I've never messed with the racial armor quest, so I don't know anything about it. My Druid has to have a Deity, but my Wizard can be Agnostic. Any advantage to being an Agnostic caster?
It has a major advantage for classes that have a lot of player-race illusions available to them in that it can alleviate otherwise lengthy or problematic faction fixes. Enchanters are often advised to go agnostic due to their epic involving so many zones that have hostile to their actual race (or typical racial deity) factions.
Agnostic allows you start as neutral to all religion-specific factions. Some religion choices will force you into a "good" or "evil" alignment, which as noted above will make the natives hostile to you in some zones you may need to traverse. So, agnostics don't have to do as much faction grinding overall, with the tradeoff being that you won't get to enjoy the starting faction benefits of a specific religion. An agnostic also has the advantage of simultaneously building faction with both good and evil classes, which can produce interesting results in old-school content. To me it's a try-it-and-see-what-happens kind of thing.
Agnostic makes you less KOS in certain situations (specifically religious npcs). At least thats my experience.
There's hardly any advantage to *not* being agnostic except for a handful of deity-only neat equipment very early on in the game's history that'll already be old news within a few months here as far as I'm aware. Of course, every time I make a bard I worship Veeshan just because I can And yes, HIGHLY RECCOMMEND agnostic for enchanters, they can get the most use out of their illusions that way
Off the top of my head Greenmist (SK) in kunark is very tough if you worship the wrong diety. There is the innoruuk snare clickie for clr/shm. Karana worshippers have probably the easiest path to high end fetching. Probably missing 1 or 2 reasons but otemherwise diety is faction/flavor in the first couple expacs and then largely irrelevant.
Right! The issue isn't so much that being agnostic is bad, but that for certain specific quests (as mentioned above), Religion is important. I had a Troll SK who gained Cabilis access to do Greenmist, but knowing ahead of time I wanted to do that, he was a Cazic worshipper. I have a halfling ranger and apparently picked the wrong religion for him. Tunare worshippers get the best arrows and some armor quests IIRC.
