Understanding Your Character

In this guide, we'll have a look at your character's attributes, inventory, and knowledge.

Your Persona
Your character's attributes are shown in the Persona window. Access this window by pressing P, or through the EQII Menu. Notice that there are five tabs along the top.

Stats
On the Stats page, you can see your Health and Power bars at the top, and your Experience bars at the bottom. In the middle of the page are your Attributes on the left, and your Resistances on the right. Some additional details are shown in the lower panel. Let's discuss some of the information on this screen:

Attributes

 * Main Article: Character Attributes

EQ2 characters are described by five attributes. Your race dictates your starting attributes. Each time you gain a level, your most important attributes will improve slightly. All five attributes have some importance to all classes:
 * Strength: affects your physical damage and carrying capacity. Affects the Power pool for fighters.
 * Agility: affects your hit rate and avoidance. Affects the Power pool for Scouts.
 * Stamina: affects your Health pool and how long you can hold your breath.
 * Intelligence: affects your spell damage, whether cast by you or your equipment. Affects the power pool for Mages, Bards and Shadowknights.
 * Wisdom: affects your ability to avoid magical attacks (base resistances). Affects the power pool for Priest and Paladins.

Resistances

 * ''Main Article: Resistance

Your defensive melee stats are shown on the right-hand side of the Stats page. These are "secondary stats": they're calculated from your attributes and skills (plus your equipment and buffs). Point your mouse cursor at each of them to see a tooltip describing what they mean.
 * Mitigation: reduces the severity of physical attacks that hit you.
 * Avoidance: your ability to avoid a physical attack, taking no damage at all.

Below the melee stats, your resistances are shown. Resistances are your defense against spells. They are the magical counterpart to mitigation, as they absorb a flat percentage of incoming damage. There are 7 types of resistances, corresponding to the 7 types of spell damage in EQ2. All nonphysical attacks in EQ2 fit into one of these 7 types. Your character's race affects his resistances, as does his Wisdom. Wisdom increases all resistances equally.

Skills

 * ''Main Article: Skills

Choose the Skills tab to see your character's skills. Skills affect how well your character will perform certain actions. Skills go up in rank automatically through general usage, and are limited by your level (the maximum rank for a skill is your level * 5). Skills are divided into three main categories:

Adventure Skills:
 * Combat: these skills directly affect your ability to inflict physical damage.
 * Spellcasting: these skills directly affect the performance of your spells.
 * Avoidance: these skills directly affect your ability to avoid physical damage. Behind the scenes, these skills are equivalent to Resistances.

Tradeskill Skills: these skills affect your ability to craft items.

General Skills:
 * Harvesting: these skills affect your ability to extract materials from harvesting nodes in the world.
 * General: these skills affect your swimming, falling, and alcohol tolerance.
 * Language: these all-or-nothing skills determine whether you understand each language or not. See Languages for more information.

Other Persona Info
We're not going to discuss every page of the Persona window in detail, but here's a quick overview:
 * Details page: shows you additional info about your character, with links to further information windows.
 * Factions page: shows your current reputation with all factions that you've discovered in the world.
 * Options page: allows you to customize your character's appearance and voice.

Your Inventory
Bring up your Inventory window by pressing the I key, or through the EQII Menu. Here you see a "paper doll" view of your character, surrounded by his inventory slots.

Equipment Slots
If this is a new character, then you'll have starting equipment in some of the slots, but most equipment slots will be empty. At the very bottom of the window, your money and weight are shown.
 * To the left is your clothing or armor, which usually provides mitigation against physical attacks.
 * To the right is your jewelry, which usually boost your resistances, but don't provide mitigation.
 * Below your paper doll is your weaponry and other held items, and food/drink.
 * Along the bottom are six inventory slots that can hold backpacks or other containers.
 * Your money is weightless, and automatically converts to the best denomination. Main Article: Money
 * Your weight limit is governed by your strength. When overburdened, your movement rate is severely reduced.

Bags
Along the bottom of the window are six slots that can hold backpacks or other containers. Double-click a bag to open it. You can open and close all of your inventory bags at once by pressing Alt+I.

As a new character, you'll start with one bag, and you might obtain a second bag from your early quests. You'll find that these bags fill up fast as you kill creatures and harvest materials on your adventures. You can sell items to NPC merchants to free up space, but you'll want to buy additional bags as soon as you've amassed enough cash to afford them.

Items
As you finish quests and defeat monsters, you'll often receive items for your efforts. When you accept these items, they automatically go into your bag slots. From there, you can do a few things with them:
 * To Examine an Item: Right-click and choose "Examine". Most items explain exactly what they are used for.
 * To Equip an Item: Some of the items that you receive can be equipped by your character. To equip an item, find it in your bags and double-click it.  Alternatively, you can drag-and-drop it on your "paper doll" image to equip it.
 * To Sell an Item: Find an NPC merchant and click on him to open the Buy/Sell window. In the "Sell" tab, you can sell any item that isn't currently equipped.  If you accidentally sell an item, the "Buy Back" tab will let you fix your mistake.
 * To Activate an Item: Some items can be activated - generally gadgets used during your quests, but also potions and such created by players (or rarely looted from monsters). To activate an item, right-click and choose "Use", or double-click the item.
 * To Destroy an Item: Right-click and choose "Destroy".

Appearance Slots and the Dressing Room
Starting at level 20, you gain access to a second tab on the Inventory window: the Appearance tab. In this tab you can place any armor or clothing that's wearable by your class. The appearance items don't affect your character's stats, they are only used to change what your clothing looks like. When you find a piece of armor whose appearance you really like, but you can't justify equipping it for one reason or another, then you can put it in your Appearance Slot instead.

The Dressing Room is a helpful tool to let you see what you'd look like with a piece of equipment on. You can use the Dressing Room to "try on" items that you don't own. You can Ctrl-click on any piece of equipment to bring up the Dressing Room and see what you'd look like wearing it. This works anywhere that you can see an equipment icon: in Merchant windows, in the Broker window, in a Loot or Quest Reward window, etc. The Dressing Room can help you shop for nice-looking items for your Appearance Slots.

Your Knowledge

 * Main Article: Abilities

Bring up your Knowledge Book by pressing K. The book is divided into sections: Abilities, Spells, Combat Arts, and Tradeskills. Each section can grow to several pages. A "Sort" button lets you customize the order of the icons in each section.

We'll discuss the Knowledge Book more in the guide about Spells and Combat Arts. For now, just know that all of your character's abilities and spells are automatically placed in the Knowledge Book. When you get a new ability or spell, it'll be found in the Knowledge Book.
 * Abilities: These are general abilities such as Sprinting, Sitting, as well as your Call of City ability (which send you back to your home city). This section also contains abilities that come from customizing your character through Achievements and Traditions.
 * Spells: If you're a spellcasting class, then your spells are listed in this section. Spells typically have powerful effects, and take several seconds to cast.
 * Combat Arts: If you're a melee class, then your combat arts are listed in this section. Combat arts typically are less powerful than spells, but cast very quickly.
 * Tradeskill: When you take up a tradeskill, you'll receive Crafting Skills that are appropriate to your chosen profession. These crafting skills are found in the Tradeskill section of your Knowledge Book.  You'll gain more skills every so often as you gain levels in your tradeskill.

When you point your mouse at an icon, you'll get a pop-up tooltip briefly explaining the ability or spell. For more detailed information, right-click the icon and choose "Examine".

To use your spells and abilities, you can click on the icons within the Knowledge Book, or you can drag-and-drop icons to your hotkey bar and use them from there instead. EQ2 automatically adds your first few spells and abilities to your hotkey bar, but you should get accustomed to putting the icons on your hotkey bar yourself. Once you move up to a second hotkey bar (or more), you'll have to add icons to it yourself.

Your Condition
Your character's condition is described by two resources: Health and Power. They are represented by the green and blue bars next to your character's name.


 * You lose health each time an enemy damages you. If you run out of Health, then you die.
 * You use Power to cast spells or perform combat arts. If you run out of Power, then you can't use any of your abilities - all you can do is auto-attack.

Health and Power regenerate automatically - slowly while in combat, quickly when not in combat. It is not necessary to sit or stand still to regenerate.

Food and Drink

 * Main Article: Food and drink

Food and drink are necessary for efficient progress in Norrath. Food increases the amount of Health you regain when out of combat. Beverages increase the amount of Power you regain when out of combat. Some food and drink also provide bonuses to your attributes, such as Strength or Intelligence.

Each food and drink is rated for a certain adventuring level. You must be of the appropriate adventuring level to gain the full effect provided by the food or beverage. Low-level characters will not get any extra benefit from using high-level food, and high-level characters will have increased downtime from using low-level food.

Most of the food and drink items available in the game are crafted by players (the Provisioner tradeskill class). Therefore, the best way to get food and drink is to buy it from other players through the Broker, or to make it yourself. The food and drink sold by NPC merchants is of very low quality, and is not recommended. Occasionally, you'll receive decent food as a quest reward.