Getting Started Guide

The first and most important thing to state is that you can join in with guild events, PvE, PvP without maxing your skills and stats. If you want to improve your skills and stats this guide is intended to help you get the best things first. I will work on a guide for the next level of character development next.

Skill Level

As a general rule I wouldn't bother trying to get 75 until you have a good range of skills at 50 because the time it takes to get there is greater then the advantage you get from having the skill at 75.

Melee & Archery Specialisations

See Conquer the Seas expansion notes for full details on the different specialisations. They have changed the archery ones into two groups since then, you can buy one from each group:
Aquatic Shot - Mage Hunter - Master Scout

Jump Shot - Mage Killer - Mana Shield

If you do not have elemental magic and you want to stay alive longer you could buy Indestructable, Mage Hunter and Mana Shield. If you want to do more damage then you would pick Destroyer, Mage Hunter and Mage Killer.

Magic

Remember to buy the spell school skills Durable, Intensify, Mana Efficiency and Quicken at 25, 50, 75 and 100 skill in the spell school. For instance when you hit 100 in Lesser Magic you would buy Intensify Lesser Magic.

Lesser Magic

The goal of this school is 70 for Launch. Along the way you will pick up some of the most important spells for everyone: Heal Self, Health to Mana, Mana to Stamina, Heal Mount, Stamina to Health and again Launch. As you are leveling this school try to skill up those spells mentioned. All of these spells can be raised while AFK.

Greater Magic requires 50 Lesser Magic

Heal Other is the next great spell and is only at 25 spell school after that Unburden is very key especially to Destroyers/Mage Killers. Infliction Shield is also a useful buff and can be used to skill up Greater Magic while AFK.

Spell Chanting requires 25 Greater Magic

At 30 you can get Sacrifice which is the second major group healing spell.

Witchcraft requires 25 Greater Magic

You get Needles at level 1 which is a nice AoE spell for Destroyers/Mage Killers for long range artillery or focus firing a choke point. At 75 you get Witches Brew which is another nice heal, it used to be vital but since they increased its cooldown it is less necessary but still good.

Melee/Archery

The aim is 50 Mastery in your chosen weapon and 50 in Sharpshooter. You also want to get the Rage skill which you can buy at 40 str & vit. This is a skill you can use once every 10 mins, it uses a lot of mana but gives you a lot of health and magic resists.

Stats

The main stats you want to increase is Vitality and Strength. You get a lot of these from fighting monsters in melee. Another good way to increase them is by mining iron ore or stone and chopping trees for wood. At low levels you gain a lot more health for every stat point you get so closing the gap between a new players health and an older players is greatly reduced.

Meditation

This is a new mechanism to gain points in skills while you are offline. This is very new and is restricted to magic schools only currently. It is however a nice way to gain skill while you are not logged in and as a guild we will be looking to support newer players by helping them buy meditation points to reduce the grind they have to do. See the official blog post for more info.

Group Combat

In a group fight staying alive is very important. Don't go to 20% health just to try to kill an enemy because even if you do kill him you will probably die right after. Instead keep fighting and keep topping your health and stamina up with constant healing. This brings us to the next point, good use of Heal Other and Sacrifice will win group fights. Whenever you see someone who is hurt and you are in a situation where you can cast a heal then heal them up even if they still have a lot of health.

The other vital aspect of group combat is staying together and helping people in need. For that to happen everyone should keep an eye on the minimap and around them to make sure they are not getting seperated from the rest. One thing we use a lot to help with this is waypoints. Everyone should be able to drop a waypoint quickly, to do this you need to bind a key to dropping a way point by typing the following command: "/bind F10 waypoint" substiture F10 for the key you want to use. If you are in trouble in a fight say so and drop a waypoint so people can quickly find you and help.

Useful Links

DFVendors is a site you people register their player vendor and the items it contains. This is useful for finding things to buy or checking how much items cost.
Crafting spreadsheet which tells you what you need to make items as well as the item stats.
A spreadsheet with all the spells in game and the reagents they use.
Enchanting spreadsheet
The official Darkfall Blog
A very good map

Graphics Settings

These video settings are good to use to start with because some setting make the game much slower. If you want to improve the graphics from these try increasing the Dynamic Lights, Particle Effects and play around with Vegitation Density and Area Size.

Important there may still be a bug with the games Anisotropic Filtering doesn't work unless you force it on in your graphics card settings. To enable this go into your graphics card settings, for instance Catalyst Control Settings, go to Anisotropic Filtering untick the "Use Application Settings" and set it to x4.