Ever since the inception of the new stat system in Avendar (February,2004) a lot of people have come to ask a multitude of questions concerning the stats. What are their uses? Is training a certain stat over another particularly useful? What are the roleplaying implications with the stats? Charisma is useful now?

This guide will try to answer most of the fundamental questions, and will try to help you understand which stats are important to whom, and why. A more indepth explanation of the different attributes will also be offered, to help clarify newcomers to the stat system.

The first place you should probably start is of course, the help files. The applicable files you should probably read are help stats and help stat changes . You can also read these files by clicking on the following links:

Help Stats
Help Stat Changes

Note: I use the words skills and spells interchangeably. Most everything applies to both, in these circumstances. The exception is save vs spell.

So, let's start with some very common misconceptions. There seems to be a universal confusion on skill to stat dependencies. Whenever you access the help file on a certain skill, players are typically given the primary attributes of that skill. For example, the helpfile for hide lists wisdom as the primary attribute. But what does that really mean?

Does this mean that my chances for a successful hide is based off of wisdom? Not necessarily. These primary attributes are actually the modifiers for your practice rates at your guildmaster. For example, since hide is based off of wisdom, you would gain more percentage points when you practice hide at your guild as your wisdom increased. This applies to all of the skills and spells within the game. If a skill has two primary attributes, then your percentage-per-practice gains depend on both stats.

So now we return to the question of skill success rates based on stats. While every skill works differently, there is always a primary starting point for every successful roll: Your skill/spell percentage. Your percentage governs all of the initial success rates, after that, depending on the skill, a second (or any number of) variable is used to determine success rates. Typically, a little thinking can apply here, but some factors are more subtle then others.

For instance, the success rate of hide is based entirely on your skill percentage. Wisdom has nothing to do with the actual rate. Remember, primary attributes listing in the help files are for practice gains only. Another skill, dodge, is obviously based off your dexterity stat. It makes sense that the faster you are, the better you should be able to dodge, right?

There are a lot of skills like this, where a stat is actually figured into the success (and sometimes, defending against) rates. However, none of these figures are actually listed anywhere, and are usually left to the player for discovering (we might actually post a guide for the more common and obvious ones).

For the most part, this is all you need to know about stats in correlation with skills. Next, we'll move onto the individual stats and their uses, and how they should concern your class.