Also, remember that the steps that I describe here are geared toward a PvP (Player vs Player) character. Although the characters described are very effective for adventuring purposes as well (if that's your thing). If you want to be a blacksmith or...I dunno...whatever else people who don't PvP do...this guide is not for you.

Most people will tell you to choose 50 magery and 50 resist as your starting skills. I disagree with this line of thought, however. My suggestion for starting skills is 50 magery and 50 healing. This applies to both a tank-mage and a dex-monkey. The purpose of healing on a dex monkey is obvious, and this skill is something of a bitch to raise up to 50. On a mage, however, the healing skill serves a different purpose. This is one of those skills you will build, only to have atrophy later. The reason you will want to start your tank-mage with 50 healing can be summed up in one word: money. No matter which character type you build, you are going to want as much resist as you can get. In this guide, I suggest macroing it (details below). However, because it is no longer possible to gain resist in town, damage now accompanies resist gain. This is where the healing skill becomes useful to a tank-mage in the early stages. One greater heal spell costs approximately 14-15 gp and uses up 11 mana points (hence, fewer resist gaining spells cast per unit time). One bandage costs 0.3 gp and no mana. Thus, by using the skill instead of the spell, you can save yourself tens of thousands of gp, and a little bit of time by being able to cast that extra spell with that saved mana.

The first thing you'll want to do with your new character is get some Sk1lLz (that's the obligatory dig at kewl speak, please disregard it). Have a friend give your newbie character about 1000-2000 gp. Using this gold, run around whatever town you start in, and buy skills from NPCs. This will cost you about 250-300 gp per skill, but it will also save you valuable macro time and get you over that "starting a new skill" hump.

Purchase as much as you can of the following skills:

• Magic Resist
• Wrestling
• Weapon skill (whatever you like, I prefer swords)
• Tactics

• Parry (optional, I like having a little extra wrestling, but to each his own)
• Anatomy

• Meditation
• DO NOT purchase Eval Int yet, that would simply add to the cost of resist-macro healing

Next, go buy yourself a crook (from any weapon shop) and get to your secure macro location. On your way there, find a rabbit (or other small creature) and tame it. Take the rabbit into your house and release it.

All of this should take you about 30 minutes to do. Do it just before you go to bed one night, because this is where the macroing starts.

Set up a macro to use the crook, target the rabbit, then target the rabbit again. In UOE (not that I use it), the macro looks like:

1. Last object
2. Last target
3. Last target

You will have already purchased about 25 resist from an NPC, and after macroing herding, you will have 100 str. This will make what's coming up MUCH faster (because you'll have to heal less).

Before you start, get yourself about 200-300 of each fire field reagent (BP, SA, and SS for those who don't look in their spellbooks), a shitload (a shitload is a quantity of indefinite, but very large size) of bandages, and a horse. Start casting fire fields and RUNNING through them. Run back and forth, trying to squeeze as much damage out of each fire field that you can. Once you are near death, step out of the field and start a bandage. Apply bandages until you are back to full health, then repeat. If you want to gain a few extra skill points during this time, try to meditate a few times while you are running through the field. Using this method, you can easily reach 50-55 resist in just a couple of hours (watch a movie while you do it, it helps the time pass faster).

This will be the last time you really look at this character for several weeks, except to set up a macro. Once you reach approximately 55 resist, it's time to start spending some money. Go out and purchase as many fireball reagents as you can find (no matter how many you find, it will not be enough) as well as all the spools of thread you can get. Turn the thread into cloth, and take it all back to your house.

Now to set up your macro. I used EZmacros for all of my character development, and found it to be very effective, but any program which records keystrokes and mouse events will be fine. Put all the cloth on the ground near your character, empty his/her backpack of everything except scissors, and put all the fireball reagents you can into his/her backpack. From this point forward, you will be macroing 3 skills simultaneously: Resist, Magery, and Meditation. Set your scissors as your last object (by double-clicking them) and begin recording. Cast fireball a number of times equal to the maximum number you can cast plus 1 (i.e. if you have 32 INT, cast fireball 4 times). The extra cast corrects for any fizzles that may happen, and insures that your mana is as low as possible. As soon as you are done casting, attempt to meditate, then start a bandage. At this point, you do not want your character to do any active meditating. This way, you get maximum meditation skill gain. Use last object, and cut 2 or 3 bandages. Apply bandages and keep attempting to meditate until you are back to full health and mana, and end the macro. Don't worry about cutting too many bandages or wasting them. You cannot apply a bandage when you are at full health, and your backpack can only hold about 400 of them. Thus, bandages and cloth are never wasted, making this part of the macro self-correcting (this is why I love the healing skill).

Change spells in your resist macro according to the following guidelines:

• 55-70: Fireball
• 70-80: Lightning Bolt
• 80-92: Energy Bolt
• 92-100: Flamestrike

Please note, these are guidelines, not constants. Change spells when you think your gains are coming too slowly.

This general set of instructions can be applied to your resist macro all the way up to GM with almost no changes. However, once you get to energy bolt, I recommend that you do NOT allow yourself to reach full mana before ending the macro. It is statistically unlikely that you will succeed in casting EB 6 times in a row (because we are not macroing magery, fizzles will be fairly common with EB), but it does happen. Once you start casting EB, change the above instructions to read "Apply bandages and keep attempting to meditate until you are back to full health, then end the macro." You will usually have about 60 mana by the time you reach full health after a series of EB's. Without eval int, 3 EBs are not likely to kill you. Not dying is a vital part of every resist macro.

One more note: When you get to energy bolt, attempt to apply one additional bandage after you have reached full health. This will correct for any large runs of heavy damage that may occur

Once you have reached GM resist using this method, it is very likely you will also have GM meditation and magery in the high 90's. Now you get to macro the most boring skill that you must have: Evaluate Intelligence. There really is no "good" way of doing this, and macroing is really the only viable way to reach GM. Fortunately, there are tricks you can use to raise Eval Int at the same time as your other skills. Read on.

At this point, you should give up on the healing skill. Stop using it altogether, or it will never atrophy. Fortunately, by raising other skills, you will encourage the atrophy of this one, as long as you don't use it.

Now it's time to start working on you combat skills. Before you do this, however, buy 25 Eval Int from an NPC. If you are willing to use UOE, you can quite easily work on your Eval Int while raising your fighting skills. Here's how:

1. Buy a horse
2. Create a UOE object called "horse"
3. Set this object as your horse
4. Create a UOE macro as follows:
   1. Use Skill: Eval Int
   2. Target object:Horse
5. Start UOloop, and set it to run this macro at a delay of approx 12000 ms
6. Mount your horse and go about your business

With this macro running, you can work your Eval Int without any thought while you raise your combat skills, thus saving yourself a little extra macro time. If you oppose UOE, however, you can get the same effect by using Eval Int on whatever you are fighting at the time.

Get yourself a good set of bone armor and a few store bought weapons of your choice. Head to Deceit, and fight the regular skeletons on Level 1. These creatures will raise fighting skills into the 60's or 70's fairly quickly, as well as provide you with fresh sets of bone armor for later. A tank mage's combat skills rise a little slower than a dex-monkey's (due to the slower swing rate), but combat skills in general rise very quickly. Make sure to work on wrestling as well while you're here. Wrestling is vital to a mage, and it rises according to the same rules as all other combat skills. You might also try summoning the occasional Elemental while you do this, in order to push your magery a little closer to GM.

Once you have reached about 70 wrestling and (other combat skill), go down to Level 4 of Deceit and fight the fire elemental. I recommend this creature because:

1. There is usually very little competition for it
2. It deals out less damage than an Earth Elemental
3. With your GM resist, the spells it casts will pretty much bounce off of you
4. Only one creature spawns at a time, lowering your chances of getting boxed in by monsters (or morons) and dying if lag gets bad.

After a couple evenings of fighting elementals and skeletons (while working eval int), you should be at GM tactics, and mid-nineties wrestling and (other combat skill). While it is better to have these skills at GM, they will eventually work up to there without any special attention from you (although the Fire Elemental will get you to GM if you want to spend the time to do so). Once you reach this point, you're in the home stretch.

Spend your daily macro time working on Eval Int (using the pet bunny you got back when you first created this character) and magery. Set up a macro to cast the elemental of your choice (there is still debate about which one is the best, but they all work), then use Eval Int on the bunny. This will take a few days (maybe even weeks), but eventually, you'll wake up (or come home) to find yourself with 100.0 Eval Int, 100.0 Magery, 100.0 Meditation, 100.0 Magic Resistance, 100.0 Tactics, 100.0 (combat skill), and 100.0 Wrestling. The perfect tank-mage.

Enjoy this while you can, because one of these days you're going to hit you old hiding macro by accident, and lose a weeks worth of Eval Int in a matter of 0.5 seconds. But that's okay, because your character will still kick ass.

A mediocre dex-monkey can be created and out in the streets in less than a week. But that's not the type of character we're going to talk about. This describes the creation of the ideal dex-monkey. By that, I mean a dex-monkey with GM resist and master magery in addition to the typical dex-monkey skills. The GM resist part will actually take longer for a dex-monkey than a mage (thanks to lack of meditation), but it's worth every minute.

The basics of this character are the same as a tank-mage. However, instead of eval int or meditation, anatomy should be macroed in additon to resist and during combat skill building. Use the UOE method described above while you are running through fire fields (on a horse) to help speed up the building of your anatomy.

A perfect dex-monkey would have the following skills:

• 100 combat skill
• 100 Tactics
• 100 Anatomy
• 80< Healing
• 100 Magic Resist
• 90 Magery
• 100 Parrying

Some people would argue against the 90 magery, but I don't know what else those people would use those skill points for, unless it's a second combat skill (which I think is pointless). The value of that magery to a monkey becomes apparent, however, once you greater heal your way through a 2 mage mana dump. With this much magery, you can also become intimately acquainted with the Invisibility spell (since you're not going to have the hiding skill).

Most of these skills are covered under the tank-mage section, but for those that aren't:

Anatomy: Macro, macro, macro. This skill is for dex-monkeys what Eval Int is for mages. It's a pain in the ass to build, but you have to have it if you want to be effective.

Healing: This skill will reach approximately 58 during resist macroing. Up to 80, use bandages to cure poison. Set yourself up in the Deceit poison pits and macro walking and curing. You will seldom survive the night (I kill people macroing this way all the time), but bandages are cheap, so there's no great loss. After you reach 80, kill a friend and convince him to let you attempt to resurect his ghost (not necessarily in that order). With the new adjusted healing times, you can attempt this many times in a shorter period. Simply have your friend cancel the resurection menu when you succeed, and macro all night long. The skill rises very quickly using this method.

Parrying: In my opinion, GM parrying is a myth, much like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster. Lots of people claim to have seen it, but I think they're full of shit. Nonetheless, OSI claims they are going to make this skill useful (kinda like they were going to eliminate town-fighting and revamp alchemy, but I digress). To gain this skill, just wear a shield while you are working on your combat skills. The fire elemental will take you up to 60 fairly easily. Beyond that, Batlin has written an essay for Stratics that might give you a few pointers. I personally think Parrying could be sacrificed for wrestling, to make that emergency heal or recall a little more possible, but that's your prerogative Because most dex-raising skills raise int as well, the dex part of a dex-monkey requires a little extra macroing. To gain back that dex after anatomy and magery/resist have destroyed it, use the so-called "fletching bug". This involves double clicking a pile of feathers, targeting a shaft, and canceling the menu which results. This skill will cap around 40 and will take you 100 dex (if you want it). The 40 skill points are a waste, but dex-monkeys have skill points to waste.

The only other issue with the creation of a dex-monkey is how to set your stats. I suggest you have 100 STR, 85 DEX, and 40 INT. The 40 INT allows you to gate in a pinch and gives you 4 greater heals in a about 30 seconds, which is more than enough to survive a mana dump or two.

Just remember, it's all worthwhile once you hear the death cry of your opponent.

Happy hunting!

  This guide was created by Bairn MacBroeden of the Baja shard.