting them wear all the armour they need and wield very heavy weapons, making them one of the most solid characters in the game. The Destructor also offsets one of the deficiencies of the dwarf, by providing dwarves +1 dexterity, and in the hands of a dwarf does fairly nice damage. The cons of dwarf are the low dexterity and intelligence – my level 26 dwarf cleric still has below 90 blocking, and these 2 low stats make him gain weapon skills very slowly. However, Bazhi is a dwarf. This is the tried and true path for clerics.
Half elves have a higher wisdom than dwarves, but much less strength and constitution. This makes them a fair bit less solid, and a worse tank. I feel that the cleric should be a damage-soaker, and the half elves just sacrifice too much to fit that role. The 15 strength also cuts the half elf off top end weapons like Krakadoom and outstanding sword. The advantages of half elves are that they have high intelligence, and skill very fast compared to dwarves. They also have a fairly powerful wrath, if you want to play a cleric like a mage.
Elves are, unfortunately, even worse than half elves in the front line role. They have less wisdom, constitution, and strength, for 2 more dexterity. There’s little reason to play an elf cleric.
Humans are a happy medium between dwarves and half elves. They have decent amounts of each stat. They’re a little bit worse than dwarves at doing everything cleric-related, but their skills raise much faster, so in that sense they’re for people who like to see skills flash up. The little sacrifice in quality they make isn’t too large, and they can still tank about as well as a dwarf. The post-level 19 increase in weight capacity also offsets the sacrifice of strength somewhat. If I were to make a cleric tomorrow, it’d be human.
Orcs are the dark horse in this field. They are actually better than dwarves at the front line role – 2 more dexterity and 1 more constitution for 2 wisdom and 1 strength. The strength matters little now – the weight capacity issue is offset by the post-level 19 increases, and the damage decrease is offset by hitting more with the 2 dexterity. The orc still has enough wisdom to get access to all the useful prayers. The downsides are that skills come slowly and prayers fail a little bit more.
Playing a Cleric
Killing things with a cleric is pretty simple. Grab the best armour and shield you can find and carry, wield the biggest weapon you can find, and grab the best pack you can find. Get a load of standard heals, find something to kill, and simply fix yourself whenever you’re less than 70 hit points from maximum. Refill on heals as you run low, pray for the appropriate resistances as the situation demands, and don’t go too low on hit points. This is one of the simplest classes to kill stuff with easily. When bashing, your job is to be quick with your ‘pray fix tank’ alias while providing modest damage. You’ll probably be also required to ‘do the heals’. Always be smoking and bound, and bind your tank as well. Don’t be afraid to drink alcohol every so often, as long as you don’t get too drunk to bind your wounds. Purge your tank if they’re using potions every so often, and also pray the appropriate resistances. Do this well and most tanks will love you.
Is a Cleric for you?
Clerics are good for those learning the game, those wanting to learn to tank or bash, and people who appreciate good solid grunt characters. If you feel your mage lacks some toe-to-toe ability, give this class a try.
2 Fighter
Learning Curve: Low Damage Dealing: A+ Damage Absorption: E Soloing Ability: D Bashing Prowess: A Tanking Ability: D Famous fighters: Too many to mention. Check out the 1700 skillmasters on the scroll in the fighters hall, Undeadguy was the first to 1600 back when Two Weapon wasn’t in, and several others who made 1600 but don’t play any more.
Class Abilities - General
Fighters don’t get many unique abilities, but the few they get sure are powerful. These are berserk, fury, disarm, outflank, will, sharpen and evaluate.
You get them all at level 1.
Sharpen is a neat new ability that allows you to make edged and pointed weapons marginally better, sometimes turning an ‘average damage’ weapon into a ‘greater than average’. You’ll need a whetstone (get a ranger to forage one up for you, polished whetstones are the best). Sharpened weapons can then be honed using a strop (again, ranger-made). The sharpening will wear off over time, but re-honing renews the sharpening. Sometimes, the sharpening backfires and you’re left with a useless weapon. Also, a weapon can only be re-sharpened 3 times before it’s ‘too thin to sharpen’.
Evaluate is a useful tool used to determine how well suited various weapons are for you and others. It also gives information about the quality of armour. Use it to determine the sort of weapons that are good for you. However, be aware that it isn’t always spot-on, some weapons that get a bad rating are still pretty good.
Offensive Abilities
Berserk is an ability you’ll be fully aware of already. It’s what sets fighters apart from others, and is what gives fighters the A+ in damage output. It is also very good for your skilling speed, as you hit so much more and harder. It’s already been explained enough in the ‘defences’ section.
Fury is the newest addition to fighters. You must have Defence: None on to utilise it. It drains 2 spell points per round, and gives you an occasional extra hit (about twice every three rounds) and also randomly does a special hit, which does upwards of 150 damage (as shown so far anyway). There hasn’t really been enough playing around with this yet to form a definite opinion on it, but it would appear berserk is overall more convenient and damaging at this stage for the average fighter.
Defensive Abilities
Fighters don’t have any particularly powerful defensive abilities, however they’re better than nothing. Disarm is the most useful one. It does what it says, costing only 10 spell points for an attempt. Success rate depends on your weapon (rapiers and other bladed weapons are generally the best disarming weapons, blunts and axes poor), your dexterity (big difference between dwarves and elves), the opponent’s dexterity (boomerangs and barbed darts can make all the difference) and the opponent’s weapon (eg, Venletta is harder to disarm when she has Mace of Darkness than her normal mace). Carry around a boomerang all the time and maximise the use of this very good ability.
Outflank is most useful when soloing. It is an ability that can only be used when fighting multiple opponents – you can ‘outflank’ one of the opponents you’re not attacking and they’ll stop hitting you for a few rounds. Success depends on your dexterity, and the opponent’s dexterity and intelligence. It’s of limited use for tanking fighters since those monsters will just proceed to hit your bashers instead after a while. When bashing, 2 places of note for outflank are Delair and Orc mountain. A fighter who enters combat quickly against the lieutenant will often get hit by the captain – an outflank allows the tank to only have to tank one monster at a time. A fighter can also begin combat on the orc mountain guards, outflank one, and have the tank rescue him/her, and once again the tank will only have to take one guard at a time. It’s fairly useful for a solo fighter, however, as quite a few areas have multiple opponents in the same room.
Will is an inherently risky ability. You convert all of your spell points into temporary hit points. Once your will power runs out, you return to 1 hit point, unless you didn’t lose many of your temporary hit points. You now get tell-tale warning messages before your willpower runs out too. For most players, this is a panic button – when bashing, you should go into will mode before doing something drastic like quitting out. For fighters without much to lose with a stable connection and a good knowledge of where the safest areas are, it’s a pretty useful ability to help when soloing. Just be aware that even in the safest seeming areas, a loose feral wolf could still wander in and finish you off. Also, never will when you’re poisoned. *cough* machine *cough*
Skills
A fighter is good in all skills, and generally raises every skill faster than any other class. The exceptions would be marksmanship (rangers and maybe rogues are faster), and maybe unarmed (shapeshifters). A levelling fighter should choose 2 or 3 skills to raise, as it gives them more flexibility when playing, and also it’s a lot easier to get 3 skills to
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Post by Lanstro on Jan 28, 2006 15:16:52 GMT
and that looks like where my word document finished. if i write more, i'll post it here - hope someone out there finds this useful!
(am i a smart cookie or what? managed to post this in the suggestions forum instead of the newbie forum, someone in charge move it for me?)
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Post by Notanalt on Jan 28, 2006 15:21:46 GMT
Did you still want this to go on the AA website? That could probably be arranged...
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Post by Lanstro on Jan 28, 2006 23:39:58 GMT
well, i'd have to finish it first, and that's hardly a given
that being said, just posting what i have so far has encouraged me to write more
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Post by Tempest on Jan 29, 2006 2:24:21 GMT
Very good info. This brings back memories of when I used to play. A couple questions and comments:
1. Does Two Weapon affect the main hand's ability to hit?
2. On the topic of skills going up based on how hard you hit, is this a recent rumor since I've been gone? I've never heard that one.
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Post by tehlung on Jan 29, 2006 5:37:50 GMT
3 necro key: newbie rating: letter....wobkip, van, others experienced rating: (letter)....ensconce, machine's necro elite rating: {letter}....tehlung/sinister/rhynst
Learning Curve: Very High Damage Dealing: B(A){A+} Damage Absorption: C(B){A+} Soloing Ability: A(A+){A+++++ will buy again!} Bashing Prowess: C(C+){B} Tanking Ability: B(A)(A+) Famous necros: tehlung, sinister
Class Abilities - General you'll use very few rituals. you get them by a combination of your int/wis.
1. rot: most efficient spell damagewise 2. lifesteal: damages opponent, heals you 3. revenant/lich: creates an undead servant 4. preserve: heals your undead 5. renew: extends undead's (un)life 6. empower: trades your hps for sps
Skills knife goes up fastest, but does shit damage. staff takes some work to raise but is overall the most efficient skill for a necro.
RAces in order of superiority, unless you are sinister human helf dwarf orc elf
Is necro for you? no.
Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here's Machine with the weather..
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Post by Tempest on Jan 29, 2006 6:47:16 GMT
Has anyone ever told you how stuck on yourself you are? =) And how come you didn't put me in the newbie necro section?! Actually, now that I think of it, I was better than Van....
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Post by Machine on Jan 29, 2006 6:54:16 GMT
Here's Machine with the weather.. Today we have a 15% chance of Lungarrii being promoted to wizard status. And here above the mainland, the same old crusty low-hanging cloud is hovering, meaning a 100% chance of Levek gclaiming for no apparent reason other than to annoy others. Back to you, Lung.
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