A few days ago someone, I forgot who, and I were discussing arials and wood elves.

Wood elves have almost identical stats with arials, yet, their xp penalty is much higher, even though they're already neutral.

Why is that? Is it the high charisma? Shouldn't human bards in that case get some massive xp penalty too? Or maybe it's the amazing acute vision, which keeps you relatively safe from one class in the game? No, that couldn't be it, arials have fly, and I'd go with perma-fly over acute vision-type any day.

>Personally I'd take acute vision over perma-fly any day. I can always fly when I want to in game with a non-arial. I can't always see that ranger.

Vuln wise, vuln_water/lightning is just about as bad as iron, depending on what you fight of course. I guess as a defender, you'd rather have the arial vulns than iron, to give one example.

> Not at all. Weapon vulns are much easier for certain classes to defend against. Defensive specs, for example, even though pincers etc are still in the picture. Elemental vulns are much easier for invokers to deal with. You can't just say vuln x is worse than vuln y without thinking of who is going to be dealing with the vuln.

So why the extra 150 xp?

> Partly to keep the race more rare. Partly because wood-elves have something other races cannot get. Arials have something other races can get.