Leapfrog

Powerful leg sinews and hollow bones let you leap up cliffs and over gaps. Your bounding strides also make your overall walking speed somewhat faster. You're left more fragile, losing brawn** and becoming more susceptible to beatings.

**Despite saying this, the mutation was changed to not reduce brawn.

Leapfrog is a first-tier movement mutation that is incompatible with Phaser, Clairvoyance, and Lithodermis.

Location

Located in the aerie near the summit of Mt. Fisty. If you can land a plane on Fisty, the mutation is at the same level as that landing spot, so you can just touch down, walk a couple tiles and grab the mutation. Be careful, however: you may run afoul of thunderbirds that inhabit Fisty en route, and the sky tile before Fisty contains the Skydock, which will try to shoot you down with flak unless you are very quick or prepared.

Effects

Leapfrog has the following effects:

[ Your dodge increased by 1! ]
[ Your broken arm resistance decreased by 30! ]
[ Your broken nose resistance decreased by 30!]
[ Your broken hand resistance decreased by 30! ]
[ Your broken jaw resistance decreased by 30! ]
[ Your broken leg resistance increased by 80! ]
[ Your beating resistance decreased by 1 - 3! ]
[ You've just received some new commands. ]
[ leap <any> : Leap up (or down) a cliff/building/what-have-you. ]

Leapfrog also noticeably increases your walking speed. Finally, your corpse will be butcherable for leaper legs, an otherwise unremarkable consumable item.

Advantages

• No more climbing gayness. You don't need to climb up or down climbs anymore or mess around with ropes and grapple hooks. This saves you a ton of time, and is handy if you don't have a build that's naturally good at climb. Technically you can do this with the crafted aperture boots, but they take a lot of skill to craft, are rare, and need atomicells to work, whereas all you have to do is expend minimal stress.
• +1 Dodge. This is a pretty straightforward buff. Dodge is a very good stat, and the returns on it don't really diminish, so the more of it you can get the better. This also means that Leapfrog is the only movement mutation in the game that buffs a non-focus combat stat.
• Faster movement speed. This bonus is really noticeable, especially when you're making several queued movements. You're a real speedy Gonzalez on the ground, which just generally makes everything you do a bit faster. Also great if you're tanking, because you need to arrive to the fight before everyone else in your party does anyway.
• Ability to leap over several tiles. Aside from being able to go up and down climbs, you can also leap <x> to leap in a direction, which will send you flying at extreme speed between 2-5 tiles in that direction. You'll move so fast that it's almost a teleport, and anything in the interim tiles will have no chance to aggro you. Hard to predict, but useful in lots of weird, creative situations and also very fun; you can sail right over nullianac packs and outspeed the necropolis train, among other things. This ability is super quirky and rewards experimentation, but remember to bring heals for the inevitable head-bopping accidents.
• Requires no focus. Every other movement mutation in the game requires at least a little focus to get going. Leapfrog requires only Reflexes, which the vast majority of builds have loads of, and the Flight upgrade also requires no focus. This is obviously really nice for builds that aren't going to have a strong focus stat.
• You get a soda safeword. If a soda machine falls on top of your dumb ass, you can leap out from under it. Hooray.

Disadvantages

• Leap isn't foolproof. It is possible to fail a leap up or down a climb. Leap is a Reflexes roll, and most sane builds max reflexes anyway so that's okay, but there is always a small chance of failure. If you do fail, you'll take a bit of damage -- or sometimes quite a lot of damage!
• Leap isn't idiot-proof. The game will trust you to not be dumb when leaping. If you abuse that trust, you're the one who will suffer. If you try to leap in a direction where there simply isn't an exit (i.e. straight into a wall) or do something similarly stupid, you'll take a bunch of damage to the head.
• You can't leap really big climbs. The bigger the leap, the harder the Reflexes roll, and some rolls are pretty much impossible with the amount of Reflexes a player can get. The Stormfront Island and borehole climbs, for instance, are an instant death if you try to leap down them.
• Negative beat soak. -1-3 beat isn't huge, but it's still significant, especially if you're taking on tougher mobs or players who rely on beat damage. High Density or Yeti Fur cancel this out really effectively, and the latter synergizes really well with Leapfrog's upgrade mutation, Flight.
• Negative broken bone resistances. Again, even though the penalty is only 30%, it's still punishing when going up against a beat-dealing opponent. On the plus side, you get a huge buff to your broken leg resistance, which is probably the most crippling limb to break.
• Can't take Lithodermis. Litho is a really strong mutation for some builds that boasts a ton of great resistances and good soaks. Froggers are locked out of all that.
• Doesn't buff focus. Unlike Clairvoyance, Medium and Phaser, frog contributes nothing to your focus stat at all. This makes it a less helpful choice for elf magic builds that want to hit strong focus totals.