New player guide
Oh my Gods! Numbers and mechanics and everything else! What does it MEAN?! What am I doing?! Well, slow down there. Let's start with your concept and character first. Read a bit about the race lore, and what class appeals to you, pick those out and your storytelling background. I can get your numbers going, but the real draw of the game is the story!
All done? Good.
Now let's go over some basics. Go to https://unwrittenlegends.net/classic/sitemap.html and look up your class, and make a quick list of what your Very Good/Good skills.
Defensive Stats
Endurance!
It's your health. It's important, early on. If you're new, max it out! It also scales % with your conditioning skill as you level. It doesn't really matter what role you take.
Reflexes and/or Strength
There's certain attacks that can only be dodged or blocked by a shield (bolts, etc). Shields are bolstered primarily by strength, and reflexes secondary. Evasion and dodging scale only off reflexes. Your class will generally determine which one you're doing (you don't want to use shields with very poor scaling, for example).
Shields > Parrying > Dodging, due to item bonuses; but you can't (generally) parry bolts of the magic or archery variety. Your mileage might vary depending on role. You'll generally want to focus on whatever is the highest skill. Reasoning, Will, Wisdom The highest of these three increases Gnosis, the skill used to resist magical attacks. The bonus these stats provide is flat, not percentile, like endurance does to conditioning. You'll make a decision on this later;for now, just keep those details in mind.
Primary stats Go back to your class on the previous website, and pick out your spells or abilities, and find out what stats are mentioned for your class. If there aren't any, and you're using a weapon-based class, that comes down to power, hybrid, and precision weapons. When the secondary stats are labeled, they generally give a less powerful bonus. Power: Strength or average of strength and dexterity if your strength is low. Hybrid: Highest physical stat of reflexes, dexterity, strength, then secondary highest physical stat, or average of the other two if too low. Precision: Dexterity or average of reflexes and dexterity if your dexterity is low. Casting: Intelligence (or, average of two highest mental stats if intelligence is low) Arcane: Reasoning Vedic: Will Astral: Wisdom
Certain spells or abilities may also specify they use a specific stat - this is ontop of the details listed above. This is why I suggested taking a moment to think about which stat to pick for Gnosis; which stats you take will vary depending on what your abilities your class has on display. Will has the highest defensive bonus of all the mental stats, so if you don't care about casting spells, default to that.
So what does this mean? Always max endurance, then strength if shields are good+, otherwise reflexes, and making sure will is reasonably high for gnosis if you don't use spells.
Generally, my rule of thumb is to focus on one 'aspect'. Do you want to cast spells? Do you want to run around smacking things with weapons? Do you want a rapier, or a bow? There's no such thing as 'wasted' stats. Even low tetriary stats provide bonuses, and it opens up the flexibility you want*.
So, pick out the most important stats and then fill in everything else with whatever feels good. Mind you, if you have Very Bad melee or Cannot Use Kinesis spells, you might want to avoid strength on the former and intelligence/reasoning on the latter.
- bards, spiritual clerics, arcanist mechanist, and religious wilders are the best at combining bolt magic with melee attacks due to VG (very good) kinesis and the kinetic weapon tag that allows them to add their kinesis to their N (normal) melee skill. Empaths can also fill that role due to relying on Shields (which uses strength) and having G (good) kinesis.
What to innate? Conditioning, Shields or Evasion and Dodging, Gnosis. The skills relevant to your specific build (whether that be sorcery, kinesis, unarmed combat, melee weapons, parry, etc) Then whatever crafting or game-interactive skills you want based on what fits the theme of your character*
- Generally, don't innate armor. There's also staffs that use Gnosis to parry with and not Parry, though they're explicitly terrible offensive weapons.
Settings Type 'settings'. Most of them are self-explanatory. Turn use components on if you're an illusionist (this will let you use your focus gem), and set training to whatever skill you think is important that you're having trouble raising (it will train it while you are logged off).