RavenGuide Archetypes

Hello & Welcome to the RavenGuide series where we’ll be guiding you through all of the systems in both Ravendawn and RavenQuest MMORPG’s.

In this guide we’ll be taking a looking at all of the details regarding the Archetype system to give you a full understanding of what it is, how it works and how to make the best use of it.

What is an Archetype?

An archetype is essentially a combat playstyle which will determine the skills and passives you have access to.

When you first create a character you’ll have to pick one of the available archetypes to begin with. Each archetype has its own panel in the skill tree menu (K) which includes a range of skills and passives that are exclusive to that archetype.

Available Archetypes

There are currently 8 archetypes to choose from:

  • Archery utilise range combat, slows and snares to keep their distance from the enemy while hitting enemies with powerful hits. They’re also able to do strong area damage and venomous damage over time.
  • Holy is a essential the main healer class, with the ability to heal themselves and allies with single target healing, area healing and healing over time to keep themselves and their groups safe while also outputting strong holy damage to enemies.
  • Protection posses many strong defensive capabilities making them perfect for Tanking. While they are able to taunt, they are not just good for Tanking, they can be paired with any class to increase survival by self healing and reducing incoming damage
  • Shadow make use of the shadows to assassinate targets with their powerful critical strikes while also slowing, snaring, stalking and debuffing them.
  • Spiritual utilise damage shield, healing over time and buffing capabilities to provide themselves and their groups with extra utility. They combine well with many other archetypes to increase survival and buffing capabilities.
  • Warfare is a melee focussed barbarian playstyle with impactful area damage, crowd control and life leeching capabilities.
  • Witchcraft curse enemies, deal strong damage over time, leech enemies health and weaken their enemies.
  • Wizardry is an elemental magic class that utilises powerful single target and area fire damage to output great damage but they can also utilise ice attacks to snare and freeze enemies.

In total you are able to combine the use of 3 archetypes at a one time. Your second archetype becomes available at legacy level 7 and you unlock a third at legacy level 15. Upon reaching legacy level 15 you gain the ability to switch your archetypes and use any that you like. Be careful when switching archetypes as your character may not be as strong when you equip a lower level archetypes and it will be much harder to kill enemies that are higher level.

Classes

Upon choosing three archetypes, these will combine together to create a specific Class. There are many different possible combinations that will create one of the 56 available different class in Ravendawn. For example if you chose Warfare, Shadow and Protection as your three archetypes this would make your class a Dark Knight, if you switched Shadow to Holy this creates a Paladin.

Legacy & Effective Level

Another important factor relating to this system is that on your main game screen you will have a level bar. This is your legacy level which is a combination of all of your characters total experience among all archetypes. Then each archetype also has its own individual level, so if you change your archetypes around often you could for example have all of your archetypes at level 20 but you might be legacy level 25+ or something. Then you have your current effective level, this is the average level of the three archetypes you have active at that moment and you can see this by pressing (K) to see your skill and archetype menu and look at the number next to your Class.

Legacy Level is important for unlocking quests and content in the game but isn’t a distinct value of how strong you currently are. Your effective level is the important factor to look at as this will show you what enemies you’ll be more capable of killing. If you are effective level 30 but you have legacy level 50 and you’re trying to kill a level 50 enemy you’ll have a much more difficult time since you are actually effectively 20 levels lower making these enemies a lot harder to kill.

The whole archetype system allows you to have more customisation over your character and playstyle, but it also allows you the advantages of reducing or increasing you effective level so that you’re able to hunt a variety of enemies in a larger variety of locations.

Inactive Skill Points & Attributes

The main perk that makes this archetype system so useful is that by levelling all of your archetypes and not just your main 3, you will gain additional skill points and attributes that will benefit your current active class. These are called inactive skill points which you’re able to see on the skill tree menu by hovering over the [i]. This will show you how many skills points are active from your current active classes plus the inactive classes. You don’t get the full amount of skill points from an inactive class, instead they will give additional points in certain thresholds for example you’ll gain 1 extra skill point for having an archetype that is level 10 and not being used. You’ll then gain another at level 20 and then again at 30. There are various levels which reward skill points and others that will do the same with attributes.

Someone who has 3 archetypes at level 30 will be much weaker than someone who has all of their archetypes at level 30, even though they would both have the same effective level. This is because they would have access to more attributes to increase their stats but also more skill points giving them access to additional skills and passives, this is especially useful because the more you progress through your skill trees the more expensive the skills cost so having more skill points is vital for maximising your combat efficiency.

If you want to maximise your character it’s always a good idea to level up all of the archetypes which not only gives you the extra skill points and attributes but also allows your the versatility to switch to different playstyles and different builds that might be better suited to different situations or many even allowing you to switch roles from being a damage dealer to maybe becoming more of a healer.