Masteries

Throughout your fighting journey, you may come across a bold white font stating that some mastery has increased. Masteries increases your effectiveness in battle. Weapon and Spell masteries influence your chance to hit and critically hit an enemy, while armour masteries increase your armour's Item Class, just like a frozen tear. These masteries can go above 100 points, if your race allows, or if you have the Gloves of Skill equipped. Every 5 Weapon/Spell masteries increases your existing chance to hit with that type by 5%, and increases your chance to critically hit with that type anywhere from 0.5% to 2.5%, less of an increase occurring as your mastery is higher. For example, if your current chance to hit an enemy is 50% and your Fire Mastery was at 20 points, then your chance to hit the enemy with a fire spell would be 50 + 50*(.20) = 60%. Your critical hit chance with fire is approximately 2+(20/5 * 2) = 10% (Really, it is 11%).

So, for future reference, the chance-to-hit formula is (Base % Chance to hit) * [1+ (Mastery)/100] = (New % chance to hit). Chance-to-critical formula is approximately 2 * [1 + (Mastery)/5] = (New % chance to critical).

Each Armour Mastery = +0.2 Armour Class. The armour mastery bonus, added to your shield item class bonus (+0.1 per IC), gives you your total added Armour Class rounded DOWN to the nearest whole number. The doublehit mastery increases your chance to hit the enemy twice with a weapon/spell by 1% per mastery increase, therefore this Mastery cannot go above 100 points.

To get your masteries higher, you cannot just go around one-hit killing the creatures, for you will not gain any armour masteries if you are not hit, and you will not get doublehit masteries, as you are killing the creature on the first hit.

Masteries are significantly more important as you progress through the game, especially if you reincarnate. The usual reaction to reincarnation from experienced players is that it makes your character weaker, as it loses 20 points off of each mastery, excluding Doublehit, but cannot go below the new races' starting minimum. Masteries are also beneficial in PKing, or your resilience to PK attacks as you may have extra armour classes from your armour masteries, or a higher critical hit rate, thus burying your opponent into the ground.

You can view what your masteries at Royal University (14,21 The Wilderness). It will cost 100*(Your level) gold to view them.

Abrakazz Razamatazz explains two different ways to mastery train in his Mastery Training Guide.