Sar wrote:There's one obvious strategic error in your skill training (apart from the most obvious one, that is training so many skills at once), and that error is training so many magic schools together. Ice! Earth! Air! Fire! Summonings! Hexes! Charms! ...what?
Well, I didn't overdo Spellcasting.
Also, you were casting Airstrike... I might be wrong, but in my experience it's not a very good combat spell damage-wise. Sure it has smite-targeting, but that is also almost never relevant.
As Hurkyl noted, it is most useful against flying creatures, and in situations where something is blocking a direct line of sight spell, there really is no other choice. But Hurkyl was also right that the hippogriff should have been the last item of my focus, just then.
Out of your combat spells I like Stone Arrow, Ice Beasts and maybe LRD. Generally, you should pick some elemental school and ignore spells outside of it. Earth would be a decent choice - sure Freezing Cloud is great, but it does the same thing LRD does (AoE damage), and you already have Stone Arrow and Earth skill, so why not just stick with LRD and wait for Sif to give you Iron Shot and, later, Shatter?
As far as I understood it, LRD requires stone or that something be made of stone, or a material that can shatter, whereas FC requires nothing of the sort. LRD works once, and that's it, whereas FC cloud always works and stays working until it fizzles. Freezing cloud is the cat's meow, but so is LRD against certain enemies, as fire is against others. Charms and hexes are necessary if I don't want to rely on potions and wands. He had Iron Shot already, but couldn't use it reliably and with too much hunger cost, even with that training, so that was forgotten to make room for others, just waiting in the wings for even more training.
I really don't think a lack of spell power is what is killing my characters, but it could be, I suppose. I just hate to specialize in one or two elements and be completely impotent against those immune to what I have focused on training. Look at Freezing Cloud's fail/hunger even with the 12.6 - 7.7 - 6.6 skill levels for the schools. I would have kept pumping them until it was zero hunger. I can't have an always starving caster.
I'll think about eliminating some elemental training. I already omit poison and necromancy, not to mention armor, fighting and weapons training, and now stealth also has been nixed. Spellcasting and conjurations aren't supposed to be too high, I'm told, so, really, what am I supposed to do with all the experience? Put it into one element until it's 27? Again, I changed the way I train, and thought I was doing "better," but clearly not. You're always focused on my skill training, so maybe a more complete map would help, level by level, school by school, through, say, XL16.
Thanks again for the postmortem.
Saturday, 5th July 2014, 00:22 
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