Corpse Eater was too good, and you're still saving the cost of a skillbook. If someone was to complain about racial abilities not being worthwhile and needing a buff, Elf would still be towards the very bottom of the list.
Corpse eater is horrible, flavor only with no real purpose except saving a few hundred gold in a game where you get hundreds of thousands. +1 Loremaster is horrible for similar reasons (more because it's easy to max when you need it anyway). I still wouldn't pass it up because this is an RPG and flavor is everything, but since you can mimic it with the Mask of the Shapeshifter and NEVER need to have it in combat, it really offers no benefit to being an elf.
The saving grace of elven racials is the Flesh Sacrifice ability. Being able to gain +1 AP on demand is game changing, and you can even do it twice with Skin Graft.
Compare to Humans, who get +5% crit, +2 Initiative, +1 Bartering AND a somewhat useful buff. 5% crit is useful to everyone except backstabbing rogue, 2 initiative is great for absolutely everyone, +1 bartering is good because (unlike loremaster) that skill is useful over the 5 cap. Encourage is maybe questionably useful, but it doesn't come at the horrible cost of Flesh Sacrifice.
The other competitor for best racials is Undead Human, with the same Ingenious perk and the Play Dead ability that opens up a TON of tactical options. And being able to lockpick with your fingers saves you from having to buy lockpicks at every opportunity. Not a huge gold save but running out
sucks. The "Undead" trait (heal/poison switch) does more harm than good though.
Races are still about:
Undeads > Elves >>> others
How do you reliably heal yourself as undead?
Poison bottles only do a little bit.
easy. necromancy(passive and spells). poison bottle (ooze barrel + empty bottle) bigger poison bottles (bottle+bottle), leech + blood. poison zone (contamination + rain) and etc and etc.
[quote=neurotic][quote=Kalrakh]Races are still about:
Undeads > Elves >>> others
How do you get Flesh sacrifice as undead elf though?
mask of the shapeshifter.
also you don't even have to be undead to utilize it.
and IMHO fane > custom undead (because of his source skill_)
Fane's native source skill really is the best one in the game huh. Combining it with a glass cannon character is truly funny.
I'd say it's a tossup between Fane's ability and the custom character "Dome of Protection" ability. Fane's extra turn is powerful, but Dome scales REALLY well all game. It's one of if not the strongest armor-heal in the game, competes as one of the strongest overall heals in the game, and then gets reapplied every turn for 5 turns to every party member in range, and it doesn't even hurt your Undead. ALL of the other innate source abilities are shit that you probably won't ever even use.
