Shattered Kingdoms

Well, when levelling up my Hellion, I levelled to apprentice entirely in stance aggressive. In that time, I noticed I could cast Cause Light in between the 'rounds' of combat. I thought this was completely normal. Then I went to train in a place where the guards would kick my rear if I wasn't careful. In that time, I went defensive, and got a lion to keep them bashed. No longer could I cast in between 'rounds' no matter how I timed it. I didn't notice it was the Stance I was in. Finally, though, I put two and two together when I went back to aggressive, and could cast willy nilly again.

That's all well and good, but does that mean I cast faster? If so, does the same thing work for 'clothies'. Will my sorceror be firing even more Magic Missiles if I go Aggressive? Is this even a viable option? Is there something I'm missing that would make this a horrible idea?

Cast time does not increase on aggressive stance, it just increases on defensive.

I can confirm what Ardith says. Back when I was working on the "Was the last action a triggered response?" script, I had millisecond timestamps up and checked a lot of things trying to find the best timing windows.

Generally speaking, mood defensive increases cast time by 50%. A couple spells disobey this. The most important of which is cause light: aggressively it casts in 1 second Defensively, however, it takes around 2.5 seconds. This means your timing needs to be good to get off a cause light between rounds defensively. A combat round lasts usually 3 seconds.

The help file says, "Aggressive combatants are more likely to hit and will dish out more damage but are also more likely to be hit themselves and expend more energy when attacking." I do not think mood aggressive makes spells cost more mana, so I do not know if we can believe that mood aggressive makes spells deal more damage or be more accurate or harder to resist. Ardith or another could probably give you better advice there.

The moral of the story is that as far as mostly-conventional wisdom goes, there isn't much incentive for anyone who casts to use aggressive stance.

My personal advice? Hellions get shield block. Train in defensive stance, because it will make your incoming damage lesser and more consistent and let you pace yourself more wisely as well as take down targets who will conceivably give you better XP.

I would also recommend not using a lion for training. They deal too much damage. Hellions can be beastly tanks and not need to worry about taking hits, but if your build doesn't favor that... at least get one of the pets that are more custom-tailored towards grinding. Ask around.

From what I could tell, mood defensive adds about a half-round lag to every spell. Mood aggressive and neutral do not suffer this penalty.

I would advise you leveling in mood neutral, not defensive, if you were leveling a hellion and also taking hits. That will allow you to cast two cause lights in between rounds, or one hellfire once you get it.

As for whether or not a lion is a poor choice for a leveling pet; They're a good choice for leveling considering that they're pretty sturdy, and being sturdy is much more important than not dealing damage. You may have to kill a couple more NPCs per tick of experience, but since XP is based on damage it won't affect you that much.

In the three seconds of the typical combat round, there is a chunk at the beginning for the melee round spam. This takes about 1000-3000 microseconds per line. Add in the "best case" scenario human reaction time of around 100-200 milliseconds, and you can figure on being able to take advantage of up to 2.75 seconds between each round for casting spells under golden scenario ideal conditions.

Unless you're taking hits yourself, squeezing in that cure light and having to sleep to recover the mana is probably going to involve slower, twitchier leveling than slogging it out with your weapon. I believe the best leveling is the most stable and least demanding of your attention, freeing you up more to do things in the foreground. Spamming cause light when you as a hellion could in theory fight lightie NPCs defensively with, say, a greatsword and spend your mana on the protection buff to slice away a significant portion of their damage (and using maledictions to shave away another edge, if they're dealing melee damage to you) seems to me a touch impatient and passes up on some of the opportunities afforded by the hellion class to fly further for your efforts.

Really, you should experiment with different ideas each time you change where you are levelling up and choose what seems to work out for you. This will help you explore the tactical options for your class and might reveal more interesting things to you than listening to what everyone tells you to do would.

Given that spell damage gives double experience per hp drained, it's hard to compete with double cause light between rounds and sleeping around the tick, although it does require far more concentration than a (decently enchanted) halberd on aim lower -- which, while slower, allows you to simply spam "kill ***" in most of the good darkie leveling areas.

I do not believe that you get double xps for that damage. I believe you get the xps you would get normally and then a bonus for successfully casting the spell. Though with that being said, it is faster to level with getting spell damage. I think this is because spells tend to do more damage than weapon strikes. There's a whole lot of other stuff I could say about the way xps are gained on SK but I'm lazy and not prone to listing stuff.

I don't know about that. At the very start of a level, get half a level with physical damage and then finish off that level with spell damage, and keep track of how many NPCs you have to kill to accomplish either of those without breaking across familiarity. It seems pretty disparate to me, and just sitting in an inn spam-casting damage spells at yourself or on a magically immune pet doesn't seem to give enough experience to account for that to me.

Take a close look at the files, Edoras, and re-read Ardith's post. Casting damage spells on things that don't get damaged won't give you damage xp. You only get cast xp, and only combat-spell xp if there's any to be had for that.

Casting a spell on a monster, or I dare say performing a damage skill, would grant the xp for succeeding in addition to damage as the help files are construed. In that sense, something like circle stab or backstab would be one of the best level-up things to spam.

Really though, you pay heavily for spell damage and experience with mana downtime. As a hellion, you could be built to do endless melee damage at lower levels. That seems better than sleeping for five minutes and spamming casts for 50 seconds afterwards.

Uh...they are.