Hadozee
by Prince Phantom
Between a busted glide ability that had to receive nearly immediate errata and a piece of art so blatantly racist that caused some people to genuinely quit the game and was the clearest example of the Spelljammer books being rushed and unfinished, there may be no race as controversial as the Hadozee. Now that I’ve got that giant elephant in the room addressed, let’s talk their mechanics, which were also a big disappointment for me. Yeah, the monkey-folk really can’t catch a break.
Hadozee Features
Speed: 30ft walking, climb speed equal to it.: Climb speeds are genuinely very nice, and it synergizes nicely with our next feature, allowing us to quickly get up high and make use of it.
Glide: If you’ve got an original printing of the Spelljammer books, this ability will look very different, and very overpowered. This old version allows you to glide 5ft horizontally for every 1ft you fall, all at no extra movement cost to you. This allowed the Hadozee to cover absolutely massive distances in a single turn, so much so that if you ran the math, a Hadozee could easily break the sound barrier. Now, things are much more reigned in and this reads much more like the Simic Hybrid’s Manta Glide, except it costs a reaction (so we can’t wavedash), can only be used on a fall of 10 or more feet, and always cancels all falling damage. This leaves the Glide feature in a healthy spot, and there will be plenty of opportunities to make use of it.
Dexterous Feet: This feature feels so arbitrarily restrictive. The playtest version allowed you to take the Use an Object action as a bonus action, and that provides way more cool build options and combat decisions. Now we can open an extra door on our turn if we are willing to spend our bonus action. Keep in mind, you’re allowed one free object interaction per turn, meaning this only has text of you need to open or close two doors or containers in the same turn.
Hadozee Resilience: This is just a worse version of the Goliath’s Stone’s Endurance. This will cancel out a very small amount of damage and costs our reaction. Most classes will have a better defensive reaction than this, and basically all optimized builds will. Also, I don’t really picture the almost certainly hollow boned monkey people to be especially more resilient than a Dwarf for example. Not really sure why this is on this race.
You play a Hadozee for Glide, because you certainly aren’t playing them for any of their other features. If you want a gliding race, I’d honestly recommend the Sonic Hybrid over this, as it gets more than just the glide and it’s glide doesn’t eat our reaction. It’s a real shame, during the playtest I was excited to build around Dexterous Feet, and then it got nerfed into a crater and all my interest in this race went with it. That glide is still a good feature though, so it escapes the lowest rating possible. This race has certainly been a net-negative on the game though.
Final Rating: 2/5
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