Stats

Starting Equipment/Talents

Iron Greatsword
Iron Mail Armor

Talent Trees

• Techniques
  • 2 Hand Weapons (1.3 mastery)
  • 2 Hand Maiming (1.3 mastery)
  • Shield Defense (0.9 mastery, locked)
  • Archery Training (1.1 mastery, locked)
  • Superiority (1.3 mastery, locked)
  • Warcries (1.3 mastery, locked)
  • Bloodthirst (1.2 mastery, locked)
  • Field Control (1.0 mastery, locked)
  • Combat Techniques (1.3 mastery)
  • Combat Veteran (1.3 mastery)
  • Combat Training (1.3 mastery)

• Cunning
  • Dirty Fighting (1.0 mastery, locked)
  • Survival (1.0 mastery)

Strategy

• Stunning Blow and Death Dance are your two early game talents. Both of these should be maxed as soon as possible.
• I would recommend opening up Bloodthirst first. You get three passive talents here: Blood Bath, Mortal Terror, and Blood Rage, all of which will help increase your character's survivability.
• You want to put some points into Rush. This helps you a lot to close the gap on tough mobs that are more than 1 square away.
• I would put points into all of the passive talents in the Combat Techniques tree (the ones that increase your stamina and health).
• For your other category point, I would probably take the extra slot, rather than another talent tree. I think having 2 regen runes is better than anything else. However, you could take the Warcries tree, which will give you Battle Shout and Second wind; both talents are nice.
• For Passive talents, I maxed the Weapons Combat, and Weapons Mastery first, followed by health, and the massive armor. (I put a point into massive armor at clvl 1.)
• You might want to spend your final category point on Field Control so you can get Track. I did so on my winner, but found that I rarely, if ever, used it. So it may be better to spend this point on the Warcries tree.

A good strategy for most of the game is to limit your line of sight. I nearly always tried to fight stuff in a place where only 1 or 2 monsters could ever see me. I think this becomes more important as you get into the later levels as you want to limit the number of ranged attacks and magic. Those are the two things that will kill you fast throughout most of the game. You don't need to worry about melee damage until you get to a high clvl and start facing elite berserkers. They can hit HARD. So you want to be careful around them. Otherwise, you want to go toe to toe with everything else. You should be able to 1 or 2 hit everything in the game except bosses.