The Tavern

This is a very basic question, but I'll go ahead and ask:
Does practicing a skill that you are training make you better at it? i.e. if I am training throwing, is it useful to me to throw rocks at a slow-moving worm?

In general: no, it absolutely does not matter how you kill the monster. In auto mode it is a little blurred tough.

If you press "m", then a skill menu comes up, and you can set which skills you want to train, and whether to use auto or manual skill training.

If you only enable one skill, than that skill will receive all XP, and it does not matter what you do to earn the XP. You can kill the worm with spells and train only throwing for example.
In manual mode it never matters what you do to earn the XP. All XP is divided roughly equally (with focused skills getting double weight) between the enabled skills.
In auto mode if you enable more than one skill, then if you throw a lot you will improve throwing more (provided that throwing is actually enabled). While this is the default if you start the game, it is suboptimal, and I never use this mode, so I cannot tell you exactly how the auto mode decides to divide the XP between the skills. If you want to train throwing, then instead of throwing rocks at worms I suggest to switch off all other skills, and use your optimal killing method.

sanka wrote:In general: no, it absolutely does not matter how you kill the monster. In auto mode it is a little blurred tough.

If you press "m", then a skill menu comes up, and you can set which skills you want to train, and whether to use auto or manual skill training.

If you only enable one skill, than that skill will receive all XP, and it does not matter what you do to earn the XP. You can kill the worm with spells and train only throwing for example.
In manual mode it never matters what you do to earn the XP. All XP is divided roughly equally (with focused skills getting double weight) between the enabled skills.
In auto mode if you enable more than one skill, then if you throw a lot you will improve throwing more (provided that throwing is actually enabled). While this is the default if you start the game, it is suboptimal, and I never use this mode, so I cannot tell you exactly how the auto mode decides to divide the XP between the skills. If you want to train throwing, then instead of throwing rocks at worms I suggest to switch off all other skills, and use your optimal killing method.

To get into slightly more detail:
In manual mode, XP is divided equally between all enabled skills (with a double share for "focused" skills)
In Auto mode, the percentages are divided between all enabled skills, with percentages set by how much you use skills (to some arbitrary value of 'use' it's hard to compare how often you use "fighting" vs "throwing" vs "dodging", as they aren't 1:1 things) (again "focusing" gives a skill a larger share, although in auto mode, focusing doesn't straight up double the XP given, it makes sure you have some decent percentage of XP devoted toward the skill)

In short, auto mode is really only useful if you don't know what skills are important, or what they do, or what you are actually using, and want the game to 'do it's best to guess' which isn't (despite rumor to the contrary) absolutely awful.

It's actually reasonably serviceable as long as you plan on continuing to get better at whatever you're good at now, which is decent enough as long as you aren't trying to do anything weird or complicated, or if you want to strongly diversify. However wanting to diversify or get better at something you're bad at now, are slightly more advanced topics, and if you're to the point where you can (and want to) do those things effectively, you're probably far enough along your learning curve that learning how to train skills manually is a good step to take.

If you're just starting out, using auto mode and ignoring the skills screen while you figure out how (and what) to fight, move and run away, what controls do what etc. works well enough (tactics are more important than optimal skilling, so it isn't an unreasonable thing to learn later)

If you want to train throwing, and are using auto mode, throwing more will give it a larger percentage of your XP, however that's a silly way to do it, if you are actually at the point where you want to consciously decide to train something different, using manual mode and just selecting what you want to train is definitely the way to go.

One case in which manual is important is with Invocations. In my experience, auto doesn't give them enough XP.

Which is one of the reasons why Trog is good for new players, it doesn't use invo, so you don't even need to switch it on.

Siegurt wrote:In short, auto mode is really only useful if you don't know what skills are important, or what they do, or what you are actually using

I find it hard to say anything to that. A very likely scenario.

Siegurt wrote:If you're just starting out, using auto mode and ignoring the skills screen while you figure out how (and what) to fight, move and run away, what controls do what etc. works well enough (tactics are more important than optimal skilling, so it isn't an unreasonable thing to learn later)

The only problem with that is this: to learn good tactics takes months, maybe years... while learning reasonable skilling takes like 15 minutes.

It is also reasonable to go out barefoot in winter rather than to learn how to tie shoelaces. You'll learn that later, maybe next winter.

Magipi wrote:
Siegurt wrote:In short, auto mode is really only useful if you don't know what skills are important, or what they do, or what you are actually using

I find it hard to say anything to that. A very likely scenario.

Siegurt wrote:If you're just starting out, using auto mode and ignoring the skills screen while you figure out how (and what) to fight, move and run away, what controls do what etc. works well enough (tactics are more important than optimal skilling, so it isn't an unreasonable thing to learn later)

The only problem with that is this: to learn good tactics takes months, maybe years... while learning reasonable skilling takes like 15 minutes.

It is also reasonable to go out barefoot in winter rather than to learn how to tie shoelaces. You'll learn that later, maybe next winter.

I didn't mean learning "good tactics" I mean "learning tactics at all" as in, being able to physically press the right buttons to make your character do what you mean for it to do. Borrowing your metaphor I meant "you should probably learn how to walk before you learn how to tie shoelaces"

Also there's a lot of subtleties to what skills are best to train when, while you can show someone the basics in less than 15 minutes (to the extent that they'll probably do "well enough" with manual skill training), however, you can't really give them the complete experience of what is best to do when without a lot more gameplay examples.

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