I've decided to work on becoming an actual combatant, rather than just faking my way through. It's never been a major interest, but I'm slowly working myself up to giving it a serious go.

I'm reworking my curing from the ground up to be more precise, more robust. I know also that nothing beats practice, practice, practice for ironing out both curing/survival and tweaking workable offenses.

Meanwhile, I could use suggestions as far as credit-y expenditures. No telling when and how many I'll have, but I do tend to purchase credits from time to time.

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     Common Skills         Rank           Pool
     -------------         ------------   ------------
     Combat                Transcendent   Melee
     Resilience            Transcendent   Fitness
     Discernment           Master         Intellect
     Magic                 Adept          Arcana
     Planar                Transcendent   Mysticism
     Discipline            Transcendent   Willpower
     Environment           Expert         Communion
     Influence             Expert         Magnetism
     Arts                  Capable        Finearts
     Beastmastery          Inept          Magnetism
     Highmagic             Capable        Arcana
     Dramatics             Inept          Performance
     Aethercraft           Master         Mysticism
    
     Trade Skills          Rank           Pool
     -------------         ------------   ------------
     Tailoring             Adept          Finearts
    
     Guild Skills          Rank           Pool
     -------------         ------------   ------------
     Kata                  Transcendent   Melee
             Tahtetso
     Psionics              Transcendent   Intellect
             Psychometabolism
     Harmony               Transcendent   Communion

I've got arti pipes. For self-gratification purposes, I want a big shiny arti tahto. I'm entirely certain it's not worth a quarter of the credits it would cost, but I want it anyway. Other artifacts that come to mind are soap, rune of absorption, gem of cloaking.

But skills are higher priority, so if there are any major must-haves, I'm all ears.

My current goal is Gedulah, Diving, Splendours, then assess how badly I need Magic. I don't plan to change races, but I haven't ruled it out entirely.


So, how's my assessment? Am I overlooking anything, or is there a different priority you'd recommend?

Yea I'd trans tailor, up to at least ged as you said in highmagic, beastmastery is always fun, arts is cool for illusion detection, magic, and environment has some nice perks in it all through.

What he said, just omni it, gosh.

Er... maybe sometime in the far future. I'm looking more for immediate priorities rather than outright wish list.

The thing I would want most that you don't have is a beast for healing. Just like it's essential to be healing with a health potion, sparkleberries, and Scroll of Healing simultaneously, I consider beast healing just as important.

But I'm not very good at combat, so maybe you shouldn't listen to me.

I was kind of hoping being a psymet monk (tank-ish and not prone to expending mana/ego for offense) would make that less of a priority. Meh.

After writing my own system, the best advice I can give is don't write your own. The time you spend fixing annoying little things can be spent practicing and learning. Dieing repeatedly to someone because you haven't yet written in choke/wounding/vessels/whatever can be a demotivation to getting into fights. Get a hold of one of the public ones, fix what you don't like about it and use that.

I would go for Acrobatics over Psymet. Avoid, limber, dodging, contort and springup are useful against just about everyone and elasticity, balancing, somersault, tripleflash and hyperactive are situationally good.

Think twice about transcending tailoring early on. Before the change to knight damage, I was a human/krokani tailor and would get throughly destroyed by knights with runes, even with splendours. In order to be able to compete, I went for demi but got there just as the rebalancing came through. Since then damage certainly isn't an issue, but I suspect this is more due to kephera + demi + rebalancing than splendours. If you're losing fights because of high physical damage + high wounds or high elemental damage, consider going for splendours.

Beastmastery's use in 1v1 Tahtetso fighting is pretty limited. Gust, block, sleepcloud and minorbreath all have their uses but the best ability is spitting for an extra poison. If you have the lessons to get to this, go for it. If not I wouldn't bother.

In terms of kata weapon artifacts, I'd go for stat runes before elemental runes before bleeding runes. +speed is by far the most useful stat and most of the Tahtetso skills are dependant on wounds so +precision is helpful for that. Dexterity makes far more difference than precision stat though, so If you're not overly tied to your racial RP spend credits on artifacts/skills to offset the weaknesses of a high dex race.

Damage runes can help force a sip instead of applying, allowing more afflictions and better damage stacking. If you have someone in a position where you can stack damage/wounds (prone+messed up) you can kill them with unruned damage or instantkill almost as easily if you use the right forms.

Bleeding runes are fairly close to useless for tahtetso. In terms of bleed/mana loss, we have twist, broken nose, paralysis and ... mantra mindfire. The mana used for clotting away rune bleeding will be easily covered by sparkleberry. I used to have 2 on my staff but traded them in because of this.