About the Realm: Classes

Warriors are about as straightforward as classes get in Realm, yet do not mistake their simplicity for weakness. Warriors are only as good as their sword arm; no matter how powerful a warrior's gear may be, it won't do them any good unless they know how to use it effectively. This means that Warriors have the least special abilities out of any class in the game, but they tend to make up for it with sheer skill. Typically, Warrior is a popular class among athletes, since it's the most physically stimulating class to play, and requires the least grinding to master.

Some popular Warrior builds include:

- Knights wield heavy weaponry and don heavy armor, and make up for their slow speed with devastating damage. They can tank, if necessary, but their lack of taunt skills means that they aren't as good at it as other classes.

- Barbarians typically dump all of their stat points into Strength and other damage-boosting stats, which is oftentimes mocked by other players. A lot of noobs play as a Barbarian at first, but a Barbarian who knows their weaknesses and plays around them effectively is a force to be feared.

- Fencers have the highest skill ceiling of any build, relying solely on technique to take down opponents. Very few people play as a Fencer, since it doesn't have the same figurative "safety net" that Knights have in the form of heavy armor, but the few who have mastered Fencer sit comfortably atop PvP leaderboards. 

Rangers are notoriously versatile, and you can't get a good sense of how someone plays just by knowing they're a Ranger. This is a notoriously popular class for PvP, and as such, most Ranger builds are built around 1v1 combat. Ranger players are typically competitive and aloof, and you'll find them most often in overworld PvP zones rather than structured game modes.

Some popular Ranger builds include:

- Stalkers have a trait that allows them to muffle the sound of their movement, and while they lack the literal invisibility toggle that Rogues have, most Stalkers leave their respective PvP zone so infrequently that they decide to dye their gear to match the environment. Stalkers also utilize a trait called Spectral Sight that modifies the Hunter's Mark skill so that they can see marked enemies more easily. 

- Magehunters were the game devs answer to the controversy about magic users being overpowered back in 2032, as before then, magic users dominated PvP with very little competition. Nowadays, the ever-present threat of Magehunters forces those once-reckless magic users to play more cautiously. Their skillset is primarily composed of debuff skills, which can be deadly to anyone unfortunate enough to be caught by them, but they're especially debilitating for mages, who effectively become useless if blinded, silenced, or even just wounded. 

Rogues have a pretty bad reputation, regardless of whether you play PvP or not. Their ability to temporarily go completely invisible is a nightmare for PvP players, but pretty much useless in PvE, since the moment they attack something, they become visible again. In PvP, this is usually enough for a Rogue to prepare a one-hit kill, or at least a strike debilitating enough that they can finish their target off before they can react. In PvE, though, most enemies have enough health that they can easily tank a sneak attack. 

There's only really two Rogue builds, one for PvP, and the other for PvE.

- Assassins are only viable in PvP, due to their aforementioned ability to sneak up on a player with invisibility. Players who get easily frustrated will claim that Assassins don't require skill to play well. While this has a grain of truth to it, as it is certainly an easier build than most PvP viable ones, in reality there are several ways to counter invisibility if you know an Assassin is coming for you. In most cases, if the same Assassin kills you more than once, then it's your own fault.

- Tricksters make up for their underpowered invisibility in PvE by utilizing the more gimmicky skills in the Rogue's arsenal. Traps, poisons, and gadgets serve to severely debilitate enemies and keep the Trickster out of harms way. Unfortunately, this is a niche already covered by several other classes that ultimately do the same job much better.

Evokers are your traditional combat mages, lobbing fireballs and summoning lightning bolts to decimate their targets. They easily deal the most damage out of any class in the game, and as one might expect, they have the least defenses too. A lot of different kinds of players flock to Evoker, as it provides the most fantastical experience compared to other classes, even among other magic users. 

Evoker builds tend to specialize in one of three elemental trios, which were specifically designed to overlap with specific roles in team-based combat.

- Sun Casters utilize the three elements associated with the sun in the game's lore, those being Fire, Lightning, and Wind. These elements contain spells that are quick to cast and destructive, and some can also be used to amplify the caster's movement, meaning they're hard to pin down.

- Moon Casters utilize the three elements associated with the moon in the game's lore, those being Ice, Earth, and Water. It is a miserable slog to fight a Moon Caster if they outrange you, as they will slow you down and chip at your health with slow yet powerful attacks. 

- Star Casters utilize the three elements associated with the stars in the game's lore, those being Metal, Poison, and Blood. They are also unofficially referred to as Vampires due to their unorthodox and often horrifying abilities, which often involve stealing their target's health. 

Witches are actually a secret class not officially recognized by the game or it's developers, yet they have come to be so integral to the game's culture that they've been left in intentionally. Named as such due to the method of unlocking this "class" being so technically unwieldy and bizarre, Witches are actually Evokers who have unlocked the skills of a scrapped class from the beta release of the game via a series of incredibly specific and ritualistic glitches. Officially, the scrapped class is referred to as "Psychic" in the game's files, but the reason it never made it out of beta is because the developers believed that the mechanics were too mechanically unusual for most players. Playing as a Witch requires intricate knowledge of how the game's physics engine works, even beyond unlocking it in the first place. Most of the Witch's skills manipulate the environment in a way that is similar to telekinesis. 

While there aren't really any builds for Witches specifically due to the limited amount of content surrounding them, Witches adopt different playstyles depending on the Evoker elements they choose. For example, Moon Witches are able to combine their telekinetic power with the powerful projectiles their magic gives them, which lets them manipulate their attacks more dexterously. 

Oracles are a support class that aren't very popular. Healers are unpopular in pretty much every game, but this is especially true for Realm, possibly due to the immersive experience of being on the frontlines being far more engaging than staying in the back. Oracles are heavily sought after in PvE content, though, due to their unparalleled healing and buffing skills. You'll almost never find an Oracle in PvP, however. Oracle players come in one of two varieties: laid back players who don't like the adrenaline of combat, and incredibly spiteful experts who are the backbones of their parties and they know it.

Some popular Oracle builds include:

- Clerics are fully focused on raw healing, and a fully powered healing spell from one is enough to get most classes back from the brink of death immediately. These spells take a while to cast, however, and it's not really suited for the fast paced nature of PvP. 

- Diviners are focused on buffing their party, mainly by nudging the RNG of chance based effects to be slightly more favorable, and also using spells that have amplified effects depending on the class that the target is playing.

- Warpriests drop any pretenses of ever being a healer and charge into battle with nothing but their weapons and what few self-buffs Oracle provides them. This is mostly a terrible idea, but people do it anyways, whether it be as a joke, or to prove to the world that they're better than everyone else. In every practical scenario, however, Warpriests can't do anything that Warriors do easier and better.

Wardens are the go-to tank class in Realm, but it's hard to define them generally like the other classes. Effectively combining the concepts of "Paladins" and "Dark Knights" from older MMOs into the same class, Wardens can either specialize in Light or Dark magic to amplify their tanking abilities. Warden is usually associated with role-players, as it is incredibly popular among those circles.

- Paladins use Light Magic to heal themselves and create protective barriers, which makes up for their surprisingly low health pool. Their taunt skill is Radiance, which emits a blinding flash of light that frustrates enemies into attacking them.

- Dark Knights use Dark Magic to keep themselves alive even at the brink of death, which is ironically where they thrive the most. They have a low health pool just like Paladins, but do virtually nothing to negate incoming damage. Instead, they simply refuse to stay down, and every time they get back up, they get a temporary buff to their damage. On top of this, a lot of their skills steal health from their targets, meaning that once a Dark Knight gets going, it's hard to get them to stop.

- Sentinels aren't so much a build as they are an enigmatic set of builds that vary so widely that they're hard to predict. They specialize in varying degrees of both Light and Dark magic, utilizing different skills from both trees. Some Sentinels combine the Paladin's healing skills with the Dark Knight's self-resurrection, for example, to make it even harder to keep them down; although this sacrifices all of the other specializations that a Warden would have access to by going for a more specific build.