Leafiara (prime)/Mechanical Musings/Leafi's Incredible Guide To Squares

This is a guide, tutorial, or gameplay strategy written by one or more players to better assist others with their gameplay enjoyment. The information presented here may be subject to the personal opinion of the contributor(s), and may additionally require periodic updates to keep current as the game environment changes.

Title: Leafi's Incredible Guide to Squares

Author: Leafiara

Date Published: 2025-04-01

Updated: 2025-04-01

Preamble

Are you facing analysis paralysis and don't know the best build for your square? This guide will help iron out those challenging questions among the convoluted mathematics of GemStone IV!

Warriors

The best warrior build wears robes. That might seem counterintuitive because warriors can train Armor Use so inexpensively, but what's better than cheap? That's right: free! By spending nothing on Armor Use, warriors free up valuable training points to sink into other cheap skills, namely more weapon types so they can take advantage of Martial Mastery. This amazing feat allows supercharging your AS by up to +50, catapulting your warrior ahead of the crowd as you play to win while your plate armor counterparts are playing not to lose. Live with a mindset of abundance, not scarcity!

Training more weapon types also means you have a wider variety of attack options. For example, you could train Edged Weapons, Brawling, and Ranged Weapons so that you can fire off a Volley, then completely run through foes with Flurry, Fury, Whirling Blade, and Clash while destruction rains from the heavens, damage-over-time style!

But wait, there's more! Due to not having any Action Penalty, your offensive SMR-based attacks can have in the realm of 15 to 25 more margin than full plate warriors!

As if this isn't amazing enough, the level 30 Light Armor Proficiency feat improves CvA, increases evade rate (so now you get even more Spin Kicks on a katar build or Radial Sweeps on a polearm build), and improves your Evasion DS by 20%, which means 0.15 more DS per rank of Dodging in offensive. By post-cap with 303 Dodging, Light Armor Proficiency grants a staggering 45.45 DS to go along with your already naturally high Evade DS due to not being weighed down by full plate!

Even further post-cap, with 75 ranks of Minor Elemental and 20 ranks of Minor Spiritual, even a self-spelled warrior with a small statue in a spell sever area (and speaking of spells, robes have no hindrance, so you can cast Major Elemental Wave!) can reach ludicrous amounts of 650 DS even in offensive stance and even without a shield. That's either borderline unhittable or outright unhittable to, for example, every Hinterwilds creature other than draugrs and undansormrs!

Now, you might be thinking: "Okay, that sounds good, but I don't have 35 million experience. In fact, my highest level character has like 3 million experience. So what about when I do get hit? Won't I just get annihilated compared to full plate or metal breastplate warriors?" And to that I say "Well, just get more exp so you can do all the things. Nobody ever said that everybody's ready for every hunting ground at every exp amount!"

Rogues

The best rogue build wears robes and doesn't train stealth. That might seem counterintuitive because rogues can train Stalking and Hiding so inexpensively, but what's better than cheap? That's right: free! By spending nothing on Stalking and Hiding nor Armor Use, rogues free up valuable training points to sink into other cheap skills, namely more weapon types so they can take advantage of Martial Mastery. This amazing feat allows supercharging your AS by up to +50, catapulting your rogue ahead of the crowd as you play to win while your shadowy counterparts are playing not to lose. Live with a mindset of abundance, not scarcity!

Training more weapon types also means you have a wider variety of attack options. For example, you could train Edged Weapons, Brawling, and Ranged Weapons so that you can fire off a Volley, then completely run through foes with Flurry, Fury, Whirling Blade, and Clash while destruction rains from the heavens, damage-over-time style!

As if this isn't amazing enough, the level 30 Light Armor Proficiency feat improves CvA, increases evade rate (so now you get even more Spin Kicks on a katar build or Radial Sweeps on a polearm build), and improves your Evasion DS by 20%, which means 0.15 more DS per rank of Dodging in offensive. By post-cap with 303 Dodging, Light Armor Proficiency grants a staggering 45.45 DS to go along with your already naturally high Evade DS!

Even further post-cap, with 75 ranks of Minor Elemental and 20 ranks of Minor Spiritual, even a self-spelled rogue with a small statue in a spell sever area (and speaking of spells, robes have no hindrance, so you can cast Major Elemental Wave!) can reach ludicrous amounts of 650 DS even in offensive stance and even without a shield. That's either borderline unhittable or outright unhittable to, for example, every Hinterwilds creature other than draugrs and undansormrs!

Now, you might be thinking: "Okay, that sounds good, but I don't have 25 million experience. In fact, my highest level character has like 3 million experience. So what about when I do get hit? Won't I just get annihilated compared to stealth or plate rogues?" And to that I say "Well, just get more exp so you can do all the things. Nobody ever said that everybody's ready for every hunting ground at every exp amount!"

Monks

Best monk build wears the robes, swings the dual katars, and fires the bows. First third of previous sentence should be clear enough because the Iron Skin only works with the robes, but second and third thirds might seem counterintuitive because the monks are clearly designed to use Unarmed Combat System. While leveling when the points are tight, it's true that training Unarmed Combat System is clearly correct path when assessed by the efficiency; however, the monks won't be leveling forever, so moving beyond Unarmed Combat System to pick up the Two Weapon Combat and the Ranged Weapons adds the diversity!

Like the I wrote in Magical Monk Guide, Unarmed Combat System has the pros and the cons. More specifically, Unarmed Combat System has low floor, but also low ceiling. Sometimes the creatures simultaneously have extremely low the Defensive Strength and characteristic of being uncrittable, which is mediocre environment for Unarmed Combat System and very good environment for the Two Weapon Combat the katars, so your the monk should train to flexibly take the advantage of both at opportune the times!

As for the ranged, the Volley is Standard Maneuver Roll-based the attack, which helps against turtled the creatures such as the pures who spawn with the Wall of Force.

Now, the you might be thinking: "Okay, that sounds good, but the I made my the monk for Unarmed Combat System, so Unarmed Combat System is what the I will use. Also, maximizing benefit of the Iron Skin means training the Dragonscale Skin, which means the I don't have the Mental Acuity, which either means Q) the I don't have the Martial Mastery and therefore my the katars have lower the Attack Strength than comparable the professions or P) the I don't have the spells and therefore my the monk becomes more indistinguishable from the warriors." And to the that the I say "Well, just get more the exp so the you can train every Ascension the skill (or get better the enhancives) and have high the Attack Strength anyway. The nobody ever said that the everybody's ready for every the build at every exp the amount (or enhancive the setup or gear the setup)!"

Conclusion

Now that you're enlightened, go forth and be the best square you can be! Remember, it's hip to be square!

(Note: The Monks section has been filtered through a prescriptivist-to-descriptivist translator to better align with the manner in which the average GemStone IV player uses the definite article in conversations regarding unarmed combat. The title of this article has been filtered through a descriptivist-to-prescriptivist translator.)

Post-Script

Updated September 1, 2025.

Since we have some new players coming in recently, I'll risk ruining the whole thing by clarifying this guide was an April Fools' joke...

...well, sort of. The purely mathematical information in here is accurate. In fact, my warrior does wear robes and has untouchable DS in offensive to all but two non-boss creatures in the game (and with a shield she can reach more into the realm of 755 DS), my rogue does wear robes without using stealth, and the higher exp of my two monks is trained for the option of using dual katars and I'm entertaining the idea of training for bows in the future.

The actual jokes are hopefully signaled clearly enough, but just in case not, the first is the absurdity of hyping up builds that require the people reading it to be 3x to 5x cap even though the usual audience for guides is beginners. (That said, you can raise robes warriors or robes rogues from low levels too, but they need spellup support to bolster their defenses since they don't have the training points to max Dodging, never mind also train spells. Skimping on Armor Use does save some training points that can go to Martial Mastery AS a little ahead of schedule, but not nearly enough to push Dodging or spells.)

The second joke was riffing on others and myself about the community's common misusage of the "UCS" initialism. For some reason, people understand the definite article when they talk about the USA, the NBA, the NFL, and so on, but suddenly don't understand it--and don't use it--when they talk about the UCS. They treat it like they treat "NASA," which would only be the case if they pronounced "UCS" as "ucks."

That's the fault on their end, but the fault on my end is that despite consciously knowing they have that quirk, I still subconsciously parse their sentences as broken English. So the entire impetus for this guide was creating the monk section that reflects my experience trying to read other people talking about the UCS (or just "UCS" to them) by including a "the" every time it shouldn't be there and excluding it every time it should be there. The warrior and rogue sections were just necessary filler to make it at least superficially plausible at first glance that I'd genuinely released something new when someone clicked the link. (...I was originally going to include a section for every profession to have even more filler, but couldn't think of anything particularly funny or outlandish to say about semis. The wizard, empath, cleric, and sorcerer sections would all have just said to play a bard to have even stronger magic while still being able to use weapons--which, keeping in line with the square sections, presumes at least a 2.5x cap bard.)