How To Manage Practices
Knowing what to spend practices on can be more challenging than it should be. It is quite frustrating to be practice poor, but if done right it shouldn't happen until you are well past level 30. If you keep a few things in mind, and plan out ahead of time, you'll find yourself with more than enough practices to keep playing without being backed into a corner.
You Don't Need To Buy Practices With Credits
More than one player seems to fall into this trap. They will spend all their practices, and find themselves short what is needed for a spell or skill. Even worse if they are short on a needed stat to cast a spell or wield a weapon. A common approach here seems to be buying practices, but this is completely unnecessary. If you have the real money, and you want to spend $2.500 per practice, then all the more power to you, but it isn't required.
The thing to keep in mind is that just because you can learn a skill doesn't mean you need it right this minute. I am horrible at this, but I've still only ever had to buy one practice for credits. You can just wait, hold off on spending real money, and level a couple times. If you are below level 100 total levels this will always give you enough practices to do what you want. It isn't as fast as just buying practices, but it is also a lot less expensive. You can spend $100 on practices, and that won't actually get you all that much, you can't even come close to maxing a stat with that amount sunk into only practices. Since you get 5 practices per level, and one per even micro level, you can load up pretty fast for not that much work, and you'll also be advancing your character and unlocking the ability to use more equipment.
How To Know What Stats You Need
Stats are the biggest eater of practices, and that doesn't ever change. It can be painful to drop 10 practices on a stat just to improve it by one point, but it is unavoidable. If you don't do it at the beginning, you'll have to do it later, and when levels are harder to get it can really slow down your gaming experience.
Whatever your class is, you can use a command to see all the spells or skills you can learn down the road. Just type 'spells className', or 'skills className', and you'll see a complete list of everything available. The results can be a bit confusing at first glance, and I'd suggest clearing your output buffer before entering in the command. You'll see something like the below...
Spell Mana Mage Cler Thie Warr Necr Drui Lvl Int Wis Chr Prac Known Dependencies
shower of sparks 4 1 -- -- -- -- -- -- 14 11 2 85% (critical)
The easiest way to read this for the spell is name, mana cost, level requirement, stat requirement, practices, highest practice trained percentage.
since Mage has a primary stat of intelligence and a secondary of wisdom, it is easy to figure out the first stat is the amount of int required, and the second is wis. In this example it is an int of 14 with a wis of 11 to cast shower of sparks. You can always do help shower of sparks as well to get an easier to read requirement list.
Once you get accustomed to browsing the spell or skill listing for a class, then you at least know generally how much you need to train up your stats for your primary class. Once you have this information, then it's time to Start Planning out what to spend practices on.
Plan Ahead, No Really It Is Easy
So far this is only focusing on stats, and that's simply because they can stall your gaming experience faster than anything. Not having enough practices for learning a spell can be annoying, but not being able to learn spells because of low stats can really mess you up. It may seem redundant, but really, check the spell and skill list for your class, this will save you so many headaches down the road. You want to know what the game expects you to have at level 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30. Then you need to make sure you are keeping up with the requirements for that stat as you progress.
Keep in mind that you will get stat boosts from your equipment, but it isn't always good to rely on it too much. If you are use to having one stat always at +8, what happens when you level up and get all new equipment? What if that new equipment doesn't give you the same stat boosts? This isn't much of an issue for certain classes and stats. Clerics always get a lot of charisma, and necros get a lot of everything. Druids however always end up in a intelligence shortage around level 30 when they want to learn solar flare. This could be avoided with planning ahead and making sure you have enough intelligence at level 30 without equipment boosts.
You Don't Need To Learn Everything
Unless you are a warrior, you don't actually have to learn everything in your primary class. Even less in your second class, and from third to sixth classes there is very little you need to spend practices on. It can be difficult to know what is actually needed, what will be good and what will be a waste of practices, but you can normally just ask someone and they'll help you out. Just remember the more words someone needs to explain why something is great, the less it is actually useful. This has proven a great way to gage how important something actually is, at least for me. For example if I was to say should I learn ice shield, a simple answer of it gives 25% resistance to fire damage would do the trick. If I say should I learn unburden, most likely someone is going to launch into a story about how that one time it was really useful and how they were glad they learned it. This just means it isn't all that useful.
People have suggested I should write a listing of spells I think are useful, and worth spending practices on. I see this as just a fecal storm waiting to happen, so for now I haven't, but I may in the future.
Getting back to the point. You don't need everything, not even everything in your main class. Look at the list, read the help files, talk to other players, and make sure what you spend practices on will directly help you. The thing I always ask is, will spending these practices make it easier for me to make more practices? If the answer is yes then I spend them, if no then I hold off. There is nothing stopping you from learning a level 10 spell at level 38, you don't need everything all at once.
Another way to tell if you'll need something is if it is directly offensive or defensive. For most spells, if it does damage, or prevents you from taking damage it is useful. The only time this might not be the case is with druid, they have some odd offensive spells, and you might want to talk to a higher level druid if you wanted to know more.
Second to Sixth Class Spells And Skills
This is another huge mistake people make with practices, and one that drives me crazy. If you haven't read the article on the importance of cast level and skill level, you should go do that before reading the rest of this one.
THE IMPORTANCE OF CAST & SKILL LEVEL ON EQUIPMENT (opens in a new window)
A lot of the time when you spend practices on skills or spells in your lower classes, they are just being wasted. Because the strength of the skills is dependent on skill or cast level, you'll always have a weak spell if it isn't in your main class. For this reason it is almost never a good idea to learn offensive skills in anything but your first class. There are some exceptions, like with a necro mage setup, or even a druid mage setup, but druids are going to need lots of practices to boost intelligence. Focus on your main class offense, and if you are a second class mage or cleric, fill in with some extras only if you have an abundance of practices. You won't ever want to be lacking in your first class because you focused to hard on your second or third.
With your third, fourth, fifth, and sixth class, they are only there strictly for utility spells. You won't ever have an offensive use for them, not until you are such a high level that none of these words matter anymore. Warrior and thief attacks are only there for first or second class warrior or thief, if you aren't first or second class don't learn any of the melee attacks from either of them. There are some exceptions, like with a druid warrior, or some other headache classes, but this is focusing on a guide for new players, not an advanced player with a challenging class. In general just don't do it.
You Are Bossy
Probably, but I also don't care how you set up your character. I'm just trying to help out with the easiest approach to playing the game for the first time. If you want to learn all the things, then all the more power to you. If you want to spend $500 on practices and be the most OP noob ever, that's great for you and Dentin. I'm just passing along some info from what I've learned the hard way. If it helps that's great, if not you can ignore it, but as long as you are aware of the issues down the road, then that's good enough.