Dear Santa Umishuli,

I'd like to request the revamp of the defense form, armadillo.

The days of 10vs10 PK fights and huge explore group outings has fallen off over the years and armadillo struggles to find use outside of these niche group settings, making this an extremely dull and a 100% reroll for most players.

Pachyderm has 98% of the damage reduction of a retracted armadillo, but without its movement being impeded by retract and with passive damage as well as gore, making it superior in every way but intercept (which can be gained by lower tier forms in most cases).

I propose that armadillo be made a bit more active in how it could be played in a PK settings as well as give it a bit of offensive utility in general.

Proposal:

1) Make a dillo's carapace do a bit of 'rebound' damage!

Each hide deflection would do a bit of damage to the attacker as well as give a chance of inflicting a few different side-affects, such as: minor strength loss from wrist sprain, losing grip of weapon (disarming), sliding off and causing to miss next attack (feint).

2) Make retract more friendly.

Remove the lag from retract for a more 'active' playstyle.

Currently it's 1 round to retract and 1 round to unretract, which actually makes reverting to word or fleeing dangerous because you eat lag and take some pretty hefty damage, seeing as unretracted armadillo actually does not have that great of damage reduction, which is something that the abovementioned pachyderm need not worry about.

This would allow it to actually be able to capitalize on some interesting situations like absorbing a flurry and shifting to something else or making a proper retreat without getting kicked around too badly.

3) Armadillos dig a lot... Give it dig!

4) Armadillos carry disease (leprosy). Make their bites a bit spicy!

Ok... It's really hard to make an armadillo 'cool', but I'm trying here. You all did a great job with Halloween forms, maybe you have some cooler ideas than I do. Please harness the powers of the holiday spirit to make armadillo interesting!

So we aren't AVERSE to a present on this.

But we dislike all of the ideas so far. Nothing really feels right, nothing does what we'd like, etc. The closest would be a basic dig thing, but it'd be very basic.

So this MAY end up getting coal unless we find an idea we like. Which, thus far, we haven't.

Here's a couple things that I think would make the form better/more fun, while still being defensive-focused and armadillo-y.

Roll. Give them the roll skill to move around while retracted. Out of combat, it'd just be movement.. pick a direction and roll that way. Out of combat, it'd just be a random direction (similar to flee). Bonus points if it moves multiple steps in a given direction. The big benefit of this is not having to retract to move.

Scream. There's a real life animal called a "screaming hairy armadillo". It screams. I think this'd be cool as a room deafen skill. Maybe it can only be done while non-retracted? But it'd cause anything in the room (non-group/cabal) to attack the armadillo regardless of if the deafen was successful or not.

Forage. It's kinda what armadillos do. It makes more sense for them to have this skill than not have it.

Swim. Everything I found about Armadillos makes a point to say they are surprisingly good swimmers. I think it'd be cool to give them the ability. Obviously they shouldn't be amphibious, but maybe the ability to travel on the surface of water without flight? Possibly even a last breath-type ability where they can spend a short amount of time underwater (maybe a 1-tick or 0-tick timer).

I went for the roll but with a variation.

Armadillos... Rollout.

Rollout only works while retracted.
Rollout hits everyone hitting you.