What classes do you feel are the easiest or hardest?

[Vvv]

Easiest for me are sultan - you can get huge army easily + resources and boomerang = op,

spiritmancer - stay in back shoot and occasionally run

Beastmaster - his animal forms are op af, his bird form shoots aoe winds that send ppl flying non-stop for ex.

Medium would be sentinel only because he is melee, and a damn tough one as well

I would rank hardest Knight-errant - he is probably the best hero killer in the game but he is rather easy to kill, everyone is hostile to you and you're alone. Oddly enough I had most fun playing as that class because of challenge. If only you could start a peasant rebellion with that class haha!

[persocom01]

I started with knight errant. You can just help a faction with a bandit and then pay them off to get your relations with them to neutral pretty easily. I think he was pretty easy... assuming you don't have a time deadline, but that might be said for all classes. It might be difficult to get the true ending since negative relations probably means you are a slow starter.

[Vvv]

Yep I did the same thing, Every time you help their peasants or when you assist their forces directly in combat vs bandits they hate you less, and eventually like you.

[ChokeMeHarderDaddy]

Jackal seems the worst so far, the best I could make him is a trash killer, he destroy archers from range but anything tankier than that he struggles

[Aurelia]

I started with the blade dancer, and could immediately tell that something was off-kilter. Once i was endgame with a full outfit of orange treasure, the game was a breeze, so i was like "Oh, okay. Maybe it's fine".

But then i played the sultan, and just waltzed through battles and even bosses that there's no way i could have beaten with the blade dancer that early on. I mean, i had this complaint about not being able to defeat the flame mage in the crater with a level 20 blade dancer, but i just destroyed this thing at level 10 with my sultan... I was able to start clearing treasure dungeons with level 9 equipment.

The sultan definately has it's major advantages even aside from that. being able to just build up your incomes right there without having to conquest is a huge advantage. ontop of being able to upgrade your buildings even on conquered ouposts/cities... That's just not fair.

The blade dancer is a fun class, and can do quite a lot of things when you get to really know how to use it (mainly running away. that's pretty much what it's best at), but even it's final skill is complete trash, and less useful than it's first skills.

I dunno, i love blade dancer for the mobility design and dance-play, but I feel like it could be ramped up a bit, and please fix that last skill...

[Jaeger]

I've done a complete (I think? The character story might have broke for me) Shaman run and have taken a stab at the Jackal and Spiritmancer. I've had a friend stream some Sultan for me and gush about it.

Spiritmancer deserves its "easy", new player friendly rating. Lots of ranged AOE that debuffs or stuns the enemy in some way as well as a pack of summons to distract them. It seems pretty hard to go wrong with them, really.

Shaman is, forgive the pun, fairly beastly. Slaughtering armies in melee seems to be their specialty given that their core abilities are melee AOEs that restore health-even more so once they transform-and their roar skill lets them just *delete* any sufficiently weakened enemy around them and get even more summoned animals to deal with the survivors. The bear form can be slow to attack, but the dragon form upgrade mostly nullifies that. I had some trouble with boss fights, though, since those perks aren't so great against one opponent and needing to stay in melee makes it easy to get blindsided one-shot by something much easier to dodge at range.

The Jackal is an oddball I probably should have saved for later. His description compares him to a Hashshashin and that seems decently accurate. Like HenryStanller said,The Jackal has some ranged/teleporting attacks that are basically impossible to miss with and reward you for killing enemies with them, which is pretty handy for picking off squishy and cowardly ranged types. Their AOE seems to be lacking, or at least a late bloomer. The game warns you about that, but I need to experiment more with smoke cloud and they do get a flaming arrow barrage eventually.

I can see how that toolkit might let them play a decent hit-and-run game against bosses too. Their bounty hunter troops...I probably need to learn more about troops overall, but they seem kind of an early/midgame thing. You can recruit them from literally anywhere, they don't have any active skills, and they only cost a little money to upgrade, which lets you conserve resources for higher tiers of faction troops.

The Sultan does indeed seem to wreck face in large part due to having a large, ranged, AOE stun on top of everything else. The chief complication with them seems to be that they start off as a ruler that has to worry about faction wars, so you're going to have to get a handle on managing, defending, and conquering settlements right off the bat. Whether that's a bad thing probably depends on how good or quick at learning that you are.

[persocom01]

it seems that not many people have experience with the knight-errant, but as far as my experience goes, he's a complete monster.

in army battles, his best skill may not be immediately obvious, but it's Dervish, a 6 directional whirlwind attack that sucks in everyone it hits into a neat pile in front of you, where you can land 2 free normal attacks on the whole stack before they spread out.

however, that's not the best way to use Dervish. Immediately after using Dervish, you can use Whirling Chop, which is basically WC3 blade dance or diablo whirlwind but everyone it hits is lifted slightly into the air and gets repeatedly hit so long as you stay near them. Dervish + whirling chop is the go to combo for any large engagement.

however, that is not all you can do, because Knight errants can learn arcana of any level. Under lv2 fire arcana is the spell Conflagration, which ignites a piece of ground for continuous fire damage. What better way to use this spell than to suck in all your enemies with Dervish, light the ground on fire, and keep then taking continuous magic and physical damage by keeping them in flames using Whirling Chop? I call this combo the fire tornado.

this combination is fatal to even the highest leveled human squads, and even some mythical creatures, only limited by how many are in range to be sucked into your whirlwind of doom, and is best used sitting on top of enemy reinforcement spawns. Dervish is very spammable with only a 6 second cooldown, and generally, if your army is with you, the full combo isn't needed to effectively spawn camp enemy reinforcements.

let's also talk about his 1v1 abilities. I'm not sure how he compares to the rest, but Sky Fiend + Sky Slash are excellent single target damage skills, and you can throw in Assassinate if the enemy is alone. I haven't had any trouble damaging bosses during duels, although I must admit, prior to pheonix summon, the lack of a summonable distraction really hurts your survivability.

[Vvv]

Henry Stanller : Jackal was meh for me as well, I kinda dislike summoning troops in this game for some reason...

Luminaire : I had a similar experience with the sultan haha. Will try the bladedancer one of these days, she reminds me of the glass canon type.

Jaeger : Aye nice sum up, they will probably balance things up as the game goes on.

persocom01 : I used him like that as well, sometimes however you get focused by the ranged enemies and those your whirlwind pulled towards you and just die quickly haha

[Jaeger]

Thank you, I try! :D

Regarding the Jackal, the Bounty Hunter might be worth a look. That character has the same personal story of the Jackal, but, at least according to one of the guides, seems to trade some of their more niche/utility abilities for some AOE attacks, a stun, and a giant, beefy transformation? I should experiment with that/see what it looks like. It could be fun from a gameplay perspective, if just a tad questionable from a thematic and story one, depending on the execution XD

[jhwang713]

I've played a lot with Bladedancer, and it seems like a weird class that can be broken with the right gear and/or legacy/"other" skills but weak otherwise. Early on, some kind of stun skill is necessary to quickly spam their low CD skills to hit and run. Later on, Air and Fire arcana (lv 2 Ice Arcana's pretty crappy btw...), increased movement gear, and maybe Rogue Stone (auto stealth every 5 seconds) and I'm able to solo any boss and an Ifrit+demon army of >100 just by dashing in, quick spam skills, and leave. Resilience is a plus. It feels like the hit and run class succeeds better against some bosses that hit stupidly hard, but weaker for tank bosses that just prefer to taunt, regen, but barely hit back.

Overall it feels like a solid class, on my second playthrough I hit lvl 20 and solo'd every legacy boss before day 45 without really trying, and every dungeon afterwards (and solo'd every Brotherhood/Clique army I came across) but I feel like Bladedancer relies alot on having certain legacy skills and items to bring out its best, something you can't know on your first playthrough. I'd have to try other classes more to make a final judgement I guess.

On a side note, I think the Bladedancer's Triple Flourish needs to be upgraded to target random enemies on its follow-up attacks instead of random directions. Also, the Ice Arcana needs better spells at lv2.

[Vvv]

Jaeger : I was actually hoping that when playing as the Jackal I could become the ring leader or at least part of the desert bandits haha.

Jhwang : That's an interesting take, but for sure the game still needs balancing. At least the devs seem rly chill and interact with fans well from what I've seen. They seem to take note of suggestions like yours about Ice Arcana or the triple flourish.

[persocom01]

Originally posted by Vvv:

persocom01 : I used him like that as well, sometimes however you get focused by the ranged enemies and those your whirlwind pulled towards you and just die quickly haha

the trick is to run sideways until you can blink into battle using Sky Slash so you avoid the closer ranged arrows. Immediately use Dervish afterwards to draw all the archers to you and stick your sword through them like they were shish kebab. Archers have poor hp and can normally only take at most 3 hits.

personally I think if he were really unstoppable it would be too much. I've won 1 v 100 battles before even with all the arrow spam, but larger than that would always require an army, which I think is fair.

[persocom01]

Originally posted by Vvv:

Jaeger : I was actually hoping that when playing as the Jackal I could become the ring leader or at least part of the desert bandits haha.

Jhwang : That's an interesting take, but for sure the game still needs balancing. At least the devs seem rly chill and interact with fans well from what I've seen. They seem to take note of suggestions like yours about Ice Arcana or the triple flourish.

the selection of the arcane skills is pretty poor, really. Fire looks like it has the most skills, until you realize 4 of them are just about shooting firebolts.

[Jaeger]

Ha, well, I've only been through the early bits of the Jackal/Bounty Hunter story, but I actually like it from a thematic standpoint a fair bit.

While I'm sure you can justify every character trying to form their own army, some of the character stories are pretty personal and...well, not small-scale per se, but there's a fair bit of soloing things.

The Jackal, on the other handy, is explicitly the leader of a band of mercenaries and their men get some attention in their plot. So, it feels quite natural to be running around, recruiting troops and characters, and doing sidequests and locations for money and plunder.

[Vvv]

Originally posted by Jaeger:

Ha, well, I've only been through the early bits of the Jackal/Bounty Hunter story, but I actually like it from a thematic standpoint a fair bit.

While I'm sure you can justify every character trying to form their own army, some of the character stories are pretty personal and...well, not small-scale per se, but there's a fair bit of soloing things.

The Jackal, on the other handy, is explicitly the leader of a band of mercenaries and their men get some attention in their plot. So, it feels quite natural to be running around, recruiting troops and characters, and doing sidequests and locations for money and plunder.

Imagine now, that a faction that is about to get their ass kicked, offers you huge rewards just to hire your band of rugged but experienced mercenaries! And ofc you take the side who offers the best rewards. If that were the case, Jackal would probably be my fav class.

[Jaeger]

Hm, it's an interesting idea. I haven't played it in quite awhile, but Bannerlord eventually added a similar mechanic to working as a mercenary for the various kingdoms. Basically, rather than having a chance to gain land and influence the way the faction is run, the Influence resource mercenaries generate by supporting/fighting for the kingdom is converted into money over time.

More desperate kingdoms would offer more money/higher rates of conversion, which incentivizes player and NPC mercenary bands to flock to them and help create more of a balance of power than a snowball effect once one of the factions gets more land, and thus troops.

Given the similarities between the two games, it's technically possible but probably tricky to make work both in terms of coding and game balance. Bannerlord puts more focus on the sandbox part of the equation with that kingdom management element whereas Sands is more of an RPG with actual storylines and such.

Before I get too far off topic, though, do any of the characters lend themselves particularly well toward getting involved with one or more of the factions either story-wise or gameplay incentives?

Given that the main story requires you to get all of the factions to agree to a truce with the Ifrit getting involved in the conflict seems counterintuitive. Though, the prince of the Nasir does demand you help him subjugate the other factions if you can't beat him in a duel and I've read that if a faction is destroyed their members, including the leaders, simply become roaming NPCs like everyone else you can recruit.