Skills 3.0

This article is solely to hold the facts and stated positions of the GMs on the Experience and TDP changes. This is not an article for opinions, debate, or suggestions, and any attempts to add such will be delt with more harshly than usual. -The Elanthipedia Moderators

Skills/Ranks

Rationale

The GMs feel that too many skills are difficult to develop by themselves due to their specificity and wish to combine them. Other skills, such as Mechanical Lore and Primary Magic, do too much and are unfair when compared to other skills.

For example, it is difficult and time-consuming to try to place both climbing and swimming opportunities at all levels in all zones, and having to only do one or the other would free up development time. In addition, the proposed Athletics skill might also be applied to things such as jumping, riding, or other athletic activities that the uncombined skills do not cover.

General Principles

• Combined skills will be set to the highest of the included skills. The remaining skill(s) will be dissolved into the bonus pool for the relevant skillset. Stealth is an exception to this. (See below.)
• Bonus pools will boost learning for the entire skillset at approximately double rate (that is, if 200 bits are taken from field experience, 400 bits are absorbed into the skill), until the pool is empty.
• The current skill cap is 1,750 ranks.

Exceptions to the General Mechanism for Merging Skills

"You may notice that the skills we are reconsidering for merging transcend the notion of "they're too easy" and are instead skills that specifically can be trained to high mindstates and high ranks either with no cost or a time cost measured in seconds with your fingers." --GM Armifer

• Stealth (hiding + stalking) will be capped at 130% of your ranks in hiding.

Rationale: This was changed in response to widespread bug abuse that allowed players to lock stalking within seconds by spamming ADVANCE/FACE NEXT while hiding. A secondary concern was that HUNT allows players to train stalking without hiding or doing anything stealthy. As a result of these two issues, there are characters whose stalking grossly exceeds their hiding; they would suddenly find themselves much more effective at stealth even though they didn't "work" for it.

• Performing: Vocals will not count toward Performing unless you're a Bard. Instead these ranks will go into the lore bonus pool.

For Bards, Performing will be capped at 130% of their highest non-vocal instrument.

Rationale: Most characters currently have "excessive" ranks in vocals due to continuous humming, which can be done during most activities with no roundtime. If players are allowed to keep these ranks, performing-based activities will have to have higher skill requirements to compensate.

"The reasoning behind bards getting vocals included in performance in this way is that some bards have trained Vocals using methods outside of HUM. Virtually zero other characters have trained vocals by singing rather than humming. Additionally, the reason for NOT including vocals is so that Performing isn't a horribly bloated skill for everybody that trained using HUM. If we included it for everybody, Performing would be the top lore for nearly everybody, and it would be at an insane number of ranks per circle compared to any other skill in that skillset. Bards are an exception to this because their performing must be high (since it's a circle requirement) and they have to train so many instruments." -- GM Socharis

List of 3.0 Skills

Below is a complete list of skills.

• Unless otherwise noted, combined skills use the normal merger formula. (See above.)
• If nothing is listed in the "Old Skills" column, it means that the new skill and old skill will have the same name.
• You will be grandfathered to your current circle no matter what. Whether grandfathered ranks are deducted from your bonus pools depends on the skill:

• For existing, combined, and split skills, grandfathered ranks will be deducted from the bonus pool for that skillset. (If you don't have enough bits in the bonus pool, you will still be grandfathered.)
• For new guild-only skills, you will be grandfathered to your current circle. (These ranks are not deducted from your bonus pools.)
• For other new skills, your ranks will be derived from other skills. (These ranks are not deducted from your bonus pools.)

Armor Skillset

Skill	Old Skills	Formula
Brigandine	Light Plate
Chain Armor	Light Chain, Heavy Chain
Defending	new skill	derived: average of the top two of Shield, Parry, Evasion, and Multi Opponent
Endurance	new Paladin-only skill	grandfathered to current circle
Light Armor	Leather Armor, Cloth Armor, Bone Armor
Plate Armor	Heavy Plate
Shield Usage

Weapon Skillset

Skill	Old Skills	Formula
Bows	Short Bow, Long Bow, Composite Bow
Brawling
Crossbows	Light Crossbow, Heavy Crossbow
Expertise	new Barbarian-only skill	grandfathered to current circle
Heavy Thrown
Large Blunt	Heavy Blunt
Large Edged	Heavy Edged
Light Thrown
Melee Mastery	new skill	derived: average of top two melee weapons
Missile Mastery	new skill	derived: average of top two ranged weapons
Offhand Weapon
Parry Ability
Polearms	Pikes, Halberds
Slings	Slings, Staff Sling
Small Blunt	Light Blunt, Medium Blunt
Small Edged	Light Edged, Medium Edged
Staves	Short Staff, Quarter Staff
Twohanded Blunt
Twohanded Edged

Magic Skillset

Skill	Old Skills	Formula
Arcana
Astrology	moved from Lore to Magic
Attunement	Harness Ability, Power Perceive
Augmentation	new skill	derived: 90%, 80%, 75%, or 70% of Primary Magic (depends on guild)
Debilitation	new skill	derived: 90%, 80%, 75%, or 70% of Primary Magic (depends on guild)
Inner Fire	new skill	grandfathered to current circle
Primary Magic
Sorcery	new skill	N/A (must be trained from 0)
Summoning	new Warrior Mage-only skill	grandfathered to current circle
Targeted Magic
Theurgy	new Cleric-only skill	grandfathered to current circle
Utility	new skill	derived: 90%, 80%, 75%, or 70% of Primary Magic (depends on guild)
Warding	new skill	derived: 90%, 80%, 75%, or 70% of Primary Magic (depends on guild)

Survival Skillset

Skill	Old Skills	Formula
Athletics	Climbing, Swimming
Backstab
Evasion
First Aid
Locksmithing	Lockpicking, Disarm Traps
Outdoorsmanship	Foraging, Animal Lore
Perception
Scouting
Skinning
Stealth	Hiding, Stalking	cannot exceed 130% of Hiding
Thanatology
Thievery	Stealing

Lore Skillset

Skill	Old Skills	Formula
Alchemy	Mechanical Lore*	allocated by player
Appraisal
Bardic Lore	Musical Theory
Empathy
Enchanting	Mechanical Lore*	allocated by player
Engineering	Mechanical Lore*	allocated by player
Forging	Mechanical Lore*	allocated by player
Outfitting	Mechanical Lore*	allocated by player
Performing	Bards: Percussions, Strings, Vocals, Winds everyone else: Percussions, Strings, Winds	cannot exceed 130% of top non-vocal instrument (Bards)
Scholarship	Scholarship, Teaching
Tactics	new skill	derived: weighted average of two parts Scholarship, one part Brawling, one part Multi Opponent
Trading

*The player will be forced to allocate his existing Mechanical Lore ranks to one or more crafting skills. Any circle-based grandfathering of Mechanical Lore will occur before the mech split.

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Skills That Are Going Away

Three skills won't exist in Skills 3.0.

Skill	Use
Multi Opponent	factored into Defending and Tactics
Escaping	dissolved into Survival bonus pool
Vocals	dissolved into Lore bonus pool for everyone but Bards

Experience Drain

The current plan is to grant an experience drain bonus for characters that are training fewer than about 10 skills simultaneously.

"There will be a gradient in there somewhere, so that people aren't as much in the mindset of 'I have an extra slot to train a skill for maximum efficiency, I'll add this random skill.'" --GM Socharis

There will not be a penalty for training many skills at once. However, "super long-term experience gain might eventually be penalized." (GMs have declined to define what constitutes "super long-term experience gain" at this time.)

Circle Requirements

Circle requirements have been redone for every guild. Here are some basic principles (quoted from New Skill Reqs - Basic Info For Everyone):

• You will be grandfathered to your current circle no matter what. The only changes you'll see are in relation to how hard it will be to circle to the next circle, NOT how hard it will be to have the right skills at your current circle. Everybody will have the same difficulty there. It will be zero.
• There are three kinds of requirements that you'll have. Nth requirements, Hard requirements, and Soft requirements.

• An Nth requirement is something along the lines of 1st Weapon, 3rd Magic, etc. It's the Nth highest skill in that skillset that is not excluded.
• A Hard requirement is a specific skill required to be trained per-circle. These skills are NOT allowed to be included in Nth requirements. For instance, if you have a Hard Scholarship req, Scholarship cannot count for one of your Nth lores.
• A Soft requirement is a specific skill required to be trained per-circle. These skills ARE allowed to be included in Nth requirements. For instance, if you have a soft TM requirement, that can count for your 2nd Magic skill, etc.

• With the condensation of several skillsets (primarily Weapons and Survival), many Nth requirements require fewer overall skills. However, the remaining skills have largely had their ranks increased.
• There are some skills that are never allowed as Nth Requirements. This is because the skills are not really in the same spirit as the Nth requirements. These skills are:

• Defending
• Melee Mastery
• Missile Mastery
• Offhand Weapon
• Parry Ability
• Primary Magic

• Total X requirements are going away. They're a little bit too fluid for any kind of structured advancement. For instance, you could hit 149th without ever training Appraisal, and then use your first 30 baby ranks of Appraisal to fill your requirement for 150th. It's really hard to construct a fiction around that where the guildleaders think "Hey, based on what he did, he's totally ready for 150th".
• Many guilds had requirements that lasted for one or two circle ranges. For instance, WMs required 1 rank of shield for the first 10 circles, and then did not require more. These requirements have been deemed nonsense and removed or made more aggressive.
• Existing skills and their combined relatives that are increased to meet guild minimums will subtract from the relevant bonus pools, but will reach necessary levels even if the bonus pool is insufficient.
• On July 18, 2012, the circle cap was increased from 150 to 200. These last 50 circles are primarily for bragging rights, as they do not grant TDPs or new ability slots. In general, the rank requirements are 2.5 times those of the 100-150 range. For details, see Increasing the Level Cap. (This is not an April Fools' Day joke!)

For your guild's circle requirements, see Post:New Circle Reqs Have Been Posted - 03/16/2012 - 03:03.

TDPs and Stats

Please read the entire section.

TDPs

The December 2010 proposal of having enhanced and reduced TDP generation for "main skills" and "alternate skills," respectively, has been scrapped as of October 2, 2012.

"What I found was, the wider the disparity between the 'main' and 'alternate' skills in the TDP equation, the worse off and better off some people were - The extremes were more extreme. Looking at the curves, I saw a sharper increase and decrease, which meant that more people were getting significant shakeups. Additionally, wide wide differences between the two, MORE people were suffering, with a smaller number gaining a HUGE number of TDPs. There were a few people losing an extreme amount, but more people were losing TDPs with wide splits. As I brought them closer together, I saw that the curves were less dramatic, and the differences were less extreme." --GM Socharis

It is possible that all skills will continue to generate TDPs at the current rate of 200 ranks / TDP, but the GMs are still doing the math to see what will be best for the game as a whole.

• TDPs are only spent by training stats and are only earned by gaining ranks and circling. There are no more for-TDP spell slots, etc. (TDPs spent memorizing spell scrolls will be refunded.)
• You will have the option of doing a stat respec to reset your stats to your racial default (what you would have if you rolled a new character) and then re-training your stats using your recalculated pool of TDPs. You can choose not to do the stat respec, which may be desirable if you have fewer TDPs under the new system. (If you have fewer TDPs and don't do the stat respec, you will have a negative TDP count.)
• There will probably be some additional free stat respecs within the adjustment period (3-6 months?) that you can use as well.
• You will not be able to change your race, even if you chose your race for purely mechanical reasons that are no longer valid in DragonRealms 3.0.

"This is a roleplaying game, and I'm only going to go so far to let people optimize after changes. There are some choices that are permanent and won't be changing - What guild you are, what race you are, etc." --GM Socharis

Stats

• Stats will no longer be capped at 99. The new cap will be somewhere between 150 and 200.
• It will cost five times as many TDPs to train stats above 99. (This formula may be changed to be less heavily dependent on race, but stats over 99 will remain very expensive to train.) Additionally, stats over 99 will cost at least 15 times as much money to train.
• You'll get roughly the same benefit from going from 99 to 100 as you would from going from 98 to 99.
• If, in the future, GMs need to make dramatic adjustments to stat models, everyone will be given a free stat respec.

Related Forum Posts

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External Links

3.0 Conversion Spreadsheet: Calculates your current and future ranks, TDPs, and circle based on the latest information about Skills 3.0. Lore Bonus Pool Spreadsheet: Estimates how many ranks you can gain in one or more skills until your bonus pool is depleted. (This spreadsheet requires information from the 3.0 Conversion Spreadsheet.)