Newbie Ramblings

From LSWiki

Introduction

This page lists some pieces of advice I have been given as a newbie. Thanks go, so far, in no particular order, to: Chaos, Arana, and Erebus. It is my hope to eventually understand enough to write some useful newbie howto's from this information. This information is a work in progress, and any contributions are more than welcome.

On Learning New Skills

Specialties appear to limit the maximum to which you can train a skill. If you have no specialty points in a skill, you can *generally* train it to 40. Further skill increases require an investment of specialty points to increase the skill cap for you.

Most skills you can learn without a specialty in them, however some you cannot.

Some skills you can learn by doing, others you cannot. A fine example is weapon skills. They increase while you use them, assuming you have room to grow.

The table listed on "show specialty access <stat>" has a points column at the far right. The number listed is the total number of free points you have to allocate for that stat, it does *not* mean that you can put however many of points in each skill listed.

In the specialty access table, sus means suspended, asg means assigned, bon means bonus. For most skills, 0 specs = a max of 40 in the skill. If you have 2 specs in a skill, and the max for the skill is 120, and then you remove one spec from the skill, it will show one point suspended, until your skill rating becomes 80. At that point the specialty point you removed will become available for allocation again.

Some advice I was given was to pick a guild, then worry about specialties. Your specialties change with your guild. However if you *know* you're going to use a particular skill in a guild, it's perfectly fine to go ahead and allocate it.

An almost direct quote from Chaos on learning:

The main learning limits are: the max from your specialty degree, the trainer's max they can train, 
which you know only by reaching it really (unless someone starts documenting those on the wiki), your gold, 
the wait time between training sessions, and, sometimes, trainer-specific limits, like where Battleragers need 
Clangedin's favour to a high enough level.

On Guilds

Changing guilds is not especially easy. Your atman (player account) permits you to play a number of different characters (Not online at the same time, that's against the rules). Use this ability to create characters and try out different guilds.

Handy Commands That Are Not Immediately Obvious

set private name for <thing> to <name>

This is how you set names for things. Example, you see "a black skinned male drow". You introduce yourself and find out what this person's name is. You can then "set private name for drow to WhateverThisCharactersNameIs", and anytime you see that person, you will see the name you set rather than their description.

Random Advice

You can sell some things that you loot from fallen enemies at Baldwin's, located 1e, 1s of the Square in LostHaven. You don't sell swords and armor and such at smiths generally.

Magic items can be sold at Lucanius's shop in the Temple of Discordia, which can be found, by leafing Losthaven to the east, and from there, traveling north until you can go up. Also, you can acquire Lens of Insight at Lucanius's, which can give you more information about items including but not limited to: material, magical nature, and invocation words. After which point they will be more valuable.

Max worth Baldwin will buy an item for is 1K.

Max worth for Lucanius will buy an item for is 10K, but he only buys magic items.