Guide for Vah Shir Beastlords

Creation

I generally stick with the suggestions given on eq.castersrealm.com for new classes; so do as they advise and stick all your points into wisdom, as this directly affects your spell casting abilities once you get them, and will be the most beneficial at higher levels. Otherwise, you have no real choices that will affect your character in any meaningful way. The character creation screen suggest that stamina, agility, wisdom and charisma are all important for beastlords; which seems like very suspicious advice to me.

The above paragraph is all you need if you are in a hurry to get started, but if you need to know why, here is my explanation. For a caster class, you generally want them to have a large mana pool, which is done by increasing their wisdom attribute (or int, for int based casters). This can be done by starting points, or by equipment. Generally speaking, it is easy to raise wis, int and strength, far more so than other attributes, with equipment. For a melee class, strength is the primary attribute that influences how often they will hit for max damage. Charisma mainly has an effect only on vendor buying and selling prices, apart from bards and enchanters. Dexterity affects how rapidly melee skills increase, and how often a weapon procs, or casts it's special effect if it has one, and so is of specialised use. Stamina and agility are more interesting: they are hard to raise by gear, and stamina raises hit points, and agility raises armor class - but both have very much smaller impact for casters, rather more of one for melee and hybrid classes. These attributes, hit points and armor class, are easier to raise directly with equipment.

As a hybrid, both melee and casting attributes are important. Depending on how you will play your character, you can choose to favour one approach or the other. I can tell you that hybrids in a group rarely get a chance to meditate, so a large mana pool is more important than it may at first glance seem to be, and will generally get healed when required, so a large hit points total isn't vitally essential. For a soloer, and a beastlord is an excellent soloer, better melee stats are important, but then so is having a reasonable mana pool to minimise down time. At low levels, hit points matter more than anything else; at mid levels, a solo beastlord is likely to spend 1/3 of his time in combat meleeing, and 2/3 playing cleric for his warder; then at higher levels the solo beastlord will spend more and more time meleeing alongside their warder. However, beastlords can self buff all statistics apart from wisdom and agility; in a raid, agility will be buffed as well, and besides agility only has a minor impact on armor class. For this reason only, we should put points into wisdom at the start.

Tutorial

You should really start by doing the tutorial, even if you are an experienced player.

First Steps

Once your character is created, you will appear in the beastlord guild area in Shar Vahl (assuming that you took the choice to start in Shar Vahl - that's what this guide is about, after all). Before doing anything else, check your inventory, and read your starting note, which will tell you to give the note to your guildmaster. Do this, and you will be given the starting instructions for the citizenship quest that every Vah Shir has to pursue, and is required for most other training quests in Shar Vahl - and takes you straight to level 2 - or very close to it. While you are in front of your guildmaster, you might put five training points in your starting weapon skill, piercing (but if you have access to better weapons immediately, skip piercing and train in H2H or 1HB, as these are generally better all round or cheap weapon types for beastlords).

Outside is a room full of scribes selling shaman and beastlord spells, with a door to the left leading to the arena, and the warriors and rogues guilds; and to the right, a door leading to the main palace.

Feel free to explore Shar Vahl a little at first; you can use backspace or the "m" key to bring up a map of the city with key features marked.