Rolling a char

[Tzat]

Ok, basically I am looking for a bit of a discussion on how to roll a cleric...maybe even just a caster class in general...
I'll tell you what I'd probably do, you critique it
Human Cleric:
Seems to me that I should keep re-rolling until my STR, CON, INT and WIS are all pretty good. POW and CHA seem rather unimportant, and DEX and AGI would be nice, but I can't have everything.
STR seems vital so that I can actually walk around ie, light load carried...once it gets past very light its like impossible to go anywhere.
CON seems important because i NEED as many hps as possible, and maybe for res puposes later.
WIS is the prime attribute for clerics, so it makes sense to have it high, though I'm not sure what it really affects thats important exactly. (there are only 2 wis skills, bandage and spell knowledge).
INT is maybe important because there are a lot of skills based on it...particularly quick chant!!!
I'm not really sure where I would/should put the bonus rolls at all...5 years ago I would have probably put them in CON, maybe 1 in STR, but that could be ridiculously dumb.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated....you could also comment on race choice for the cleric class, but try to be specific in why you say what you do...

Thanks!

[Gormal]

Con and wisdom are your most crucial skills. If you have a low one of either it will come back and haunt you greatly later on. Try to get yourself to max con notch..I'm not sure what it is for a human cleric anymore, been so long since I played one...its not ultra high though. Being a few points high on con is great too because you can suffer a few ress drains.

Strength is important especially if you ever want to wear the best hp rings in the game. They are quite harsh on your strength and you will find yourself wearing shiny golden boots at level 50 or some crap. Try to keep your str at least above 80-85.

Intelligence will help your meditate alot.

Dexterity and agility are something you want to have pretty high too. If you wanna be really anal abou t your stats be that way, I am. Clerics have the ability to fill lots of roles if played well. You can play battle cleric or caster cleric, its a really versitile class so you want really versatile stats.

--------------------------
Kildran T'sarith -Redeemer- Wanderlust Excelsium

[Tzat]

Yeah, so we pretty much agree... The only thing is that you basically say to have everything but pow and cha high....and rolling that would take about 3 years, if its not impossible...this new roller makes things a bit more interesting.
I used to just roll till everything but pow/cha was "good" but its not that easy anymore.....its probably better though, nice to know more specifically what you have.

[Tilandal]

OK for a cleric here is what I feel the most important stats are in the order of importance:

CON : Well basicly the most important stat for any class. Everyone wants the max notch in con.

AGI : Ok this may be a bit debatable but basicly you will be bashed much less with high agility plus since you will not be wearing much ac equ the extra 20ac humans get from agility is a gret bunos.

WIS : well of course the main sta for clerics.

STR : I put it here because I didnt feel it was more important then WIS. Nothing worse then a naive cleric.

INT : Int is valuable but int equ is plentiful and having the max int notch isnt very important.

DEX : it will keep you from fumbling and raise your hit but in some situations at high levels it may be best if you just dont hit at all. Will make life easier at low levels but not a huge thing at high leveles

POW & CHA: well not much to say here roll a bads if at all possible so you have more stats for other slots:P

[Corth]

I find it interesting that Tilandal ranked AGI third. I noticed while I was rolling an invoker a couple of weeks after alpha started that I also was giving a lot of weight to agility. Up until that point I had been playing a newbie rogue with lousy agility and those seasoned warriors really put a whooping on me.

Now that I've been fortunate to have gained 40 levels or so (its magic!), I find that agility isn't quite as important. Yeah, of course ac is more meaningful now, but unless your a warrior, you shouldn't be tanking much anyways. And its not too difficult to find good ac gear as a warrior if that is your class.

So basically, my conclusion is that agility is a newbie stat. At low levels with lousy eq it is very helpful to have good agility. Since I roll characters with the purpose of eventually becoming high level, I will not accord much weight to agility. It might be more difficult in the short term, but in the long run you'll be happier if you apply your limited amount of stat points to other areas.

Corth

[This message has been edited by Corth (edited 04-26-2001).]

[Taer/Ssil]

Whats the max con notch for an ogre shaman? Anyone know offhand?

-Gulz (name subject to change)

[cherzra]

Pretty low I believe, 60 or something. Just roll some chars and find out. I wouldn't bother with con.

[silvea]

my order of stats:

for a cleric it wouldbe:

WIS : The bigger your bonussen on your skill the better, nothing more to say.

CON : Never can be good enough, but I would not put my bonus points in it.

AGI : You get bashed a lot less, and it gives you a great advantage at lower levels while aiding you a lot at higher.

STR : Carrying a lot is cool for me, I'm a real pack rat :P

INT : Not very importand, as long as it is not bad, it won't do much at higher lvls, and aid little on low, except for meditating.

DEX : As long as it is not bad, you should be oke, if you need the dammage of your weapon then you are in trouble already at higher levels. And triggers are nice for fumbling so.....

POW : no real use for this.

CHA : all the same, no real use also.

If I would make a mage I just would swap the wis for int, and put the wis below my dex.

I hope this helps some,

Silvea alias Almile

[Malacar]

Just a note... Charisma effects how many folks you can have following you at a given time. It's not as useless as it once was, especially at higher levels.

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Malacar - French kissin midgets, and damn proud of it. Oh yeah... My comments can offend you now, I don't care anymore. Have a day.

[Tzat]

Interesting note Malacar. Thanks.

Thanks to everyone else who gave some input also.

One comment I have is that unfortunately it seems like there is a lot of stuff that is somewhat important... and that rolling all those stats high is next to impossible (if not altogether impossible). I guess we just need to be satisfied with some more run of the mill stats...maybe only concentrating on 1 or 2 specific attributes.

[vynigumba]

Would not be nice if some administrator give us some facts?

I heard rumors that POW is useless, even for necromancers and psionicists, or that rangers should max INT and not WIS, that HP do not depend on CON anymore and that AGI is useless after lvl 20. Now CHA affects number of followers (which? undead? slaves? elemental? pets? all?).

I am kind of confused.

HELP, I dont want to find out when I got lvl 40 or so....

[Uthgar]

Before we get huge amounts of misinformation:

All 4 physical stats get used for skill checks and for save vs stat rolls (mostly from harmful spells)

Int, Wis, and Cha are primary spellcasting attributes for Mage/Ranger, Cleric/Paladin, and Bard type characters respectively. All uses of spells are affected by this attribute in some way.

Int and Wis affect learning of skills.

Charisma affects the number of people who can be in a group you lead.

Power has a huge effect on psionic skills and on number of psps available (as well as psp regen now). It can also affect ability to control rebellious followers.

Strength: load, wield weight, +dam, crits
Dex: +hit, fumbles, bonus attacks
Agi: AC
Con: per level hp bonus (capped for non-fighter classes)

Every stat is worthwhile now, except Power for non-psionic chars. We went to some effort to make the under-used stats more meaningful in this incarnation of Sojourn.

Uthgar

[Tzat]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR><font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by vynigumba:
<B>I heard rumors that POW is useless, even for necromancers and psionicists, or that rangers should max INT and not WIS, that HP do not depend on CON anymore and that AGI is useless after lvl 20. Now CHA affects number of followers (which? undead? slaves? elemental? pets? all?).
</B></font><HR></BLOCKQUOTE>


Well, I think I can answer some of your questions:

A god echoed (Maybe Kiaransalee) on the mud last night that POW will determine psp points soon, ie beta.

Rangers currently have int as their magic attribute, not wis, despite the fact that wis might make more sense. In any event they scribe spells like mages etc. Someone (Miax i think) said that this was actually quite a pain to change in another thread. So yes, INT seems like it is more important for a ranger than wis in that respect.

Hitpoints DO depend on constitution (still) but it seems that for non-warrior classes in many races you do not need to have a very high con to get the maximum HPs. My rudimentary experiments (with a cleric) show that the max hps at level 1 are achieved with: fair con for humans, mighty con for grey elves, and mundane con for dwarves. So it seems that you dont really need to have 100 con to get the most hps for non-warrior classes, in fact, a much lower score should be fine. (experiment yourself)

AGI is never useless. At low levels casters tank more and therefore it has a larger effect. At higher levels the point some people are making is that clerics and mages dont really tank, so its not so important. Nevertheless I believe a high AGI makes you less susceptible to bashing, and would protect you a bit when mobs switch to you. Anyway, hopefully you have a tank that will rescue you right away so maybe thats not critically important.

I believe that CHA affects the total number of followers you can have. This would include how many people you can have in your group as you lead a zone...so if you have a crappy CHA you might not be a good leader, particularly important with bigger groups at higher levels.

Hope that helps, correct me if I'm wrong.


[This message has been edited by Tzat (edited 05-03-2001).]

[Jaeron]

Then why not make power do something for other classes?
No not something cheesy like "The higher your power, the harder you swing!" I was thinking along the lines of defending against psi attacks. If you have a high power, psionic attacks do less damage.

------------------
Jaeron -Shadowstalker, Merc for Hire, at your service.

[Sarvis]

Well... charisma affects the number of people you can lead in a group. I think it was between 12 people at a low charisma score and 15 people at a high charisma score. So if you don't care about leading zones you don't care about charisma.

HP still depends on Con, but casters get their maximum bonus earlier than warrior types. An elf clerics bonus table might look like this:

Con hp Bonus
50 +1hp/lvl
65 +2hp/lvl
75 +2hp/lvl
.
.
.
100 +2hp/lvl

An elf fighters might look like this though:

Con Bonus
55 +1hp/lvl
65 +2hp/lvl
75 +3hp/lvl
.
.
.
100 +6hp/lvl

(note that I made these numbers up.)

Agi affects things like dodge and parry by giving them a bonus. It also affects AC which is supposed to be much more important in the new combat engine. If you were a cleric it would be nice to have some in the early levels so you could tank things with the extra AC from agility. But in later levels you would most often be in a group so you probably wouldn't be tanking very much... thus you don't really need AC.

I think very few rangers max out their int... our other stats are too important. It does affect our mem times, but we (or at least I) just try to mem whenever the group is and if we don't get all our spells back it's no big deal. There was some talk a couple weeks ago about making rangers pray, and depend on wis for their memtimes... which would mean we'd want higher wis than int. But since we don't really worry too much about either of them... heh.

POW determines the number of psp's psionicists get. I don't think it affects anything else at all, for anyone.
55

[Guest]

There are plans that will make power useful and a desired stat for non-psis. We'll definately let you know before Saturday so you'll know how to roll your chars.

[vynigumba]

Well, thats was explanatory .

a final doubt
is the sum of the points in each skill always the same?

[cherzra]

I have a question to add to the one Vynigumba asked:


Are the 3 bonuses a fixed amount, or in a range? E.g. is a bonus 5 points, or 2d2+1 (just example numbers)?


I hope it's always a fixed amount.. or some people might get shafted, which wouldn't really be fair

[Gindipple]

I have one to add to Cherzra's are the bonuses more than a single point? Are they not 1?

[Sarvis]

Pretty sure the sum total is not always the same. A couple times I rolled with like 4 bads and nothing else above average, which would seem to be a much lower sum total than 4 goods 3 averages and a mundane.

I think Ragorn said a while ago that the bonuses were a die roll. Didn't say the exct amount though, just that it was "bigger than you might think."

Sarvis

[Taer/Ssil]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR><font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Uthgar:
<B>Power has a huge effect on psionic skills and on number of psps available (as well as psp regen now). It can also affect ability to control rebellious followers.

Uthgar</B></font><HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Does wisdom still come into play, as far as psp gain in levels?

[Tzat]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR><font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Gindipple:
I have one to add to Cherzra's are the bonuses more than a single point? Are they not 1?</font><HR></BLOCKQUOTE>


Certainly more than one point. You can easily up a "mighty" roll (no more than 93) to perfect with 2 bonuses. Can't remember if i've ever done it with one...

[cherzra]

I sincerely hope the bonuses are a fixed amount and not a dice roll, this would be extremely unfair. What if one person gets the bottom of the barrel on a 1d4 roll three times in a row, while another gets three 4's? There should be equality for all.

(note: I know hp gains are random too, but there are 24 of them so it evens out much more in the end. Whereas there are only 3 stat bonuses, so the chance for getting screwed is really present. Simple mathematics)

Cherzra Eat Slime

[Faerlien]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR><font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Kiaransalee:
There are plans that will make power useful and a desired stat for non-psis. We'll definately let you know before Saturday so you'll know how to roll your chars.</font><HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Since Beta has started, will these changes still be going in?

If so will players beable to change power stat?

Anyone else wonderin?

Thanks in advance,
Faerlien

[This message has been edited by Faerlien (edited 05-15-2001).]

[This message has been edited by Faerlien (edited 05-15-2001).]

[Faerlien]

heh sorry, posted last time near 12, so the message wasn't on the active topics.
Sorry to double post, but just wanted to see what people had to say.

[This message has been edited by Faerlien (edited 05-15-2001).]

[This message has been edited by Faerlien (edited 05-15-2001).]