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Mage/Warrior?
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RPGDot Forums > Dungeon Siege

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Rawis
Gorthaur
Gorthaur




Joined: 01 Apr 2002
Posts: 1861
Mage/Warrior?
   

Im a warrior (level 50) and i leveled up in combat magic pretty fast, im level 26 in combat magic, but my INT don't increase! Isn't it possible to be both warrior and mage?
Post Fri Apr 26, 2002 9:05 pm
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Danicek
The Old One
The Old One




Joined: 15 Dec 2001
Posts: 5922
Location: Czech Republic
   

Yes, it is possible, but you must develop your character from begining as "dual class".
If you start with it when you have very high strenght, it will be extremly difficult to raise inteligence. There are some strange rules I read about somewhere.
But this is important result.
Post Fri Apr 26, 2002 9:14 pm
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Danicek
The Old One
The Old One




Joined: 15 Dec 2001
Posts: 5922
Location: Czech Republic
   

Ah, here it is.

Quoted from Shakti
For all you folks wondering why you can get your stats to raise evenly if you keep your skills developing at an even pace too (by constantly rotating the skills you use), but once you let one skill get too high (such as melee) then your stats get all out of whack and you just can't get certain stats to raise much at all no matter what you do. For example, you focus on Melee combat only at first, and then at Melee level 50 you decide to focus on Combat Magic. Sure enough, you can get your Combat Magic skill up to 30 or even 40 in no time, but your Intelligence won't increase much at all. The problem is so bad that you literally get to a point where you don't have enough intelligence or mana to even cast higher level Combat Magic spells.

Well, here's exactly how it works:

There's a page called The Numbers Game at Dungeon Seige Heaven that tells part of the story. The problem is that what Zen says is very misleading and poorly-worded, and therefore gives the completely wrong impression about what's happening.

It all hinges on this table:

----------Str------Dex--------Int
Melee----64%---27%----9%
Ranged--25%---62%---13%
Nature----9%---18%---73%
Combat--13%---17%---70%

Okay, now forget what Zen says about this table. What this table really shows is the relative growth rate of your stats based on your DOMINANT skill, regardless of which skill you're actually using at any given time. In other words, If your dominant skill is Melee, then no matter which skill you use to fight with, your stats will grow more or less at the rate of 64% for Strength, 27% for Dexterity, and 9% for Intelligence.

That's the basic idea, but we have to modify it a little bit. It actually all works on a curve based on whether or not any one skill is clearly dominant. If you have level 60 Melee, for example, and level 0 Ranged, Nature, and Combat, then Melee is extremely dominant and even if you switch exclusively to one of the magic skills for a while, your stats will still grow at a rate close to 64% Strength, 27% Dexterity, and 9% Intelligence. So even if you focus on Combat Magic exclusively for a while, you could raise your Combat Magic to level 50 and your Intelligence would have grown hardly at all, because that stat has been growing at a stunted 9% rate, more or less.

However, here's where the curve effect comes in. If you finally manage to get your Combat Magic skill fairly close to your Melee skill, you'll see Intelligence starting to increase at a faster rate again, more along the lines of the 13% / 17% / 70% listed in the Combat Magic row of the table. Once your Combat Magic hits level 60 (equal to your Melee skill) then your stats are definitely affected according to the Combat Magic row of the table when you use Combat Magic.

Okay so the succinct way of saying all this might go like this:

1. When your skills are all roughly equal, then your stats grow at relative rates as shown in the table each time you use a given skill.

2. As one skill becomes more dominant than any of the others, then your stats start growing more and more at the rate associated with your dominant skill, regardless of which skill you're actually using.

Clear as mud?

So the key to growing your stats evenly is to grow your skills evenly (with one little exception I'll note in a minute). As soon as one skill becomes more dominant than the others, it significantly skews your stat growth into a pattern associated with the dominant skill. The only way to overcome this skewing is to push the other skills back up equal to the dominant one so that no skill is dominant. Then focus on the skills that will grow the weaker stats until they catch up. The problem here is that you'll get in to a see-saw effect once you start trying to rebalance stats out.

Now the exception I mentioned is this. You do NOT have to work all four skills equally to keep your stats even. You only have to work melee, ranged, and one magic school. If you work all four, you're putting more growth into Intelligence and it will become noticeably higher than Strength and Dexterity. This may not be a bad thing--it depends on how they cap the growth for stats. If each stat has an independent cap (e.g., 80 max for Str, 80 max for Dex, and 80 max for Int), then it doesn't matter if Intel moves ahead a little bit as long as you're keeping all four skills roughly equal. But if there's some aggregate cap for all stats (e.g., 80 for any one stat, but the total of all three stats cannot exceed 180), then you might not want to let any one stat get too much higher than the others.

If you worked on just three skills at first, such as melee, ranged, and nature magic until those skills were near their 150 skill caps, then you should have a fairly even distribution of Str, Dex, and Int. Now you can turn around and train combat magic skill at a disgustingly fast rate and get it caught up to nature magic in no time.
Post Fri Apr 26, 2002 9:22 pm
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Danicek
The Old One
The Old One




Joined: 15 Dec 2001
Posts: 5922
Location: Czech Republic
   

And little bit more info, again from Shakti

quoted from Shakti
Okay it took a few days, some long threads with a lot of number crunching, lots of ideas, contributions, and discussion by many talented people to finally nail down exactly what is happening with stats as you level up.

It's *really* hard to explain, folks. The basic concept is that you get one stat point for every uber level you gain. It's easy to predict what your stats will look like if you train exclusively in skill and forsake all other skills. But it's nasty to predict what your stats will look like if you multi-class, because you gain a little bit of stat exp with every single "hit" you make with your various skills. It's an incremental process.

I have a spreadsheet available now that gets us as close as we're going to get to formulas that can be used in some kind of character generator utility. I'm not a utility developer, but I freely offer use of my formulas to anyone who wants to develop a nice character generator.

This spreadsheet cannot get any more accurate than predicting what your stats will look like provided you level in full-integer increments using only one skill at a time. (For that matter, I guarantee that no utility will be able to get more accurate than that, either.)

What I mean by this is that to have your actual in-game results closely match the stats predicted by this spreadsheet, you have to use only one skill at a time, and you have to use it for an entire skill level before switching to some other skill. For example, you have to use melee for three full levels, then switch to ranged for two levels, then back to melee for a level, then switch to nature for 5 levels, then back to ranged for a level, etc. If you try to use two different skills in between levels, so to speak, then your numbers will ultimately differ from the numbers predicted by the spreadsheet.

Again, this is unfortunate, but its due to the fact that your stats change with every single hit you make, and the skill with with you make the hit changes how the stat points are allocated among your three stats.

Despite these drawbacks, this spreadsheet can be a very useful tool for understanding why stat growth looks so screwy at times, and for planning a distribution of skills (and the order in which to train them) that will get you close to your idea of "perfect stats."

The spreadsheet is in Excel 98 format, and the download is a zip file that you'll have to unzip to use. Some barebones instructions are on the spreadsheet itself. Be aware that I'm making this spreadsheet available "as-is" and I will NOT answer emails asking me how to use it or how it works, unless you are a utility developer and you can't figure out how my formulas are working. If you want to understand my formulas, I suggest you look at Column B only, because in that column I used descriptive names for cells and ranges of cells so that the formulas would be a bit more intuitive.
Post Fri Apr 26, 2002 9:24 pm
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Danicek
The Old One
The Old One




Joined: 15 Dec 2001
Posts: 5922
Location: Czech Republic
   

Both posts are from Shakti and are copied from forum on PlanetDungeonSiege.
Post Fri Apr 26, 2002 9:26 pm
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Rawis
Gorthaur
Gorthaur




Joined: 01 Apr 2002
Posts: 1861
   

Oh, suppose i can't just switch then. Too bad.
Post Fri Apr 26, 2002 9:27 pm
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Danicek
The Old One
The Old One




Joined: 15 Dec 2001
Posts: 5922
Location: Czech Republic
   

Yes, it looks like it is very difficult and not efective to switch in later parts of game.
DS character developement and its collerations are extremly strange and difficult to understand.
Post Fri Apr 26, 2002 9:29 pm
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vaticide
Put food in here
Put food in here




Joined: 21 Feb 2002
Posts: 1122
Location: One step behind a toddler bent on destruction.
   

Your best bet is just to get them high level and then just use the buff spells to buff yourself up (slowly) and get ready for battle. That is what I do with a similar situation.

-v
Post Fri Apr 26, 2002 10:07 pm
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