Well first you want to decide if you care for stealth or not. LC far easier to train Stealth in than Plate of course being a WM you can train Stealth with plate AND shield using Rising Mists (aguments stealth) and stunning your opponents retreating to pole and hidding on them while they stunned (stunned things receive around 50% penalty to their perception I believe). Today's WM does Plate because of YS, SUF and SW giving you a very nice bonus to combats so you can overcome the Plate hinderance and nothing is better in protection particularly down the road than Plate. Oh and Earth Sense spell now also grants a MO (multiple opponent) rank bonus as well. Also as there are no penalties any more for wearing two types of same family of armor you may want to train LC/HC or HP/LP combinations for the easy TDP. Mixing the two is not recommended (LC/HP). However there are armor nuts out there that train everything all the time or most of the time. Too painful in my oppinion espeically down the road when you start hunting bigger stuff. Repeated trips to the vault to change armor sets are just NOT my cup of tea.

Definately want to train shield. Lots of folk train shield easy at your ranks with a small arm worn shield. Get yourself a small shield and wear it on the arm. If you want to switch to a Large shield down the road you can as shield hinderance will drop down to insignificant after 200 ranks and you will find using a Large shield at that point stancing it at 100 with evasion rest works superbly well especialy if you hunt TM/Missile critters. I typicaly stance Parry/Evasion 100/84 or Shield/Evasion 100/84 switching back and forth keeping all three locked and not compromising my defence. Try stancing yourself at Evasion 100, parry 60 shield 20 or even go nuts and do the 60/60/60 thing until you hit around 100 ranks of each. I did that wearing plate and had no problems for the most part. Can also try 80/80 evasion/parry 20 shield. Try mixing and matching till you find the combination that works for you best. As an Eloth ... well you probably want somthing that gets you hit less Eloths are a touch squishy.

NO. Most definately do NOT make yourself a Moon mage by letting your magic go nuts over your combat ranks so you can circle chase. Not worth it in the long run. Besides you are a WM and you do require decent amount of combats to circle. As you get bigger you can widen the gap safely between your magics and your combats due to the Defencive spell boosts and stat bonuses to defence but at the beginning I'd not advise it. This is mostly reffering to TM. PM/PP/MD/Harnes do not really matter and make life a LOT easier as you can stuff more mana into your spells earlier and the sooner you can max SUF/SW the better for you as that will let you hunt at optimal level safely as well as alow you to let your TM get safely ahad of your combats by more ranks as you get bigger. My PM/Harnes are nearly double of my defences(200+ ranks higher). However my TM is only 60 ranks ahead of my main defences.

As far as Evasion moving slowly that mostly has to do with the fact that it is a survival and at first when your mental stats are low while you are young you will move your primary/secondary skills far faster than your tertiary ones. As your mental stats grow you will see Evasion move at a more resonable rate especially once you can max out your SW to safely allow yourself to overhunt by a tier. Of course Plate is a pain to dodge in at low ranks so yes you will parry/block far more offten. To ensure evasion moves play with the stances as I said above and get SW as soon as you can.

Training TM at lower levels is easier by snap casting. Just prep your TM spell at min mana cast criter chest... repeat. Dont bother targeting dont bother waiting for full prep. That is if you are using a single hit TM spell like Aether Lance. If GZ same. Prep/cast ... repeat.

Consider your hunting spot carefuly. Try hunting near an area where you can take two to five minute side trips to lock non combats such as Swimming/Climbing. Plenty of hunting areas where you have a climbing spot that trains climbing. Many a place you can lock Climbing in under couple of minutes if you know the spots than back to hunting. Same with Swimming. Keep a full gem pouch on you if you can and appraise it while hunting every two minutes or so will keep your Appraisal locked all the way up to 150+ ranks at which point you can start appraising things you hunt while hunting them "Appraise Warrior Quick". Make sure you move your MD as fast as you can while not hunting. Don't be lazy and train it while you train your Harness/PM while listening to a class or teaching when not hunting. Wearing a camb or two and charging it 10 mana points (optimal teaching caps at stuffing 11 mana at a time into a camb apparently). So prep spell charge camb 10 focus camb cast... repeat. Why? Once you hit 180 or so in MD you can charge cambs while they are worn while having a free hand meaning you can train MD while dancing with a critter hunting. Besides you will need MD for the overall ranks of Magic to circle down the road anyway.

Take a good look at the Sepll books for each element and evaluate carefuly what you want to get and when you can get it. Keep in mind that you really only need a few TM spells to train TM well so don't waste valuable spell slots on TM spells early on on many TM spells that well ... do exactly the same thing differently. Cosider getting disabling/defencive spells as early as you can. Frostbite is a nice usefull disabling spell early on. Tingle is a must, Ice patch very good early on too, SD becomes very usefull once you got 200+ PM as it becomes more effecive with more PM skill. SUF/SW a must as soon as you can get them. So is YS if you are wearing plate. SUF can grant up to 7 bonus to Agility/Reflex this is useful in more than hunting as Agility helps in disarming/lockpicking/skinning/climbing etc.

As for what to hunt. Well there are TONS of things to hunt early on all the way up to 400+ ranks. So it mostly comes down to what sort of place you like to live in what sort of environment you preffer. I'd suggest spending some time in Illith, Therengia, Islands and Zoluren each of them and see which one apeals to you the most. Each has it's own flavour, the good, the bad and ... Unles of course you are all about circling and trying to get there as fast as possible. In that case you need to figure out the most optimal critter to hunt at level Easines VS how well it teaches. Which leads to the point below...

Decide which you want to be early on. Cricle chaser/RP play for fun and do things on the spur of the moment. Some folk live to be UBER and UBERER others could not care less how fast they hit cicle ... X or get Y ranks in skill #. Your call figure out what makes the game Fun for you and stick with that you probably will get a lot more out of it in the long term.

Thats all I got...

>>My Evasion complaint had little to do with its tertiary status, though: I can lock evasion fine in a full LC on at level creatures. In HP, it doesn't get much past very muddled. I suppose its just a factor of hindrance.<<

Yes. Try wearing LC on the body and using plate accessories instead.

>>I was just wondering if the boost in PM/Harness ranks and ability to stuff more mana into things would be worth grinding out a bunch more ranks rather than circling for a little bit.<<

Some people advise this. IMO, it won't put you ahead in the long run so just train as much as you can in combat.

- Mazrian

<<2) Since I'm highly considering eventually using an entirely HP set, I figure it's likely a good idea to start dragging shield up. Is there going to be any reliable way to do so that doesn't require backtraining a tert skill? Granted , its not an absurd amount of backtraining, but I've no love of standing around in goblins learning next to nothing save shield.>>

You might consider picking up another weapon or two to make that back training a little more bearable. Brawling can be trained pretty easily by adding circle to your combat maneuvers.

Stances can be saved now for shield evasion and parry, so it is easy to switch back and forth between training shield, and parry. I have always preferred to focus on one of the defenses at a time instead of splitting my stance points between shield and parry.

I use the following saved stances
Stance Shield = Evasion 80, Shield 100, Parry 0
Stance Parry = Evasion 80, Shield 0, Parry 100
Stance Evasion = Evasion 100, Shield 80, Parry 0


On spells, I would recommend you find 2 or three target spells you like, and then focus on the buff/debuff spells our guild has to offer.

Garzeng, Aether lance, and aether lash are all pretty good TM spells.

Sure Footing, Swirling winds, YS, are the core buff spells, but Aegis of Granite (shield spell), Earth Sense (Multi bonus), and Tail wind (bonus to your ranged, penalty to ranged for anyone else in the room) all have their uses.

Debuff spells like tingle and vertigo also help bring critters down a notch, making them easier to hit, or to dance with.

I prefer Static discharge as my get outta trouble with a swarm spell. But some folks prefer frostbite, and shockwave is also effective at clearing a room.

Primary and Harness do train best in combat, but I personally see no reason they cannot be trained out of combat higher than target. I think it is far more troublesome if your target gets too far above your defensive skills. (at least at the lower circles)

Use cambrinth for training magical devices as soon as your skill allows. Charging the cambrinth with 11 mana increments seems to give the best training. Cambrinth is handy for buff spells during hunts.

There has also been a relatively recent change to how mana recovers. It recovers at a faster rate the higher your attunement is. Harnessed mana also increases the power of a spell where before it did not. Prepping spells at minimum, and harnessing a little more once or twice before casting is far more beneficial than it use to be.

Wabo

>There has also been a relatively recent change to how mana recovers. It recovers at a faster rate the higher your attunement is. Harnessed mana also increases the power of a spell where before it did not. Prepping spells at minimum, and harnessing a little more once or twice before casting is far more beneficial than it use to be.

This is true. However its the other way around. Before there used to be no real cap and you could increase the power of a spell by harnessing extra mana by a LOT. Recently or not so recently (within last year I belive) they have imposed a cap on this. So you can still increase the power of a spell by harnessing extra mana and squze a touch more under the cap however there is a definate cap now to doing that and in the overall scheme of things the extra is quite a small bonus.

Personally I've not found earth sense to offer that much of a difference in training multi. Keep in mind also that change had been put in when critters still came to us.. before we had to wander around to find them. Earth sense doesn't follow you and I wasn't about to keep casting it in every room I had to wander into

The biggest help I've found in training defenses and multi is reflex. I also normally don't take my mage hunting without SW up. Also great to have on would be the YS for added armor absorption and SUF

Just my 2 cents..

>Before there used to be no real cap and you could increase the power of a spell by harnessing extra mana by a LOT. Recently or not so recently (within last year I belive) they have imposed a cap on this. So you can still increase the power of a spell by harnessing extra mana and squze a touch more under the cap however there is a definate cap now to doing that and in the overall scheme of things the extra is quite a small bonus.

Uh, no, spells were all designed with caps.

>>Before I get flogged by everyone for my post regarding Harnessed mana contributing to making a spell more powerful let me retract that and rephrase it. I have searched back and while I have not found the original GM post I found posts in refference to it. What the fix did was LIMIT the amount of extra mana a mage can stuff into above THEIR own cap based on their ability (PM/Harness ranks) giving them ability to cast spells more powerful than they should be able to with their ranks. A mage can still do that but the amount of mana they can stuff into the spell above their ability level is imited now as opposed to before where it was only limited by the Global cap of the spell itself where you potentialy could be circle 1 and still cap a spell by harnessing the mana for it and casting instead of preping at X (X being the cap amount) and casting which would make the spell backfire as the mage did not yet have the ability to cast that spell at that much mana.

Okay, I see what you're referencing now.

You're basically talking about how everyone now has a maximum amount of mana they can handle in total based on PM/HA. Harnessing mana helps make casting higher easier, true enough.
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