If you are new to Role Playing Games (RPGs), you might not be familiar with the term MANA. Mana is a type of energy that your character needs to use certain skills and is expended (used up) when you use those skills. The more advanced skills can be purchased and can either enhance other skills or are more powerful than the basic skills that you have when you start the game. Your basic skills require no mana at all, but many of these higher skills need mana (energy) to work. The blue bar at the upper left of the screen shows how much mana your character has. As you use a skill that requires mana, your mana level will decrease, and the blue bar will decrease to show this. If it gets too low, you won't be able to use that skill anymore until your mana increases again. Also there are several types of monsters that can suck your mana away.

• 1. Over time, your mana level will naturally regenerate, but this is a fairly slow process.
  
• 2. Clicking on Din's Altar in town will regenerate both your mana as well as your health.
  
• 3. Clicking on "Manastones" found down in the dungeons will regenerate your mana.
  
• 4. Clicking on "Lifestones" found in the dungeons will regenerate both your mana and your health.
  
• 5. Mana can be obtained by using certain items such as mana potions, various drinks, etc.
  
• 6. Certain weapons, clothing, armor, etc. have mana regenerating properties, but these are rare.

To use a purchased active skill, drag the purchased skill from your skills screen into one of the numbered skills hotkey slots (shown below). To use attack skills, put your mouse cursor over the item you want to attack and press that skill's number on your keyboard. If you continue to hold down that attck key and place your mouse over an enemy, you will continue to attack it. If you hold down the attck key, you can continue to attack other monsters just by placing your mouse cursor over each monster while continuing to hold down the attack key. Be careful not to use up all you mana.

Other skills you can buy are passive skills, like "Plate Armor" (found under "Defender"), and do not need a hotkey. Buying this skill allows you to use plate armor in the game. After the initial purchase, any additional purchases of the plate armor skill will make the armor you wear stronger.

You can view the available skills for your character by either clicking on the skills icon (shown at the right), or by pressing the "S" hot key. To see information on what all character classes can use (weapons, armor, magic, etc.) click HERE. If you have any points to use (spend) to buy a skill, there will be a flashing plus sign "+" on the skills icon. After bringing up the skills screen, for a warrior character you will see a screen similar to the following:


When this screen first comes up, you will see ten icons at the top of the screen that represent your basic skills. Your character already has these basic skills so you do not need to buy them. They are there just so you can see what your basic skills are.

Below the ten basic skill icons at the top you will see skills that you can purchase if you have enough money and skill points. You obtain skill points by increasing your experience by killing monsters in the dungeon and by completing quests for Din and the townspeople. Your experience level is shown by the blue bar located just above your skill's hot key bar shown at the bottom left of your screen. As you kill monsters and solve quests, your experience will continue to increase. Once the blue bar reaches it's maximum, your character will increase one level in experience and be awarded some skill points. You will receive 2 skill points per level at first, but it goes up by 1 every 5 character levels. So after you reach level 5, you will receive 3 skill points per level; after you reach level 10, you will receive 4 skill points per level; and so forth. The number of skill points in the above example is 11 (circled in blue).

When you first start the game you only have 1 skill point and 75cp money, so you might be able to purchase one inexpensive skill. The first thing you must do to purchase better skills is equip yourself with your weapon, and enter the dungeon and kill monsters to collect gear, weapons, money, etc. When you return to town you can sell the extra gear to vendors in town to get money. Also, as mentioned above, your experience will increase and eventually you will be awarded more skill points as you kill monsters and solve quests.

Now that you have enough Money and Skill Points, it's time to buy a skill. Bring up the skills screen (press "S"). You can investigate all the skills by placing your mouse cursor above each skill icon, which will give a brief description of that skill. At the bottom of each skill description window it will tell you how many skill points and how much money is needed to buy the skill. If you have enough money and points to buy a particular skill, a plus sign "+" will be seen next to that skill's icon. If you want to buy that skill, just click on the plus sign "+" and you will now have that skill. NOTE: Sometimes it is a good idea to save up your skill points to get a really good skill that you like. For instance, my favorite skill on the above screen is the Whirlwind skill (shown on the skills screen for 9 points). So if I only had 6 points, I'd need to save my points and obtain more points by increasing my experience to buy that particular skill.

You may also sell a skill back to the "bank" by clicking on the minus "-" sign next to a skill on your skills screen. However it will cost you money to do this, but you will receive some of your skill points back that you can now spend on a different skill if you want.

Skills are shown on 3 different skill screens (only 2 if you are playing a Hybrid character). So be sure to check out the skills on all 3 screens. In the above example, for instance, under the Defender screen (click on Defender) is a skill I'd like to eventually obtain called "Plate Armor". It costs 15 skill points, so I'll have to save up my points in order to buy that skill which lets me equip myself with plate armor.

There are at least two types of skills, Active Skills and Passive Skills.

If I buy a passive skill, I don't need to do anything else. The passive skill will become part of all my other skills usually by improving my attack in some way. Active skills need to be triggered by a keystroke or mouse click to use them in battle. The following paragraphs will tell you how to use your active skills.

Now that I have bought an active skill, I need to set things up so I can use that skill in the game. If I bought the "Perfect Strike" skill (the one with the hand cursor next to it shown above), to use that skill I must first use my mouse to drag that skill from my skills screen to one of two places:
•I can drag the "Perfect Strike" skill icon down to one of the empty slots in my skills hot key bar (shown below) at the bottom of the screen as shown in the above picture by the white arrow.


Which ever numbered slot I put it in will be the number I need to press on the keyboard to use that skill. So in the above picture example, I will need to put my mouse over a monster or barrel, for example, and then press the number "2" on the keyboard to use Perfect Strike to attack in the game. This will cause my MANA level to go down, but it will regenerate over time (see "What is Mana")

Another place I can drag the skill is to one of the 3 "secondary right click slots" (shown on the right) which are located on the right of the screen near the bottom. If I put a skill into the bottom of these three slots, I can use that skill by right-clicking the mouse. If I have more than one skill in these slots, only the skill in the bottom slot will be active when I right click. If you have 2 or 3 skills in these slots, you can change the skill you want to be active by using the scroll buttons located just to the left of the slots. You can also set up the mouse wheel to scroll these skills by going to "Options/Configure Input" and changing "Mouse Wheel Action" from "Zoom" to "Scroll Right Click Skills".


You can also put other things in your skill slots like ice bombs, fire bombs, various weapons, power ups, health potions, mana potions, food, etc. Once the bomb(s) or weapon(s) are placed into your skill slot(s), you can use them by hitting the associated number or right mouse click.

For instance, if you place a weapon in skill slot 5 that has a 200% damage bonus when attacking a particular monster, you can easily just hit "5" to attack that monster with that weapon when you encounter that particular monster (a very handy feature indeed!). By putting a health potion in one of your skill slots, you can use that potion just by pushing the appropriate hotkey.

There are many skills, so they can seem somewhat complicated; but this also makes for much richer gaming experience. As you choose new warrior characters to play, you can "equip" each warrior with different skill combinations so that each warrior plays differently. So even though the game claims 141 different character combinations, the use of different skills by each character type increases this number geometrically!