Post by lechuck on Dec 2, 2021 20:19:56 GMT -5
Saw a hilariously incorrect post by Lotion on the GDB and it inspired me to explain what exactly the stats actually do.
ENDURANCE
Endurance governs HP/stun/stamina, regeneration rate, poison resistance, and certain saving throws. Each point of endurance is a difference of about 5 HP/stun. The base HP roll has a surprising degree of variance to it, so two characters with the same endurance can easily have a 10 point difference in hit points or stun.
Humans will have approximately:
Average endurance = 95-100 HP/stun
Good endurance = 100-105
Exceptional endurance: 115-125
Endurance has always been considered one of the two potential dump stats for combat characters. By and large, a bit of extra HP isn't likely to make a huge difference in a single fight compared to strength and agility, but it can affect your long-term survival a lot. Think of all the times you've survived with <20 HP. If you'd had considerably less endurance, you would have died on all of those occasions.
The sweet spot for hit points is around 110ish. That'll let you survive quite a few things that others wouldn't. Maxed backstab can deal up to about 100 damage, for instance, and a lot of spells deal about 50 damage at the top end. Having just north of 100 is a nice safety buffer. If you have 120+, you can survive falling an extra room where others would have been killed or knocked into the negatives by the drop. Less than 100 HP is really iffy for combat/wilderness characters. It's not that you can't play with 95 or whatever, but things just become a lot scarier.
Unfortunately, since endurance doesn't directly affect skills, it's still difficult to justify prioritizing it. It's more convenient to place it 3rd and hope for a high base HP roll. After all, what good is a bigger HP pool if you're not actually winning the fights? Prioritizing endurance is something you might do as an aide or merchant where the other stats barely matter and you just want to hedge against backstabs and such. On a warrior/ranger type, you'll get more mileage out of other stats.
The faster regeneration from high endurance is honestly really convenient to have, but it's usually not something that saves your life. Since so many classes get the bandage skill, it's mostly just a quality of life thing. If you've taken enough damage that you might be in danger, you probably wouldn't just sit down and rest on the spot, you'd go somewhere safe, and then it doesn't matter very much whether it takes 10 or 20 minutes to regenerate. But when you've taken one or two hits from some animal, it's convenient to recover faster while you do other shit.
Poison resistance is kind of whatever. Can't remember the exact formula, but I don't think endurance ever gives enough poison resistance to worry about it.
Endurance can also give bonuses (or penalties) to saving throws, but I have no way of knowing which spells and how it works so I'm just going to ignore it.
WISDOM
Wisdom governs mana pool, skill timers, perception skills and saving throws. It is traditionally the dump stat for combat characters. Mana is obviously irrelevant if you don't cast spells, and since you're probably not going to be at the receiving end of spells with any real regularity, the saving throws can generally be ignored. It's certainly not a reason to prioritize wisdom, anyway.
All the same, here's the mana formula. It can also be used to find out your exact wisdom:
100+(3*(wis-13))
In other words, we subtract 13 from our wisdom, multiply the result by three, and add a hundred. If you have exactly 100 mana, you have exactly 13 wisdom because (3*(13-13))+100 = 100. Any three points above or below means one point of wisdom above or below 13. If your mana pool is 94, you have 11 wisdom. To see your mana pool as a non-magicker, switch the infobar on or put %m in your prompt.
The two main effects of wisdom are skill timers and perception bonuses. We'll start with the latter.
As you can see from the wisdom table at the bottom of this post, the perception bonus from wisdom is kind of stingy, especially if you compare it to agility's stealth bonus. You need pretty high wisdom to get a bonus at all, and it doesn't go very high unless you get into wisdom numbers that exceed the limit for humans. Furthermore, due to a weird quirk in the code, every character gets an age-based wisdom penalty unless their age is in the 'ancient' bracket. This makes it very hard to get top-tier wisdom. Even if you prioritize it 1st, it's still uncommon to even see exceptional, and I suspect AI is literally impossible unless you're ancient.
So if we have 16-18 wisdom, we get +5 to all perception skill checks, and that's pretty much the most you can expect to get on a human. With a universal penalty to the stat, you'd literally need a 1/100 perfect roll to get more than that on a human. Meanwhile, someone with 16/17/18 agility gets +10/15/20 to all stealth skill checks. This imbalance means that stealth usually trumps scan at equal skill levels. If you have 90 scan and they have 90 hide, you're only going to spot them consistently if they didn't have high agility.
This is how it works exactly:
I'm going to use the terms 'scan strength' to mean the mathematical effectiveness of your scan roll, and 'hide strength' as the same for hide. Whenever you have scan active and you look in the room or try to target someone hidden/invisible with any targeted command (look amos, kill amos, nod amos, etc.) your scan strength is checked against their hide strength to determine whether or not you spotted them. This is the scan formula:
scan_skill + perception_bonus + (a random value between -20 and +20) = scan strength
The random value is rolled on every check. If you have 80 in scan skill and +5 from wisdom, your scan strength on any given 'look' falls anywhere between 65 and 105. You might look three times and roll a scan strength of 71, 102 and 96. Those are the levels of hide strength you can detect on each of those instances.
Hide strength is just hide_skill + agility_bonus + equipment bonuses if any. There's no random roll involved. However, since agility's bonuses to stealth go so much higher than wisdom's bonuses to perception, you can become completely undetectable even to characters with fully maxed scan. Most characters won't have any perception bonus from wisdom because most characters just don't have high wisdom, so if you have a miscreant or stalker, or even an elven infiltrator or scout, and you prioritized agility first, almost nobody will be able to spot you with scan.
That said, if you do want to get the most out of scan, you'll want high wisdom. It's just not worth going for unless your character's main purpose is to spot hidden/invisible people. If you're in any kind of combat role, it's absolutely never worth prioritizing wisdom for this purpose. A human stalker with maxed scan and average wisdom has a maximum possible scan strength of 110. A human miscreant with maxed hide top-tier agility has a hide strength of 115. Even if the stalker has enough wisdom for a +5 bonus to perception, or if the miscreant only had 18 agility instead of 19+ (AI for humans is 20), there's a 1/40 chance to spot them. Elven stalkers and miscreants with any real amount of agility are completely undetectable. Even elf scouts and infiltrators with top-tier agility would be undetectable except maybe to elves with 90 scan and insanely high wisdom.
Scan is of course not the only perception skill, but we don't really care that much about a small bonus to things like listen and watch. It's only important for scan.
Next up is skill timers. Here's the formula:
2 * MAX(8, 60 - wis_app[GET_WIS(ch)].learn + (curr_skill / 7))
Translation: take sixty minus the learn substat associated with your wisdom score (see the wisdom table at the bottom of this post), or eight, whichever is higher. Then add the skill's value divided by seven. Multiply the result by two. That's your skill timer for non-combat skills. Combat skills are double and psionic skills triple. So if we have 14 wisdom and 60 points in bandage, the timer for that skill is 2*((60-32)+(60/7)=73.14 minutes.
It's kind of nuts how much of a difference wisdom makes. If you're rocking below average wisdom, your basic skill timer might be an hour and a half, and three hours for combat skills. Meanwhile, with extremely good wisdom, your base timer is more like half an hour for non-combat and an hour for combat skills. Since some skills go up by multiple points at a time, you can max those out in a hilariously short time if you have really high wisdom. Like novice to master climb in eight hours, for instance.
That sounds massive! That almost makes it seem like wisdom should be prioritized on all characters, right? Your skills will be three times as high! Right? No. It's a trap.
Well, in the first few days of play, it will in fact make a huge difference. When it's easy to fail all your skills, they'll go up about as fast as your wisdom allows. However, most non-combat skills are so easy to max out regardless of timers that all high wisdom really does is make it take about a day less to max out stealth, hunt, skinning, etc. And once a skill is maxed out, the skill timer is obviously irrelevant.
And then there are the skills that aren't easy to max out. Why are they hard? Usually for one of two reasons: either you rarely get an opportunity to use the skill, or it's very difficult to get failures once you reach a certain point. Like you could max out poisoning very quickly with high wisdom, but do you have enough poisons to fail the skill on every timer window? If not, the timer was irrelevant. And if you do have enough poisons to do that, you'll max it out pretty quickly anyway even with shit wisdom. And it gets even worse when we get into combat skills.
As we all know, many combat skills are brutally difficult to raise because you can't just generate failures on demand. If your attacks rarely get dodged, your weapon skill almost never goes up. Combat characters generally reach what's called the 'plateau,' the point where they no longer really get any better because their skills have stopped failing with any regularity. High wisdom will make you reach the plateau faster, but it's reached pretty easily by anyone, and once you're there, skill timers become completely irrelevant. If you're lucky to raise a skill once per 24 hours played, who cares if you could technically have increased it every 45 minutes?
And that's why wisdom is a bad stat. If you happen to get a decent wisdom without prioritizing it, hey, cool. It's kind of nice to have. You'll cap your easy skills a day or so faster, and reach the plateau in 7 days of play instead of 10, or whatever. But soon enough, the stat does literally nothing whereas strength, agility and endurance continue to affect your character forever.
Even if you're a 'gick, I would say that wisdom is only really worth caring about up to 100 mana. Having more is kinda nice, but 100 is the sweet spot because a fully maxed mon spell costs 50 mana, so 100 mana is the perfect amount. Having, say, 112 mana will rarely let you do anything you couldn't with 100. If you're playing a combat class with a magick subclass, the other stats will still help you more than wisdom would, although you might not want to prioritize it last because having less than 100 mana definitely is a bit irritating.
AGILITY
Agility does a lot of things. It's the stat that governs the largest number of coded faculties. I probably couldn't even list them all, but here are the most important ones:
Stealth skills
Combat skills
Attack speed
Ranged attacks
Backstab/sap
To start with the biggest thing, stealth skills are heavily dependent on agility. See the agility table at the bottom of this post for specifics.
Once you get into the upper end of human agility, the stealth bonus gets insanely high. It gets even more silly with elven numbers. A human can get up to +25 to stealth checks and elves can get up to +40. A 40 point bonus is the same as the difference between journeyman and master skill levels. And since the classes with high stealth tend to get an agility bonus, it's really easy to roll high enough agility to get the highest possible bonus for your race.
You don't even need 'absolutely incredible' because the bonus for humans and elves caps out at exceptional. Exceptional for humans is 18-19 and the bonus caps at 19. Exceptional for elves is 24-26 and the bonus caps at 25. This means that if we're playing something like a miscreant or stalker, we can even consider prioritizing agility 2nd. It's still entirely possible to hit exceptional with your second priority if you play a class with a bonus to that stat and an age without a penalty.
Agility affects hide and sneak in different ways. With hide, it just helps you avoid detection from scan. Agility doesn't increase your chance to successfully hide. With sneak it does, so agility can make even advanced sneak failproof in the right kind of environment. An enforcer at the class cap for sneak (60) in a crowd room (+25) with 17 agility (+15) has 100% sneak, although armor worn on the body, arms, legs and feet will give penalties based on item weight and material. The foliage bonus is smaller than the crowd bonus and varies from area to area.
Next, almost all combat skills are affected by agility. See the column in the table that says 'react'? That's the bonus you get to damn near every combat skill. Including offense and defense. Now, it caps out at +10 for humans, which isn't a whole lot, but it's still the equivalent of half of an entire skill level. For elves it goes all the way up to +28 at AI agility, although it tapers off at +25 which is also where elves cap their stealth bonus, at 25 agility. You don't get much out of AI agility. A +25 to combat rolls is pretty fucking huge. You'll be reversing people's kicks even when you're barely at journeyman. It's pretty sweet. You'll definitely notice it.
Unfortunately, for the same reason that skill timers end up being irrelevant, agility's bonus to combat skills kind of erodes itself. See, you'll eventually reach a point where many of your combat skills are stuck because you can't really fail them anymore. That bonus just makes you get stuck that much earlier. It's not quite as useless as wisdom because some combat skills can be maxed out regardless, and then the bonus is pure gravy on top, but it's still just not as good as it sounds. You'll be hard pressed to max out bash and kick, and you can forget about ever maxing offense/defense. Your weapon skills will also suffer from that bonus to offense, so your plateau point comes that much sooner.
For the sake of argument, let's say that a new character starts at 5 in combat skills, and they max out at 100. That's a very primitive way of putting it but it illustrates the point.
A human fighter with average agility might plateau at 50.
An elven fighter with exceptional might plateau at 35-40.
Once in a rare while, the stars might align and you find yourself in a situation where you have the opportunity to surpass the plateau. It's not impossible to do, after all. Let's say somebody did it and ends up with a maxed-out fighter, and you're best friends with that guy and he's willing to spar with you eight times a day for the next two months. Now you have the opportunity to become a maxed-out fighter yourself, and once you get there, those agility bonuses will be sweet. But the reality for 99.8% of characters is that this simply never happens. They join some clan, they spar until they reach the plateau, and then they just never really get any further. And then those agility bonuses work against you and you'd have been better off prioritizing stats that don't erode in that manner.
Attack speed is another major aspect of agility. Now, attack speed is governed by several different things, including your skills and the weight of your weapon, so it's not just agility; but that stat has a pretty big impact on it. This bonus doesn't erode itself in the same way as the flat bonus to combat skills, because attack speed is not a skill that we need to increase through failure. This means that for the purpose of swingin' fast, it's always good to have more agility. However, there's a hard limit to attack speed: you can only attack every three seconds, no matter how ultra-gosu maxed-out elven sifu you are.
And it's possible to get to that level without being a super-agile elf. Now, if you're a clumsy dwarf, you'd probably have to be a completely maxed-out warrior type wielding a literal lightsaber to consistently hit the attack speed cap, granted; but if you're, say, a human with 'very good' agility, you genuinely might get there if you use a relatively light weapon. An elf with top-tier agility will be way faster in the beginning, so it'll look like agility makes a huge difference. But once both are plateaued, odds are that the difference will be very modest. If both were to get to the upper echelons of combat skills, the difference will be negligible.
This is why the idea of elves being low-key awesome fighters is a lie. It'll look badass in the beginning when that flat bonus from crazy high agility blows the starting skill levels out of the water, but if you look again after ten days of play, that bonus will have shriveled up considerably. Suddenly the guy with a bunch of strength and 115 hit points is winning with ease while that city elf is sobbing at his nicks-and-grazes fighting style and fretting over his 93 hit points while wishing he could get his weapon skills above journeyman.
Ranged attacks get a fairly sizeable bonus from agility as well. This is pretty nice, and while it can make it a little tricky to fully max out your archery, you'll get there eventually and then it's nice to have a fat bonus to hit. Unfortunately, it doesn't actually help that much in the end. It doesn't affect your chance of hitting the locations that hurt more, and it doesn't give you more critical shots. And with maxed archery, you'll almost always hit regardless of agility, so while high agility does give a nice bonus that largely eliminates that tiny chance to miss with master archery, it usually won't do a whole lot. Once you've mastered the skill, the chance to miss is small enough that you don't really have to care about getting a bonus to hit.
When it comes to archery (and crossbows and whatnot), your typical average shot even at maxed skill does not in fact do that much damage. As with melee attacks, you need to hit one of the vulnerable locations (mainly the head or neck, and wrists are also pretty good) to really do enough damage for it to have been worth the hassle and the risk of putting your sword away to take a shot. And on top of that, for your shot to be legitimately scary, you also need to roll a critical. Now, contrary to popular belief, melee attacks cannot crit; but ranged attacks can.
Take your archery/crossbow/slings/etc. skill and divide it by five. That's your chance to crit. A crit deals double damage. When you hear about that time some dude took 90 damage from a single arrow, that's what happened. The shooter hit him in the head or neck and rolled double damage. At the highest possible archery skill (90), you have an 18% chance to deal double damage. I don't really know what the odds are of hitting the head or neck, but suffice to say that it's not terribly likely to make both checks. Those really deadly head/neck-crits might happen no more than 5% of the time even for the best archer in Zalanthas. And agility doesn't increase the chance.
And finally, agility affects chance to hit with backstab and sap. It does it in kind of a weird way: for every point of agility you have above your target, you get a +3% chance to hit. Or -3% for every point below theirs. If there's a big difference between your agility and theirs, it has a significant impact on your chance to hit (or avoid) a backstab. This can make it tricky for elves to max the skill out, but there are ways around that if you get creative.
Being hidden also gives a huge bonus to hit with these skills, and if you have master backstab and are hidden, you're almost guaranteed to hit unless you're a really slow dwarf trying to sap a really agile elf. Still, since whiffing a backstab or sap is so embarrassing and so bad for your future, it's nice to have that extra edge. If you're planning to use these skills, you definitely want to consider prioritizing agility at least 2nd, and if you didn't get a particularly good agility roll, you'll want to keep this in mind when you're about to backstab an elf. He might have enough agility to give you a -30% chance to hit, and that's definitely a big penalty to a skill that's often "kill or be killed."
Agility also has a substat called "c_delay." The only thing I've been able to find about it is that it governs the delay from drawing/sheathing weapons.
STRENGTH
Strength governs melee damage, carrying capacity, and certain combat skills. It also has some secondary effects such as determining which bows you can use, or your chances of winning Giant's Fist under some hilarious pseudonym that people will chuckle at when they hear the NPC shout it.
I'm pretty sure we all know that strength makes an enormous difference in melee combat. The difference between middling and high strength is fucking huge. If you don't have high strength, it's almost impossible to kill anything that reacts to being attacked. Sure, an animal that just stands there until dead will not require a strong character to kill it, but if there's a player behind your intended target, you can basically forget about killing them without high strength unless you can do something that prevents them from running away.
The thing that really makes strength so effective is the fact that when you hit a vulnerable body part, your damage is multiplied--including your strength bonus. If you have +4 damage from strength and you hit a guy in the neck, that's actually +12 damage. If it didn't do that, the stat would be somewhat more balanced. By the way, even the body, where something like 50% of all attacks land, has a 140% damage modifier. And if you're using a bludgeoning weapon, the head is a 400% modifier. That's on top of the 180% stun damage modifier of bludgeoning weapons.
Let's all have a laugh and look at the kind of absurd damage you can do. We'll take Amos, a human fighter with exceptional (19) strength, 75 in the two handed skill, and he's using a maul that does 1d10 damage. That's a pretty realistic scenario.
Amos gets +4 damage from his strength. Since he's using a two-handed weapon, his strength bonus is amplified by a formula. First it adds half your strength bonus, and then it adds an additional:
(etwo_skill * str_bonus)/100 = 3
So an additional +5 from etwo'ing at 75 skill, for a total strength bonus of +9.
Amos rolls a 5 on his 1d10 damage dice, for a total of 14 raw damage. He hits Malik in the head. Bludgeoning weapons deal 180% stun damage (but only 90% health damage), and the head has a 400% stun damage modifier. These are calculated in sequence.
So 14 raw damage turns into:
(14*1.8)*4 = 100,8 damage, rounded down to an even 100.
One hundred stun damage with a single swing. From a human. And he only rolled a 5 on the weapon's damage dice. Imagine if he'd rolled higher, or if he'd had AI strength or been a dwarf. The damage could easily go into the 120s and 130s.
Meanwhile, let's say that Amos only had 'good' strength. That gives no damage bonus. Instead of doing enough damage to knock out most characters in a single blow, he deals:
(5*1.8)*4 = 36 stun damage.
Needless to say, no amount of agility will ever come remotely close to making that kind of difference in sheer combat performance. It's an absurd, gamebreaking gap in damage dealt, and agility's impact on attack speed is completely pathetic compared to this. Even if we don't use the edge case of etwo bludgeoners, the difference between middling and high strength is huge.
Just to keep it fair, let's say these two Amoses are dual-wielding two ordinary 1d8 longswords and hit the body on both swings, rolling 4 on the damage dice for simplicity's sake
Exceptional Strength Amos deals: ((4+4)*1,4)*2 = 22 damage
Good Strength Amos deals: ((4)*1,4)*2 = 11 damage
So even when we don't let Amos A use a bludgeoning weapon or etwo to capitalize on his strength he still deals literally twice as much damage as Amos B. And that's with just exceptional human strength. If he had absolutely incredible strength or was a dwarf, well, the gap grows. And I think we all know that the same difference in agility has nowhere near that kind of impact.
Now, there's no damage bonus between 10 and 14 strength. Then you get +1 at 15 and 16 strength, so very good (16) isn't even better than the upper half of good (14-15) for a human. Then at 17 we get +2, and then it's another +1 for every point of strength all the way up to the mid-20s, which is mul territory. It doesn't hit diminishing returns until then. And given the way that strength's damage bonus scales with two handed skill, once you get to 17, each subsequent point of strength is even better than the last. The benefits of strength accelerate the more you have, as opposed to agility which tapers off at exceptional for both humans and elves.
So the next time somebody tells you that they prefer agility over strength for combat characters, you can dismiss their opinion out of hand. They're simply mistaken. They're certainly free to feel that agility's bonuses to stealth and archery and whatnot makes the stat preferable to them, but if they say (as people on the GDB often do) that agility is just as effective as strength in terms of sheer combat performance, they're simply lying. It's demonstrably false.
On top of the numbers themselves, there's also the fact that in this game, the kind of combat you're worried about is not those 5-minute fights where you get whittled to death. Fleeing is an instant action. The shit that actually kills you is damage spikes. Some agile guy hitting you quickly for 1-10 damage a pop is just never gonna kill you unless you were literally locked in an apartment. You die when somebody chunks you for half of your hit points and then does it again a few seconds later, before you've had a chance to react. That's what strength does, and that's why every trigger-happy PK twink plays with max strength. To kill somebody without high strength, you have to resort to all kinds of tricks. With high strength, you just need to land a few hits. And it's not as if you couldn't also use those same tricks to hedge your bets. Nobody is scared of agile characters. They're scared of muls, half-giants and dwarves.
Other than damage, strength affects encumbrance. And yet again, the benefits are MASSIVELY skewed towards high strength. If you go from 10 to 15 strength, your carrying capacity grows from 110 to 140. Hardly any difference. Meanwhile, if you go from 15 to 20 strength, carrying capacity skyrockets from 140 to fucking 290. IT MORE THAN DOUBLES. The difference between 15 and 20 is fucking 500% bigger than the difference between 10 and 15. Five hundred percent. Once again, as with damage, we get enormous advantages from prioritizing the stat and rolling a high value whereas the entire middle range of the stat does practically nothing.
Strength also affects a few skills. It actually gives a bonus to climb. It also helps with bash and subdue. For backstab and sap, strength adds its flat damage bonus once to the total damage dealt, and a second time if you etwo. In a roundabout way, you might also say that strength helps any skill that cares about encumbrance.
Here are the stat tables. Stats technically go all the way up to 100, but most of the bonuses cut off around the natural racial maximums. You can exceed your racial cap with anything that boosts stats, such as spice, spells or enchanted items. If you combine enough of those, a human could have half-giant strength.
ENDURANCE
Endurance governs HP/stun/stamina, regeneration rate, poison resistance, and certain saving throws. Each point of endurance is a difference of about 5 HP/stun. The base HP roll has a surprising degree of variance to it, so two characters with the same endurance can easily have a 10 point difference in hit points or stun.
Humans will have approximately:
Average endurance = 95-100 HP/stun
Good endurance = 100-105
Exceptional endurance: 115-125
Endurance has always been considered one of the two potential dump stats for combat characters. By and large, a bit of extra HP isn't likely to make a huge difference in a single fight compared to strength and agility, but it can affect your long-term survival a lot. Think of all the times you've survived with <20 HP. If you'd had considerably less endurance, you would have died on all of those occasions.
The sweet spot for hit points is around 110ish. That'll let you survive quite a few things that others wouldn't. Maxed backstab can deal up to about 100 damage, for instance, and a lot of spells deal about 50 damage at the top end. Having just north of 100 is a nice safety buffer. If you have 120+, you can survive falling an extra room where others would have been killed or knocked into the negatives by the drop. Less than 100 HP is really iffy for combat/wilderness characters. It's not that you can't play with 95 or whatever, but things just become a lot scarier.
Unfortunately, since endurance doesn't directly affect skills, it's still difficult to justify prioritizing it. It's more convenient to place it 3rd and hope for a high base HP roll. After all, what good is a bigger HP pool if you're not actually winning the fights? Prioritizing endurance is something you might do as an aide or merchant where the other stats barely matter and you just want to hedge against backstabs and such. On a warrior/ranger type, you'll get more mileage out of other stats.
The faster regeneration from high endurance is honestly really convenient to have, but it's usually not something that saves your life. Since so many classes get the bandage skill, it's mostly just a quality of life thing. If you've taken enough damage that you might be in danger, you probably wouldn't just sit down and rest on the spot, you'd go somewhere safe, and then it doesn't matter very much whether it takes 10 or 20 minutes to regenerate. But when you've taken one or two hits from some animal, it's convenient to recover faster while you do other shit.
Poison resistance is kind of whatever. Can't remember the exact formula, but I don't think endurance ever gives enough poison resistance to worry about it.
Endurance can also give bonuses (or penalties) to saving throws, but I have no way of knowing which spells and how it works so I'm just going to ignore it.
WISDOM
Wisdom governs mana pool, skill timers, perception skills and saving throws. It is traditionally the dump stat for combat characters. Mana is obviously irrelevant if you don't cast spells, and since you're probably not going to be at the receiving end of spells with any real regularity, the saving throws can generally be ignored. It's certainly not a reason to prioritize wisdom, anyway.
All the same, here's the mana formula. It can also be used to find out your exact wisdom:
100+(3*(wis-13))
In other words, we subtract 13 from our wisdom, multiply the result by three, and add a hundred. If you have exactly 100 mana, you have exactly 13 wisdom because (3*(13-13))+100 = 100. Any three points above or below means one point of wisdom above or below 13. If your mana pool is 94, you have 11 wisdom. To see your mana pool as a non-magicker, switch the infobar on or put %m in your prompt.
The two main effects of wisdom are skill timers and perception bonuses. We'll start with the latter.
As you can see from the wisdom table at the bottom of this post, the perception bonus from wisdom is kind of stingy, especially if you compare it to agility's stealth bonus. You need pretty high wisdom to get a bonus at all, and it doesn't go very high unless you get into wisdom numbers that exceed the limit for humans. Furthermore, due to a weird quirk in the code, every character gets an age-based wisdom penalty unless their age is in the 'ancient' bracket. This makes it very hard to get top-tier wisdom. Even if you prioritize it 1st, it's still uncommon to even see exceptional, and I suspect AI is literally impossible unless you're ancient.
So if we have 16-18 wisdom, we get +5 to all perception skill checks, and that's pretty much the most you can expect to get on a human. With a universal penalty to the stat, you'd literally need a 1/100 perfect roll to get more than that on a human. Meanwhile, someone with 16/17/18 agility gets +10/15/20 to all stealth skill checks. This imbalance means that stealth usually trumps scan at equal skill levels. If you have 90 scan and they have 90 hide, you're only going to spot them consistently if they didn't have high agility.
This is how it works exactly:
I'm going to use the terms 'scan strength' to mean the mathematical effectiveness of your scan roll, and 'hide strength' as the same for hide. Whenever you have scan active and you look in the room or try to target someone hidden/invisible with any targeted command (look amos, kill amos, nod amos, etc.) your scan strength is checked against their hide strength to determine whether or not you spotted them. This is the scan formula:
scan_skill + perception_bonus + (a random value between -20 and +20) = scan strength
The random value is rolled on every check. If you have 80 in scan skill and +5 from wisdom, your scan strength on any given 'look' falls anywhere between 65 and 105. You might look three times and roll a scan strength of 71, 102 and 96. Those are the levels of hide strength you can detect on each of those instances.
Hide strength is just hide_skill + agility_bonus + equipment bonuses if any. There's no random roll involved. However, since agility's bonuses to stealth go so much higher than wisdom's bonuses to perception, you can become completely undetectable even to characters with fully maxed scan. Most characters won't have any perception bonus from wisdom because most characters just don't have high wisdom, so if you have a miscreant or stalker, or even an elven infiltrator or scout, and you prioritized agility first, almost nobody will be able to spot you with scan.
That said, if you do want to get the most out of scan, you'll want high wisdom. It's just not worth going for unless your character's main purpose is to spot hidden/invisible people. If you're in any kind of combat role, it's absolutely never worth prioritizing wisdom for this purpose. A human stalker with maxed scan and average wisdom has a maximum possible scan strength of 110. A human miscreant with maxed hide top-tier agility has a hide strength of 115. Even if the stalker has enough wisdom for a +5 bonus to perception, or if the miscreant only had 18 agility instead of 19+ (AI for humans is 20), there's a 1/40 chance to spot them. Elven stalkers and miscreants with any real amount of agility are completely undetectable. Even elf scouts and infiltrators with top-tier agility would be undetectable except maybe to elves with 90 scan and insanely high wisdom.
Scan is of course not the only perception skill, but we don't really care that much about a small bonus to things like listen and watch. It's only important for scan.
Next up is skill timers. Here's the formula:
2 * MAX(8, 60 - wis_app[GET_WIS(ch)].learn + (curr_skill / 7))
Translation: take sixty minus the learn substat associated with your wisdom score (see the wisdom table at the bottom of this post), or eight, whichever is higher. Then add the skill's value divided by seven. Multiply the result by two. That's your skill timer for non-combat skills. Combat skills are double and psionic skills triple. So if we have 14 wisdom and 60 points in bandage, the timer for that skill is 2*((60-32)+(60/7)=73.14 minutes.
It's kind of nuts how much of a difference wisdom makes. If you're rocking below average wisdom, your basic skill timer might be an hour and a half, and three hours for combat skills. Meanwhile, with extremely good wisdom, your base timer is more like half an hour for non-combat and an hour for combat skills. Since some skills go up by multiple points at a time, you can max those out in a hilariously short time if you have really high wisdom. Like novice to master climb in eight hours, for instance.
That sounds massive! That almost makes it seem like wisdom should be prioritized on all characters, right? Your skills will be three times as high! Right? No. It's a trap.
Well, in the first few days of play, it will in fact make a huge difference. When it's easy to fail all your skills, they'll go up about as fast as your wisdom allows. However, most non-combat skills are so easy to max out regardless of timers that all high wisdom really does is make it take about a day less to max out stealth, hunt, skinning, etc. And once a skill is maxed out, the skill timer is obviously irrelevant.
And then there are the skills that aren't easy to max out. Why are they hard? Usually for one of two reasons: either you rarely get an opportunity to use the skill, or it's very difficult to get failures once you reach a certain point. Like you could max out poisoning very quickly with high wisdom, but do you have enough poisons to fail the skill on every timer window? If not, the timer was irrelevant. And if you do have enough poisons to do that, you'll max it out pretty quickly anyway even with shit wisdom. And it gets even worse when we get into combat skills.
As we all know, many combat skills are brutally difficult to raise because you can't just generate failures on demand. If your attacks rarely get dodged, your weapon skill almost never goes up. Combat characters generally reach what's called the 'plateau,' the point where they no longer really get any better because their skills have stopped failing with any regularity. High wisdom will make you reach the plateau faster, but it's reached pretty easily by anyone, and once you're there, skill timers become completely irrelevant. If you're lucky to raise a skill once per 24 hours played, who cares if you could technically have increased it every 45 minutes?
And that's why wisdom is a bad stat. If you happen to get a decent wisdom without prioritizing it, hey, cool. It's kind of nice to have. You'll cap your easy skills a day or so faster, and reach the plateau in 7 days of play instead of 10, or whatever. But soon enough, the stat does literally nothing whereas strength, agility and endurance continue to affect your character forever.
Even if you're a 'gick, I would say that wisdom is only really worth caring about up to 100 mana. Having more is kinda nice, but 100 is the sweet spot because a fully maxed mon spell costs 50 mana, so 100 mana is the perfect amount. Having, say, 112 mana will rarely let you do anything you couldn't with 100. If you're playing a combat class with a magick subclass, the other stats will still help you more than wisdom would, although you might not want to prioritize it last because having less than 100 mana definitely is a bit irritating.
AGILITY
Agility does a lot of things. It's the stat that governs the largest number of coded faculties. I probably couldn't even list them all, but here are the most important ones:
Stealth skills
Combat skills
Attack speed
Ranged attacks
Backstab/sap
To start with the biggest thing, stealth skills are heavily dependent on agility. See the agility table at the bottom of this post for specifics.
Once you get into the upper end of human agility, the stealth bonus gets insanely high. It gets even more silly with elven numbers. A human can get up to +25 to stealth checks and elves can get up to +40. A 40 point bonus is the same as the difference between journeyman and master skill levels. And since the classes with high stealth tend to get an agility bonus, it's really easy to roll high enough agility to get the highest possible bonus for your race.
You don't even need 'absolutely incredible' because the bonus for humans and elves caps out at exceptional. Exceptional for humans is 18-19 and the bonus caps at 19. Exceptional for elves is 24-26 and the bonus caps at 25. This means that if we're playing something like a miscreant or stalker, we can even consider prioritizing agility 2nd. It's still entirely possible to hit exceptional with your second priority if you play a class with a bonus to that stat and an age without a penalty.
Agility affects hide and sneak in different ways. With hide, it just helps you avoid detection from scan. Agility doesn't increase your chance to successfully hide. With sneak it does, so agility can make even advanced sneak failproof in the right kind of environment. An enforcer at the class cap for sneak (60) in a crowd room (+25) with 17 agility (+15) has 100% sneak, although armor worn on the body, arms, legs and feet will give penalties based on item weight and material. The foliage bonus is smaller than the crowd bonus and varies from area to area.
Next, almost all combat skills are affected by agility. See the column in the table that says 'react'? That's the bonus you get to damn near every combat skill. Including offense and defense. Now, it caps out at +10 for humans, which isn't a whole lot, but it's still the equivalent of half of an entire skill level. For elves it goes all the way up to +28 at AI agility, although it tapers off at +25 which is also where elves cap their stealth bonus, at 25 agility. You don't get much out of AI agility. A +25 to combat rolls is pretty fucking huge. You'll be reversing people's kicks even when you're barely at journeyman. It's pretty sweet. You'll definitely notice it.
Unfortunately, for the same reason that skill timers end up being irrelevant, agility's bonus to combat skills kind of erodes itself. See, you'll eventually reach a point where many of your combat skills are stuck because you can't really fail them anymore. That bonus just makes you get stuck that much earlier. It's not quite as useless as wisdom because some combat skills can be maxed out regardless, and then the bonus is pure gravy on top, but it's still just not as good as it sounds. You'll be hard pressed to max out bash and kick, and you can forget about ever maxing offense/defense. Your weapon skills will also suffer from that bonus to offense, so your plateau point comes that much sooner.
For the sake of argument, let's say that a new character starts at 5 in combat skills, and they max out at 100. That's a very primitive way of putting it but it illustrates the point.
A human fighter with average agility might plateau at 50.
An elven fighter with exceptional might plateau at 35-40.
Once in a rare while, the stars might align and you find yourself in a situation where you have the opportunity to surpass the plateau. It's not impossible to do, after all. Let's say somebody did it and ends up with a maxed-out fighter, and you're best friends with that guy and he's willing to spar with you eight times a day for the next two months. Now you have the opportunity to become a maxed-out fighter yourself, and once you get there, those agility bonuses will be sweet. But the reality for 99.8% of characters is that this simply never happens. They join some clan, they spar until they reach the plateau, and then they just never really get any further. And then those agility bonuses work against you and you'd have been better off prioritizing stats that don't erode in that manner.
Attack speed is another major aspect of agility. Now, attack speed is governed by several different things, including your skills and the weight of your weapon, so it's not just agility; but that stat has a pretty big impact on it. This bonus doesn't erode itself in the same way as the flat bonus to combat skills, because attack speed is not a skill that we need to increase through failure. This means that for the purpose of swingin' fast, it's always good to have more agility. However, there's a hard limit to attack speed: you can only attack every three seconds, no matter how ultra-gosu maxed-out elven sifu you are.
And it's possible to get to that level without being a super-agile elf. Now, if you're a clumsy dwarf, you'd probably have to be a completely maxed-out warrior type wielding a literal lightsaber to consistently hit the attack speed cap, granted; but if you're, say, a human with 'very good' agility, you genuinely might get there if you use a relatively light weapon. An elf with top-tier agility will be way faster in the beginning, so it'll look like agility makes a huge difference. But once both are plateaued, odds are that the difference will be very modest. If both were to get to the upper echelons of combat skills, the difference will be negligible.
This is why the idea of elves being low-key awesome fighters is a lie. It'll look badass in the beginning when that flat bonus from crazy high agility blows the starting skill levels out of the water, but if you look again after ten days of play, that bonus will have shriveled up considerably. Suddenly the guy with a bunch of strength and 115 hit points is winning with ease while that city elf is sobbing at his nicks-and-grazes fighting style and fretting over his 93 hit points while wishing he could get his weapon skills above journeyman.
Ranged attacks get a fairly sizeable bonus from agility as well. This is pretty nice, and while it can make it a little tricky to fully max out your archery, you'll get there eventually and then it's nice to have a fat bonus to hit. Unfortunately, it doesn't actually help that much in the end. It doesn't affect your chance of hitting the locations that hurt more, and it doesn't give you more critical shots. And with maxed archery, you'll almost always hit regardless of agility, so while high agility does give a nice bonus that largely eliminates that tiny chance to miss with master archery, it usually won't do a whole lot. Once you've mastered the skill, the chance to miss is small enough that you don't really have to care about getting a bonus to hit.
When it comes to archery (and crossbows and whatnot), your typical average shot even at maxed skill does not in fact do that much damage. As with melee attacks, you need to hit one of the vulnerable locations (mainly the head or neck, and wrists are also pretty good) to really do enough damage for it to have been worth the hassle and the risk of putting your sword away to take a shot. And on top of that, for your shot to be legitimately scary, you also need to roll a critical. Now, contrary to popular belief, melee attacks cannot crit; but ranged attacks can.
Take your archery/crossbow/slings/etc. skill and divide it by five. That's your chance to crit. A crit deals double damage. When you hear about that time some dude took 90 damage from a single arrow, that's what happened. The shooter hit him in the head or neck and rolled double damage. At the highest possible archery skill (90), you have an 18% chance to deal double damage. I don't really know what the odds are of hitting the head or neck, but suffice to say that it's not terribly likely to make both checks. Those really deadly head/neck-crits might happen no more than 5% of the time even for the best archer in Zalanthas. And agility doesn't increase the chance.
And finally, agility affects chance to hit with backstab and sap. It does it in kind of a weird way: for every point of agility you have above your target, you get a +3% chance to hit. Or -3% for every point below theirs. If there's a big difference between your agility and theirs, it has a significant impact on your chance to hit (or avoid) a backstab. This can make it tricky for elves to max the skill out, but there are ways around that if you get creative.
Being hidden also gives a huge bonus to hit with these skills, and if you have master backstab and are hidden, you're almost guaranteed to hit unless you're a really slow dwarf trying to sap a really agile elf. Still, since whiffing a backstab or sap is so embarrassing and so bad for your future, it's nice to have that extra edge. If you're planning to use these skills, you definitely want to consider prioritizing agility at least 2nd, and if you didn't get a particularly good agility roll, you'll want to keep this in mind when you're about to backstab an elf. He might have enough agility to give you a -30% chance to hit, and that's definitely a big penalty to a skill that's often "kill or be killed."
Agility also has a substat called "c_delay." The only thing I've been able to find about it is that it governs the delay from drawing/sheathing weapons.
STRENGTH
Strength governs melee damage, carrying capacity, and certain combat skills. It also has some secondary effects such as determining which bows you can use, or your chances of winning Giant's Fist under some hilarious pseudonym that people will chuckle at when they hear the NPC shout it.
I'm pretty sure we all know that strength makes an enormous difference in melee combat. The difference between middling and high strength is fucking huge. If you don't have high strength, it's almost impossible to kill anything that reacts to being attacked. Sure, an animal that just stands there until dead will not require a strong character to kill it, but if there's a player behind your intended target, you can basically forget about killing them without high strength unless you can do something that prevents them from running away.
The thing that really makes strength so effective is the fact that when you hit a vulnerable body part, your damage is multiplied--including your strength bonus. If you have +4 damage from strength and you hit a guy in the neck, that's actually +12 damage. If it didn't do that, the stat would be somewhat more balanced. By the way, even the body, where something like 50% of all attacks land, has a 140% damage modifier. And if you're using a bludgeoning weapon, the head is a 400% modifier. That's on top of the 180% stun damage modifier of bludgeoning weapons.
Let's all have a laugh and look at the kind of absurd damage you can do. We'll take Amos, a human fighter with exceptional (19) strength, 75 in the two handed skill, and he's using a maul that does 1d10 damage. That's a pretty realistic scenario.
Amos gets +4 damage from his strength. Since he's using a two-handed weapon, his strength bonus is amplified by a formula. First it adds half your strength bonus, and then it adds an additional:
(etwo_skill * str_bonus)/100 = 3
So an additional +5 from etwo'ing at 75 skill, for a total strength bonus of +9.
Amos rolls a 5 on his 1d10 damage dice, for a total of 14 raw damage. He hits Malik in the head. Bludgeoning weapons deal 180% stun damage (but only 90% health damage), and the head has a 400% stun damage modifier. These are calculated in sequence.
So 14 raw damage turns into:
(14*1.8)*4 = 100,8 damage, rounded down to an even 100.
One hundred stun damage with a single swing. From a human. And he only rolled a 5 on the weapon's damage dice. Imagine if he'd rolled higher, or if he'd had AI strength or been a dwarf. The damage could easily go into the 120s and 130s.
Meanwhile, let's say that Amos only had 'good' strength. That gives no damage bonus. Instead of doing enough damage to knock out most characters in a single blow, he deals:
(5*1.8)*4 = 36 stun damage.
Needless to say, no amount of agility will ever come remotely close to making that kind of difference in sheer combat performance. It's an absurd, gamebreaking gap in damage dealt, and agility's impact on attack speed is completely pathetic compared to this. Even if we don't use the edge case of etwo bludgeoners, the difference between middling and high strength is huge.
Just to keep it fair, let's say these two Amoses are dual-wielding two ordinary 1d8 longswords and hit the body on both swings, rolling 4 on the damage dice for simplicity's sake
Exceptional Strength Amos deals: ((4+4)*1,4)*2 = 22 damage
Good Strength Amos deals: ((4)*1,4)*2 = 11 damage
So even when we don't let Amos A use a bludgeoning weapon or etwo to capitalize on his strength he still deals literally twice as much damage as Amos B. And that's with just exceptional human strength. If he had absolutely incredible strength or was a dwarf, well, the gap grows. And I think we all know that the same difference in agility has nowhere near that kind of impact.
Now, there's no damage bonus between 10 and 14 strength. Then you get +1 at 15 and 16 strength, so very good (16) isn't even better than the upper half of good (14-15) for a human. Then at 17 we get +2, and then it's another +1 for every point of strength all the way up to the mid-20s, which is mul territory. It doesn't hit diminishing returns until then. And given the way that strength's damage bonus scales with two handed skill, once you get to 17, each subsequent point of strength is even better than the last. The benefits of strength accelerate the more you have, as opposed to agility which tapers off at exceptional for both humans and elves.
So the next time somebody tells you that they prefer agility over strength for combat characters, you can dismiss their opinion out of hand. They're simply mistaken. They're certainly free to feel that agility's bonuses to stealth and archery and whatnot makes the stat preferable to them, but if they say (as people on the GDB often do) that agility is just as effective as strength in terms of sheer combat performance, they're simply lying. It's demonstrably false.
On top of the numbers themselves, there's also the fact that in this game, the kind of combat you're worried about is not those 5-minute fights where you get whittled to death. Fleeing is an instant action. The shit that actually kills you is damage spikes. Some agile guy hitting you quickly for 1-10 damage a pop is just never gonna kill you unless you were literally locked in an apartment. You die when somebody chunks you for half of your hit points and then does it again a few seconds later, before you've had a chance to react. That's what strength does, and that's why every trigger-happy PK twink plays with max strength. To kill somebody without high strength, you have to resort to all kinds of tricks. With high strength, you just need to land a few hits. And it's not as if you couldn't also use those same tricks to hedge your bets. Nobody is scared of agile characters. They're scared of muls, half-giants and dwarves.
Other than damage, strength affects encumbrance. And yet again, the benefits are MASSIVELY skewed towards high strength. If you go from 10 to 15 strength, your carrying capacity grows from 110 to 140. Hardly any difference. Meanwhile, if you go from 15 to 20 strength, carrying capacity skyrockets from 140 to fucking 290. IT MORE THAN DOUBLES. The difference between 15 and 20 is fucking 500% bigger than the difference between 10 and 15. Five hundred percent. Once again, as with damage, we get enormous advantages from prioritizing the stat and rolling a high value whereas the entire middle range of the stat does practically nothing.
Strength also affects a few skills. It actually gives a bonus to climb. It also helps with bash and subdue. For backstab and sap, strength adds its flat damage bonus once to the total damage dealt, and a second time if you etwo. In a roundabout way, you might also say that strength helps any skill that cares about encumbrance.
Here are the stat tables. Stats technically go all the way up to 100, but most of the bonuses cut off around the natural racial maximums. You can exceed your racial cap with anything that boosts stats, such as spice, spells or enchanted items. If you combine enough of those, a human could have half-giant strength.
/* strength apply */
/* to_dam, carry_w, bend_break */
struct str_app_type str_app[101] = {
{-9, 1, -1}, /* 0 */
{-6, 5, 0},
{-5, 10, 0},
{-4, 20, 0}, /* 3 */
{-4, 35, 0},
{-3, 50, 0},
{-3, 65, 0}, /* 6 */
{-2, 80, 0},
{-2, 95, 0},
{-1, 105, 1}, /* 9 */
{0, 110, 2},
{0, 115, 3},
{0, 117, 4}, /* 12 */
{0, 120, 6},
{0, 125, 9},
{1, 140, 12}, /* 15 */
{1, 155, 18},
{2, 170, 24},
{3, 195, 32}, /* 18 */
{4, 230, 40},
{5, 290, 48},
{6, 380, 56}, /* 21 */
{7, 430, 64},
{8, 500, 72},
{9, 640, 80}, /* 24 */
{10, 680, 80}, /* 25 */
/* agility apply */
/* react, stealth_manip, carry number, missile bonus c_delay */
struct agl_app_type agl_app[101] = {
{0, 0, 0, 0, 15}, /* 0 */
{-30, -50, 1, -30, 10},
{-20, -40, 2, -25, 8},
{-15, -30, 2, -20, 7}, /* 3 */
{-10, -25, 2, -15, 5},
{-5, -20, 3, -10, 5},
{-5, -15, 3, -5, 5}, /* 6 */
{0, -10, 4, -5, 4},
{0, -5, 4, 0, 4},
{0, 0, 5, 0, 4}, /* 9 */
{0, 0, 5, 0, 4},
{0, 0, 6, 0, 3},
{0, 0, 6, 0, 3}, /* 12 */
{0, 5, 7, 0, 3},
{0, 5, 7, 0, 3},
{0, 5, 8, 5, 3}, /* 15 */
{5, 10, 8, 5, 2},
{5, 15, 8, 5, 2},
{5, 20, 9, 10, 2}, /* 18 */
{10, 25, 9, 10, 2},
{10, 25, 9, 15, 2},
{10, 25, 10, 15, 2}, /* 21 */
{15, 25, 10, 20, 2},
{15, 30, 10, 20, 1},
{20, 35, 11, 25, 1}, /* 24 */
{25, 40, 12, 25, 1}, /* 25 */
{28, 40, 12, 28, 1},
/* endurance apply */
/* saving throws, system shock, move bonus */
struct end_app_type end_app[101] = {
{-50, 0, 0}, /* 0 */
{-50, 10, 1}, /* 1 */
{-40, 20, 2},
{-30, 30, 3},
{-25, 40, 4},
{-20, 45, 5}, /* 5 */
{-15, 50, 6},
{-10, 55, 7},
{-5, 60, 8},
{0, 65, 9},
{0, 70, 10}, /* 10 */
{0, 75, 11},
{0, 80, 12},
{5, 85, 13},
{5, 88, 14},
{5, 90, 15}, /* 15 */
{10, 95, 17},
{15, 97, 19},
{20, 99, 21},
{25, 99, 23},
{25, 99, 25}, /* 20 */
{30, 99, 28},
{30, 99, 31},
/* wisdom apply */
/* learn, perception, saves */
struct wis_app_type wis_app[101] = {
{0, 0, 0}, /* 0 */
{1, -30, -50},
{2, -20, -40},
{4, -15, -30}, /* 3 */
{6, -10, -25},
{8, -5, -20},
{10, -5, -15}, /* 6 */
{12, 0, -10},
{14, 0, -5},
{16, 0, 0}, /* 9 */
{18, 0, 0},
{20, 0, 0},
{24, 0, 0}, /* 12 */
{28, 0, 0},
{32, 0, 0},
{38, 0, 5}, /* 15 */
{44, 5, 10},
{50, 5, 15},
{56, 5, 20}, /* 18 */
{62, 10, 25},
{68, 10, 30},
{74, 10, 35}, /* 21 */
{80, 15, 40},
{86, 15, 45},
{92, 20, 50}, /* 24 */
{92, 20, 50}, /* 25 */
Human Human STR/AGI/END Human WIS
3d4+7 4d4+4
Absolutely Incredible | 20+ 21+
Exceptional | 18-19 19-20
Extremely Good | 17 17-18
Very Good | 16 15-16
Good | 14-15 14
Above Average | 13 12-13
Average | 12 10-11
Below Average | 10-11 8-9
Poor | < 10 < 8
City Elf cElf STR cElf AGI cElf WIS* cElf END
3d4+3 3d6+8 4d7+5 2d4+8
Absolutely Incredible | 16+ 27+ 34+ 17+
Exceptional | 14-15 24-26 30-33 16
Extremely Good | 13 22-23 27-29 15
Very Good | 12 20-21 23-26 14
Good | 10-11 18-19 20-22 13
Above Average | 9 16-17 16-19 12
Average | 8 14-15 13-15 11
Below Average | 6-7 11-13 9-12 10
Poor | < 6 < 11 < 9 < 10
*Elf wisdom was nerfed a long time ago. Don't know the exact values, but it's certainly not what this table says.
My estimate is that elven wisdom is higher than humans by about the same amount as dwarven vs. human strength.
Dwarf Dwarf STR Dwarf AGI Dwarf WIS Dwarf END
3d4+9 3d4+6 3d4+6 2d4+13
Absolutely Incredible | 22+ 19+ 19+ 22+
Exceptional | 20-21 17-18 17-18 21
Extremely Good | 19 16 16 20
Very Good | 18 15 15 19
Good | 16-17 13-14 13-14 18
Above Average | 15 12 12 17
Average | 14 11 11 16
Below Average | 12-13 9-10 9-10 15
Poor | < 12 < 9 < 9 < 15
Half Elf HE STR HE AGI HE WIS HE END
3d4+6 3d4+7 3d4+7 3d4+8
Absolutely Incredible | 19+ 19+ 19+ 21+
Exceptional | 17-18 17-18 17-18 19-20
Extremely Good | 16 16 16 18
Very Good | 15 15 15 17
Good | 13-14 14 14 15-16
Above Average | 12 13 13 14
Average | 11 12 12 13
Below Average | 9-10 10-11 10-11 11-12
Poor | < 9 < 10 < 10 < 11
Half Giant HG STR HG AGI HG WIS HG END
1d15+35 3d4+0 3d3+1 1d8+14
Absolutely Incredible | 51+ 13+ 11+ 24+
Exceptional | 48-50 11-12 10 22-23
Extremely Good | 46-47 10 9 21
Very Good | 44-45 9 8 20
Good | 42-43 7-8 7 19
Above Average | 40-41 6 6 18
Average | 38-39 5 5 17
Below Average | 37-36 3-4 4 15-16
Poor | < 36 < 3 < 4 < 15
Desert Elf dElf STR dElf AGI dElf WIS dElf END*
3d4+3 3d7+8 4d4+5 1d15+25
Absolutely Incredible | 16+ 30+ 22+ 41+
Exceptional | 14-15 27-29 20-21 38-40
Extremely Good | 13 24-26 18-19 36-37
Very Good | 12 22-23 16-17 34-35
Good | 10-11 19-21 15 32-33
Above Average | 9 17-18 13-14 30-31
Average | 8 14-16 11-12 28-29
Below Average | 6-7 11-13 9-10 26-27
Poor | < 6 < 11 < 9 < 26
*Desert elf endurance was also nerfed at some point. It feels like it's the same as humans now, with like +50 stamina on top.
