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Old 09-12-2010, 02:51 AM
Noselacri Noselacri is offline
Sarnak


Join Date: Aug 2010
Posts: 422
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All the races can do the same things. There's no "only ogres can do this". Frontal stun immunity is very strong, but don't go telling people it's a requirment for anything. It's as stupid as that other thread where people claimed only ogres could be raid tanks.

The place where it matters the most is when soloing really tough mobs, something that doesn't become much of a factor until Kunark and especially Velious. Shamans were legendary for soloing guardian wurms, and once you get your rare high-end spells and good equipment, anything that doesn't out-damage your healing while slowed is soloable. Being an ogre made this a fair bit safer since you might occasionally end up in a situation where getting interrupted meant dying, but it wasn't what determined whether or not you could. Race alone will never determine whether you can or cannot do something in this game (other than do certain quests and use certain items, of course).

The thing about stun immunity is that it doesn't always help. It's a great ability when it lets you get off a spell that makes the difference between failure and success, but it's not as if that happens all the time. Unless for some reason you made your shaman to solo exclusively, the vast majority of your time will be spent in scenarios where the stun immunity doesn't matter at all: when you're not being attacked. Bonus regeneration generally has a more constant value in that shamans should almost never stay at full health unless they're also at full mana. This means that the troll/iksar racial helps even when you're sitting on your ass healing a tank where ogres and barbarians otherwise have nothing. Well, barbarians always have nothing.

Troll regen essentially translates into a bit of flowing thought, not a whole lot but certainly a noticeable amount. It's very valuable until you get torpor and the big canni, at which point it sort of stops mattering since you won't be relying on actual regen anymore. Then ogre becomes the only race choice that makes a difference. Up until then, it's just a matter of preference: trolls have more staying power and ogres have more reliable spellcasts. All things considered, across all three eras, ogre has an advantage because their racial ability never becomes obsolete. It's nowhere near game-changing, though. People seem to think you spend half the time stunned when tanking.