Advancement
From Haelrahv Wiki
(this is a modified and updated version of the in-game HELP ADVANCEMENT file)
(some information might be repeated in our New to Haelrahv article)
Contents |
The INFORMATION Display
This is one of the most important screens that you will become familiar with almost immediately. This display will give you the basic rundown of your character's stats and some other important information. Ignore the numbers and a few other things on this example as Counselors regularly change their stats and other things when they feel the need to.
Information for Demonic One Draxx Rodnujan, Level 7 Human Psionic Agility : 100 Age : 120 seasons Charisma : 100 Race : Human Coordination : 100 Gender : Male Intellect : 100 Height : 10'3" Mentality : 100 Weight : 672 lbs. Perception : 100 Strength : 100 Vitality : 100 Encumbrance: You are minimally encumbered. Asapi rank: Funky blister Statistic training points: 568 Skill training points: 132 Physical and Elemental Resistance: Blunt : 0% Cold : 0% Electrical: 0% Erosion : 0% Heat : 0% Piercing : 0% Poison : -14% Slashing : 0% Mental and Magic Resistance: Magic : 29 Mental : 46 For questing information, type QUESTS.
- The first line will tell you your character's name (in case you forgot) and title if you have one, as well as your level, race and profession.
- Below that is a listing of eight very important factors to living in Haelrahv: your character's stats. These are initially determined by your starting profession. Over time, however, you may increase their value with stat training points which are gained with experience and levels (more information on this later).
- Beside the stats are five pieces of general information on your character including age, race, gender, height, and weight.
- The Encumbrance line will tell you in one sentence about how burdened your character is by everything that they are currently carrying. This affects a number of things, the foremost being combat effectiveness.
- The asapi rank displays what the Almighty Asapi has dubbed you for your current level of achievement.
- Below the important information about your asapi rank is a listing of your current stat and skill training points. These are what you will spend to increase your stats and skills. More on this later.
- The second to last piece of information is your resistance to each of the 10 types of damage. Each of these will change depending on your race, profession, certain stats and skills (and in the case of poison resistance, how often you're poisoned). Your armor will add to this, but the addition will not be shown here, as armor covers specific parts of the body and these refer to the body as a whole.
- And finally, the bit telling you to check your Quests. Check your quests, guys and gals!
The Eight Statistics
Understanding what these do is probably just as important as understanding what skills you need and want to train. In fact, these determine how well you perform in your various skills when you put them to use! Please peruse our Statistics pages for specific information on each.
| Statistics Navigation | ||
|---|---|---|
| Agility • Charisma • Coordination • Intellect • Mentality • Perception • Strength • Vitality | ||
To train any of these eight stats, you must first have some statistic training points, which you receive by earning experience and levels. You will get one stat point for every 1000 experience points you earn. That is to say, actually putting them into your experience point total, rather than just getting experience points into your experience pool. You will also gain 30 stat points each time you level up.
You can spend these points at various training facilities around the world. How much you spend depends on your racial bonus/penalty and any trait or flaw you may have in the specific stat. There is also a cap on how high each stat can be trained. The default cap is 100 for each, which is further adjusted by your racial bonuses/penalties in the stat, +/- 10 for each bonus/penalty point for training the stat. Traits and flaws further modify the training cap. This cap is completely removed once the character reaches level 100.
Skills
Your skills determine how well your character performs in certain actions or situations. These can range from using a weapon, defending yourself, using spells, singing, etc. Here is an example of what you might see when you type SKILL or SKILL ALL in game. Again, ignore the numbers.
Skill sheet for Draxx Rodnujan: Acrobatics : 200 Parry : 200 Alchemy : 200 Persuasion : 200 Appraisal : 200 Poisons : 200 Archery : 200 Polearms And Spears : 200 Athletics : 200 Psionic Ability : 200 (250) Aviation : 200 Pulse Weapons : 200 Bladed Weapons : 200 Repair : 200 Blunt Weapons : 200 Research : 200 Climbing : 200 Rhythm Instruments : 200 Cooking : 200 Riding : 200 Craftsmanship : 200 Sculpting : 200 Dancing : 200 Security : 200 Drawing : 200 Shield Use : 200 Driving : 200 Singing : 200 Ecology : 200 Skinning : 200 Electronics : 200 Spell Casting : 200 Evasion : 200 Spell Research : 200 Exotic Weapons : 200 Stealing : 200 First Aid : 200 Stealth : 200 Fishing : 200 (207) Streetwise : 200 (207) Handle Animal : 200 Stringed Instruments : 200 Heavy Armor : 200 Surgery : 200 Intimidation : 200 Swimming : 200 Law : 200 Tactics : 200 Light Armor : 200 Tailoring : 200 Marksmanship : 200 Thrown Weapons : 200 Medicine : 200 Tracking : 200 Nautical : 200 (207) Unarmed Combat : 200 Occult Lore : 200 (240) Wind Instruments : 200 Painting : 200
General Stuff
- What you see here is a list of the 59 skills that you are able to train as you progress through life in Haelrahv. The number beside the colon lists the current rank of the skill according to how much you have trained it. You can only train a skill a maximum of two times each level, with the exception of certain skills that are related to your chosen profession, which can be trained three times each level. Let's call these triple-trainable skills your "focus skills" since it's easier to type than "triple-trainable skills".
- In the character manager, depending on which profession you chose, your final choice will be to choose which of the nine weapon skills you want to focus in (as in, add them to your "focus skills"). The only exceptions to this are the Guardians, who are only allowed to have Unarmed as their weapon focus, and the Mercenaries, who automatically gain all weapons as "focus skills".
- In addition to the "focus skills", four of these will be what are called "core skills", which are the skills deemed necessary for every person in a particular profession to utilize. Each time you level up, each of these four skills will automatically be raised by one point, which means that you do not need to spend a skill point to raise it. This auto-trained point does, however, count towards the three times you can train your focus skills, meaning that after leveling you can train the core skill two more times if you wish.
Training Caps
- As with training stats, so too is there a cap on how high each skill can be trained. First, there is the level cap which restricts the number of ranks a character can possess in any one skill by their current level. This is related to the number of times you can train a skill. For instance, a level 10 mage can have a maximum of 30 in Spell Casting and only 20 in Tactics. If that level 10 mage instead had 0 in Tactics, he can spend 20 skill points to get it to 20 if he so wishes.
- The second cap is the upper limit cap. No skill can be trained above 200. Like with the stat caps, this one is removed once a character reaches level 100, though there is still a cap similar to the level cap, which is based on your total experience since you cannot actually progress to a level beyond 100, but are still able to train skills and stats beyond that level. This really only applies to your focus skills, since the rest of them can never attain 200 ranks before reaching level 100. Yes, this does mean that you can max out your "focus skills" at level 67.
Skill Bonuses and Penalties
- Notice in the above example that there are numbers in parentheses beside another number without them. The numbers in parentheses is the current ability level that you are able to use for that skill, while the other one is the level that you have trained by spending skill points. This number in the parentheses shows the effect of any bonuses or penalties that you have on the particular skill due to your [[category:Professions|profession], spells, psionic abilities, spellsongs, alchemy potions, poisons, traits or flaws, or the death penalty (more on this later).
- In addition to these, the atmosphere of a certain room may aid in completing or hindering tasks, which may also raise or lower your current ability with the skill. Some rooms may have small bonuses to many skills due to people gathering there regularly and can be of assistance to you (for example, Cloud Court in Llanfair), while other areas may offer a larger, more specific bonus to only a few skills due to access to special equipment. Also, campfires will give a bonus your "focus skills".
Obtaining skill points
- You will earn skill points through gaining experience. For every 2000 experience points that go into your total from your pool, you will gain one skill point. In addition, you will get 15 skill points upon advancing to the next level. To use these, you need to locate a training facility for the skill you wish to raise and train there. For every rank you raise a skill you need to expend one skill point.
Experience
The word that exists in the forefront of every power gamer's mind: experience! Things in Haelrahv work a bit differently than in other games, so here is where you can get the low-down on how gaining this intangible, formless, gaming gold and ascend your way to near god-hood. First, an example of what you see when using the EXP command in-game. You will of course get your name, race, profession, and level again here. But you will also get some new pieces of information.
Experience information for Draxx Rodnujan (Level 7 Jaddan Psionic) Experience : 200870 Skill training points : 132 Next Level : 9130 Stat training points : 568 Experience Penalty: 5 You have not experienced anything useful recently. Perhaps you should do something to further your knowledge. Your last image was taken 2 minutes and 10 seconds ago. If you were to roll back to this image, you would lose 0 experience points and 0 levels.
Total Experience
- The first thing you should take note of are the two sets of numbers on the left. The top one will tell you the total number of experience points that your character has earned during his or her adventuring. This number will be steadily getting larger as you experience things in the game.
- Below that is the number that every power gamer is looking for: how many experience points you need until you can advance to the next level! This number will count down from 30,000 each level as you drain more learned experience from your experience pool and put it into your total. You must obtain 30,000 experience points to reach each level of advancement. Yes, to get from level 1 to level 2 you need 30,000 XP, and getting from level 99 to level 100 also requires 30,000 XP.
- There are ways to LOSE experience, but most of those can only be obtained by severely breaking policy. Such as AFK scripting for gain (for example, running a script to have your character forage over and over for experience while you are not paying attention to the game). This activity will not be tolerated, and repeated offenses (up to five) can and will result in your character being deleted.
- In contrast, AFK scripting for the sole purpose of staying connected (for example, running a script to send the EXP command to the game every few minutes) is perfectly fine.
Skill and Stat Points
- These have already been explained in this article, but your current accumulation of both of these points is displayed here (as well as in the INFO screen), as their totals are directly affected by the gains in your experience total.
Experience Penalty
- In an attempt to curb power leveling to some degree, a penalty system has been implemented. After so many hours of experience gain (that is to say, experience that has been drained from your pool and into your total experience), you will begin to drain experience at a lower rate.
- For more information on this, please see our Experience Pool article.
Experience Pool
- Below all of the numbers is a line that lets you know about your experience pool. More often than not, this will only tell you one of two things: if your pool is empty, or if there is currently experience in it. You put experience into your experience pool by doing certain activities. These activities range from hunting, alchemy, carving, etc. Over time, the experience in the pool will drain into your experience total, which is like allowing time for your mind to digest what it had just learned. The points will drain away from this pool in "pulses".
- When you "pulse", a few things happen: a certain amount of experience is put into your total, a certain amount of experience is lost ("waste"), and still more experience is put towards working off the death penalty (only if you are currently under one). Your intellect score directly effects the efficiency of your mind in processing what you have learned, and higher intellect scores will reduce the amount of XP that is lost as "waste".
- There is also a maximum amount of experience that can go into your current total experience during any given pulse, which is based on level. This effectively means that a character is unable to go into an area and kill things for hours on end and advance faster than everyone else. They can fill their pool up very quickly by doing this, but they must still wait for their pool to drain into their total regardless.
- For more information on experience draining rates, please see our Experience Pool article.
Imaging Information
- The final line tells you how long ago it was that you had a genetic image taken and what you would stand to lose if you died and was cloned right then. You should pay attention to this notice as it will likely save you quite a bit of heartache and frustration in the long run.
- In other words: image as often as possible!
Death
It can and will happen eventually, and it can set you back quite a bit, but there are things that can be done to protect the investment that you've put into advancing your character. You have two options when you die that will enable you to breathe and go on with your activities once more.
Medics
Medics are your friends! If you alienate them, woe be onto you! WOE! A medic will be able to repair the damage that some nasty critter, trap, or perhaps even another character has done to your body. In addition, they are the ONLY ones that can be trained how to use cardiostimulators, which is the sole method of reviving the dead. When sufficiently trained, a medic must first repair vital body parts (all parts but the limbs and eyes) and any bleeding wounds so that you will be able to breathe safely. Then, they can restart your heart by using those lovely cardiostimulators. This, along with a few other benefits, is a very good reason to make friends with a medic and bring them along on any excursions through hunting grounds you make.
- There are a few benefits to this method. First, you will not have to run back to retrieve your items, as you are simply being brought back to life. Second, medics are able to reduce the death penalty! The drawback? If you don't know any medics who can do this or one is not available, then you will need to wait around for one to come to you, and they will have to find you as well.
Cloning
If you hate Medics, they hate you, or you don't want to wait for one to show up, you have the option of abandoning your current body, and having a new one cloned for your spirit to inhabit again. Around the planet, there will be various locations for you to go to where you can pay to have "a genetic picture" taken of you. They will then store that information until the time is needed to create a new body for you to live once more. This is what we call imaging. This is not, of course, free. Each visit will require a fee if you are above level 3.
- Should you be foolish, and forget to do this often, there is a good chance that you can loose a great deal of the time that you have put into your character. Imagine being at level 25, getting killed, and then finding out that the last time you had a imaged was at level 8. That would be quite a set back. On top of this, you will need to go back to where you died to retrieve your items, as they are obviously not cloned as well, which could potentially have you running through a hunting area naked.
- To add insult to injury, if you had any cybernetic implants, you will lose them all. Part of the process of getting an implant involve removing the body part it replaces. You will be cloned as a complete person, and will therefore have to undergo the surgery to get it reinstalled again.
- Your items will be protected from the wandering hands of graverobbers. If you should by chance fail to retrieve your items after an hour has passed, they will be moved to the nearest pawnshop, where the owner (and only the owner) can purchase them back. Should they remain in the pawn shop for an extended period of time, they will be placed up for general sale to anyone.
The Death Penalty
Dying is not something that should be taken lightly. Dying causes great trauma to the body and the mind, and after you are able to walk and breathe again, you will find that you will not be operating at full strength.
After being revived (by either method), you will have a penalty applied to all of your skills AND stats. This penalty can vary in severity, but it will lower every single skill you have by some percentage. Newer characters may not even notice this, as their skills may be so low that little difference can be seen. More advanced characters, however, may find that they are suddenly quite a bit worse at just about everything.
- The only way to work this off is by using up experience points in your pool. Every pulse will expend some of the points in the pool towards working this off, and will slowly lower the penalty until it is gone. Should you die again while under the effects of a death penalty, an additional penalty will be added onto any that are currently in place.
- Remember, however, in Haelrahv it is easily possible to gain experience without taking part in dangerous activities. If you are affected by a severe death penalty, perhaps spending some time on a non-combatitive activity is just the thing for you.
