Are my sea fairing ways detrimental?
 

I’ve only been playing a week and after reading through some posts around here I think I’ve reached a critical point in my characters development. I’m level 16 notoriety and have discovered that my notoriety is a bit bloated due to questing, so I’ve stopped that all together. I love sailing most of all, and second to that is womanning a cannon. My question is this, if I concentrate all my time and skill progression into those two areas will it come back to haunt me later, or will I still be able to catch up on my landlubber skills here and there during breaks from sailing about?

If you like sailing and the sea, I would definetly focus on that, it will earn you money, so you can buy a ship earlier than some. On land fighting skills will suffer, so my suggestion is to pick one weapon you have now (not the pistol) and concentrate on that whenever you are fighting. So that you'll have at least one weapon you can use on land when you absolutely have to make something dead. I say not the pistol because you can't shoot at Navy / EITC soldiers with a pistol. So I would pick the doll or sword and stick to it. I have neglected the dagger up til this point. I am noteriety 20, 16 cannon, 13? doll I think. I have a Frigate, and between my doll kiting and sword skills (9) I can do ok, with much room for improvement, but I can handle tasks on my own.

You'll be fine. The only real way to screw up a skill is to put a skill point where you don't need or want it.

I group the land skills (cutlass, pistol, doll, dagger, staff) separately from the sea skills (sailing, cannon). I try to keep the skills in each group at roughly the same level, and don't worry about there being a big divergence between the two groups.

I agree with Bilge. I have tried to keep the weaponry at the same lvl, workin on all instead of one. My first pirate grew too fast and left the weaponry in the dust. This made it harder in the long run to get their lvls up. Especially grenades! Best bet is to work on them as you go along.

I’m all over the place right now, my sailing and cannon are both around10-13, my cutlass is around 6-7 my gun is around 5, my doll is around 10 and my dagger is 3. lol

Some of them could actually be higher than I’m thinking they are, like gun and cutlass

You’ll have to forgive the vagueness of the numbers, I’m at work right now so I having nothing to go by but memory and yeah, my memory stinks. lol

I’m not sure what I should do.

I'd work on your dagger to get it up to the same level as the cutlass, then switch off between them. The doll is easy to raise. I used giant crabs.

You can use giant crabs for the gun, too. Use the A-S-D keys to walk backwards in a circle, and the mouse to aim and fire. It sounds cumbersome, but it works well. You can walk faster than the crabs, even backwards.

I'm in kinda the same boat (if you'll pardon the double entendre).

I ran through the Pearl quest. After I came out of it I noticed how low all my actual skills were.

If you don't have a pressing need to see the Boss Battle ASAP, here's what I'd recommend doing.

Allot yourself blocks of two days (real days) to work on a given thing. Spend two days on sword, then two days on pistol, then two days on sailing, etc etc. Also, allot quest time in there too (as if the quest were a skill).

Any day you don't play doesn't count against the two day block.

The only breaks I'd recommend are for teleport token quests. The tokens are too valuable to put off getting. So when you come up for a teleport token, interrupt whatever else you were doing and get it.

This should even out your skills and rep.

Personally, I'm too anal to do it this way. So, since I finished the Boss Battle, I've been grinding almost exclusively on a single skill to mastery.

So far I'm mastered on both voodoo items and sailing. I'm pushing in on mastering cutlass.

thanks for all the advise, my plan is to get my dagger and gun up to the level of my cutlass, I figure my doll will always be higher because I use it so much. Aside from that, I plan to SAIL SAIL SAIL :D I almost have sailing high enough to get the war sloop but I still need some coins lol.