How Classes Work 

 

The major appeal of Archeage to me, versus games like Black Desert Online, Blade and Soul, Revelation Online, is the class system. I am a big fan of games where you can do everything on one character so you feel compelled to make a bunch of alts. My early gaming was in Final Fantasy XI and Eve Online where you did just that, you had one character who could unlock and level all the classes on it.

 

Now, the interesting thing with Archeage is because there are 12 unique skill trees, and you pick three of them to build your class, there are actually 220 different and unique classes. You can, at any time swap out of one tree and put another one in. The benefit to this is that you can become highly versatile and adaptable for any situation. The downside is that you end up doing the leveling from 15 thru 55 for each of the trees.

 

The most common trick for leveling is to stick with the first three trees you put in and grind those up all the way to level 55. Once you have reached 55 on your commonly used trees, when you are farming or grinding slot in one or even two different trees to level up with. When doing a lot of labor intensive things, go ahead and put three trees that need to be leveled. This will help you burn through a lot of the lower levels and when you are out there grinding with these trees, they will be more useful to you. 

 

Skilltrees

 

The 12 trees in Archeage are broken down into: 

 

6 Main Trees (which are trees you can selected at character creation).

6 Support / Supplemental Trees

 

Inside the 6 main trees you have the following

 

Battlerage: Melee Damage

Swiftblade: Melee Damage

Sorcery: Magic Damage

Malediction: Magic Damage

Archery: Ranged Damage

Vitalism: Healing with Offensive Damage from Healing Power

 

With the exception of Defense every tree grants some sort of mobility skills. In addition, each tree brings with it utility and synergy with at least one, if not more, of main trees. 

 

Auramancy

Shadowplay

Witchcraft

Songcraft

Defense

Occultism

 

Skill Points

 

In Archeage Unchained you are allotted 28 skills points, which you will earn gradually as you level starting at level one.   

 

In previous versions of Archeage players received 28 skill points to build their characters with, 

however, they were required to pay one point per passive they wanted to have in their builds. As of the 5.0 update, players no longer have to pay for passives, however, they are now limited to 18 skill points. 

 

Additionally, prior to 5.0 you could buy any skill in any tree regardless of how many points you already had in the tree. Now, the last skill in every row requires an investment of 3, 4, or 5 points respectively, which means there are some skills that you are locked out from (Stealth being a big skill that falls into this category) unless you invest the proper number of points.

 

This has made a huge difference in builds, and has shifted some meta builds around due to the availability of points.

 

Passives

 

Before we jump into builds I think it is important to talk about passives. Passives are a key part of any build as they are responsible for massive amounts of boosts, especially when we get into skill damage, critical damage, and overall healing buffs.

 

One key point about passives is that you have to be very careful in the reading of them. Not all passives apply across the board. Some passives say, for example, melee crit rate. This means that any melee attack, including basic attacks, will earn this critical rate increase. Other skills, specify a specific skill tree, which means only those skills earn the benefit, even though there are similar skills in other trees. 

 

Synergy

 

As we discussed in the trees section there are several trees that share an inherent synergy between them. Some of them are directly shared due to skills and abilities that combo with each other. Before we get into this I want to remind you of a resource I shared with you at the beginning called Archeage Codex. The nice thing about playing with the build calculator at Codex is that it shows you all the different combos you unlock as you spend points in certain skills, and it also shows you the ones that you can potentially unlock. 

 

You can also use the in-game Skill Combos box, however, this one does not provide anywhere near the information you will get from the one at Archeage Codex. It will only show you the combos linking from the skill you choose.

 

Common Synergies

 

Archery & Shadowplay

Stalkers Mark reduces targets magic damage reduction stat by 16%

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Battlerage & Shadowplay

All of the Battlerage passives that affect melee skills carry over to the Shadowplay Skills as well

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Malediction and Sorcery

The 7 point passives in each tree compliment each other 

 

Vitalism and Shadowplay

Freerunner allows for no cooldown Antithesis 

Drop Back allows for up to 3 Antithesis or Mends to be Insta-cast 

 

Vitalism and Occultism 

Pain Harvest allows for Mend to be spammed with no cooldown

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