Meet the Warrior: He loves to get up close and personal

Lord Commander, let me introduce you to the Warrior class. You need to clearly understand his strengths to lead him to reach his full potential.

Tweet: Lord Commander, the Warrior can wear the best armor, so let him tank for the team. http://ctt.ec/PB429+

The Warrior excels at:

• Tanking
• Shield Blocking
• Shouts
• Adrenaline-based Combat Skills

In the following sections, we will elaborate on these abilities.

Tanking

The Warrior is a melee specialist that can wear heavy armor. He can reach the highest armor level of all characters and should always be on the front lines. However, while the Warrior can potentially take a lot of punishment, don’t expect this to be true for an unequipped level 1 Warrior. Without proper equipment and skills, a Warrior can barely outlast other characters.

Still, if you can afford it, a fully equipped Warrior is nigh-impossible to kill with physical damage, especially if you add a few protection spells. On the flip side, the Warrior is very equipment-dependent and is therefore a money sink.

Shield Blocking

While it’s great if you can sustain a lot of damage, it’s even better if you don’t take damage at all. Warriors are one of the few classes specializing in shield blocking. Depending on the type of shield equipped (and other buffs), the warrior can block a considerable amount of blows he sees coming. This greatly helps his survivability. Blocking a blow from a small creature will avoid all damage. Blocking blows from large and huge creatures will at least reduce the damage taken.

Shouts

One of the key abilities the Warrior has is shouts. Shouts are skills that usually affect all allied characters within earshot and provide some beneficial effect for a number of turns. The Warrior has quite a few shouts to pick from that can greatly help the team. Most shouts are defensive in nature which perfectly fits the theme of the Warrior.

In contrast to magical effects like enchantments and hexes, shout effects cannot be removed by the enemy team.

Adrenaline

Another unique feature the Warrior brings to the table are adrenaline-based skills. Usually, skills and spells require energy and spamming them will quickly drain the energy pool. Adrenaline is different: a character starts out with an empty adrenaline pool but adrenaline can be gained by hitting enemies. The amount of adrenaline accumulated is indicated by a yellow bar above the character model. Once you have gained enough adrenaline, you can start using adrenaline-based skills. Unless you fail to hit the enemy (in which case the adrenaline pool will slowly decrease), you will rarely run out of adrenaline once the required amount has been built up. This means, adrenaline-based skills are not available at the beginning of the fight (for lack of adrenaline), but are then only restricted by cooldown once you have built up sufficient adrenaline.

There are ways to counter adrenaline-based characters, and since there are adrenaline-based monsters, too, it is important to know them. First of all, if you can’t hit anything, then you will not be able to build up adrenaline. Snaring & kiting, blindness, hexes that cause misses, hexes that prevent adrenaline from building up or skills that target the adrenaline pool are a great way to keep an adrenaline-based character from using his most powerful skills.

Warrior Skills

This table shows the current set of skills implemented for the Warrior. All characters you hire come with a random skill set but you can learn new skills in the Training Hall. As your characters level up, you can also improve many of their skills which will make them more effective (indicated by the green numbers).

The Warrior’s energy-based skills have a blue background while adrenaline-based skills have a yellow background to indicate what kind of resource is required.

Skill	Description
Energy-based Skills
	Cyclone (Melee Attack Skill) Hits all characters around you. Gain 1 adrenaline for each character hit.
	Strike (Melee Attack Skill) Perform a deadly strike at your foe. Damage is increased by +13…30. Gain an additional point of adrenaline.
	Hamstring (Melee Attack Skill) Hamstring your opponent. Damage is increased by +4…10. Target foe is crippled for 3…7 turns.
	Shield Bash (Melee Attack Skill) Bash your enemy with your shield. If the target is a small character, then it is weakened for 2…5 turns.
	Sixth Sense! (Shout (2…5 turns)) Senses incoming attacks from the flanks giving you a chance to defend against them.
	Shrug off! (Shout) Remove a condition and heal for 22…50.
	For Great Justice! (Shout (2…5 turns)) Each successful attack generates an additional strike of adrenaline.
	Watch Out! (Shout (3…6 turns)) Warn all allies within earshot. Increases armor by +9…20.
Adrenaline-based Skills
	Retreat! (Shout (3…6 turns)) Order the retreat. Increases movement speed by 33%, removes crippled condition and avoids attacks of opportunity.
	Crushing Blow (Melee Attack Skill) Perform a crushing blow on your foe. Target foe is knocked down.
	Sever Artery (Melee Attack Skill) Bleed your foe with a savage slash. Target foe is bleeding for 2…5 turns.
	Gash (Melee Attack Skill) Inflict a severe gash on your opponent. Damage is increased by +9…20. If target foe is bleeding, then it suffers from a deep wound for 2…5 turns.
	Slash (Melee Attack Skill) Slash your foe. Damage is increased by +15…35. Lose two additional strikes of adrenaline.
	Final Thrust (Elite Melee Attack Skill) Lose all adrenaline. If target foe has less than 50% health, then deal an additional +26…60.
	Jump Attack (Elite Melee Attack Skill) Jump high into the air and bring your weapon down with great force. Target must not be a small character. Damage is increased by +17…40. and is weakened for 2…5 turns.

Please note that the game is currently in development, so balancing will result in changes to the skills shown here. We will add more details like energy/adrenaline cost or cooldown once this process has settled.