Compensating for skill and attribute penalites.

[phlinn]

This tip only really helps if you have a lot of tweak points, either from levelled items or from crafting. In either case, the trick is that stats and skill points from gear are applied after race and class penalties and bonuses are applied, and thus aren't subject to them. So don't bother putting regular skill points and stats into them unless there's some benefit you absolutely must have or if you really need a few extra points.

As an example, I'm playing a dwarven crafter/paladin/defender at the moment. It's early, but I tend to put my tweak points on gear into wisdom and agility. The mana penalty for gloves and heavy armor are more than I want to deal with (currently at 62% reduction for weight then halved again because i do in fact wear gloves of any sort), and are applied to all sources of mana, even the enchanter ability. Wisdom casting is clearly the way to go. I'm not going to go that high on wisdom to be honest, as I'm not casting focused, but it's still far better than the returns on raising int and allows me to heal myself without using an item slot for potions. One point of agility gives you the ability to jump, and I won't ever need the other abilities. I do not yet know if the speed increase and jump radius from agility are only gained by the base skill points, but I'm guessing they aren't, so i have no desire to raise my base agility higher and probably never will. I benefit from agility as I'm shooting for a high AC, but I think tweaking the skill up will be all i do in the long run.

Semi related note: The ac benefits from defense and agility are maximised when defense is 5 points greater than agility.

[sekira]

phlinn wrote:

Semi related note: The ac benefits from defense and agility are maximised when defense is 5 points greater than agility.

Actually, the ac is maximised when defense is 2 or 3 points higher than agility, but the difference is very little between getting the skills within 50% of each other and getting that maximum... More specifically, if you have a defense of 20 and an agility of 40, you will have 89% of the base AC multiplier (not counting the agility bonus to ac) of having 31 defense and 29 agility.

Because of the diminishing returns of getting defense up to that maximum, and because of agility's other aiblities (jumping radius, speed, +3 to AC bonus per skill) I try to keep my defense at about 50% of my agility skill, meaning, if I'm thinking of raising my skills to get more AC, I'll put 2/3 of those points into agility and 1/3 of those points into defense.

EDIT: my bad, the maximum is in fact when defense is 5 points higher, sorry phlinn. I'm still going with my method though ;D

[phlinn]

Heh... I should have been more clear and specified the multiplier, not benefit. The other benefits of agility could make up for it though although that starts depending on the AC of gear when factoring in agility. On my current dwarven crafter build, I'm only doing agility from gear, and defense from points. I thought about factoring in an attribute, and the constant bonus from agility, but assumed that it would be dwarfed by the multiplier for my heavy armor build.

I feel vaguely guilty that I didn't sit and work out the maximum multiplier via formula, I brute forced it in a spread sheet to see if there was a pattern. My math skills are deteriorating.

[Variaz]

Don't worry about maths, just play.

You'll be okay if Agility/Defense are about the same value. Just remember that you need both skills for optimal defense. You might want to focus a bit more on Agility if you want more speed or need better jumping though. I believe a ranged or mage could benefit more from Agility than Defense.