I fervently disagree.
It is an ability just like the healing herbs and has huge advantages over other abilities as it is not restricted by mana, knowledge points, or having to farm monsters to learn how to make, and the bandages have a very low cool down. The only balancing mechanism is to require it to be in the hot bar and take up one of the 8 slots.

In playing this last alpha I and many others were happy to help numerious new players with their questions in general chat.
Of the many questions there were two that really could use some more help from the tutorial section; What a fleshing beam looks like and how to change the resource in the crafting station.
Here are my 'give me a sec' versions.

A tutorial for catching a horse would also be good as that was another very high frequency question. Really just giving the players a link to the video in which Prometheus shows us would go a long way to helping the new players.

Oh and something needs to change with chests and crop stacking...
A large chest has 45 slots. Grain/beans/meat stack to 100. So you can put 4500 into one chest. That is 225 bags.
Meanwhile a warehouse holds 192 bags.
So a single large chest can hold more (potential) bags of grain/beans/meat than a warehouse.

Any solo or small group can seek out a city with the tech they want and join it to get access to that tech by simply buying a residential plot outside of the city.
Valhalla, Duath, sproketon, were all large successfull cities made up of solo or small groups.
Right now there is no activity or player presence which is what you are runing into.

Valhalla was specifically created by a number of small groups who decided to join together into a larger group just for the purpouse of claiming a city for small groups like them.
They got one of the first 4? city spots on the map and by many scales, the best one for conducting pve activity in the shadow vale while also being very close to one of the starting locations.

I believe that the desire to make higher quality equipment rarer and more costly can be done without RGN and with more resource sink and player satisfaction.
The current system has 3 RNG levels for crafting.

Basic is 80fine/20good, and stays there for residents despite tech.

Craftmanship+ specialty shop:
80good/20 exceptional
This roughly means that every third item will be exceptional

Engineering + specialty shop:
40good/60 exceptional
This roughly means that every other item will be exceptional

All these odds are fine and appear fair.
But because of RNG it is entirely possible to have a run of 15 items with none being exceptional.
(I have experience with this from making hundreds of cotton cloth armor)
This is quite frustrating and produces lots of worthless unwanted good equipment which floods the market with little demand when exceptional goods are also available.

My suggestion is to switch from RNG to resource costs.
Instead of one craft button you have two.
One with the base resource costs that produces the lower quality option.
The other with twice (for the 40/60 ratio) or three times (for the 80/20 ratio) base resource cost that produces the higher quality option.

So with Engineering and a tailors shop you would have two buttons-
One that will cost 5 cotton cloth and produce a good quality cloth armor piece.
Another button that will cost 10 cotton cloth and produce a exceptional quality cloth armor piece.

This maintains the over all odds of getting a piece while increasing the resource sink but letting the crafter know what they will get instead of having them roll the dice to see if they are lucky or not.
This reduces the issue of crafting unwanted good items and prevents the market being flooded. In addition with a reliable way to get exceptional items it is more likely to see them for sale in the market instead of hoarded as rare event pieces.

This same base idea can be extended to enchanting.
In the enchanting case the first enchant on an item requires one of each reagent, the second requires two of each reagent, the third requires four of each.
Even if you keep the RNG odds of loosing an item the loss is quantifiable in its cost to replace without having to worry about more cumulative RNG gambling.

As of the last alpha pvp mostly happened in hot spots which covered about 20% of the map, so long as you did not go afk or go alone (best with 5 friends) in those zones you were safe from pvp (mobs still could spawn / wander into you if you were afk and kill you but that's another matter)
If you were pk'ed you lost your gear. With the exception of metal plate armor or highly enchanted armor this loss was a minor setback.
There was a 'sherif' presence in the game (good pvp'ers who could only pvp evil people) but not enough population in the server as a whole for a good idea how the ballance worked. Call outs in chat letting sheriffs know of a evil pvp group resulted in the evil players running away, or the sheriffs arriving and killing em, or no effect. (attributed to low server population IMHO)
I played the vast majority of the time solo and was able to gather all materials and get to 100% knowledge on all mobs while only getting pk'ed 3 times in the 45 ish days I played. And always at known hotspots.

TLDR- it is very doable at the moment but changes in population may affect that either way.

Looking at most of the builds posted and watching some videos of the playtests I noticed that pretty much without exception an Int of 16 if not 18 was used by all if just for the memorization points.
I also acknowledge that the magic abilities are the most varied and useful of all avalible in the game and a high int helps with that.
But I fear that Int has become a required stat, thus reducing the real options for players to customize their character. If all characters have high Int as the standard then something is unbalanced.
Thus if all the characters have high int then that means that any spells or effects resisted by high int will be less useful in game.
So you -have- to take a high int to be able to make useful hot bars and you -shouldn't- use many spells with status effects as they are easily resisted by the fact that -everyone- has high int.

If others feel the same way I would encourage the Devs to distance memory points from int and instead make them something you can buy with knowledge points, perhaps scaling cost too.
Best case people start with a few memory points but can buy up as they need and magical soft CC status effects are again effective against most of the population who are not mages.
Worst case some players have a huge number of memory points due to their grind and drive and are able to memorize all the abilities, but still can only switch them out when not in combat and still restricted by equipment. They no longer have to reset at fires but it cost them a lot of knowledge points.

In addition the main counter to a high strength and constitution fighter, would be magic statuses, but this dose not happen because even a melee fighter needs a high int for the memory points.

Charisma is also a potential sticky point as the words of power only effect those with lower charisma than you... and considering how effective the power words stun and kill were people may start seeing a high charisma as a necessary cost at player creation to protect against the power words.

Hopefully more abilities will come out giving players other ways to reduce the effect of magic CC or damage other than needing a high int or charisma.

I did not get to play in the last alpha and only have other peoples videos and the information in the forum to go off of, so let me know if I am way off on the reality of the situation.

I understand the concerns of naked griefers and mid-end game pvp.
But if you want to combat the naked griefer issue then just make mana directly connected to equipment and not stats. Give mage equipment, like, 200 mana per item, leather 100, chain 50, plate 25... or something. That way a naked player has no mana to cast spells with and is not an issue.

But this patch forgot about the players who click on the mage starter package and join in the game.
Before, the experience of starting a new mage lived up to the warning on the tin "medium". It was not easy to kill mobs and an errant ice spike might get the attention of two or three baby black widows and you would get knocked down, ok. Moving on to the goblin camp it was again hard, but not impossible to take on one goblin and maybe a wolf.

This is no longer the case.

And when comparing the struggles of playing a mage at start with playing a melee? It is obscene.

I am building a larger argument and comparison to illustrate how this patch caused more harm than it could have possibly alleviated in the realm of low to mid pvp and pve which is where all players get their first experiences and impressions of the game, not late game with full city tech, numerous unlocked abilities, 40+ talent points, and enchants.

The bottom line was gutted.

This is my opinion from personal experience trying a new mage in solo pve content, and from having a T3 kitted mage with T2 enchants and numerous talent points.

I admit that I may be in the minority... but believe that it is not the case.

I personally see no point in playing a mage when we are simply easy targets for any melee pvp player and emaciated pve farmers. We cant even jump down a cliff to run away.

I will go to melee until a patch comes to remedy the situation.

I have faith, for now, that the developers will correct this. I just hope it does not continue into the next alpha.

@Razvan
Thanks for all the input !
It is information like that I cant get just watching videos and looking at builds or the wiki.
I look forward to playing and seeing the free form class developments.

There is something like this in D&D online and it seems to separate players with the power creep making a bigger difference between starting players and 'end game' players making the environment not all that welcoming to new players.
The idea of having a relatively even playing field and low power distance is one of the main premises -and for me selling points- of Fractured.
Because of the low power distance here I can gift a friend equipment and they can start working on their skills and talents without a discouraging gap knowing that a max talent player is only going to have 2 more stat points in any given stat (10%-20% difference) and only up to twice as many secondary skill points (fortitude, willpower, etc) allowing them to easily quantify their progress and differences allowing them to look forward to grinding for a known bright future instead of feeling they -have to- grind in order to even participate in the game content.

We had the massive mage spell rebalancing because they had too little reliance on equipment, meaning the devs want there to be reliance on equipment (expendable resource) more than talents (renewable resource). As such It would seem that the devs want the tallent tree to be the flavor of a character (determined by talent tree end abilities and the neat things between trees) but equipment and enchanting to be the meat.

Could you be more specific as to the area of the game play that you feel needs more 'fine tuning' that is not possible with talents + enchants + material bonusses?

Well a patch did just come out for the launcher... so that is something !

@BECKFAST
Bodo is a deliberate, careful, and considerate person.
He did multiple draft checks with the guild before posting to make sure it would not be adversarial. He is worthy of the benefit of the doubt most get without a second thought.
We may disagree on points, but they are still good points.

@GamerSeuss
You could still give open access to the resources of a region once claimed, that way anyone could still go harvest them but they would be at a disadvantage to those who have invested in the region and have a shorter trip.

Note that there is nothing preventing a solo player from buying a house in a region and getting the same special access to a restricted node in my original proposition.

As always solo and small group players have the most freedom as they can just move between cities to get the benefits of the region and tech without doing any real work (building the town, feeding the town, ranking up the town, defending the town) other than paying the 4k for the plot.

I would love to see different colored canvases for the carts ! Like take cotton cloth, imbue it with reagents, and use to build a cart that is a different color !

How did you spend 2 hours? each box was limited to a max number of characters. -confused-

But any way...
One big suggestion and takeaway from this alpha was the need for node exclusion. If an ore/coal node is not in a -=Claimed=- territory then it should not be harvestable at all. This would encourage the spread of towns and increase reliance on trade instead of the 'why should I buy/trade for it when I can just go get it on my own'. I believe this was the standard case two alphas ago and while there were problems, lack of trading and resource scarcity was not one of them.

Please, please, finish the implementation of the 3rd city upkeep crop - vegetable/greens- without it we all are getting a incomplete picture of how city growth and management will be. If the current field count, 60 external, and fertility levels are balanced with 3 necessary crops then having us test the system with only 2 necessary crops implemented is just giving us false information and makes fertile territories useless in comparison to high ore concentration territories.

The "Raycasts" graphic may be blocked by your friend but the effect continues and does damage. This visual thing was present last alpha. Also watch out for bushes blocking shots as if they were trees or rocks.

Accessibility- The wads argument is long and continuous. The problem with animation canceling allowing higher attack rate is an example of something they didn't want to deal with and which wads would exasperate. They want to slow down combat and separate actions vs movement instead of allowing both at the same time. There are games that do this by locking down input channels during ability animation so you cannot move and act or interrupt an action... (note that right now you cannot interact with many things while in combat mode, if they were to extend that a bit more it may make wads movement possible but would greatly increase botting) but they have not gotten that figured out. I hope they do. Until then I just got an ergonomic mouse- yes my apm and accuracy was reduced, but only to the point that I represent more of an 'average' player which the game is built towards and not the twitch happy professionals.
You can already rebind action bars to different keys by the way...
I fail to see how clicking action bars is a must especially when many of the abilities are skill shots and that is the prefered mode of action backed by the devs saying that there never will be tab targeting or auto targeting.
Other quality of life changes are in the 'we hope and expect them to be dealt with down the line' category. This is alpha and is going to be messy.

I am sad to see the carry weight foolishness be finally patched, but it is good that was done !
Thanks for the bug fixes !

glad to hear it !

Again with a different field, this time inside town.

For some reason after this patch a portion of Zeniths outer fields got reduced to 100% fertility.