-Thickened Skin (1 Slot) - Reduces incoming damage by 1
-Dense Muscles (1 Slot) - Increases outgoing melee damage by 1
-Target-Tracking Eyes (1 Slot) - Increases outgoing ranged damage by 1
-Offensive-Tuned Reflexes (1 Slot) - Increases dice rolled for attacks (basic and trick) by 1
-Defensive-Tuned Reflexes (1 Slot) - Increases dice rolled for defend (basic and trick) by 1
-Sharpened Senses (1 Slot) - Doubles 'sensing' rolls, such as trying to detect something via sight or smell.
-Softened Steps (1 Slot) - Doubles 'stealth' rolls.
-Ambidextrous Hands (1 Slot) - Allows simultaneous use of two weapons at once
-Counter-Tuned Reflexes (1 Slot) - When you tie while defending, you deal 1 damage to your opponent.
-Supported Grip (1 Slot) - Allows two-handed weapons to be effectively used in one hand.
-High-Twitch Muscles (1 Slot) - Increases attack-speed by 1
-Broad Frame (1 Slot) - Increases enemy morale loss
-Fast Creation (1 Slot) - Creates a Fast in your body, which can be used to store up to 3 things. Some examples are Frenzy (1 Fast for 3 Frenzy), pre-fueled, single-use tricks, or things like extra weapons, replacement shields, or any manner of tools/items.
So...
- Dense Muscles are more useful to us (by a fair margin) than Thickened Skin, especially in the long term, so we can skip thickened skin.
- Target-tracking Eyes are generally less useful than Dense Muscles except in weird/specific circumstances, so skip that except under unusual situations. Regardless, we're generally going to be better off having one or the other, not splitting them.
- Sharpened Senses/Softened Steps are kind of situational. At some point we're likely to want to fit these onto our fylgia, though.
- Ambidextrous hands, we can skip as well. Not our fighting style.
- Counter-tuned reflexes, at least as I can read them, are
really persnickety. You have to receive an attack, and defend against it with dice rather than a perfect, and then have the numbers come up as a tie. Too edge-case to be worth investing in for general use.
- Supported Grip... honestly somewhat tempting. Being able to use our atgeir and also just have a free hand has a lot of potential utility. I'm not arguing
for it, necessarily... but I'm also not arguing
against it.
- High-Twitch Muscles? A bit hard to say. Its super-useful when the combat round ends early, since it'll mean that we got off more attacks and/or they got off fewer. It's
not so useful for the move rate thing, since we're going to be handling necessary combat repositioning with wings of fire
anyway. If the round doesn't end early, though... it's just letting us get the same total number of attacks in somewhat earlier, and I tend to think that wouldn't be worth it. I'm not going to say "no", here, but I'm looking at it suspiciously.
- Broad Frame is... huh. It doesn't feel like a Halla
thing, really. We don't
want our enemies to be demoralized. We want them either dead or having fun. That might just be me, though. Anyway, it doesn't feel like something to spend precious build resources on. Might be better suited for Abjorn and/or some of the kids.
- I feel like Fast Creation is something we want to handle in our fylgia
- I feel like Fast Creation is something we want for our fylgia, because fylgia-shapeshift slots are less valuable than standard shapeshift slots, and then we put our frenzy in
that. Ideally, the way I see it, we manage three shapeshift slots in our fylgia (Odr infusion?) so that we can have one for the fast and one each for "super-stealth" and "super-senses".
So... my final run-down:
- Dense Muscles: All the yes.
- Target-tracking eyes: Alternate loadout. Lots of one or lots of the other. Not both.
- Supported Grip, High-Twitch Muscles:
maybe.
- Fast Creation, Sharpened Senses, Softened Steps: fylgia.
It's true. 2x Target Tracking Eyes + 2x High-Twitch Muscles is pretty much Massive Honed Kindle Spinner Spam (once we've gotten enough proficiency in that particular trick to make it free), or, from the perspective of our enemies, "Why is everything exploding". There's some value there. At the same time, it's going to be a bit before we hit that magical "kindle spinners are free" point, and until then, i'm thinkign that Dense Muscles have the advantage.
