Shattered Kingdoms

It's interesting though. It should be the norm that decides things like this not the exceptions.

Priests are difficult to level earlier on, but once you get the difficult part out of the way, you've got one of the most useful characters in the game. The effort is required because the reward is so great. Leveling priests at higher levels seems almost automatic. There's nothing saying you can't just put on some heavy armor and grind on NPCs until you get to the level which you get flamestrike. If you joined your religion already, well... sorry if its a cloth religion. These are all choices.

Non religion priests can only wear light armor not heavy.

Brass or copper is enough to fully deflect 80% of the fights(and take like a whole of 5% HP dmg till you kill a NPC for the rest 20% of the fights), up until jman at least.

"Because you might have more fun later, you should have less fun now."

Why can't all leveling feel "automatic"?

Getting to play your character with a complete set of skills and spells as intended is not a "reward", but a necessity.

Obviously not everyone agrees that leveling is too hard for a priest. I don't agree. I think its fine. Its tough if you spend the time leveling in a way which is perceived to be less dangerous than another, but in essence just takes longer. Yes, priests outside of religions can only wear light armor with zero penalties, but consider the penalty of the lost time when you have to rest repeatedly because you're losing HP so quickly. Wouldn't it make sense to take the hit to the few skills you do have to basically be immune to low level NPC damage?

Then I make a challenge to anyone to make a gnome cloth priest and get to journeyman and tell me how many hrs it took them. Solo. Then do the same thing with a Merc and tell me how long it took. I almost guarantee it will take almost twice as long.

Achernar, remember we are trying to speed up leveling for those under journeyman.

[edit] Also, it is usually bad rp to hold of from being inducted as soon as possible. I say usually, because I can think of a couple of really lame excuses to not become inducted as soon as possible.

Melee levelling is always faster from caster levelling at low levels. At higher levels though, casters win melee classes.

Anyway, if people are so concerned from melee damage, priests get a great amateur level damage spell. And SK offers quite a few areas they can use it and hit jman while they are safe behind a pet(and trust me, pets tank these areas pretty well).

My current is a clothy gnome priest and I think it took me 25 hours to hit journeyman, but there was a lot of time spent RPing and what not. Spear of faith is actually a veteran spell now, but I agree with DA. Cure light on undead works wonderfully for lower levels. And if you don't wanna wait til vet to get sof, then learn it early like I did. I learned it at apprentice 5. Sure it took a level and ae to learn, but it makes leveling cake. Priests are -not- that hard to level.

-Dmitri

Edit: Oh, and I level really slow in general.

At jman you get flamestrike though, it's enough to give you very nice XP considering it hits groups of NPCs and quite a few areas in that range or higher have groups of 3+ NPCs.