Hey everyone. I was looking into starting to get into Lusternia coming from Achaea. I was looking for a game with more roleplay. I also would like to be involved in combat, however, and was wondering about how many skills would I need to trans before I'd be able to compete well in combat. I know it probably depends on the class, but in general figuring in 3 skills for class abilities...how many others would I need to survive and have a fighting chance?

Another thing...what do you consider the most fun classes to play? What's a good bashing class that's not tri-transed. I'm going to start getting into it and slowly work up credits through iron elite membership I think. I'd like a decent bashing class cause I personally hate bashing and would like to get high level (80ish I'm thinking?) as fast and as easily as possible because otherwise I'll burn out. Any way I could get an opinion based breakdown on the classes?

Any and all help is greatly appreciated. Thanks a ton!

If you don't like bashing, there's also influencing and aethercraft.

For trans skills, there's always going to be one more thing you can learn that makes things better/easier. Depending on what archetype you go with, your kill method can come from one skill, or a combination. It also really depends on what your goal is for combat. I tend to be more concerned with staying alive and being a mild annoyance, letting other people go for the kills. Staying alive skills are resilience, discipline, combat, high/low magic, maybe some beastmastery. Obviously it'd be best to trans them all, but you're not going to be crippled if you can't. Killing people skills are going to be your guild skills. Your guild and tertiary skill choice will determine how your lessons should be spread. There are a very few skills that depend on other skills. If you're a tracker, you'll want to trans environment, if you're an enchanter, you'll need to learn high magic, if you use a lot of willpower, you'll want to learn some discipline.

I love being a druid personally.

You don't necessarily need trans to be helpful in a group fight, but the skillsets to make you live longer would be Discipline, Combat, Resilience, and High/Lowmagic.

Trans Discipline so you can cut Focus Body time down to one second, and get Focus Mind.
Trans Combat for stances and shields to help deal with warrior and monks, plus ShieldStun.
Trans Resilience for less dmg and chance to resist poison
High/LowMagic up to at least Gedulah/Green for getting out of locks, though more can't hurt.

Beastmastery can be pretty good too, and you probably will want Planar up to Conglutinate, to cut back on down time after death.

Since you're spending credits, you'd probably want to pick up 3 artifact pipes, I think they're like, 50 each.

Monks or Warriors would be the really good bashers, but as was mentioned, there's also influencing, or the super easy street that anybody can do, aetherbashing. Though personally I find aetherbashing even more tedious then normal bashing. ):

The smiley is sad because you put it upside down lehki.

Warrior/Monk are some of the best bashing classes in the game, though ANY archetype can succeed when it comes to good bashing abilities, so long as you understand the class. We have an Aquamancer mage who tears mobs a new one (though he does has artifacts to help), and Bards are pretty damn excellent at bashing as well.

With that said we have a lot of players who are level cap thanks to a system we have called aetherbashing. Learn a bit of aethership, get a group together and go off for a ride and basically earn massive amounts of xp. No health vials, curatives, or trans guild skills necessary.

There is also influencing. I'll admit that it CAN be a lot slower to influence mobs rather than bashing them because with bashing you get critical hits and group up with others, whereas in influencing you don't get crits and can't group up, but the upside of influencing is there is basically no risk of getting jumped (and if you do that person can't touch you again for 30 real life days), you need only bromides potions, and with the use of begging and selling esteem you pretty much make bank and can buy credits off the in-game market.

So even if you don't get trans in guild skills you have Aethercraft, Influence, and Dramatics (which helps with influencing). Transing those three pretty much gives you everything you need to get to level 100 without ever killing a mob in enemy territory.

Anyway I hope that all helps and the best of luck to you in game. Make a bunch of novices in different archetypes and see where it takes you. You might like the idea of Ninjakari but end up hating it and loving Nihilists instead!

It just seems like there's waaaay more skills in Lusternia than Achaea which makes things a lot more confusing...and expensive....

Lusternia has a much steeper learning curve and price to entering combat. You aren't required to have any of them to fight, though, and can always earn credits in-game.

It's tough starting over in IRE games, but doable as well.

Go for maxing out influencing and getting dramatics to vagabond. You can sell esteem needles for 6-10k each from the amount of esteem you can get from influencing city guards and denizens. You may even be able to participate in village riot events, where there is a pvp-form of influencing known as Debating. You can get Aethercraft up to siphoning and then try finding someone nice enough to take you on aetherhunts for some nice experience too.

As for bashing class... I hear guardian classes, with the exception of Celest's, is pretty slow, but they're awesome in combat. Warriors... good bashers, but you need to invest in a ton of arties and general abilities to make a presence in single-combat.

So really you don't need to have a good bashing class since you can influence and seem make a ton of gold that way, and also can aetherbash and make tons of xp that way.

So what are just some overall fun classes to play? And what are classes that don't require an insane amount of artefacts to be competitive?

Thanks for all the help so far! I really appreciate it! Trying to get started in a new IRE game is tough.

I've always found the guardian archetype (Researchers, Illuminati, Nihilists, and Celestines) and wiccan (Shadowdancers and Moondancers) to be the most fun since you get ents (or crystals for Researchers) to follow you around and do cool things. You don't really need artifacts to be competitive as guardians or wiccans, though you'd probably need to be tri-trans guildskills wise (and maybe some investment is discernment for instakills). Guardians and wiccans are also heavily tied in with the RP of the organization and have a lot of mechanical RP backing as well.

Mages and druids can be fun, depending on how you like to play. They are the "demesne-user" classes (think of having a 10-30 room grove with passive effects hitting in your room and adjacent rooms) which can be appealing if you enjoy that sort of thing. They are also pretty vocal for group combat (setting up a demesne, fighting the opposing side's demesne user for control of the area, etc.). Mages are considered to be better than druids if you go that route (because they have a tertiary choice that allows them to be effective outside their demesne as well as in it).

I've never found warriors/bards/monks to be very appealing, but if you're into melee classes or musical stuff, they can be fun.

EDIT: Also, influence is only a good option if you pick a race with higher charisma, since your CHA stat determines how fast you influence.

Experience for Influencing is also not slow compared to Bashing. Remember, the rewards for influencing and bashing have been increased. A citymate of the same age as me was a lower level than I was, but she influenced her way up to level 80 and I'm still at level 76. Even as a monk, it's painfully slow to kill tough level 70+ denizens due to the lack of critical hits. Maybe the tables will change when I'm at level 85+(higher levels=higher crit rate), but that's a long ways to go and sometimes you get unlucky with the bashing areas being already cleaned out by someone else.

Questing's also a really great way to get gold. Questing in Lusternia is very different from questing in Achaea.

I'll second what Arel said about the Guardian classes, although I can only speak to Hallifax personally. But the organizational roleplay tie-in is really nice and the cosmic planar history is pretty fascinating.

As a researcher, I can be semi useful in group combat, despite the fact that I haven't actually transed any guild skills. Also much love to passive shielding.

But really every class and faction has the people who love it and it is going to depend pretty heavily on which faction you want to roleplay as, which is something you probably know best. There's also, depending on who you're interracting with, fun options for roleplay involving race.

Also, this site is great for looking at different skills: http://sites.google.com/site/xieltalnara/Skills

So if you wanted to check out what some of the different classes could do, that'll be pretty helpful.

EDIT: Sorry, I keep thinking of things to say but the family system here is really great and a good RP outlet too. You can join a family from whatever org you end up in or go out and start your own. A lot of the families compete to earn honour and become Great Houses and get perks for the family.

How does guardian's combat work exactly? Comparable to occultists from Achaea? Thanks for all the help! I super appreciate it. Right now I'm leaning towards either guardians or a warrior (the wounds system seems pretty interesting to me) while possibly looking at the wiccans...

Thanks again!

I'm not super familiar with occultist combat, but some of the guardians have Tarot which would be pretty similar (Celestines and Researchers). Guardian combat usually revolves around setting up instakill conditions like enemy at half mana as a condition for Celestines and Nihilists or at a high level of affliction (timewarp for Researchers and temporaryinsanity for Illuminati) and then using the instakill. Celestines and researchers can also use deathtarot as an instakill option. Not sure if any of them can damagekill besides a researcher balestoning.

All Guardian guilds have Tarot, Arel.

You get a single companion who does a various amount of tasks for you. For Celestines/Nihilist (not entirely sure how it works with the new guardian guilds still, but should be the same concept), we have to form pacts/pledges to our respective half-deities, which grant guardians abilities to invest in their companion. Then you can order your companion to attack your foe and, depending on the situation, decide how best to kill them.

It's a bit like Priests in Achaea along with Occultists. The fun thing is TERTIARIES. For Celestines you get Rituals>Sacraments, Cosmic>Celestialism, and then you can pick between three skills for your third guild skill. Celestines have a choice between Healing, Tarot, and Astrology. You can switch however many times you want, you can even skillflex to save a bit on lessons.

I think overall Guardians are a pretty well-rounded simple archetype. I'm not a very good combatant but I've always enjoyed the class (a lot more than I enjoyed Bard!), because I could still be useful in combat situations without being amazing. The roleplay is also pretty exceptional since each org bases a LOT off the half-deities that guardian guilds are in charge of protecting.

EDIT: I forgot to note that Guardians have a pretty big downfall. When you get your symbol (or whatever it is called for other guardians), it has a decay time so you have to renew it every so often*. Also if your deities die you lose your pledges and I believe also your symbol*. However, if you rune your symbol, not only can you get it customised for 50cr more but it will never decay and, from what I understand, you don't lose your pledges. At least, when I returned from dormancy I still had all my pledges even though the half-deities had died. This could just be because I was dormant, though.

* Not sure if this still applies as my memory is fuzzy and things could have changed.

Well... wow, I really misread those helpfiles.

The new guardian guilds are a lot more like wiccans, where instead of one ent, you get a bunch and each one does something different.

And for Illuminati, you also get to mutate yourself beyond recognition.