In addition to the four breeds (the body type that your character will reside in, analogous to races in most other role-playing games), you may choose from 12 professions (analogous to classes) from which your character will determine his or her particular strengths and weaknesses. Choosing a profession that will closely match the manner in which you plan to play is of paramount importance if you wish to succeed in Anarchy Online, and choosing the best-matching breed for your chosen profession is just as vital.

Before distributing your IPs, be sure to consult our Skill Dependencies section. Oftentimes you can save IPs by improving a skill that will intrinsically raise several other skills (for example, increasing your intelligence rating will automatically raise most of your nano skills). Also keep in mind that it is important that you save as many IPs as possible. While you may have an abundance in the beginning, this will change as the game progresses.

This section focuses on helping you get your character started in an efficient manner. By no means is it intended to cover the full life of your character. Once you advance in level a bit, you’ll get a feel for what you want to do with your character–that’s a decision for you to make, based in large part on how you find yourself playing. Instead, we’ll cover the general feel of each profession; pros and cons of each breed with respect to each profession; general comments on the weaponry, armor, and nano skills of each; an overview of the most important skills for each; and finally, in the Relevance sections we’ll comment on the role of each class in a team environment vs. going it alone.

Adventurer

The adventurer, were it not for a mastery of piloting skills, symbolizes the jack-of-all-trades, master of none. As the adventurer, you are not really good at anything, but you are also not terribly bad at anything. As a result, you will find that you can perform many different roles in a group, but you will never be able to carry out any of them as well as someone who specializes in that particular role.

The adventurer with Coat of Barbs. This, and other nanos like it, will soon become some of your best friends.

Breeds
The Solitus is the breed best suited to the adventurer profession.

Solitus
Strangely enough, because the adventurer is a strictly average class, the Solitus works out extremely well. You will have a nice combination of combat and nano abilities that will serve you well in the long run. This breed is probably the best to play when choosing an adventurer.

Opifex
The Opifex actually makes a rather good adventurer and would be better than the Solitus were it not for the stamina deficiency. The breed’s sense and agility will come in handy often, but the lowered hit points will often prove a strong liability.

Nano
Unfortunately, because the adventurer class does rely quite a bit on its physical abilities, the Nano is probably the most difficult class to play as an adventurer. While you will be able to heal and buff your party often, you will be useless in a combative role and may as well simply choose to be a doctor or a trader.

Atrox
The Atrox is on par with the Nano in terms of making a poor adventurer. You will be strong, and your strength will help out a lot when in melee combat. On the other hand, any other nano-oriented class will dwarf your nano abilities, and you may as well simply choose an enforcer, as you would be of more use and would live longer.

Weaponry
Despite that you begin the game with a pistol, you will want to ditch it rather quickly in favor of a one-handed edged weapon. While you are quite proficient with the pistol and the fling-shot skill, the rest of the ranged weapon skills are rather difficult to learn. On the other hand, you are rather proficient with the one-handed edged weapon skill, and the rest of the melee skills will be rather easy for you to pick up.

Armor
As an adventurer, you will probably have the widest selection of armor in the game. Since you will be focusing on both combative and nano abilities, you should be able to keep up with most types of armor.

Nano
As an adventurer, your nano abilities will be just as important as your combat abilities. You will probably have one of the widest selection of nano programs available, as you will be able to heal, team heal, morph yourself, morph your entire team, cause damage to enemies, increase your AC, and even increase skills or abilities.

Skills
The adventurer isn’t exceptionally adept at anything, other than melee combat, swimming, adventuring, running, using pistols, treatment, and navigation. On the other hand, the adventure isn’t really bad at anything. Instead you will find yourself running in the middle on most everything and, as a result, you will be extremely versatile, able to shape your character in whatever way you wish. However, you will want to save as many of your IPs as possible and max as few things as possible. In addition, you will want to invest in navigation later on, as your character will be particularly useful to a team because of your piloting abilities.

General Skills
This is a list of skills that are not dependent upon the discipline that you have chosen. These skills can be useful to all classes.

Body–adventuring, swimming
Speed–running speed
Trade and Repair–psychology
Nano and Aiding–first aid, treatment
Navigation–vehicle air, vehicle ground, vehicle water, map navigation

Skills to Keep Maxed
Instead of maxing any skills in particular, try to max your main abilities in the beginning. Later on when you find a direction that you would like to take your character, whether it be more toward physical or nano abilities, you may wish to focus on a few particular abilities. However, until that time comes you will want to keep them all maxed.

Abilities–strength, agility, stamina, intelligence, sense, psychic, body development, nano pool

Skills to Keep in Mind
Unlike most of the other professions, there really isn’t anything important that you’ll need to keep in mind. Simply increase different abilities, as you need to. The one exception is your navigation skills. If you are in a group that uses any of the vehicles, you may wish to increase your navigation abilities, as you will be one of the best pilots your group has at its disposal.

Navigation–airborne vehicle navigation, ground vehicle navigation, water vehicle navigation, map navigation

Discipline-Specific
While we suggest sticking to melee combat and never really investing in ranged skills, others have found ranged combat to be rather important. As a result, the skills for each discipline are listed below.

Keep in mind, however, that if you choose melee combat, you will want to pick one particular school, whether it be one- or two-handed blunt or edged weaponry, or piercing weaponry. Personally piercing is suggested, but that is simply because you can use that with one- or two-handed weapons. In addition, by choosing melee weaponry, you will not have to constantly invest in ammo, which can be a huge financial boon.

Melee–1H Blunt Weapons, 1H Edged Weapons, Piercing, 2H Blunt Weapons, 2H Edged Weapons, Parry, Sneak Attack, Multiple Melee Weapons
Speed–Melee Initiative, Ranged Initiative

Relevance
As the adventurer–whether you play with friends or on your own–you’ll be capable of holding your own, if you play competently.

In Groups
In a group setting, the adventurer fills in the gaps. If the team needs healing, the adventurer heals. If the team needs buffing, the adventurer buffs. If the team needs someone to soak up damage and protect some of the weaker classes, then the adventurer does that. In addition, the adventurer can morph all party members into reets if they need a quick getaway. As a result, the adventurer will not be able to perform any of these roles particularly well; however, having someone to fill in the gaps can be very nice.

However, when it comes time to piloting a vehicle, this is one area where the adventurer will truly excel. If your team needs transportation, then having an adventurer around is ideal because they can pilot anything. (Although the fixer is a better choice if piloting is your thing.)

Alone
Despite that Anarchy Online is highly team-oriented, as the adventurer, you truly shine when you’re alone. While not as proficient at combat or healing as a martial artist, you can still do just about anything and are quite capable of taking care of yourself. You just need to keep in mind that you need to act as your own team, performing all roles simultaneously, watching your health (to know when to heal yourself), attacking enemies, and piloting vehicles.

Agent

Ever dreamed of being a “secret agent man”? Well now’s your chance. The agent profession specializes in subterfuge and deceit and plays out as one of the most interesting classes in the game. Agents are masters of concealment and excel at killing from afar via rifle- and bow-class weapons and the aimed shot, but they also can get the job done up close through sneak attacks and martial arts skill. Additionally, as the agent, you can–through expensive nano programs–imitate any other class, going so far as to run nano programs specific to other classes. If used correctly, this can make you the ultimate jack-of-all-trades.

Breed
For prospective agents, the Opifex breed is an excellent choice.

As the agent, your aimed-shot proficiency can be used to get some extra damage in before your opponent realizes you’re there.

Solitus
As you probably noticed back in the breeds section (and as we’ll keep reiterating throughout this section), the Solitus is a very well-rounded breed, leading to a sort of jack-of-all-trades but master of none character. This breed often comes in as the second-best choice for a character but never as the first. Such is the case with Solitus agents. Granted they are meant to be jacks-of-all-trades of sorts, but they achieve this through their nano programs not through plain vanilla average abilities all around. With this in mind, the Opifex is a much better choice for your agent’s breed.

Opifex
Ahh, the Opifex. Stamina is arguably the least important of the six main abilities (strength, agility, stamina, intelligence, sense, and psychic) and is the only weakness of the Opifex. Among skills that the agent will be using, stamina is definitely the least important. On the flip side of the coin, agility and sense are quite important. With this in mind, you can probably guess that the Opifex makes for a strong agent. Rifle, bow, aimed-shot, and concealment skills depend entirely on the Opifex’s best abilities, while nothing of importance to the agent relies on a high stamina rating. Choose this breed for your agent with confidence, for it is far and away the best choice.

Nano
The Homo Nano’s weak strength rating won’t hurt you that much as an agent; however, the weak agility score will have a significant impact on your success with rifles and on your concealment score. The Nano’s strength in intelligence and psychic abilities will come in handy if you plan on focusing on nano programs; however, the Opifex is recommended over the Nano, as this writer feels that the nano benefits are overshadowed by the weak agility showing–especially considering the agent’s inherent nano pool potency.

Atrox
The Atrox is a no-go for prospective agents. You won’t be attacking from up close often (or at least you shouldn’t be), so the Atrox’s extremely high strength rating will be largely wasted. We already discussed the uselessness of stamina for this class, and that’s it for the Atrox’s strengths. Furthermore, the Atrox is an extremely poor breed when it comes to nano programs, and while the agent isn’t focused on nano technology, it is important to have a moderate ability. So as you can see, the Atrox is easily the worst breed for this profession.

Weaponry
While you’ll begin the game with a solar-powered rifle, the agent’s weaponry skills also include bows. Choosing one of these two classes of weaponry and concentrating on it as your character develops is highly recommended. Your solar-powered rifle won’t stay useful for long, but there are plenty of worthy replacements out there in both of these classes.

Armor
With your high agility and sense ratings, finding quality armor will not be a problem. Several different types of high-quality armor require solely high agility and sense, so you won’t have to waste any IPs in your quest to better equip your body.

Nano
The agent’s nano program repertoire focuses on increasing damage output (through the nano augmentation series of programs), holding enemies in place, and–most uniquely–temporarily assuming any profession desired. When you animate professions this way, you gain the ability to use any of their nano programs. The possibilities are endless. With high enough nano skills–and enough credits to purchase the required nano programs–an agent can feasibly do anything that any class is capable of doing. Now that’s impressive.