Considering playing a Warrior? Warriors are a class that seem complicated at first glance, but don't have too much to them once you get stuck in. And it's perfectly possible to start out simple with a single Exhaustion and pick up the more complicated skills and take higher level Exhaustions 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. This may involve reduced hits, limits on how and when you can attack, and worse consequences to taking damage. Your limit in ability use is the extent to which you are prepared to take on exhaustions.

The only Exhaustion you really need to worry about at low level is Off-Balance. This makes you go flying back (REPEL) when hit, but only if you're hit hard enough. Each time you stack Off-Balance reduces the amount of damage needed, so you're basically free to use Manoeuvres until just shy of hitting the threshold where most of the damage you're taking is high enough to knock you back. Unless you're feeling energetic it's not recommended that you cross it.

At low level, Warriors are reasonably simple - at first you'll only have a single standard Exhaustion to learn to use, which is Off-Balance, although they have some other skills which have an immediate impact on them (like “take a DRAW to call a DRAW”). If you take Burn Self then you'll have to remember to reduce your hits (body hits in the physical plane or spirit hits anywhere) as and when you self-heal, which is a special Exhaustion, but otherwise you only need to introduce other Exhaustions when you take skills from level 2 and above or choose to take something worse.

At high level, Warriors get a bit more complicated with a range of up to 5 different Exhaustions to balance, but by this point you should hopefully be more used to how they play and what these are, and can pick the ones 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 REPEL. 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 2 maximum body hits or 2 maximum spirit hits until you're refreshed. Make sure you don't drop either to 0 by doing this.