YASQ (Yet another silly question)

[Garacaius]

So i've noticed when i'm playing caster classes armour seems to completely decimate my casting chance, I understand that Sif Muna can negate miscasts at high enough piety, but what skills reduce the penalty to allow me to wear some decent armour?
I always feel very stretched out in skill allocation when I play a mage, as Bilbo Baggins says "sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread", Maybe i'm just playing them wrong though lol.

[crate]

With basically anything heavier than swampDA/ring mail, you should raise str for casting success (it helps more than int) in very nearly all realistic scenarios that don't involve Chei. (Int is a flat success boost, str gives diminishing returns, but the returns on int are so bad that str is still better. Int is helpful for spell power, though.)

Armour skill helps also but the returns on xp investment are not great.

Generally you just get more spell skills for casting spells in heavy armour.

[mopl]

crate told you all what you needed to know about heavy armour and spell success.

Just note that wearing heavy armour isn't mandatory... It's totally possible to win the game with a robe, and some of them are really good for casters (Archimagi, resistance).

[mechanicalmaniac]

I think it's possible to get help from Ash if you curse all your gear. I know there's a category on his ^ page that talks about being "bound in armor and magic."

[Sprucery]

Ash will boost your skills, yes.

[mechanicalmaniac]

I always knew that, but I could never figure out how to get the relevant skill boosts to activate. A post of Mogri's over at Talking Time has cleared me up on this.

[damiac]

An important thing to keep in mind is that while the armor penalty decreases your success chance with spells, it does not decrease your spellpower. So once you have enough skill to cast a spell at a good success % in heavy armor, it's just as good as if you were wearing something lighter.

[Garacaius]

An important thing to keep in mind is that while the armor penalty decreases your success chance with spells, it does not decrease your spellpower. So once you have enough skill to cast a spell at a good success % in heavy armor, it's just as good as if you were wearing something lighter.

Skill in spell casting?

[tasonir]

damiac means enough skill at casting the spell, not the skill "Spellcasting". Armor only makes it harder to cast a spell successfully - if you do succeed, you get all of the power of the spell. So you can "overtrain" magic slightly to cast in heavy armor, and you get the benefit of having stronger spells that you would probably have wanted in robes as well. So you eventually get to the same place, the downside is you can't safely cast the spell as early on when it would first be available to someone in robes.

Simple guideline: The best way to raise your skill "in casting a spell" is to train the magic school(s) for that spell. Secondary ways to raise it is with higher int or spellcasting. Alternatives exist like wizardry equipment to bypass some of the skill requirement.

The more schools of magic a spell has, the more exp it takes to raise those, so spellcasting becomes comparatively better. This rarely matters but if you were casting freezing cloud, spellcasting isn't terrible to raise (it's 1/4 as effective as a school, but since there's 3 schools to train, it's 3/4 as effect as training each equally). This part can usually be ignored so I stuck it in its own paragraph.

[cloud4ge]

When I play a DE caster, I usually raise my str to 9 with my early stat allocations. Someone told me to do this when I first started playing, and I've seen other people doing it as well, so I just do it as a rule of thumb assuming it helped with wearing armour and encumbrance (which apparently doesn't exist anymore). I've been wearing leather armours and ring mails without much problem.

Does anyone else roll like this?

[KoboldLord]

When I play a DE caster, I usually raise my str to 9 with my early stat allocations. Someone told me to do this when I first started playing, and I've seen other people doing it as well, so I just do it as a rule of thumb assuming it helped with wearing armour and encumbrance (which apparently doesn't exist anymore). I've been wearing leather armours and ring mails without much problem.

Does anyone else roll like this?

I think that's old data. In the olden days, you had to worry about stat death if something drained your strength, and additionally carrying capacity was a constant nuisance that necessitated a bunch of boring busywork. Stat drain is now a correctable debuff rather than instant death, and carrying capacity is no longer a thing at all. A typical DE conjurations build can happily trundle along with 4 strength and not care.

The only time you'd want to raise strength to 9 or more on a pure conjurations build would be if you wanted to upgrade to a mid-weight armor. Robes and regular leather are plenty good enough to win the game with, though, and I certainly wouldn't bother preparing for swamp or pearl dragon armour before I actually have access to a set. Why not just wait and see if you get an artefact with a superfluous strength bonus, and not have to spend those stat bonuses on strength at all? Also, why not spend the relatively less valuable late-game stat bonuses getting your late-game armor set up rather than the early-game bonuses before you actually have that armor and when every stat point is precious?

[Siegurt]

The only time I vary from that rule is if I find a nice ego ring or scale mail very early (This most recent DEVM game I played I got a +4 ring mail of poison resistance on d:2, that's enough of a bump pre-lair over +0 leather or robes that it was worth dropping a couple extra points into str rather than int or dex, but only because I had the armour in hand, plus VM end up having to fight all undead and demons with weapons and armour unless they stumble across a second early game offensive spellcasting list, so it's good to have more defense)