[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:
The virtue is pretty useless in a combat role, since she only has ~26 hitpoints. ...

26 hitpoints too fragile for combat my ***. Tell that to the VQ drivers out there. We're fighting it out on 23 hitpoints. A Virtue is a perfectly serviceable light battle chassis. While certainly not up to the specs of a super-SC, she's quite serviceable and resilient for someone with a mere 26 HP. A few items can easily remedy most of her more annoying deficiencies, and her magic, while slightly inflexible, is certainly top-notch: It's hard for most units to penetrate a high-level mirror image, and mistform is a great HP multiplier: When you consider that, say, A natty with his measly protection, is being slammed for 10 points of damage out of his 80-odd HP, and can thus sustain maybe 9 hits before biting it, the fact that a virtue can soak down 26 normal hits due to mistform is a plus. Of course, you can slap Mistform on the others, too, but that'll cost you points in buying more air magic: An out of the box Virtue already can do that.

Virtue can be quite tough if you give her equipment, buffs, whatever. Not "optimal", though. The reasons I haven't chosen a Virtue prentender tend to be thematic, and that her fighting skills aren't particularly good, and that you can summon Virtues later on that are comparable.

They're not as easy to kill as their meager 26 HP would suggest....after all, when the game was first out, the VQ was discounted as a noncombatant as well. The amount of snivelling that has since surfaced has rather disproved that idea, though.

Ultimately, hitpoints are irrelevant: It's not how many hitpoints you HAVE, it's how many hitpoints you rake in vs. how many you lose: Your HP pool is simply a buffer. A larger buffer is nice, but not strictly necessary.

[ June 04, 2004, 20:05: Message edited by: Norfleet ]