hey i'm a new WM and trying to figure out how to learn summoning. i seem to be figuring out most of the other magic stuff but this one has me stumped. any help?
player of Bammr

A new WM won't have a pathway. First one is level 4 or so.

To learn summoning you'll need to align to an element.

After that you can perform admittance and impedence to build charge and discharge charge. Or you can cast spells you're aligned to to build charge, then 'summon imped' to deplete your charge levels. Admit and Imped will take around 20 seconds with summoning below 100, and both will teach you summoning fairly well.

My method was to go to rats, lock TM by casting my elemental alignment spell, then summon imped till I was at 0 again, and continue working whatever other weapons I wanted. Note I didn't leave combat, so I was still learning my defenses, etc. Highly recommend you stance shield for that...

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Pants.

>can you suggest a spell progression to start out with? i would like to be able to work on learning all the schools as soon as i can but don't know if that would hurt me by missing spells i will really need.

First: all spells are on preview right now. You can cast everything, and can't learn anything. It's related to the 3.0 roll outs, and the constant bug tweaking going on. I'd suggest playing with spells to see which you like/love/must have/can't stand.

Actual advice: You will want/need a spell from every magic skill asap. That's utility, augmentation, TM, warding, debilitation. You also want intro/basic spells starting out, they will be what you can actually cast. The AP spellbook is no longer 'free' so you'll want to just stick to in-guild spells, because there's not a lot of reason not to unless you want the effects from ease or STRA etc. My last noob character I used Air bubble for utility, Etherial shield for warding, Mark of Arhat for debilitation, and substratum for augmentation. It's probably not optimized, but it was functional.

There is nearly enough variety in the WM spellbooks that you can just pick whatever intro/basic difficulty spell you want from each magic skill and cast it. As for TM, I'd just pick the one that fits your aligned element and general RP'ed theme. The days of 'you must use GZ because it will train 40000 ranks of TM' are over. All of the intro TM spells are good. Except stone strike. There is a system bug with multi-shot spells dealing 2 or less damage types that is crippling Stone Strike right now, I'd avoid it.

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Pants.

>> All of the intro TM spells are good. Except stone strike.

We are in global preview so this isn't a huge deal, but avoid all multi-strike spells for now. A few weeks ago I put 75 casts of gar zeng on a creature that refused to die. This has been somewhat alleviated with the recent bug fix but they are still not in a lot of trouble.

Also, ignite + mark of arhat is really fun.

i just realized that we don't have to choose spells yet so i will save this list for later.
when you speak of an element to align to are you saying that we will be choosing one to specialize in or just referring to what we are aligned to at the moment?
thanks for the help

>>Most WM have a thematic alignment for their RP though, and keep it static.<<

Does anyone actually do this? WMs, sound off.

OP, you're not locked into any particular choice and there isn't one that is necessarily better than all the others. You want to choose an Alignment (probably) primarily based on the spells you cast most often, so you can gain charge, and secondarily based on the Pathways you want to use once you have those.

To me picking a thematic element is something that only works at low circles. After you get further up it becomes kind of silly IMO to avoid having access to the rest of your spells just to keep up a flavor.

>>Most WM have a thematic alignment for their RP though, and keep it static.<<

>Does anyone actually do this? WMs, sound off.

I've always player my mage as a water cabalist and happily nerfed myself out of the Fire book, but even I wouldn't align water for RP purposes! I'm usually air-aligned because air spells make up the vast, vast bulk of my combat casting.

Elriic's bent has always been fire and always been. Any benefit for aligning to another element will never outweigh sticking to fire in his book. He aligned himself to it the moment the align verb became available and hasn't looked back.

I will say that the moment I can align the negative aspect away from water, I will. Probably I will align against aether as the only spell I really use is aether cloak and I never really felt much affinity towards it in the old system either.

*These are purely RP considerations and have no bearing at all on how useful or not useful certain skills are or aren't.*

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<<"earning too little skinning experience for a day or so isn't nearly as bad as having a spell that breaks your wings."

>>Most WM have a thematic alignment for their RP though, and keep it static.<<

>Does anyone actually do this? WMs, sound off.

Yeah, after warding/buffing it's relatively easy to stay focused on one book while you train target and to a lesser degree debil.

i take back my comment on ignoring the water book
I would pick soemthing up to get the water glove cantrip

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