HOW TO PLAY A WARRIOR

Hey, I seem to have approval to write a series of newbie guides for the site. I understand that most of you will probably disagree with what I'm writing here, but consider the audience – I'm writing this for a new player who has been with the game for less than two months.

Okay, so you're playing Armageddon. You're hanging around the Gaj and you're meeting players who have ten, fifteen – even twenty day warriors. They are pulling off feats that may seem amazing to you – rather than getting beat up by scrabs and wild beetles, these guys are actually taking out raptors and gith.

How the hell did they figure out how to do this?

Obviously patience helps. And this is going to be a tough one. I can pretty easily get most characters to the fifteen to twenty day mark pretty easily. My last three characters were all taken out by staff avatars or staff controlled characters – as you get good staff represent the only real threat to you in the game. So my advice to you to is to make a couple of disposable warriors. Go out. Fight scrabs. Go ahead and get yourself killed. It's important to do this to get it out of your system.

By the time you're on your fourth or fifth character, you'll be ready to join the Byn. So roll up a character with a commoner background. Please strongly consider making a human. Go out and grab yourself three to four hundred coins from either salt mining, or hacking obsidian. That plus your starting money will put you a little over one thousand.

Next go buy a mount, some chest armor, a helmet and a blade. If you can, buy a used mount. This is a really easy way to save yourself a couple of hundred coins. For armor and your blade, don't buy yourself anything fancy. The reason? Once you're in the Byn, you'll be making social contacts with other players, plenty of whom will be able to find you a line on some cheaper, reasonable quality gear. Only noobs buy the stuff from the NPC-controlled shops. Remember to save about five hundred coins, because you'll need money to join the Byn, and then you'll really want to have some pocket money afterwards when you're no longer allowed to mine salt.

Then go find the Byn sergeant, and ask to join. If you are unable to join the Byn for any reason, consider either House Kadius or House Salaar. They are about 80% as good. The problem with taking a military role in most of the other sponsored clans, is that they more or less expect you to join for life, which is unfair. After all, if you spend one hundred and twenty hours or so buffing up your character, do you really want to donate it to somebody else's cause for the rest of it's life? I usually don't. The Byn tends to be a lot lower on the drama/bullshit factor as well.

Once in the Byn, life tends to be actually fun. There are plenty of other dudes around to spar and role-play with. You have reasonable protection and insulation not only from monsters, but also from gangsters and criminals (READ: the Templarate) as well. The schedule helps break up your day. Your first few months will be tough as people will pick on you for being the new guy, but you can get through it. If you're lucky you can manage to join up at the same time as some other new people, deflecting attention. I didn't personally think that I'd enjoy playing a shit-kicking, rough-and-tumble mercenary but it's actually pretty fun. You'll want to keep a low profile your first year. After that you'll have plenty of opportunities to cause mischief and fuck off. No one really pays attention to the senior mercenaries. Another nice thing about the clan is that you can usually trust your Byn sergeants, especially if you've known them a while. They're usually staffed by pretty good players. Oh yeah, and the Byn happens to be one of few clans where they are reasonably tolerant of people leaving.

A couple of pro-tips: consider turning down jobs that are obvious bullshit. If the job sounds dangerous, it probably is. You might want to hang around in the Byn for another year, perhaps even a total of three at the most. At that point you'll want to leave the Byn. If you hang around too long, the officers will possibly resent your leaving. Leave after a year or two.

Okay, so what next? The thing is, after a couple of years in the Byn you will have *tons* of connections. And don't ask me why, but the staff for some reason seem to be more tolerant of players who are playing ex-Byners. “Well, the guy PKs a lot, but hey, he was in the Byn so that makes it okay.” Another thing is that other players will have more respect for your character if you have Byn experience as well.

But you're not finished, right? You want to buff up your character some more! At this point you will be ready for a few additional purchases. An apartment is not bad as you will have some place both to store your stuff, as well as a place to hide up if the going gets rough. You probably want some better armor by now. Remember that if you're going on a shopping spree, your dollar will usually go a lot farther in Tuluk than in Allanak. Consider avoiding PKing – it's one of the more rapid ways to get in trouble.

And how to buff up your character? Go beat up scrabs until you can do so without hardly getting hit. Next, go beat up raptors until you can do so without hardly getting hit. Then, go beat up gith until you can do so without hardly getting hit. At the point where you can take out a couple of gith at the same time, without breaking a sweat, then you will truly be a force to be reckoned with.

One final goal for your character, is armor. You probably won't really need a fancy sword to kick ass in this game, but some decent armor is a really nice investment. Eventually, you'll want to get to the point where you can spend five or six thousand on a suit of armor.

Why did I write this? I don't really view myself as a cheater. I'm just surprised that the Armageddon staff don't make this sort of information freely available. I can't think of any other video game where you'd get in trouble for asking for a copy of the instruction book.

Remember that this guide is by no means intended to turn you into an expert – plenty of smarter people here have better advice for you. Rather, this guide is meant to help a beginner get their hands dirty. I plan to create guides for the other classes somewhat soon.

Cheers and happy hunting!