Your character's "guild" is analogous to a class in Dungeons and Dragons or other RPGs. It determines your character's abilities, such as known spells or fighting commands. Guild choice also heavily influences your vitality, or character's HP and Guild Points. Guild Points are analogous to MP in other RPGs, and are used for casting spells or taking special actions. Guild choice (along with race) dictates how far you can train your stat points. See Advancement for more information on vitality and stat training. This page is focused on the abilities and mechanics of guilds. For lore and flavor, see the Newbie Handbook's Guilds section. For general combat information and strategy, see the Combat Guide.
Many guilds require following a specific deity, and some are restricted by alignment or race. While guilds restricted only by deity or alignment will technically allow any race to join, pursuing an alignment contrary to the nature of your deity or race generally results in substantial negative consequences from both the game and other players.
There are three general types of guilds.
Fighter: hard hitting, hardy guilds, focused on offense and defense, but lacking in spells, support, or other abilities. They have a large fighting skill tree, and perhaps one other small supporting tree, such as occult or covert. Fighters generally train strength, dexterity, and constitution well, and can wear the strongest armours without being impeded. Vitality recommendations for fighting types are generally 10k HP minimum, and only a few thousand GP at most.
Caster: spell casting types, such as wizards. Low HP and low damage resistance, though often surprisingly durable due to layered defenses. Casters have faith, occult, or magic as their main skill tree. They. can only wear the lightest of armours, and being impeded will drastically reduce spell efficacy. Casters need intelligence or wisdom, and generally train vitality to have 3-4000 GP or higher, often resulting in more GP than HP.
Half Caster: a middle ground between the other two types, half casters have fighting skills but also cast spells, but are not as effective at either as a specialized guild. They often require training both physical and mental stats, and advance significantly in both fighting and one of the casting skill trees. Casters can wear medium weight armours (or a mix of heavy and light). Every half caster guild needs its own careful consideration in vitality advancement, though generally they have between 5 and 10k HP.
Guilds generally also have a primary focus for combat (player killing or PK), and one or more other uses. PK functions apply to combat with NPCs as well, but fighting NPCs is generally much easier than fighting other players. Additionally, every guild has some support functions to assist other players outside of combat. Note that, if advanced properly, every guild is useful to a non-trivial extent in combat, though some are better at it than others.
PK Abilities
Confuse: force enemies to fight each other
Damage: the hardest hitters
Debuff: lower an enemy's combat abilities
Disarm: cause an enemy to drop weapons, preventing fighting commands until reequipped
Eject: force an enemy to leave the room and delay return to combat
Hold: prevent a player from moving for multiple rounds, a critical function for securing kills
Trap: A temporary hold to movement
Layer Strip: use a large number of hits to remove caster defenses so HP damage can land
Silence: prevent an enemy from casting spells; Pirate, Shadow Mage and Psionicist can stop fighter commands as well as spells
Stun: prevent an enemy from doing anything at all
Tank: unusually difficult to kill, distracts enemies and handles tough NPCs. Note there is no "taunt" ability in the game; other players cannot be forced to target a tank
Support Abilities
Buff: boost combat capability of friendly players
Enchant: provides a crucial step in the process of obtaining top tier equipment
Fix Gear: repair damaged equipment
Judge: determine combat efficacy and save levels of weapons and armours
Heal: on-demand restoration of damage to a player's HP or removal of debuffs
Invis: make a player or item invisible; useful for being sneaky and discouraging thieves
Potions: makes potions to heal, restore GP, and boost stats
Resurrect: summon corpse and restore other players to life without skill loss
Shield: the single most important defense, absorbs a set percentage of all damage received (65% at huge)
Steal: take things from other players or NPCs
Guilds of the Realms
The realms of the dragon offers training in the following guilds, arranged alphabetically. A brief summary of the guild's play style is included here, but please visit a guild's page for specific information. PK and Support abilities listed for each guild are generally in order of importance or usefulness.
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