Ragar loots keeps (and gets his own looted) in Ubisoft's new F2P dungeon crawler/manager

Slashing/Shooting/Casting Your Way To Riches And Glory!

When you first start the game, you'll have to pick your initial hero. Your options are: the Warrior, cleaving his way through monsters in melee; the Archer, laying traps and shooting his bow at range while his bird goes in for the kill; and the Mage, raining down fire and lightning to smite his foes. If you're coming in via a free beta invite, only two of these classes will be available as Mages are currently restricted to those who have bought the second or third-tier Double-O Packs. Since the description on the Double-O Pack page says "Early Access to the Mage", I would imagine the class will be available at launch or soon after to free players, either for gold or for Blings (TMQEL's premium currency) but, for the moment, if you want to sling spells you'll need to pay at least $40. You do get some other stuff with the higher-tier packs to make up for the price difference, but this could be an annoyance for those who saw that Mage on the homepage and decided that was who they wanted to play.

Regardless of which class you pick, the controls are the same. It's a Diablo-style action RPG: click to move, left-click is basic attack, you assign special attacks to right-click as well as 1-3 on your hotbar, and Q is your potion button. When you start, all you have is your basic attack and a single special move. Every time you level, you'll either unlock a new power or you'll power up an existing technique if you've already unlocked everything. The system works and there's a decent amount of variety in the abilities each class unlocks in each of its three skill trees. One thing to note though is that the ability unlocks are tied to level and you can't skip ahead to the stuff you want, regardless of how awesome that other skill is (Flame Coat and Conflagration FTW!) or how much your current one sucks (I'm looking at you, Smite). As for the skill upgrades themselves, from what I can see they're just straight +damage/+health/etc. style bonuses to the base skill, but the Skill menu only allows me to see so far ahead for each upgrade. For all I know the top of that tree could be filled with "has a chance to proc instant death" bonuses, but I have quite a way to go before those secrets are revealed to me. I tried a bit of the Archer, but for the bulk of my dungeon raiding in TMQEL I bounced between the Mage and the Warrior.

Despite being labeled as Mana, the Warrior's resource pool is pretty much Rage like we've seen in other MMOs; you start with zero and have to hit people to build up for bigger attacks. If you slot the Charge attack, you can build some quick mana for another attack or at least to close the distance on some Snotters or whatever other ranged monsters your neighbors throw in your way. Aside from that, you're looking at building mana either through your basic attack or one of the four skills from the Mana Mastery tree, then spending it with attacks from Combat Techniques (knockbacks/stuns/healing attack) or Dragon's Fire (fire attacks and aura).

Speaking of fire, let's move on to the Mage. As a Mage, you start with a full mana pool and everything other than your basic attack uses mana. Your spells fall under Spontaneous Combustion (fire and lots of AoE damage), Electric Induction (armor and lightning attacks that cause foes to take more damage), and Unholy Rendition (snares and healing attacks). Whereas I'm charging into battle as a Warrior and cleaving my way to mana to fuel Flame Coat and Stunning Blow, my Mage usually involves dropping Combustion and Fireball AoE, then using Death Grip to snare them in the fire for more damage while Combustion comes off cool down. Early on my Mage seemed to be making much better progress through keeps than the warrior; Flame Coat was nice and all, but Combustion with Death Grip was making AoE work much easier. Now that they've caught up to each other, the two feel about equal - the Mage still has better damage, but the Warrior's survivability is nothing to sneeze at with some of the gauntlets I've seen in these keeps.