Shattered Kingdoms

25 + leftovers from creation, yeah.
plus mentor stuff i guess

I ask why people bother arguing with me at all. I am clearly always right.

Hey hey let me say first, welcome to SK.

I've played more than my fair share of priests with both max ART trains and no art trains. My suggestion for you would be to decide before you use all of your stat points what you're going to do. Are you going to remain neutral so that you can get to know the game without worrying about being PK'd all the time? Are you going to devote a lot of time to enchanting for other people and yourself? What religion are you going to do? What does the religion spell for your religion give you in terms of bonuses?

All of these things you need to decide before you create your character. Also, under no circumnstance listen to Kin when he suggests training CHA. Even if you were going to join a tribunal there are so many +greater CHA mods out there that are easy to enchant it's pretty much a pointless stat to max if you're willing to spend the extra grind time to get a properly built character.

My last priest I built like this and was extremely successful -

Max WIS/INT/MANA, -5 from racial max CON, 6 art for use with scrolls/staves and what not, and 13 CHA. I had no trouble GMing in under a week without much help at all.

Priests are in fact one of my favorite classes to play, second only to warlocks. There is so much utility to the class and everyone wants to be your friend. It's definitely something I would suggest playing as a new player.

Olrin was one of the original dwarven priests that I recall (Josh/Mclosky's char, was it?). Used lots of in-game objects to help him deal with the dwarven challenges. Giants are an even more stubborn racial choice for the priest class - very hard to get high int on a naturally dim race.

My advice for newbies: play a human race because you'll be more natural with any physical EMOTE commands. It'll be a comfort zone kinda thing initially - but you can always branch out into one of the more exotic races for your next character (sprite, griffon, centaur and minotaur should probably be avoided by those new to the game as they might pose a slight learning curve from a RP perspective).

But by all means, read HELP <statistic> either in-game or here on the website - http://www.shatteredkingdoms.org/help and make a few mistakes if you like. You'd have to work fairly hard to actually break a character through incorrect stat trains - you'd be useful to the entire playerbase if you can simply resurrect someone so don't feel like there's some hard to reach pedestal to have an affect on the game.

Keep an eye on the WHO list and learn about the religions - HELP GODS for example. Heading towards a god favoring your character's chosen alignment can help map out his future, although nothing is set in stone.

Good luck, and welcome!

Wait, what?

I heard this as well in game. Perhaps the help file should reflect the effect art does/does not have on cleric spells
as there seems to be a player knowledge discrepancy. I wasn't told it was 'pretty useless.' I was told it had no
affect.

Art will affect your HW, your SoF and your flamestrike...That's pretty much it, for a priest. Not completely useless, but mostly so. Oh, and scrolls and staves too, in the case of offensive ones.

If you plan on using aggressive scrolls or staves art can be useful.

Art trains are useless for priests.

I want someone to come here with the art for gate argument again.

Priest spells/skills affected by ART:
Offensive staves (capped at 3 ART, meaning anything over 3 won't have any effect)
Offensive scrolls (capped at 6 ART, meaning anything over 6 won't have any effect)
Flamestrike - Reflex Save
Spear of Faith - Reflex Save
Dispel Magic - Willpower Save
Holy Word Dispel - Willpower Save
Summon - Willpower Save

While ART is not completely useless for some classes (warlocks, shamans and sorcs), for priests it's less useful unless you plan on engaging in a lot of PVP. I would definitely agree that maxing INT/WIS/MANA should be your primary focus and easy to max all of them if you answer you creation questions well enough. That should leave you with enough points left over to either put in CON or ART. I would personally choose CON as there's a save associated with it naturally (fortitude, which can be necessary for a priest facing a shaman or hellion) and there are end-game group affecting scripts such as gas blasts that can affect even priests in the back row. A priest without much constitution is going to die much faster and be useless to the rest of the group for healing when they're dead.

Being as this is your first character, I would suggest maxing INT/WIS/MANA and as many points into CON as you can for survivability to learn the game and such. People will love you when you don't need to heal yourself in the middle of a fight at the expense of the rest of the group.