jcarter's Armageddon MUD Fan Site
Skill Grinding
Skills are an important facet of Armageddon MUD and can mean life or death for any character in Zalanthas. Long-term players who know how to manipulate the DIKU codebase will always have more advanced characters than those who don't, giving them an edge over any new player.
Skill gains in Armageddon MUD work through failure. When an attempt at using a skill fails, a roll is made to determine whether or not the skill is raised. After this attempt, a lock-out timer is initiated that does not allow any more skill raise attempts for a given amount of time. The rule of thumb is that the time is approximately an hour for the average human, and slightly shorter for those with higher wisdom.
Since this lock-out timer is in place, spamming a skill after it fails is fruitless and will only serve to get you flagged by Arm's immortal staff. Whether you have 50 failures or 1 during the lock-out timer, there is absolutely no difference.
The most effective way to increase a character's skills is to switch from one to another after the original fails. For example, if your character is out hunting and fails at archery, enter melee combat using one weapon type (slashing/piercing/chopping/bludgeoning) and combat style (dual wield/shield use/two-handed). If you've missed some swings and taken a few hits, you can assume that you've failed at one skill or the other, so switch it up! Drop the shield and etwo your weapon. Find whatever reason you can to use as many skills as possible.
Magicker spells work similar to regular skills. However, they can only be trained through regular spellcasting failures within the power level that has already been unlocked. Casting a spell at a higher power level and failing will not allow for a skill-up roll. For example, if your Drovian is trying to raise create darkness and the power level is pav, casting the spell at sul will not increase the skill level.
The most efficient means I've found to raising spells is to get the spell power level to mon first. Once at mon, the mana cost for the spell will be reduced for each power level. The spell should then be cast at sul power level. Casting the spell at sul then offers a mix between difficulty/failure rate and low mana cost.
Spells are organized into tiers. The first spells a character has upon creation is the first tier, the spells that branch from that are second tier, and so on. In general, it takes approximately 6 to 10 failures for a human to branch the first tier, 8 to 14 to branch the second tier, and over 12 to branch the third tier.
