Your guild level is based on the average of all of your primaries. To advance from being a first level as a wizard you will need to get to guild level 60, 80 and 100 for 2nd, 3rd and 4th.level wizard respectively. After that it is pure conjecture. Some believe it is time since death, rating or GL with some Quest points thrown in for good measure. It is probably a combination of some or all. Once you become a 4th level then it is ‘dead man’s shoes’ to advance. You have to wait for someone above you to die and then, if you have all the requirements, you will take their place as a 5th, 6th or 7th level wizard. I should point out that attempting to kill those above you will not help unless you are both PK and the use of poisons is just a waste of good food. The position of Senior Wizard or 8th level is decided by an election. Either way relax, you are not in a race. Enjoy yourself.
Advancing your Primary Skills
Each Order gets a different set of Primary skills, yours are listed on the welcome page of this site. Advancing Primary skills are always done in the Order room, or the visitor’s area of foreign wizard guilds, as it is the cheapest way to advance them (in terms of the cost in XP). To advance skills in the Order room you will need the required XP and some cash, to see how much of each enter ‘Cost Primaries’ when in the Order room. The Cost to advance a level increases in both XP and money as you move upwards until you reach ‘Guild Max’ and can no longer be trained in that skill in the Order room. This happens at level 300 for Primary magic skills, at level 50 for other magic skills and level 10 for non magic skills.
Advancing your Other Skills
In the Order room you may also advance all your other skills, covert, fighting, faith, other, crafts to level 10, something I highly recommend, especially Ot.he. (Other, Health) Once you have ‘Guild maxed’ all skills you will then have to decide how to advance your skills from then on and there a three ways you can do this, you can be taught, you can teach yourself, or you can TM the skill.
With TM's you may earn it yourself or, get a bonus by sharing one with someone else by watching their skills. Every time you cast a spell you use a skill or skills, most spells use more than one or in some cases the same skill, several times, and each time you have the chance to TM. As a general rule the lower your particular skill level the higher the chance of a TM for that skill. The other way to TM is to be with someone else when they use a skill and share their TM, this will mostly happen if you are grouped.
Learning from others
As mentioned, the cost of advancing skills increases as the level of your skill does the same and advancing non primary skills can be very expensive. You can teach yourself but it will always be the most expensive way of advancing. There will be times when you will want to do this regardless of the cost such as entering dangerous situations that may result in death and hence the loss of your XP.
By far the most common way of advancing non Primaries is to learn from someone else. Teaching is also a skill that can be advanced and, if you have high enough skills, then your teaching bonus will be high enough that others may want to learn from you, which is another way of earning XP and possible TM’s. Some wizards will even pay you to learn from them which is a handy way of earning cash as well as saving on the cost of advancing skills. Sined runs a program to reward those who learn from him and details can be found at http://sinedondisc.tripod.com/teaching/xp-promo.htm
What skills can I learn?
There are 6 main skill areas Magic, Fighting, Covert, Faith, Crafts and Other each is organised into a tree structure. As you become skilled enough in a particular branch then sub-skills become available to you. To see all the skills available visit the The Spellcheck Project website at http://spc.darkmud.co.uk/
This is an essential site for a any player interested in learing more about what skills are available. It also allows players to list their skills, see what a change in a basic stat would have on their skills, compare their skills to another player, see where you stand in the Order ranking and several other features. It does not list every player and some players, especially the PK ones, can choose to hide their skills from public view.
