Means seduction influence types stronger (so effectively, you will influence with seduction faster). They are flattery, charm and beguiling. Compliments is empower.

I've been Aslaran, and they're just fine with a sip and herb penalty along with a strong fire damage and far less advantages.
And Merians are a horrible race for Celestine, so I know all about people only being a race for roleplay.

Sip penalties are harsh when paired with low stats because the affect compounds. Your stat sets your base value and your sip amount is based on a percent of that. If we look at a given 20 second window in combat you can model the overall Health/Mana/Ego Per Second gained. A low base stat will already have a large impact on this HPS value. A sip penalty will then further reduce this. This is then compounded by the fact that you can not survive burst damage as not only is your base value low but your regen comes in slower tics.

If a race has a sip penalty but they are still to be general purpose they need equal con/int/chr and they need to be above average. This is a hard thing to balance though as if you make them too high you remove much of the penalty. If you make them too low you will never see people play them. If you have a wide gap in the stats you will end up with a specialist race who is fine/good at some tasks and screwed in others.

If you go with low stats, sip penalty, and high regen you end up with a race that can have the same HPS value as another race but still be susceptible to burst damage. This is a more interesting trade off than trying to balance the sip purely with stats.

The final complication is that sip speed is one of those things that affects almost every aspect of the game. Other penalties, like elemental susceptibility only apply to some aspects of the game. So players generaly play around them, where as it is impossible to do so with the more general debuffs.

I'll agree with you on the last part. Guardians are horribly underpowered with anything but Mugwump by all accounts. Hopefully the new changes to level 3 equilibrium bonuses will permit a clear headed review of the guardian class.

Ah, before I forget, we'll probably be upgrading the speed of hexes (and maybe runes?) with these new changes.

In my opinion, the influence "upgrades" aren't really upgrades. The point of re-balancing the races is to make them level on the combat field, and I don't see too many people using influence in combat (aside from a few telepaths!).

Also, why are Viscanti and Illithoids given a village influence upgrade?? To me that is just asking for trouble down the road. I understand that they need upgrades, but I'm sure we can think of other things to help them along.

Here are some out of the box ideas:

Viscanti: Give Geomancers the ability to imbue the Taint into objects (similar to esteem). While a Viscanti has one of these objects in their possession, they are able to use the taint regen (maybe knock it down to lvl 2) which they already have. Of course the object would have to tick off over time, and it may even create an interesting new market.

Illithoid: With an inflated ego (using Illdrain) the illithoid can create a psychic barrier around himself. This works similar to telekenisis forcefield, but on a -much- smaller scale.

Vesar, the point of the Influencing Attacks is because when it comes to village influencing, the lower Charisma does hurt. If this effect does go in and Magnagora starts winning a lot more villages, maybe it needs to be toned down. But as it stands, a Faeling/Elfen Charisma just dominates the cities, moreso Magnagora then Celest. So in a PEACED village, a group of 10 Viscanti vs a group of 10 Faelings vs a group of 10 Elfen vs a group of 10 Merians, 9 times out of 10, the Faeling or Elfen will win.

Vesar: The main reason for the influence upgrade is that even Master Viscanti have a base of 12 CHA. Even with upgrades, this barely catches up with baseline humans for influencing. However, as Estarra wishes Viscanti to have low amounts of ego, she wants them to have stronger village influencing so as to not give viscanti a disadvantage during revolts. I think that this doesn't take into account the necessity of having strong debaters in a city, especially compared to Faelings/Merians/Elfen, but it doesn't seem to be changing. I certainly take influence ability into account when deciding on a race to use, or I would have never left being an orclach.

EDIT: Silvanus apparently broke out his ninja powers. Dammit.

This is a very good explanation of this particular issue, especially that last point. The only thing you didn't mention (and it's a relatively minor point) is that damage done to you is proportional to your max health/mana/ego to a certain extent.

I'd really understand that, but Tae'dae are faster now too and they weren't touched. (not saying they need to of course) It just seems wierd to downgrade a class that didn't have much going for it. I'm with those other Igasho players, I wish I could scale, when I was researching the Igasho I had to find a friend, get them to scale, then teleport over.

Sounds like good analysis to me. Now what if you considered Vesar's idea of allowing Viscanti to carry around with them a Tainted item that would give them access to Lv2 (or 3?) regeneration? Would this offset the sip penalty to allow viscanti to be viable and not a specialized race?

Even inside taint, the lvl 3 regen is not enough to offset the sip penalty. The penalty is superior to the benefit, and that' the main problem with Viscanti.

Hmm, no one has suggested simply reducing the curve of the elixir advantage/disadvantage (as was done with the balance/equilibrium advantage/disadvantage).

That's a biased perspective centered upon the magic classes who were using weak races for their speed upsides and only needed to be more tanky. Personally, I would be very upset if this were to take place and all of a sudden I'm left under 3500 mana/ego because most metagamers only wanted health.

I would propose that brood viscanti, and brood viscanti only, get their sip penalty removed and allow +2 regeneration outside of tainted areas for both.

That might set Tae'daes being faster and aslarans slower, but it hits the poor faelings again.

Given that the affected races are aslarans (crushed by recent balance changes), dracnari (need some love) and viscanti (really need love), this is an excellent option. Of course, consider as well that you've wanted all the races to be different. How different are they really going to be if all the differences start meaning very little? Then again, brining balance/equilibrium/sip ranges closer together means good things in terms of balancing out combat equations.

After considering it for awhile, I'm on Akui's side. She's getting completely stomped on a regular basis with runed up fullplate and typical warrior defs. I'm here as a Druid with Greatrobes. Very little else- she's got Stag just like me, so she has access to the bulk of my defensive skills.

I went Aslaran for the extra balance and eq, mainly, and these upcoming nerfs are gonna be painnnnful.

Tanks you

I think that would absolutely destroy faelings. With both the speed and elixir advantage reduced, we would need more constitution to have a chance to survive most fights.