Arcanists

Arcanists is an online multiplayer strategy game developed by FunOrb. Since FunOrb was created by Jagex Ltd, the creators of Runescape, a player can use his or her RuneScape account (if he or she has one) to log in to Arcanists. Arcanists is FunOrb's most popular game, and strives to perform the expectations of the gamer: to have a customizable character and a chatting device. Its gameplay is somewhat similar to artillery games such as Worms, in the facts that:

*The gameplay is set on a two-dimensional field.
*The objective is to kill the members of the other team(s) within a set time limit per round.
*The player can control more than one character (minions), similar to the fact that in Worms the player controls an army.
*The arsenal of magical spells includes both simple, easy to use spells, and spells that while very powerful when used correctly, may easily miss completely or even damage the player who uses them, similar to Worms' firearms.
*The games graphics and sounds are primarily "cartoon-like".
*The objects and landscape sets used to generate the field are arranged into "themes", such as forests, beaches, volcanoes, ect.

Spells and Spellbooks

This game has many spell books with a wide variety of spells to choose from. The spellbooks are as follows: Arcane, Flame, Stone, Storm, Overlight, Underdark, Nature, Frost, and Seas. Each has unique spells. So far, only members who subscribe to FunOrb can use spells from the last seven books. Free-to-play players can use all of the Arcane spells and most of the flame spells.

Each spellbook (except Arcane) comes with their own "familiar" (shortened form of "familiar spirit). To obtain a familiar, a player must have all the spells in a spellbook in their current spell selection. These familiars help to improve the player's ability to do certain things, depending on the spellbook. (The Flame familiar is the Harpy Flame which increases fire spells' power, the Frost familiar is a Frost Sprite which increases jumping ability of the player and their minions, ect.)

A familiar is different from a minion in the fact that they do not take up a spell in the spell selection, they are only killed when the player who used it was defeated, and they have five different "levels" of use. These levels cost twenty hitpoints every level, at a maximum of level five with one hundred hit points removed, but the ability will be at the maximum.

Players buy spellbooks and spells by getting wands, which are received from playing rated games. Every spellbook costs five wands, and each spell costs two or three wands.

Rated Games

Rated games are games that increase or decrease a player's rating, depending on whether they win or lose. Only paying subscribers are allowed to enter rated games. Winning increases rating (5000 being the maximum), while losing decreases it (zero being the minimum). All players start out with a rating of 1000. Players may or may not win wands even if they lose a rated game, although their rating will still go down if they lose.

A few players have gone on the least crowded worlds (which usually have zero players on them) with a friend, and purposely defeated their friend to increase their rating and gain wands. This is almost universally called cheating, although Jagex, although they have been notified of this, have not released any statements about it.

Extra Features

Paying subscribers have access to many more benefits than free-to-play players, more so even than RuneScape (another game created by Jagex). Besides the access to seven more spellbooks, familiars, increased friend and ignore lists, pay-to-play players are able to use their spells against free-to-play players in unrated games.

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See Also

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