Training a Trader
Basic Questions Stats Lore Skills Survival Skills Combat SkillsBasic Questions to Answer Before you Start
The first decision which will greatly influence how your life as a Trader is whether you want to become a good fighter, or whether you just want to fight enough to keep Imaar happy enough to let you circle. Either is an acceptable choice for a Trader, although one is obviously a much easier route to take than the other. Hunting as a Trader is very difficult; we do not have any abilities or magic to help with combat, and weapons are a tertiary set for us, making them very slow to learn. But anyone can roll up a barbarian or magic user and be a good fighter, if you really want to impress people, do it with style as a Trader.CHOOSING YOUR RACE
Another thing you must decide before rolling up your Trader, is what race you will be. The two main factors in your decision will be how you plan to train your stats, and what race you feel you would like to roleplay. Depending on your personal preference, each of these factors may not matter at all, may be the only thing that matters, or somewhere in between. Since what race you would like to roleplay is all a matter of opinion, and I can't really give you any advice there, I will give advice assuming that the only concern is for statistics. Here is a list of which races are, in my opinion, the best statistically for a Trader (note that some will go up or down on the list depending on whether you plan to hunt or not):ALTERNATE EXPERIENCE SYSTEM
When you are ready to start training your skills, you will want to decide whether you want to use the alternate experience system (AES). If you are unfamiliar with AES and would like a detailed explanation, click here. Personally, I love AES, so the training strategies in this guide are written from the point of view assuming you will be using AES. Some skills may be more or less difficult if you are not using AES.STATS
The first task to train your character is to train your stats. There is no "best" way to train your stats, and you cannot screw them up too badly because you will always get more TDPs later to fix any stat that you neglected at first. The first question you must ask yourself before training your stats is whether or not you plan to Hunt a lot for fun, or will you only hunt enough to satisfy the combat circling requirements. This choice will drastically affect how you should train your stats. If you do not plan on hunting: This will make your strategy much simpler. You will only need a total of 55 ranks of evasion ever, and 34 ranks of armor for level 30, plus 2 ranks of armor for every level past 30th. These requirements are very low, so you will spend very little time hunting. So reflex is basically useless for you. Agility will also be pretty useless, although it will still help you if you ever plan on opening boxes or practicing stealing. How important Strength and Stamina are to you will depend on how much weight you like to carry around, and how willing you are to deal with being unable to stand up at times. So you will want to spend enough TDPs on Strength and Stamina to carry your stuff, and then concentrate on Charisma and Mentals. And don't forget that discipline helps lots of things besides just learning. I'm not sure exactly what it helps, but the GMs who would know are always saying that people don't train it enough. The importance of Charisma is widely debated. Some Traders claim that it is a huge factor for how much money we make, while others claim that it doesn't come into play very heavily. I have never tested it, so I do not have a theory either way. I can tell you that charisma is my second lowest stat, after stamina (I have +2 to training it). I've always figured that TDPs are worth more than extra kronars, so I do not train it as high as some Traders, although I would not suggest neglecting too much. So now that you know which stats will be important for you, the decision is to decide which stats to spend your initial 600 TDPs on. Some people choose to train mentals heavily at first, in order to circle faster and quickly get TDPs to train physical stats. When your skills are low, mental stats won't affect your learning as much since your skills will be easy to learn anyways. And you can run into serious problems trying to train combat with too little Strength and Stamina and too much burden. What I would suggest is to train physical stats and charisma (if you believe in it) at first, and then concentrate on mental skills once your skills get high and start getting tough to learn. If you plan on being a hunting Trader: This makes your strategy much more complicated; you need to train everything. The best advice I can give is to train the stats that you figure you need the most at the moment, while keeping your stats more or less balanced according to the cost to train each stat for your particular race. I would suggest the initial strategy of training physical stats (and possibly charisma), and then letting your mentals catch up once your skills begin to get high. You can also probably neglect agility and reflex safely until you begin to hunt more difficult creatures. But eventually, you will probably want to keep your stats more or less balanced.Training Lore Skills
TEACHING - This skill is very difficult to learn, especially when you are brand new and have low scholarship. There is no trick to training this skill, it will probably be one of your hardest circling requirements to meet. Be glad that we only need 70 ranks of it for 30th circle and never need it again. You can learn teaching 2 ways, by teaching a class to other people, or by listening to someone teach teaching. It is easiest to learn by listening to others teach, until you have high enough skills that people will actually want to listen to you teach for long enough periods of time. Factors that contribute to how well you learn when someone teaches you are, with a complete guess at their order of importance:Training Survival Skills
HIDING - Hiding used to be one of the most difficult skills to learn in the game. This was because the timer for learning hiding is 2 or 3 minutes long, and each time you actually learn hiding, it will not teach that much. But AES has greatly alleviated this problem, and hiding is actually quite easy to learn on AES. Just hide every few minutes and you will have no trouble meeting the hiding circling requirement. Hiding can be a very useful skill, so if you are serious about training your hiding high, the best way to train it is by hiding in front of creatures and ambushing them. Any time you ambush a creature, this resets the hiding timer. STALKING - We have no stalking circling requirement, but it is a useful skill to learn. Learning stalking is much the same as hiding. There is a long timer, but you can reset the timer by ambushing. Or you can learn stalking quickly by using AES and stalking a person or NPC every few minutes. FIRST AID - We are only required to get this skill up to 10, although this is another useful skill that can save your life if you keep training it. First Aid is really easy to learn at first, the only problem will be finding a bleeding wound to tend. If you happen to get a light bleeder while hunting, you may want to keep it for a little while and train your first aid before getting it healed by an Empath. If you are not bleeding, you can always try finding someone who will let you tend their bleeding wound a few times. Good places to look are in the Empath guild or Cleric guild. Dead people are good to practice first aid on, because you're not going to mess up their wounds and kill them. CLIMBING - Climbing is a skill that is useless 99% of the time, but for certain areas you may need alot of climbing to get in. We are only required to get 10 climbing for our circling requirements. A great place to learn climbing up to 10 really quickly is the ladder into cave bears. To get there from the Stone Clan Trader outpost, you climb the trail, then go up, west, up, up, then go entrance and go crevice. Be careful though, cave bears have been known to occasionally make their way to the bottom of the ladder. PERCEPTION - We have a very low perception circling requirement, but more importantly, perception is a very useful skill for dealing with theft. There are four major ways to learn perception:Training Combat Skills
This part of the guide is the hardest to write, because combat is constantly tweaked and changes so much. When I was a new Trader, I grabbed a sturdy set of armor and went to crocodiles with 0 ranks in all my combat skills and I learned extremely fast. To try that now would probably be equal to suicide. So I cannot actually tell you what is a good place to hunt where you survive and learn quickly when you are new. Even if I did know, it may be different a week from now. If you are new to DragonRealms and completely unfamiliar with the combat system, you may want to try hunting ship's rats in the shipyard to get the hang of how to do combat. But if you are familiar with the combat system, I would suggest you make sure you have strong armor covering all of your body and try hunting something a little more difficult like goblins or cougars or wood trolls and such. Just try all the different creatures around the Crossing and see which ones will teach you evasion the best without beating you around too much. Fortunately, I can give you a little more specific advice on which armor or weapons you should choose to use. For armor, Traders can work down the hindrance of both leather and chain to 20% of its maximum hindrance. Leather will not be as protective, but you will be able to work off the hindrance faster. So leather is good if you only plan on hunting to meet the circling requirements. If you plan on being a hunting Trader you may want to consider using chain, which will be more protective once you get enough skill to work down the hindrance. Or even better, you can do like I do and train both leather and chain. For plate armor, we can only work the hindrance down to 50% of the maximum hindrance, which is always high for plate armor. I do not suggest you use plate unless you are really determined to use it. NOTE: Since writing this, armor hinderances were changed for all guilds, and the GMs won't tell us the new numbers. Traders' hinderances in leather and light chain have definitely gone down, most likely to around 5% in leather and maybe 10% in light chain. For weapons, it depends on whether you plan on hunting a lot, or just to circle. If you just want to circle, then you really only need 1 weapon to jab/parry with and gain balance while you dodge. Light Edge or Medium Edge are the best weapon types for this. If you will be hunting a lot, then you will want to train more than one weapon. Personally, I train 7 weapons and I still often get mindlocked in all 7 before I can kill all the creatures in the room, because of having Weapons as a tertiary skill set. Here are my opinions on what weapons are good ones to choose:MELEE
RANGED
WEAPON COMBOS
Balance is the key to combat in DragonRealms, so it is important to know which combinations of moves will help build your balance, and which will only help you fall flat on your face. Here are some of the best attack combinations that I know of: