Questions about Skills and Spells

[Necronson]

So my question is this, is there any soft cap or hard cap on skills? I've been training my dodge/parry like crazy after constantly watching Trolls assail my poor mages with boulders.

My second question is about the specific enemy Phantom, I'm pretty sure it casts Blade Smite as his spell. The problem I have is that my squishy mages that should have a pretty decent protection value against spells is guaranteed one-shotted if they cast it and that's at level 5 with the apropriate protection ring/mage necklace/mage cloak equiped. From the manual the particular spell does 63 spell dmg. Does certain enemies get a damage boost of some kind?

Great game by the way. Having a blast.

[CT6502]

Great questions! The hard cap on skills is probably 255 (8-bit integer), although I've never tested it. In reality, since you can only train 6 points per level (for each skill), you can only gain a max of 9*6=54 from training a particular skill. The rest has to come from actually using the skill, and it would take a _long_ time to build up really high. BTW it's also good to train as soon as possible, as it gets more expensive at higher levels and you don't get a discount. However, don't train everyone on every skill - only train 1 or 2 skills per character. For example, dodge/parry is only effective if your equipment weight is 8 or less, so it's useless for fighter types.

Regarding the phantom, I can't remember the exact formula for damage, but I don't think there is a damage boost per se. If you're curious, you can toggle "combat math" by hitting Shift+8 during combat. You can change the scroll speed with + and -, and freeze it by hitting 8. It can be really interesting to see both your attacks and the monster's attacks using combat math.

If you have more questions, jump over to discord.noxarchaist.com - there are a bunch of expert players on there who can give advice on defeating tough foes like the phantoms. Have fun!

[Necronson]

Oh yeah I totally forgot about combat math. Thanks. I got through the phantom area thankfully, but I'll definetly enable that option.

[Rik]

I will respectfully disagree with Chris in the area of skill boosting. :)
There are ways to boost your skills to 255 (that is indeed the limit) by using them constantly. Dodge is pretty easy to boost:
Say you're a level 5 mage with < 9 weight equipped. Go to the starting area near Everton and fight a mob. Get to melee range with them and simply press the space bar. Put a weight on it, and go brew some coffee. Come back 30mn later for a massive dodge boost.

[CT6502]

Originally posted by Rik:

I will respectfully disagree with Chris in the area of skill boosting. :)
There are ways to boost your skills to 255 (that is indeed the limit) by using them constantly. Dodge is pretty easy to boost:
Say you're a level 5 mage with < 9 weight equipped. Go to the starting area near Everton and fight a mob. Get to melee range with them and simply press the space bar. Put a weight on it, and go brew some coffee. Come back 30mn later for a massive dodge boost.

Well... okay. But, splutter, splutter, I guess it's how you want to spend your playing time, and what your goal is. For me, playing with a party of 6 characters, it didn't seem to hurt to just play the game at a "normal" progression, and not try to min/max. However, I could definitely see if you were trying to win with a single character (or just a couple) then you would want any advantage that you could get.

In any event, to complete the quests and the game, you definitely do not need to do any sort of min/maxing or grinding. Just play the game, do the quests, wander around, fight monsters, have fun, and you'll be fine. :-)

[Nox Ffred Dragon]

Great discussion!

A few comments for the OP - the skill max is !255. There isn't any correlation between mob spells and player spells in terms of the damage they do. While you can recognize the graphics effects of the spell and try to draw a conclusion on what spell the mob is casting, my advice is don't :-) Better to consider the mobs spells to be mysterious and unknown to the Order and they just happen to share graphics effects with some player spells.

[Necronson]

Originally posted by Nox Ffred Dragon:

Great discussion!

A few comments for the OP - the skill max is !255. There isn't any correlation between mob spells and player spells in terms of the damage they do. While you can recognize the graphics effects of the spell and try to draw a conclusion on what spell the mob is casting, my advice is don't :-) Better to consider the mobs spells to be mysterious and unknown to the Order and they just happen to share graphics effects with some player spells.

Ah, that makes sense. Had me right confused for awhile with the spells.