Racial passives

Some of the Nexus races had passives before, but besides for the elves infravision, alot of them were not very useful. For example trolls could regenerate health as well as stamina, but it wasn’t overly useful as the ticks were too slow to be relevant in combat and regenerating outside of combat took so long it was better just to use a charge of mend.

I think theres a lot you could potentially do with racial passives, from activated abilities to passives to profession bonuses.

For instance the troll regenerate passive would be better as an activated ability that either worked like a miniature meditate on a long cooldown or gave you fast ticks of regen for a short period. Then as a passive they could be resistant to poisons and diseases (goes along with regen).

The trick would be making sure every race got some fairly balanced racials and kept with their racial flavor. Like dwarves could have a blacksmithing profession bonus, but also maybe they get a small bonus percentage to armor, possibly an extra 5-10% or something depending how armor numbers were looking.

Elves would get their night vision, Sprites would passively have levitate. Maybe elves would get a passive bonus for missile skill or damage. Sprites for daggers possibly.

Ogres could maybe have a thick skin passive, reduces damage by 2% and adds a passive stun resistance or some such.

In that way you could have races that lent themselves to different roles, but in different ways. If you wanted to maximize damage reduction maybe you go Ogre, but if you want a better solo tank with some sustain maybe u go troll. And then have like your Renis and sprite have some caster attributes that can fit one style or another, etc

I actually really like the direction of this thread. Bump.

I kind of like this for a different reason. And I want to merge it with the idea of size of things discussion. Because frankly the size of things means one of 2 things, either we go more complicated, or go stupid simple and just make dragons and big ass things hit harder. Which maybe isn’t the best result. But combining size with the racial passives might be what makes more sense.

If you go with the size modifiers I think you just end up with ogres being the best for everything except like cleric and mage. If you change up the stats a bit and make each stat matter more, then you could just use stat tweaking for the mobs to make the large mobs hit harder like you were suggesting, just give them higher strength totals.

For instance make each point of strength add 1 damage to your base melee attacks, but instead of Half-giants having the highest strength in the game at 35, bump the strength cap up to 40 for them, maybe ogres can get up to like 38 and humans would still be your baseline with 30. That would leave your strongest half giant potentially able to hit for 10 damage harder than your strongest human, but you would have to invest in strength and probably suffer in another stat. And I think when they originally made Nexus they were thinking along those lines when they made the stats.

Otherwise you get the ogre with bare minimum strength of 17 or whatever it was, hitting harder than the human fighter with 30 strength just because he’s large and gets like a 25% damage buff.

Also, there was weird caps on some of the stats. Con for instance, you got extra health and stamina at approx these numbers. 18, 25, 28, 30, 32, 34, 35. Any Con that you had below 18 was just a fricken waste of a stat, and you need 7 points to go from the first bonus to the second.

While I think you don’t want to go crazy and give a health bonus per stat of con, or anything crazy, maybe you could have the con bonuses start at 10 and you got bonus health every 5 points in a stat, and bonus stamina every 5 points but on a different stat line. Then in between you could get some passive permanent armor, so that you weren’t just getting nothing for your stat point. For instance, bonus health is at 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40 (thats still 7 tiers of stat bonuses, like the old system had, but its spread out more evenly) then you got the bonus stamina at 12, 17, 22, 27, 32, and 37. And for the stats in between past 10, you could get like 2 permanent armor or something.

Well size modifers can be do more than just direct combat formulation changes.

Consider that having a lot of size means a lot of energy. So maybe as a base the combat cool down timer is 10 seconds for half giants and ogres. With a base of 8 seconds for human sized things, and maybe 6 seconds for sprites.

But with the damage modifiers still existing so it ends up panning out.

But if it pans all the way back out, what are we left with? Well we could have just taken out size modifiers and everyone hits for a uniform set of damage.

Which keeps balance, while imploring people to roleplay instead… But then it defines the min/max of races to classes, b ecause why be an Ogre with 1 piety, when your vigor device heals for -3… and a human with 5+ piety who vigors for +2 ^.^ lol

Well I guess if the size modifiers are done differently, but Nexus before was really like 90% size based, and 10% stat based once they put the size modifiers in. Some of the stats were just there to make sure you put 10 points into them so you didn’t get super penalized, ie you took obscene extra damage below 9 con or so, and you couldn’t get away from a mob that was blocking your exit when you had below 10 dex.

The stats were almost just there to provide penalties, more than to provide bonuses. And the below 5 intel not being able to talk was lame.

Making stats worthwhile so you may have some incentive not to min max. Making other stats beneficial to each class and not just putting a cap on the stats to force people into a stat line to be playable. Maybe if you want to lower the larger races attack speeds, the attack timers could be based on dexterity, so if you go with like 10 dex your going to have long timers and the larger races would have lower dex caps so that they couldn’t get past a certain attack speed value.

Back to the actual topic of this thread a bit, I was thinking more about some of the racial passives.

Perhaps Orcs could and half orcs could get bonus to double damage and crit %. In one of two ways, either make them have a static higher % chance, such as an extra 2% to double damage and 1% to crit, OR add damage to their crit, like instead of criting for 4x’s damage they crit for 4.5x’s damage and double for 2.5x instead of 2x. That way you actually have a racial that adds damage, but a different kind of way to add damage than just your flat % to base damage. It would kind of fit with Orcs, maybe call their racial Ferocious Temper or some such.
I think Orcs also had infravision? (this is based on my suggestion to change crit damage in the thread about skill)

To make humans kind of the standard, but give them a solid racial, you could make humans get bonus experience and bonus skill experience as their racial. That alone would be pretty strong, maybe 10% bonus for both. Fast learner or some such.

Maybe elves and half elves would get an additional 1 second taken off their attack timers along with their infravision, Elven alacrity or some such. Maybe also a bonus to spell damage of some kind like 10% or something, that way they could fit that elven caster role, or the elven warrior/rangeresque role. Might also make them good for the combination classes like bard or paladin if they had a little of both.

Perhaps Reni’s being kind of the premier caster could cast spells that were one or two tiers above them. Attuned to the weave or something. I think they already used to have a bonus passive magical resistance or something as well didn’t they?

Drow I was almost thinking something along the lines of bonus to backstab and snipe damage, but then it really curtails them into thief/ranger. Obv they get infravision as well. Maybe they also get the 1 second off attack timers like their elven counterparts.

Half Giant, something based of their strength, perhaps they get an additional 15% damage while using a two hand weapon or dual wielding since they are strong enough to hoist the weapons around so easily. And/or maybe they get a Staggering Strike racial where they have a 5% chance to do an attack for 150% damage, so it would be almost like another type of double damage, but less damage than a double damage and just with a flat % that didn’t scale to make it too OP.

I’m not sure how much you want to curtail racials toward specific classes, but you could maybe make Ogres and/or Orcs get an additional 1 or 2 minutes of berserking uptime.

Sprites racial is fairy size, they take an additional 1000% damage from all physical attacks and make a splat noise when they die.
When a sprite dies, it inspires nearby allies with a spray of pixie dust to increase their morale, boosting all combat stats drastically for 1 minute.

Halfling could perhaps get a bonus to their stealing, but like I said then your kind of making them a niche race for a specific class.

One racial that could be kinda fun, is dwarves get some kind of bonus while being drunk, maybe bonus damage reduction or a slight damage increase, with a little bit of accuracy issues.