The Mog Blog

Hello those of you at the Mog Blog. :| I do apologize at the lack of attention I have been giving lately with the news but its been kinda slow as of late. So instead of posting something up for news, I figured I’ll lend some help for those of you that have purchased Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. I’m aware we haven’t dropped the review for this game yet but believe me, its good. It’s definitely worth the buy if you’re looking for another huge RPG. Skyrim’s fun and all but with the rampant bugs… you get the idea.

Kingdoms of Amular, a fantasy RPG brought to you by Big Huge Games and 38 Studios, is a huge game. One of the first major decisions you’re going to make is what character you will play and how there skills factor into what you plan to do. You are presented with 4 starting races with both male and female variety (finally a game where I like the female playable models). This is what today’s tip will be focused on, planning skills out for your character.

When you’re brought to the character creation screen, you are presented with 4 playable races. 2 Human types, the Almain and Varani, and 2 elf types, the Ljorsalfar and Dokkalfar. These races don’t really vary much besides which deities your character can follow at the start for permanent bonuses. The racial bonuses are as follows for skills. Each race also gains a deity to follow upon create but keep in mind, the bonuses may seem small at first but later they will be be more felt. Each bonus stacks upon other bonuses so keep your character type, rogue, warrior, or sorcery in mind when you’re creating your character. Experience however has no drawbacks… until you hit 40 and no longer level. :| Just pick something else (can’t respect deity).

Almain

• Persuasion +1
• Blacksmithing +2
• Alchemy +1

Varani

• Detect Hidden +1
• Mercantile +1
• Lockpicking +2

Ljosalfar

• Dispelling +2
• Sagecraft +1
• Alchemy +1

Dokkalfar

• Persuasion +1
• Stealth +2
• Sagecraft +1

As you can see, its a pretty decent spread for each race but the major issue when it comes to Skills is that after playing for a couple days, you’ve come to notice a few things about skills. Some are COMPLETELY useless. By completely useless, I mean that you really have no reason to even bother with them.

On that note, I will give you the basic rundown of these skills and which may be your best bet on surviving the land of Amalur though the game isn’t to difficult, even on hard. You have 40 Ability Points to allocate to these so plan accordingly. Your racial bonuses do not count towards this total as well as being able to train at each rank (Basic, Advanced, Master) once per skill for a total of +3 each skill. You just have to find the corresponding trainer.

Alchemy

• Increases chance to harvest reagents. Improves the your options for creating potions.

Blacksmithing

• Allows you to harvest crafting components from enemies. Improves options for creating gear. Increases effectiveness of Repair Kits.

Detect Hidden

• Allows you find hidden items, doors, enemies, disarm traps, etc. Increases the gold found.

Dispelling

• Decreases difficulty of dispelling protective wards on objects. Rank 4 removes dark sigils (instant fail).

Lockpicking

• Decreases difficulty in unlocking mechanical locks. Increases ability to force lock opens.

Mercantile

• Increases sell price, decreases buy price. Allows you to destroy items and gain gold from the item.

Persuasion

• Allow you to choose dialogue options that can lead to extra rewards or paths. Decreases Bride costs.

Sagecraft

• Crafting skill that allows you to create gems to socket in to items. Also increases the frequency of how many shards you can procure in the world.

Stealth

• Decreases site range of unaware enemies in stealth. Increases pickpocket success.

That covers all the skills in the game. Now that you have a pretty good idea of what each one does. Lets cut to chase on skills and my own opinions of what may be helpful for you.

Alchemy: Unlike Skyrim and a few other RPGs, you do not regen health in this game if you’re idle or out of combat. Therefore you will need to manually go to a healer or use potions to heal yourself. Mana on the other hand does regenerate over time. This skill is honestly essential in finding out the recipes for potions if you choose not to buy the recipes at stores. At level 16, you can go into the master rank and learn the final milestone to gain all recipes.

Blacksmithing: Early in the game, if materials drop well enough, this can be a value skill in which you can make your own equipment which will save you money but materials use space in your inventory. It’s fairly straight forward honestly but the biggest perk to this really is that you can name your own weapons. Blacksmithing covers all types of armors regardless of class/destiny.

Detect Hidden: Not going to lie, this skill is a downright necessity. With the perks you gain per milestone, even up to rank 5, its all going to help benefit you more. Using this in conjunction with Mercantile will do nothing more but fatten your coffers and give you a ridiculous amount of money to play around with. This is how you get your stuff.

Dispelling: Dispelling, when you get the mini game down, isn’t particularly difficult but the problem here is that if you fail these locks, you will take damage. Potions aren’t exactly falling off the trees everywhere you’re turning around so having to heal after every lock is just a pain in the ass. Rank 4 you gain the ability to remove the instant fail icons from the mini game so it would make things far easier. Besides that, I see no point past Rank 4 honestly.

Lockpicking: Lockpicking, to say the least, is completley useless. Lockpicks in the game aren’t expensive and even less so if you pick up the Mercantile skills. The mini game is easy enough to where you can open Very Hard locks with 0 skill so whats the point of even bothering with this? All you really need is a nice quantity of picks and you’re good to go. This skill is also whats upsets me about the Varani since its mostly a trash skill. Though Detect Hidden and Mercantile will help alleviate some of your pains.

Mercantile: This skill, coupled with Detect Hidden as I mentioned early causes you to just gain money at a vary fast rate. Even in higher ranks, you can throw items into your junk pool and receive a percentage of their value when you destroy them. This helps a lot when you are deep in a dungeon with minimal inventory with a lot of lower quality items sitting in your pack. The boon here however also is the fact you can buy and sell at better rates. Unlike Skyrim where each merchant has a set amount of gold to trade with, Amalur allows you to just sell everything to your hearts content.

Persuasion: This skill isn’t bad, it could be better though. It allows you to pick dialogue extra dialogue options with a chance of success that can lead to a few extras. Early on, you’d probably get a fair bit of mileage out of this but I don’t see a point in expanding very far with this skill.

Sagecraft: Your other crafting skill like Alchemy and Blacksmithing. The thing about this is that it has various uses. Far more than Blacksmithing honestly. It is also a redamndiculous method of gaining money early on as well. You can combine shards to create gems that can either be thrown into socketed equipment or sold off at a premium. The skill itself, like the other crafting skills allow you to gain shards more frequently as well so its just making things better for you.

With all that being said, I believe the main skills you should focus on are Detect Hidden, Sagecraft, and Mercantile. Oddly enough those are the skills that lead to higher income. Money makes the world go round they always say. You can max each of these out with just 7 skill points (+3 from trainers), so that’s 21/40 points spent. You have 19 more to distribute wherever you want so feel free to do so. Besides, when you have access to a Fateweaver, you can respec for a price to receive all your points back for a price (except racial bonuses and trainer points) . Keep this in mind that you can use this method to do a ton of crafting at once and then respec again to what you want to use in the field. This even applies to ability points so you can play a round a bit to find what is fun for you. My next tip will discuss character development and destinies.

The second part is now live and can be found here.