Is it possible to learn all skills in Glitch?

Question

Is it possible to learn all skills in Glitch? I haven't seen anything definitive either way, but it looks like you can.

Answer

Yes, it is currently possible to learn every skill available, and many people have. The only disadvantage to learning more skills is that there is a compounding 3% time penalty for every skill you learn above a certain limit. The limit is determined by your current level of the Better Learning Skill.

The effect of this is that learning many 'fast' skills will make the longer skills later in the tree far more difficult to learn. The current maximum penalty is over 4x the base learning time, so for skills that take days or weeks, this can be significant.

Thus, learning some skills you aren't interested now might penalize you in the future, should there be a long learning time skill that is introduced into the game later down the line. The game developers have said that they have many skills planned for release in the near future.

One of these skills is thought to be Unlearning, which will allow you to 'forget' skills that you don't have any interest in retaining. It would take a fraction of the time it takes to learn a skill in order to Unlearn it. The descriptions of the Unlearning skills are already programmed into the game, although the skills are not active and cannot currently be learned.

The Skillifier is a tool I developed to track skill times and help you prioritize, if learning time is an interest/concern:

http://agent86.nfshost.com/glitch/

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Does the mage armour skill effect work with magic robes?

Question

Mage armour - "Protection spells (like Stoneflsh) are twice as strong if not wearing armour

Does this count if I wear magic robes, or do I have to be completely naked?

Answer

Armor in this game means anything with an armor rating.

Robes, even enchanted, don't have an armor value, so should be fair game.

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How do I use the Wood Elf's 'Command Animal' effectively?

Question

I have chosen to be a Wood Elf and was looking forward to the command animal skill they have. However I fail to see how it is a valuable asset as all it does is create a static, uncontrollable meat shield.

Is there something I am missing?

What is a good situation to be using this skill in?

Answer

In general, all of the short-duration, uncontrollable summons/commands are incredibly useful precisely because they are on-demand meat shields: having the enemy attack something else while you finish them off is pretty useful, particularly if you and your followers aren't cutting it. Strength in numbers and all that.

But Command Animal is particularly effective for two reasons:

• It affects nearly every animal in the game, and boy there are a lot of animals. You'll be hard pressed not to find a place outdoors where you can't use it.

• When fighting a group of animals, it takes one of them out of the picture in addition to helping you attack the rest. So if it's 3 vs. 1 against you, commanding an animal makes it a fair fight.

• It's a decent substitute for the Animal Allegiance shout, so if you were planning on using it, it frees up your shout slot for something else.

Playing around with summons might not be your play-style: even conjuration isn't for everyone. But if you're looking for a way to manipulate fights to your advantage instead of sneaking around or straight up attacking, Command Animal is a great racial ability.

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What does Bureaucratic Arts II do?

Question

The description is:

With the second level of Bureaucratic Arts, the ability to wrangle permits from the Bureaucrats becomes yours.

What does this actually mean?

Answer

Bureaucratic Arts II allows the player to obtain more types of permits from the Bureaucrats in Bureaucratic Halls. As of now, the only item this enables you to obtain is the General Building Permit, which is consumed in certain phases of Street Projects. However, because the game has just started, Street Projects are running under a simplified regime that does not yet require complex items such as Building Permits. tl;dr: This skill is currently useless.

It is hinted that in the future more types permits will be added. For example, in the forum post introducing Party Packs, the developers hinted that Parties will in the future require Party Permits which presumably will require BA II to obtain. There also exists the unimplemented skill Bureaucratic Arts III, which hints that the developers may expand the skill tree in this direction in the future.

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I am playing with a necromancer in Diablo 2. What is the recommended skill points distribution for hell difficulty?

Question

I'm playing with a necromancer (84 exp) in hell difficulty with the following skills:

• skeleton mastery: 20 (for revived monsters stats)
• corpse explosion: 15 (for quick cleaning of small monsters pack)
• bone spear: 20 (main attack)
• bone spirit: 20 (for bosses)
• 1 skill point for the rest, coupled with a +6 all skills from various items

Somehow, I get the impression that even moderate level monsters are not killed fast enough, even when using lower resist or decrepify (the latter has the nice effect of slowing down enemies and is the most used spell).

I didn't found any updated guide for hell difficulty (for patch 1.12 or later), is there a better combination of skills/spells?

Answer

I've referred to this for my source on necromancer skills: http://classic.battle.net/diablo2exp/skills/necromancer-curses.shtml

Lower Resist decreases an enemies elemental resistances and Decrepify decreases their physical resistance. Unfortunately, bone spells do magic damage, so I don't think either curse improves your bone spell damage (as Grace Note pointed out). They are only useful for your minions; Lower Resist helps your skeletal mages and Decrepify helps your skeletons. Also, if you are using Revive then those minions will do more damage when you use those curses (most monsters don't do magic damage).

Unless you totally focus on them and skills that synergize (see my sidenote), Bone Spear and Bone Spirit are ineffective because they do not scale up in Hell difficulty. However, Bone Prison and Bone Wall do. Also curses and revives scale up because they are based on the strength of monsters in Hell.

For a summoner, playing heavily to revive is a good plan. Look at some revive necromancer guides, this being a short example: http://diablo.incgamers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=707530. I recommend maxing Revive and Iron Golem, so that you have plenty of summons to work with and a golem for killing monsters to get that first revive. I also think you're better off replacing Bone Spear with Bone Prison and Iron Maiden. Then you can lock monsters in with your minions and have them damaged by both their own attacks and your minions, while boosting with other curses you have. Iron Maiden has the nice property that an increase in skill level increases the damage taken, not the spell radius like many other curses. Bone Spirit is appropriate to some extent for helping your Iron Golem take down monsters, but certainly not worth focus.

Sidenote: To get an idea of how much damage a pure bone necromancer does, I'm in Hell difficulty with my necromancer right now using an all bone build, around level 76, roughly these skills (I can update values tonight when I check):

• Teeth: 10 (about +6 with items)
• Bone Spear: 20
• Bone Spirit: 20 (about +4 with items)
• Bone Wall: 10
• Bone Prison: 20
• Some other misc. skills

And I only do over 3000 damage per spirit. That's very little in Hell difficulty.

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Is Detect Kuji Shrines actually useful?

Question

I have been playing Mini Ninjas, and acquired the "Detect Kuji Shrine" spell. I tried to use it, but found that the little fireflies/yellow flying sparkly things that it creates move too quickly to really follow, and often it is easier to find the hidden shrines by just looking for the regular fireflies that indicate hidden surprises/secrets.

Am I just using the spell incorrectly? Or will it show me things that the fireflies don't?

Answer

Keep in mind that it has been a while since I last played Mini Ninjas. It is useful to the extent that you can use it point you in the right direction. All the spell does is point you to the fire flies. Most you should run across yourself, but a few are out of the way. As for expending ki, there are plenty of powerups even on hard difficulty. The spell should only lead you to Kuji Shrines, so it won't show you anything new.

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Skill cap for Borderlands

Question

I bought the GOTY edition of Borderlands I am a bit confused. I could figure out, that with the included DLC the level cap is now at 69. But what is the skill cap?

I have this little tool: http://www.borderlandsthegame.com/skilltree/roland/

It shows me 57 skill points which let me thought, that this tool is not for the latest DLC but for the one where the level cap was 61.

Could someone clear the information for me? I like to know how many skill points I can use.

Thanks!

Answer

There are a total of 105 talents to skill up in. You start gaining skill points at level 5.

From the Borderlands wiki:

If the player uses an unmodded character and does not have any DLC, the player will have accumulated 54 skill points by the time they reach the maximum level of 58. However, with the addition of the Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot, The Secret Armory of General Knoxx DLC, and Claptrap's New Robot Revolution, it is now possible to attain a maximum of 69 skill points (2 extra from The Underdome, another 2 from Claptrap's Revolution, and 11 extra from The Secret Armory).

If you use an editor to change your character, you can actually add 105 skill points and fill up the entire tree.

So to answer your question(s?), 105 is the maximum required to fill up all the trees and 69 skill points is the maximum you can attain from the GOTY edition.

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Good starting skills for Dungeons of Dredmor

Question

What is a good set of skills for a newer player in Dungeons of Dredmor?

Answer

The "easier" skills are those that are least situational, those that are constantly useful and don't require leveling up a lot before becoming so.

My "easiest" builds so far have been very combat-centric selections, and will normally consist of (in no particular order):

• Swords, Axes or Maces. I personally favour Swords, but Maces have a very useful knock-back bonus at level 2. Overall they all have pretty much the same effects at each level.

• Artful Dodger or Master of Arms depending on if you intend to go with roguish dodging or heavy armour - either can work, but be wary that high armour absorption won't help against elemental attacks later on, but a high block score (which you get from armour and shields) can.
  Artful Dodger also provides the very handy Knightly Leap skill that lets you perform short-range teleportation, so if in doubt pick that and concentrate on your dodge skill.

• Burglary, because infinite lock picks are a must, and the easier avoidance of traps is handy.
  The invisibility trick at level 3 is also really helpful if you get in trouble.

• Berserker Rage provides randomish buffs than appear when you fight to make you stronger for a short period of time (and can stack for some really hefty bonuses).

• Assassination provides more randomish bonuses in combat, these do a little bit extra damage, but most usefully either put enemies to sleep or stun them.

• Smithing; there's nothing quite like having really good equipment from an early stage.
  This skill does require leveling up to be really useful, but is seriously worth the effort.

• Fungal Arts will provide a near-infinite stream of buffs and heals from mushrooms, but does require a lot of micro-management (so can be a little dull, to be honest).
  This is really strong if you keep generating mushrooms, which you can do at level 1 so the skill can be ignored when leveling up, allowing you to concentrate on your combat skills.

If you don't fancy the effort of Fungal Arts, swap it out for Perception. It's another passive skill (or less to think about), which lets you see further and adds bonuses to your Dodge and Enemy Dodge Reduction scores so helps in combat.

You could also consider Viking Wizardry if you don't want to consider your mana wasted, the level 1 buff spell is very useful in combat at the start of the game, but the skill tree does become less useful as you level up and get better equipment so it might be something you want to neglect.

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Is there a way of speeding up skill learning in Eve Online?

Question

Learning skills - especially to high levels - can take weeks. Is there any way to decrease the amount of time needed to learn a skill?

Don't get me wrong - I think this real-time aspect of the game is great. But it's not entirely unreasonable that some action or item or whatever might improve my learning abilities. A skill-learning skill perhaps ;-)

Answer

Skill training time in EVE Online is dependent on your characters attributes. Every skill is dependent on one primary and one secondary attribute which determine the speed at which the skill is trained. The primary attribute has the biggest influence, the secondary attribute a minor influence and all other no influence.

Update: Learning skills are being discontinued. All text in italics will be obsolete...

The learning skills each increase one attribute by 1 point per level. There are basic and advanced learning skills for a maximum possible increase of 10 points. There is also a generic learning skill that will further improve all attributes by (i think) 1% per level.

There are also some implants that increase your attributes. The benefit is that it doesn't take any time to increase your stats but in return they cost more and are lost if you get podded. A good strategy is to plug in what you find and save for a +3 or +4 set depending on what you can afford to loose and the likelihood of loosing it.

To best plan the schedule of your learning skills you should install EVEMon. There you can plan what skills you want to train over the next months. The program can then optimize the schedule and calculate what you should remap your attributes to in order to minimize training time.

Finally the most time efficient approach is to first train up all learning skills to about +9 (basic level 5 + adv. level 4). The downside of that approach is that this takes a lot of time and your character will stagnate in terms of proficiency during that time. Most people will therefore recommend that you mix learning skills with practical skills to prevent you from getting bored.

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