Search around the forum to find out which skills are buggy. There about 6 of them that don't work right, including specialization in Spear, Axe, Crossbow, and True Shot.
Plan to find swords being the best weapons, but bows are very nice too and you can make use of other weapons, but think twice between spending points on them.
Trader skill is a waste since merchants run out of money and you end up with items you cant sell until you find a new merchant. Store the items in a chest and sell them later. You will soon have 1000s of gold as you near level 10 and nothing to spend it on until later.
Identify level 1 and 2 can be useful in the early levels, because spending 150 for a merchant to ID is costly, until that point where you have 8,000 gold or so at level 13 and wont care as much. Still, there are some valuable 10,000-50,000 gp priced items, you may want eventually, so
Ranger sight is a poor choice when you can get Elven Sight for same cost. "Sight" lets you target creatures further away, they literrally wont appear until 1/2 across screen unles you have Sight items (not hard to find) and the skill. Use the CTRL key to auto-target the closest monster. This is very useful when your Sight skill extends to the edge of the screen and past it, since you wouldnt know a monster was there without CTRL.
Sight is not being able to see better in dark places. There is nothing Ive found that increases your vision other than tweaking in-game gama correction. This is a must as the game is TOO DARK! Increase the Shadows slider bar to 50, as this seems to help too.
Some magic skills are better than others. I dont recommend Deadly Disks, as creatures tend to take less damage (by 50% or worse) than the listed amount on the skill. Resists of monsters will determine the effects of spells, so when not using weapons, its good to have 2 ways of doing magic damage, i.e. an unresistable spell (like hell spikes) and Meteor or Lightning, or one of the other elemental skills. Freeze is a great skill, and quite possible too good when its on a weapon. If you want to make the game easy, use a Frost weapon.
Spiritual Resistance is the stat for resisting magic, from Liches and the like. It's important to raise this, along with you other resists, but you wont need it in the early game. Also the spiritual resists of creature will allow them to be Frozen, or not. There are some times of magics that seem to be unresistable such as Blindness curse, which I have not tried yet, but Ive heard can severely diminish the effectiveness of monsters after its been trained a few times. The traps skills can also be over-powered for its small cost, if you use the Death Scorpians. So beware of using Frost, Blind, Scorpians, as they tend to trivialize some of the game's challenge. However, there are "boss" variety monsters (like Diablo) that may require using these power skills unless you are particually skilled and patient to find other ways.
