Shattered Kingdoms

Art, again, is pretty useless for a priest. CON is slightly more useful, but generally speaking, a priest in PVP situations will not be in the front row. I'd max Wis, Int, Mana and then consider where you want to take your priest to decide what to do with them then.

I maintain that CHA would be a complete waste of a stat train. Leveling early for a priest is simple, if you get decent IC advice about where to go. However, if you find yourself wanting to go into a cloth religion, I suggest sticking it out for a few levels, because the lack of armor will effect your training a bit. Take advantage of being able to wear light armor while uninvested and just grind them out with weapons before you switch to spell spamming in your cloth digs.

As a priest, I wouldn't train CHA unless you plan on joining a tribunal, or if you feel you reeallly need the bonus leveling (I would advise just spending the extra hours leveling and ending up with a properly built character).

Art does have some uses for a priest. Certain religious spells are aggressive and can be saved against. Staves and scrolls can be used to great effect in pvp as well, and having a few points of art helps a lot in that regard. Also, it seems that the dispel effect from holy word is stronger from someone who has trained art.

I think deep-elves make the strongest priests because the 25 int is insane. If you want to go grey aura and don't want to be a gnome or halfling, then half-elf or human is probably the way to go. I would advise against the dwarf priest combo.

For a non-tribunal priest, I would max intelligence, wisdom, constitution, mana. I would train 3 art. I would make sure to mod dexterity up to maximum.

Art is useless. A person can be snagged with charm person just as easily with or without art.

Religious spells can be saved against, but harm cannot. The dispel of holy word seems to be even more effective than the dispel of dispel magic, though I've never taken the time to test it, it just appears that holy word dispels things far more frequently than the dispel magic spell.

Furthermore, if someone is going to bother building up saves, then they're going to have enough to make your character's art trains worthless. The only way you're going to land a spell on them is that rare occasion when their saves fail. If they're not going to bother with saves then they're going to be nailed with your spell anyway.

You'd be much better off investing those points in art in something useful, like hp or mana trains. Personally I'd suggest mana trains though, since that gives a bigger mana pool and better mana regen, and if you're in the front taking hits with your priest then you're doing something wrong, and should be getting out of the way. Not to mention that hp trains on a priest isn't going to make a difference anyway due to the low volume of hp trains priests receive.

Have you tested this?


Lots of armor starts out with a bit of willpower or fortitude. Even someone who does not take any time to enchant their suit could easily have 15 of each, especially if they bother to grab jewelry with 3-4 enchants. So there are people with slightly enchanted suits, meaning that having a bit of art would be useful.

Yeah, baldric, it was called pre-art sorcerers.

To be honest, Ardith's logic is very sound, and I don't know why anyone would try to disagree with him here.


Unless art has some kind of really well-hidden exponential growth in trains, it makes no sense to spend any of your 25 points on something the average enchanter can spend 40 points counteracting and still have all their trains elsewhere. Hardcore enchanters easily have over 100 points to work with, to put it in perspective for you. Art is so poorly documented that the only thing which might make it a good sell -- player experiences -- seem only to be united in one thing: maximizing art trains is a poor investment. High art characters might rely on +attribute items, as well, meaning that they've shot themselves in the foot twice: the items they need to enchant (+stat) are harder to enchant and find.

All in all art trains are not worth the price of your next best alternative.


If it makes me any more of an authority on this, my first priest had max art trains and I regret it more than any one night stand I ever involved her in.

Lest we lose our newbie, it's worth pointing out that SK's mechanics are closed-source and not really available to us. As players, we honestly have no clue what training a stat even really does. What you read here are mostly suppositions and conclusions from players supported by volumes of personal experience and once-leaked game mechanics.

In some games, if you're stupid for doing or not doing something, that means the thing is not balanced. In SK, this is not so. SK isn't perl, in other words. There is not more than one right way to build the kind of character you want to play. Keep that in mind, be judicious, and don't be afraid to both ask for advice and evidence to back it up.

Blasphemy! Building a dwarf priest is a great way to get into taciturn dwarf roleplay - you'll be so frustrated by not being able to concentrate on your prayers that the grumpiness will just flow naturally.

Haha man, I remember Krager having his panties in a knot all the time.

Krager was awesome!

Jhorleb, you're the authority on priests. Where do you stand on art trains?

p.s. You get more than 25 stat trains, grep.