Thirteen1

It’s week 5 and it’s the final week of coverage, we’ve been over every Bloodline now and hopefully by the end of this you will have a good solid knowledge of every class.

So let’s take a look at what this week has to offer us. We have another one of the ‘Bloodlust’ Bloodlines in this week, with the Blood Priest. But I’m going to cover another Melee which will be the Ranid Assassin as I think it is quite a fun class to finish up the weekly coverage, and it will be the focus of our in-depth analysis.

If this is your first time reading a weekly class coverage, I’m going to aim to give you a good brief insight into each Bloodline as they rotate out every week. Because learning a new Bloodline every week is a pretty daunting task, as a free-to-play player you can sometimes feel overwhelmed. But don’t worry I’m here to help.

I’m hoping with these overviews you can get a feel for what the class is and how it plays, helping you judge what you might want to play next.

The Bloodlines this week are the Ranid Assassin, Blood Priest, Thorn and Igniter.

Melee – Ranid Assassin

So shall we get into this weeks coverage? I think so. The melee that we’ve been given this week is the Ranid Assassin, or as some people might refer to it as the ‘trolling’ class. But nevertheless it is the focus of this weeks in-depth analysis so let’s press on!

The Ranid is a very agile fighter, capable of dealing a lot of damage and can be a very deadly melee to go up against. One drawback to the Ranid is that you don’t have good sustained damage, as they are quite fragile, so you have to dodge attacks and jump in and out dealing bursts of damage.

The Mb1 ability of the Ranid is quite interesting due to the effect changing when you use ‘Camouflage’, ordinarily it will strike the enemy twice, but when you’re under the effect of Camouflage, it will strike 3 times and stun the enemy. This makes it incredibly crucial to get a good opener on an enemy.

With the Ranid playstyle being very stealthy, and focused on ‘kiting’ enemies, you can often survive for a long time without any heals (this is if you are good at avoiding attacks), so having a good awareness of what is going on all around you is incredibly important if you want to succeed with the Ranid.

Due to the Ranid having very good mobility, you can often be in a situation were it may be just you against 2 other players, there will be times when you can still win from this position, with careful and precise play you can pull off some clutch game winning 1v2’s. However this can also be frustrating to go against for the other team, as sometimes you’ll find people jumping around and kiting at the end of a game in an un-winnable situation.

To learn more about the Ranid Assassin, go to this weeks in-depth analysis here.

Healer – Blood Priest

This week we’re given the last of the 4 Bloodlust Bloodlines, and it’s the Blood Priest (Healer), it has a slightly different playstyle to the other healers and it’s something that makes for very interesting decision making.

Unlike the other healers there will be times when playing the Blood Priest were you really have to think about prioritizing heals, I know… I know you’re thinking “But don’t I have to do that with every healer?” — Yes!, but with the Blood Priest every heal on your allies will slightly damage yourself.

Alright, so we’ve established that this isn’t your ordinary healer, and I may have just put you off by saying that you damage yourself when healing others. “But I don’t wanna take damage when I heal people, that just sounds terrible!” — calm down! Obviously there are trade-offs, for instance you will notice a significantly faster cast speed on your heal than other healers, and also you’ll get a shield that redirects damage.

The Blood Priest has some other tricks up his sleeves too, a ridiculously strong space bar ability, ‘Possession’, this travels to target location, and will Possess an enemy on impact, making them unable to move or act for the duration, then it will continue to move you to the target location. This makes such a strong ‘out’ and adds a lot of mobility and control to the Blood Priest.

It also has AoE (area of effect) fears, insects (effectively a blind), blood shield and generally quite respectable damage output for a healer, it’s definitely one I’d recommend trying out.

Tank – Thorn

So we’re now onto the Thorn, I don’t know if any of you played in the Beta but if you did, this thing was ridiculous! Easily capable of absolutely crushing 1v3’s this tank was an absolute monster in the beta, so I’m glad they tweaked it for release.

I said that they’ve tweaked it so it’s obviously not as ridiculously strong as it used to be, but it’s still a very viable and also very strong tank, so you don’t have to worry about it being weak. The Thorn often gets a lot of stick for being an easy class to play, but I think things have a changed a bit since the beta, it has a few different abilities which add more dynamic to the otherwise Mb1 centered play.

I can honestly say that running around the arena, smashing people in the face with branch-like arms is something to be desired, the Thorn is just an all-round fun tank to play. It does have some interesting projectiles, such as the Mushroom Spore, this will hold an enemy in place making a great gap closer.

There is also Fungal Spores, these will slow and reduce damage and healing done by the target. You can drag people to you with Defiled Plant and also use this to drag people back into your Ultimate ability, which is effectively a massive wall of roots that will slow and damage an enemy over time.

So really the Thorn is still a very strong damage dealer, but it also has quite a lot more control, with some self healing abilities they can be incredibly difficult to kill.

Ranged – Igniter

Right then the last Bloodline to cover of the week, and well, the last of the Bloodlines for the weekly coverage! It’s the Ranged DPS class – the Igniter. This is a class that you will try and may struggle to pick up at first.

One of the most difficult ranged classes to play in my opinion, and I’ll tell you why. The Igniter is very…VERY squishy, but, it is also one of the highest damage dealers in the game. What you really need to do when playing this class is chain together your abilities perfectly and very accurately.

If you don’t do this — you can pretty much consider yourself dead. So basically, you have to use all of your ‘outs’ to gain as much distance from the enemy as possible, and you have to land pretty much every volcano to stun the enemy in place. It is this control that you need to grasp in order to chain the rest of your damage dealing abilities.

You do have quite a lot of knockbacks as the Igniter, the right mouse button ability casts 3 projectiles at the enemy knocking them back slightly after every hit, this deals a lot of damage but it has a long cast time. This is why it is crucial to land those volcanoes, otherwise you can easily miss and/or get interrupted.

The Igniter used to be a bit slower than it is now in terms of run speed, but a recent buff increased the speed slightly, this is going to make you able to get away from enemies a little bit easier, but you still need to be very accurate to get good results with this Bloodline.

But in all honesty, if you want to throw fire-bolts around and if you’re a bit of a pyromaniac you should definitely give the Igniter a try, it’s a lot of fun.

So there we have it that wraps it up for this weeks class coverage, and the last of the series as we have now covered every Bloodline. Be sure to check out this weeks in-depth analysis on the Ranid Assassin here.