I imagineYou'd still see more svirf villagers than gnomes even removing inh stoneskin from svirfs. Conversely, if you gave gnomes inh stoneskin, I imagine you'd see a hell of a lot more of them in the village instead of them always being shifters.

Generally my point was just that the best perk of a svirf villager is stoneskin, not detect invis or any of their other abilities. I do not think svirf villagers are OP at all. Just saying they can be tough little bastards when you add up berserker powers + stoneskin, and claiming that vuln just doesn't sell me on them being in dire need of it. Pincersvirf is a cliche for a reason.

And cause I was bored I wrote out a brief imaginary dialogue between some IMPS when they conceived svirfs in general, showing why I could never even approach doing what Imms do.

Twist: "Nice race we came up with, looks like a viable variant on gnomes for people who want to be a bit more melee oriented but still keeps with them making viable mages."
Daev: "Looks good. But what if players want to play a svirf rager? Nobody will because of that massive vuln we gave them just like nobody plays gnome villagers. I don't think rager resist is enough dam redux to make it survivable."
Twist: "Oh ####, you're probably right. I guess they need an inherent ability to grant them dam redux for a time to cover that so people will play them as villagers"
Daev: "Fine we'll do that. Svirfs are earth things, inherent stoneskin will take care of that. And it's an inherent ability not magical at all, so they can use it. Hey Thror, you're finally going to have a bunch of midgets running around the village!"
At this point Thror starts swearing about people sissifying his village.
Daev "Now then, should we do anything about gnomes in the village?"
Twist: "F*** gnomes, we'll just create the shapeshifter class for them instead."
Zulgh: "Fine, but in then I'm going to code skills called punt, cross, and leverage, just so people can enjoy kicking the little bastards all over Thera."

Yep. That's probably how it all went down. :)