Races and Character Creation

Just creating your character?  There are a lot of choices to make!  You can select one of the pre-made classes or you can custom-build your own character.  The pre-made classes are good places to start, but the most powerful characters are usually custom-made.

Before you start, you ought to get a basic idea of what you want your character to do in life.  If you want to be a melee or archer, what weapon do you want to wield?  Do you want to rely on your melee defense to avoid attacks, or will you be using magic to reduce the damage you take?  Do you want to be a mage, and if so, do you want to rely on yourself alone or do you want to be an effective group player?  Refer to the 'Classes' section for an overview of the most popular character choices.

The first choice you will make is your character's race.  There are now 4 races in Asheron's Call - Aluvians, Gharu'ndim, Sho, and Viamontians.  Race affects your appearance and your starting skills.  Aluvians begin with dagger and assess person trained, Ghuru'ndim with staff and item tinkering trained, Sho with Unarmed Combat trained, and Viamontians begin with Loyalty *specialized* and Armor Tinkering trained.  Before the expansion, most people prefer to be Ghuru'ndim because of the bonus skills, Item Tinkering was the most useful.  Of course, if you plan on using a racial weapon, stick with Sho.  Viamontians now have the best set of starting skills, so they will likely become the most popular race.  Either way, racial skills are not *that* useful though, so don't be afraid to pick your race based on aesthetics.

Next, it's time to allocate your attribute points.  There are 6 primary attributes and 3 secondary.  Strength increases the damage and chance to hit most melee weapons (except dagger) do and increases the amount of burden you can carry.  Endurance determines how much health and stamina you have, as well as improving your base resistances and stat-recovery.  Coordination improves the chance-to-hit for all melee weapons and adds bonuses to damage for dagger and all missile weapons, as well as adding to your melee and missile defenses.  Coordination also improves many trade skills.  Quickness affects dagger's chance-to-hit, melee and missile defense, and increases your running (and to a lesser extent, attack) speed.  Focus is crucial to all magic and trade skills, magic defense, and also affects your ability to use magic items.  Self is equally important to magic and magic defens and affects your mana pool. 

You get 270 points to spend, which is enough to raise 3 of the six attributes from 10 to 100.  You really ought to spend 2/3 of your points improving your primary attack method's modifiers to 100 (or close to it), so if you are a mage, raise your focus and self, and if you are a sword-swinger, raise your strength and coordination.  The last 90 points are a bit trickier to allocate.  You really cannot get around without magic, so consider spending some on focus or self if you have not already.  If you are planning on having great melee defense, don't neglect your quickness.  You will be crippled by burden if you leave your strength at 10, so raise that too, if you can.  If you have to neglect one stat, I suggest endurance.  You will start with only 5 health, but that can be fixed quite easily and since no stats are affected by your endurance score, it has the least impact of the 6 attributes.

Your last important decision is choosing your specialized and trained skills.  Skills fall into one of 4 categories:  specialized, trained, untrained, and unusable.  Specialized skills receive a +10 bonus at creation and the percentage increase per point is smaller than a trained skill, but you have to spend extra training credits to specialize something.  Trained skills get a +5 bonus at creation and can be raised with experience, but not as quickly as specialized skills.  Untrained skills can be used, but you cannot improve them by spending experience.  Unusable skills cannot be used at all, unless they happen to be magic schools and you have a spell cast on yourself that improves that school's stats.

You get 50 training points to spend during creation and you can carry over any extras with you, if you can't buy all the skills you want immediately.  I strongly recommend specializing your primary attack and defense methods.  To a tank-style melee, that means melee weapon and melee defense, but to other classes, that could be a weapon (or war magic) and life magic.  Again, refer to the classes section for more information.  There are also many other skills you shouldn't neglect.  If you are a melee or archer, take healing!  Mana Conversion is essential for mages and very useful for pretty much everyone else.  Arcane Lore is a nice skill for the less magic-minded character and allows you to wear magical items.  There are plenty of skills and you won't be able to get them all during creation, but you will get a good number of skill points as you progress, so don't worry too much.

Below is a table containing all the skills, a brief description, the attribute bonus formula, and the costs to train and specialize, as well as the relative importance.  For weapon skills, I've graded the importance assuming you are using that form of attack.  Strength is S and Self is W (for willpower).

* - These skills are free to the appropriate race.