Starting strong in Corepunk: Guilds and groups optimization guide

Intro

This guide is designed primarily for const parties and guilds, offering an advantage through optimal balance in party roles, gathering, and crafting professions. It will also be helpful for solo players to simplify their progression in Corepunk.

1. Choosing a character: roles, gathering, crafting, and building a balanced party

When selecting a character, consider your gameplay expectations. Depending on your play style, you can choose one of the following roles: Tank, Healer, or DPS.

Building a balanced party

• For successful PvE/PvP gameplay, a balanced party should consist of:
  • 1 Tank
  • 1 Healer
  • 2 DPS
• To optimize performance:
  • Avoid having both DPS as melee (to prevent them from hindering each other).
  • Aim for one ranged DPS and one melee DPS, each with different damage types (physical and magical).

Class and role overview

The following table outlines the classes and roles officially announced by the developers.

Switching roles

At max level, characters can switch between three weapon types available to their race, making it an important game mechanic to consider when choosing a character.

For example, a Champion - Destroyer can switch between:

• Melee DPS
• Ranged DPS
• Tank

2. Gathering professions: selection and allocation

Specializing in gathering

• Focus on one gathering profession early on, especially if you're in a group of 4 or, better yet, in a guild.
• Leveling multiple professions is inefficient and may prevent access to rare and epic resources (available at 40% and 100% gathering proficiency).

Recommendations for guilds

1. Identify players with the most playtime and allocate professions among them, regardless of party composition.
2. Distribute resources evenly among players with similar playtimes to avoid imbalances.

Gathering profession play styles

When choosing a profession, it's important to consider your personal preferences and play style. Even in micro-activities like resource gathering, your character traits should guide your choices.

• Butchery: Involves farming creatures like bears, wolves, and turtles. Ideal for players who enjoy grinding.
• Mining: Methodical, involving resource node circuits with minimal mob encounters and PvP risks.
• Herbalism and Logging: Often performed alongside Butchery farming or in peaceful forested areas.

Current issues (Early Access)

• Mining: No Tier 3 ore nodes on the map; Tier 2 nodes require Tier 3-level skills.
• Butchery: Farming wolves for skins is difficult unless you are at least three levels higher than them.

Distribution Strategy

After assigning gathering professions to the most active players, they return to their parties and allocate the remaining professions within their groups. To help with distribution based on playtime, it's recommended to conduct a guild survey in advance. At this stage, you can adjust the resource gathering distribution if the most active players haven't covered all the essential resources.

Note

In Corepunk, non-combat professions impact a character's combat stats. While it's still unclear how gathering professions will affect combat, we do have some preliminary details from the developers regarding crafting professions. Let's explore this further with an example.

3. Choosing a Crafting Profession

This is the most exciting part, as the developers plan for crafting professions to provide unique combat bonuses. While the exact mechanics are still unclear, the current bonuses are as follows:

• Weaponsmithing: +5% weapon damage
• Construction: +10% artifact (implant) bonuses
• Mysticism: +2/3 additional runes equipped
• Alchemy: +2/3 additional active potion effects

These mechanics encourage selecting crafting professions based on character effectiveness. However, if you enjoy being an alchemist and making potions in bulk, follow your instincts. Let’s consider which professions offer the most effective bonuses for specific character classes.

Weaponsmithing

This profession is straightforward—basic weapon attack bonuses are primarily beneficial for DPS. However, there’s a nuance: since other professions also offer benefits for DPS, Weaponsmithing should be chosen by those who deal the most damage through regular attacks rather than abilities and rely on strong but slower attacks.

Construction

This one is less obvious and requires some calculations. Imagine a Tank and a DPS both choose this profession. Most of the Tank’s implants focus on HP, physical, and magical armor. Let’s assume they equip six Steam Cell Implants, which grant a total of 2400–4800 HP. Taking the average—3600 HP—the 10% bonus adds 360 HP. For simplicity, we won’t factor in armor. Meanwhile, our DPS might be fully geared for attack, with six Battle Sleeves providing 120–240 attack power, averaging 180. The profession bonus in this case would add 18 attack power.

Assuming this DPS is a Ranger with an attack speed of 1.4 hits per second, they could neutralize the Tank’s extra 360 HP in 360 ÷ (18 × 1.4) ≈ 14.3 seconds. It appears that the Tank benefits more from the artifact bonus, potentially extending their survival in combat.

In general, the larger the base values, the greater the effect of the bonus. Therefore, classes that focus on health and mana will benefit most from this profession. I’d recommend ranged DPS to consider other professions over Construction.

Mysticism

Mysticism is the most unpredictable crafting specialization, thanks to the wide variety of available runes. Without leveling Mysticism, you can equip only two runes, but with it, you can equip four or five. Reviewing the current list of Corepunk runes is essential to understand their potential effects. Even with just two runes, most essential needs can be covered, as not all classes rely on more than two critical runes.

Here are a few unique runes worth highlighting:

• Rune Dark Horse: Increases movement speed by 5-10%, but the artifact loses its bonuses—a great option for map exploration and resource farming. Keep an artifact with this rune in your inventory and equip it when needed.
• Rune Thorns: Returns 2-6 + 6% of physical armor to attackers—a Tank-specific rune.
• Rune Lamprey: After using a skill, your next attack deals 100% more attack power—a great rune for DPS with high physical attack and skills with short cooldowns, as it can trigger every 25 seconds. If your character relies on combos with skill gaps of less than 25 seconds and combo cooldowns longer than 10 seconds, this rune's effectiveness is questionable. However, if you can spam your skills with a pause slightly over 25 seconds, this rune will work wonderfully.

Many other runes increase stats for 5 minutes after killing enemies or trigger under specific conditions, such as using a skill or taking damage. The logic behind runes suggests numerous possibilities for future developments. However, for now, stick to the current list. In my opinion, two runes that boost attack after defeating enemies or using a skill are sufficient for DPS, provided the above conditions are met. Tanks and Healers can benefit from a full set of 4/5 runes providing HP, mana, armor, and shields.

Alchemy

This profession is the most flexible in terms of combat bonuses. It provides +2/3 additional active potion effects simultaneously. Alchemy offers a wide range of consumables valuable to any profession.

For example, a DPS character can use potions to boost attack speed and damage, and with the Alchemist profession, they can further enhance critical chance, magic attack power, and more. Tanks can benefit from potions that improve physical and magical armor, while Alchemy allows them to also increase HP and mana regeneration. Likewise, Supports can take advantage of these benefits.

A powerful synergy for the Alchemist profession is the Pathfinder talent tree, which extends potion durations and amplifies their effects. This talent tree is particularly advantageous for Tanks, Supports, and solo players, regardless of their class.

Having reviewed the combat bonuses provided by crafting professions, it’s important to consider other factors that influence your choice. One of the most critical aspects is aligning your crafting profession with your gathering profession. Analyze the resources required for crafting popular items in your chosen profession. Ideally, your gathering profession should provide most of these materials, particularly the rarest resources.

Cooking

It’s also worth mentioning another peaceful profession—Cooking. Although it’s available to everyone, the best recipes require resources from Herbalism and Butchery. Therefore, the best solution is for a party member specializing in Alchemy or Mysticism to level up Cooking. However, since gathering professions don't yet affect combat stats, and your party or guild members can provide all necessary resources, this distribution only affects gameplay comfort and is not decisive.

Recommended Crafting Professions by Role and Class

In summary, here are the optimal class and profession choices:

Stay tuned for the next guide, where we’ll cover how to start strong in the first few hours of gameplay.

(c) Art, Close Circle