S'ok. I played Lusty quite some time ago (Think: 2+ years ago and then a VERY brief stint around when Bards came out) and due to life had to quit. I recently decided to try and come back, as I honestly enjoy the community.

Right now I'm a bard. Not fun. I've got my mind set on changing archtypes, but I'm a bit hung up.

The choice is between Serenguard and Moondancers. I'm from Serenwilde, and IC I don't really have any motivation to switch communes/cities. Also, I've been a druid archtype before, and am not interested in going back to it.

Both the Serenguard and the Moondancers each have a certain appeal to me, so it's rather hard to decide. I want to be fairly proficient at bashing and am only mildly concerned with pvp. Most of my time will be spent bashing/rping/crafting, but a bit of pvp would be fun, too.

I suppose I'm going to get some responses of "Do you want to bash with swords or do you want to use magic." - which is a reasonable, basic question. But if I could answer that easily, I'd have already decided and never posted. Both interest me. I've never played either archtype. I'm intrigued at how a BC fights and the affliction wounding system. I'm also intrigued by the wiccan fae and aspects portion.

Is there anything either one could offer that tips the scales at all? I'm about to lose my mind trying to decide. The sad (but true) fact is I've been sitting here for two days considering everything. I just don't know enough about either class to make a good call. Perhaps some of you with experience in these guilds/archtypes could ask more pinpoint questions about aspects of combat with each archtype and that would help out... I dunno.

Any advice/suggestions/comments/hugs are appreciated.

Oh, and race isn't a factor, I have a cameo.

might want to consider cost.

Warriors cost more to have more fun with than wiccans do.

If you want to mainly bash and stuff: Go Moondancer with Astrology. Trans Moon for Moonburst and high Astrology for buffspheres for yourself.
If you want to do a bit of PvP too, and like seeing huge numbers when looking at your health, go warrior.

Out of curiosity, why don't you like bards?

Warriors, of course, revolve around hitting people with metallic objects. BC is far and above the best of the weapon specs, and it has lots of stunning/knockdown moves to hinder your opponent with, as well as crushwindpipe to impair curing and eventually bashbrains to kill with once you get the wounding high enough. It's a pretty cool class and it's all active.

Moondancers use an entourage of fae that cause various effects on the opponent (sleep, mana/health drain, balance loss, random affliction, movement hindering) to supplement a strong active offense of hexes and aeon. They revolve largely around sticking afflictions like anorexia/asthma to hinder aeon curing or getting a sleeplock under aeon, and doing this for long enough to kill with moonburst or lash to half mana and toadcurse.

So if you want to try to stick afflictions and get past people's aeon curing for the kill, go moondancer. If you want to smash people's faces into a bloody pulp while building wounding, go warrior.

Either class is very strong for both PVP and bashing.

serious pvp makes warriors the most expensive. credits and gold wise. I imagine they're more fun though, they have different ways to kill and you can really make your own style. Moondancers are pretty one tracked pvp wise. For bashing I like the Moondancers astrologer works very well and some people have been having a lot of fun rping with it too. i don't know anything about the serenguard rp, but the moondancers are more populated so at the least there's always some guild people to interact with. though of course that's not to say you can't interact with people from other guilds! warrior forging gives you plenty of time to craft...

Alright, first off, thank all of you for your input. Hope you don't mind a couple clarifications.

Ashertu/Krellan: I'm actually honestly surprised about the suggestion to take astrology with a moondancer over hexes. Like I said, I know very little about how they fight, but all I could ever remember hearing about skill choice for them was hexes if you wanted to fight, healing if you wanted to make dying hard as hell, but also killing hard as hell, and astrology was more or less put the wayside as a skill that used to be viable. Did I hear wrong before, or did I just hear uninformed opinions?

As per cost: Is the high cost related to needing to trans the guild skills prior to being very effective at bashing, do proper swords cost an insane amount, or do you have to be artied to hell to be effective? *Note that as far as right now, I'm not planning on being incredibly heavy into pvp, so if the issue is "It's an insane cost to get to a level where you could touch people the likes of Daganev or Ashteru", I'm not really trying to do that right now... or probably ever. I've heard scary things. So for warrior fun level, is it fun to put on some hammers and go bash ccc faces in, and is the cost to do that any different from a decent pvp cost?

Acrune: I want to move off the bards for two reasons. 1. Character baggage. There's rp elements that just want to make my character (and me) move off the guild. 2. From all I've seen of them, bards are much more a support class than any other class. I'm just very interested in trying a more offensively focused class.

Also, do affliction skills (for any archtype) affect ccc's? I guess I was always under the impression that ccc's just needed to be influenced or direct damaged down. But I'd never really tried anything but direct damage before, so it was totally an assumption.

Again, thank you all for your comments.

No idea what a ccc is, but only direct damage works on denizens. That, or influencing them. For warriors, it's expensive as hell to get top tier, but if you want to just bash, it isn't too expensive. Maybe... however many credits you need to trans your weapon spec and around 50000 gold for a decent set of hunting weapons and field plate. From what I heard, for warriors, it's cheap to get decent, it's expensive to get good. What you've heard about wiccan skills is right. Hexes kill people, healing keeps anybody from killing anything. What astrology is good for is bashing (and fighting to a degree, until people update their systems and or you have an ungodly level of skill) due to the very useful buffs that they get. And some other things that I forget.

Astrology has great buffs and direct access to Astral. That last is less of an issue with your construct now, but still. It's always been a good hunting skill - the hexes/healing things you heard were more about pvp, I think. Though Thoros has been working on showing how good astrology can be in pvp.

There is no reasonable limit on the price for quality weaponry - but the market is highly illiquid. Forging a top quality weapon can take literally thousands of reforges, and unless it was forged on commission you can expect to wait years for it to sell. Artifacts are unnecessary outside of top-tier pvp combat, but make a huge difference in effectiveness, more so than for any other class. Razenth is right that decent weapons often aren't much more than comms.

Non-damage skills don't really affect creatures, with rare exceptions like nymph for Moondancers or nullify. If you go warrior, you'll be very glad of raze/cleave - it helps a lot when hunting.

It's a computer-controlled character a.k.a. non-player character a.k.a. mobile.

(I think he may have been making the point that this forum is still IC, and it's totally my fault for going into insanity speech. Or maybe he doesn't know, in which case you helped him out. )

I just didn't know what the hell a ccc was.

generally, warriors have it easier for low maybe even mid-tier fighting and win against other classes. at the top tier, it's hard to keep compete without being artied and runed on weapons. master weapons always cost over 100k easy. two weapons is obviously more. plus you want sets of weapons. hunting ones and then fighting ones. as a warrior you'd have to be at Sojiro or Nico's skill level to touch Ashteru without being artied up. neither of them have serious runes I believe, but they do have the general trans guild skills planar discipline, forging resilience basics. but then again ashteru is a freaking tank with over 10k health easy and so you'd have to be able to kill him with wounds. with a non warrior class, to compete at top or mid tiers, you just need some decent levels a min of 80 for some health and then basically trans guild skills, useful trade if you take one, if not then you can ignore it, discipline, resilience, combat to parry, maybe not magic but it's helpful. I mean I suppose absolute minimum would be guild skills and then discipline to fabled then planar so you don't lose insane experience if you fight too often off prime. also this assumes as a moondancer you go hexes. astrology is a good choice we said for you cause you're not heavily into fighting and prefer bashing, but seems to want to experienc esome fighting. lots of good astrologers, you can talk to. Furien you can ask oocly, you can also talk to Laysus or Nejii (Shiri) here. it has great utility, you can even charge people who often seek the buffs astrology can give. it is useful for mild combat like groups maybe a little one on one with luck because it's a really lucked based skill pvp wise. to bash as a moondancer you need trans moon, fabled wicca and all the useful buffs from astrology, not sure how far that is. this is for full potential as in you can't get any better with any of the other guild skills. warriors need two 180 weapons. Sorry gotta finish this later! or someone else can!

Furien is Alianna. And by luck based, Krellan means that the afflictions to a certain extent vary depending on the day it is. They can get a wide range of affliction on a certain preson with some that are set in stone and some that will change every hour. Fighting with astrology requires a lot more forethought and quick thinking to work with what you got, compared to say, hexes or Tarot.

*wishes that Astrology and (maybe) healing was actually a choice for pvp too and MD's wouldn't always -have- to take hexes if they wanted to fight*

The forum is not ic.

Shut that cavernous abyss you call a mouth, you filthy mud-spawned compost-feeding inbred bow-legged wyrdo.

You're not helping.

At times I question that statement.

I'll start helping as soon as you start helping by taking a long walk off of a short pier in shark-infested waters whilst wearing the corpse of a freshly killed seal, glomdoran scum.



I truly don't think it's too bad over here.

In Achaea on the other hand......

The forums there are just another battleground for e-go's to battle against each other.

They also tend to be a lot more entertaining to watch, since, let's admit it, who doesn't like watching bloated ego-masses smash into each other in a flurry of non-sequitors and ad hominem attacks?