Appraise

This will give you any special strengths or weaknesses of any creature or player it is used upon. Note that any items that enhance resistances are taken into effect when the skill gives you the information. A complete listing of the resistances shown are here.

This will enhance your fighting abilities for a short time in the way of adding bonuses to your attack, defence and weapon skills. The bonuses and duration of the Avatar both are directly based on your Prowess skill level. The higher the skill level, the higher the bonus and the longer the duration.

Bless adds a blue tag (Blessed) to the short description of the weapon. For a short period of time, this weapon will deal extra damage to evil or neutral creatures. It adds an additional automatic damage to whatever you are fighting to your regular attack, like a thief's toxin poison does. Note that testing this power in conjunction with prowess implies that the duration is per attack, not rounds, as my blessed weapons lost their blessing faster when using dazzle than when not. As your prayer skill gets better, the duration will increase considerably.

This is one of a few skills that require a shield. You can attempt to stun an opponent with this, and certainly damage him. The stun is not guaranteed, but you will do damage. When you do get a stun, it is relatively short in duration (one to three rounds on the average) Note that damage done does not seem to matter what kind of shield you have, be it a small junky shield or a crested shield. It seems to be the same.

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Once you get this skill, there is no reason at all not to use it. The skill is free, and it restores a small amount of hp and sp back to you. (Sorry, no ep) Since Paladins can not use Fangs of Ashura, this skill will become one of your staple abilities. Note that you can NOT ceremony player corpses, and the vitals gained back, though small at first, increase as your prayer skill increases. Also, Ceremony helps keep your Alignment in check, bumping it up towards Paragon with each use, similar to burying corpses good but slightly better.

When used, this skill will take the disease from your target and transfer it to yourself. While this sounds unpleasant, it does cure the target, and also it does less damage to yourself than the target was taking. Plus at higher levels, the damage done will actually be reduced to neglegible (ie.. 1/1/1) to yourself, although you will still lose one round�s attacks when you take the damage as usual. Also note that you can not Cleanse yourself if you get diseased.

A few important things about the convert skill. It works just like the ethos changing room in the fact that you can only convert someone once. This applies in conjunction with the ethos changing room, because if your target has utilized the ethos changing room to change his or her alignment, the Conversion will automatically fail. While your target does not need the required cash the ethos changing room needs, they will need 300 xp per his or her current level to change. It is the opinion of this Paladin that conversions should NOT be used on heritage level players, even if they will shortly become Paladins. This is to give the player time to reflect upon and learn the nature of alignment. Also note that you can not convert someone against their will.

Dazzle will become one of the best staple combat skills you possess. While it is expensive at first, it soon will be used in just about every combat that you are in. It's duration is based directly upon your prowess skill, so the higher your skill level, the longer in rounds the skill will last. It does seem to cap out at around 30 to 35 rounds, but unless you�re fighting something huge, things will be dead long before that is reached. If you are forced to wimpy from combat, or combat is stopped for any reason (like a thief's fasttalk or cleric's pacify or hold) the dazzle will end. Note, though, it IS possible to run from a room, use a healing item and run back into combat if you have something to the effect of "alias 1 drink potion" then leave room 1 enter room real fast. As long as you do not receive the "combat is over" message, dazzle will remain active.

This is another skill that requires the use of any shield. While active, this will provide a defensive barrier that cuts the damage you take from attacks by about half. It is an ablative barrier, meaning that it will go down as you take damage. While the protective properties are not affected as the barrier is damaged, it will eventually go down and you will have to recast it. Typing "defend status" will tell you how tired your arm is from holding your shield up. It's easy to see the message in combat for the both your defend status and the barrier going down as they are both bright ansi messages (You feel as if nothing could harm you! and You stop concentrating on defense) Also I would recommend alias'ing your status command for something such as alias ds defend status and alias'ing defend alias de defend. There is no way to bring down the barrier manually and recast it, so you will have to start each combat at whatever damaged status it is at at the time. Once you get this skill, there is no reason to not walk around with it active at all times. Casting time is instantaneous, so in a non-lagged environment, it is possible to see the message that your barrier goes down and recast it before the start of the next round.

You can reduce the damage a poisoned person or creature is taking per tick with this skill. Note that the amount that is lessened goes down as your skill level increases, maxing out (or minimim�ing out as the case may be) at 1/1/1 damage per tick, but it never goes completely to zero, and you still lose one round in combat when the poison damages you as usual. You can Detoxify yourself if need be.

Contrary to popular belief, this is a useful skill, IF you can get it to work. The damage given if the one-shot fails is negligable, unless you�re fighting a little peon undead. Undead such as Magnemmar, Stranger, Shinzu and Undead Chilblain have just too many hp for this non one shot to be effective. But as with all powers, with increased skill levels the chance of the one-shot increases. Note that this power will not work on anything but undead. Including evil thieves.

Magic 8 ball. Silly power, but cute in the right circumstances. Answers are totally random, has no bearing on game play at all. Note you can only ask yes or no questions with this power.

This is a room light. Makes a glowing sphere that can not be moved. The duration is pretty long, and increases as your skill level increases. You can drop more than one sphere in a room at once. When the sphere goes out, no matter where you are in relation to the room you cast it in, you will get a message that it went out.

This adds the tag (Holy) to the short description on the shield it is cast upon. The enchantment is permanent upon the item, unless it is stored in your player vault or cast upon your Shield of Faith, which will be unenhanced the next time that you log on and you will have to recast it. If a shield is Imbued before any charms are cast upon it, the Holy shield can then be charmed an additional time. The Imbue has to be cast upon the shield before the charming starts, otherwise it will not work. For example, a Shield of Artrimas will take 2 charms normally, unless it�s Imbued before the charms are cast upon it, in which case it can be thrice charmed. If you fail an Imbue attempt, it curses the shield. I don't think there is any reason to not cast this once you get it upon logging into Astaria upon your Shield of Faith, unless you possibly have an alternate shield you plan on using.

This is a touch healing power, meaning that you have to be in the same room as your target. The amount of HP gained from a Mend goes up dramatically at higher skill levels. If you heal yourself with it, you receive less hp from it than if you were to heal another target. You can heal monsters with this the last time I checked.

This adds time to the corpse of a player before it rots away. You can not Preserve the corpse of an NPC. It does add enough time so that even the slowest Cleric can get there for a Rez. Note that you can not feast a corpse once it is preserved. Also you get a small amount of xp from the casting. Not a lot, somewhere around 250 to 500 xp. I have not been able to determine if an increased skill value raises the timer on the preservation, for obvious reasons this is difficult to test properly.

This adds anadditional few minutes on the decay rate of any portable food.It will add the tag (purified) to the food. It can only be cast upon a piece of food that is already in the rotting state.

Bards would kill for something like this. This tells stories automatically. If you move while you are telling it, it will disrupt the story. Also you have to hear the stories from another Paladin to learn them yourself. Perrin makes these stories, and I bet if you had some good ideas, you could give them to the Guildmaster and he could forward them to Sir Perrin.

This power WILL detect evil shadowed thieves or people invis due to the effects of a saffron potion. They have to be evil though. It will not work if someone is Neutral or Good Aligned.

This will let you be able to see if an item is cursed. You have to have possession of the item in qu estion. Nothing else special.

This is a guaranteed damage skill in combat. It does a bit amount and is really useful in both combat and pk attempts. Again, the damage goes up with an increased skill in sanctity. There's a 10 second usage timer on it, and a one round effect timer.

This is a room attack. It will damage any and all monsters in a room with you. It will not damage players in any way. The effect timer is 3 rounds and the usage timer is 10 seconds. A 15^th level Paladin can easily kill Nightmares with Shine. See the Tactics section for specifics. Damage increases with skill level.

Great anti-pk tool. If you are concerned that you are being hunted, you can effectively hide from any magical means of location, including the sage Cogito in Maelstrom's Floating Fortress. The effect timer on it increases with skill level, and seems to max out at approximately 6 minutes.

This is the Paladin's formweapon skill. There are 5 types of swords that can be obtained with this skill, these being a short sword, bastard sword, longsword, magical longsword and a Holy Avenger. The swords are better the higher up on that list they go. The type of sword you will get is random, and there is a small small chance you will get the Avenger. The higher level you are the more likely you are to get a magical longsword instead of a short sword. The Avenger is a unique, so if another Paladin has one already, you can not get one with this power until that Paladin logs off. Note that you can get rid of the blade simply by typing "soulblade disperse" but there is a 10 minute usage timer on the skill, so you can�t try to get an Avenger by typing soulblade, soulblade disperse over and over again.

What can I say about strike? This is one of the best skills in the game, in any Guild, in my opinion. This power really has no use against monsters unless it is a special monster with defenses, like a psion monster with a barrier. Even so, the damage is not enough to do anything other than piss the monster off, as we all know that monsters in Astaria tend to have huge amounts of hp. It�s use is mainly designed for player confrontation. Strike will deal damage to your target directly, no armor or defenses will lessen this. Meaning that the attack goes right through wards, fields, barriers, dodges, guardians, defends, blocks, etc. There is a 2 or so round effect timer and a 2 minute usage timer. Damage dealt goes up with skill level. This is a VERY useful pk tool if you can get it off right. See the Tactics section for more information on using Strike effectively.

This is another very useful combat skill. While you generally will never be able to stack stuns by yourself, two high level Paladins can keep just about anything stunned indefinately. Used in conjunction with a weapon that stuns as specials, you can stack stuns by yourself. Effect goes up in rounds as your skill level increases. There is a 30 second usage timer on it and a 1 round timer before the effect goes off.