New race conversation

[osma]

This post is designed to discuss the pros and cons of the new races, and how they stack up.

I have tried out saerka for a few days, so lets give first impressions on that.

Saerka are archers, plain and simple. They are both good at it, and bad at everything else. They have a race ability that gives damage and accuracy bonus to archery, good dex training and fly ability for air combat shots.

On the other hand, they are somewhat large, which would help them a bit in melee combat, but their wings are hitslots which must be protected. Their flying ability isn't all that useful for combat due to only being able to do it occasionaly and the fact that flying controls are clumsy. And their training for anything BUT dex is bad or worse. Str and Con cost 6, the same as a human, while wis and int are 7 and 8 respectivly. That means that they more or less required to go into a high dex class, and most of them wouldn't seem to work well (hard to backstab from the air i assume).

Assuming you do make an archer of some sort, uncanny precision is quite useful. I haven't noticed a notable increase in damage, despite being told it does, but the accuracy is much better. With full skills (except foam) and around 70 dex, i can hit around 95%+ with a yew bow. As a shadowperson, even with higher dex and full foam, i still would only get around 92% accuracy with a yew bow.

Fly, while not terribly useful in archery (once in a while you can fly into the room, getting a shot off even if the mob is aggressive, basicly an automatic sneak), it has many other uses, such as reaching out of the way zones without needing a rift, or traveling to and from a treasure chest (the high altitude lets you see quite a ways, better then a telescope.) Also, flying takes basicly no ep whatsoever, so you could easily fly from one side of the map to the other without using any ep. It is however MUCH slower, so it is best to run roads as far as you can then just fly to your location.

Saerka have useful epr, moderate hpr, and mediocre spr (aka, not a magic race, and try to not let them get hit). They have max dark vision and reasonable light vision. They loose feet and cloak slots, and gain left and right wing (2x rings). Having 4x rings versus 2 and shoes/cloak is a toss up as to which is better, but the player should remember that since the wings are hitslots, the rings worn on those slots need to have some armor class. Also, although they can be protected, rings dont help overall armor class, so your overall will be lower then with other races.