No melee skillups against combat dummies?Follow

I still can't get in the game (hopefully next month!) to check on training dummies but here's some thoughts:

1. Old thread about skill up theory

2. Ancient thread about dual wield for skill ups

What we always did, and these two threads seem to support, is:

-fastest "trainer" weapon of the type you want to skill up
-easiest experience giving mob you can beat on
-if you dual wield, just put the low skill weapon in off-hand and play as normal through most regular content. Depending on situation tell your group "okay if I skill up ___________". I remember warriors doing this often when tanking in pick up group situations in which the group was easily handling the mobs.

I don't think combat dummies have ever worked for skilling melee, but beating on a mercenary in an arena does work.

check this: http://www.evilgamer.net/forums/showthread.php?t=8865

combat skills (casting, melee) cannot be raised in non-combat zones (GH, GL, PoK, etc.), however, non-combat skills still can be (mostly divination, conjuration, abjuration) along with alcohol tolerance, bind wound, etc.

In the past what I would do is find a pet class friend that has the AA Pet Hold and duel with them and beat on the held pet. Don't know if this still works or not but it's worth a try.

Several people have answered this, but here's the reason why: Combat skill attempts are based on the difficulty of the target you are swinging at. So attacking a grey mob (or non-combat NPC) will not grant skill increases, since the difficulty is too low. Spell skill attempts are based on the difficulty of the spell. So as long as you are casting a relatively recent spell (which you pretty much always are), you'll get skill increases. The only restriction is whether the game physically allows you to cast the spell (ie: doesn't give you some kind of illegal target, or you can't cast that here message). Doesn't matter if what you cast the spell on is affected by the spell or not, you can gain skill just from successfully casting the spell. Effect is meaningless.

Back in the day, one of the safest ways to increase evocation (safer than nuking yourself, which some people did) was to nuke mob corpses. They were legitimate targets for spells. And if the mob had a drop on it, the corpse would stick around for quite some time. Might be silly, but that's the logic (and at least part of the game mechanics) behind this.



Several people have answered this as well. Just find some relatively safe/easy mobs (green or lt blue), and go to town. It'll take some time, but honestly nowhere near the amount of time skill increases used to take. About 6 months ago or so, I got on a skill up kick, and raised my h2h skill on my paladin (cause why not, right?) from basically zero to max in about an hour or so in Hill of Shade. In that case though, I was fighting mobs that I could trivially handle at 6-8 at a time (while still lt blue no less!), so taking extra time to kill (a lot of extra time, although getting slays with your fists is somehow satisfying). Depending on class and level range, this may be more or less easy for you.

about the spell thing... sitting in the guild hot tub casting the lowest level spell possible for a given spell school will still give skill ups.

I often used the lowest level as I would be level 30ish with some spell school I finally got a useful spell in that drained half my mana to cast... so using a fire resist buff, a vision spell or such was way easier to spam as I could do it constantly.

I wouldn't be surprised if casting a higher level spell in some way improves the rate of getting the skill ups. Nor would I be surprised if it didn't.


The other thing is to make sure you aren't capped out for your level in a given skill. Having (ahem) wasted some time myself in the past by not noticing I had capped out this can be easy to do (especially if doing a 3-4 spell rotation for an hour sitting in the guild hot tub).

This absolutely works. I have a 85 mage and use her pet to advance melee and spells against for my other toons. Just /duel in any non PvP zone and melee your skills up.

You could go to a PvP zone; I used to do this in The Arena until a frontal lobe challenged arrested development headcase named Cheo showed up with a case of ****** and WTFPWN'd my Mage and Shadowknight. I presume his windowlicking mother ate paint chips after her brother got her pregnant with him...

Since then, I've moved on to use the use "hidden" area in Shadow Haven -- the one that teleports down to the class specific spell merchants and you click the tree to port out. It's non-PVP and out of the way so as to not SPAM chat windows.

Edited, Aug 27th 2015 4:01pm by nekokirei