This section lists guilds that you will want to avoid for now, but that may be of interest once you have gained some experience. The description generally focuses on the reason why the guild won't work well for a new player - see the guilds section for a general description of these guilds.
In BatMUD, archers are a front-row guild that adds the shooting ability to a tank role. Weird, I know. They can work as backrow shooters, but are much weaker than dedicated blasters in this role. Archers also require a lot of experience to develop.
To be any good as an archer, you want to have enough experience to take a tanking guild plus this one, and put enough experience into both of them. Once you do that, archers are a highly useful guild to have, but as a new player, you are better off looking elsewhere.
Experienced barbarians are highly valued members of exp parties, thanks to their ability to stun mobs with their Battlecry and Lure skills. However, to be able to do this, barbarians need to build up a lot of barbaric "reputation".
As a new player, you get none of the strengths of barbarians, ending up with what is basically a ranger without the extras that make rangers work.
Crimsons are a really good defensive tank guild. This, however, comes at the cost of requiring a lot of experience - the main advantage of crimsons is the ability to train a lot of defensive skills to 100. If you do not have the exp to do so, there isn't much reason to take crimsons.
Kharim is a tank guild using a combination of long blades and shields. It can be really effective, especially when combined with crimsons, but it is also rather difficult to get going. It is not meant for new players.
A mounted guild - not a bad choice once you can afford to take both beastmasters and cavaliers, but fairly lackluster on its own.
Nergal is a minion-based guild with amazing versatility, especially when you add reaver levels. However, it requires a lot of game knowledge to get into - if you don't know where you find good minions and good spells to teach them, the guild won't work for you.
Spiders are a secondary guild - their purpose is to augment your primary guild. You don't want to join them as your first and only guild.
A fairly simplistic blaster guild focusing on harming spells. Their ultimate spell, "harm body", is quite useful, but highly mana-intensive, which is problematic for a newer player. As such, you should only consider priests as a partial (5-17 levels) addition to some other guild, to get the healing and utility spells.
Yet another tank guild, whose theme revolves around poisons. Fairly weak on its own compared to the other melee guilds.
Templar is a defensive melee guild that is rather weak compared to the alternatives. The guild isn't terrible, but since ghost liberators are generally better, the only reason to take them is if you also have nun levels (nuns cannot join ghost liberators).
Animists are an expansion guild - you need full levels in Ghost liberators, Templars, or Monks to join Animists.
Druids are an excellent secondary guild - they offer a lot of utility and protective spells, as well as a couple attack ones. As a stand-alone guild, however, they do not work very well compared to the alternatives.
Nuns are a very interesting guild, offering good offensive spells, as well as some healing and protective ones. However, you need a lot of experience and knowledge of the game to make the guild work.
Bards offer a wide variety of protective and utility spells, as well as a fairly good attack song. To advance in the guild, however, you need to do a series of quests that start as tedious and get worse from there - not a good way to get started with the game.
Runemages are essentially a weaker version of the mage guild. They work well with limited experience, but require a lot of preparation to get started (runic research). The guild is very useful as an add-on to a bard/folklorist, but as a single guild, there are better options.
Alchemists are a non-combat guild, which means that their ability to gain experience is rather limited. If you are interested in a crafter-type of character, you are better off gaining experience as something else, then reincing.
Same comment as with alchemists applies. Merchants can gain experience using minecrafting, but this is less effective than old good monster killing (unless you get lucky).
Mages are an essential guild to any equipment party, but also a very bad pick for a new player, as they require a lot of experience and equipment. If you want to play a mage character, consider joining the Riftwalkers at first.
The base 10-level guild offers little, but is a pre-requisite for joining elemental guilds (offensive spells) and the inner circle (protective and utility spells).
Channelllers are a weaker version of mages with a variety of utility and support spells that "pure" mages do not get. They can be useful in the right situation, and generally cheaper to get into than mages, but still not a recommended choice.
