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Old 09-30-2019, 09:48 AM
Noselacri Noselacri is offline
Sarnak


Join Date: Aug 2010
Posts: 422
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It takes a pretty long time before the realistically available gear can raise your stats to the point where ogres don't have a huge advantage over other tank races. Especially when you consider that even once those stats are technically cappable for, say, a human, an ogre could just gear into a different stat and maintain that aggregate bonus. It's really not until Velious endgame that you just have so many stats on your gear that the racial naturals no longer matter. It's possible for other races to max a stat before then, but that requires gearing specifically for this at the cost of other stats.

Ogres have like fully 50% higher melee stats throughout most of Everquest. For vanilla in particular, the kind of gear you'd have to wear to cap your stamina on a non-large race is pretty awful, you certainly won't do it in planar or whatever you might otherwise wish to be wearing. Dwarf is the only decent non-large race for melee, and they're still -40 strength, -32 strength, +20 dexterity compared to ogres. Agility is not a very useful stat so the agile races don't make up for it in any real way, nor is their agility advantage anywhere near as big as the strength and stamina advantage of ogres.

So an ogre warrior can start with 140 strength, 132 stamina, 95 dexterity. That's a seriously excellent baseline. A dwarf could start with 100/100/115 which sounds a lot less exciting, and you'd need about +100 str and stam from gear in order to cap out with buffs. That's not happening in vanilla. Probably not happening in Kunark, either. The ogre might end up with capped str/stam and higher dex than the dwarf thanks to the freedom to gear for dex. Even when you disregard FSI, the race is just objectively superior until Velious raiding. While capping strength isn't intensely important for tanks, it's still nice.

Shadowknight is the quintessential ogre class. They benefit fully from the stats and from the FSI. Warriors don't get that much out of FSI, it's not like it reduces your "DPS uptime" by a significant amount. For shamans it's heavily contingent on whether or not you intend to be a trophy soloer; if your MO is root-rotting, FSI does very little for you. In groups, while it can help when you take aggro, it's not a constant advantage either. You'll probably spend 90% of your time doing things where FSI is irrelevant, so while I'd personally still go ogre shaman, it's not such a big deal. The strength and stamina aren't nearly as interesting for a shaman, in part because any race you pick (except iksar) will have it.
Last edited by Noselacri; 09-30-2019 at 09:51 AM..