Shattered Kingdoms

I know I've been playing for around 7 months or so now, but I still feel like a newb in SEVERAL areas. Biggest ones being gear and enchantments. I have little to no idea about almost any gear in this game, and generally when I ask for help IC either people just procure stuff for me (which is nice, but doesn't help me learn), or the few things they've shown me require several people to get (ie: that stained mithril for example). I know where to get things for my rogue for the most part as she used to die often, but the scout..?

I know where to find a decent bow or two and a decent spear or two, but I am clueless as to armor for scouts. Obviously, there's the twagras skin route. I did that before and had (I think) all MP put on it. Ideysa had an IC priest friend for a while who was very helpful in consecrating her gear but I still felt like I had no idea what I was doing/what they were putting on her things. A scout in game told me to stick with damage/accuracy for all my weapons. Armor though? I put MP on it before because I figured if I was getting hit as a scout, like on my rogue, something was going wrong.

When I lost the skins to PvP and the aforementioned priest was no longer around, I got lazy and went the sacred armor route. I think they mostly have AP (likely something else I can't remember) and grant armor/protection. I wear a quiver, of course, and Matron Ventaro (I think that's her name)'s robes and necklace. There's MR on the necklace I think, and also on my symbol. I grabbed a generic fort and MR ring from Thrildshy. Found a random fort bracelet wandering around. I've occasionally toyed with the idea of attempting an MR route on the scout, but have no knowledge of MR stuff in game (I asked a while back - but with the exception of a robe that someone gave her once, that was lost anyway, it didn't produced results). Only willpower piece of jewelry I'm really familiar with is a necklace, and I'm already wearing two neck pieces.

I'm not asking for item locations as that's stuff I guess I'll have to figure out in game (right? I'm fairly certain that's IC knowledge). But I see other people in game, with fairly "new" characters, who go out, get very specific armor and know exactly how many runes of what they want to put on everything and I'm sitting here thinking I must be doing a lot of things wrong because I've had this scout for... approximately 20 weeks, if her age is an accurate guide, and am still clueless.

Questions I guess are:
1) Keep the sacred armor or ditch it or does it matter?
2) Can you enchant sacred armor (I really have no idea) to make it worth keeping?
3) If I go the skins route again - how should I have them enchanted?
4) Is other mithril found in game better than well-enchanted skins?
5) Bows and spears both, damage and accuracy best bet as I was told IC?
6) What innates/added enchants should I aim for in regards to jewelry?

Any other suggestions are more than welcome. I've always approached things in SK from a RP standpoint first, and PK standpoint as a distant second. I got very comfortable with my rogue, her armor, weapons, and enchantments (she also had a ton of help, I won't lie), but have never felt comfortable with the scout and am trying to fix that.

There's a lot people purport to know, but we don't really know, about the enchanting system. This includes factors influencing how readily an item enchants. It could be nothing more than a random number generator. It could be an intricate system accounting for concentration, percent mana pool, item material, art, and who knows what else. What we suspect is that art and caster level play a role in succeeding in enchantment. What we don't know is whether that's because of the "level" of an item increasing with enchantments, or if some other formula is being helped.

So the answers to several of your questions would be opinions and hunches. For example, classically, sacred armor hasn't enchanted well at all. I know from personal experience years ago that the Aludra set wasn't worth trying to "salvage" with enchanting. So items 1, 2, and 4 are pretty much de gustibus. The compare command will help you examine the innate protection quality of a piece of armor, and that factors in before enchantments enter the equation. You can use this command to find the specific beginnings of the answer to item 4 whenever it becomes pertinent in-game.

You want your enchantments to prepare you for what you'll encounter. This requires knowledge of the future. Veterans and old players have sets of expectations, often based on field data, of what's more likely to be seen than other things. For example, it will often be said that there are far many more things that you'll have to roll a fortitude save for than a reflex save, so the former is preferable over the latter. This kind of thing is probably best discussed in-game with an experienced player on "your side" who understands current opposition. However, ceteris paribus, it's worth pointing out that all enchanting has to account for stacking. There are some posts in the forums where I explain stacking to jennbo in terms of buckets and boxes: that thread would be a good place to look into enchanting minutiae. Items 3, 5, and 6 are more or less in this category: different scenarios and different veterans have different experiences and conclusions. Ask questions, think critically, and don't be afraid to spend time experimenting with multiple configurations to form your own opinions.

FYI, I sigh to myself every time someone goes 'let me rest, enchant works better at full energy.'

Art, level, and specific item are the only real factors in my personal opinion. I'm not sure what it is about the 'specific item', but it is obviously not material/quality. There are adamantite rings that come with +4 innate and take +6 easy, there are adamantite rings that come with +0 and blow up on the first enchant every try. There's diamond armor that comes +4 and takes +4 more with some effort, while there's diamond armor of similar quality that doesn't. And it's always true about those items.

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Re: OP

First, please give me a moment to make my opinion on something clear. The skin skill is useless, you might as well forget it exists. Skin was historically only a mediocre option because actual mithril sucked (in terms of enchants available). Now you can only add AP/MP/MR to skins anyways, and they enchant for crap, and the areas you get skins from are usually slow repop/pains in the butt.

It is just about impossible to get sufficient Save Enchants without saves on your armor, which effectively means, in layman's terms 'anybody wearing skins is a newb who's gonna get got'. You have 6 jewelry slots. Assuming you even had innate greater saves on all that, that's 24 enchants. 24 enchants divided amongst 3 saves. Which immediately requires you go 'oh damn, screw reflex', so 24 enchants divided between Willpower and Fortitude. Then you can enchant for +6 once to each. So 18 will/fort. Which hey, isn't actually terrible. Except for the fact that this is assuming you could find 6 pieces of great fort/will eq and didn't need something with innate attributes or whatever. Oh, and don't forget you have 0 reflex (or I guess potentially 6 reflex). Oh and casters have double digit art and impairment.

Anything with any kind of innate enchant is better than skins.

Sacred armor is a great placeholder set of eq and if your patron loves you, it has +saves on it. If it has +mp, your patron hates you and you should obviously convert to another church. In my experience, sacred does not seem to enchant at all lately. It's odd because the sacred -armor- of Ain blew up on the first enchant every time, without fail, yet the sacred -jewelry-, which comes with +great save..enchants just fine.

MR is unlikely to be an option because sorcs/etc are using the good Mr jewelry and you're unlikely to have easy access to spell ward on a scout. You could just aim for 50 Mr or however much you can get. It'd probably be more spell protection than the average half enchanted newb has.


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ETA : For the unaware, enchant used to work differently. 'Enchant armor' used to randomly add will/fort/reflex/mp/mr to a piece, so theoretically, with enough skins and enough time you could make a 4will/4mp skin from scratch. Theoretically. (That didn't happen often, and we're talking mountains of skins, people like Ardith used to go out and get 30+ mithril lion skins, and would be lucky to wind up with a couple good ones.) I've personally never liked skins as an option. Now that you can only add ap/mp/mr to skins, they're a lot more subpar than they already were.

I said a while ago that enchant armor needs to be able to add stacking fort/will/reflex saves to armor.

You might have to break this down for me further. I have six jewelry slots, yes, but one is taken up by a quiver. Are you saying all the pieces should have innate saves and saves added on? What does casters having double digit art mean (and impairment? Never even heard of that)?

Also, does every religion have sacred jewelry? I've never seen this for Sadr, just the armor set.

Lastly, you say maybe up to 50 MR. Where does this number come from?

Every religion has 10 unique sacred items. Some faiths have jewelry; others do not... It's just a matter of how the pieces were allocated.

I cant really tell you where to find decent armor on forums. As far as MR goes, I personally would not go that route. You would only likely be able to achieve 50% resistance and it would be a pita to remove armor and eat herbs. You should try and face spellcaster classes from 1-2 rooms away with arrows.

This. Some have shields, others don't. Some have containers, some have staves.

You want as much innate saves as you can get, yes. The quiver is a waste of space, get a robe or something big enough to hold the arrows and your stuff, or just carry the quiver in your inventory. You want to add each save to one separate thing, just one thing. One ring with willpower added, one necklace with fort added/etc. If that doesn't make sense and you don't understand, look around for an explanation on how enchanting works, it's not complicated but I don't feel like breaking down stacking for the hundredth time right here.

The 50 come from the fact that that'd be close to your cap for how many MR enchants you could get. 7 pieces of armor, 6mr per piece (which is probably pushing it a lot), would put you a little below 50, and you could probably get to mid-50s with jewelry. Which last I knew basically converts 1:1, 50mr is 50% chance to resist.

Art is the spellcaster check vs saves. I don't know the mechanics but a sorc with 14 art casting stuff at you has a significantly higher chance of landing his spells through enchants. For added spellcaster pwnage, every spell you resist gives you an 'impairment' affect briefly. If I cast petrification at you and you resist, you now have a fort penalty, so my next spell has a better chance of landing. If I cast it a second time and you resist, your fort penalty gets bigger. So on and so forth.

Unless it has been changed, MR has never been 1:1 chance to resist or near to it. It isn't a linear line, more a asymptotic curve remembering back when I learnt about it and had my necro. The first MR giving the greatest percentage, then lessening more and more as you stack it up. Thats why people with 1 MR enchant tend to resist 1 in 20~ spells or so, but someone with 20 MR would still only resist 1 in 10~.

I think Dulrik posted years ago that MR will never give 100% protection no matter how much MR you have, but you can get extremely close to it. But this was years ago, it might have changed since then

Edit: Awkward moment when noone wants to correct my mistake calling it a parabolic curve >.<