Soooooo yeah. I'm still fairly new to the game, as I'm sure my numerous posts on the forum have shown. In any event, I am curious to find out what skills people feel are worth pumping lessons into. I'm not familiar enough w/ Lusternia to do more than make conjectures on the subject. Advice?

Three questions:

1. Which guild do you plan to join? Have you chosen which specialisation you'll follow in the branching skills?

2. How available are credits for you? Only IC earned ones, some OOC bought, a lot OOC bought?

3. Do you plan to become a PvP fighter? Or a total pacifist (who doesn't even fight mobs)? Something in between?

1. I AM a Blacktalon.

2. I've already transcended druidry, hunting, totems, herbs, shieldparry in combat, potionlist in discernment, and any of the skills that seem to be universally suggested to novices like insomnia. I've 150 credits on me right now. Depending on what is beneficial I'm likely to buy more credits in the future.

3. I'd like to become involved in PvP. Probably something more inbetween.

In that case, here are the "must-haves":

I. Planar. Not for combat, but for utility. Conglutinate instantly ressurects you at your nexus (with a VERY small exp loss) each time you die off-plane. Best transcendent skill ever.

II. Discipline. You'd like to have Focus Mind (at fabled). Cures one mental affliction when used, costs negligible mana. For now, only solution to get out of many affliction locks. Also, more discipline = faster Focus Body.

III. Resilience. At Trans gives a good chance to resist poisons, and resistance towards physical damage. Not the first thing to get, but don't forget about it.

IV. If you want to help your commune influence villages, get Divert in Influence. It's at Gifted or Expert, forgot exactly.

V. Don't forget Low Magic! If you have a lot of cash to pump into it, Serpent (trans) is very good. If not, get at least Green, to remove soft locks.

Yellow in lowmagic (adept 0%) gives you +1 con for a day at the cost of 3p. Green (gifted 0%) is the only way you can cure warriorlocks (slit throat + slickness).

You don't need trans planar if you have trans ecology - I'd say leave planar at teleport and just transmigrate when you die.

You really need perceive in Environment (capable 50%) if you don't have it already, as it allows you to see what rooms are melded by a druid or mage so you can find the endpoints and break the meld. Windtalk in Environment (master 0%) is really convienient, I think, and tumbling (expert 50%) which lets you perform a delayed move to get out of a room no matter what is really nice for getting away from instakills or situations where you're really afflicted.

For village influencing, analyse (capable 0%) really helps you help your commune, and divert (gifted 50%) lets you do even more.

More Discernment gives you Illusions (at gifted 50%), which allows you to remove illusionary terrain so you can wyrd over it (illusionary terrain is like the mage equivilent of saplings). At fabled 0%, you get Contemplate, which allows you to check someone's mana without spending eq or balance - necessary if you ever wish to perform the crow 25% mana instakill, but I'm not sure how plausible that instakill is anyway.



Those skills, plus focusmind and resilence, as Cuber mentioned, are the ones that will be useful to you. Which are necessary, I have no clue. I'd say get illusions in discernment, percieve in environment, yellow in lowmagic, analyse in influence, and from there, get whichever other skill seems really nice. Or ask your guild - I'm not sure how much, say, contemplate helps a Blacktalon.

Who are you and how did you stay under my radar? (EDIT: Nevermind, found you!)

For 150 credits, I would say planar to teleport, discernment to illusions, then dump the rest into discipline in pursuit of focus mind, which I don't think you'll quite get. While focus mind isn't as crucial as it once was, it'll help you with the kind of fighting you'll get drafted into as a Blacktalon, and give you a faster power regeneration and paralysis curing. Quite frankly, the power and paralysis is worth more than focus mind--that's why I'd pursue it, even if you don't quite get to fabled.

There are a lot of other skills that would be nice to have that you could reach without the discipline training. Shorlen gave a pretty complete list of it. All of those other skills (minus green, but get in touch with Xavius in-game--there's no reason for you to stand and take abuse from a warrior as a druid) have workarounds, though.

1. Discipline. You ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO HAVE focus mind (fabled) in order to break a hexlock.
2. Planar to get conglutinate (trans). If I'm not mistaken, transmigrate only works on the plane the deepbonded animal is on, and I guess you could take your animal whenever you travel planes but it'd be a bit of a liability with no guards/statues around.

Those are the two most important, really.

Except that Shamarah is wrong on both counts.

Actually, Shamarah is right on both counts. You need to trans discipline, firstly because focusmind is nice to have for curing and secondly because otherwise mages can whore paralysis daggers on you and there is not a damn thing you can do. It has alot of useful abilities along the way which you will need such as metawaking to fight wicca. Selfishness is also very sexy. I also suggest planar, if not for conglut(which you don't really need if you can afford the high costs of transmig and I hear glom is pretty strict on power. Yes this is rumour only don't burn me) but also its nice to have for scrying and talking from other planes. You should also work on getting tumble since you are a druid(unless you are furrikin) and resilience isn't needed.

Hexlock's been nerfed. Hexes have been upgraded, but focus mind is no longer a minimum entry skill.

Transmigrate works anywhere. Is conglut still useful? You bet. Between rebirth and transmigrate, do you need to worry about it when credits are limited? No.

My mistake on #2, but with #1, it's still entirely possible to get hexlocked against a good opponent, and if you do get hexlocked without focus mind, you're 100% screwed.

Hexes can't give slickness, so you can now apply melancholic to chest to remove asthma. This was one of the reasons for the change of melancholic to a salve, from a purgative.

As far as I know "soft lock" is a term we used to describe an affliction combo that simulates a lock but actually isnt a lock. Like slitthroat slickness (or otherwise known as a slitlock) is not a soft lock because it's actually a lock. An example of a soft lock would be something like like a queue lock. The instance where an attacker will keep putting on a certain affliction on you because they've noticed you'll cure that first unabling you to cure the real affliction that they want to keep on you. Or something like a cure lock where you either stack afflictions of the same cure to make it harder for you to cure a certain affliction.

So the sentence "get at least Green, to remove soft locks." Well it gives the wrong impression because you do not need Green to remove soft locks.