Vocations
Five vocations, five different ways to handle a fight. Four of them get the mechanic that defines them at level 20. Pick one below to see how it plays.
Weapon Mastery
The front line. You stand in the middle of the fight and stay there.
At level 20 you gain a specialisation in your weapon, and the three melee types stop being interchangeable — each one now does something the others don't. Which weapon you draw becomes a decision about the fight in front of you, not just about attack values, so a knight carries more than one and switches.
Axe
Your swings spill into the creatures beside your target. The weapon for being surrounded.
Club
Blunt force gets through heavy plate. The weapon for the armoured things everything else bounces off.
Sword
Tighter defence, more hits turned aside. The weapon for when you are the one being hit.
Simple to play, hard to kill, and the only class whose gear choice changes tactics mid-hunt.
Traps
Bows and crossbows, fought at range and on the move.
From level 20 the archer stops simply shooting things and starts preparing the ground. You lay traps, then pull monsters across them — the damage is waiting for them before they ever reach you. Trap damage bleeds through armour that would blunt an arrow, so the tougher the target, the more the traps matter.
It rewards knowing the map and thinking a step ahead: choose the spot, set it up, go and fetch them. Played well, the fight happens where you decided it would.
Mobile and deliberate. Weak if you stand still and trade shots, strong if you make the monsters walk your route.
Ranged caster
The most fragile vocation in the game, and the most direct.
No companion, no melee worth falling back on — just damage at distance. You kite: hit, step away, hit again, and never let anything close the gap. Anything that reaches you is a real problem, so the whole class is footwork.
High damage, no safety net. The least forgiving vocation to learn and the one that punishes bad positioning hardest. Currently the only vocation without a level-20 mechanic of its own.
Dryad
A caster who fights through someone else.
At level 20 the druid summons a Dryad and starts casting through her: the spells leave from where she stands, not where you do. Monsters never go for her, so she is never in danger from what she is shooting — but she also does not move herself into a good angle. That part is your job.
So the druid plays the fight around his companion. Kite the monsters into her line, or plant yourself in front of them and hold them still, whichever gets her a clean shot. She does the damage; you decide where it lands.
Indirect and positional. You are half caster, half handler — and unusually free to choose between kiting and tanking from one fight to the next.
Bone Guardian
A summoner with one servant, and it is the one that takes the hits.
A ritual at level 20 raises the Bone Guardian and binds it to you permanently. It is your tank: it holds the front wearing the protection your own gear provides, while you keep your distance and fight from back there. The trade is real — while it stands you are markedly softer than you would be alone, because your defences are on it, not on you.
It is not a summon you throw out each fight. It stays with you, across floors and between sessions, and it can die. Losing it means a trip back to the altar to raise another.
You are the mind and it is the body. The most self-sufficient vocation to hunt with, and the one with the most to lose in a bad fight.