Shattered Kingdoms

Alright, so what should be the primary concerns for training stats for casters? Does one focus on uping stats in Int and Wis or would you rely on an item to do this for you? Also, Cha, as a caster you need charisma to control your charms. Does a higher Cha decrease the response time of commands? How does this work? As for Con, when you have a warlock or a necro does this affect the health of your animated or controlled NPCs? If you have Con items does it take that into affect or is it your base stat? What would be preferred, maxing Int, Wis, Con, and Cha or would you also attempt to get in mana or art over these? I know mana increases your mana pool thus more spells, and art I am not very familiar with. So what does art do?

I'm looking at creating my first caster, and I am interested in seeing how these things change the building efforts.

You want INT and WIS to be at their maximum all the time, it's up to you to decide whether you want to do that with mods or training them naturally: Maxing your mental stats naturally allows you to wear jewelry to augment your saves and overall have to spend less time enchanting since you don't have to try and get good enchantments on stat mods. Relying on mods allows you to put more trains into art, mana or hp, which essentially mean you get to increase your high-end game (when you're well equipped) at the cost of your low-end game (Right after a death/loss of equipment).

I'd max charisma naturally, as every caster class (Except priest) uses charisma for ordering and it also helps your leveling time. Charisma doesn't make your actual -orders- faster (They're always instant) but it does decrease order lag -after- the order. A giant can order his pet to rescue him and be stuck in order lag for more than 3 combat rounds, whereas an elf with max charisma has an order lag closer to half a round. Charisma also makes charm person harder to save against.

Don't use your constitution as a dump stat or your HP will be way too low. Aim for the healthy/durable range, regardless of the race you choose. Honestly I prefer to max my HP trains as a caster as well, just on account of the fact that caster HP sucks so bad. Again, doing so will probably mean you're going to end up relying on stat mods or sacrificing art/mana trains.

Don't put your strength or dex too high: Unless you decide you want to max dex in order to avoid dirt kick. I'd advise against that though, because again, you have to keep -some- stats low unless you are going to wear a lot of mods.

I've heard varying things about created/conjured class pets. I've heard that the HP of the necro/warlock affected the hp of their animates/elementals, I've heard some say that -all- of the conjurer's stats mattered... I personally ascribe to just the HP thing.

Art is -purely- offensive and will make your spells harder to resist: Blindness/deafness/finger of death/etc will take more fortitude to reliably resist when you cast it, charm/sleep/dispel will take more willpower to reliably resist when you cast it, acid blast/color spray/all warlock spells will be harder to reflex save against. Your spells will NOT do flat out increased damage, but those spells which have saves for half damage will end up landing fully more often. Up to 3 art applies for staves, 6 for scrolls, 9 for wands.

Training mana increases not only your base mana pool but also your regeneration rate, which is way way way underrated. It's awesome.



As for what -you- should do: I would recommend (as a new player to casters) maxing INT, CHA and WIS naturally, and training CON up to mid-healthy/low durable, and train mana at least 4-5 times to help with regen, probably more because having mana regen is sooooooo nice. Depending on your starting stats you may end up with more trains left over, in which case I'd suggest training art up to 6 times or so.

As for what -I- do when I roll a caster: I generally leave my intelligence a little ways off of the maximum, wear a greater intelligence mod and carry another greater mod around with me: That way I can not only max my intelligence with jewelry, but wearing INT mods when you're taunted can actually counter-act taunt's INT loss completely. I also leave my WIS around the middle of the road and intend to mod it end-game, because while WIS does affect your mana pool, it doesn't affect your overall capability like INT does. WIS mods usually aren't too difficult to find either. I usually max my charisma naturally or put it very high, leave my constitution right at durable, and completely dump strength and dex. I then usually train 9 or more points in art if I'm playing someone who uses offensive spells, and also max my HP just because I like having hit points.

For example, Antiira, my last deep-elf sorcerer, didn't have any stats naturally maxed, but he had max art (14 trains for a sorcerer I think), around 6 mana trains and max HP trains, and I usually walked around with 6 INT above the maximum and carried around another greater int mod in case I had to fight someone that could taunt, and I also carried around a greater CHA mod just to supercharge my charm person save and lower my order lag if I polymorphed into an elf. I typically wore around 25 or more points in stat mods/spell affects to account for that, though, and so I ended up having to spend even more time enchanting those greater stat mods just to get decent saves. I wouldn't recommend that to someone new to casters, personally.

Excellent reply, I believe you answered all my questions. Thank you. I hope this info is helpful to other newbs also.