| II. BECOMING
A WARRIOR MAGE F. COMBAT WITH WEAPONS AND MAGIC Your defenses are a very important part of combat as a Warrior Mage. Your choice of fighting style will dictate how you train your defensive skills, but in all cases, more is better. Even if you are one who likes to wear heavy plate armor and carry a shield, evasion skill is still vitally important to train. Evasion is the only defense that reduces the strength of an attack before it is applied to your other defenses. Parry skill comes into play when evasion skill is not enough. After parry comes shield skill and your last hope is to rely on your armor to protect you from harm. Warrior Mages are required to know a lot about one main weapon skill, and some about a second weapon skill. The secondary skill may be in the same group as the primary or a different group. So a Warrior Mage could train two edged skills, one edged and one ranged, or any combination. However, nothing but time and effort prevents a Warrior Mage from learning as many different weapon types as he or she likes. Different situations and opponents sometimes call for different weapons. Magical attacks take a bit more planning to get the most out of them. Preparing and targeting spells incur a penalty to your evasion skill. These penalties come in the form of a straight percentage cut to evasion. The penalty for preparing spells varies based on the spell, the mana used, and the mana you are able to channel into the spell at your full potential. It ranges all the way up to being 'perilously hindered.' The targeting penalty consistently cuts your evasion in half. It will not be readily apparent in the beginning of a Warrior Mage's career as there is not that much evasion skill to lose, but the penalties can be quite deadly when someone relies on large amounts of evasion skill to survive in a hunting area. Both penalties are said to decrease over the spell preparation time as the caster approaches either fully prepared to cast or fully targeted, but there is still some debate about this. Once those states are reached, the penalties are definitely removed. Once a Warrior Mage becomes able to cast spells without waiting for the full preparation time without backfiring, targeting right after preparing can eliminate the preparation penalty on a targeted spell. When someone begins to target a spell, all preparation for casting ceases, in addition to the preparation penalty. |