Character creation

[e11]

I'm thinking of grabbing this game while it's on sale.

I've been looking up the basic of character creation and the skill tree, and I hear you get enough points to max out four different skills.

How important is it to be smart about skill distribution in this game? I see the Almain havev +2 Blacksmithing, which I intend to use, but I just find the dokkalfar cooler-looking. Is it a waste to go with a dokkalfar who fights up-front with a sword, as opposed to being a sneaky assassin?
And is there really no racial difference on the Might/Finesse/Sorcery spectrum?

[Yoinkyz]

starting race isnt a big deals. youl be fine

[Bankai9212]

Only skills worth getting are blacksmith, gem crafting, I think detect hidden. Doesn't really matter since you can respec.

[e11]

Originally posted by Bankai9212:

Only skills worth getting are blacksmith, gem crafting, I think detect hidden. Doesn't really matter since you can respec.

What about Persuasion? I always max that one out in rpg's, and it usually pays off.

[Bankai9212]

From my playtime, it’s not used much if anything you’ll maybe get more gold for a quest, but detect hidden will give you more since it also increases gold found.

[Fogmoz]

Making sure you like how your character looks is much more important than the starting skills you get.

• Alchemy isn't super useful but I leveled it because constantly failing to gather materials was giving me an aneurysm.
  
• Blacksmithing is a solid choice, eventually. Once you have more options, you can better customize your gear to your build.
  
• Detect Hidden is super useful. There are more hidden caches of treasure than you'd expect, and it's convenient to have stuff revealed on your minimap.
  
• Dispelling depends on your skill/patience with magic locks. I'd definitely get it to 4 to remove Dark Sigils though.
  
• Lockpicking is essentially useless. Even at max skill, hard/very hard locks will give you barely any warning before snapping your lockpick. However, lockpicks are cheap and plentiful, once you find the merchants. Just stock up and get comfortable losing a pick or two on any hard/very hard lock.
  
• Mercantile is completely up to you. Buy low and sell high, you know the deal.
  
• Persuasion's usefulness depends on how comfortable you are with save scumming dialog checks.
  
• Sagecrafting is another solid choice, again, eventually.
  
• Stealth is sadly no good, imo. I always try to be stealthy in RPGs, and the number of opportunities I had to sneak around was disappointingly low. For sneaking around NPCs, they're usually in well-lit areas and it becomes an annoying chore to find a blind angle to successfully pickpocket/steal items. For sneaking around enemies, good luck - most are either in tight packs that randomly move around, or are scripted to ambush you.

As much as I ♥♥♥♥ on Lockpicking, I still chose Varani because I wanted to look like a pirate. It really doesn't matter.

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I'll add that, if you are careful (and good with your money) you can actually get every skill to 10. However, you need to hit all 18 Basic trainers before level 15, and all 9 Advanced trainers before level 33. There's a bit of wiggle room since the DLC adds 3 Master trainers, but it's still a challenge - mostly the need to amass ~270,000 gold before level 15.

[Mez Koo]

There are so many skill trainers that you can pretty much max out all the skills you want with planning and effort in the end game.