I have been pondering some of this myself.

Armor: because of the changes to TDP's there will be little reason to train multiple armors- unless you want to, and wearing armor that you are not as skilled with may cause more penalties in combat. Until we know more, if I had to focus, I would focus on leather/chain- so you have the option to train stealths better. But until things change, why not train most of them? Just switch out greaves and maybe the helm.

Weapons: For gods sake stay away from crossbows! Just my current frustrations- Flavius is HX primary. Now in 3.0 he can switch to LX for faster loading, and that might help but I really regret this being his primary weapon.

I don't have an opinion on HE vs ME- with 3.0 fatigue is supposed to play a bigger element, so that might be a concern to a newer character. Thinking one handed weapons is probably smart since shield will not play as nicely with 2handers in 3.0.

Hmmm if I were to start over, thinking 3.0- I would probably go with HE and HB and HT- all one handed, all viable- and your HT can also be either HE or HB. Maybe pikes/HT since there are one handed spears. If I wasn't planning on training up strength and fatigue as much I would probably go ME and MB and LT

But seriously just is just me musing....if you care about your characters at all....listen to people who play around with this more than I do....

Clerics have mapp and mpp (among others of course). The big evasion boost helps offset heavier armors while mpp helps offset the thinner ones.

Generally I hear that HP at top end penalizes evasion so much it's more of a hinderance than benefit, and I feel that cloth/leather are too squishy unless you're going to be training stealth a lot. If so, player made cloth competes with leather now, but is less hindering to stealth. So I would strongly consider it for stealthy. If you want to play a stand and deliver type, I'd say hc/lc just because it's good. Possibly brigantine after the 3.0 release.

As for weapons, I'd recommend a variety just to keep you in combat and keep defenses learning. I train 4-5 on my clerics. I don't see much benefit to learning ME or MB because the stat and RT cap kicks in similar to Heavier weapons but the bigger ones can scale better. I like having a thrown, it gives me a ranged weapon that's solid but doesn't mean I have to take off my shield. And I can forage up a rock or log. Brawling is a good choice for clerics just because of blessed brawling.

Feel free to text me, can talk more later.

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Let's save us all some time: I'm a troll who rarely has anything helpful. There.

I don't like training stealth much, so between SoL/MaPP/MiPP/Bene/PFE I opted for a full-plate mixture. I anticipate stealth will be less broken in 3.0 once first-strike isn't so terribly important, but even now it's not a bad setup for PvP, if not optimal. My hope for 3.0 is that between damite protections, MiPP, and an evasion buff, my Cleric will be as close to a tank-o-mage as possible.

For weapons I personally use HT, LX, ME, MB, Brawling, and Offhand. I chose ME and MB on the off-chance that somehow, someday, somewhere, someway, offhand ranks will actually matter for people besides Barbarians. I would definitely recommend at least a thrown weapon, brawling, and a melee weapon of choice. PS or Sick + a spear to the chest is a wicked combination indeed.

For armors, I've tinkered with a majority of them (no cloth or bone, yuck), and spend a substantial amount of hours training in them and trying to figure out what works the best (400 ranks in both chain and plates, as well as leather). I've ditched training stealth a long time ago, so using something less protective (cloth/bone) never really was a viable option. The main decision for me came between chain and heavy plate, where its a balanced protection vs awesome protection with an evasion penalty. I found at similar ranks when fighting critters, the evasion penalty in plate was high enough to where it was affecting my defensive abilities; I was receiving the occasional light hit, where previously in chain I would be blocking/parrying 100% of the time (with all buffs up, naturally). This was before the new armor/forging came out though, but those were my generalized findings then. All things considering, you won't notice a big difference in protection or survivability if all the ranks are the similar, except initially when hindrance is kicking your butt, so choose something that fits around your play style.

With weapons, I train ME (as my main, I started with this and stuck with it over LE) , HE, LT (throwing blade stacks FTW), brawling (because its ridiculously easy currently), HX, halberd/QS (for fun), and HB. Its good typically to choose one or two melee weapons, and one or two ranged weapons. As with armor, it really depends on what you find fun, and you should choose something fun because you're going to be training with that type of weapon for a long, long time. Slice resistant or puncture resistant critters never stopped me from taking my good ole scimitar and trying to slice them up anyways.

-Langa (I'm back!)