User:AIM5/Sandbox
Warmage Starter's Guide
This is meant to serve as a guide or new or returning Warrior Mages that are interested in one of the easier paths to take.
First off, join the guild. Use 'DIR Warmage' to find the guildhall. Once here:
(insert guild room description)
Use 'join' twice and listen to Gauthus' speech.
Once he's done the first thing you'll want to do is pick a spell. There are a lot of different schools of thought regarding your initial spell choice. Fire is the easiest.
The Fire Book spell progression offers the most diverse (and cheap) spell choices. As a magic primary you're going to be learning 9 different kinds of magic at a minimum:
Magic: You primary skill in magic. This is trained by casting spells of any type.
Attunement: This is learned primarily by doing what is called a 'powerwalk'. More later.
Arcana: The use of magical items, this is trained primarily with cambrinth.
Utility: Casting spells of a utilitarian nature.
Augmentation: Spells that alter your skills or stats.
Warding: Spells that increase your resistance to certain things both physical and magical.
Debilitation: Spells that adversely affect others.
Targeted: Spells that damage/kill things.
Summoning: A Warmage only skill that allows for the use of pathways and familiars.
Fire Shard (FS) is a targeted spell that will teach both your primary magic skill and targeted. After choosing FS, go out the arch and find the guild shop. It will be up stairs and to the east. Search around for it, it's good to know the different areas of the guild. A cambrinth ring costs somewhere around 2.5 gold. Get one and put it on.
The next thing you're going to want to do is make a weapon selection. On this I can't help you out. Weapons are a large part of who you see your character as. I will say that at a minimum you should pick three but try to get five in the mix.
Some advice on weapon selection: Pick weapons that compliment each other. If you're going to use a bow or a crossbow, train offhand and a thrown weapon (light thrown is easiest to train but it also doesn't hit very hard unless you have the coin for an expensive weapon). Use DIR weapon to get directions to the murder-store.
I can show you two decent set ups I've used in the past.
HT, Polearms, Brawling, 2he/he.
Crossbow, offhand, HT, 2he/he.
Training HT offers you a quick kill weapon that doesn't require aiming or advancing. It's a necessity for invasions and it doesn't hurt in PVP as well.
2he/he is trainable with one weapon (a bastard sword or a broad axe) for expediency purposes. It's a good TDP farm.
Now that we have our nifty spell and weapons we're 90% of what makes a Warmage.
Below I'll include some scripts that may help you starting out to get those initial ranks to get some circles under you. The first 6 circles are all about getting spells that will allow you to train everything you need to.
6 circles, 6 spellslots.
1. FS (TM)- 1 circle 1
2. ES (WARD)- 1 circle 2
3. Ignite (UTIL)- 2 circle 4
4. MOA (DEBIL)- 1 circle 5
5. Substratum (AUG)- 1 circle 6
That is one of each of the spells that are required to train everything.
Now. How to get to 6th circle. Bear in mind the below suggestions are a bare minimum.
You need: 3 weapons (you technically only need 2 to get to 6th but train at least 3 and try to train 5)
-Your pick on these
5 magics
-Targeted
-Arcana
-Attunement
-Elemental Magic
-Any class you can get
3 lores
-Tactics
-Mechanical Lore
-Scholarship
4 survivals
-Evasion
-Skinning
-Outdoorsmanship
-Perception
1 armor
-Shield
Parry
Defending
Summoning
Get your weapons and get a targeted shield from the armory (use dir armory). A lot of people will tell you to start mixing armors this early on. I've found this to be detrimental with the recent changes to combat and critters. You'll find yourself stymied looking for an at-level creature that you can handle with more than light hinderance. That said, light armor and chain armor are your best bets to begin with. You can mix them until you find the creatures are becoming to difficult or you can set up a rotation of armors (this is also problematic as you wont have a lot of carrying capacity with your stats).
Speaking of stats:
The rule for starting out is pretty straightforward. Train strength and stamina until you have light or no encumbrance from your items. What is left should go into bumping anything below 10 to 10 (with the exception of charisma). After that, raise discipline with the remainder. Leave charisma alone for now, it's a very useful stat, just not for you at the moment.
Combat: Your first pick of critters should reflect what direction you're taking with your Warmage. That's not to say you can't be both a skinning expert and a locksmith but it takes double the effort to do both.
Louts outside the east gate of Crossing drop boxes. You can also skip their boxes and just wait until you reach goblins to start picking if you're set on being a locksmith.
I recommend rats. Locksmithing is hard for even survival primes to keep at level with their hunting. Skinning allows for a lot of leeway in training. You can skin without arranging when you're barely able to skin something or you can arrange completely and make something easy that much harder. It's trainable in combat and it wont kill you.
You can choose either but I'll assume you picked skinning as your money maker. Rats are found just southwest of the bank, over the bridge, southwest again and through the gate. You can use 'DIR rat' for directions to their hidey hole.
As a Warrior Mage you're required to train parry for your entire career. Do not take this to mean you don't have to train shield. You have to train shield.
Let me say that again.
YOU HAVE TO TRAIN SHIELD.
If you expect your character to be viable you need to be able to shield them from ranged attacks. Shield is learned at a tertiary rate which makes it a pain but it's a no-brainer. If you picked up that target shield I mentioned earlier, grab it out and 'adjust my shield'. It should give you a message that indicates it is now worn on your arm. Wear that thing and lets play with stance points.
You're initially stanced to evasion and parry. You always want to keep your parry or your shield (or a combination of the two) at 100 and use the remainder in evasion. In a new character's case, the remainder will be 80.
In order to parry a blow, you have to have a tool for parrying. I prefer to have a parry stick (purchased or donated by an Empath or Thief) but you can also use one of the weapons you purchased with the exception of bows, crossbows and slings.
First rule of combat: Train necessary tertiary skills first. Those extra two or three pulses make all the difference when you're talking about a game played in years. Shield is a necessary tertiary skill for warmies. If you want to be a stealthy warmie, stealth is a tertiary skill as well.
They don't need to be locked before moving on but they do need to be moving (and never allowed to pulse to 0/34).
So use 'stance evasion 80' then 'stance shield 100'. Once shield is moving comfortably, take a weapon out and 'stance shield 0' 'stance parry 100'.
Script for stance here. Or you can put them on macros.
F1 = stance shield 0\r stance parry 100\r parry\r F2 = stance parry 0\r stance shield 100\r block\r
Either way, you want that stance swap to be fast.
Evasion is always training and doesn't need to be worried about until the creatures you're fighting aren't moving it.
This will meet your parry, defending, armor and 2 of 4 survival skills (if you only skin and don't hide)
That's defenses. Offenses.
The first thing you'll want to lock is your targeted and arcana. ALWAYS TRAIN TARGETED WITH A CAMBRINTH ITEM.
There is NO reason to not use a cambrinth in combat. Arcana is essential at later levels and this is an easy way to train it.
A very basic targeted magic script (that uses that fancy cambrinth ring you bought) can be found here.
If you don't like scripts, you can test your typing skills and develop some callouses by using: 'target fs' 'charge camb ring 1' 'charge camb ring 1' 'invoke camb ring' 'bob' waiting for a fully targeted message and then 'cast'-ing. Over and over again.
This will take care of 3 of 5 magics.
Once your targeted and arcana are moving and/or locked, move on to weapons. A very basic weapon script can be found here. When using slicing weapons, use 'feint' or 'slice' in the command area, puncture weapons use 'jab'. When using throwing weapons use 'get item' 'throw' and use 'bob' after each throw if you're having trouble maintaining 100% stamina.
This will take care of 3 of 3 weapons.
Next is tactics. Learn how to train tactics here. It's an easy lore that becomes very useful later on in your career and is trainable in combat.
This will take care of 1 of 3 lores.
Alrighty, all locked up from combat or near enough? Time for boring training. Attunement is trained in tiny incriments when you're doing various magical things but not enough to lock it. In order to lock it, you need to do a powerwalk. A powerwalk script that starts from the Crossing Bank can be found here. The principle is easy enough though. Move a single room, use 'perc' or 'conc' to perceive the mana of an area. Move to another area (without doubling back to one that you've already perceived) and perc again. Rinse and repeat till locked.
This will take care of 1 of 5 magics for a total of 4 of 5.
Next is mechanical lore. Try to find a group of people that have a class going in any magic that you don't have (debil, warding etc) and start foraging and braiding grass. A script for braiding can be found here.
This will take care of 1 of 5 magics and 2 of 3 lores (including scholarship) for a total of 5 of 5 magics and 3 of 3 lores. You're at the mercy of a class until 2nd circle.
Perception/outdoorsmanship Collecting rocks isn't possible until you get a few ranks of outdoorsmanship under your belt. You can do this by using 'forage rock' and then throwing the rock into a waste bin, bucket or other trash receptable. Don't chuck them on the ground. You'll annoy the people around you and eventually the room will be too cluttered to forage in anyway. This will take care of 2 of 4 survival for a total of 4 of 4.
Summoning: There's no way around this skill before you get your first pathway. Thankfully your first pathway is at 4th circle and this locks relatively fast even without it. Use 'align fire' to align yourself then use 'summon admit' to build a charge, once your charge is full use 'summon imped' to reduce it.
I wont go into the intricacies of summoning but once you reach level 4 immediately do the task Gauthus gives you to get your first pathway, Pathway focus Damage. Learn more about summoning here.
Notice that pathway damage is fire aligned? Now (because you aligned fire like I said) when you cast a spell you gain fire attunement. Once enough attunement is gained (it doesn't need to be full to train with) you can use 'pathway foc damage' to use that charge to train summoning in combat. This becomes even easier when you get Mark of Arhat and can train debilitation and increase your charge even further.
An easy and effective way to train summoning is to try to start path damage every time you cast a spell that aligns you (in this case, fire). It wont always work but it's a no-brainer way of keeping summoning locked.
This is enough to get you started but some things to remember:
You need athletics to get anywhere, train it. Do not get more than 1 starter targeted spell. Elementalism at 8th circle will remove them as requirements. As soon as you get enough spells to train all the different magics and you have the skill, get 'deep attunement' as a spell feat. When you begin training the different non-combat magics, find a way to incorporate arcana with them. Do as much as you can in combat.
RPing a Warmage.
As with any guild...you can do whatever the heck you want with your character. If you want to be a bunny-slipper wearing necromancer that only hunts barghests by the full light of Katamba...well more power to you.
Almost any guild can be described as a 'protector' but their directions vary widely. A Ranger is a protector of nature, an Empath is a protector a life, a Cleric...souls and so on. Even a Necromancer can be said to be a protector of sentient self-reliance. A Warmage is a protector of the balance of the elements within the plane they reside. Duty, Honor, Death means something entirely different than just a Paladin with some flashy spells.
A Ranger might die trying to extinguish a forest fire that a Warmage started. Both are protecting what they feel needs to be protected but it would still place them at odds.
As such, it's popular for Warmages to display affinities for certain elements as if they themselves are directly impacting the balance of a certain element.
How these affinities are expressed through RP is also varied. Some choose a fatalistic approach. "If I CAN burn it, I SHOULD burn it." and some choose a more socially-friendly "I will only use the earth to directly impact the things around me."
Warmages are not directly tied with the stability and order of Kermoria but through their works they preserve the balance of elements that allow life to exist. That isn't to say that Warmages cannot have political viewpoint and act on them accordingly. At it's root, elementalism has no political viewpoint but it can be made to serve the caster's. If that same forest needs to be burned down, or ice is out of balance, why shouldn't it be used to also decimate an army of Elpazi?
So, as an archetype Warmage would seek to maintain the balance, a Warmage 'villain' would either seek to unbalance it or tip the balance in their favor...or simply not care what effect their actions had.