by Tracy » Sat Feb 18, 2012 8:45 pm
If you could get your hands on some good +skill gear with some mana regen on it you could keep the 7 different skills, but you'd need to drop a little meditation to make it work (depending on what your gear looks like).
Aside from that, with a 120 cap in most skills now with the advent of power scrolls, you may want to rework it. The base magery skills, mage/med/eval/resist/wrestle you'll want to keep, and you'll have to find a different 6th skill, probably one to increase damage, survivability, or give you more versatility.
For survivability the primary option used to be parry, but they've changed the game so that for every point below 80 your dex is, that's 1 point of effectiveness you lose on parry, so if you have 120 parry and only 60 dex, your effective parry skill is 100.
I suggest damage/versatility. Spellweaving is a good standalone skill, as it gives you the ability to resurrect yourself ahead of time (keep gift of life up on yourself all the time), and word of death can hit bosses at low health for upwards of 500 damage with a level 6 arcane focus.
If you're more traditional like myself and don't really get into the new stuff as quickly, you might try inscription for your 6th skill, as GM inscription gives you an additional 10% spell damage increase on all your spells at all times in addition to any you have on your gear, and it also gives you the ability to make your own stuff (some of the craftables are really nice, like the scrapper's compendium).
Another option you could choose is poisoning, but that's more of a pvp-type template and you'd have to get a decent weapon and trade out wrestling for fencing or swordsmanship, and finding a weapon for a template like that is really hard (has to be spell channeling no penalty, have high hit chance increase, and has to have poisoning as one of it's primary or secondary abilities, like a kryss for example). But casting an explosion/ebolt on a dexxer, then having him run in on you only to get hit with level 6 lethal poison, is a pretty powerful combo. That was what I had on my red character.
If you want to go with 7 skills and go with a slightly different direction, necro/spirit speak are a really good combo. Spirit speak is to necromancy as eval is to magery, it directly affects damage. Magery and Necromancy affect your ability to successfully cast. So for that you'd have 120 eval and spirit speak, and maybe 105 magery and 90 necro to have a 100% chance to cast the spells you use most frequently. You'd probably sacrifice a bit of resist or meditation (or a little of both) to make it work, along with the +skill gear I mentioned earlier. The problem with these type of templates is if you lose the gear, the character is worthless.
There are other options I'm not as familiar with in terms of benefits because I've never used them, but some people make bushido mages for example...and since I've never looked at bushido, I have no clue what it does for you. Maybe someone else will reply to that.
But my current mage with a 700 cap on a new account will have a template of:
120 mage
120 med
120 resist
120 eval
120 wrestling
100 inscription
as my account ages, or if I get some really nice gear with +skill on it, I may amend the template to incorporate some focus (but always in increments of 20, 20 focus = 2 stam regen and 1 passive mana regen).
Hope that helps.
Basically, you have options, just need to go with what sounds interesting and figure out how to make it work.