Your first week

Characters are cheap to make and most players end up with several, so the stakes on your first choice are lower than they feel. But class is a build commitment rather than a control scheme, and the six classes do not converge - a Brawler and a Runic Mage want opposite fights, opposite gear and opposite pets, all the way to the level cap. Picking the one whose fights you enjoy matters more than picking the one with the best numbers.

If you do not have a preference yet, the honest recommendation is Brawler or Warrior. Brawler because Strength grants it damage, armor and health at once, so there is exactly one stat to get right and gearing mistakes are cheap. Warrior because it has no bad matchup, which is forgiving in a completely different way. Both let you learn the game rather than the class. The classes page has the stat reasoning for each, and the choosing-a-class guide compares them properly.

The daily loop has three different clocks and they are not competing for your attention, they are meant to be interleaved. Tavern contracts run on energy that refills whether or not you spend it, so the tavern should be running whenever you are not looking at the game. Dungeon runs sit behind a cooldown, which makes them the paced part of the day. Everything else - the wheel, quests, the login streak - is a short visit.

The one habit worth forming immediately: start a tavern contract before you close the tab. An idle energy bar is regeneration you have thrown away, and it is the single most common thing a new player leaves on the table. The same logic applies to every capped daily thing in the game later on, so it is a habit worth having early.

Loot is generated rather than placed: a template rolls into an item with a rarity, a level band and affixes, and higher rarities roll more affixes with better ranges. The instinct that follows from that is to wear the rarest thing in the bag, and it is wrong often enough to be worth unlearning early. A coherent set gives bonuses at fixed piece counts, and a completed lower-rarity set routinely beats an assortment of mismatched better items.

Two more things that save time. Loot rolls from a band around your level that reaches further down than up, so gear stays relevant for a while and there is no point holding an item for a level you have not reached. And the smith raises an item's tier, scaling every line on it - which means upgrading a piece you are keeping is worth more than upgrading whatever is currently equipped.

Arena rating. It is asynchronous PvP against other players' builds, and a build that has not finished a set has nothing useful to learn there yet. Losing early costs you nothing except the impression that your character is bad, which at this point is not information. Ascensions, likewise: they arrive late deliberately, because the choice only makes sense once you know how your class wins.

And do not hoard. Diamonds spent on a dungeon cooldown skip on a day you are actually playing are worth more than diamonds saved for something unspecified, materials sitting unbrewed are upgrades you did not make, and an unspent daily anything is worth zero. The whole game is built so that the correct move is almost always to spend what refills.