Passively nullifying 4 Gun attacks per round sounds reasonable when using multi-round guns that can do 12-16 attacks per round, but against single round guns it means there's no possible way for you to ever land an attack ever, unless you have another gunner/archer in the party.

I can't really think of a way to change it other than making it not work from behind, or just work from the front.

Just to be sure...

Was it intentional that Demon Hunter's growths are literally the same as Arbalest's?

Ran into this today Some crazy 57ish Door.

4 floors down. Not sure how to report this otherwise!

Ok so just to throw it out there for this one, but might be interesting *shrug*

Class: Arcane Alchemist - Using the power of alchemy the Arcane Alchemist can gather elemental arcane energy into himself and release it in a multitude of ways.
Weapons: Sword, Spear, Tome
Unlock: Level 20 Mage and Alchemy Trait at 3
Skills:
Offensive:
Defensive: > The idea is to create spells or maybe a single ability that can be used in multiple ways that effects/power/element changes based around what combination of Elements are used.
Support: /

Utility:
Fire/Water/Wind/Earth/Ice/Light/Dark Manifestation - 1M - Adds 1 fire/water/wind/earth/ice/light/dark manifestation
Secure Power - 2 ranks - The manifestation's an Arcane Alchemist has do not empty at the end of the turn, rank 2 does not take up a skill slot
Innate:
Arcane Manifestation - 5 ranks max, allows the Arcane Alchemist to gather 1 elemental manifestation to a max of this skills level.



Yes I am using the word Manifestation to avoid calling it Mana, and no this actually is not inspired by magic the gathering, in fact it more was a thought on the game series "Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana" and "Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis". I also thought to maybe suggest it use or get some powers that involve breaking things down which would give some more use to the items people don't normally use or break down for materials. Or maybe getting power buffs to certain elemental spells based on the element of the weapon being wielded as this might give more use to some elemental weapon types that are under used due to their abilities (Such as Galdric which is all but unheard of simply because if gives a -2 penalty to power)

Pretty much self explanatory. This just isn't fair. I mean, Checkmate is 5 momentum, and ND is only 3?

I'd probably lower the scaling to start at 1x (moving up to 5x total) and raise the momentum cost to 4.

Know No Pain is almost like having 20 Defense as a passive, except it gets multiplied by how many instances of damage someone deals, making it horribly effective against things like multi-round guns.. and that's not considering the Rage mechanic.

I'd suggest either making it block a certain amount of damage per round, simply lowering the reduction per rank to 2 (and doubling the Rage it gives you, maybe), or stop it from working from behind as it's quite easy to drop multihit physical damage down to the single digits.

Firstly, Eternal's Flame Effect is expected to affect all Players within your party, right? Well, I was in a Party consisting of a Grimalkin, a Redtail, and a Doriad. When I used a Flame, they all got the effect from Eternal Flame with the exception of the Doriad. I'm not sure why that is, but he was also a Void Assassin (not sure of his Sub-Class) if that maybe helps explain it or locate the issue.

Secondly, the Eternal Flame's Effect seems to "update" in a weird manner between Players. If I used Typhur as my last Eternal Flame in a previous battle, and then proceed into a new battle and used Salamander, it updates for all Players in the party. If I use Salamander in the very next turn, and then use a different flame, say Phoenix, it does not update at all. Also, on one occasion, I used Typhur and Salamander in one turn, and in the following turn, I used Phoenix. In this case, it updated for all Players except myself. It should also be noted, that I'm the 4th Player in the Party, and that at this point, the 3rd Player in the Party, had quite a few effects going on him, to the point where I couldn't even see the Eternal Flame Effect icon on his "Profile HUD"; so I'm not sure if that might've played a role in this (I guess it depends on how it's coded).

As with most balance fu threads, I expect a fair amount of discussion about this. I'd like to ask everyone participating to keep this civil. While it hasn't been particularly bad lately, history has made me wary of posting without a disclaimer, so here i is: Just a friendly reminder to keep the ad-hominems, name calling, and/or any other poop-tossing to PMs. Please keep the thread on-topic, thanks!


I'll be blunt and cut right to the chase: Elves suck. I mean REALLY suck. Despite having a passive specifically about boosting healing, numerous other races are more desirable healers, for multiple reasons. In this post, I plan to dissect, bit by bit, why elves are undeniably the worst race in the game, why this matters, and what could be done to change this.


1) Base Stats

This is the only category elves are not absolute garbage in, so I felt it appropriate to start here. Honestly, their bases are quite respectable. They come up to a solid 30 total, with the lowest stat (minus Faith and Luck at 0 - which is fairly standard) being 3 in both defenses. 4 Strength prevents them from being absolutely useless until they get enough FP/FP Mangement to rely on spells, while 6 will is a good baseline for a race intended to be more magically based. Honestly, there's nothing much really worth commenting on, but I included it for the sake of completion.


2) Racial Growths

I'll just come out and say it. Growth-wise, elves are absolutely garbage. I'd take an Imperial over an Elf, any day, just for the higher skill.

20% Strength: Fairly standard. Not good, not terrible.
20% Will: While this is standard, it's an absolute dealbreaker for the elf, for reasons I'll outline below.
15% Skill: On it's own, not too offensive. But much like will, this ends up being a massive issue. I'll elaborate below.
15% Cel: This is average/good, considering. Not terrible, but not great. Serviceable.
10% Def: Eh, what did you expect from elves? Not a colossal issue considering they're intended more as healers.
15% Res: Not amazing, but pretty high by most standards. Only Umbrals/Doriads/Liches/Cabals are higher.
40% Vit: Standard beyond standard. The vast majority of races have 40% Vit. Next!
0% Faith: This seems an odd design choice, but that's just my opinion. 0% is standard.
15% Luck: Much like Res, while it's not the highest, a lot of other races don't get this much.

The simple issue with Elves' Will is that even with LE and Talent/Trait bonuses, they cap out at 100% Will growth as an Evoker/Grand Summoner. This means that any race with 25% Will (Including Karatynn, Redtail, Cabal and Raid mechs, Zerans, Liches, Doriads, and Wyverntouched) has a fairly feasible time becoming a much better healer than an elf (which I'll go into further detail about when discussing heir racial skills.) Basically, the absolute highest an Elf can physically get their base Will is 65 + 3 from traits, while all the races mentioned above can reach a base of 80, granting them +12-+15 to all their heals compared to the elf. Again, I'll outline why this is preferable to their racial, later. You could argue that the odds of getting 80 Base Will with 105% is highly unlikely as it involves a 5% chance of double growth, and you'd be right. But even just a few points is a big difference. Again, please wait for the section on their racial passives.

When you factor in the above, suddenly, the lower skill starts to jump out. The true reason this begins to become an issue ties in to the nature of their healing passive, but basically, it amounts to "They'll be FP Guzzlers if you try to capitalize on that racial passive, and they'll have bad stats for hitting without burning FP."

Honestly? If it were up to me, I'd gladly shave some Vit off for more Will, and some Luc for more Ski. Even just 5% each.


3) Racial Passives

Let's get the big one out of the way. Healer's Legacy:

When healing an ally or themself with a healing spell, the base Power of that spell is doubled. In addition, when creating potion items with Alchemy, their Skill is increased by 1.

First off, it only affects healing SPELLS, meaning skills like Aid, Field Medic, or Repair are unaffected. You may wonder why this matters, until you realize that the only healing spells with a Base Power to increase are graft and Phoenix - and Phoenix never has worked with Healer's Legacy at all! So this leaves us with ONLY Graft being affected by this passive, and let's take a look at this screenshot of Graft's information from the Wiki...



Note the incorrect FP costs. 10/12/14/16/18. However, 18 is still darn close to double 10, so for simplicity I'll say "doubled" instead of "close to double" or "9/5" or any other method of comparing the costs.

... so... healer's legacy turns that +2-+12 into a +4-+24. which doesn't seem terrible. Until you consider the FP costs. If you have 50 will and a 20 power tome, for example, Rank 1 Graft does 72-74 based on Non Elf vs Elf, while rank 5 does 82-94. Okay, so this doesn't seem like absolute crap. But you could cast that 74 twice for the cost of that 94. Most people will elect to leave Graft at rank 1 for exactly this reason; it's so inefficient to upgrade simply due to that FP cost! If you try to double the FP cost of your Grafts just to keep up with another race's higher base will, you'll be burning double the FP. This compounds with their low skill, since they lack the stats to acually be accurate with tomes. Let's get real, here. Healer's Legacy currently exists for that Alchemy bonus. It's bad.

(I'm not saying it's totally useless. While a bad idea for BDPs, Healer's legacy could potentially help in PVP if you can withstand the FP costs of an improved graft. What I AM saying is that many other races can heal better even without the doubled FP costs and Healer's Legacy barely helps them catch up, which is downright bad for a race.)

But wait! That's not even all! Their other passive, Spotless, is just as bad, if not worse!

Having built up no tolerance for the dark magic in the outside world, Elves suffer 25% more Dark damage. However, they have a natural resistance against Water damage, reducing damage they take from it by 25%.

Okay, so from a purely logical standpoint, this looks like it makes sense. Water is pure and serene, while darkness is foreign and icky. But...uh... can we look at the presence of each damage type for a moment? Water is highly limited; Curate/Priest, Ensui, half of a Barghest's Demon Drool, half of a Hexer's Black Bubble, 3 different Youkai (Drowned Woman, Sazae-Oni, Asrai) A Spatial Corrupter's Red Sea, and on-hit effects from the Swordfish Sword and Coral Weapons. On the flip side, Darkness is absurdly common: Black Roar, Half of a Barghest's Demon Drool, everything a Spectre has, half of everything a Hexer has, the Kigal Replica (which is a major go-to item for mages unless they land 1 star rebelling tomes or amazing spellblade weapons) the Kirosh, numerous on-hit effects including the likes of the Evil Club, Spectre Sword, Carapace Weapons, Devilbark Weapons, etc. Honestly? That is just not a fair trade-off, in any way, shape, or form! If it was 15% or so, I wouldn't even bother bringing it up, but 25% is pretty massive.


Suggestions, random thoughts, general brain droppings, and other silliness.

Base Stats: They're perfectly fine as is.

Growths: No matter how you slice it, the Elf desperately needs at least a bonus 5% to Will. Take it off of Vit, lowering their 40% base to 35% base. This way, they won't be as easily outperformed as healers by Redtails and half of the Mech Types, among others. Shaving 5% off their Luc to add to Skill might also be a fine idea, since I honestly can't really think of reasons for them to be less dextrous than ordinary humans, who all have 20% (or higher, for Tannites) skill.

Racials: Healer's Legacy is way too limited as is. Either make it work on healing skills like Aid, or maybe lower the FP cost of healing spells by a significant percentage instead of giving them a power boost, or SOMETHING that isn't just "lol suffer R5 Graft's FP cost if you don't want to be outhealed by so many other races." As for Spotless? Why not make it a bit more interesting by throwing status into the mix; maybe something like a 15% Dark Weakness/Water Resist AND a 10% higher chance of being poisoned/ 10% lower chance of being blinded, or something like that?


If anything was awkwardly worded or needs clarification, please point it out so I can fix it. I admit to posting this a 4 AM after losing a long battle against insomnia, so perhaps my eloquence (and overall mental stability) isn't what it could be.

Anyways, I've said my piece. And please, do try to keep this civil.


EDIT: In re-reading this post upon waking up, I came back to correct some small errors. I caught a small error in forgetting to factor in the +1 Stat Traits, and also, in my sleep deprivaion, I was looking at level 60 as 60 levels worth of stat gains when the truth is actually 59 level ups. Both of these mistakes have been fixed, and now, instead of stating that an Elf cannot possibly surpass 66 Will, I've correctly stated that they can reach 65-68 with perfect gains depending on if they take those traits or not, and have corrected the difference in healing this causes.

It seems that it can sometimes cause the user to retain his airborne status after the fight is over.

Quote: Purplish Edgelord rushes him with the jackhammer!
Weak! The Black Clad Elf takes 182 Darkness damage.
Purplish Edgelord's turn.
Purplish Edgelord says "Desperado."
Purplish Edgelord's turn.
Purplish Edgelord takes 0 Blunt damage.
Purplish Edgelord's turn.
Purplish Edgelord says "(what)"