Merchant

A non-combat trading class that appraises, brokers, builds and sells to other players for real coin.

The Merchant does not fight. There is not a single combat ability in the class, no damage skill, no buff, no aura, and nothing that helps in a brawl. What it has instead is seventy-eight ways of moving money, and almost all of them involve another player at the other end of the transaction. You appraise their gear, you identify their enchantments, you repair their armour, you sell them a shop, a farm, a mansion, a ship, a warhorse, a butler and eventually a palace. Everything settles in coin through the ownership, auction, property and staff systems, which means a Merchant's power is measured in what other people are willing to pay rather than in what it can kill.

It plays quite unlike anything else on the game. You are running a business in a world where the customers are other characters, and the skills are the contract law, the shopfront and the stock list. The early levels are service work, appraising hauls and repairing gear for a fee. The middle of the class is a shop, an auction house and a hiring network. The top of it is real estate and shipping on a scale where a single sale takes an hour of cooldown. Merchant is a base class, so no prior class is required, but the guild does not take walk-ins: the Merchant's Guild sits in Aurin, and a guildmaster must grant you admittance or induct you before join merchant will work. You will also need to be an Explorer of at least level 10 first, and joining resets you to level 1. Guild ranks run Peddler, Trader, Broker, Magnate and Guildmaster.

Resources#

SP is the only resource, and the class documentation calls it capital, which is the better way to think about it. Every skill spends some, from 1 SP to reprice an item on your counter to 250 SP to move a war galleon. It regenerates on its own and there is no conversion, no coin cost baked into the skill itself and no second bar to manage.

The second resource is the merchant satchel, run by the Supplies skill at level 3. Contracts, seals, deeds and shipments all consume physical stock, and a skill with an empty slot behind it fails. Check the satchel with supplies. Carry caps start low and rise with level.

Merchants have no armour category access at all. Plate, mail, leather and cloth are every one of them closed to you, so the only wearable gear is the kind that carries no category, which in practice means ordinary unrestricted equipment. Do not expect to survive being hit.

Talent Trees#

Eye#

Appraisal and inspection. Appraise at level 1 reads an item's grade, quality and condition in one report, and the branch builds from there through Identify for enchantments, Rune Read, Value Read for open market pricing and Bulk Appraise for sweeping a whole container at once. Seal Authentic at 85 lets you put your own mark on a piece, which is how a Merchant's word becomes worth something. This is the tree that other players come to you for.

Ledger#

Bookkeeping and finance. Contracts, escrow, loans, consignment, deed transfer and letters of credit turn player to player deals into things that can actually be enforced. Market Read and Market Report give you live pricing across the world. Wholesale Network at 56 is a passive toggle granting the best vendor prices in every city, and Trade Empire at 99 is the capstone: a bounded daily tribute from every mansion, farm and ship you own.

Voice#

Advertising and auctions. Hawk Local and Hawk Global are paid broadcasts, Notice Board handles persistent adverts, and List Item and Host Auction put goods in front of buyers, the latter taking a percentage of somebody else's sale. Headline Anchor at 93 sets the day's world news headline and has a full day of cooldown behind it.

Stall#

Player-run shops and live auctions. Build Shop raises a counter wherever you are standing and customers buy from it with the ordinary list and buy commands. Stock and Set Price manage the goods, Dismantle Shop packs it all up and pays out the takings. You must stay in the room while the shop is open or it will fold itself up. Auctioneer at 24 runs a live room auction with bidding and automatic payout.

Architect#

Real estate development, running from a Cottage at 31 up to a Palace at 94. You are placing buildings for buyers rather than for yourself, and Install Room and Sell Room Deed let you fit those buildings with armouries, libraries, vaults and the like. The cooldowns get long towards the top, which is deliberate: a palace is not a thing you sell twice in an afternoon.

Land#

Farm brokerage, structured the same way as Architect but for agricultural property. Smallholdings, crofts, small farms, working farms, estate farms and finally Baronial Lands at 98. Install Building and Sell Plots handle the extras once a farm exists.

Husbandry#

Pets and animal services. The ladder runs from a songbird at level 9 through dogs, hunting hounds, falcons, warhorses and direwolves up to griffins and a roc at 96. Alongside the sales, Groom Service and Vet Service earn fees from other players' existing animals, and Pet Broker lets you take a cut of a pet changing hands.

Network#

Staff hiring and personal services. The service half is available almost immediately, with Repair Service, Stylist, Craft Clothing and Ink Service all arriving by level 7, and it is where most early income comes from. The hiring half fills in later: cooks, farmhands, butlers, guards, stewards, shepherds, mercenary captains, and a Champion at 95.

Harbor#

Ship brokerage at the docks, from a rowboat at 13 to a war galleon at 91, with Fit Ship Weapon at 49 for arming what you have sold.

Skills#

Eye#

Ledger#

Voice#

Stall#

Architect#

Land#

Husbandry#

Network#

Harbor#

Playing a Merchant#

The first ten levels are the friendliest opening in the game, because everything you learn is immediately sellable to somebody. Appraise at 1 answers a question every player has about every drop they pick up. Hawk Local at 2 lets you advertise that you can answer it. Repair Service at 4 gives you a genuine, recurring, in-demand service, and Stylist, Craft Clothing and Ink Service by level 7 give you three more. Park yourself somewhere busy, hawk what you do, and charge for it. Identify at 10 and Value Read at 20 round the appraisal business out into something people will seek you out for.

The middle game is the shop. Build Shop at 14, then Stock and Set Price, and you have a counter that other players browse with list and buy from with buy, exactly as they would at any NPC vendor. Remember two rules: only one shop per room and one shop per merchant, and you have to stay in the room. Wander off for too long and the counter packs itself away and returns your goods and takings. Coin from sales is held until you dismantle, so a shop is a commitment for the evening rather than something you leave running. Auctioneer at 24 is the alternative when you have one valuable thing rather than a stock list.

From the thirties onward the class becomes property. Architect, Land, Husbandry and Harbor are four parallel ladders that all work the same way: a sequence of increasingly expensive things you place or sell for other players, with cooldowns that grow from minutes to an hour at the top. You do not need to climb all four. Pick the one your server's players actually want and specialise, since the SP costs at the top end are high enough that spreading yourself thin means never having capital when a buyer appears. Network sits alongside all four and is what makes the properties worth owning, since a mansion wants a butler, a steward and a guard, and a farm wants a farmhand and a shepherd.

The thing to plan around is that you cannot fight. Not badly, not slowly, not at all. You have no combat skills, no armour category access, and a class configuration built for bargaining rather than blades. That means levelling is a problem you solve socially: group with people who can fight, be useful enough to be worth bringing, and let the party earn what you cannot. It also means that anywhere dangerous is genuinely dangerous for you, and that a merchant who wanders into a contested area alone is unlikely to wander back out. Work the cities, work the guild channel, and let the customers come to you.

At the very top, Wholesale Network at 56 and Trade Empire at 99 change the economics. The first gets you the best vendor prices everywhere, which quietly improves every other thing you do. The second pays you a bounded daily tribute from every mansion, farm and ship you own, which is the closest thing in the game to income that does not require you to be logged in doing something. Getting there means having built and kept a genuine portfolio, so if you are aiming at the capstone, start thinking about what you own rather than what you sell somewhere around level 60.