Strength : 20 Reflex : 22
Agility : 26 Charisma : 12
Discipline : 20 Wisdom : 20
Intelligence : 19 Stamina : 20
Favors: 2
Concentration: 90 Max: 90
TDPs: 61
Encumbrance: None

I'm about to circle 30, any suggestions on what I should raise?

Depends on your race/weapon you're usin. I'd say bump up strength and try to get min rt with your backstabs, that or work on your mentals a little.

~Birkan Featherhands teh Drunken Prydaen

What Gonif said. ;)


Sometimes the key to happiness is not assuming it is locked in the first place- Ziggy

A journey of a thousand SMILES begins with a single step- Ziggy

I spent all my early days min/maxing my character. The idea of min/maxing is to minimize attributes that you don't care about (to some degreee) such as charisma, reflex, stamina and to use the TDPs you saved on those to maximize other attributes (in my case, agility). While this was fun at 40th circle when I had 40 agility and pretty good discipline, later on in life you end up regretting it. A lot of people preach stat balancing, and at a low level I'd reccomend this. Basically the way the stat system is set up in DR, the higher your stats get, the more you experience something called 'the law of diminishing returns'. Due to the fact that you have to spend more TDPs on every rank, the more ranks you have the less an individual rank makes a difference AND the more it will cost you. The idea behind stat balancing is that you keep your stats even based on COST to you in TDPs. That way, you are maximizing your overall statistics considering how many TDPs you have spent. In this case, you could also choose skills that you want to ignore, for example Charisma. It is up to you, but it is something you should think about when planning your character for the long-term, because it is really hard to fix a character you have been breaking for years, trust me.


EVERY DAY, I'M HUSTLIN

12 Charisma here and stealing is my highest skill (approaching 300) From the last time I didn train charisma i noticed training agility helped more, but that being said, I'm holding off spending TDPs until I see what Z releases with khri and such. I get the sense he wants to make charisma less of a dump stat.

<<Get all your mental stats up higher. You'll notice, and appreciate, that the most at this point.>>

Definatly, get your int and wisdom up there, personally I'd get every stat to about 20, then mentals to 30.


~Birkan Featherhands teh Drunken Prydaen

My racial bonuses are Strength and Agility and banes are Intel and Wisdom. I'll be training my mentals up a bit when I circle to 39 it sounds like.

Discipline, Wisdom, Intelligence to 30.


________
"Just an observation, but you do not seem to know what you are talking about, and the things you say seem generally unintelligent."

I'd reccomend raising them to 30 in the mid 100s range. My personal strategy was to get everything to 20 (mentals first of course) and then wis/int to 30, then the rest to 30.


~Birkan Featherhands teh Drunken Prydaen

<<I'd say from a circle standpoint, if you get to 60th circle without having any mentals past 30, then you might want to consider investing in them for a few circles.>>

mental stats seem to pretty player specific, one "way" will work for play style A but not so much with B.

I don't have an mental stats above 30 at 62nd circle and if i ever do get some, it most likely will be intelligence and post 70th. Most people spout off about how X wisdom will cut # seconds off your to next rank time if you keep it constantly at dazed or mind lock.

Best rule of thumb i've found is... if you are mind locking a skill to fast, increase intelegence, if it takes too long for it to drain down before you can train again, train wisdom. With survival skills though, i find you can get by with higher INT than WIS... combats and magic, tend to need higher WIS due to the fact they are pretty bit and multiple skill intensive and you need the draining power.

it really is all about play style... if you a min-maxer type player than use the calculators that are available and shave them extra seconds off, if it makes you enjoy the game go for it.

Yamcer

---

"You know, while I understand the importance of seeing the (personal) validity in other's arguments, it's impossible for me to believe fully that others are correct. If their argument was correct, I'd change mine." - My GF

>Best rule of thumb i've found is... if you are mind locking a skill to fast, increase intelegence, if it takes too long for it to drain down before you can train again, train wisdom. With survival skills though, i find you can get by with higher INT than WIS... combats and magic, tend to need higher WIS due to the fact they are pretty bit and multiple skill intensive and you need the draining power.

That's a pretty simple yet effective way to look at it, and I agree. If you keep skills constantly locked (especially primary skills), generally you should train more wisdom. However, tertiary skills generally benefit more from intelligence even when it comes to draining, and so for that reason I tend to favor intelligence heavily with most of my characters, as I prefer to keep my skill spread as low as possible.

That said, its hard for anyone to give difinitive advice because the relative benefits of the individual stats is different with the EXP changes. As far as I know they haven't been rolled into TF yet so I can't even begin to test it yet. My guess is that with pools getting larger (tert at least, I don't remember the announcement exactly) the benefits of intelligence will be diminished somewhat relative to wisdom.

>and you look at how much you will benefit from raising either wisdom or intelligence 5 points (that's a couple circles worth of tdps for most) you will notice you are saving about 1 hour of training per 48 hours these skills are locked.

Mentals are not a sexy stat looking at them 5 points at a time. Their value lies in the increased learning capacity over time. Are you going to notice any difference learning with your character that has all 30's in mentals vs. your character that has 32? Probably not, unless you're really looking at it under a microscope.

However, it takes my war mage, with 30's in all mentals, a good 2 hours longer than my thief to rank a skill in the mid 200's on a wall rank. The differences are not as profound on post wall ranks, but spread that out over however many skills you routinely train hard at any given time, depreciate some of that spread to account for skills not being trained optimally and the returns are still quite substantial. Project that out over a year, even for a very casual player, and you end up a good bit further than you would be without having trained mentals.

I'm not promoting being a mentals tank. My personal training of my characters is very physicals-intensive for the first 40 circles, just because I can't really enjoy them until things like burden, fatigue and combat roundtimes are a non-issue. Usually when I hit the 300's I find that improving mentals that would help me get through the really boring wall ranks (and all other ranks) faster made my character more effective and well rounded than investing in stats that directly bonused specific skills and contests.

I throw out 60th circle as a point to assess because several of your skills are going to be cresting or coming to 300 at that point, and the wall ranks begin to drag on. As I said before, the decision should be contingent on your enjoyment of the game.

~ S.S.

I'm also waiting on the new learning system.. i wanna see how well the drain while logged out works... i can picture myself spiking INT high and getting huge pools than going to bed after a fun day of training and getting a nice chuck of ranks done.


Yamcer

---

"You know, while I understand the importance of seeing the (personal) validity in other's arguments, it's impossible for me to believe fully that others are correct. If their argument was correct, I'd change mine." - My GF

<<Assumptions:
<<Person1 - 20 int, 30 wis, 30 disc
<<Person2 - 45 int, 45 wis, 50 disc

That is (discipline excluded) 40 stats worth of TDPs.

If training 6 hrs a day that's saving you about 11 days for 10 more ranks than the one who didn't train mentals but trained the skills (hiding, stalking, weapon, etc) just as hard.

So for 2 weeks worth of training you could instead have 20 more in any two stats or 35 more in any one stat. I'd wager there's quite a large difference in 20 of any stat compared to 55 of the same said stat. I'd even go as far as to say it would make more of a difference than 50 ranks in the skills that affected the same things as that stat.

Keep in mind if you hadn't trained the mentals you'd have only 10 ranks less than that person who did train mentals 40 times... plus you'd have the added benefit of the 35-40 stats worth of TDPs to play with.

Just because it takes 2 weeks longer, doesn't mean you aren't training them at all. Using that 13 days worth of IG time you'd have 340 in those primary skill ranks while the other person would have 350... however that other person would be mentals heavy whereas you could put those TPDs into any of your stats as you see fit.

From what I understand, especially at higher levels like 300+ ranks, 10 rank gaps aren't really much to worry about.

Anyway, just my thoughts on the subject. In my opinion, mentals are still more important for contested spells than for learning purposes. I would not tell someone they are training wrong for working these stats, as it is certainly up to personal preference as to how one's character should be set up. Different training styles certainly call for different mental set-ups.

I guess it just seems to me that there are a lot of people on the forums (which probably isn't a large percentage of the overall players) stating how mentals are great for progressing experience-wise through the game, and I feel like they can sometimes be misleading to those that don't have a full understanding of how experience works (not that I have a complete grasp, but I feel I have a good understanding). I'm not saying those people who train/rally mentals do not have a grasp (they may even have a better understanding than I do) but those w/o that understanding might take what they say as the end-all-be-all and it's just not so. Mentals are good, but I feel they can be overrated on the forum boards at times in regards to learning rates.

---

"...you do not deserve Ability X just because another guild received it." -Armifer

"Sabbra Caddabra" your skill/title/ability is now mine.

<<I don't read most forums so I can't really speak to this, but it seems to me I have presented a long-term argument saying nothing more than 'these are the returns over time'. Perhaps for someone who is asking about mentals in the 300, 400 & 500 range, this long term snapshot could be beneficial. No one has said they are the end-all-be-all. I guess I'm just looking at it from a longer term perspective.

I'm sorry if it came off as me saying it was indeed you or anyone implying such. I merely meant that there are some people who read these boards and see 5 different people who all stand behind training mentals and think "Lots of people think training mentals is the way to go, I should do that." When it seems to me that not a large percentage of the actual DR population posts on the forums. Also, some who read may not have a decent understanding of how experience is gained in DR. Again I'm not saying I'm an expert, but I do know the basic formula and I'm able to use that formula to get an estimate of how much time I'm saving by training mentals.

I think your points for training mentals are quite valid. If you're into min/maxing your character or if you really hate that a wall rank takes a couple hours longer than someone with twice your mentals, then yes train up. However, people should know that there are characters who are very well trained who do not, and they do so with not as much work as one might think (i.e. training about 15 minutes more per 6 hour session, or not training the extra 15 mins but having lots more stats to play with and still only being about 10 ranks behind where they would be after 50 ranks).

---

"...you do not deserve Ability X just because another guild received it." -Armifer

"Sabbra Caddabra" your skill/title/ability is now mine.

>atomictim.com/dr

Avoid this url if you are looking for specifics. It's great to get a general idea of how long it "might" take to rank a skill, but in reality it's pretty far from accurate. After about a day of playing with that thing, and looking it over, the results from the calculator are shaky at best.

I use http://home.comcast.net/~toolshed47/ and a pulse calculator that I found from googling (there's at least 2 out there, but only one works on XP64) but I dont know of their accuracies. Personally, I don't care as long as I'm getting ballpark ranges for management purposes, and after seeing the results I really could care less about 1 or 2 day's difference over the span of a year and rather see nice round or even numbers on my stats.

Stat's main purpose is for skill contests. A difference of 10 in all mentals isn't worth all the effort if it is purely for learning purposes. A difference of 20 in all mentals, well, if your character wasn't already going to develop mentals that way maybe because of class or play/combat style, you're most likely better off ignoring the temptation of the 1~2 weeks you might save from learning, because the improved mentals also means lower physicals which means far more pain in the process of getting those ranks.

My thief has 38 agility and has been regularly dealing with snowball's and cliffhangers (bandits, geni's, at 160's disarm and 150 lockpicking, my lowest survivals) while OUTSIDE of town and only botched maybe 1 in 20, none of which were fatal at 28 stam. The character also had only 22 discipline (bad, bad, for race) until recently so I'm not personally seeing significant beneifts to khri that I'd follow how everyone else swears by it for a thief.

Precision min-maxing takes way too much time and fun out of the game that I just stay away from it.

I am talking about longterm differences. 10 in each mentals diffierences is only a couple days at best over the span of a year's training, and this is talking about tert skills. If you want to go beyond 1 year, just multiply those few days by how many years you want. The difference is negligible.

If we're talking about 20's difference in each mental skills, then as I have stated, if your favored playstyle doesn't already involve that much mentals, you're better off without it. Forcing yourself to overtrain mentals to save maybe a month's playing over the span of a year will frustrate you to no end the remaining 11 months of the year due to restricted optoins.

My point is that you should train your character however you feel comfortable, not go with the "best way" others tell you. I'm sure everyone has heard this a thousand times from other games already, but this is even more true in DR. Going out of your way to aim for something that is theoretically more efficient is just going to set yourself up for an unhappy, soured gaming experience, burnout, and leaving the game.

>I am talking about longterm differences. 10 in each mentals diffierences is only a couple days at best over the span of a year's training, and this is talking about tert skills.

10 in each mental means a whole lot more than that over the course of the year. Unless you barely play anyway.

I'm at circle 65, and working lockpicking to get to 70th myself and was just thinking about this whole Stat raise. I figured out this morning that when I circle the 5 times, I should have enough in TDP's from the circles along with all the training I've done to up my mentals. Along with agility and reflex.

Reflex right now is at 30, which I'm raising to 35
Agility is 35, which I'm raising to 40
Intel is at 30 which I'm raising to 35
Discipline I'm raising from 35 to 40

Least thats my goal next week once I hit 70th. I'm goin to leave Wisdom alone (30 right now) till I have at least 50 in intel than going to pound out wisdom. As it stands now, here are my stats at 65th.

Strength : 30 Reflex : 30
Agility : 35 Charisma : 30
Discipline : 35 Wisdom : 30
Intelligence : 30 Stamina : 35

I'm sitting on right now 300 TDP's just from training after hitting 65th and upping Charisma from 25 to 30. I'm set now except for 3 ranks in hiding, 13 in lockpicking and 3 in backstab for 70th. So I'm looking forward to the 5 circles of TDP's to set up what I'm going to end up doing. Not sure if my posting helps any, but thats how I'm setting Dalkin up.

~Dalkin~