8.1 Class Overview

There are currently five classes in Starmourn:
- B.E.A.S.T.
- Scoundrel
- Nanoseer
- Engineer
- Fury

Each offers a distinct playstyle, completely different skills and abilities and access to different armor and weapons.

B.E.A.S.T
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B.E.A.S.T stands for Biointerfacing Exoskeletal Assault Suit Tech/Technician (depending on whether you're referring to the suit or the operator).

These are shock troops that seek to overwhelm their opponents with a panoply of weapons and the enhanced strength granted to them by their armor suits.

B.E.A.S.T.s wear heavy armor. 

The three skills of a B.E.A.S.T. are:

+Plasmacasting - All about using their plasmacasters to inflict damage upon their victims, including barbecuing them.                          
 
+MWP (Mech Weapons Platform) - This involves using the other weapons mounted on their suit, including a railgun, a minigun, a missile launcher, a stabbing blade, a net launcher, and more. This skill also contains abilities that have you punching, crushing, and, in one of its instakills - literally ripping an opponent in half.
 
+Suittech - Other abilities that a B.E.A.S.T. grants its operator, such as using the jumpjets, activating advanced life support, and balancing production of overcharge and plasma, the two class resources for this class.

See HELP BEAST for more information.

Scoundrel
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Scoundrels fight dirty, and are prepared to win at all costs. With a sardonic outlook on life and the ability to make use of their surroundings to maximum effect, a Scoundrel definitely shoots first!

Scoundrels wear light armor.

The three skills of a Scoundrel are:

+Gunslinging - It's this skill that Scoundrels are probably most known for. With their trusty and iconic multi-ammo PIECE** (Prion Industries Electroswitching Compact Eradicator) by their sides, the Scoundrel is a force to be reckoned with, making near-impossible shots, switching ammo types, and using reload combos.

+Guile - This is where the some of the Scoundrel's dirty-fighting comes into play. In Guile, a Scoundrel might fire off a blast from a jetpack to send up a blinding wave of dust and grit, she might smash you in the face with titanium knuckles, she might dive from cover to cover, and can even plant bugs to keep an eye on what's going on in other parts of the world.

+Improvisation - In this skill, Scoundrels construct and use various types of IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) to cause maximum chaos and damage. They can then do various things with them, such as throw them into an adjacent room, attach tripwires to them, attach them to walls or props using magnets, and so on.

** Although Prion Industries invented the PIECE, they've been out of business for decades. The name, however, has stuck.

See HELP SCOUNDREL for more information.

Nanoseer
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For a very long time, scientists had been working to give people the ability to finely-control swarms of nanites by thought or gesture, but no workable solution had been found for an individual to take command over the millions of individual nanites that make up a swarm.

Then, in 2616 B.E., a Shen void user named Amasha Atiq managed to bring the level of control necessary without the rapid degradation previous attempts had seen. The key, as it turned out, was using void kith, but not in its raw form, which had been tried many times without success. Kith can be quite powerful, but lacks the precision required on its own.

What Amasha discovered was that by filtering the void kith through psuedo-organic circuits, in the form of intricate tattoos inscribed using the substance called iriil. This kith-associated material is only found orbiting, at high velocity, the largest black holes. Iriil doesn't fit into the commonly-accepted forms of solid matter - gas, liquid, solid, plasma - and appears to sometimes have the properties of all four simultaneously. What we're certain about, however, is its strong connection to kith. Unlike astrium, which is believed to be a byproduct of iriil decay, iriil itself appears to have a direct relationship to kith, or perhaps could be said to 'contain' some kith.

When Nanoseers begin their practice, they are tattooed with one of these intricate iriil designs somewhere on their body. They funnel void kith into tattoos, where the kith is 'filtered' into a force with less raw power but far more precision, and then transmitted to the nanite swarm via their swarmglove. The nanogoggles permit the nanoseer to see an alternate reality layer to help them see what the individual members of the swarm are doing.

Nanoseers wear medium armor.

The three skills of a Nanoseer are:

+Nanites - Control over a nanite swarm, which can be used to protect the Nanoseer, afflict their enemies and even directly affect the timestream.

+Voidism - Using the power of void kith, they're able to do things like levitate, hurl props around by creating localized voids in the direction they wish to hurl the item, throw void bombs, and more.

+Oblivion - This mystic skill sees the nanoseer connecting to and using energy from the long-dead Empyreals - the eldest beings known in our universe. Their energy, filtered through black holes, is what we know as void kith, but even after the filtration process all energy isn't the same. The different Empyreals had differences in 'flavor' and by tuning into these various 'frequencies', one gains various abilities, like gaining immunity to different kinds of damage, reversing your local timeline for a few seconds, destroying an item, and more. 

The five Empyreals the Nanoseer is able to be attuned to are the Architect (also known as The Omega), the Conqueror, the Traveler, the Progenitor, and the Sunderer.

See HELP NANOSEER for more information.

Engineer
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Those of the engineer class in Starmourn are tinkerers and creators, and they use their creations to great, and deadly, effect.

Engineers are primarily known for the wide range of items they employ, from stationary turrets to mobile drones, from magnotrons to hoverboards. 

Engineers wear medium armor.

Their three skills are:

+Gadgets - This is all about just what it says: various kinds of gadgets. Here you'll find abilities around hoverboard use, magnotrons, shrink-rays, tazers, wormhole generators, and much more!

+Turrets - With this, engineers establish networks of turrets (that other engineers can splice into) that must be powered with a QPC - quantum power cell. These turrets can be of multiple types, from laser to flamethrower to strobe and more, and the engineer can even transfer control of a specific turret network to someone else, engineer or not. Everybody remembers the first time they got a face full of shrapnel from a shardflinger! (Because it hurts so much. Ouch.)

+Bots - An engineer can deploy multiple bots ranging from scouting drones to tankbots to burrowbots and more. These bots don't just do damage - they can do things like push a table over on someone taking cover behind it, or to spy on a particular room. These bots can also be sent on multi-room patrol paths set up by the engineer that the bots will move through on repeat, allowing the engineer to project power beyond her location.

See HELP ENGINEER for more information.

Fury
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Furies embody the explosive nature of star kith itself, and is probably the hardest class to effectively play. Combining star kith use with rage-fueled acrobatics and flame-wreathed kithblades, though, means a Fury really lives up to its name.

Furies wear light armor.

The three skills a Fury has access to are:

+Battleflow - This skill combines kithblade use with stance-based attacks that flow into each other via transitions. For instance, as you're entering combat, you might choose to launch an upward slashing attack. When the attack finishes, there's a short window where you're transitioning to a new stance, determined by the attack you used, during which you can use a Rage ability (see below). In this case, an upward slash might land you in Ember stance, after which you'd be able to use a Rage ability, and have a new set of potential attacks to launch. Maybe from Ember stance you then choose to cut at your opponent's legs, which would lead you into Flare stance. The key point here is that the order of things goes Battleflow attack -> Rage ability -> new stance. You rarely stay in the same stance from attack to attack, and you don't manually trigger your stance changes. The attack you use and the stance you were previously in determines what stance you flow to.

+Rage - Rage is both the name of the skill and the class-specific resource Furies have. You generate rage on successful kithblade hits, and you can then use Rage abilities in the middle of transitions to new stances in Battleflow. Many Rage abilities can also only be used in specific stance transitions too, making the way in which you decide to flow through the stances in Battleflow even more important. Rage abilities tend to allow you to augment your normal physical abilities, and allow you to do things like knock a prop into an adjacent room, topple your target, hit them so hard they take internal damage, and, if you have earned enough rage, you can go into an overpowered mode that gives you access to some powerful abilities that'll work from any stance.

+Fulmination - This is a star kith-based skill that does everything from altering the effects your kithblade can deliver to inducing hallucinations via giving someone a bad fever to creating mirages to blasting everyone in the room with flame. Unlike Battleflow and Rage, which are fairly intertwined, Fulmination is an independent skill. Abilities can be used when you choose.

See HELP FURY for more information.