New player questions

Dagon

Hi, I'm new to Lusternia but not IRE. I was hoping someone might be able to answer some questions to get me started. 1. Is there a class thats considered best for bashing or influencing? 2. Are certain races better for certain classes? 3. I will have about 1000 bound credits from retiring my character on a different game. What skills are considered necessary besides the guild ones? I know survival is a must in the other IRE games. 4. What guilds/cities have the most population right now? 5. I mostly like to go bashing( influencing sounds fun though) are there any certain artifacts I would need? I know an artifact weapon helps a ton on some other games even if its level 1. Thanks

Marcella

1. monks, bards respectively

2. not really!

3. Discipline is a great skill for power regen and whatnot, and has some neat stuff in it. Otherwise Resilience is being deleted soon but considering you'll get a full lesson refund on it it might not be a bad idea to spend lessons in that anyway.

4. I think Magnagora and Serenwilde have the highest population right now, idk about guilds

5. Artifact weapons for bashing are elemental whips, the divinus or fire ones are the most popular. You can buy them from Korue Dragnet on the Path of Nature whih is up the mountain from the aetherplex.

Cyndarin

1. Without artifacts, Celestine, Cantor, Moondancer, or Paladin are the best bashers at high level bashing due to using divinus damage typing naturally. 

Low levels, there are no standouts. Casters will outbash physical classes at low levels due to low crits. Nihilists and Shadowdancers are the "bad" bashing guilds.

2. Without artifacts? No not really. Some teeny tiny differences, but races are designed to not have a huge impact. With the race pendant? Lucidian for power heavy classes like warriors. Dracnari is great for burst damage classes. Kephera is the best tank. 

3. Discipline, beastmastery, environment, combat. 

4. Serenwilde maybe? No one is dead at the moment from what I can tell. 

5. Divinus whip. Crit rune. 

Falaeron

Just some additional input to what other people have said.

1. Since you are mostly interested in bashing I would highly recommend a divinus whip (275cr). Assuming you get one then you don't really have to consider the damage output of each class. My experience is that warriors (lots of health) and TK mages (forcefield which makes you take ego damage instead of health damage) are both tanky.

3. I'll go through each of the general skill and try to give detail on what might be useful for someone who focuses on bashing/influencing without taking combat into consideration.
Aethercraft - only really useful if you want to go on aetherhunts with other people. Aetherhunting is a good source of experience but it's definitely not something you can do 24/7 since it relies on getting enough people to want to go with you. In general the more you invest in this skill the better, but you can contribute with just 25 lessons or so to get siphon.
Arts - can be ignored
Beastmastery - bodyguard is useful for bashing, but it's also very high up. Otherwise you might consider getting up to at least influencing (~215 lessons?), which allows you to train your beast to give you a small buff to each of the influencing types. This will also get you battle/aggressive which lets you have your beast attack mobs for a small boost in bashing speed. Aggressive allows your beast to shatter denizen shields too.
Combat - Most of this stuff is really for... combat. The only thing you might consider is veteran, which gives you a small health buff but it's quite high up (600 lessons?).
Discernment - Nothing in here other than some of the early skills like diagnose/firstaid that I think most guilds will tell you to learn are that useful for bashing/influencing. Purely for utility you might want to get thirdeye (178 lessons) which lets you see shrouded people.
Discipline - Curing (~ 25 lessons) is useful if you don't have a system to automatically cure your vitals for you but once you get a system this is obsolete too. Like veteran in combat there is a small health buff available at 600 lessons called endurance. The only other skill that is useful for bashing is damageshift which lets you shift any wasted damage when you kill something with a critical hit to the next attack but that's 1292 lessons in. My bashing speed has improved considerably since getting it though.
Dramatics - There are a lot of milestones you might want to go for if you're influencing. The gestalt skills will make you take less ego damage while influencing. Charity and empower are the most common types of influencing from my experience and the respective gestalt skills for each are at ~7 lessons and ~252 lessons, respectively. Histrionics gives a small ego buff at 600 lessons.
Environment - Mostly combat/utility here. Attunement at transcendent will give you a small damage resistance bonus to one environment at a time but this is one of the last things I would get.
Highmagic - You can only choose either high or low magic and some classes may restrict you to one (e.g. mages must take high and druids must take low). Netzach is a cheap ego buff at 34 lessons. Only other one that might be useful is Geburah at 423 which is a small damage bonus but I doubt you'll even notice it when bashing.
Influence - If you're interested at influencing at all, get transcendent. A smaller milestone would be wheedling at 600 lessons. Before that you're really just not being as effective as you should be.
Lowmagic - I don't know much about this since I've never needed to look into it. I think autumn at 600 lessons gives you a once per in game month experience bonus for one in game day.
Planar - Astral (178 lessons) is required for bashing astral. Conglutination is very good at 423 lessons if you do bash astral. Otherwise mostly utility.
Resilience - Drop 16 lessons into it for a small damage resistance to cutting, blunt and I -think- poison but that might be at 34 lessons.

Dagon

Thank you everyone for your replies

Tylwyth

AFAIK resilience has already been cut/folded into combat. So I wouldn't worry about trying to learn any of it.