ghoul t1 skill idea

[Brcz]

As we all know, ghouls have a -20% global speed penalty and their t1 caps how much damage a single hit can deal to them.

Of course, the challenge of ghoul is not necessarily getting one-shot, so much as getting two-rounded by all the enemies on the map every 5 turns.

I would suggest a tweak to ghouls that would retain the -20% global speed penalty, but take the autokill feel off of it. In a single-death game, difficulty is of course expected and even desired, but I'd argue that there should still be a sense that there was something the player could do to prevent it. Often with undead, there's just no such sense because the two-round death comes out of nowhere before the player can react.

I propose the racial t1 caps how much damage the ghoul can take between any of its turns, regardless of the number of attacks the ghoul takes during that time span. So maybe at 1/5 it would cap that value at 90% of their maximum hp. So no matter how much the ghoul gets hit between any two of its turns, it cannot be killed if it has more than 90% of its max hp as of the beginning of its turn. This restriction would be based on the ghoul's actual turn (ie., factoring in its speed penalty), not the game's or opponent's turn clock.

This would be in line with the notion of undead resilience. You can just pound at them but they'll keep shambling along for a little while longer even after you've cut off their head or whatever.

That way, a ghoul can never be killed from full health, by getting surprised and two-rounded before it had a chance to react.

I'd argue that this is balanced, because the global speed still represents a substantial penalty to damage output, the chance to be hit with status effects, the ability for enemies to position themselves, etc. Undead also cannot use infusions, so it would not be possible to load up on cd-free heals and essentially skate on the edge of death for several turns in a row using this.

[sajberhippien]

It's a cool idea, but the implementation you suggest would create some weird effects; any boost to speed would make you essentially easier to kill. It would also be kind of unintuitive in how it would work in regards to actions with unusual speed costs.

[Bananadine]

Something like this would also allow the talent to shield a ghoul against multiple "hits" within a single attack - as when something like Dual Strike or Flurry hits several times, or when a magical meteor inflicts both physical and fire damage, or when something happens to be using a weapon that converts 50% of its damage into blight or whatever. If I understand right, any of those divisions can potentially allow two or more chunks of damage to slide under the Ghoul talent's damage filter (even though their sum would be great enough to catch on the filter), which is one more factor making that filter effect almost useless.

If this (or something similar) could be implemented, I think it could be really cool.

[astreoth]

I'd be far easier to just turn the global speed malus into a movement speed malus its thematically acceptable enough but not nearly as punishing for a ghoul player.