As you play the shard and gain more and more in each of the skills, you'll come to see that some are more useful than others to the pure mage. To help you save some time on this trial-and-error process, I'm here to list off the skills I've found most helpful. Craft skills will be left off for fact that pretty much all craft skills have a place with every character. I've mentioned elsewhere that GM Inscription gives a 10% SDI bonus outside of the item cap; naturally that would be one of the most important secondary skills for a Mage.
Poisoning: I list this one first because it might be the most helpful. In determining the level of poison you inflict on your target with both Poison and Poison field, the game checks your Magery and Poisoning skills accordingly:
- [Poisoning + Magery] / 2
- If this score is 65 or lower, you do level 1 poison. From 65.1 to 85, level 2 poison. 85.1 to 99.9 is level 3, and 4th at 100 or better.
If you're lucky enough to have 120 Magery before you begin training Poisoning, you'll only need 80 Poisoning to start hitting with Deadly from three tiles or closer. If you couple this with Evil Omen, you'll get Lethal poison out of it. This is even better, as it's that much harder for monsters to cure Lethal and it does that much more damage on top of them not being able to heal.
Hiding: This is one of the best skills out there for a quick get away. If something is putting the hurt on you, dropping a Wall of Stone and hiding is the easiest way to get some breathing room. The wall will drop pretty quickly, but you'll remain safely hidden while you catch your breath. Another use I have for this skill is when running through high spawn areas. If you move fast enough, most creatures won't come after you. Once one of them does, the odds of others attacking you goes up a great amount. Even if you ignore them, they'll follow you for a while and wind up outside of their natural areas; to avoid that, as soon as you break line of sight or get about half a screen away, hit your Hiding macro; the monsters will drop aggro and go about their business. Consider it a courtesy to the next guy, who might be looking for the monster that would've chased you around the world otherwise.
Parry/Bushido: These two are questionable skills for a Mage, but somewhat common even on shards where skill caps force you to be more specific about the character you are. I suppose that counts. These skills are great defense skills; at 120/120 (and 80+ dex), you have a 40% chance to parry with a two-handed weapon. That's a hefty bit of defense, which you can easily take advantage of if you're using Mondain's Staff. If you choose to go the Book/Shield route, you may want to put Bushido on a Totem or Soul Stone to bring your shield parry back to par. I don't believe spellbooks count as weapons for one-handed Bushido parry.
Animal Taming/Lore: Though you don't really need either of these to own and control most Evos, it's more than worthwhile to GM these two if only for the Taming bonus potion. This potion instantly adds two control slots to your character, and is required if you ever want to donate for the 8th pet slot. At GM skill and below, there are few pets that will help you terribly much; Dragons, White Wyrms, and Nightmares are pretty much the full range. There are other interesting pets, such as the Unicorn for females and Ki-Rin for males, but other than a minor gimmick there isn't much to either of those pets. You can, however, tame and bond a Torditsarion if you find one. It is the Demon evo pet, and it has some interesting tricks. I've so far seen mine poison (Deadly), bleed, mortal strike, and paralyze blow creatures that it's fought. At third stage, it is a decent enough evo; less of a tank than the Mercenary, but fairly powerful.
Music/Discord/Peace/Provo: These skills are a bit under-rated on the shard. When you're trying to tame creatures, few skills are as useful as Peacemaking. Unlike Paralyze, Peacemaking doesn't impart a penalty to a fresh tame's skills. By the same token, Peace makes for a better paralyze on creatures generally than the Paralyze spell does; Paralyze's duration is ruined by high resist, but Peacemake has a generally solid timer to it no matter what. It will, at the least give you plenty of time to land a good combo on a creature, which may be enough to slow it down.
Discord stacks with Curse. There aren't many creatures that you would need to use it on, but for training pets it can come in handy. At GM skill, Discord is 20% reduction to a creature's stats and skills. This can help Evos greatly, as they gain by hitting a creature. Just make sure to never use this on a creature you want to tame.
Provocation... does anything really need to be said? Provocation is one of the greatest crowd control skills you could hope for. Minor spawn off creatures like the Dark Father become that much more manageable with Provocation in play. Creatures immune to magic, like Toxic Elementals, are often not immune to Provocation. If you can throw two of them against each other, you'll have plenty of time to avoid them without hassle.
Stealth/Ninjitsu: I am generally opposed to Ninjitsu for fact that it holds the most over-powered ability ever, Mirror Image. However, I often use these two skills to scout around or in cases where I can't be bothered to fight all the creatures around. It only takes using Stealth once to be able to use Shadow Jump as much as you like. Shadow Jump is basically a free teleport, free meaning that it doesn't cost Stealth steps to use. You'll remain hidden after the jump, giving you the chance to explore at your leisure in nearly perfect safety (I say nearly because I recall there being monsters that can reveal. Other than at Champs, I've never had this happen).
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