​Introduction
Orna features a number of buildings available to either construct ourselves as players or indeed find out in the wild. For the first couple of years of Orna’s life we could only really build similar buildings to what we’d find in the wild such as shops and bestiaries, making our home towns more like shopping malls for dowsing rods and monster remains. The only unique building initially was the Keep, where we could invest some gold and store items and followers. 
​
Then Odie introduced refineries and jewellers into the game for us to build, at a maximum of one per area. However, the biggest update to constructible buildings came during early 2021 where a handful of useful buildings became available for players to build in our origin towns only. The buildings genuinely make our origin town feel more like a town, especially when you start receiving villagers to live in your residences! It makes your town feel more alive.

This update is commonly known as the origin town update for obvious reasons, and it brought some really awesome features to the game that cater to both new and established players. In this Orna Legends guide we’ll take a look at all these new origin town buildings, detail their functions and why players will look to construct these, as well as sharing opinion on when players should consider building these and what to prioritise. 

Orna players have always known that experience and orn gain items existed, and for some items the exact increase was known. An update in September 2021 brought with it two super important things that improves Orna players’ quality of life significantly in regards to orn/exp gain items.
​

1. Exact numbers for orns/exp gain are now visible on the items in-game. This clears up any doubt as to what the gains each items actually gives us.
2. Quality on items now affects orns increase, just as it affects experience gain. Until now, quality only affected experience gain and not orns. For example a Superior Dark Garb now gives more orns than a standard quality one, just like how experience gain works.

This second change has alleviated a certain amount of pain with the orn grind, especially around the mid-game where millions of orns are required for next tier classes but orn income from mob killing wasn’t on par. The majority of players were under-orned by each new tier jump. Thankfully this new change to orns affects a number of low-tier items as early as tier 3! 

Orna 3.0 brings with it a humongous update the likes of which Orna has not seen for a very long time. One part of this update is the introduction of themed dungeons, which bring with them a variety of unique monsters, gear to find and extra bonuses upon dungeon completion. Themed dungeons are also very much promoting the new party play feature as part of this update, however solo players can still face the full power of party-mode Dungeons in the new horde mode (themed dungeons only) , where they will face the same quantity of Monsters during the dungeon as they would when playing with a party. 

The most commonly asked question regarding themed dungeons is how do they spawn? Do they spawn randomly as new buildings or take the place of other buildings/dungeons or what? Well the answer is currently that themed dungeons do randomly spawn on a weekly rotation but they take the place of existing dungeons, no new buildings appear. Every Sunday evening at midnight UTC  the dungeons rotate randomly, with roughly 50% of existing normal dungeons becoming themed dungeons, and the rarity of each dungeon type is transmitted appropriately with Valley of the Gods being the rarest for example. Fuximus (famous Beowulf player) carried out a community incidence report survey during beta, results below, showing approx 50% of dungeons get turned into a themed dungeon every week, with some then being rarer than others.

​The Orna 3.0 Beta has been released for a couple weeks now during September and on top of the list of changes provided by the dev Odie in main discord, I wanted to provide more visual changes and any small additional things that are new for 3.0. With the live version due to drop any day now, i’ll do my best to keep this article updated with any new changes that make it to the live version and it should be a useful point of reference for players to get a quick grasp of what’s new. Please remember any information below is subject to change so please feel free to contact me if there is wrong/changed information and we’ll get it updated!

Skill and Equipment Loadouts for Blademaster Swash build - featuring paths from both Majestic or Dragoon as prerequisite classes.

For quick build loadouts from this guide please go here(not released yet), otherwise please continue on to read the full guide below!
​YouTube video at the bottom of the guide also.

The first opportunity to strip naked for high attack in Orna obviously starts when we can unlock the Swash spec at tier 7 (lvl 150). Typically it’s rare for all players to have the heavy 2 Mil orn cost to purchase their tier 7 class directly on reaching level 150. However the 50K orns cost for tier 7 specs is an easier pill to swallow and in the case for this guide, provides a great introduction to the world of Swash with the Blademaster class (the main melee option at tier 6).

Going Swash first gives us time to get accustomed to the Swash life and be prepared - it’s the ultimate glass cannon playstyle and likely very different to how you’ve played Orna up until this point. As usual when entering a new tier in the game we’ve got a number of fairly brutal mobs to deal with at tier 7 that can be especially tough to deal with while being a class tier down. The tier 7 Majistrate class gains over 1000 HP which will make most difficult Blademaster encounters much easier to deal with, however we gotta start somewhere.

​Nevertheless, Blademaster Swash is fun, fast and as long as you’re prepared to die regularly and lose a few dungeons here and there, it’s definitely an awesome and viable entry into tier 7 and more importantly for your overall Orna career, it’s a great first step into the wonderful world of Swash.

​As always, we’ve got heaps of experienced Swash players on hand to help out in the Orna Legends discord server, welcome to everyone - you’ll also want to join the dedicated Swash server set up by Swash legend Lenneth Valkyrie called  The Arisen Swashbuckler. A must-visit for all aspiring Swashies.

​This will probably be my most end-game related guide to date however let that be something interesting to look forward to for you lower level players! The Altar of Ascension was introduced to Orna along with the Origin Town Buildings update in April 2021, and initially blew a lot of late game players’ minds with the hefty 50 Mil orns cost just to build the thing! It’s four months on from its introduction to the game now so I’m confident enough with my experience of ascending to make this guide. 

​Ascension is effectively the Orna Developer’s current answer to end-game levelling progress. They had posted hype screenshots of a possible Tier 11 class available at level 250, however that idea was replaced with Ascension, although I wouldn’t mind seeing a Carl class at some point! I feel the current live iteration is working extremely well, offering end game players a chance of increasing their favourite class’ stats by putting in some effort and paying the required costs. 

We're into our second month of community-ran events within the Orna Legends framework - next event this weekend is a fishing event available for all to enter with a chance of winning some awesome summonable prizes!

Thanks to our Events Manager: Regular Beans, he's set up the OrnaEvents site for easy events submission and management. 

So get yer rods out this weekend for some fishing fun! Check out the events page for this weekend or also the rules and prizes below in this post.

Once your character reaches level 50 (tier 3) you will unlock the ability to enter Gauntlets and Dungeons to slay the foul demons and beasts within! You will need gauntlet keys to enter but don't worry, there are plenty of opportunities to find these by playing the game normally. One of the best ways early on is to kill as many bosses in the world that you can, also keep an eye out for quests giving keys as a reward.
Dungeons and your menu Gauntlet are effectively the same content, just that Dungeons are statically located on the world map and your menu Gauntlet is of course accessible wherever you are. All dungeons and your gauntlet have individual cooldowns, they are not shared, allowing you to complete many many dungeons if time allows.

What you may have realised if you've completed a number of dungeons already through different levels, is that the number and type of monster you encounter within Dungeons actually changes depending on what tier of Dungeon you have entered. You can actually change the tier of dungeon (up to your tier) with the drop down menu. If you enter without changing anything the game will create a dungeon of your current tier automatically.

Each Dungeon Tier has a set number of mobs/bosses that will appear within the dungeon. For example a tier 5 dungeon has 3 extra floors and 2 extra bosses than any tier 1 - 4 dungeons, but also certain floors will have a certain tier of mob that always spawns. The mobs within those tiers are always random. Any mob can spawn in dungeons except from weather specific mobs, so it's a great place to farm water biome mobs for example. There also exists dungeon-only mobs which can be lucrative also.

The infographic below is a useful resource showing what tiers of mobs spawn in each tier of dungeon, as well as what floors you will find bosses on. 
The X-axis dictates which tier of Dungeon you are entering and Y-axis shows how deep or how many floors and therefore number of mobs the relevant tier of Dungeon contains within.

I've finally got round to writing down a bunch of helpful tips that typically answer a lot of common questions about Orna. How many do you know?!