Tons of Newbie Questions

Thanks so much for getting back to me barka I really appreciate your input and you answered pretty much all of my questions. If I have any more (which I most certainly will) I'll post them in this thread. Thanks again!

Stumbling around in darkness "is" a failure. Direction Sense does let you wonder around in darkness without error if it's high enough and the time you stumble around, is considered a fail in direction sense. More then that, eventually in my experience. You will only be able to fail in darkness and almost never in thick storms.

There are such things as climbing boots, but much like climbing ankle spikes, or climbing body harnesses they're not sold by NPCs. You could get them off Kuraci PC merchants though. Or, more commonly, off corpses of those who got them off PC Kuraci merchants .

Plague is supposed to be possible to cure, but I do not know how to cure it via non magickal means. It goes away on its own eventually if you dont treat it, but your wisdom stat drops permanently by a small margin.

Foraging for stones/gemstones to sell straight to NPC merchants isnt very profitable really. Nowhere near compared to salt foraging for Jal, or any other scripted job in the cities. Foraging for stones is paramount when you deal with PC merchants, but they need those to make their own funky stuff with.

There is an NPC merchant in Tuluk/Blackwing Outpost that sell one or two basic cures. But generally it tends to be so unreliable (they get sold quick) and expensive, that you really should just deal with a PC about it. They're definitely not sold in enough numbers to support practice in poisoning for example.

Does Bash even deal any kind of damage at all? It puts a heavy delay on you and makes you prone, so for awhile you cant move, flee, cast, or do anything, and are in a very vulnerable position. In many early life occurrences, getting bashed = almost certain death. But Bash itself does not damage hp.


Can you confirm 1 failure is a "guaranteed" skill up? 1 failure means a 'chance' of skill up, no? Getting harder and harder as the skill level goes up.

At the same time, the scenario the OP mentioned gets noticed very quickly. It happens sometimes in Byn. When people log in, go sparring, log out, repeat. The Imms 'have' been known to do things to discourage that kind of activity. Though usually people who do that are doing it due to time constraints and all that stuff, not the sheer need to twink.

I would discourage the practice of 'shitmugging'. You're basically putting "shit" in a mug that's supposed to contain ale, or whatever. And acting on an assumption that the person will "seriously" not realize he's about to drink some foul smelling shit. It works, but if an Imm is watching you, expect some trouble.

Very light - no problem - light - easily manageable - manageable - heavy but manageable - very heavy - extremely heavy - then there's one or two more that I forget, but you shouldn't be going around that encumbered anyway.



I don't know the numbers, but the common consensus is to try and stay at 'light.' If you have to go at easily manageable then that's okay, but any higher should be avoided at all cost. I'm pretty sure that there's no bonus to being lower than light, but I could never verify this other than trying and observing no visible difference.



Relative to whatever number is the highest that any guild can get the skill. MOST skills can be raised to 80 or 90 by some guild, but the standard weapon skills only go to 70 even for warrior, and there's a few quirky ones like shield use which nobody gets higher than 45, and parry 65. As such, a warrior's 45 shield use will show up as master while a burglar's backstab, which caps at 40, will probably say journeyman at max because assassins cap it at 90.



The time it takes to complete a craft depends on your skill, but it's largely irrelevant because crafting never takes very long.



Yes, which is a problem because you stop missing against most opponents long before the skill is maxed. You then have to seek out super agile things to improve further. This is the main reason why two handed is a bad style unless you're willing to go to extreme lengths to twink it up, and even then, it isn't overwhelmingly powerful.



Yes, and note that your weapon skill does nothing for your off-hand attacks, nor will you gain weapon skill increases from these attacks. The dual-wield skill essentially becomes your weapon skill for whatever weapon is in your secondary hand. Also, your off-hand attack gets a significant penalty to hit, making it possible to raise it quite high against otherwise weak opponents where your main-hand attack never misses anymore. This is good for rangers and assassins as they branch the highly important parry skill from dual-wield, and don't have to do anything overly twinky in order to do so. It still takes forever, though.



VERY tough. They're right up there with weapon skills as the most difficult skills to increase. They don't operate on the '1 fail = skill-up' system that most skills do but rather have a small chance to go up when your attack is dodged, and dodges stop happening almost entirely at some point before the skills are maxed or even particularly close to it.



It just says 'you fail the rescue' and nothing happens. You don't enter combat when failing to rescue, and I don't even think it will "aggro" the mob or trigger the crimcode.



The stat gains/losses from ordinary use are temporary. If you get addicted (which takes a lot of use and is too expensive for most - really it's not gonna happen accidentally) then it gets a bit weird and I've never been able to verify if any of the consequences are permanent. Whatever the case, they are fucking CRIPPLING and your character is quite fucked if he gets deeply addicted and then loses access to the spice, which is almost guaranteed because the cost of keeping up gets so ludicrous after a while that it's basically impossible to continue unless you're a Kuraci merchant or something.

What happens when you're in withdrawal is that your max hp and stun will go down, just like if you're starving. And they'll just continue to drop and drop every in-game hour until eventually you have 1/1 hp and 1/1 stun. Your character is then utterly fucked because you can't really do anything except sit around, you can't use the Way, and anything that deals damage can be fatal. I tried it once. I don't know how long the withdrawal lasts, but after multiple RL days with no end in sight and my PC stuck in an apartment unable to contact anybody and unable to leave Red Storm because going into the desert with 1 hp is insane, I got bored and suicided the character. I suspect it probably isn't quite permanent, but it lasts so long that you can forget about doing anything coded with your PC for a long, long time, possibly RL weeks.

I've also noticed two-handed cross into a higher skill bracket without missing on more than one pc.

I did not know this. Hallelujah!

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Also, as a note on the City vs. Desert Sneak/Hide subject:

I've always twinked these up by sneaking in the opposite environment. (Assassins trying to creep up on jozhal and vice-versa.) Recently I had a character with desert sneak /hide. I maxed my hide skill in a matter of like... 3 days played by hiding randomly around the bazaar. However, after TEN days played, I couldn't get my sneak past novice, despite sneaking through the bazaar and other parts of town 1-3 times per IRL day during that time. I was part of a clan which made it basically impossible for me to train it in the desert. Any idea why this could have been? The character died with novice sneak at 10 days played, despite a fair amount of twinking. :/

Largely irrelevant.