Lately I've been messing around a lot with the Calligraphy skill in Project Gorgon. What's that? Well it's a writing skill you originally pick up from a Dwarf named Sammie Grimspine. Sammie's an old soldier that had an "accident" that forced her out of the Military.
1- Yes, Project Gorgon has a female dwarf.
2- I think it's pretty safe to assume the "accident" is that she's a (spoiler) werewolf. During a full moon in game she turns into a wolf. LYCANTHROPY! GASP!
I picked up the Calligraphy skill several months ago but never really did much with it at the time. I do remember being a little disappointed when I tried to write a book in game and not being able to since my Calligraphy skill was low.
As of last week, I decided to raise that skill up to some more respectable levels . . . and especially so that I could contribute a dad joke to the weekly Poetry Jam that happens on Saturday afternoons.
My dad joke made me level up in Bard, Oratory, and Performance . . . call me William Stingspear.
Come to find out, the Calligraphy skill is amazingly easy to train . . . pretty much like the Meditation skill only easier. All this skill really takes to level up is money to buy ink and paper! Unlike Meditation it doesn't even take time . . . you just buy 25 ink (the maximum you can buy at a time) and spam click the crafting button until you get to level 13 . . . where you buy Advanced Ink and once again spam click until you get to level 19. Wash rinse repeat. Just find the easy recipes and come with money to burn on ink.
I think I'm safe in saying I don't think it was really intended to work this way, however. The result you get from one click of the crafting button is an hour-long buff that gives you access to combo moves in Sword and sometimes an additional buff that would be of aid to offensive powers. In other words, I think you're supposed to slowly level this as you're playing though the game so you have access to the buffs while you play . . . and especially if you're a sword user.
The buff I'm particularly trying for is at 55 Calligraphy skill. it provides an 8% damage buff to all piercing attacks. I NEED MOAR DAMAGE! I'll take it any way I can get it.
When I think about it, Calligraphy really is the yang to the Meditation skill's yang. They both use very common to find ingredients. They both open access to combo moves (Meditation gives Unarmed combo moves). The difference is that Meditation's buffs are all defense based.
BTW, I highly recommend you at least train up to Meditation 39 for the fire resistance debuff. It can be quite handy for fighting those fire Droaches in the Dark Chapel and Fae Realm. If you keep going up the Meditation path you can eventually get a nice +30 health boost buff for your character as well.
Sigh. This is my only Droach screenshot . . . at least Buzz and I did ~3600 damage on that one.
Meditation buffs are really worth it, but I'm not sure if the Calligraphy buffs really have that much pizazz.
Personally I'd like to see the devs revisit Calligraphy a bit to give it more flair since, you know, according to the wiki page it was one of the first 25 skills in the game.
Imagine if it did things like caused your core attacks to also cause burning or proc interesting debuffs on the enemy instead of just scaling the percent of one damage type. NEEDS MOAR PIZAZZ! It'd be great if the Calligraphy skill also opened up combo skills for players wielding two knives *cough* like me. Jus' sayin'.
The Pizzazz is a favored work appliance after all . . .
Once you hit level 50 in the Calligraphy skill, you have to move on from Sammie and seek out a higher level trainer in Rahu named "Ufkar." Unfortunately for some players, he also happens to be enemies with another Raksasha named Kohan. If you gain favor with Kohan, you lose favor with Ufkar . . . and vice versa. Kohan happens to train some pretty awesome Sigil Scripting and Gadgeteering skills.
A month ago or so I had favored up Kohan a little bit so he'd sell me a Gadgeteering skill around Christmas time so I could give mint candy canes out for free under the Serbule Christmas tree. Whoops!
So yesterday after hitting the level 50 cap, I switched to . . . CARPENTRY, WHAT?!?! WHY CARPENTRY? It makes sense, honestly, for two reasons:
1- Ufkar likes Capentry items as gifts, so I crafted and gave him 100 wooden crates.
2- Carpentry is a great complimentary skill for both Meditation and Calligraphy because you can craft meditation stools to increase the duration of your Meditation buffs, and you can craft calligraphy benches to increase the duration of your Calligraphy buffs.
Did you get lost in that maze of skills? I certainly did!
While at the end of the day it's questionable if that 8% piercing buff will really be worth it, you know what was worth it? Handing out gag books to my guild mates during silent times and inserting my first book into the Project Gorgon library, which just happens to be a cut and paste of one of my first blog posts about Project Gorgon when I was playing the Demo.
There you go . . . that's really all I originally wanted to do anyway. :)
Happy Dueling!
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