Charhelp Helpfile

======================================================================Other: charhelp======================================================================Welcome to Tyr's guide to character building on buffymud.There's only one thing you can do when building a charthat'll really hurt you, and that's to have your vitalityseriously out of balance with your offensive stats.The most common mistake is to have quite a low vitality,the problem with this is obvious, when you have half someone'svit, you need twice their damage to make up for it. The problembeing that if your strength was say 100, and you increased itby 1, that's a 1% increase, if your vit is 20, and you increaseit by 1, it's a 5% increase. In short, the further apart yourvit from everything else, the greater the benefit of trainingthe lower one over the higher. Which is why a character withbalanced offense and vitality is superior to one with verydisporportionate offense and vitality.How much should you train your vitality?There's no definate answer to this, as a general rule of thumbalmost any training system that includes vitality will do youfine, the people who get in trouble are really just the oneswho just stop training vitality at some point and keep levelingup. For comparison, most highish level char's vit ranges up toaround 100.Generally try to keep your vit about up to pace with your otherstats and you should do well.The other mistake that's not nearly as common, is just the opposite;radically overtraining your vitality, which is bad for the exactsame reasons.Other small mistakes:Overtraining ranged: Because inflicting ranged damage incurs nodamage onto yourself, if a char could level just or mostly offranged they'd lose almost no condition, which would be veryoverpowered. For that reason once you do a certain amount ofdamage to a mob from ranged, additional damage slowly diminishes.It'll never stop completely, every point of weapon skill will stillincrease your dam a little bit, just by less and less. For thatreason it isn't practical to rely soley on ranged damage tofight your mobs, you will need a bit of other offensive stats.Obviously, lots of general magic without the magic enduranceto support it is also bad.That's really it, as long as you don't make those mistakesyour char will be competative. I'll go into a few detailson the mechanics now, mostly just so you can know to trustthat assertion.Styles, this doesn't entirely belong here, but I feel obligated to point out, since pretty much nobody seemsto work it out, Mobs adapt to your styles. If you usean aikido style for a round, it is most likely the mobwill use a Karate style the next round. ie they fightbased on the premise you don't change style families.Firstly, demon mystic and researching, these skills do nothingcombatively, however, they do increase your level, which isused in a few combat calculations, and is important insocial attacks and pins. Furthermore, training these statsdoes not add nearly as much to your train costs as other ones.You'll notice players with heavy investment in researching ormystic have a much higher level for their comparitive total experience. So it's really not true that a char heavy ineither stat can't fight nearly as well, they do have a slightdisadvantage, but it's not nearly so significant as it mayat first appear.All other stats increase damage at exactly the same rate per secondof combat. Ranged is a little different, as it's damage is basedon the same dps, but multiplyed by the average fight time. Things do flux around a little, most long timer abilities haveslightly better dps ratios than short timer abilities.Fireball(20 seconds) does more damage than 4 firebolts(5 seconds each)for instance. Due to to-hit chances, physical stats do betteragainst weaker opponents and worse against stronger ones.A buff like armored skin is weak against magic users or devilsas it decreases each hit by a certain amount.To go through every stat and buff would be insane, suffice to saythat they all produce the same amount of damage per second, oroccationally, damage per second reduction, as any other, onaverage. So it's equally viable to follow ANY, and I do meanANY training program. A slayer with magic is just as viableas the same level slayer without it, a witch with rangedweapon skill just as effective etc etc. There are literallymillions of possible combinations of stat builds and characterspossible. And none of them, except those noted at the start,are any worse than any other.----------------------------------------------------------------------
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