by Arlos » Fri Aug 06, 2004 1:50 pm
Racial abilities aren't in right now for the most part, apart from undead having water breathing, being immune to normal fear & sleep/sheep, and being highly vulnerable to anti-undead spells, primarily stuff from Paladins. If you're undead, don't duel a Paladin of even close to your level, you'll die, period. Paladins CAN fear you, they get insanely high damage/mana ratio undead nukes, and they get a seal that just about doubles their melee output against undead. Priests, if I remember right, get a anti-undead root or mez too. If I ever played on PVP server, I doubt I'd play undead, for just those reasons. They DO plan on putting in racial abilities for all races, to better differentiate them, but they're not in as yet. Oh, BTW, Undead DO have some swimming limits, they take fatigue the same as anyone else in deep deep water, and will die from it if they try and swim too far from sore. Same thing happens to ghosts too, actually.
As for race & stats, it really doesn't make a whole lot of difference. The differences right now are only a couple points in a stat or two, and those're counterbalanced by extra points elsewhere. Like a Tauren will have 2-3 more STR and STA than a undead, I think, but undead will have more AGI (directly effects armor) and SPI (HP regen). Stats DO matter, quite a bit actually. Just about every stat is useful to just about every class, actually, though obviously some classes will put premiums on certain stats. About the only non-useful one is INT for rogues & warriors, and even then, INT effects how rapidly weapon skills go up, so it's not totally useless.
Once next patch rolls around, Rogues and Hunters will use AGI partially for their damage rating. The numbers I saw quoted work like this:
Warrior: 1 pt of STR increase = 0.15 DPS increase
Rogue: 1 pt of STR = 0.075 DPS increase, 1 pt of AGI = 0.075 DPS increase, plus every AGI pt for rogue increases crit hit chance much more than the same increase does for a warrior.
Skill points are very different than talent points. Skill points are accumlated based on XP you get from mob kills. Quest or location-discovery XP doesn't count. The exact amount of XP per skill point is uncertain, seems to be between 400 and 600, and it's also uncertain whether that's effected by the bonus XP you get for being rested. I think no, but not 100% sure on that. Skill points are used to buy new weapon proficiencies and trade skills. This includes things like lockpicking and the various tracking abilities, beyond the normal tradeskills like smithing, etc. You can reclaim skill points you've spent on something at any time by dropping the skill. However, if you do that the skill's gone completely, and if you want to get it again, you'll have to work it back up from 1 again. Plus, if you had any purchased or dropped recipes, those're gone too, and will need to be re-acquired or re-purchased.
Talent points you get 1 per level after the first, so a L50 has 49 talent points. These are spent on rather Diablo-style abilities, which can be pretty potent. For example, normally when Warriors switch stances, they lose all accumulated Rage, which is what is used to power their special abilities. However, by spending talent points on the right skills, they can gain the ability to retain up to 50% of the max rage pool when they switch. They also plan to, eventually, add in racial-specific talent lines, which will presumably enhance or grow the racial abilities whenever those get added. That's a wait-and-see tho. You cannot currently change talent point expenditures, so spend carefully. Supposedly there will be some way to do it eventually, but it won't be something you can do on-the-fly like you can with skill points. Right now only mages and warriors have talents, priests and rogues get them next patch.
-Arlos