The Aniversary edition of Titan Quest offers you 9 different masteries and this guide only looks at these 9 masteries.
Level 2: You have to choose your first mastery.
Level 8: You can choose a second mastery.
The mastery Runes is only available with the DLC Ragnarok and not part of this guide.
With every combination of masteries you create a different class. In the end It doesn't matter which class you choose first.

There is a good guide in which you can see the names of all classes
http://cs2bus.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=758110958
Warning: You can't change the masteries later in the game, but you can delay your decision for your second mastery as many levels as you want.

Tip: If you are not sure about your second mastery, start another char with this mastery and play a litte bit with it. You can use this char later as additional storage room.

The most important question at start is: What kind of fight style do you prefer?
The game offers different fight styles, and not all masteries support all fight styles in an equal way. Don't play a style you don't like, only because somebody told you this would be a litte bit easier.

Only possible with the mastery Warfare.

There are no two handed melee weapons,

Possible with every mastery.
Recommendation Defense, Warfare
Extended Recommendation: Rogue, Dream, Hunting

Some masteries can call permanent Pets (Nature, Spirit, Dream, Earth, Storm).
The pets of Warfare are only temporary.
Recommendation: Nature
Extended Recommendation: Spirit

Possible with every mastery.
Recommendation: Hunting
Extended Recommendation: Rogue
A spear is an 1H melee weapon in this game and is like a bow mostly depending on dexterity. So many bow fighters use for infights a spear and a shield.

Possible with every mastery.
Recommendation: Dream, Storm, Earth
Extended Recommendation: Spirit, Nature

At start if you don't know what you want, take the unversal mastery Nature. It's very strong and you can combine it easily with every class and every playstyle. Only a little bit less universal is Dream.

Rogue is the only mastery which can built traps.
The new DLC does add throwing weapons.

With top gear every class is easy in a normal play through. Watching videos where high level chars equiped with top gear are slashing a boss in seconds don't help you with your first char.
Don't think a combination of two similar masteries gets you a strong class for your first game, quite the opposite is the reality.
For first chars Elementalist (Storm, Earth) or Conqueror (Warfare, Defender) are not the best classes when the game starts to get tough.

When you choose your second mastery and determine your class you haven't played 10% of the game and can't see the future problems.
First chars differs in two main categories compared to top equiped second chars:
1) They deal less damage and need more time to kill enemies, this results in taking more hits.
2) Their armor protects less, this results in taking higher daming with every hit.
The well known combination of the two points eliminates many classes for starters.
Glass cannons need top gear or they will break.

Advice: You need some healing or reducing of the incoming damage and at least one pet.
Why a pet? Without high quality gear with top resistances all classes are only the running target in some boss fights. In such fights you have to rely on your pets. This is a possible strategy for the fight against the titan at the end of act 3 when your level is about 33.
The masteries Nature, Spirit and Dream are perfect second masteries and they function well with most other masteries.

My suggestions:

• Champion (Warfare, Nature) fast melee damage and top healing. This class also works fine in the next category

• Templar (Defense, Dream) can take big hits and strikes back with power

• Ranger (Hunting, Nature) sharp arrows with top healing, in infights he can switch to spear and shield

• Ritualist (Dream, Nature) this combination is not a fragile glass cannon and a good damage dealer

• Soothsayer (Nature, Spirit) the two classes with the best pets including top healing for the complete pack. Let the Pets do the hard work. This class is much better for starters as for pimped chars, because the pets don't depend so much on the gear (except for good rings and amulelts with bonus for pets).

Some class have an improvement for the standard attack without any drawback, different standard attack improvements can't stack.

Masteries with a standard attack improvement for all weapons:

• Dream

Standard Attack Improvement for Bow and all melee weapons:

• Rogue
  
• Warfare (with small energy costs)

Standard attack Improvement for Bow

• Hunter (with small energy costs)

Masteries with a permanent buff for damage or attack speed

• Storm
  
• Earth
  
• Hunter
  
• Natur

This buffs can stack with each other and one standard attack improvement.

The passive improvements of some classes are comparable to permanent buffs.

There are different kind of melee weapons and different classes offer passive skills for some types.
If you like to see yourself with a specific type of weapon you should use the appropriate mastery.


If a Corsair (Rogue, Defense) wants maximum benefit from all his passive skills he should use an axe.

There is no passive bonus for magical staffs. Only the spirit class has a skill (Ternion) that needs a staff.

Strength: "Increases all your physical Damage."
Intelligence: "Increases your elemental damage, vitality damage and energy regeneration rate."
Dexterity: "Increases your offensive ability, defensive ability, poison, bleeding and piercing damage."

The displayed overall weapon damage and DPS include your atributtes and modifiers from your gear, but the displayed damages of your skills in the skill bar don't include.

At start your armor protects you against most attacks, because the enemies are using physical attacks with only a litte bit of armor piercing. Later the armor value is only secondary, because when you encounter your first enemy mage you see there is more. In your char view you can see at primary and secondary 16 additional resistances, but that are not all resistances of the game.
You have to learn which enemies are most dangerous for you and kill these enemies first.
In your first playthrough on normal it's impossible to max all these resistances with drops you find.
An example of needed poison resistance:

Keep different armor parts with different resistances in your box. I have always some additional jewelry with me, because rings and amuletts are good at resistences and don't need much space.
Your first priority resistances should be the three elemental (fire, cold, lightning), poison and vitality. Maximum cap is 80%. In Epic mode you start with -40 primary resistances.

The description of the vitality resistance and the absence of a display for life leech resistance can be misleading. Vitality Resistance: "Reduces the damage from Vitality Attacks and Life Leech."
Every life leech attack starts with a vitality damage and after that life leech is executed in dependency of this first damage.
This means every vitality resistance reduces life leech, but life leech resistance doesn't reduce vitality damage.
Some later bosses make heavy vitality damage!

Every level up you get only 2 points for yor attributes and you can't redistribute them. At start you are leveling fast, but when leveling slows down it's hard to correct your mistakes. You have to focus on the important values.

Every level up you get 3 points for yor skills. You can use them for raising the general skill level of a mastery or raising a specific skill. Only the points of specific skills can be redistributet.
Normally you are 40 when you reach the end of act 4 and have collected about 120 skill points.
In most masteries the best skills are at skill level 32 and it's technically possible to reach in both masteries the end. But it's better to go only in one mastery to the end at that time and invest more points in skills.
After the first act you should plan in which mastery you go to the end and how far you go in the other mastery (10, 16 or 24).

Like I said, gear quality outranks clearly everthing, including good skill distribution and good playing. The drop quality in the first 3 acts (on normal) is really not motivating in this game and from my experience is the drop rate of good items for Int mages the worst of all. Only at the end of the 4. act it's getting better for Int mages.

If you are using staffs with elemental damage, don't let the game lure you into wasting points into strength, because of armor. In the long term additional hit points are better,

The raise of health is different for all masteries. if you have 2 masteries with low health raise per mastery level you should put points into health. HP is always good and I think it's an good rule of thumb, to put on every second level a point into health. It's never wrong to have a life buffer.

The displayed values in the game are all rounded.