Ohai,

So I'm back after a 20 IG year break or so, poking around the news and forums and whatnot. Good to see so many changes have been put in and the game has continued to grow and develop!

Back when I was playing the common-sense thing seemed to be to trans Planar for Conglutinate, especially after level 80 when Astral bashing became more feasible + xp loss hurt like buggery. Now, with the revamp of Planar, I seem to have a whole load of practically useless skills over and above Conglut, none of which seem to have any practical benefit for a mediocre combatant. The only two really useful skills post Conglutinate seem to be Link and Tesseract; but I'm noob and probably missing something important.

My question(s) is thus: is it worth forgetting Planar, pumping it back up to Conglutinate, and dumping the rest of my lessons to finally trans Geomancy? Would I have enough lessons to do so? Is there a better place for said lessons? Is Gatemaster at all useful?

Obligatory skill list:

------------- ------------ ------------
Combat Master Melee
Resilience Apprentice Fitness
Discernment Master Intellect
Magic Apprentice Arcana
Planar Transcendent Mysticism
Discipline Master Willpower
Environment Capable Communion
Influence Master Magnetism
Beastmastery Capable Magnetism
Dramatics Apprentice Performance
Arts Capable Finearts
Aethercraft Inept Mysticism
Highmagic Capable Arcana

Trade Skills Rank Pool
------------- ------------ ------------
Artisan Adept Finearts

Guild Skills Rank Pool
------------- ------------ ------------
Elementalism Mythical Mysticism
Geomancy
Illusions Virtuoso Intellect
Phantasms
Psionics Transcendent Intellect
Telepathy

Thanks in advance,

Rahil

Is it even possible to forget a common skill?

I'd say not, you'd lose some of the planar communication ones, and having Nexus can be useful at times.

This has been proposed before, but it'd be nice players had the option to refund all lessons learned past conglut. I guess this is just wishful thinking on my part...

I'd definitely keep it up to Broadcast so you can hear what's happening on other planes (sans aetherspace of course).

Includes aetherspace if your empath is a cool person and planarbonds your ship, though.

It actually also includes aetherspace if you're on any plane other than Prime.

Ya, I had a few lessons in Aethercraft. FORGET X dumps them into the lesson pool as per guild skills, then you SKILLCHOICE SELECT it back. Didn't ask til I'd checked it.





So is communication the only real boon to having deep planar? Is gating/distorting/unravelling/master used that infrequently?

Gates and distortion are definitely used, but no more than a few active people within an org really need to know them. If you're big on defending territory you'll want distort but with so many ways to travel these days it's not truly effective.

Eh I don't see a compelling reason to keep it, then. Napkin math says if I drop Planar, I'll have enough lessons in the Mysticism pool to trans Geomancy and get Planar back to Fabled for Tesseract, or get up to Conglutinate/Link then pump Discipline up to Selfishness.

Unless anyone can paint me a picture where having trans Planar is a wonderful thing for a lesson-poor soul.

Don't quote me on this, but I think if your bashing skill uses the Mysticism pool (Symbol/Staff/whatever), any related skills give it a slight boost. Might be worth keeping for that reason, and communication via Broadcast is spiffy on Astral.

Forgetting skill sets and losing lessons when you already seem to be so hard up for them seems weird to me. Sure the higher Planar stuff isn't as necessary as conglut, but it's still useful in some situations.

Yeah it was a little counter-intuitive to me as well, until I realised the ~400 lessons or so I'd lose from restructuring granted me three abilities (Myth-Trans): Unravel, Nexus, and Gatemaster. I honestly can't see Rahil using any of those abilities any time soon: I've yet to even see a player-made gate to Unravel, Nexus seems impractical unless you have something to get past guards, and Gatemaster buffs abilities I'd never use along with the one-man-only gate, which I just can't derive any reason to use. The only instance I could think of where having a handy, self-only gate would be for hunting on Astral for a quick getaway to Cosmic, since trying to have one leading into enemy territory would probably just lead to it being distorted and/or unraveled.

So yeah. 400 lessons is a steep price, but considering I was able to redistribute 800 lessons into skills I use every day (trans Geomancy, virt Discipline), pick up Master Aethercraft, and retain Conglutinate, I'm pretty happy with my decision. The 400 I lost were locked into virtually useless abilities.