The Eight Statistics

Understanding what these do is probably just as important as understanding what skills you need to/want to train. In fact, these determine how well you perform in your various skills when you put them to use! So without further ado...

Strength: This is a measure of the character's physical power, and has a bearing on how much the character can carry without being burdened and your athletic abilities.

Vitality: High vitality means that the character can go for a longer amount of time before they begin to feel fatigued. This also effects your body's ability to fight off poisons and disease, as well as how much damage you can endure.

Agility: A measure of your flexibility and ability to move your body. This will aid in acrobatics as well as evading incoming attacks.

Coordination: A measure of how well you can move various parts of your body in tandem. This has a direct effect on various activities as disarming traps, stealing, and playing instruments.

Charisma: This is the measure of your characters personal charm, which does not necessarily include physical appearance. A high charisma will aid in getting more from selling commodities or items, as well as getting discounts from certain stores. This also has an effect on spellsongs and is paramount to many Guardian abilities. Along with all that, this stat contributes to your essence. Unlike other games...this is not a stat one should ignore!

Intellect: This measures your characters mental capacity. This stat will effect the rate at which you waste experience when draining your pool. This is also an important factor in magical spell power, and the amount of focus points that one has. Intellect is especially important for Mages.

Mentality: This measures the strength of one's mind. This has a direct bearing on the characters mental powers (psionics), the resistance to such powers, and the amount of focus points that the character has. Mentality is very important for Psionics in particular. Mentality is also a measure of how well you can handle stress and focus on a hard task, and therefore factors into many things, like healing wounds when you're injured or faced with the mortal peril of someone you are healing.

Perception: An indication of your character's awareness of their surroundings. With high perception, a character can finding hidden objects and people easier, as well as spot people sneaking around and stealing. Perception is also important in the use of most weapons, particularly ranged ones such as guns and bows.

To train any of these eight stats, you must first have some statistic training points, which you receive by earning experience. You will get one stat point for every 1200 experience points you earn. That is to say, actually putting them into your experience point total, rather than just getting experience points into your pool. You will also gain 25 stat points each time you level up.

You will spend these points at various training facilities that you can find. How much you spend depends on the current level of the statistic as well as your racial bonus/penalty in the specific stat. There is also a cap on how high each stat can be trained. The default cap is 100 in a stat, which is further adjusted by your racial bonuses/penalties in the stat, +/- 10 for each bonus/penalty point for training the stat. This cap is completely removed once the character reaches level 100.