Considering that high dex races generally make better warriors than giants now, and that wasn't the case when exp penalties were assigned, can you really still justify the huge exp penalty of being a giant when more intelligent, faster races of the same level often make better warriors?

Play one to its strengths and you'll do fine.

You'll notice I died to a giant warrior if anyone gets Cagocluse's pbf. That was fully prepped, and largely due to command denial.

He took legacies to increase the utility of bash. It worked well.

Probably wouldn't have died if I hadn't been trying to seal the kill, but I might still have.

The only place where it's even remotely close is at level 48 and up - at which point - XP penalty does not matter. For the entire rest of the life of the character generally strength > dex except for PVE.

And honestly, if I were the Imms, I'd take a look at weapon specs in general and the types of weapons available at different levels. The game balance of the right now to me feels really good, compared to how it used to be but sword spec still seems 'incorrectly' better than many of the alternatives (spear spec for instance). This could be handled by making flourintine worse in general or riposte worse in general or by changing some of the weapon types for vuln hitting weapons away from sword to things like axe/mace/dagger/whip.

Giants are still far and away more deadly (as in likely to kill you) than a high dex warrior. They have much better lagging potential as most lagging moves care about str and/or size (bash, cranial, pincer) and in general they have superior ability to do burst damage (double thrust, pincer, drum, flurry, chop, charge, stab/twist).


Dex warriors have much higher defenses and are better equiped to fight 1 vs group than giants and can "win" more fights through their supperior defenses.


Also keep in mind that exp penalties don't represent combo strength as much as they represent rarity. An elf warrior has a high exp penalty and they are basically meat until legacies, in fact a lot of the high dex races don't really come into their own until the upper ranks whereas giants are solid from level 11-51.

Or halfies would have a higher penalty than full elves

Flurry kills dex classes

Boneshatter/drum kills dex classes

Sub 10 lbs. Nodisarm weapons aren't exactly dime a dozen for dexy warriors so crashing also kills them without even entering evade in the equation. AOE damage also kills them.

You are lying to yourself if you think giants aren't deadly anymore, but one that fails to have burst damage, reliable disarm or reliable stat loss is of course going to suffer.