Every game, and unlike the others that are in town 2 and 3 it's in your inventory at creation.
On Runepriests - they're amazing... Shields are amazing for mitigating any non-magic damage and they can avoid so much with a shield (plus the +4 blocks hireling stacked with a good shield skill gets hilarious... gotta love doing overland cyclopses without a scratch because of chain blocks)
Yeah really strong. I think you can't go wrong with a freemage, druid or runepriest as your main mage/healer type. Only orcs seem vastly inferior overall, the passive seems completely worthless since it comes so late at which point you'd have infinite mana pots anyway, if it was like a racial for orcs they'd be a fuckton stronger. Their schools of magic are so so, not getting Light magic means they end up being poor healers since they'll be lacking in options and being able to GM arcane resist or master melee weapons is like really pointless.
I think in order it's runepriest/freemage > druid >>> shaman. Freemage isn't particularily good at anything but since you can train every school you can get a lot of support shit like all the specific wards and all the debuff removal, expert nature+holy is good enough for healing, and they're the only ones who can get whispering shadows for "free" which is really helpful for a good half of the game. That's why as a generalist caster spot they're great, but dwarves are a lot tankier(racial giving them more health and being able to use shields+medium armor) and get better heals since they can GM earth/holy so there's an interesting tradeoff. Druids do get pretty interesting promotion abilities too so they're worth considering and they can use medium armor even if they can't block, so they're tankier than freemages but less so than runepriests.
For hybrids, it's Crusader >>>>>> Ranger > Scout/Hunter, the hybrid thing only makes sense if the shared spellschools have heals so they can help the group, having fire or air is completely pointless other than maybe throwing mediocre aoes instead of strong single target, and the ranged part of the hybrids(other than crusader) is also completely worthless since ranged weapons pretty much sucks in this game due to mechanics, so they're really melees with spells, and crusader is just a fuckton better at it by getting a strong school, being able to GM it AND getting insane promotion abilities as a paladin.
For melees, I'd say Bladedancer > Barb/Merc >>>>>> Defender. Bladedancer seems the superior choice to me but it might be equal to the other 2, not sure, DWing is very strong though especially in combination with flat damage buffs like the paladin one. I'd probably DW swords over dagger though, the GM dagger is way way too late in the game while the GM sword can be acquired as soon as act2(still need to promote though).
Barb seems good, especially with Spear, I don't know about Mace I assume the stun proc from crits don't work on bosses so that makes it meh, if you could GM axe on barbs they'd probably be the best, but alas. Mercenary are very good as long as you get Warfare and use them as "melee casters" by spamming skills instead of autoattacking. You compensate the shittier weapon levels by never missing and eventually having 100%crit rate as long as you have the mana. I'd probably even build them differently than I did mine and go like 2might 2spirit for a bit until you have a good enough mana pool you can use bigger potions without wasting(say 150mana) then just 4might every level, adjusting health via items(all the relics as well as +endurance gear and 1pt endurance).
Defender is basically a waste, you can max weapon and warfare so you can try to tank, but by doing so your defensive skills will be as low as anyone else, so not sure there's a point. Maybe eventually but you need too many skill points since you need axe to not miss, shield up to master to get the damage while blocking(so the dmg output isn't shit), warfare to at least master and eventually GM, heavy armor to master at least so you don't miss all the time, plus you'll need spirit to get enough mana to use warfare shit, so seems like it's spread too thin.
