Skill
Skills are the many particular aspects of the adventurer's trade that your character will need if he intends to survive. Like experience levels, they are gained automatically as you earn experience through the killing of monsters. While gaining experience levels provides general boosts to your character, gaining skill levels only provides benefits for the narrow sections of adventuring that they pertain to. Like character levels, the highest level a skill can reach is 27.
Focusing your skill progression on skills that A) your species has a natural aptitude for and that B) you'll actually use can make or break a character. Every species has an aptitude ranging from -5 to +5 for each individual skill, a measure of how easily they can learn it. While you aren't necessarily restricted from branching into skills you have a bad aptitude for, training them will take longer and you may not be able to acquire enough experience to keep your character effective as you go deeper into the Dungeon.
Characters start the game with access to a small selection of skills. More can be acquired over time.
Skill Types
Skills are roughly divided into five categories:
Offense
- Fighting: Improves your damage in melee, increases your max HP.
- Unarmed Combat: Improves your damage, accuracy, and attack speed when making melee attacks without a weapon, and allows you to make auxiliary unarmed combat attacks.
- Individual Weapon Skills (Short Blades, Maces & Flails, etc.): Improves your damage, accuracy, and attack speed when using the weapons each skill covers. Some weapon skills cross-train, allowing you to learn their associated, lower-level skills at a faster rate (+4 to the corresponding aptitude, roughly 2× normal speed).
Defense
- Dodge - Improves your evasion (more effective when wearing lighter armour).
- Armour - Improves the AC bonus armour gives you (more effective when wearing heavier armour), reduces the impact of armour EV penalties.
- Shields - Improves the SH bonus shields gives you, reduces the impact of shield EV penalties.
- Stealth - Reduces the likelihood of unaware monsters detecting you.
Thievery
- Stabbing - Adds a damage multiplier when you attack an enemy that is not yet aware of you (more effective with certain weapons).
- Traps & Doors - Increases the likelihood of you finding nearby traps or secret doors, as well as your ability to disarm mechanical traps.
Spellcasting
- Spellcasting - Slightly increases the spell power of any spell you cast, reduces the spell hunger generated, increases your max MP, and grants you extra spell levels to memorize more spells.
- There are many individual skills for the many magic schools you can study. These include styles such as Conjurations (direct attack magic) and Charms (magic to enhance your abilities), as well as elemental schools such as Fire Magic or Poison Magic. All of these skills have the same general effect, however: to improve the spell success rate and spell power of their associated spells (though some schools have other minor benefits as well, such as improved prowess while wielding an elemental staff). Be aware that some elemental schools are opposed (Fire/Ice, Earth/Air). If you've already gained skill in one school, you'll find it much harder to train the other (-4 to the corresponding aptitude, roughly 1/2 normal speed).
Alternative Magic
- Invocations - Improves the effectiveness of powers granted by the gods, increases your max MP.
- Evocations - Improves the effectiveness and safety of using magical items.
The Skill Screen
Pressing m will bring up the Skill Screen, allowing you to select which skills you'd like to train and how you'd like the game to invest your XP. It also shows you your character's current skill levels and aptitude for each skill, complete with adjustments made for cross-training and opposed magic schools. You can switch between displaying only those skills you can train/have trained and all skills with the * button.
You can select which skills to train by either clicking on its name in the list or pressing the key associated to it. Any skill that you haven't selected will have its name displayed in dark gray, and it will not improve. You can also choose to focus certain skills, causing them to gain twice the amount of experience they'd normally receive. Focused skill names are displayed in white, and their tiles icon will display with a blue glow.
The skill screen also allows you to choose whether to divide your XP in auto or manual mode by pressing the / key.. Auto mode adjusts the XP division so that skills you use more will receive the greatest share of new XP, while those you rarely use receive less. In manual mode, each active skill receives a perfectly equal share of gained XP, while focused skills receive double that. It is easier to control where your XP goes in manual mode.
Skill Requirements
In any case, you'll notice that you do not have access to all skills from the very beginning of the game. This is because many skills require associated equipment to become available:
- You must be able to freely wield an appropriate weapon in order to train its weapon skill.
- You must be wearing armour (with an evasion penalty) to train Armour.
- You must be wearing a shield or be able to create a magical shield to train Shields
- You must have a spell of a particular school memorized to train that school's skill.
- You must worship a god who grants invocable powers to train Invocations
- You must have an evokable item in your inventory to train Evocations
Removing these items, forgetting these spells, or abandoning these gods will cause you to no longer be able to train their skills, but you will not lose the progress you've made thus far. Be aware that when quaffing a potion of experience or drawing an experience card, you will immediately be asked which skills you'd like to improve. Make sure you have access to the skills you want to put this into!
Experience Required
The chart below shows how much total XP must be allocated to a skill for it to reach each skill level:
| Level | Total XP | Level | Total XP | Level | Total XP | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 50 | 10 | 2,800 | 19 | 12,300 | ||
| 2 | 150 | 11 | 3,450 | 20 | 13,950 | ||
| 3 | 300 | 12 | 4,200 | 21 | 15,750 | ||
| 4 | 500 | 13 | 5,050 | 22 | 17,700 | ||
| 5 | 750 | 14 | 6,000 | 23 | 19,800 | ||
| 6 | 1,050 | 15 | 7,050 | 24 | 22,050 | ||
| 7 | 1,400 | 16 | 8,200 | 25 | 24,450 | ||
| 8 | 1,800 | 17 | 9,450 | 26 | 27,000 | ||
| 9 | 2,250 | 18 | 10,800 | 27 | 29,750 |
These amounts are then adjusted based on your character's aptitudes. An aptitude of n means you'll need 2^(-n/4) times as much XP to advance as a human would:
| Aptitude | +5 | +4 | +3 | +2 | +1 | +0 | -1 | -2 | -3 | -4 | -5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| XP Multiplier | 2.38 | 2.0 | 1.68 | 1.41 | 1.19 | 1.0 | 0.84 | 0.71 | 0.59 | 0.5 | 0.42 |
For balancing reasons, some skills also have inherent bonuses or penalties to training, regardless of your aptitude. Spellcasting is penalized, requiring 130% of standard XP to gain each level. Invocations, Evocations, and Stealth are easier, however, requiring only 80%.
These amounts are also significantly increased as your character gains more and more skill experience. At higher levels, the amount of actual experience required to produce the same increase in skill levels reaches as high as 250 times the amount of experience a character with no skill experience would require. However, mobs in the late game give drastically more experience, so this effect is not too difficult to overcome.
History
Prior to 0.10, the Stealth skill training bonus was even better. Each level required only 50% of the XP needed for other skills.
Prior to 0.10, skills only required particular equipment or spells for the first level, and those first levels could only be gained by using those skills while gaining XP.
Prior to 0.9, XP functioned very differently: instead of automatically being assigned to skills, it would go into an experience pool. This XP was then applied to skills as they were used, resulting in repetitive and annoying "victory dances" designed to funnel the XP appropriately.
