New Update = Elf child effectively useless? (for mysticism classes)

[Chaneyi]

- Elf child trait now costs 3 to use (up from 2)
- Slightly nerfed Ancestors Voice skill
- Elf child will no longer start with Ancestors Voice Skill

There's been quite a few discussions about elf and how to get certain classes and from what I have learned, it is incredibly hard to get anything but an elf gatherer or crafter, if you start as an elf child.

For druids or mages, not only did you have to be lucky with the attributes (mysticism) and passive abilities (luck) but you also had to have 2 out of three things covered: 2 magic users and/ or 1 elf druid/mage and/or 50+ relationship with forest kin. Considering that even on turn 5 or 6, the groups encountered on the elf island are incredibly too high for your current group, it left you with magic users for the most time, which is also incredibly hard to do, before the child grows up.

Now, with a lot of Godpoints, it was possible to unlock a young elf druid and and the elf child, which would have maxed the amount of traits your are allowed to use at the start of a new game: 5 and 2
By upping the elf child trait to 3, this becomes impossible.

I understand wanted to keep things rare, but honestly, at this point - why even bother with an elf child, unless you want players to only use them as crafters/gatherers.

The fact, that EVERYTHING is also absolutely RNG (including events that could help with stats, such as getting a cat or simply getting the correct stats) ... I have to admit that this change is incredibly frustrating. I was very much looking forward to being able to have my chosen grow up to be a mage or druid, but it feels like this thought is now going down the toilet or will involve a lot of modding.

By putting the elves at the end and on the most difficult island, you won' get to to play with them too much and that is the shame.

Sorry for the rant, but I was saving up the Godpoints to get the 30 needed to get both elf child and druid and now... bloooop

[iacs]

You can not use druid and child at the same time regardless of starting point cost. They both use Harmony slot and no god has two harmony slots at once. Start with druid, get another magic user or reputation, then get elven child naturally. For example, i started with druid, befriended elves and hired guardian at turn 100. They quite soon had daughter who became a mage. Now i'm going for second recruit - elven gatherer, as i already have three mages in active party - druid chosen one, her mage daughter and witch. Witch i will soon send to my village and her place will be taken by that main quest druid Nai-ysir.

[-=EDF=- Kouta Seto]

So basicaly, ONE person here wants ANTI RNG, the other wants RNG.

So Dev's if you read this : OPTIONS ARE DUE FOR THAT!

There are MANY who HATE RNG based games, and there are those liking them. Personaly? I hate RNG based games like that.

[alan]

Without randomness games like this become too formulaic. I vote for RNG

[sokka87]

i just want elf child to have voice of ancestors back. i can live with the ability nerf and increased cost but removing that is just over the top. like this whole update was just a giant middle finger to elf players

[Lumisteria]

Originally posted by Chaneyi:

The fact, that EVERYTHING is also absolutely RNG (including events that could help with stats, such as getting a cat or simply getting the correct stats) ...

I just want to say that the quest village of Theodor will always offer a cat, often a low level one, but this is often enough to at least get more chance for Myst level up.

I am not saying this is enough to solve your issues, but this is one example of situation when you have options that are stable and not RNG.
It's the same with loyalty helping getting some possible paths for the child, it's a stable thing that will remove some layer of RNG (so there is mostly one RNG left), but this one isn't helpful in your situation since you can't get the loyalty soon enough for what you want.

However this shows that the game does provides some options that aren't based on RNG, this is just not the ones you would need in your specific situation.

[Chaneyi]

Originally posted by iacs:

You can not use druid and child at the same time regardless of starting point cost. They both use Harmony slot and no god has two harmony slots at once. Start with druid, get another magic user or reputation, then get elven child naturally. For example, i started with druid, befriended elves and hired guardian at turn 100. They quite soon had daughter who became a mage. Now i'm going for second recruit - elven gatherer, as i already have three mages in active party - druid chosen one, her mage daughter and witch. Witch i will soon send to my village and her place will be taken by that main quest druid Nai-ysir.

Hah - you're actually quite right. My brain decided to ignore the fact that both use harmony slots ... so much for my original grand plan.
As for what to start with, I know that options are given to change your Chosen, such as the elven child, the young druid and so on, but I am one of those that enjoy having them start as children - especially since I now have to save another 23 God points to get the elven druid to even start with one again.

In regards to RNG - by no means do I have an issue with RNG in general. It spices things up, creates unique situations, memories and interesting challenges.

But sometimes it seems to be a bit anti-climatic. So, for stats for example, I had a warrior who did not get more than once a Strength +2 modifier ... within ... I believe it was 19 or 20 levels? I have no issues if this is occasional but to deprive classes of their main stats for dozens of levels seems a bit frustrating at times.

In regards to elven characters - it does feel as if the devs are trying a bit too hard (my opinion) to keep you from playing elfs or elven children - which I think is a shame. If it is an option, it should be supported, at least that's how I feel.

As for "static" events/rewards - so far I have only ever gotten the cat in early games once. It may be bound to a specific choice, but I haven't found it yet, so if you would like to provide info on this, I would appreciate it.

Also - for elves, getting the loyalty up in early times, before the child grows up ... is really a pain. I have tried, sneaking about, scouting ahead, returning to the ship to avoid enemies. But if my group got engaged once that was pretty much instant death. I would just be happy to have an option to have a non-laborer elf character, chosen, who started as a child

Also, I am not telling anyone to like or dislike certain aspects of the game, but just want get my thoughts out there and maybe questions some decisions.

I am more than happy to hear the reasons for those choices- though obviously I cannot guarantee that I will agree with them. I also understand though, that I am one of many players and not all decisions/choices will be to everyone's liking. Such is life.

Anyway, thanks for the responses and information.

[Lumisteria]

Originally posted by Chaneyi:

As for "static" events/rewards - so far I have only ever gotten the cat in early games once. It may be bound to a specific choice, but I haven't found it yet, so if you would like to provide info on this, I would appreciate it.

Early game, you do various quests for Theodore. Getting food, then checking an abandonned house, then he sends you to a village for dealing with another Chosen problem.
When you solve this issue, in most cases you deal with the Chosen and the village is now allowing you to do various things. One option is to ask to visit the Kennel, it's as far as i know a one time only option, that allows you to recruit either a spider or a cat. The cat cost 20 of whatever you want (material, food, gears), cost a bit high but totally doable early game.
You usually ends with a low level cat but i already got good cat this way.

The other slavyan village Kennel will usually offers you only dog, only this village offers you a cat, but you are guarantee to see it (if you don't destroy the village of course).

So it's a good way to get a cat early on, and usually this will happen before your child grows up.

[Chaneyi]

Thanks for the info. Will check that out.

Maybe you can answer this as well, is it possible to get a mysticism elf when you start as an elven child, without visiting the elven island? Is it possible to get 2 magic users before the child grows up?

[ironarmchad]

I have quite given up on making my chosen a child. It sounds cool at first but it substantially raises the chance of end of game pre-turn 30 and my chosen children ALWAYS grow up, fail and become scoundrels. I know it is just bad luck but I would rather have the lackluster warrior chosen then another fail class chosen or worse a rat chosen.

It would be kind of cool if chosen children had all available unlocks (eg. a female chosen with myst 4 would always have witch as an option rather than just a chance) and if they never straight failed their path. They are the chosen one after all...

[Lumisteria]

Originally posted by Chaneyi:

Thanks for the info. Will check that out.

Maybe you can answer this as well, is it possible to get a mysticism elf when you start as an elven child, without visiting the elven island? Is it possible to get 2 magic users before the child grows up?

I'm not sure it's possible. I don't know the different characters you can have in addition to elf child so maybe i miss something, but the main way would be starting with two childrens and even this way you don't have high chance to get one magic user, so two seems unlikely.
The elf child does have usually a bit longer time to grows up than the human childs but not that much longer.

Originally posted by ironarmchad:

It would be kind of cool if chosen children had all available unlocks (eg. a female chosen with myst 4 would always have witch as an option rather than just a chance) and if they never straight failed their path. They are the chosen one after all...

This may be a bit too powerful to ensure that a child chosen will always get some paths. However note that a human female child with 7 myst will always see the witch path, and some paths are also guaranteed to appears if you have enough in the stat (but usually not require as much for this), for human childs at least.

[sokka87]

Well, im having an issue that may make it so i never work with elves again. The elf trait on my child chosen reset on age up.

[ironarmchad]

@Lumisteria I never knew that the event ever became guaranteed with enough myst, so thanks. My point is that it is kind of a big risk for the first 30 turns to have a child chosen so some bonuses might be in order (I would settle for no fail chance). We are talking about a bonus on precisely one character so I doubt that we could get into OP territory, particularly when considering Slavyan children.

For RP reasons I like my Chosen to be a cool class I actually want in my main exploring party, not the scavanger or scoundrel that are good when put in gathering squads or left at home. It would be nice to be able to take the early risk on the chosen being a child, in order to grab a better class than warrior for the chosen but the odds on getting something boring or too weak (like a rat) are too high for me to risk it.

[asdf]

I think that if they didn't want to nerf elves as a whole then they needed to nerf the elf child god trait. Starting with an elf really completely broke the game in my experience - elves are just so powerful that if you got them to grow up the game was basically over. An elf child was also not at all a liability in the early game before this patch because ancestor's voice meant they could still carry you through mental/magic challenges, and they didn't slow down your party either. Personally I think I would've preferred if they just nerfed elves as a whole instead of focusing on the child start, but it's better than doing nothing.

For example, this is the kind of nonsense an elf child start could do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8kesr5fnV4

This is a playthrough where I literally soloed the game using a child on the maximum difficulty, with no savescumming (I did restart a number of times from failed attempts of course, but during the run there was no savescumming so it wasn't *that* unlikely to succeed), and then won the game on turn 69 because elves are broken once they grow up. Elves are probably still overpowered once they grow up, but now at least starting with an elf child is a liability in the early game (especially on max difficulty) so the harmony gods aren't all trivializing the game on the highest difficulty.

[Lumisteria]

Your solo playthrough definitively played a big part in showing the issue and power of elf starting child.

Originally posted by asdf:

Personally I think I would've preferred if they just nerfed elves as a whole instead of focusing on the child start, but it's better than doing nothing.

The delicate part about this is that a character is the same whether they are player characters or enemies. Meaning that every change on the base elf change not only the elf you may have but also the enemies you may encounter.

Since elves are dangerous and difficult enemies, nerfing them would change a lot of the difficulty of some challenges, especially since a group of elf is usually more dangerous than an elf alone (and the player usually don't have a lot of elves).

So this is one of the reason why the change of ancestor voice isn't that big and they have to change other things.

[iacs]

Looking on my five elves in current game of "Thea 2 The Elven Collection"... Yeah, they are overpowered. I have four in main team and i really need one or two to win every challenge. I even sent the gatherer straight to village

But collecting all possible elves is so fun!