Thread: SK Race Choice
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Old 06-15-2023, 04:01 PM
greatdane greatdane is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2011
Posts: 659
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Iksar is mostly fine in Velious since the Velious armors don't have race restrictions. You do miss out on some useful clickies from Blood Ember pieces, but it isn't something you can't live without. For dungeon crawling in particular, you won't be doing a whole lot of fear-kiting, so lacking access to the free darkness and fear clickies doesn't matter that much. They're definitely good when soloing outdoors, but there are very few places in dungeons where fear-kiting is feasible, so if dungeon crawling is what you have in mind, it's no biggie. The legs are great for pulling but not a significant mana saver, it's more of a plan B for when FD fails or you need to do it repeatedly. You don't generally FD so often that being able to do it for free will have a meaningful impact on your mana sustain. The breastplate clicky is just a nice buff.

The bigger concern is stats. I get the impression that you're not a hardcore high-end raider, and this means that you definitely won't have maxed strength/stamina unbuffed on an iksar. I'd say this matters more than the AC and regen that lizards get. An ogre has 52 more stamina and 60 more strength than an iksar. That has a pretty significant impact on solo performance. The FSI is quite handy as well, though not as much as it was before the changes to bash. If you're keen on regen, trolls have 39 more stamina and 38 more strength than an iksar, which is also quite a bit. That's more stats than an entire set of Velious quest armor gives, even the Skyshrine one.

Personally, I think intelligence is irrelevant unless you're trying to truly push the limits of what an SK can solo and are actually spending an entire mana pool in one fight. For any ordinary kind of soloing, it almost never matters how big your mana pool is because you're either never at full mana or you never spend it all in one go. It's like getting a 10% bigger gas tank for your car when you never drive more than ten miles in a day. The only time the size of your gas tank ever matters is if you need to drive as far as you possibly can without ever stopping to refill. I can't even think of anything an SK can do solo where that would be relevant, it's not like you're gonna be soloing cliff golems and shit. The hardest thing I've ever heard of an SK soloing is one of the WW dragons, and in the video the guy posted of it, he didn't even spend all his mana. And that was a troll. Besides, the difference in mana pool between the dumbest race and the smartest is the equivalent of like one or two lifetaps, so it's not like it has any serious impact on what you'll be able to do. People who say it's important are just trying to sound like they know more than everyone else.
Last edited by greatdane; 06-15-2023 at 04:30 PM..
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