Arelith

I'm a little confused by the recent patch notes. Identifying Drow requires lore? I thought Drow were -extremely- visually distinctive, and the setting's boogeymen. Am I supposed to pretend to not know what I'm looking at if I see a dark-skinned, white-haired elf, if the examine doesn't explicitly tell me it's Drow?

ReverentBlade wrote:Am I supposed to pretend to not know what I'm looking at if I see a dark-skinned, white-haired elf, if the examine doesn't explicitly tell me it's Drow?

How would you have reacted if you hadn't used examine at all?

If you can CLEARLY see their a drow..their a drow. Use basic common sense in approaching it ICly.

This isn't for identifying the drow stripper walking around with all their dark skin on display, you can do that just fine on your own, but for identifying the one wrapped up in more cloth than a halloween mummy.

WYISWYG

I think there's a good amount of info on both sides. Personally, I am -for- the new update. I think trying to compare it to real life situations is kinda silly. Sorry, if I'm repeating others posts, I've not the time to 9 pages of responses, ( I did take a random sampling, though)

Personally, playing a rangery kinda character as my main with upwards of 50 spot skill, but a 5 lore skill, I thought it was just plain silly that my character can count the hairs on a fly's legs, but unable to catch the slightest glimpse of a minute character detail, or "tell" a Teifling or Drow would give away their race, beyond the full hood/gloves

In the past my characters have fallen victim to the drow-trickery of donning a hood, and covering up all their skin, using a non-drow portrait on their character and masquerading around the surface passing themselves off as a surface elf when encountered in the wilderness areas.

I'd always thought that being a high-level dedicated ranger with "Drow" (elves) as a racial enemy would have allowed my character to go beyond the black-and-white issue of the game-engine's limitations, and be able to pick up on the subtle nuance of racial behaviors.

With the current system, that's solves, and so I say thank you for it.

I think it's awesome that a mechanic (disguise) still has a place to defeat me and my spottiness, and that my training as a Ranger gives me (finally) big bonus to racial detection... all I can say is the only thing that's missing in our system (IMO) would be a HIGH DISGUISE character be able to use that skill to "lend" it to a party-member. -so if, say, you were PARTIED with a high-level Disguise Skill capped character, that high-skill character could oversee your disguise, or even disguises YOU him/herself... offering a passive Skill Level / 2 circumstance bonus while you're partied together.

People pick non drow names and portraits because others often used it to metagame race.