🎯 Scope: this page is about learning skills, and nothing else. It looks at Intelligence, Wisdom, and Discipline only through the lens of how fast you turn field experience into skill ranks. These same three stats also drive spell damage, contested spells, spirit health, concentration, and many guild abilities — none of that is considered here. If you're building for combat, PvP, or a specific guild ability, weigh your training differently and treat this page as just the learning half of the picture.

This is a deep-dive companion to Statistic Training. That page tells you what order to train stats in; this page explains why, with the actual formulas and the math behind "get your mentals to 100" — purely for skill learning. If you just want the short version, read the TL;DR and stop.

The three "mental" stats — Intelligence, Wisdom, and Discipline — are the only stats that affect how fast you learn skills, and how fast you learn is all this page cares about. Every formula and number here comes from Elanthipedia's Experience article; sources are linked throughout and collected at the bottom.

⚠️ These numbers are player-reverse-engineered from the CONVERT command and GM posts. They match every hard number a GM has ever published (see the Intelligence check below), but treat them as "extremely good approximations," not gospel.

(Ranked purely by learning speed. Discipline in particular is more valuable than this list suggests once you count its non-learning uses.)

1. Train Intelligence, Wisdom, and Discipline to 100. This is the community meta and it's correct. Below 100, points are cheap; at 100 the TDP cost per point jumps 5×.
2. After 100, feed only Intelligence and Wisdom, and keep them roughly balanced (Wisdom a touch ahead — see why). Leave Discipline at 100.
3. Discipline is the weakest learning stat — roughly a third the strength of the other two, point for point. It's still worth 100 (cheap points, and it helps everything else in the game), but it's the first stat you stop feeding.
4. The only "effect" breakpoints are 30 and 60. Above 60 the benefit is a perfectly straight line — 120 and 150 are not magic numbers, they're just round budgeting targets.

Only your base stats count toward learning — spell/ability buffs to Int/Wis/Disc do not increase your pools or pulses. (Confirmed on the Intelligence and Wisdom stat pages: "uses only base Intelligence" / "uses only base Wisdom.")

Think of it as a pipeline:

field exp earned  →  [ POOL ]  →  pulse  →  real ranks
                     (Int, Disc)  (Wis, Disc)

Your rate of gaining ranks depends on both the size of the pool and the size of each pulse. Intelligence makes the bucket bigger; Wisdom empties it into ranks faster. Because they act on different stages, their effects multiply — which is why you want both, not just one.

All of this is on the Experience page. Skip to Breakpoints if you don't care about the algebra.

The starting size of a skill's pool, before stats, where X = your ranks in that skill (source):

Where x = Intelligence (source):

Where x = Discipline (source):

Notice the Discipline slopes are exactly one third of the Intelligence slopes at every band. That's the "Discipline is weaker" effect made concrete.

Combine them, where i and d are from steps 2 and 3 and base is from step 1 (source):

pool = (1000 + i + d) / 1000 × base

So Intelligence and Discipline are just a percentage multiplier on top of your base pool.

There's no published algebraic formula for the pulse, but GM Armifer gave hard numbers on 12/10/2015 (Experience § Stats and learning). Using value 10 as the 100% baseline, Intelligence and Wisdom have the identical magnitude:

Wisdom applies this multiplier to your pulse; Intelligence applies it to your pool. Discipline adds to both at "10% efficacy" per Armifer.

Yes. Plug the Intelligence formula (step 2) into the pool multiplier (1000 + i) / 1000:

The reverse-engineered formula reproduces the GM's published figures exactly. That's why we trust it.

The per-point benefit halves at 30, and halves again at 60 — for all three stats. Positions are identical; Discipline is just 1/3 the size.

Above 60 it's a straight line forever. The 61st point of Intelligence and the 300th point are each worth the same 0.15%. So:

• 120 and 150 are not mechanical breakpoints. They're round-number goals people set, nothing more.
• 149 vs 150 is one point = 0.15%. Effectively identical.
• If you genuinely don't care about TDP cost, there is no "optimal" stopping point — higher is always linearly better.

Nothing happens to the benefit at 100 — the line runs straight through it. But the TDP cost to raise a stat jumps 5× (Attributes § TDP cost formulas). For a character with no racial modifier, the cost of the next point is:

cost of next point = value × 3      (below 100)
cost of next point = value × 15     (100 and above)

This cost cliff — not any change in benefit — is the entire reason the community meta is "train mentals to 100." (Racial modifiers shift these costs; check Attributes § Racial Bonuses. Or just use TDP PROJECT <stat> <goal> in game, which is what the train script does.)

Cumulative learning multiplier from each stat, relative to a value of 10:

The first 20 points (10→30) of Intelligence buy you +12%. The next fifty points (100→150) buy you +7.5% — and cost 5× as much per point. That's diminishing returns in a nutshell.

These recommendations optimize skill learning only. See the scope note at the top — combat and guild considerations can and should override them.

Cheap points, big cumulative payoff, and 100 is exactly where the cost cliff hits. There is no reason to stop your mentals between 60 and 100. (Getting all eight stats to 100 costs roughly 40k ranks' worth of TDPs — see Statistic Training.)

Every point past 100 costs 5× what it used to, so spend it where it does the most: the two full-strength learning stats. Leave Discipline at 100.

Because pool × pulse multiply, the best return comes from keeping the two factors even rather than maxing one. Push them up together.

One subtlety: with Discipline sitting at 100, it has already padded the pool (Intelligence) side of the equation. To keep the two multiplied factors balanced, let Wisdom run a few points ahead of Intelligence (roughly 5–10). It's a minor optimization — don't sweat it if your stats are already close.

Point for point, Discipline gives about 1/3 the learning of Intelligence or Wisdom (see the formula slopes above; GM Armifer characterizes it as "10% efficacy" — more on that discrepancy below). Either way it's your lowest learning priority. But its sub-100 points are cheap, and Discipline quietly helps nearly everything else — fatigue, spell accuracy, contests, spirit health — so 100 is a fine home for it. Just don't pour post-100 points into it for learning's sake.

Say you're a Human at 150 / 150 / 150 (Int / Wis / Disc) and you wonder whether to drop Discipline back to 100 and move those TDPs into Int/Wis.

• Dropping Discipline 150 → 100 refunds 93,375 TDP.
• Reinvested optimally, that takes you to about Int 166 / Wis 173.
• Net change in learning throughput: +2.3%.

The pieces:

So yes — for learning only, it's a small win, because you're trading weak Discipline points for full-strength Int/Wis points. But you'd be giving up 50 points of Discipline's combat and utility value. Whether +2.3% learning is worth that is a personal call.

How far can you go? If you keep dropping Discipline and reinvesting, the net stays positive down to about Discipline 45 (the break-even). Below that you lose more learning than you gain back, and you're gutting a stat that does everything. The sweet spot is exactly 100 — it's both the peak of the reinvestment curve and the natural cost cliff.

• Base stats only. Buffs to Int/Wis/Disc don't help learning. Train the real number.
• Discipline's exact strength is fuzzy. The reverse-engineered pool formula makes Discipline 1/3 as strong as Intelligence, but GM Armifer described it as "10% efficacy." Nobody has nailed down Discipline against hard numbers the way Intelligence was verified. Either way, the conclusion is the same: it's the weakest learning stat, take it to 100 and stop.
• These stats do far more than learning. Intelligence, Wisdom, and Discipline all feed spell damage, contested spells, spirit health, concentration, and guild abilities — see each stat's page. This guide optimizes learning only; if you value combat or a specific guild ability, weight your training differently.
• The pool × pulse "throughput" model is this guide's synthesis. The individual formulas are sourced; combining them into a single multiplier to compare builds is our analysis, not an official number. It's a sound approximation, not a promise of exact in-game results.

• Experience — the master article for everything above.
  • § Stats and learning — GM Armifer's hard numbers.
  • § Experience Pool Size — the pool formulas.
  • § Mindstates — clear → mind lock scale.
• Attributes — TDP cost formulas, racial modifiers, the cost cliff at 100.
• Time Development Points — how TDPs are earned.
• Stat pages: Intelligence, Wisdom, Discipline.
• Demystifying the Experience System — Isharon's classic explainer.

See also: Statistic Training for a practical stat-by-stat training order.