Hi folks!

With the departure of Varian to realms unknown, a few daring souls were pulled through to a new world they couldn't possibly imagine. With them comes newest addition to our class pool - and perhaps an old favourite: the Predator class!

Predator is a neutral-tether class available to everyone that has culminated from the finale of the Worldeater saga, and is best described as blood-thirsty warriors who constantly seek out the next challenge with their famed sitara by their side. They possess a mix of cunning, ferocity, and ingenuity when dealing with their foes, and of course, they are flanked by their iconic wolf - a direwolf in our case.

Those of you seeking to learn the Predator class can do so by visiting Sigurd Brynja within the Augerweald at v76795 where he has made his home, and using the command LEARN PREDATOR FROM SIGURD. Like our other neutral classes without a guild, there is a cost of 40 credits to obtain the class. Apprenticeship won't be enabled for a short while afterward, so you will need to visit Sigurd if you seek the class.

Now for some quick bits of information!

- The three skills of Predator are Knifeplay, Predation, and Beastmastery.
- For the time being, lessons in these skills can only be learned from Sigurd or another player.
- Predators make use of LEATHER armour.
- Predators carve their own SITARA knife from the bones retrieved from a corpse.
- Predators do NOT have a guild they are part of.
- Predators CAN be selected through creation with the same limitations as other unguilded classes.

Predators with their sitara knife pull all their benefit from the DEXERITY stat, foregoing both brute strength and magic to make their ends meet. Most of Knifeplay and Predation relies upon balance recovery to execute their attacks, however Beastmastery utilises equilibrium to issue commands to their beasts. Don't be caught offguard though! Aside from one or two skills, they do not overlap balance and equilibrium together. Faster balance recovery is likely the favoured of the class.

For those curious, the kill routes for the class are more on the simple side. Aside from making the most of Knifeplay stances, I believe most should be able to make quick sense of class without too much complexity involved. The venom route in particular should be fairly straight forward.

HELP PREDATOR and HELP PREDATOR RP will tell you more about the class and its lore, along with the help files for their three skills. I highly recommend reading them as they were created beautifully by Emellan and Ictinus!

To begin with, the class comes with the 'hunt_predator(1-3)' artifact and unique to them is the 'hidden_daggers' artifact, for all your dagger throwing needs. The usual weapon runes also all apply to the class, and will increase the damage, penetration, and speed of your sitara.

As the final note to everyone, this class does indeed come from Imperian and has been brought over to Aetolia while balancing them for our systems here. As such, some skills are going to be roughly the same as you might remember them if you've played the class before, while other aspects of it are going to be completely new and different. While I've tried my hardest to preserve most of its iconic skills, there are going to be some things missing or changed so that they better fit in with our combat system, or so they don't overlap with other classes that I considered iconic to them.

Having said that, there's always the possibility that more can be brought to the class. This is just the starting foot for them after all!

Enjoy!

Penned by my hand on Quensday, the 24th of Chakros, in the year 513 MA.