In both the beta and the launch, you must choose between 5 classes in Dune: Awakening. MeinMMO summarizes the most important information about the archetypes, their skills, and techniques.
What classes are there in Dune: Awakening? In the character creation of the survival MMO, you choose from the following 5 archetypes:
- Bene Gesserit: A shady order of women with a deliberately nebulous agenda. Adepts of the sisterhood are valued by the nobility and feared by the rest of the Empire.
- Trooper: All Great Houses of the Landsraad maintain a standing army or a house guard. The backbone of these formations is made up of professional soldiers known as troopers.
- Mentat: The mysterious and withdrawn order of Mentats conditions its followers to store and analyze vast amounts of data with superhuman speed.
- Sword Master: The highly respected sword masters of the fallen Ginaz school are still the best fighters in the known universe.
Not available during character creation – at least in the beta:
- Planetologist: Planetologists are researchers and explorers who have learned to survive in hostile environments in order to terraform them. Their training is very intensive, as they are the first to enter any newly discovered planet.
Here is some gameplay from Dune Awakening:
Dune: Awakening – The Class Differences
How do the classes differ in gameplay? When you start Dune: Awakening, you can defend yourself equally with melee or ranged weapons, regardless of the class, as soon as you find or craft a suitable weapon – you can make your first knife at the very beginning.
Nevertheless, the choice of class has consequences, as it determines your starting skill and gives you access to the three skill trees of the respective archetype.
Important: The choice of class does not lock you into a rigid framework of skills and talents that you cannot escape from. Instead, in Dune: Awakening, you can find masters of other classes and learn the skills of other classes through their quest lines. In the end, it is only the available skill points that limit you in the choice of skills and talents.
Let’s take a closer look at the five classes with their respective advantages and disadvantages. Here is the table of contents from which you can directly jump to your desired class:
Bene Gesserit
Playstyle
- Physical and mental mastery, dagger specialization, and manipulation through the “Voice”
Possible Starting Skill
- Voice “Coercion”: Use the Voice to compel someone from a distance to come to your position.
Talent Trees
- Strange Path: Improvements to dagger fighting and access to mobility skills
- The Voice: Enhancements for manipulating opponents, for example, to call them to you or temporarily take them out of action
- Body Control: Access to group buff “Litany Against Fear”, improved self-healing, increased protection against poisons and heat
Suitable for: Players who enjoy manipulating other NPCs and providing a useful group buff.
Here you can watch the official class trailer for the Bene Gesserit:
Trooper
Playstyle
- Offensive ranged combat, also with heavy weapons and tech gadgets
Possible Starting Skill
- Shigadraht Claw: You fire a claw attached to your wrist using a shigadraht. Due to the extreme tensile strength of the wire, you are catapulted in the direction of your shot. This way, you can also destabilize opponents.
Talent Trees
- Shooting: Specialization in different types of weapons
- Suspensor Training: More mobility in the air, access to gravitational field and special grenades
- Tactical Tech: Access to grappling hooks, hunting seekers, and explosive grenades, reduction of skill cooldowns
Suitable for: Players who enjoy shooting large weapons from a distance and want to move quickly through the game world with the grappling hook.
Attention: During testing, we found the master for troopers quite early in the game, in the first friendly NPC base to which the journey automatically leads. If someone is actually considering a different class but is eager for the grappling hook, they can obtain it relatively quickly.
Here you can watch the official class trailer for the trooper:
Mentat
Playstyle
- Reconnaissance and strategy, ranged combat with gadgets
Possible Starting Skill
- The Guardian: Deploys a suspensor-based arrow projector that covers a shooting field via motion detection and thus detects potential targets.
Talent Trees
- Mental Calculation: Sharpshooter and pistol training, more efficient repair, can overload enemy shields
- Assassination: Access to poison capsules and stun arrows for the hidden bow, as well as poison mines and poison clouds
- Tactician: Access to shield wall (can also provide cover for allies), (anti-)gravitational mines and projections
Suitable for: More defensive natures who prefer to operate from a distance or use technical gadgets.
Sword Master
Playstyle
- Aggressive yet mobile melee fighter specializing in long swords
Possible Starting Skill
- Knee Attack: You dive at an opponent with a brutal attack. The attack causes shock damage and significantly destabilizes the target, but costs stamina.
Talent Trees
- The Blade: Improvements for fighting with the sword
- The Will: Access to the defensive skill “Distraction” and improvements to resistances
- The Path: Access to “Knee Attack” and group buff “Inspiration”, improved stamina efficiency
Suitable for: Front-line soldiers who want to look their enemies directly in the eye during combat.
Planetologist
Playstyle
- The best driver, pilot, resource collector, and scanner in the game has a nose for spice
Possible Starting Skill
- Suspensor Field: Deploys a suspensor device that catapults you and targets into the air. Helpful for navigation and overcoming obstacles.
Talent Trees
- Scientist: More efficient extraction with the Cutteray, improving energy cells and water yield efficiency,
- Researcher: Access to Suspensor Field, improved climbing, scanner mastery, can create maps of surveyed areas
- Mechanic: More efficient repair or deconstruction of vehicles, saves fuel when driving and flying, and scans better from within the vehicle, can harvest spice more efficiently
Suitable for: Players who place a slightly lower focus on combat and want to focus more on collecting resources and exploring the game world.
Dune: Awakening – Learning Skills and Techniques
From the various active skills you learn throughout your survival battle, you may only use 3 skills from a skill bar. However, you can freely switch learned skills if they are currently not on cooldown.
Unlike skills, learned techniques provide passive bonuses for specific areas. There is also a bar with 3 slots, and only the techniques in these slots are activated.
You can unlock and upgrade skills and techniques in the various skill trees up to 3 levels using competence points that you earn during your adventure.
For many of the talents from the trees, you must meet certain requirements to learn or improve them, such as investing points in previous talents.
Is there a reskill option? Yes! You can perform a so-called competence recalibration, namely every 48 hours.
Dune: Awakening will be released on June 10, 2025, with a Buy2Play model. There is no prior early access phase, rather you buy the finished full version. The survival MMO comes without a subscription and aims to offer new updates and content for free. You can find out more important information here: All about release, prices, features, and editions of Dune: Awakening
