The Tavern

I am curious whether training 4-6 levels of a weapon before Lair and/or before finishing the starting book is ever a good idea for mage characters. If so, which sorts of weapons benefit the most from modest training? Light and fast, heavy and slow ones, inaccurate ones, or maybe it's only worth it with early above-average weapon finds like morningstar/scimitar/dire flail?

I don't train weapon if I haven't found a good weapon yet (electro, venom, draining, distortion) because the weapon will stay rather bad even with 6 levels and later probably I will need to train another weapon category instead.
Otherwise I train 4-6 levels before Lair indeed

Edit. Optimal behavior is to run fsim and see how much damage you deal at every weapon skill level. You will quickly see when it is a bad idea to train weapon and when not.

Must one kite in order for a venom weapon to be worth using? I've found them to be underwhelming, but also have not been anal to kite everything that gets a green droplet.

Venom is great before Lair, but you need to kite to take full advantage of that: kill dangerous speed 10 melee things (e.g. orc warrior, ogres) without risking to take damage but it's good also to other things like adders or killer bees because they have insane EV so it's hard to get multiple hits against them (so lower chance to trigger a elec hit) while having low HP and being very fast so venom will eat their health very quickly (plus pois-)

My rule of thumb of weapons for mage char until clearing lair\orc (the point I usually don't postpone training a weapon skill if I haven't yet found anything worthwhile):

* use a elec weapon. Failing that, a venom\draining weapon will be a good substitute. When available the quaterstaff of yulf is very good against most things (do a favor to yourself and don't zerk ogres).
* if the elec weapon is a whip\short sword I may train till 4ish skill to get it a 1.0 delay (swinging at 1.1 delay can be a deadly difference against things like orc mage)
* against some enemies I still prefer venom because it works better and it is safer - the aforementioned orc warriors, killers bees and anything against which is better to stack venom.

If you are an elemental mage, you could start training a few levels of staves; an elemental staff could later become your melee weapon, together with a good skill in evocations. If you can't find a quarterstaff early on, you can train maces/flails instead. But I never train any weapon before I have my early damage spells at 4# spellpower. Spells should always be your main weapon.

i would suggest just using 0-skill melee with a weapon that has a high enchantment and low delay, preferably elec brand. even an artefact dagger with good enchant is fine for cleaning up very weak enemies - venom is especially good early on.

How come nobody ever asks "When is a good time to put a few points into conjurations for my MiFi?"

Hilarious!

The answer is "MiFi never run out of weapon swings" but the basic premise is still there. Don't train weapon skills if magic is your main kill-dudes, until you are kill-duding with impunity. You should probably worry about your direct defensive skills first, too.

Another possible explanation is that it is quite easy to get decent melee damage even with low Str (quickblade of electro or even plain whip of draining/venom) and melee damage almost does not care about your body armour or shield, yet training Conjurations does exactly nothing when you have single digit Int and wear plate armour with shield.

MiFi players ask question "when is it good time to train ranged or evocations" and I rarely see these questions for mages.

Because training magic doesn't lower the damage you deal with weapons, but training armor makes it very difficult to cast spells.

Good points, VAF. Tasonir, to be fair you can do melee without wearing heavy armour. OgFi for example, or KoAs if you wanna remain stealthy..

Also, training armor doesn't make it very difficult to cast spells. It either has no effect or actually makes it easier.

Lol, i read past it and assumed he meant using heavy armour. Didnt even notice that..