Slime Squisher
Posts: 338
Joined: Wednesday, 20th November 2013, 11:37
Cleansing fire upon species list
The only thing I cannot get is why such a long list of species is held in game? Some species surely have unique mechanics, some of them is newbie-friendly while other are difficult and can become challenging with some playstyles.
Let's get our axes on them!
Barachi - have hop and slow movement, no other interesting features. Slow movement is availible on Naga, while hop can be moved back to felids. Felids are quite balanced now, so hop can take 2 turns: preparation and jump (I have cat and I noticed that it always aims before long jump for 1-2 seconds).
Halfling - small, rMut, sling apt. If you want small specie - you can always play spriggan. Being small is not that fun anyway. rMut feature is not a real rMut effect with 90% resistance, Halfling's rMut is 1/2 (or 2/3) chance to resist malmutation, which doesn't make sence - you will be mutated anyway. And slings are too powerful anyway so they don't need good aptitude specie.
Hill Orc - very strong specie with awesome melee and good magic aptitudes. Almost like mix of Minotaur and Gargoyle. So why do we need it? Worshipping Beogh is not a striking feature, we can move Beogh to Temple gods, that can be worshipped from altar. If one can argue that only orc can lead orcs, I can reference to the story about Cacame Awemedinade, the Elf king of dwarves.
Human. Easy. It's boring. Yeah, you can tell me about average species, fast leveling, but it's boring. We come into dungeon to play elves, nagas and demonspawns.
Kobold. Same as Halflings, but with less features.
Merfolk - aquatic, apts lean towards hybrid playstyle based on DOGEing, polearms and ice magic. Nothing interesting. Aquatic nature of merfolks are not that unique - you can just fly over water with Gargoyle.
Ogre - big, have good magic apts. Trolls are big too. You can use GSC on troll too. And you can cast spells with Troll. if you don't fell good with troll magic apts, it can be raised a bit.
Tengu - good at melee and spells, can fly with 0.1 bonus speed. Sounds like Gargoyle, disregarding it's +0.1 to speed. But we already have 2 fast species, and in most times +0.1 to speed is not that helpful (I watched Amnesiac playing TeAE lately, it was full of boring and painful kiting of all that yaks and 2h ogres for like 300+ turns just to land several shock zaps on it without being hit).
Vampire - satiated/bloodless game. You can be a living being and a ghoul in one game. Nice, but you pay for it with awful food system. And it have no other striking features.
So, there are 9 species (1/3 total!!!) to remove without any noticable loss to gameplay and variety of features. Doing !greatplayer and !great_class will become less tedious. Also it clears a lot of space for new experimental species like faerie drakes, permasilence specters, shakeshifters and other stuff that make sence!