I want to play Khajiit Nightblade, but I'm probably going to use a destruction staff with mostly syphoning skills. Light armor. But literally all the Khajiit racials are suited towards melee. All the Altmer racials are suited towards magic.

How do you justify to yourself intentionally gimping your character to play how you want?

The "play how you want" part.

only invest in the ones you want to use, leave the rest unused if you don't want them. There are many other ways to get similar bonuses with other skills.

You just have to tell yourself that the skill points you would have spent in a useful racial are instead being used somewhere else that is equally useful. This is of course, untrue in most situations. There is nowhere else you can put spare skill points to make up for not having +12% magicka, or +9% magicka recovery. The racials in this game are just imbalanced and we will have to live with it.

The "play what you want" crowd don't comprehend statistical advantages. They will say rolling a certain race for the racials is "min/maxing", but the racials in this game aren't min/maxing, they are huge boosts. The soft cap argument doesn't fly either, because it still doesn't take away useless racials.

In the end, it is just a personal choice you will have to make. Do you want to play your favorite race, or do you want access to a 12% larger magicka pool, and reduced spell costs?

So you are going an Altmer to play a Mageblade, and you feel like people are going to say you are Gimped.

What?

My Orc sorcerer hits those who judge his choices with a tree limb. It's worked so far.

Err, no. He is saying he wants to play Khajiit, but he doesn't want useless racials for the build he plans on playing as. He is saying how much better Altmer racials are for magicka based builds.

Ahh okay, well I mean people do this anyways, this shouldn't matter if you are playing with the top 1% of hardcoe players.

I mean that PvE guild race changed to troll to get world first for Isle of Thunder in World of warcraft.... try hard much?

Diversity.

You'll be like eminem to the rap game back in the 90's.

Yeah, see that IS min/maxing. When I played a hunter, I could have switched to draenei or worgen to get roughly 1% more damage, and I knew a lot of players who did. But to me, 1% damage? Who cares.

The racials in ESO are much bigger than that. As a caster or healer, +12% magicka pool, AND -6% spell costs from Breton is almost mandatory when compared to a race that doesn't have any racials that boost magicka abilities. Same for melee with Khajiit or stamina users with Redguards.

In this player's case. He is giving up +12% magicka pool, +9% magicka regen, AND 6% spell damage(on elemental spells), for nothing. That is simply too much for a racial.(In my opinion).

Racials are not THAT powerful that they will gimp your build. Sure they are nice little bonus and there if you really want to min/max to the smallest % but again they are not enough to really gimp your build in any way.

Actually the current racials are incredibly powerful. As it stands an Altmer magic user will get 12% more magicka, 9% magicka regen, and 6% more damage with elemental spells. That's not a small amount. You will be doing noticable more damage as an Altmer than you would as a Khajiit.

Simple answer, don't like it then don't play it. Or you can create your own game and design it how you want it.

With stat soft caps, its all relative. At VR10 with VR10 gear it won't matter that much.

So... the Altmer could then put those stat points somewhere else right? He is still gaining the same usefulness from those racials(stat budget wise). Soft caps do not negate the fact that the Khajiit is gaining 0 usefulness from racials for a magicka build.

Passives take skillpoints which can be spent elsewhere. The bonuses are good but many is a matter of player skill. If a mob hit your 100hp tank for 150hp that could have been dodged, it matter little if you had 115 hp due to a racial - you should have dodged. Extreme example I know but in this game combat is like that. Passives are good but active skills beat them.

I don't try to justify anything. I just don't care. I'm gonna play an altmer even though I haven't decided yet if I want to be a caster or a melee fighter.

Passive damage dealing skills are a big deal. When you play a DPS character, your role is to dish out as much damage as you possibly can while staying alive. As it stands the Racials make certain race and skill combinations too good to pass up.

To the person talking about how soft caps "negate" passives, you sound like someone who has heard that on the forums but have no idea what you're talking about... We're talking about a bigger mana pool, faster mana regen, and more damage. There are no softcaps that would cover all of those.

But that isn't true. There is no where else you can spend skill points to make up for the loss of a useful racial. In the end, if you have a useless racial, I guess you could put more points into crafting... As for your second example, what if the mob hit your tank for 110 damage? Tank A dies, Tank B lives long enough to get a heal or use a cooldown.

If the racials were like +2% HP, +1% damage with bows, +1% damage with melee attacks, then sure it would be min/maxing, that would be great. But 12% stat pool boost is huge, same with +15% critical damage.

And what if the mob hit your tank for 120 damage? Both still die. Told you it was an extreme example. What if tank A activate 75% damage reduction while tank B miss it because he think he will survive with his extra hp? With that argument +magicka is just as important for the tank as it may allow him to pop one more skill.

You are just creating specific situations which don't address the actual issue. The fact is, certain builds will gain a substantial advantage by choosing certain races. Racials should not be a substantial boost, this makes players feel forced away from the race they actually want to be playing.

Yes, magicka is still useful for a tank. But the Khajiit bonuses are useless for a mage, and I am sure there are other combos like this. The glaring imbalances that I see are that magicka users who don't choose Altmer/Breton will be at a huge disadvantage, and assassin style Nightblades who arent Bosmer/Khajiits will be at a big disadvantage as well in pvp due to Sneaky.

simple play the class and race u like and let the elitists hate? thats what I am doing I dont care what is supposed to be the min/max

+12% resource pool, +9% resource regeneration, and +6% damage is not min/max. That is my point.. and I am most certainly not an elitist.

i refuse to play anything but Khajit, thats how I justify it.

The whole idea of gameplay affecting racial is silly. They should of just based them around stuff like increased swim speed for argonians, they need more racials like that.

All they are doing is promoting "cookiecutter" races. When ever you see a dark elf sorcer you already know, if hes smart hes gonna be using fire magic, or a wood elf nb will probably be using a bow etc.