Understanding Your Character

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, which can be. 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

The melee stats are shown on the right-hand side of the Stats page.
 * Mitigation: reduces the loss of health from physical attacks that hit you.
 * Avoidance: your ability to avoid a physical attack, taking no damage at all.

Resistances are a type of defense against spells. They are the magical counterpart to mitigation, according to the tooltip, as they absorb a flat percentage of incoming damage. There are 7 types of resistances. 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.

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".

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 bags at once by pressing V.

As a new character, you'll probably start with one bag, and 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.

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.

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.