All races have fighters. However, dwarfs are outside concurrence as their warriors are not intended for battle alone and don't get that great warrior skills.
Humans and orcs have a 6 point higher body stat total than elves and darkelves. This means even if elves have highest dexterity and darkelves have second highest dexterity and highest strength, they can hardly afford to lower their constitution any further to raise their dexterity or strength any more. Which allows humans and orcs to easily get better strength then the elves through dyes. Humans can also gain elvish dexterity, even if their constitution is then no better than that of an elf.
It is of course questionable if that is really worth the effort for a certain class, but it is possible. And it is obvious that elves and darkelves need a lot of compensation for the better stats.
Tanks[edit]
Tanks are defensive melee warriors who can take a lot of damage, even if their own damage output isn’t that high. Pure and intended tank classes are the human Paladin, the human Dark Avenger, the elven Temple Knight and the darkelven Shillien Knight.
The Dark Avenger is definitely more popular than the Paladin, because the he gets a summon and aggressive abilities such as Drain Health instead of just healing and anti-undead features. The one advantage of the Paladin is however getting the Aegis Stance.
Temple and Shillien Knights have a disadvantage in their stats compared to Human Knights, and they get no Shield Stun. Still they get Aegis (passive, no penalty or mp cost) and have a higher Dex value (better Shield Defense rates), plus they get a lot of other skills that their human counterparts lack, such as their cubics.
Two other classes are also interesting for tanking, but they have the disadvantage that they don't have any hate or aggression ability to make mobs concentrate on them. These are the elven Swordsinger and the orcish Destroyer. The Swordsinger can get very good defense values through his songs. The Destroyer, while not specializing into shields, can fully specialize into heavy armor and is able to deal a lot of damage, too. In certain party constellations, these classes might well serve as a tank replacement.
For example, if a Destroyer is combined with a Bladedancer, a Prophet and a Shillien Elder, he is easily the highest damage dealer in the group and has no problem to make mobs concentrate attacks on him. As the later classes are quite popular, this is not such an unusual situation.
Damage Dealers[edit]
Damage Dealers are offensive melee warriors who have bad defenses, but can deal a lot of damage.
There are basically three ways to make more damage.
- Increase p.atk.
- Increase the number (and strength) of criticals
- Increase the attack speed.
The human Gladiator and the orcish Destroyer are using the first approach. While they get very high p.atk values and definitely more damage output that tanks, they are still low in comparison to the other damage dealers discussed here. OTOH they can fully specialize into armor, and they get Final Frenzy (Gladiator as well as Warlord) and Guts + Frenzy (Destroyer) to increase their damage output with falling hp.
The so-called dagger users human Treasure Hunter, elven Plainswalker and darkelven Abyss Walker use the second approach.
The special class orcish Tyrant uses the last approach.
The Treasure Hunter gets both Critical Chance like the Plainswalker and Critical Power like the Abyss Walker, additionally the passive ability Boost Attack Speed and the special attack Dash. This is necessary because they only get human dexterity. However, as already stated, humans can gain superior strength and elvish dexterity for lowering their much higher constitution to elvish values. Therefore it looks as if the Treasure Hunter has in the end the upper hand in this comparison. The only things that the other classes can do to compensate is using their healing/debuff skills, but honestly the mp of warriors is quite limited.
The Tyrant neither has great p.atk nor has many criticals. He has however a very high attack speed using his Puma Todem and the Fist Fury ability - the later can only be used with Fists. As Orc he has more Con than anyone else in the game, so he has no problem to gain +4 to Str and +5 to Dex without getting mediocre Con values (means he ends up at Str 44, Dex 31, Con 38). He has however a load problem - already with Con 47, and it is obviously not getting better with Con 38. And as he gets the highest attack speed, any improvement he can gain in p.atk. or criticals has greater impact than on other classes. If he has been balanced in his unmodified basic statistics like the other classes, this means he is probably the one with the greatest damage potential of all. It has however to be pointed out that Tyrants have a lot of problems in practice - it is hard to get a good weapon for them, as fists are so very seldom and everybody likes to have one.
Support Warriors[edit]
There are only two support warriors in the game, the Swordsinger and the Bladedancer.
The Swordsinger has mainly defensive group buffs and is therefore much less popular than the Bladedancer, as there is usually only one in the group who really needs defensive group buffs (the tank), while others prefer offensive stuff (into which the Bladedancer specializes).
Archers[edit]
The three archer classes are the human Hawkeye, the elven Siver Ranger, and the darkelven Phantom Ranger.
The Hawkeye has some of the advantages over the other two as described in the dagger user section, as well as the important Stance ability which makes them unable to move, but gives them the best range of all archers in the game.