Dark Elf vs. Grey Elf vs. High Elf

[Sardaukar]

Hi,

I have been playing a lot of Elf Priests, mainly Grey Elf ones. But lately I have been into playing Dark Elf Priests. So, I have small question. Some of following might be slightly spoily.

Grey Elf:

- dodge
- good learning & mana
- fragile as all elves
- good missile weapon
- relatively easy to get training from Thieves Guild as neutral

High Elf

- dodge
- good learning & mana
- fragile
- lawful, so slight problems if wanting training from Thieves Guild
- good missile weapon

Dark Elf:

- alertness & find weakness
- no dodge
- no starting missile weapon
- bit better To than Grey Elf
- less learning but best mana among elves.
- no problems with Thieves Guild, slight problems getting lawful, but nothing too bad
- bad prices in Dwarftown

My question is about Dark Elves, will good mana, alertness and find weakness be enough to offset lack of dodge and lower Le plus price problems, compared to other Elves? Opinions needed.

I have gotten one DE Priest to lvl 25 before it did die, so I am not too experienced with later game. Furthest I have gotten was with GE Barbarian who died to Cat Lord and I have been playing years.

[LexyBoy]

The skillset is way better, Alertness alone beats Dodge in my view. By the time you can get Dodge >90 you will probably have decent DV from armour already. Find weakness is brilliant for almost everyone, unless you're a pure spellcaster.

The lack of Healing coupled with chaotic alignment and being even more frail than the others IME makes the early game a bit tougher.

The racist shopkeeper thing is annoying but no biggie. You can always just keep the C alignment and re-educate them all :)

[mewmew]

IMO Dark Elves are one of the top tier races. I won two of them - an archer and a beastfighter (the latter just like less than a couple of hour ago :3), Find Weakness significantly increases the damage output both melee and (to a lesser extent) missile combat, Alertness is always nice to have and sometimes it's a life saver (you dodge a lot of stuff from some nastier opponents like ACW or Chaos Archmage, avoid a lot of traps too), also it cannot be even wished for, I would take any of those skills over Dodge which is just like +10 DV at 100, but, well, I didn't play a class without Dodge yet. To slightly decrease the shop price problem you can play female dark elves (actually that's true for all elves since they tend to have low Charisma (on which prices for males depend) and good Appearance), prices still will be bad so selling si isn't that useful for them, but prices don't matter that much.

[Sardaukar]

The skillset is way better, Alertness alone beats Dodge in my view. By the time you can get Dodge >90 you will probably have decent DV from armour already. Find weakness is brilliant for almost everyone, unless you're a pure spellcaster.

The lack of Healing coupled with chaotic alignment and being even more frail than the others IME makes the early game a bit tougher.

The racist shopkeeper thing is annoying but no biggie. You can always just keep the C alignment and re-educate them all :)

Well, lack of Healing is not a problem with class like Priest that comes with both Healing & Herbalism.

[mewmew]

also



The lack of Healing coupled with chaotic alignment and being even more frail than the others IME makes the early game a bit tougher.

dark elves are the toughest of all elves, they are the most sturdy elves, and no race has healing as its racial skill AFAIK
dark elves lack guaranteed literacy of other elves but, since you get it at 1st Thundarr quest, and since non-barbarian and non-beastfighter dark elves would probably have it anyway, it doesn't matter that much

their base healing rate is kind of slow though

[Sardaukar]

If I have gotten it right, Alertness is more useful against spell attacks & traps and Dodge against physical attacks (increases DV)?

Find Weakness is really good skill, anyone know if it stacks with slaying weapon, e.g. Purifier that is one of Priest crowning gifts?

[mewmew]

Yes.

Slaying weapon/ammo guarantees 100% critical hit to the monsters which it slays, i.e. Purifier will always crit against undead, demons and unlife (constructs), other methods to increase critical hit rate like Find Weakness are irrelevant. When you fight those who are not undead/demons/unlife Find Weakness will increase your damage on average with it.

[SirTheta]

The only knock against dark elves is their truly awful shop prices, which can delay crowning slightly - luckily not something you have to worry about on a Priest. Granted, I've won a GE Priest who used mino axe, so it's not like they have trouble doing melee, but DE is best elf for FW + Alertness alone, no matter what class you're playing [well, unless the class has FW & Alertness..].

Dodge is a really bad skill that's mostly useless - you won't even notice it missing. Alertness is approx. 10003x as good.

[GordonOverkill]

I personally like dark elves very much... I play random rolls almost exclusively and I won with three dark elves so far (archer, barbarian and priest), which makes them my personal most successful race together with gnomes. For high elves I just got one successful elementalist and with grey elves I didn't win at all. In my eyes alertness and find weakness are definitely very big advantages.

[Blasphemous]

DE Mindcrafters are amazing but prices suck indeed.
Otherwise it depends on the class. Personally I almost exclusively play gray elves but that's just me, it probably has more to do with roleplaying than actual benefits.
Initial neutrality is useful as you can go either way and back without much effort. Mystic can be talked to right off the bat if you have tele+control.
Also dark elves are a bit uglier but since they already have worse prices, it won't matter that much save for some long term corruption impact.

[Ravenshire]

also



dark elves are the toughest of all elves, they are the most sturdy elves, and no race has healing as its racial skill AFAIK
dark elves lack guaranteed literacy of other elves but, since you get it at 1st Thundarr quest, and since non-barbarian and non-beastfighter dark elves would probably have it anyway, it doesn't matter that much

their base healing rate is kind of slow though

Priest is one of the classes that is guaranteed to have literacy starting out

Classes that train in literacy regardless of starting learning score: Druid, Elementalist, Healer, Merchant, Mindcrafter, Monk, Necromancer, Paladin, Priest, Wizard.
(taken from the wiki)

[Sardaukar]

I just discovered that Dark Elf Paladin is quite Chaotic. Usually helping carpenter gets DE Priest to NC, but not Paladin. Just want that stethoscope. :D

[JellySlayer]

A few things to note on this:

Dodge is a very, very hard skill to train unless it is a class skill. I can pretty much guarantee that if you are playing a HE/GE priest, wizard, whatever, you will probably never get Dodge to 100 without wishes. It usually caps out at around 60, and you might advance it by one point every couple levels after that if you're lucky. Unfortunately, the benefits of dodge are stacked more toward the higher skill values, IIRC, so don't expect more than 3-4 DV out of it.

The starting missile weapon and the significantly higher starting Le can be pretty significant for HE/GE priests. Priests have much lower learning than wizards, and have a hard time reading attack spells, so rolling a 20+ Le score is a pretty nice benefit, which is very difficult roll for a DE--on a bad roll, you could have <10 literacy. It seems that DEs do have an extra spellbook though, which means it's more likely that they'll actually start with a useful spell. It's worth noting that Le is much, much harder to train than Ma, so even though the DE might start with 10 more points of Ma, that's not as big of deal as the GE starting with 5 more points of Le.

Find Weakness and Alertness are both very nice skills to have, though not essential. I don't consider skills to be nearly as important as starting stats/gear.

Overall, I think that HE/GE survive early game better due to starting missiles, and are better casters due to better starting Le. If you want more of a melee-oriented priest, then a DE certainly edges out HE/GE, but then you might be better off with a Dwarf or Drakeling instead.

[Sardaukar]

Good points, melee-oriented Priest, I'd probably say that none better than Dwarf. Drakelings are really nice (having Alertness and acid spit), but they have this temperature thing plus very short life span.