Mythos Previews
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In its current form Mythos offers a selection of four races and three classes for play. You can choose between a diminutive, cigar-smoking Gremlin, elf-like Satyr, plain vanilla Human, or hulking Cyclops for your avatar. Their faces, skin tones, gender, and hair styles can be customized and, depending on which race you picked, you'll benefit from specific damage bonuses and resistances. The classes so far aren't anything surprising, but offer quite a bit of versatility. There's a Bloodletter who focuses on melee skills, a Pyromancer who specializes in fire magic, and a technology-savvy Gadgeteer who concentrates on fighting from a distance with rifles.
So far we've been checking out the Pyromancer, and it's been an interesting class with which to try out different skill combinations. You're awarded skill points with each level up that you can pump into learning new abilities or powering up existing ones. The skill tree itself is broken into three sections for the Pyromancers: cinderblade, flamecaster, and coalsmasher. We've been focusing mostly on coalsmasher since investing in that skill tree unlocks the ability to summon creatures made of fire and to lay down destructive area-of-effect blasts. Should you become unhappy or bored with your skill choices, it's possible to pay an NPC in a major town to refund spent points so they can be reallocated. So, if you wanted, you could swap out coalsmasher skills and try to invest more heavily in the cinderblade line, which are built to make Pyromancers more effective in melee combat by adding damage modifiers to weapons and health status.
And a snip from GameSpy's article:
Online RPG developers have thus far been hesitant to retread the ground that Blizzard strode with Diablo II's "hardcore" mode, which simultaneously terrorized and tantalized players with the prospect of losing forever all their hard-earned progress after a streak of unlucky virtual dice rolls or server-side latency. But Mythos is going there, and in certain ways upping the ante considerably.
Upon character creation, you'll notice a series of check boxes next to the naming field. If you mark the one listed as "Elite," then every monster you encounter will be stronger and more resilient (due to your attacks doing less damage across the board). The one marked "Shadowlands Only" will force your character to permanently reside in a PvP-enabled instance of the gameworld, meaning you're fair game for all comers, regardless of level disparity. The one marked "Hardcore," finally, does it like Diablo II. If you die in combat, regardless of the reason, your character's gone. Internet thrill-seekers should bear in mind that you can check all three of these boxes upon character creation for an experience that's sure to be memorable, if more than likely brief.
