Making Races More Focused

[Red]

Branched from Shaloren Supremacy. This thread is to try to rework racial abilities to make each race more focused in one area, rather than trying to cover every niche with just four abilities. Original thought by grayswandir.

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Racial Themes

Halfings-Mobility

Higher-Magic or Healing

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Halfling

Duck and Dodge: Move up to 3 spaces. You can move through enemies, and this will not break wild speed. CD scales with TL.

Indomitable: Removes 2–6 stun, daze, or pin effects, and makes you immune to stuns, dazes and pins for 2–6 turns. This talent takes no time to use.

Evasive Maneuvers: Whenever an enemy attacks you, gain an 6% - 12% evasion rate for 3 - 5 turns. This can stack up to 2 - 6 times, with no more than one stack per enemy.

Fleet of Foot: Whenever you take 14% - 10% of your max life in a single hit, gain a Wild Speed effect (+200% - 500% movement speed) for 1 turn. Any non movement action will break this effect.

[grayswandir]

So, doctornull and I worked on the halfling design in irc:

• T1 Duck and Dodge: Move up to 3 spaces. You can move through enemies, and this will not break wild speed.
• T2 Indomitable: Unchanged.
• T3 Evasive Maneuvers: Whenever an enemy attacks you, gain an 6% - 12% evasion rate for 3 - 5 turns. This can stack up to 2 - 6 times, with no more than one stack per enemy.
• T4 Fleet of Foot: Whenever you take 14% - 10% of your max life in a single hit, gain a Wild Speed effect (+200% - 500% movement speed) for 1 turn. Any non movement action will break this effect.

Also we worked on highers, but didn't get as far. As a rough summary:
Bloom is fairly iconic, and should stay. Any other resource effects are too finicky or are overshadowed by bloom, so that can't be the theme.
Remaining available themes are vision, healing, and magic.

I really like vision, but don't think it'll work as an overall theme. So I say just give highers an innate +1 vision and then don't do anything else with it.

Healing ideas:

• Current T1.
• Passive Healmod.
• Flat armor equal to 10% of current regen effect.

Magic ideas:

• Current arcane resist.
• Current +15% damage bonus.
• When you're hit with a spell, reduce the cooldown of a random higher racial or spell talent by 1-5.
• When you cast a spell, extend the duration your regeneration effect if present by 1-3.

[Red]

Christ, that last magic ability sounds like Fungus on steroids. If you're playing as a mage class, you're going to be casting a spell at the very least once every other turn, so pre-load a powerful Regeneration Infusion and it's going to last forever. Have a CD rotation with no blank spots and a couple of Runes (which count as spells) to cover any accidents and you could have infinite regen with only one point in that ability. Even Fungus characters need at least two Infusions to make that happen.

In other words, that ability is much too powerful. It either needs to go or be limited somehow.

Additionally, we should make sure no two races have overlapping themes. I'll just give my thoughts on what the themes should be, and as decisions are made with consensus on what themes should be, add them to the OP.

Cornac-Versatility

Higher-Healing

Shalore-Magic

Thalore-Nature

Doomelf-Corruption

Halfling-Mobility

Dwarf-Defense

Ghoul-Durability

Skeleton-Not sure

Yeek-Psionics

[HousePet]

I guess posting it here makes more sense...

Idea for Cornac: Those extra generic categories that you can learn throughout the game have a higher mastery level.

[Red]

What's the level scaling on Duck and Dodge? I'll add Halflings back in to the OP when I know what that is, so I have the whole racial tree there.

In addition, what were the thoughts on my Ghoul suggestion?

[grayswandir]

The idea is that Duck and Dodge doesn't scale except for cooldown, like all the other T1 racial talents.

[Red]

Ah, right. Will edit OP now, be sure to post CD when you figure it out.

In addition, edited Ghoul concept.

Ghoul-Passive
You maintain your ghoulish body, increasing how tough it is. Because you accomplish this by sloughing the most dead and rotting flesh to the surface, enemies who strike you find themselves sickening themselves.
Increase Constitution and Strength by 2-10. In addition, gives 5-25 Blight melee retaliation, with a

Ghoulish Charge-Active
Run headlong through your enemies, dropping off your rotting flesh as you do.
Move 3-7 squares, putting down tiles that heal undead and harm living (as Retch) in a radius 0-2 around the line you passed through. Any enemies you pass directly through have a basic attack performed on them. The final spot you reach has a radius 2-1 precision.

Retch-No changes needed.

Consume-Active
Reach out with your horrid jaws and consume your enemies, invigorating your own flesh with sweet, tender living flesh.
Attack the enemy for 60-110% weapon damage with 100% lifesteal. Any healing over your max HP turns into a 1-5 turn regen effect of a power equal to the overheal amount.

[jaumito]

Having talents you can improve as you level up is fine, but I believe that you could get more of what you want (racial focus) from tweaking innate stats and abilities.

Some examples:
Halflings: X% extra movespeed (or globalspeed, or combatspeed), Y% damage penalty.
Highers: X% silence and confusion immunity (they're born leaders, aren't they?), Y% arcane affinity.
Shaloren: X% extra spellspeed, Y% negative blight affinity (the Spellblaze Curse!)
Dwarves: X% movespeed penalty, Y% resists bonus, Z% resists cap bonus, T% increased carrying capacity (they're traders, they're used to move stuff.)
Skeletons: X% cold and darkness affinity, Y% negative arcane (or nature?) affinity.

etc. etc. (the more the better)

This way, each race would get their own feel from day one, rather than by mid- or endgame. It'd be easy to code and balance as well.

[Red]

Thalore: X% Nature Affinity, -Y% Spellspeed

Doomelf: X% All Damage Bonus, -Y% Allresist (can go into negatives)

Ghoul: X% Allresist, Y all saves, -Z global speed

[Delmuir]

I'm going to take a crack at the Ghoul by looking at them a bit like a zombie and Skeletons as brittle.

For Ghouls, the fear immunity makes sense but their bleeding does not. They still have a body, albeit a rotting one.

I think that ghouls should have a natural resistance to bleeding but not an immunity… maybe a a 70% reduction in damage and duration akin to their poison resistance.

I also think that Ghouls should be more resistance to most damage types in general:

+20% resistance to all types of damage except cold and physical, and +10% resistance caps to those types.

No change in physical damage resistance but -30% to cold and -15% to cold resistance cap.

I agree with Red about Ghoulish Leap and that would be the only skill I change however I wouldn't solve it by granting them another mobility option so much as I would grant them a passive that would make them incrementally immune to knock back and grant ability to shake-off critical hits.

For Skeletons I propose:

The immunities of poison, bleeding, and fear make sense so I'll leave that alone.

I would add this though:

-10% to physical and fire damage and -5% to physical and fire resistance cap.
+30% to cold damage and and +15% to cold resistance cap.

The idea being that their physical nature manifests in certain, semi-logical resistance strengths and weaknesses. Ultimately, a player could compensate for that with gear but it'd be noteworthy enough to consider your build choices.

Update: I see Jaumito had a very similar idea. I'm thematically in agreement with his reasoning. Each class can have a unique feel right away without being tailored to specific classes.

To that end, I would grant Highers and all Undead (as they're inherently magical) 25% manaburn resistance.

[Atarlost]

From a lore perspective, racial diversity is problematic. It's also potentially problematic from a political standpoint if any race winds up with its mechanically enforced biases matching an actual real world ethnic or religious stereotype.

You should be able to take any race but yeeks and undead and ask yourself "what class should I be if I have to be this race?" and not have an easy answer. You should also be able to ask "what class should I avoid?" and none of the canonical answers should come up. There's a bunch of canonical race/class combinations in the Daikara and Dreadfell lore and a few named characters and the Shaloran associates of the Grand Corruptor. Additionally, every community should produce a viable military. Any race that is all melee or all ranged isn't going to make sense. Yeeks aren't a normal community because of The Way and undead aren't a normal community because they're classless or get their classes from what they were in life.

So, is that the case now? Pretty much yes. Cornacs can be anything and the sparse classes that benefit less from the cat point are mostly exotic. Highers are strongly pushed into being not just archmages but single element archmages with disruption shield. Shalorens are pushed away from oozemancer and to a lesser degree other wilders, but almost every class has a crit build and MotE is good for all of them. Timeless creates some push into classes with Unstoppable, but I consider Unstoppable more at fault in this case. Thalorans are somewhat biased towards will classes, but not terribly, and classes with lots of spare generics. Halflings are very slightly biased towards cunning classes, but I don't think there's any class that doesn't have a build with cunning as the tertiary or secondary stat. Dwarves have a bias towards heavy armor classes and classes with con trees and classes with the Mobility tree, but they're also biased towards alchemists so the melee only problem may be averted.

Only Highers badly need to be redone. Dwarves could do with non-armor armor enhancers like the Stone Skin spell getting armor hardiness for better synergy, but putting armor hardiness on their own skills would just increase the bias towards heavy armor classes and to a lesser extent classes with access to mobile defense. Also, either "Stoneskin" the Dwarf racial talent or "Stone Skin" desperately needs to be renamed. Thalorans could do with a lower XP penalty so they don't get shafted when they can't invest deeply in their racial tree. Huge XP penalties should be for races with lots of good one point wonders like the current Halfling, not races that are good if you drop 10-15 points into them. The 10-15 points spent on racial talents are their own price.

[grayswandir]

Did the halfling: http://te4.org/games/addons/tome/graysw ... d-halfling