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Negative Effects of Cross-Class Practicing

Posted: Mon Apr 21, 2008 4:11 pm
by Vortenos
How does the negative effects of cross-class practicing work? What actually happens? How much can you train in another class before it hurts you?

I ask this trying to figure out how much weapon skill and cross-class spells I can do. I see posts warning of prac'ing too much, but no description of the penalty.

Re: Negative Effects of Cross-Class Practicing

Posted: Mon Apr 21, 2008 5:49 pm
by Azazello
Most things are 'decided' using your effective level.

You effective level has classes though, something like mage, cleric, shaman, warrior, thief
Each char has X amount of pracs and real level.

You put your pracs in skills and depending on your stats, skills difficulty you get soem output.

When you put pracs in some class, your effective levels change. For example you start as noone. Put 200 out of 300 pracs in warrior and 100 pracs in mage. Ignoring the skills levels and difficulty we can say that you are 2/3 warrior and 1/3 mage.

This means your char of level 55 == real level 28, is something like level 19-20 warrior and level 8-9 mage.

The effect of your spells for example is then something like: % in the skill * effective_level_factor.

This means everything matters. You race,your stats, your max possible pracs in certain skills, your total pracs and most important the way you put your pracs!

Correct me, i bet i made some mistakes and forgot something.

Re: Negative Effects of Cross-Class Practicing

Posted: Mon Apr 21, 2008 6:44 pm
by Caerroil
How the penalty manifests itself is "simple", pracs in all non class A skills/spells will make your skills/spells in class A less good (it will also affect your OB, hps, moves and mana which can be good or bad depending on what your main class is and what you pracced).
How big the effect will be is a much more complex question to answer. It depends on what your main class is, what class the skill/spell you prac outside your main class is, its level and how many pracs you put in it and the total amount of pracs you have.

Code: Select all

     Warrior
   /        \
Scout       Cleric
   \        /
      Mage
The further away in the above figure a class is the more effect pracs will have on the original class. (The two closest classes doesn't have an equal effect either, scout pracs affect warriors less than cleric pracs for example.)

Regarding your specific situation where you start out as a caster and want to get some warrior skills and cross-class spells: Some 5-10 pracs in warrior skills won't have a big effect on legend level and it is very common to have around 30 pracs in cross-caster spells. Staying as pure as possible does have advantages, until you reach really high levels, but the added versatility is generally considered to far outweigh the negative effects of not being 100% pure. (Casters with 5 pracs in warrior skills and 30 in cross-caster class are generally considered to be pure casters.)

Edit: If you want to test something don't be afraid to do so, MUMEs prac system is highly forgiving since you can get your pracs back by doing "train off <skill/spell>" and after some time you will have forgotten all about that skill/spell and regained the practice sessions you had spent in it. This enables you to test out things without any risk of ruining the character for more than a few days or perhaps a week (if you spent a lot of pracs in a hard to learn skill) while pracs decay.

Re: Negative Effects of Cross-Class Practicing

Posted: Mon Apr 21, 2008 7:31 pm
by Vortenos
Excellent answers! Thank you.

Re: Negative Effects of Cross-Class Practicing

Posted: Mon Apr 21, 2008 7:37 pm
by Wobbler
The effects of a skill drop also depends on the class of the skill .
A 5% decrease in a weapon skill gives -1 ob regardless of level, which equals the effect of losing 0.2 effective levels as a warrior and can be ignored.
A 5% decrease in a spell at level 25 equals the effect of losing 1.25 effective levels. At level 50, it equals the effect of losing 1.375 effective levels.

The effects of endurance, sneak and backstab are level-dependant; I am uncertain about bash.

Re: Negative Effects of Cross-Class Practicing

Posted: Tue Apr 22, 2008 8:33 pm
by Elestir
Caerroil wrote:

Code: Select all

     Warrior
   /        \
Scout       Cleric
   \        /
      Mage
This picture is bit misleading. Following table gives better idea about the "distances", but it is only a rough approximation.

For whities:

Code: Select all

          Warrior   Thief    Cleric    Mage
Warrior      1       1/2      1/3      1/4
Thief       1/2       1       1/4      1/3
Cleric      1/3      1/4       1       1/2
Mage        1/4      1/3      1/2       1
For darkies:

Code: Select all

          Warrior   Scout   Shaman
Warrior      1       1/2      1/3
Scout       1/2       1       1/3
Shaman      1/3      1/3       1

Re: Negative Effects of Cross-Class Practicing

Posted: Wed Apr 23, 2008 7:47 am
by Caerroil
An important thing to consider when it comes to multi-classing is how dependant on a high knowledge a skill/spell is to work properly. Some skills more or less only work if you have a very high knowledge in them, skills like sneak and backstab will be quite poor with less than 101% in them and even 101% won't be good. Then there are some skills that depend relatively little on the knowledge, like weaponskills where you get +20 OB from 100% in them and +10 OB from 50%.
Another thing that is a big part in deciding if a particular combination of classes is viable are the stats needed for such a combination. Classes with similar stat requirements will obviously be easier to combine while classes with very different stat requirements will be much harder.

The above gives a few common combinations that work well (scout+warrior, mage/cleric+warrior, cleric+mage), some that work ok (warrior+mage, scout+mage, warrior+mage+cleric) with some effort and some that more or less doesn't work at all (scout+cleric). Some combinations seem unlikely to work from the figure/table in the posts above but due to combining skills/spells that doesn't require high knowledge and decently compatible stats they do work quite well, mage+warrior is one of those and the most common combo.
What I mean with combo above isn't a warrior with bob or a cleric with some missile but rather a combination of the main abilities of the classes. Just adding one skill/spell can at times be much easier, when the skill/spell works even with a low knowledge in it.

Re: Negative Effects of Cross-Class Practicing

Posted: Fri Apr 25, 2008 6:25 pm
by Irileyh
Most people say that cleric-scouts don't work in the slightest, but I tested it out a bit with Syd. It isn't really the best at all, but with +4 attack at level 35, i solo'd Muranog by blinding/stabbing. It wasn't worth the regen though. But! It is possible!

Re: Negative Effects of Cross-Class Practicing

Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 1:11 pm
by morholt
well, if you put stats more aggressive for cleric kind it would even work better ;-)

Re: Negative Effects of Cross-Class Practicing

Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 6:46 pm
by Maulpaw
My thief pracced i think 8 cure serious and 12 remove poison or maybe exchange those numbers. Anyways. I think my backstab went from 100 to 95, and i'd say i notice quite the difference. So I am praccing off some spells.

Re: Negative Effects of Cross-Class Practicing

Posted: Wed Apr 30, 2008 8:41 am
by Maulpaw
For all you who don't know how effective 'train off' is I decayed 12 pracs in about 20 hours. I decayed all my remove poison and a great deal of cure serious that i was still using. Probably some parry too.

Re: Negative Effects of Cross-Class Practicing

Posted: Wed Apr 30, 2008 9:24 am
by Orix
Well that depends. From what I experienced it is quicker for a warrior to decay non-warrior skills. It would take some time to train off a superb trained warrior skill, but it would be much quicker to train off cures etc.

Re: Negative Effects of Cross-Class Practicing

Posted: Sat Jun 07, 2008 2:34 am
by Aximander
The "class distance" formula is still in effect? I remember in the past (Mume 6 and before?) a warrior required 4 pracs in a magespell to get the same progress as 1 prac by a mage, 2 pracs in a thief skill to get the same progress as a thief, etc., but thought that the concept of class distance had disappeared with removal of pre-selected classes. So currently cross-class pracs affect skill percentages differently depending on the classes involved?

I learn something new every day!

Re: Negative Effects of Cross-Class Practicing

Posted: Sat Jun 07, 2008 8:01 am
by Caerroil
Yes, there is a version of the "class distance" formula in effect, though it is more complex now since the difficulty of the skill/spell also has an effect. But yes, for every class skills/spells from other classes has varying effect on the original class.

Re: Negative Effects of Cross-Class Practicing

Posted: Sat May 16, 2009 6:49 pm
by Numi
Quick clarification: does cross-training more difficult skills dilute prime class more or less than less difficult skills?

Re: Negative Effects of Cross-Class Practicing

Posted: Sun May 17, 2009 3:37 pm
by Elestir
It should be only about number of practices spent in other guilds. After all "more difficult" skills usually need more practice sessions to spend on them to be learned well enough.

Re: Negative Effects of Cross-Class Practicing

Posted: Sat Oct 24, 2009 4:05 am
by dunmir
So a question lets say ive got my cleric, and ive got a few mage skills armour, shield, det,block,chant,charm so about 53 pracs how badly do you think it would hurt my cleric skills which is mostly max and would my mage skills be usefull at level 30? aka can I charm eagle and lion?