georgemarvin2001
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Hi. I see that there isn't a guide specifically for the resist skill, which is one of the most important in the game, and one of the hardest to train, so I figured I will write one. Here goes:
First, and I can't stress this enough, use advanced in the character creation menu, and create the character with 50 resist to begin with. It doesn't matter what your template is, it's going to be the first skill you need to train. Well, you might make an exception for Alchemy, since it costs a ton of regs. But even then, it should be the 2nd skill.
The big reason for training it early is, as any veteran player will tell you, that resist is the most difficult skill in the game to train if you're at the skill cap. If you're already at skill cap and suddenly figure out that you need to GM magic resist, it will take 20 mages casting flamestrikes on you constantly 24/7 for a couple of days. If you don't have a large guild that's willing to help you out for an extended period of time, your character can probably never train it by normal gameplay. I still use my first character, but he didn't train it early, and has been stuck at 75.1 for literally years. After that experience, I learned that if you don't train resist first, you'll probably never be able to do it.
When you've got a new character, it's a fairly painless skill to train, though. It just takes a little patience and a lot of reagents.
Enough chit-chat, let's get on with the guide.
Lock everything but resist as soon as you create the character.
Use the button on the skills menu that says "show real"
Now, you need to either get a friend to start casting lightning or set up a macro with another character. I use another account, run 2 clients, and have a little razor macro set up for the mage who's doing the casting:
CastSpell Lightning (#30)
Wait for Target
Absolute Target
Pause 1.00sec
CastSpell Lightning (#30)
Wait for Target
Absolute Target
UseSkill Meditation
Pause 17.00sec
CastSpell Greater Heal (#29)
Wait for Target
Absolute Target
Pause 1.00sec
All you'll have to do for most of this macro is just go to the Razor macro tab, click record, and hit your new character with 2 lightning bolts, use meditation skill, then hit him with a greater heal. But the pauses are VERY important, and you have to add those manually. In order to set up the pauses, you'll have to right click in the Razor macro window, click "constructs", then set the pause for 17000 for 17 seconds, 1000 for 1 second.
Note that you meditate before casting the greater heal. It's a safety precaution, just to make sure you've got enough mana when you cast the greater heal, so you won't accidentally run out of mana and kill your new character.
Basically, just load up your mage with 150 garlic, 150 ginseng, 150 spider silk, 450 mandrake root and 300 sulfurous ash, then find a nice, safe spot, start the macro, then go do whatever for an hour or so, and when you come back, your new character should be at 65.1 real skill. If not, just rinse and repeat. If you need to conserve resources, check in regularly, so you can stop the macro when you've maxxed out the skill gain; you can NOT gain past 65.1 REAL skill with lightning.
Now, you'll have to do the macro over with e-bolts. Load up with 300 each garlic, ginseng, spider silk, mandrake root, black pearl and nightshade. Turn on the macro. Go eat, drink and be merry for a couple of hours or so, while your reagents go poof.
CastSpell Energy Bolt (#42)
Wait for Target
Absolute Target
UseSkill Meditation
Pause 17.00sec
CastSpell Greater Heal (#29)
Wait for Target
Absolute Target
Pause 1.00sec
This will take your character to 85 resist.
Now, There are two alternatives: The first is to switch to Flamestrike. Load up with 500 garlic, ginseng, sulfurous ash, and mandrake root, and 1000 spider silk, turn on the macros, and go watch TV or something for a couple of hours or so.
Flamestrike is the same setup as energy bolt, just increase the pause from 17 seconds to 25 seconds, and increase the delay after Greater Heal to 5 seconds. That way, the mage keeps his mana up to 100% for each cast, minimizing the chance that you'll come back to see your new character going ooOOoOo.
CastSpell Flamestrike (#51)
Wait for Target
Absolute Target
UseSkill Meditation
Pause 25.00sec
CastSpell Greater Heal (#29)
Wait for Target
Absolute Target
Pause 5.00sec
Edited: It has been called to my attention that there is a second, possibly better method for gaining from 85 to 100: Using mana vampire costs about a third less regs than my old method of flamestrike and heal. Unfortunately, two of the regs that it uses are black pearl and blood moss, which cost more than the regs used in the flamestrike method, so you don't actually save any gold, but you may save a little time, since healing costs mana.
Regs needed: about 500 each of black pearl, blood moss, mandrake root, spider silk
macro:
CastSpell Mana Vampire (#53)
Wait for Target
Absolute Target
UseSkill Meditation
Pause 22.00sec
Now, your character should be at 100 Resisting Spells, and you're ready to train some of the easier and more fun stuff.
Your characters have now been hard at work for about 5-8 hours, and you've spent about 5,000 reagents just to GM one skill. But you've only had to check on them, change macros and re-stock reagents 3 times, each of which just took a couple of minutes.
FAQ:
1. Why not have the character do the casting on him/herself? Well, the closer you are to 700 skill points, the harder it is to gain. If you're casting on yourself, that means you will need both magery and meditation at GM so you can consistently cast energy bolts without failing, and won't have to wait forever for mana to recharge, plus you'll need Evaluate Intelligence at close to GM because of the way damage and resist is calculated, before you can get past 65 resist. Which means that you're going to need several times as many regs, and it will take several times as long to GM resist. The benefit is that you're raising magery, med, and Eval Int at the same time that you're gaining resist, so it's an option to consider. Personally, I would rather raise them afterward, because they are all easy skills to raise. You can actually play the game and get them all to GM just running around killing monsters or other players in a matter of hours.
2. Won't it be faster if you have more than one character casting? Sure. If you've got some friends, or GM mages on all 3 of your other accounts, you can GM resist on your new character in a lot shorter time period. I just used one mage in the instructions for simplicity. Just make sure to stagger the macros; you don't want to get hit by multiple flamestrikes simultaneously.
First, and I can't stress this enough, use advanced in the character creation menu, and create the character with 50 resist to begin with. It doesn't matter what your template is, it's going to be the first skill you need to train. Well, you might make an exception for Alchemy, since it costs a ton of regs. But even then, it should be the 2nd skill.
The big reason for training it early is, as any veteran player will tell you, that resist is the most difficult skill in the game to train if you're at the skill cap. If you're already at skill cap and suddenly figure out that you need to GM magic resist, it will take 20 mages casting flamestrikes on you constantly 24/7 for a couple of days. If you don't have a large guild that's willing to help you out for an extended period of time, your character can probably never train it by normal gameplay. I still use my first character, but he didn't train it early, and has been stuck at 75.1 for literally years. After that experience, I learned that if you don't train resist first, you'll probably never be able to do it.
When you've got a new character, it's a fairly painless skill to train, though. It just takes a little patience and a lot of reagents.
Enough chit-chat, let's get on with the guide.
Lock everything but resist as soon as you create the character.
Use the button on the skills menu that says "show real"
Now, you need to either get a friend to start casting lightning or set up a macro with another character. I use another account, run 2 clients, and have a little razor macro set up for the mage who's doing the casting:
CastSpell Lightning (#30)
Wait for Target
Absolute Target
Pause 1.00sec
CastSpell Lightning (#30)
Wait for Target
Absolute Target
UseSkill Meditation
Pause 17.00sec
CastSpell Greater Heal (#29)
Wait for Target
Absolute Target
Pause 1.00sec
All you'll have to do for most of this macro is just go to the Razor macro tab, click record, and hit your new character with 2 lightning bolts, use meditation skill, then hit him with a greater heal. But the pauses are VERY important, and you have to add those manually. In order to set up the pauses, you'll have to right click in the Razor macro window, click "constructs", then set the pause for 17000 for 17 seconds, 1000 for 1 second.
Note that you meditate before casting the greater heal. It's a safety precaution, just to make sure you've got enough mana when you cast the greater heal, so you won't accidentally run out of mana and kill your new character.
Basically, just load up your mage with 150 garlic, 150 ginseng, 150 spider silk, 450 mandrake root and 300 sulfurous ash, then find a nice, safe spot, start the macro, then go do whatever for an hour or so, and when you come back, your new character should be at 65.1 real skill. If not, just rinse and repeat. If you need to conserve resources, check in regularly, so you can stop the macro when you've maxxed out the skill gain; you can NOT gain past 65.1 REAL skill with lightning.
Now, you'll have to do the macro over with e-bolts. Load up with 300 each garlic, ginseng, spider silk, mandrake root, black pearl and nightshade. Turn on the macro. Go eat, drink and be merry for a couple of hours or so, while your reagents go poof.
CastSpell Energy Bolt (#42)
Wait for Target
Absolute Target
UseSkill Meditation
Pause 17.00sec
CastSpell Greater Heal (#29)
Wait for Target
Absolute Target
Pause 1.00sec
This will take your character to 85 resist.
Now, There are two alternatives: The first is to switch to Flamestrike. Load up with 500 garlic, ginseng, sulfurous ash, and mandrake root, and 1000 spider silk, turn on the macros, and go watch TV or something for a couple of hours or so.
Flamestrike is the same setup as energy bolt, just increase the pause from 17 seconds to 25 seconds, and increase the delay after Greater Heal to 5 seconds. That way, the mage keeps his mana up to 100% for each cast, minimizing the chance that you'll come back to see your new character going ooOOoOo.
CastSpell Flamestrike (#51)
Wait for Target
Absolute Target
UseSkill Meditation
Pause 25.00sec
CastSpell Greater Heal (#29)
Wait for Target
Absolute Target
Pause 5.00sec
Edited: It has been called to my attention that there is a second, possibly better method for gaining from 85 to 100: Using mana vampire costs about a third less regs than my old method of flamestrike and heal. Unfortunately, two of the regs that it uses are black pearl and blood moss, which cost more than the regs used in the flamestrike method, so you don't actually save any gold, but you may save a little time, since healing costs mana.
Regs needed: about 500 each of black pearl, blood moss, mandrake root, spider silk
macro:
CastSpell Mana Vampire (#53)
Wait for Target
Absolute Target
UseSkill Meditation
Pause 22.00sec
Now, your character should be at 100 Resisting Spells, and you're ready to train some of the easier and more fun stuff.
Your characters have now been hard at work for about 5-8 hours, and you've spent about 5,000 reagents just to GM one skill. But you've only had to check on them, change macros and re-stock reagents 3 times, each of which just took a couple of minutes.
FAQ:
1. Why not have the character do the casting on him/herself? Well, the closer you are to 700 skill points, the harder it is to gain. If you're casting on yourself, that means you will need both magery and meditation at GM so you can consistently cast energy bolts without failing, and won't have to wait forever for mana to recharge, plus you'll need Evaluate Intelligence at close to GM because of the way damage and resist is calculated, before you can get past 65 resist. Which means that you're going to need several times as many regs, and it will take several times as long to GM resist. The benefit is that you're raising magery, med, and Eval Int at the same time that you're gaining resist, so it's an option to consider. Personally, I would rather raise them afterward, because they are all easy skills to raise. You can actually play the game and get them all to GM just running around killing monsters or other players in a matter of hours.
2. Won't it be faster if you have more than one character casting? Sure. If you've got some friends, or GM mages on all 3 of your other accounts, you can GM resist on your new character in a lot shorter time period. I just used one mage in the instructions for simplicity. Just make sure to stagger the macros; you don't want to get hit by multiple flamestrikes simultaneously.
