[Druby]

While there's a lot of discussion I've seen floating around about how only certain class combinations allow one to play a dodge or not, one thing I don't see mentioned is how races often lock or heavily incentivize players to build their characters a certain way.

There are a good number of races that heavily push players to build them as either dodge or tanks, through both their base racial stats and racial traits. Quick examples are Papillion, who's racial stats lean heavily towards celerity, Felidae and Oracle who's base stats and racial traits lean them heavily towards celerity and dodge, or Lupine who's base stats and racial trait lean them heavily towards tanking. There are obviously others, but these are just the ones that come off the top of my head.

Well now, Dragonruby, some people might be saying. Base stats and racial traits don't define a build. Nothing's really stopping you from building a Felidae as a tank if you really wanted to. And, in some regards, you're right. And, theoretically, you could do so, and the build would work perfectly fine for like 90% of the content in the game. A lot of the issues that this sort of thing brings really comes into play primarily when optimizing characters, fine tuning them for harder content in the game such as Boss Rechallenges, or PVP.

However, it's exactly at this level where this stuff REALLY matters. Hit and Evade are basically in a state of constant cold war, where you hit or evade gouge as high as you can to try and nullify the other. Optimization here can be make or break for a lot of evade builds. It's not as strict for tanks in general, as constant DR is a bit more reliable than gambling whether or not you take a 300 damage crit to the face every other turn, but similar optimization happens at this level, when you start trying to take into account alternate sources of DR, or reaching certain break points the same way one might try to hit certain levels of evade.

Now, consider all of this from the perspective of a new player. You've never seen SL2 before, but it seems fun! You like RP, and you like turn based strategy games, it all meshes! You hop on, and pick a catgirl, cause fuck it, catgirls are cute, and then you find that... Well, you don't like playing dodge. Okay, well you'll retune your character to be tank, and then later on, when you want to get into more proper end game content, you find that suddenly, you're not quite as good as all the other characters and the only way to get around this would be to just completely remake your character from scratch. That's a bit disappointing isn't it? Especially if that's a character you've invested a lot of time in, and you still want to keep playing them, but now you're basically told that to keep up with everyone else, you need to go back to playing something you don't like, or just make a new character entirely.

Of course this is entirely hypothetical, but it's something that I'm sure has happened before, and highlights the issue at hand. People are free to swap around their classes to mix and match and experiment things that do or don't work, but... Your race? That tends to hard lock you into certain numbers in ways that might not be intuitive or is too restricting. Why does every dodge character need to be a Papillion, or an Oracle, or a Felidae?

Of course, I'm not saying to get rid of racial traits or equalize all base stats, part of the fun of the game comes from optimizing numbers, figuring out interesting mechanics that work with different abilities and racials. However, I'd like to suggest that some (if not all) races get new Traits available that can help tweak some of their base stats around to better optimize them for certain roles that break the mold of what their race might usually lock them into. Traits that modify how certain racial abilities work could be great too. After all, an Oracle's racial, which gives them a bonus 10-20 Evade every 2-4 turns (based off whether or not you take certain traits for it) is useless as a tank! Maybe as an example, a trait lets you convert it to something that, every now and then, converts a hit to a glancing blow, which would still play into Oracle's futuresight, narrowly avoiding an attack they see coming, while allowing people more freedom to build them how'd they'd like. This is just an example, and people are free to suggest their own ideas, or other possibilities, but I think it's a general consensus that there aren't enough Traits in the game that make people have to make a decision, and people often have spare trait points that they just don't use. Filling out Traits with some of these options could help to improve build variety and alleviate that situation as well.