What career specing does for you character...

[Sentack]

Okay, I got my copy of the game and thumbed through the manual and for once, their's something in there that's actually interesting to know!

When you add a point into a career line, all baseline spells you have in that line get upgraded by one level. So, if your level 20, and you have 4 points into Line A, all associated skills in Line A are treated as if your character where level 24. Or so the manual implies.

In the end, this might mean that if you fully spec into a line, the 3-6 abilities you have associated with that line will be treated as level 55 spells, instead of level 40 spells. Remember, spells upgrade automatically as you level, all spells normally cast at your level unless they don't upgrade at all. (i.e. The PBAE Root in all 3 Range DPS Lines) Note, this is only for the baseline abilities they mention, I don't know about the abilities you can unlock in those lines.

Go to the WarDB to get an idea of how Spells/Abilities upgrade with your level. Then look at the career builder and see what lines are affect what spells. I figure it'll be important to learn this over time. Luckly, we can always respec for a modest cost.

[Gorgaz]

Sadly, this isn't quite the case.

After level 10, all spells only level-up normally on EVEN ranks through your teens, and stop doing so at level 25. This means that at lvl 11, you have one point to spend, so your normally level 10 ability can be upgraded up to level 11. So, at level 40, your normally level 25 skill is upgraded to level 40 with 15 points spent in a mastery.

[Rusby]

I have so much to learn about this game.

[Gisli]

One thing to be careful about. A lot of people come in with a mindset from DAOC about what absolute numbers mean. Maybe you think somehow that to land your spell "needs" to be the same level as the enemy. There is no reason to believe that the absolute number of the level has any intrinsic meaning. Presumably a "level 40" spell from full spec is noticeably better than its "level 25" counterpart. But that doesn't mean that "level 25" is useless just because of the magic number 25. Things should scale. In general, the "level 40" spell -- that is, a full mastery spec spell -- should do 40 or 50% more damage.

[Sentack]

Hrm, that's very interesting, so with no spec points spent, at level 40, all spells/abilities have reached a 'rank' of 25, we'll call it. So you have Level 40 characters with normally Rank 25 Spells. Then, if you 'fully' spec into a line, you can bump up those few abilities to rank 40? Okay that actually makes sense then, because the WarDB only lists spells up to rank 40, I figured they hadn't taken into consideration 'spec' yet, but I am wrong. How curious.

Thanks for the info. And it seems like in Warhammer, a spell is 'deflected' and not 'resisted', Hopefully to stop the confusion between a 'resisted/deflected' spell over spell resistance, which is damage reduction. But indeed, nice to see that the old rules of 'spell level' aren't true here.