Considering playing a Warrior? Warriors are a class that may seem complicated at first glance, but don't have too much to them once you get stuck in. And it's perfectly possible to focus on just one of the two main Exhaustions and pick up the more complicated skills and take the other Exhaustion as and when you feel ready.

1. Whereas other classes generally have some limited resource available to them which is used up each time they use their class abilities. Warriors are instead free to use most of their abilities, known as Manoeuvres, as they like (subject to a 15 second cooldown between them).

2. Whenever you want to use an ability, you do so. Manoeuvres are typically flashy special moves which exceed your normal capabilities.

3. The cost for using Manoeuvres is the Exhaustion, which will have a lasting negative effect on you until you are Refreshed. With one high-level exception there are two different Exhaustions: Off-balance and Faltering, which generally make receiving calls and damage worse for you. You can take these multiple times each, which make their effects stack and worsen. Don't push yourself too hard!

Off-balance makes ALL negative effects take +2 seconds for each stack. So your first Off-balance will make the default impairment duration 12 seconds. Then 14, 16, and so on. Do it too many times and pretty soon that occasional DISARM is going to feel really bad!

Faltering causes you to take a STUN in addition to the usual effects whenever you take a hit, for 1 second for each time you've stacked it. This is one to be really careful about, as even a single stack will make life harder. My advice? Make the most of RPing that stun on each blow you take. Really ham it up.

If you're trying to keep it simple, focusing on Off-balance skills is probably the way to go. But you do also have the choice of taking everything as Faltering for a different kind of simplicity.

At low level, Warriors are reasonably simple - you can start by focusing on a single standard Exhaustion to learn to use, although they have some other skills which have an immediate impact on them (like “take a DRAW to call a DRAW”).

At high level, Warriors get a bit more complicated as you'll probably end up stacking both Off-balance and Faltering, but by this point you should hopefully be more used to how they play and how they work, and can pick which one to focus on taking which fit best with your fighting style. Thanks to an extra stack of Weapon Mastery skills you're likely to have twice the usual number of weapon calls to remember each encounter too.

A possible basic build for a Warrior is:

• Combat Proficiency (Free)
• Use Weapon
• Weapon Skill 1
• Line Break
• Weapon Mastery 1
• Burn Self

This starting build provides more weapon calls than ususal for your chosen weapon, as well as the ability to stack Off-Balance to call ARC PUSH. Though you only have 8 body hits and 4 spirit hits, When the going gets tough you have the option of calling HEAL on yourself at the cost of stacking Faltering.

Ready to try creating a Warrior? The full description along with class skill tree and descriptions can be found here - you get Combat Proficiency from the Weapon Skills tree for free, and you'll need to pick 5 other level 1 skills (plus more for any additional XP you're adding) from these sets of skills:

• Warrior Skills
• General Skills
• Weapon Skills

As a Warrior it can be hard to go wrong in terms of build, but a recommendation for beginners is to focus on Weapon Skills with a few class skills to support these, for more consistent combat effectiveness without needing to rely too heavily on abilities which incur Exhaustions and their associated risks, keeping these as a fallback.

Armed with this information, you can then complete the remaining steps of Character Creation.

If/when you're ready for more on the standard Exhaustions, you can find a list of these here.