Bento said:
Any tips on character builds? Any skills that can be passed on or are crucial? Any reason to pick Light Armor/Weapon instead of Heavy? Are there enough times that persuade is used to make it worthwhile?
I meant to whip up this awesome post yesterday while at work, but I was swamped all day and barely got a chance to breathe, and this weekend will be spent on long-neglected chores and errands.
But in a general sense:
- You should spent the majority of your stat points on stats that drive the skills that you'd like to master, as the higher any given skill's corresponding stat attribute is, the higher you can train in that skill. Dexterity and Intelligence are some of the most important stats to power up. Additionally, Intelligence is the corresponding stat to the most skills in the game.
- Avoid putting points into Strength. It's a mostly useless statistic that drives very few skills. You can literally put 0 points into it and have a supremely powerful character by end game, thanks to the enchant system. Dropping points into Dexterity and Constitution will nicely juice up your carrying capacity and ultimately drives much more important skills than Strength alone will.
- Light weapons > heavy weapons. Some of the best equipment in the main quest and at least the first half of the expansions are light weapons. They tried to balance things in later expansions by offering better heavy weapons, but light weapons can also be dual-wielded, so at the end of the day, they still crush heavies. Light weapons is also driven by Dexterity (which also drives or partially drives a solid number of other skills including dual wield, block, and helps raise your carrying capacity.
- Heavy armor > light armor. Don't bother wasting any skill points in light armor, as the minor benefit they'll contribute to things like cloaks and boots don't outweigh the overall AC improvements you'd gain by building up heavy armors instead.
- Environmental magic and alchemy are critical skills. Environmental magic drives your enchant ability as well as the number of mark/recall locations you can record. Enchanting is the fastest way to improve your character, allowing you in part to offset the weaknesses inherent in ignoring certain stats and skills in order to focus on others.
- Strong alchemy will also help to turn the THOUSANDS of herbs and materials you'll collect throughout your questing into a huge number of different brews, recreational drinks, and potions. Health and mana restoration potions are fairly important depending on your character class and relative power level. There are a number of not-too-difficult to make potions that can be sold for hundreds and thousands of gold pieces a pop, granting you license to speed-improve your equipment, and more important, max out your training opportunities at every new town and turn. It'll also improve the odds of successfully mixing the concoctions and decrease the durability hits of your mortar and pestle. Eventually, you'll become so good that you'll never break your mortar and pestle. Finally, you'll be able to brew up perma-stat boosting potions. You're limited to consuming only one per character level, so the faster you boost your potion-making skills, the sooner you'll be able to start.
- Persuade is important if you plan on pursuing as many quests as possible to successful completion. Some NPCs won't give you quests if your persuade isn't high enough, and other quests just can't be completed successfully for the same reason. Not critical, but probably a good idea to put a few points into every once in a while. If you do decide to invest, try to get to 30 as soon as possible, as that'll allow you to basically tackle the first few towns-worth of quests without too much trouble. Probably a better idea to start enchanting moderately enchant-able cloaks and gear to artificially boost this, instead of putting actual points into it.
- Repair is handy for similar reasons as alchemy. The higher your skill, the faster you can repair and the less damage you do to your repair hammers. Not even remotely critical since a strong alchemy skill will net you more than enough cash to pay for full auto-repairs at the local armor shops, and the mark and recall spells will easily allow you to warp out of tough situations to visit said blacksmiths, and then warp right back in. Not a bad candidate for boosting through enchanting of cloaks and other decent enchantment-absorbing gear.
- Mercantile will net you better buy/sell prices and can make a very huge impact later on in the game once it comes time to sell amazingly expensive potions and excess gear. Mega-mercantile-enchanted equipment sets in the late game will allow you to become a multi-millionaire without too much difficulty. But probably not a skill I'd pump points into.
I could write so much more, but I think I'll stop here for now and will follow-up with more gameplay tips if there's a demand for it.
