So you're ready for some in-depth info on character creation? Well you've come to the right place. I'll try to explain the procedure for creating a character with a little more depth than the intro section does. Everything here is based on my own opinion and those of other experienced players I consulted. There is certainly no "best" way to create a character, so what I will give you here is my view on it. If you don't agree with me, feel free to send me some e-mail and explain why. Bear in mind, though, that replying can take a little time, as I am very busy.

Let's get started.

First it's important to know what kind of character you will be. I have split this guide into three parts. The first part is the pure warrior part, with some variations for Archers and Swordsmen. The second part is the half-warrior/half-mage part, and the last will be the pure mage part, split into an all-round and a pure-war style. Before we do that, I'll begin by telling you something about the different attributes in Asheron's Call and what they're good for.

Attributes

Strength
The Strength attribute determines how much you can carry before you become encumbered and your Run, Jump, Melee and Missile defense skills begin to drop. There is nothing quite as painful as being slaughtered by a Drudge because you were 200% encumbered from all your heavy loot. Strength will also influence the amount of damage you do using melee weapons, and the number of critical hits you get. It's also included in most combat skills:

Axe	= (STRENGTH + Coordination) / 3
Jump	= (STRENGTH + Coordination) / 2
Mace	= (STRENGTH + Coordination) / 3
Spear	= (STRENGTH + Coordination) / 3
Staff	= (STRENGTH + Coordination) / 3
Sword	= (STRENGTH + Coordination) / 3
Unarmed Combat	= (STRENGTH + Coordination) / 3

Endurance
Endurance determines your physical toughness. Your character's starting Stamina is equal to his Endurance, and his starting Health is half of his Endurance. Endurance is not used in any skills.

Coordination
The Coordination attribute is essential for defensive skills like Melee Defense and Missile Defense. Apart from that, it's also very important for the combat skills, especially Bow and Crossbow:

Alchemy	= (COORDINATION + Focus) / 3
Axe	= (COORDINATION + Strength) / 3
Bow	= (COORDINATION) / 2
Cooking	= (COORDINATION + Focus) / 3
Crossbow	= (COORDINATION) / 2
Dagger	= (COORDINATION + Quickness) / 3
Fletching	= (COORDINATION + Focus) / 3
Healing	= (COORDINATION + Focus) / 3
Jump	= (COORDINATION + Strength) / 2
Lockpick	= (COORDINATION + Focus) / 3
Mace	= (COORDINATION + Strength) / 3
Melee Defense	= (COORDINATION + Quickness) / 3
Missile Defense	= (COORDINATION + Quickness) / 5
Spear	= (COORDINATION + Strength) / 3
Staff	= (COORDINATION + Strength) / 3
Sword	= (COORDINATION + Strength) / 3
Thrown Weapons	= (COORDINATION) / 2
Unarmed Combat	= (COORDINATION + Strength) / 3

Quickness
Quickness is essential if you want to be able to escape from monsters, as this attribute equals the amount of Run skill you will have. Furthermore it will have the same influence on your defense skills as Coordination:

Dagger	= (QUICKNESS + Coordination) / 3
Melee Defense	= (QUICKNESS + Coordination) / 3
Missile Defense	= (QUICKNESS + Coordination) / 5
Run	= (QUICKNESS)

Focus
The Focus attribute will allow you to identify items and use the magic skills in the game:

Alchemy	= (FOCUS + Coordination) / 3
Appraise Armor	= (FOCUS)
Appraise Item	= (FOCUS)
Appraise Magic Item	= (FOCUS)
Appraise Weapon	= (FOCUS)
Arcane Lore	= (FOCUS) / 3
Assess Creature	= (FOCUS + Self) /2
Assess Person	= (FOCUS + Self) / 2
Cooking	= (FOCUS + Coordination) / 3
Creature Enchantment	= (FOCUS + Self) / 4
Deception	= (FOCUS + Self) / 4
Fletching	= (FOCUS + Coordination) / 3
Healing	= (FOCUS + Coordination) / 3
Item Enchantment	= (FOCUS + Self) / 4
Life Magic	= (FOCUS + Self) / 4
Lockpick	= (FOCUS + Coordination) / 3
Magic Defense	= (FOCUS + Self) / 10
Mana Conversion	= (FOCUS + Self) / 6
War Magic	= (FOCUS + Self) / 4

Self
Self equals the amount of Mana you will have at the start of the game, and has the same influence on the magic skills as Focus:

Assess Creature	= (SELF + Focus) / 2
Assess Person	= (SELF + Focus) / 2
Creature Enchantment	= (SELF + Focus) / 4
Deception	= (SELF + Focus) / 4
Item Enchantment	= (SELF + Focus) / 4
Leadership	= (SELF) / 4
Loyalty	= (SELF) / 4
Life Magic	= (SELF + Focus) / 4
Magic Defense	= (SELF + Focus) / 10
Mana Conversion	= (SELF + Focus) / 6
War Magic	= (SELF + Focus) / 4

General Attribute Advice
Before we deal with any specific recommendations, I would like to give you some general advice first. The things I say here go for every character you want to play. It is important, especially for people making a character for the first time, to not vary from the Attribute values I recommend by more than ten points. For instance, I have seen some people assume that a mage does not need Strength at all and set their Strength to 10. This results in a character that can't even lift his own staff.

When creating your character it's important to think about how his attributes will look after he gains ten or twenty levels. When you create a good character, the ratio between the different attributes stays the same even as he goes up levels. This might sound a little vague, but allow me to explain. As you might know it costs experience points to raise a certain skill or attribute. It is more expensive to raise attributes because they influence multiple skills. Now every time you raise an attribute or a skill by using experience points, it will get more expensive to raise. You should know that if you have (for example) 10 Focus and 100 Strength from the start, it will cost just as much experience to raise your Focus to 20 as it will to raise your Strength to 110. So the worst thing you can do is to think "Oh, I'll just take a low Quickness and start the others out higher and then I just drop all my experience into Quickness". What you need to do is choose your attributes in such a way that you want to increase them all equally. The best set of attributes will make you think "Uhh, which attribute should I increase next?". So be sure to remember that raising a lot of attributes a little is cheaper then raising one attribute a medium amount.

Now you're probably saying "That sure is a nice idea, but I have no clue which attributes or skills I will want to increase until I actually play the game". That's why I wrote this guide: in the upcoming parts I will explain why I choose a certain attribute for a each kind of character.

Before getting to specific characters, I want to discuss Strength and Coordination for any character. First, Strength. My advice would be to choose a minimum of 40 strength, no matter what kind of character you make. You need this to carry some armor and to be able to ship some loot.

The other attribute I want to give you general advice about is Quickness. As you read above, Quickness equals Run. Run is one of the most important skills in the game, as it allows you to escape from enemies. For instance imagine you are fighting a Banderling Guard and all of a sudden you get jumped by two others who just spawned. Then is a good time to have enough Run to outrun them. Also, if you are planning on going to the Direlands you need a lot of Run. Personally, I had 200 Run (210, with the help of some Quickness I jewelry). This was sufficient to outrun almost everything there. You will want to have at least 150 Run to make it there alive, and I would go with at least 170 to be sure. Run is an important skill for all classes except the pure melee warrior, because he will be able to take a beating before he goes down. However, setting Run too low while being a warrior will prevent him from going to the more dangerous places.

General Skill Advice
The reason why I talked about attributes first was because all skills are derived from the attributes. However that does not mean attributes are more important! AC is a skill based game and everything you do in the game will be done using a skill. Only Strength, Endurance and Self will have some direct influence on the game. The skills you choose will pretty much "make" your character. When creating your character, you are completely free to mix and match skills, as long as you do not spend more then 50 skill credits. That means that you can make anything you like, whether it is an cooking item enchanter or a lockpicking life mage.

There are four "levels" of skills, namely Specialized, Trained, Untrained and Unusable. Unusable skills are, like the name suggests, unusable until you train them. Untrained skills are usable but you can not spend experience points on them and they will not increase with use (they will get better if you increase their associated attributes). Trained and Specialized skills do increase with use, although specialized skills increase 30% faster (or, rather, they cost 30% less experience points than trained skills to increase). As your character gains levels and skill credits, you can train unusable and untrained skills, but you cannot specialize a skill after you have created your character.

To repeat what I said about Quickness, you must have Run skill. Personally, I always specialize Run because it be a lot cheaper, experience points-wise, to increase it to the heights it needs to be to survive in the Direlands. Remember that you cannot specialize a skill after you have created your character, so choose wisely. The only reason not to specialize Run is if it prevents you from specializing another, more important skill (for example, if by choosing to specialize Run you can't specialize your favorite offensive skill). Furthermore, if you are a fierce warrior that can take lots of hits you might set Run to just trained.

The Pure Fighter - Melee Classes

You do not have any knowledge of magic and you have chosen to train in using an axe, a sword, a staff, a dagger, a mace or unarmed combat. You will likely stand next to the enemy, taking damage and dealing it. You will be the "tank", the protector of the physically weaker mages. You will be able to take quite a beating and still be able to flee, but you also have enough skill to survive even the tougher fights. For this kind of characters the first four attributes are essential.

Recommended attributes:
Strength:	85
Endurance:	70
Coordination:	70
Quickness:	70
Focus:	25
Self:	10

Little explanation is necessary here. The first four attributes are, in my opinion, the most important. If you want to alter them feel free, but stay within +/- 20 of these values. The character described above is sort of a "default" warrior, you could say. You should note that Strength affects the damage you can do in combat and the number of critical hits you get, so that makes it a little more important than the rest.Also Strenght will determine how much you can carry and since you will probablywant to wear the best armor you can find, you need Strenght.

Endurance will directly apply to your Stamina and your Health, so if you want to swing heavy weapons and choose for maximum power each time you swing, be sure to get high Endurance.

Coordination is important for both hitting and avoiding damage: warriors with much Coordination are hit less often and hit more often.

Quickness is important for being able to flee a battle if he gets hit too often or too hard, and for avoiding damage. The more Quickness you have, the easier it is to dodge incoming attacks.

Focus is mainly part of the skills that apply to magic, but there are some exceptions. The most important of them is Arcane Lore. Arcane Lore will allow you to use magic on items; the best weapons in the game are good because they have magic. Whether its Blood Drinker III or Strength I, they all help your ability to battle, and therefore they are very important, especially later on in the game. You will also want to be able to identify some of the loot you find and some of the weapons you can buy in the store: Focus helps with that, too. However, Focus is not essential to keep you alive at earlier levels, so it starts out low.

Recommended skills:
Specialized: (your favorite combat skill), Melee Defense, Run

Trained: Healing, Missile Defense

Not much to say here either. I can hardly give you a "best" skill list, because the skills are what makes a character. You might find it much cooler to have a warrior that fights with both throwing knives and a staff rather than with a sword. Or play a warrior that can handle an axe as well as a mace. Feel free to change everything here, but remember: if a skill is specialized it will rise faster and will cost fewer experience points to increase. If you choose to have more skills and have them all only trained, you might get in trouble because you never actually hit your target. I would recommend choosing one weapon and excel in using it rather then having more and being average in all.

The Healing skill is a sort of poor man's Life Magic: it will let you heal yourself using bandages. When your skill is high enough, you will be able to quickly heal yourself, which is a Good Thing after a heavy battle.

Missile defense is a skill people usually forget about, because most monsters do not use missile attacks. This will result in your skill being used, and thus raised, less often then Melee defense. If you choose to not train it at all, you might have a problem at later levels when you encounter powerful enemies with bows. I would recommend you train it, unless you have another very important other skill you want to train.

For playing tips on a warrior, see the Warrior Guide.

The Pure Fighter - Ranged Classes

Just like your melee counterpart, you lack the fine art of magic. Instead you must get your kills by killing enemies at a range. Just like mages you will be searching for spots where you can hunt the enemy, but the enemy can't hunt you. If, however, an enemy comes close, you can take some damage, unlike the mage. This does not mean that you can take the role of "warrior as tank". You will want to be fast to outrun enemies if they decide to go chew on you instead of your tank. For you, Coordination is an essential skill, because that is the only skill that has any influence on your ability to kill with your bow.

Recommended attributes:
Strength:	50
Endurance:	50
Coordination:	100
Quickness:	100
Focus:	20
Self:	10

A bit different attributes here than with your warrior. Since Strength is not in the formula for either Bow or Crossbow, it is safe to scale it back to just the amount you need to carry loot, arrows and armor. The same applies to Endurance: you will not be taking damage all that much so your Stamina will not be drained quite as fast. Coordination is the skill for an archer, as it is the skill that will directly determine how often you hit. Try to keep this skill high and continue to train in it as you play.

Quickness is needed if you want to be able to "shoot 'n' run 'n' repeat". For example, you see an enemy far away, you shoot an arrow to lure it, then keep filling it with arrows until it is near you. Then you run away from the enemy, turn around and shoot it again. Repeat. This is an effective tactic that you will use quite often.

Focus and Self are the same story as for the pure warrior, melee style.

Recommended skills:
Specialized: (Bow or Crossbow), Run

Trained: Healing, Fletching, Missile Defense, Melee Defense

Read the part about the melee pure warrior class first, as it will be similar to what I would like recommend here. The only big difference is that you will be using melee defense less often, and missile defense is more important. This is because you will likely searching for places from which you can shoot enemies, while they cannot hit you: towers, steep cliffs and so on. However if you can shoot arrows at an enemy, it means the enemy can do the same to you. True, there are fewer enemies using a ranged weapon than there are enemies using melee weapons, but you will be happy having missile defense in case you meet one. I shall shortly explain the main difference between Bow and Crossbow. Bows are in general faster, lighter and more common. They do however less damage then the Crossbows, who are rarer, heavier and slower. However they can pack quite a punch.

The Tankmage

Most UO players will shiver hearing this name, the class that they feared so much but that everybody eventually became. The class EQ players thought they got rid of. In AC it's back. "different than it ever was before". The tankmage is not a good warrior, nor a good mage. It is somewhere in between. You will be able to take quite a beating and do melee or ranged damage and you will be able to use some beneficial magic to aid in your battle. However, do not think you will just a good warrior as the pure warrior, nor such a good mage as the pure mage. Unlike other games, the Tankmage is just a workable option, not the only way to go for power gamers. You will have to combine both your warrior and your mage powers to be succesful. This will be a hard role, requiring more expertise from you to play this character than it would require for any other class. Since you will be a weaker warrior, you need to be able to compensate for this by using magic. Using it wisely is very important, though certainly not easy.

If your warrior part uses a ranged weapon:
Recommended attributes:
Strength:	50
Endurance:	50
Coordination:	70
Quickness:	70
Focus:	50
Self:	40
If your warrior part uses a melee weapon:
Recommended attributes:
Strength:	60
Endurance:	60
Coordination:	60
Quickness:	60
Focus:	50
Self:	40

As you can see, the attributes are quite a bit lower than the attributes of the "pure" classes, so be careful when fighting. Know your strengths and weaknesses and use magic to compensate. For an explanation of the attributes and why you should pick them, look at the 'pure' class sections.

Recommended skills:
Specialized: (your favorite magic skill), (your favorite combat skill), Run

Trained: Mana Conversion, Melee Defense, Missile Defense

It is very hard to recommend any skills to you, since especially with a tankmage you will be completely free to choose your own skills. I would recommend against war magic though, as it is much wiser to have one offensive skill than to have multiple. If you want to be an succesful war mage you need to have Mana Conversion peaked at maximum efficiency and you need to have a high skill in war magic itself. Furthermore, training war magic it is rather costly.

The Pure Mage - All-round Style

You will be able to turn mana into a form that is most deadly to all living things. You will be able to do a lot of damage in a very short time frame, but this will prove a necessity because you have little health and you are not good at evading damage either. You should rely on the terrain or on your warrior friends to keep the enemies off your back, and to prevent them from killing you in one blow. A good mage will drop the enemies before they ever reach him. The pure mage is a i class when used correctly. Important is using the landscape to its full extent. Stand in high towers and shoot down, so that monsters can not get to you. When there are no structures for you to hide in, be sure to keep a distance between you and the monsters and start shooting from as far as your spell allows it. Over all, it is a very interesting class to play but always watch your back. The all-round will not only able to blast enemy, he or she will also able to heal his allies and (even more important), cast the x-to-mana spell. An example is Stamina to Mana, which allows you to quickly recover mana by resting, casting Stamina to Mana, and repeating. You can even choose Creature or Item Enchantment, making you a mage with many skills. However you will not be as good (your skill will not be as high) as the pure war mage. He specialized in War Magic, and will see his War Magic skill increase faster.

Recommended attributes:
Strength:	40
Endurance:	60
Coordination:	10
Quickness:	70
Focus:	80
Self:	70

Strength will be needed for carrying armor, components and loot.

Endurance is important for two reasons. The first reason is Stamina to Mana. If you want that spell to be successful, you need to have enough Stamina to convert to Mana and cover the cost of casting the spell itself. The second reason is your Health, not only because there is a Health to Mana spell, but also because you will be very bad at evading damage due to your low Coordination. You will have to be able to withstand some damage in case you need to flee, or if an enemy casts a spell at you which you cannot resist.

I hope it's pretty obvious why I left Coordination at 10: it's not included in any skills that are essential for you. You could consider moving it up a little but you will never be good at evading damage unless you make it very high, which will result in lower essential skills.

Quickness is very important for a mage, as since he will not be able to dodge damage easily he will need to have the option to flee. He must resort to his legs more often than to his armor and health, so be sure you train Quickness (and Run) regularly.

Focus and Self are obvious because they are included in the magic formulas. The reason I set Self a little lower is because you will be able to get Mana fairly quickly because of your life magic spells, and it is pretty expensive to get more mana. In Everquest, for example, it is pretty easy to double your Mana, but in AC this takes a long time and a lot of experience points. I think you can better spend that experience elsewhere and keep using Stamina to Mana.

Recommended skills:
Specialized: Run, Mana Conversion, Arcane Lore

Trained: War Magic, Life Magic

Run, just like Quickness, will be needed to keep you alive. Mana conversion will trigger more often the higher the skill is, and when it triggers it will greatly decrease the amount of Mana a spell uses. Life and war magic are pretty self-explanatory too. You might want to Train Mana Conversion instead of Specialize it and then train in one of Creature or Item Enchantment. If you save your skill credits as your character gains levels, you will be able to train in the other at level 9 and then have all the four schools of magic.

The Pure Mage - Pure War Style

Rather than relying on life magic to get your Mana back fast, you will rely on a high Mana Conversion and a higher skill in War Magic to keep the spells you cast from fizzling. The pure war mage will be ier then his all-round counterpart if you look solely at offensive capabilities. However, he will not be able to heal himself or others, and will not have access to Item and Creature Enchantment as fast as the other mage class.

Recommended attributes:
Strength:	40
Endurance:	40
Coordination:	10
Quickness:	70
Focus:	85
Self:	85

The big difference between the war mage and the all-round class mage is in Endurance, since a war mage will not be using life magic until at least level 16, when you get enough skill points to train in it. You're best to keep it lower and make your War Magic and Mana Conversion skills start out higher by choosing a higher Focus and a higher Self.

Recommended skills:
Specialized: Run, Mana Conversion, Arcane Lore, War Magic

Trained: (none)

Written by Joris "Prophylon" Jansen
Thanks go out to The Hooded One for his advice and Svala the Red for revising the guide and pointing out a few important things content wise.