Lutetium

I was going to make a big post about race balance and throw in some math but I'm just repeating my previous posts. So to be succinct and right to the point, Elf is trash on NA outside Oregon because range was designed when the game had 3 skillsets, melee which gets you killed but is fast and good damage, magic thats slow and big damage from far away with less risk of being up in the enemy's face but easily interrupted by one goblin giving your girl a slap on the behind, and range which is high damage far away without charging so they had to balance it with the random chance to not hit the enemy at all. That was fine when there wasnt like 20 talents none of which but range have a "missing" mechanic and the game has shifted to a "high speed action" style of gameplay instead of a "rock paper scissors psuedo-RTS".
Of course this use to work a lot better before hotshots started injecting dlls to freeze the memory address of aim rate to 100% on the client so now we've got this broken system that chatters back and forth with the server comparing client and server aim meters that desyncs the higher your latency to the server due to mabi using an in order encrypted tcp stream, this works fine with sub 5ms latency you'd see anywhere in Korea, but breaks the skillsets usability in NA.

So whats the fix? Remove the aim meter mechanic and replace it with a drawtime mechanic, if you shoot right away the skill wont do full damage like using magic with 1 charge instead of 5, make draw time faster than magic since range doesnt have the AOE capacity of magic to make it fair obviously, and replace aim ratio boosts with draw time reductions. With such a system functionally range ends up working the same for the people it already worked for so long as devcat sets the timings correctly, but now it also works for everyone else too.

The cold hard truth though? Range works in Korea so it won't be changed to fix NA (maybe some of the devs do want to fix it, but corporate isn't going to let them if the word about how broken the functionality is on NA has even been able to reach them) and elves will be eternally stunted on NA due to being added after range but also being stronger with it and needing balanced by making them do no damage if you use armor so any miss is an autodeath (ms helps but it was also nerfed for all races just to nerf it on elf and punish them if they try to survive w/o armor and do damge) and making them weaker with functionally every other skillset.

I doubt many people really want race changes, or that many who say they would "change to elf" would stay that way without ranged being fixed but really if devcat wont fix range why would they add something more complicated that touches the character database and allow race changes. If they want you to buy NX they dont need to add new race change functionality and will add a new item ID for a wing they already have modeled and set it to spawn in a new hex code color and give it a new color name prefix with a 0.12~% chance to spawn.

Yes I know I just said play human instead of elf and I play giant, human is the best race mechanically and mathematically and is the most played in korea and thus the favored race by the devs, but giant uniquely has the most defense potential so I can air headed autopilot play the game on 2 hours of sleep and not die, if you're like that giant will be more enjoyable but falls far behind in single target DPS vs final hit, and AOE DPS vs final hit with erg 2h, you do get an extra grouping option with stampede though.