I was reading through the site, and I ended up with some questions:
Can you go without a guild, and if so, are there any skills you cannot get?
Is this like Achaea, where you can go without a guild, but must pick a class to gain those skills?
Can you pull off crazy mix & match skill combos?

In Lusternia, being in a guild is EXTREMELY important.

While you can be a rogue, you will get no where because half your skills won' work.

Yes, you can go without a guild, but you won't have any guild skills. But if you enter a guild and get to GR1 (which only takes 24 hours here, no interview process like in Achaea for most guilds) and then quit, you'll keep -all- skills, guild skills included. If you quit your commune/city though, you won't be able to use a lot of them, since they require power specific to the organisation.

No, it's not like Achaea, for the reasons I just described.

And no you can't have mix & match anything. Your skills are defined by your guild. BUT you can choose from one of (a couple) for your third guildskill.

Actually, some classes can mix-and-match. All guilds have two primary skillsets and a secondary skillset.

Using warriors as an example:

primary #1: bonecrushing -or- blademastery -or- pureblade -or- axelord

primary #2: athlethics

secondary: sacraments (celest), necromancy (magnagora), moon/stag (serenwilde), night/crow (glomdoring), hunting (anywhere)

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Actually, you can be a rogue if you don't plan on engaging in PvP. If you do plan on playerkilling, you can still be a rogue, but you'd need either high Planar (To get Power from Astral) or a powerplex jewel (An artifact that gives you Power.) And the only archetype that can go rogue without losing a substantial amount of its skills is warrior with hunting instead of totems/rituals; but rogue warriors don't get hounds, which are a significant part of hunting. Lusternia doesn't encourage rogues for PvP, but the roleplay of being a rogue can be very satisfying (Just ask Marina or Suhnaye). Your hunting, influencing, and questing won't be affected by being a rogue. As for making skill combinations, each archetype has a limited choice of skills; in most guilds, the only variety is in your third skill. Warriors get a lot more variety in communes, since they can choose one of four primary skills, and one of three secondary skills, with a grand total of twelve different combinations.

Huge hijack, but after talking to a convert from the Shadowdancers to the Blacktalon, I realized why so many warriors prefer the wiccan skills.

Wicca's a pretty crappy skillset. Wiccans bash with moon/night, def with moon/night, get specialized active afflictions with moon/night, and get covens, one of the major flavor aspects of their archetypes, with moon/night. Wicca is actually just the fae, and the fae alone don't win fights.

Druidry is the crux of druidic combat. It handles demesnes, the defining characteristic of the druids' fighting style. Druids bash with druidry. Druids kill with druidry. Druids get about half of their specialized afflictions (scarab, darkseed, sap) from druidry. I've never seen a skill list for Hart, but Crow is basically utility, totem bonding, and the other half of our specialized afflictions. Even then, affliction power comes from the tertiary skill choice, not Crow. Making Crow on par with Night (and, presumably, Hart with Moon) would make druids overpowered.

It is possible to be a Rogue and enjoy life in a certain way... Marina has made much more of a life than I have IC since becomming rogue... Primarily she has Lord Lacostians Order to help keep her occupied, as well as being an avid healer. I've always been far more the scholar and hermit, even when I was a part of Serenwilde I was rather withdrawn except to a select crowd. Rogue is sort of the ultimate middle ground for diplomacy and whatnot... Not that many people listen to you much *Mutters*

As a tip, I would suggest you stick with whichever guild you choose untill your at least level 60 and have developed your character a decent bit. Starting character profiles are fine and dandy, but they don't come close to using in game experiences to develope your character.

I'm going to speak as one who has no guild, quitting it in the Tutorial so I could be attached to a city while being guildless.

It's possible to level, but if you plan on engaging in combat, you will stink, since it appears only guild skills have any skills useful for bashing mobile denziens. If you invest in credits and beef up the influence skill, you can use influence skills to gains levels and perhaps gold. There are also some non-violent quests you can engage in, most notably the pilgrim quests.

I could only see the no guild archetype if you were going to try making money as a dedicated artisan. But I would not recommend going guildless to start if you want to be involved in combat. I occassionally engage in wargames/ffa/duels, and it's really hard for me, a Level 31 character, to last against anybody but a lower-level novice who's not good at combat.

You have no idea what you are talking about.

First, Wicca is a pretty solid skillset. The syngery of the Fae doesn't rival a demesne, but for Wiccans, they are absolutely essential. Furthermore, passive mana (and for MDs health) is pretty damn nice. Even for Shadowdancers, passive paralyse/bleeding/sleep/pooka on top of succumb mana drain is lethal. Very few people can even begin to keep up with that drain.

Second, demesnes don't win fights by themselves anymore than Fae. The only exception might be the geomancer demesne with poison gas.

And third, Stag does gives LOTS of afflicting power. I dare you to fight Munsia in demesne with Ancestral Curse up.

I dunno, I think Xavius has a point. Setting a demesne on someone is a hell of a lot nastier and more hindering than setting a bunch of Fae on someone. And we can't -kill- with Wicca even against fairly bad people, since we would have to use curse. (Can't toadcurse without lash, can't damage without moonburst.)

Well, I've killed with curse a few times, although the people I slew weren't exactly the best fighters, it is possible to kill with curse.

I do need more skills, though..

... Who was that?

It all depends in the situation. In single combat, yes, Druidry is useless by itself, much better with crow/stag, and it only reaches full potential with runes/dreamweaving, or when replaced by Ecology. In group combat, particularly when you're defending, demesnes are the most important support tool there is; 'just' trans Druidry is extremely effective in a fight if you're giving support to other people.

I disagree with that assessment.

A low-mid fighter can do quite well with cudgel, sap, vines, and a timed demesne. The next step to augment that is the tertiary skill. I mean, really, if I had to start forgetting skills, first would be riding, next would be magic, third would be Crow. Ecology would be second from last, druidry last of all.

This isn't to say that Crow is a horribly underpowered skillset. It's not. It has all sorts of fun tricks. They just aren't essential to anything that I do. Moon, on the other hand, is essential to what Wiccans do. Even in Narsrim's example above, he had to drag in Night to make a point about how good the fae are.

Picking apart his argument even more, he says that "demesnes don't win fights by themselves anymore than Fae," completely ignoring that druidry is more than the demesne, it's sap, cudgel, demesne, darkseed/scarab, and our pet (for whatever tiny benefit that's worth). Wicca, however, is...fae, broom, toadcurse?