DM: Skills vs. Stats From: jas@rdii.com (Jim Smith) Date: Thu, 27 May 1993 05:52:01 +0000 I was trying to explain to Mitch why it is bad in the long term to train stats vs. training skills, and it occured to me that I may not understand it completely myself. So to better educate everyone concerned, I thought I'd post my explanation to Mitch to see what the rest of you thought about it and to find out just how close I am to the truth. Here was Mitch's original comment, and my explanation: > Generally, it occurs to me that if it's "too bad you can't quite get > and X in stat Y," you should just spend your first fight or two > building it up. So you won't work right till yo do ... who worries > about winning their first fight or two, anyway? For short term dixies, that's fine since you will eventually DA him. It's a bit more complicated than that for long term warriors. As I understand it, if you train stats too soon, you hurt your warrior in the long run due to the fact that you can only learn a certain number of skills in regular DM. Allow me to explain a little further about skills for a moment and I will come back to this. (Better settle in, this will take a while. ;-) Skills are used as bonuses when fighting in the arena. The six skill types are attack, defense, parry, riposte, initiative and decisiveness. Each single skill represents an additional 5% bonus to that particular skill type. Your warrior starts with a certain number of skills, based on attributes and fighting type. For instance, slashers start with high attack, initiative and decisiveness, while TP's start with high defense, parry and sometimes riposte. When you get a total of 16 skills (or a 80% bonus) you get an "EXPERT" rating in that skill. You can also get "ADVANCED EXPERT" at 20 skills, "MASTER" at 26 skills, "ADVANCED MASTER" at 34 skills and "GRAND MASTER" at some point after that. (Probably at 44 skills but I don't know for sure.) Some warriors can start with experts in certain skills. I have a slasher that started with experts in init and riposte. You gain skills one of two ways, either by training skills during arena fights, or by training certain stats above certain levels. There are all sorts of charts that have devised to show which stats affect which skills at which levels. OK, back to the original thought regarding skills. Once you get 20 skill increases for a given skill type, you can no longer increase that skill type by training skills. You CAN, however, gain skills by raising stats over the breakpoints. The problem is, if you do this BEFORE you hit your limit of 20 skills, the additional skills are counted as part of the limit of 20. If you wait until AFTER you hit the limit, the skills you gain would take you over the limit of 20, gaining you extra skills. Now, you have to be cautious here, because timing is everything. If you wait too long to train stats, you might get transfered to ADM sooner and miss out on training your stats. The reason THAT is bad, is that when you go to ADM, the stat raise percentage chance is RESET so that you are back to having a WL * 5 / 1 percent chance of raising a stat on your first turn of ADM. (Isn't this a lovely system!) This makes it very feasible to raise high WL characters 6 or 8 times without huge effort. By the way, there is a limit of 21 on stats in regular DM, but there is NO limit in ADM. You tend to get the skills you use the most, i.e. attack, init and dec for slashers, so it is fairly easy to get 2 or 3 skill areas maxed out before you need to start training stats. It's a very "touchy feely" sort of thing, and every manager has his own system for predicting when to train what. My understanding is that once you raise the most important skills for a given warrior by 20 (like attack, init, and decise for my slasher), you should then start raising the stats that would further enhance those skills. A warrior with a WT of 17 will generally average about 2 skills/fight. A 13 WT averages around 1. (Your mileage may vary, tax and dealer prep extra ;-) OK everyone, how accurate is this? Jim -- jas@rdii.com | aka Mundamugu, witchdoctor, headshrinker and team James A. Smith, Sr. Engineer| manager of Zulus from Hell in Delarq Tor (DM 58). Racal-Dana Instruments Inc. | Currently: 12-20-3 (8 DA). Founding Member of the #include <std.disclaimer> | Brotherhood of Nasty Killers (BONK) Local 58. Referenced By Up