Whats a good race and guild and city for a newbie that doesn't intend to buy any credits OOCly.

Faeling>Any Guild>Any City
This Combination, Owns! I'm serious, Faelings are where it is at.

Don't listen to him. As far as guild and city go its really an RP choice, so think about what you want to be and how you want to act. Go with a race that has a specialization for the guild you choose.

Meh, he has a point though, honestly it i all about RP and what you want out of your character, if you give us some info, we could point you in a better direction.

As they stand, Faelings are best suited for Glomdoring Guilds, Viscanti for Magnagoran guilds, though this can vary with the Ur'guard. Elfen with the Serenwilde Guards, Dwarf is good for Moondancers/Shadowdancers though, if you know what your doing, and Merian for Celest Guilds. There are some races that excel in the different types, like Dwarfs for Wiccans. Aslaran, Orclach, Dracnari are used as Warrior races, if you want to go warrior, dont go Serenguard cause they're the worst right now.

For a newcomer to Lusternia, I would suggest spending your time at first just exploring and getting to know the world. I think any Guardian class has a good range of skills for bashing mobs (the non-player, non-unique monsters).

I'm a little biased, but Celestine (the New Celest guardian class) has a pretty good selection as far as low level skills. Puella heals you. Laetetia cures ego. Cosmicfire is one of the best attack spells against mobs. Waterwalk makes water travel much faster, which, as a citizen of New Celest, makes some of the quests easier.

Some other tips:
Learn Teleport in Planar (learned at Adept) as soon as possible. Not only do you get a great spell to help when you get lost (which can happen a lot), you also get Rift, which is a great way to store extra commodities.
Ask questions. Bug your guild mates. They're there to help you.

Good race/class: Merian Celestine

Of course you could always go Dwarf Moondancer

Cosmicfire is actually one of the WORST attack spells, Rauros.

You'd be better off with a mage using blast, or a Wiccan/Druid using curse. Both Wiccan guilds have fairly good bashing skills, anyway, because of sprite and nymph, but it's your choice.

If you aren't interested in fighting, I suggest Moondancer (can fly without wings whee.gif) or Hartstone for your guild. Reason being the totems skillset. Serenguard gets totems too, but imho, they suck without creds.

Totems:
Free food (if you're good at foraging)
Free regeneration of mana (night) and ego (day)
Free waterbreathing
Sprinting
Climbing + Clinging to trees (otherwise high up in environment)
Leap + Burrow (handy if your way is blocked. aren't as good as tumble, which is also high up in environment, but a lot better than nothing)

Lucidian race:
level 2 regen day outdoors for both health and mana
level 3 blunt vulnerability (sucks for bashing)
no wings, but doesn't matter if you go Moondancer

Elfen / Faeling race:
level 1 / 2 regen in forests respectively (but forests only, so you don't get the regen if you bash elsewhere)
faeling got really, really bad health (which also sucks for bashing)
elfen got no wings either

Oh yeah, and picking either Moondancer or Hartstone would put you in Serenwilde, which gives you a relatively easier time than Glomdoring for a while, in terms of combat and obtaining supplies.

Lucidian isn't really that good. *peer Summer* The L3 blunt vuln is REALLY awful.

You want, mm, Elfen, Mugwump (iffy) or possibly Dracnari as an outside choice. Mainly Elfen though.

Yeah, I know the level 3 blunt is bad But probably isn't a whole lot worse than them unspecialised faelings of the same level. And besides, I do so like Lucidians and Faelings, so hehe.

At level 60:
Faeling (no specialisation) health: 1980
Lucidian health: 2880
Elfen (mage / guardian specialisation) health: 2520

If say a mob hits for 1000 damage to a Lucidian and 700 to a Faeling / Elfen (pulling numbers out of thin air here, no idea how the formula for blunt vulnerability goes), that's approximately 35% of each of their lives (though admittedly a far lower 28% for Elfen). For healing, Faeling got +1 sipping, but Lucidian has a higher max health to begin with.

I find viscanti geomancer pretty simple and useful :o, since blast isn't too bad to begin with and earth plane is a pretty nice bashing ground, at least for me, and geomancy is also pretty good for pk :o.

btw that's a lot of smilies.

Hmm, well yeah, Magnagora is a good city to be with if you can fight. If you can't, still pretty good as long as you don't mind staying in the background.

And smilies are great. smilies.

Please don't suggest that anyone become a Lucidian because that will ruin their experience. Almost every creature including astral denizens hit for blunt damage. I have seen former lucidian moondancerss take as much as 1200-1300 damage an attack from a lobstrosity. Simply put, Lucidians are the single worst race. They have the greatest penalty bashing and will fall in 0.2 seconds to any bonecrusher or geomancer.

Yeah, I know. I'm a Lucidian Moondancer. I thought them astral mobs hitting me for that much was because I didn't have a single def / armour up and don't have any damage reduction skill though

Still, there's still plenty of other things to do (albeit mostly less profitable than astral) besides bashing astral mobs.

for bashing, Orclach Ur'Guard, L1-20 quests, newton etc, 21-70 Spectre Isle and spiking, L70+ Halls of the Dead.

Cosmicfire has the advantage of being fairly fast and cheap. Its damage also goes up as your level of Cosmic improves, so I wouldn't say it's a bad attack spell at all. It's better than blast at the higher ends easily, and slightly faster than staff I believe, though a bit less damage. It's just horribly for PvP since lots of people can get pretty high magic resistance.

I'd just like to add that most people don't stop and think about cosmicfire too much. Let us consider the the guilds who have it: Celestines and Nihilists.

Imperial Merian Celestines have 18 intelligence and +1 equilibrium. At least initially, this makes cosmic fire damn good. I remember when I was in the 40-50 level range, it hurt.

Master Viscanti have 16 intelligence. While this is a bit weaker than the Imperial Merian Celestines, they can set their demon to shackle-whore and also torture. These two add up raw damage very quickly.

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General message: While cosmic fire is far from amazing at the other end of the spectrum, it does start off as a rather useful, cheap, and successful method of attack.

And remember that he is not buying credits. It takes near forever (okay, I'm exaggerating, but still... approximately 100 hours of harvesting / bashing astral) to trans even _one_ skillset from nothing unless you get lucky with competitions / are a bashing machine.

Which is why I suggested Cosmicfire in the first place... sheesh.

on the low end:

blast > cosmicfire > nature curse > any knight weaponry

celestine = cheaper on the cures, and more tanky at a lower level compared to moondancers
but moondancers / hartstone = relatively more useful skills, depending on what you want to do