Best posts made by OlivePit

@Farlander
Why not just encourage other players who like trading to do so by giving them your excess in exchange for a cut?
Or even better, have them be part of your guild and have the resources be divided to those who need it with excess getting traded by the players that like to do that? That way when you need a reagent or material it might be on hand as another guild mate donated it, or you just add it to the 'want' list and when the traders make their rounds to the neighboring markets, they keep an eye out for that material and get it for you.
Trading is an aspect of games that is valued and enjoyed by many players - see any truck driver simulator concept or econ trading sim-
It is simpler and healthier for the game to allow these players to have their fun and provide their support than to create whole AI systems to cut them out.
Bonus- because the markets are not linked and require physical presence to place or collect orders, and items take up limited space, there is little concern of some one manipulating the markets for their homogentisic and capitalistic ends.

Talents before provided players with far too much sustain and tank abilities which turned most combats into long drawn out slug fests or quick burst boom events.
I agree with the devs that this is not the desired play situation.
Moving these sustain and tank abilities to equipment is a good move in my opinion as it requires more investment of time, money, materials, for an 'end game' build. While before the equipment was cheep and the build mostly relied on tallents which were free to move once acquired and never lost.
There are also many missing pieces in the talent tree and list of abilities along with more resources for crafting equipment. We only have part of the picture.
There are still many pieces of equipment and materials which give stat bonusses. You may just not be looking at all the options.
The imbuing process does have limitations as there is not any direct damage increase that I am aware of. But this is ok as one of the issues was the ease and quickness melee, and with more work mages, could get to damage cap. This is put off by the enchanting method whos cost and bonusses may be adjusted later per testing results.
The flat progression works fine, at any state there exist challenging mobs to fight and at the top end there is city vs city pvp via Sieges. All of which is gated horizontally by gear, not verticaly by talent points.
The point of the cities is to encourage group play. Switching to individual tech would defeat this and thus will not be done. I support the devs in this decision.

To your unique build challenge I am currently playing a mage who uses staves and abilities which can crit along with a high perception and crit chance, thus a mage archer thing.

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

There is a good bit of land scape and enviroment variability. You just have to travel there.
The small stones problem is partially enviromental. Go to the Creeping or whispering woods and they are littered everywhere, while they are less prevelant in other areas. Just as certain trees / plants / animals / mobs / ores are regional.

Developing the habit of carryig 10 stones and picking them up when you see them generally fixes the issue.

Having low strength definatly makes this harder ! but that is all part of the stat and equipment/ talent choices which have consequences mentality of the game. As the tank I would carry 20 stones for the party of 4 to compensate for the weaker allies.. Again, the game is group oriented highlighting how diversity of allies is valuble.

As a past solo mage I feel the pain, but even back then was able to keep 10 stones on me when adventuring... I just didant get to keep as much loot as everyone else XD.

The cliffs are very intentional. Probably to guide player movement to make it more predictable for other players to set up ambushes - like bandits- and further encourage group actions for defense and offense. We had a teleport spell that you could use to go over mountains... it was patched fast, repeatedly, and hard. You can still go up and down some of the cliffs if you know the trick, but is a hassle.

Right click attacks are your friend.

There is a modest amount of player support from players via the wiki and the forum. We were hoping that Gamigo would pick up the work and make it all shiny and nice... they have not yet... Mostly people are unwilling to look, which is sad.

Have un-imbued gems give some basic mild bonus?
I did not test imbuing this alpha weekend as I usually rely on my guild to collect the mats as byproducts of hunting trips. I dont remember it costing 500 for a chipped tier 1 imbue, if that is true then it is too much. 100 at most. Giving players one as part of the tutorial should not even be a big deal as their first weapon / gear will be replaced within 24 hours once they kill some animals with better skins (dire wolf / warg).

I dont think that the gems need to be more common, I got plenty from just mining ore. If I had wanted more I would have put up a buy order for them at 5-10 gold each (chipped) and would expect it to be filled by people who get them and would rather have the gold.

The problem would be locking players out of the starting town imbuing table after the tutorial is over... and making sure they can only use it for one enchantment... Tricky...

Hot bar ballance is a hot topic that has been discussed at great length and heavily tied with the ballance between items that replicate skills but do not require the effort of hunting the mob for the skill, and spending knowledge points for the skill.
There is talk about there being more consumables as part of the 'alchemy' system that is not yet implimented which just increases the debate.
The devs have never weighed in on the discussion. As such it is unlikely to change.

A picture to go into the beast book would be nice.

The cliffs and terrain funneling are absolutely intended. The best guess is to make player ambushes possible which would also encourage traveling in groups. There are paths up and down the cliffs that are minor changes in texture and take time to get used to. The windy maze into the bone yard, ogre city, and bandit layer are also absolutely intended and will be kept. Plan on gearing up, gathering friends, having plenty of consumables and moving as group when going after big targets like dragon. I got lost three times trying to find the path to him two alphas ago but finally figuring it out was worth it.

Camera zoom is likely tied to wanting to keep ranged combat characters from having too much of an advantage. I and others have argued that the zoom means that any character is always just a step and hop away from melee which greatly gives advantage to melee players. The apparent response is that we should be moving in groups deliberately with melee in the front and ranged behind them. Rogue stealth ability helps a lot by the way.

There is a fair amount of diversity in the regions but can be hard to see until you go through each and discover the resource variety of each. Some small stones are common, others have no flax plants at all, some have purple mists, some verdant growth, some heavily restrictive hilly bits. It is there but hard to notice in this short test.

They have armor skins advertised already, same with furniture (dont know about functional tho).

There are lots of places where a player could set up an atmospheric hunting lodge or witch hut (with building skins) already in the game. The brown squares in the picture are such places:

With higher player count more of these spots will be occupied and could be used for that.

Mounted combat would be totally OP and yet another unbalancing factor in favor of heavy armor melee who already have the most advantages in the human world... at one point in time your characters movement speed was tied to your dex, there were players that could move faster than horses. It was totally removed. As such I do not expect to see it come back at all.

The crafting discrepancy is intended to create diversity and trade incentives.
Each town gets 1-2 research points per rank, you have to research all the lower connected technologies to get access to something. Here is a much reduced example of a town tech tree:

As you can see it is expensive and time consuming to build up and there are far more techs available than can be gotten by one town. As such each governor has hard choices to make and know that they cannot please everyone, and often not even themselves. This promotes trade and the creation of multiple specialized cities.

Health regen scales with con as do the bandages. There are hints at further 'alchemy' consumables. There are multiple pieces of equipment and talents that help in this as well. As with everything in this game you make compromises and work with them while using gear and/or allies to cover your weak points. You should not expect to be able to tank, dps, and CC all at the same time with one character.

The terrain is absolutely intentional. There are texture cues on the cliffs that show where one can go up or down them. It takes time to spot them but become second nature over time. For everyone else there are the clear brown paths visible on even the world map.

Mages have burst, Archers have sustain. Archers also are more likely to get crits.

The mages heal is a constant gripe I share and ties to the over powered nature of bandages as a comparison. In any case this is not a heal tanking game, more of a careful squad based game. There are much better heals out there, you just have to work for them.

For houses be in the roped area and click the house icon that pops up.

There are imbued gems that increase the items durability by 100-300%.

The enchanting system is new and being tested/ballanced.
Before it was just the 'imbuing' system, but with no gems. Tons of complaints about the complexity and requirement to farm mats too high a barrier to use. So they made it easier for the players with a simple direct coin system.

Navagation is a learned skill. Play for a week and you notice the texture changes that indicate you can go up an area of cliff. This gives players a 'home turf' advantage as they know the area around their homes better and can use it to escape or ambush.
There was a teleport ability that you could use to go over cliffs, walls, mountains. It was crushed and stated that it would not happen. The navigation learning curve is totally intended.

There was two ore / stone per node, they reduced it. More noise and we might get it back to two.
Harvesting is not going to be for everyone, that is what gives life to market economies. I did a bunch of it and was happy to take peoples money for my labor and their lack of interest.

Wooden bo staves are very much like a 'channeling spear' as would be a rapier. They exist.

Animal leather is cheep and accessible, warg/dire wolf/ troll leather is not. I would never use the better leathers in place of the animal leather i can get from the ubiquitous wolf packs that plague the world. Maybe it is just a preference thing?
There is a similar complaint about needing linen weave to make bandages, why not cotton? Their answer there was that 'alchemy' would be using the higher tier stuff for better consumables.

getting on and off a horse or logging out and back in works for unstuck in most circumstances. Creating a mechanic that tracks player location all the time for a rewind, just for alpha/beta, is asking a bit much.

Many classes have no equivalent to the second wind skill at all, it is not a norm, but an exceptional thing. There are other charisma or int based healing skills that are useful, or the ubiquitous over powered bandage (no cast time, no animation interruption, can use on a horse, no mana cost, no knowledge point cost to learn, no memory point cost to memorize, etc...)

If they had cure KO health on the spot then that would greatly increase the amount of mob spawn camping and thus greatly reduce the availability of mob spawns to the rest of the game population. Forcing players to return to towns to learn skills, switch talents, and recover max hp is a good, and thematic, way to keep players moving. The other alternative is moving as a group for security and acting organized, which the developers are absolutely encouraging in a number of ways.

Gathering resources is not going to be for everyone. With higher population the markets will be there to give players who dont like to harvest a place to get what they want.

The limitation of the hot bar is absolutely intentional. It makes choices matter and creates variety of builds while encouraging group play.

Mana is a limited resource that needs to be carefully managed in this game. This is why there are metal armors, and imbued gems, that can increase it at the opportunity cost of not getting a different benefit. Choices matter, there are pros and cons to everything.

Players can steel carts, would you want them to be able to steal you horse at the same time? Also harvesting in pairs greatly reduces this 'inconvenience'

the restricted terrain is absolutely intended and have been repeatedly reinforced through the nerfing of abilities that used to bypass them.

Can increase durability of items with an imbued gem from 100-300%. it is there.
There is a thorough automated imbuing tool available here on the forums and linked in the wiki. They may put it into the game later.

Melee already have the highest armor, the highest sustained damage, the highest crowd control, the best self heal. sounds like you are getting greedy.

Friends lists would be nice as would party locations, and your last body, on the world map.

so something like this:
To claim a house plot, be in the roped area and click on the house button.

This is a cut down version of the town tech tree, each town rank only gives 1-2 research points, this town is rank 2 and spent it all on these three basic technologies. To get access to tanning tubs the town would need to be a minimum of rank 5 and invest 3 research points. To get mage apparel it would need to be minimum of rank 5 and invest 5 research points.

As such there are seriously hard decisions to make. Not possible to please everyone at any one, or even two, cities. Thus giving value to specialization, creating niches for inter town trade, and giving players reason to travel to different towns.

The area inside the blue lines are the territory of the town. (toggle on map view).
The red circles are places where people can claim plots and get access to that towns tech.

Ok, over the past numerous alpha tests we have had constantly shifting requirements for ranking up cities.
Prestige from buildings in town or out of town, number of citizens, number of residents, high food/gold costs, etc...
The goal behind these systems seems to be encouraging the inclusion of many people into a greater project and thus creating a community.
I greatly support this goal, but the methods of achieving it seem to have issues.
Some factors are logistical - you cant see who is taking what from where and so citizens steal = anti social and community behavior.
Some are informational- citizens/residents/visitors cant see the cities tech progression, and so have no idea what they are joining.
and there are plenty of other factors as well.

I would encourage people to post what systems they think are necessary for making towns locations for community building (the supposed goal) and how those systems would work.

Personally I feel that buildings built by residents should add to the cities prestige and use prestige as a gate for ranking up.
This would allow for cities to encourage residents to build houses and supply them with supplementary services in town, or to focus on prestige buildings in town instead which would allow residents to make manufacturing plots.
While this may encourage duplication of some buildings, that is a choice of the town to be monotonous and boring. It could also be moderated with minor balancing of building prestige being related to how much space it takes up.

What are other peoples thoughts?

Instead of using some new mechanic to deal with environmental conditions and stacks, new material properties which greatly reduce the options of playable equipment type, do what i suggested earlier and have stack decay tied to elemental resistance level. the higher your resistance the faster stacks decay.
This allows for elemental resistance enchantment to have a purpose. It allows players to wear whatever armor material they want and then compensate with enchantments/rings to adapt to the environment.

It prevents the awkward situation of having 80% cold damage reduction, but frozen into a brick since resistances have nothing to do with stacks. And for what reason?
Stacks already have a decay mechanic and we already have the damage reduction curve for resistances, just stick them together such that at a elemental resist of 50% your stacks decay 50% faster.
This would make it so some number of mages/elementals/severe weather would still have an effect on the player, but it could be moderately mitigated such that it is playable and maintains the ambiance.

Currently the only real option is to run with an ability sucking 10m/s to be totally immune to the entire system. at which point why even have it?. this is not an interactive play feature of the game. it is an arbitrary tax that only sucks fun and choice from the game.

Brining back gem imbuing, socketing, and unsocketing would also help the situation.
For a cost, say 1k per gem level?, you can remove a gem from your T3 arch mage gown and swap in a cold resist gem for your trip to Aerhen instead of having to craft and enchant a whole new set of armor.
It would allow for that lateral progression and flexibility that the game was championing and reduce -some- the new vertical progression grind we have now.

A warning showing up in your mail to warn you that your property is low on funds would be good.

Fractured -had- enchanting tiers for weapons/armor which directly increased the stats for them... but it was taken out for unknown reasons... Same with gem imbuing to an extent.

Bare handed skills and talents should not exist... they create the 'naked mage' problem all over again where ability/effect is not tied to equipment.
Switch that to fist wraps that require cloth and some reagent and problem solved. (cloth + cinder pearl = fire elemental fist weapon based on int... or cloth + ingots = brass knuckles for str/dex damage)

Ranged combat is quite a misnomer in this game with such a small field of view and so many movement / cc abilities.
As such why is the mage 'advantage' of range so heavily weighted even tho they can barely get 1 ability off before the ranged combat becomes melee?
Giving mages melee elemental weapon options (which their abilities could also work with) would allow them options and allow the devs to see more of the balance factors as people move from forced ranged mages to melee mages. (we are already a fair way into this what with the battlemage sets popularity)

We already have stances and toggle abilities like crippling strike, fire arrows, striking wounds... why not keep that methodology for other mage based abilities? Instead of fire bolt call it fire infusion ability, which is a toggle and modifies mage melee/range abilities with the fire bolt effect which modify or scale off of weapon damage just like crippling strike or fire arrows work with other classes? so take the base mage staff of 9int damage and the ability converts that to fire damage while adding 4int fire damage and stacks. Have this work more or less the same for all weapons (that channel) and then you can have flaming falchions / bows / staves / fists. If you -really- need to make people specialize their weapon for each ability then fine, that is an easy addition, but the base idea should work fine in each situation.

This is shown in the enchanting ability class and in this picture here:

As such why force mages into some special restrictive situation where they need to have abilities not based on weapons like everyone else?

A good example is the acid breath ability, it has a 3m range cone but roots you for 3 seconds. Meanwhile many melee attacks already have a cone attack just base in them - great sword has a 2m ranged cone attack for example. The acid breath ability could be more flexibly and usefully linked to weapon type and the AOE that they already affect in the same way that other weapon based abilities work with an activation cost and/or a cost per strike or per second. This would allow for far more interesting builds where one may weigh the options of having a lighter weapon for more attack speed and more stacks, or a larger weapon for greater aoe (quartersaff) or base damage (mace/wand?).
As is the acid breath ability is hugely restrictive, more cumbersome, and either under whelming when fighting mobile single targets or overwhelming when fighting static groups (corralled skeletons, stunned)

If it were an enchant ability enhancing base weapon then it would be more useful, flexible, and enjoyable.
Keeping the methodology that works and just giving mages more weapon choices with int damage would make all the difference.
Fist wraps for high speed single target melee (dagger), wands for small range aoe (sword), orbs for longer range but small aoe (spear), staves for big damage (hammer), quarterstaffs for big aoe.

From what I have seen, heard, and experienced all of the really big aoe mage spells and toggles (thunderstorm, cloak of elements, etc) are just so impractical, ineffective, costly, and restrictive that they are not used. As such the question of why they even exist comes up.

The processing time for mage equipment is also all over the place, imbalanced, and problematic.
Linen can be gotten anywhere and everywhere easily and rather quickly, while cotton can only be obtained through 2 days of farming multiple plots that could be used for food to upkeep or rank up cities, and other mob dropped materials are quite erratic in availability and time to harvest as well.
The value and cost of the materials are totally irregular and some how hardly representative in their corresponding qualities given in the equipment produced.
This is the one area where the t2 equipment tree got it right; use of other materials for crafting of the equipment to somewhat standardize the cost in time.

I agree with Spoletta and others that the tanning method should include reagents for the process.
I also agree/argue that the 4hr timer with fuel for one ingot is quite frustrating and taxing on work/life/game balance.
I would argue that cloth could also use some form of processing, call it magical imbuing if you like, which takes a reagent/fuel and time to be completed.
I argue that the 16 hour timer for tanning is best, and requiring some sort of fuel would also be good. Something comparable to coal/charcoal may be gatherable herbs and their enchantment potency. so you need to go out and harvest 60 total potency of herbs which could mean 4 stacks of 5 herbs each with 3 rank 1 enchantment qualities. Or you could use fewer materials of higher potency. This way there would be a use for all the low potency herbs out there while also balancing out the time factor.

In exchange give cloth armor -some- area of value.
One argument for why cloth armor is so cheep and easy to make is that it is tissue paper and practically worthless, while in contrast metal armor provides huge resistances as well as variety of bonuses to choose from.
I think that everyone would be happy with expensive cloth armor if it also had comparable stats, if in just different areas.
For example: plate armor has the best physical defenses, but no elemental defenses, leather has a good balance, and cloth has the best elemental defenses but no physical. or plate is best vs piercing, leather vs slashing, and cloth vs crushing.

As a final plug I would like to advocate for the return of imbued gems for adding qualities to weapons/armor/jewelry instead of the current system of imbuing each piece separately.

Just go back to the more restrictive gem imbuing and socketing system.
since you could only imbue certain enchants on certain gems you had no real problem with unwanted enchantment overlap and in the rare case where there is overlap you have not permanatly damaged your equipment, just wasted a gem and the reagents.
Then you take the gems with the enchantments you want and put them into the equipment, thus getting what you want.
This would also create a market, and demand, for pre-enchanted gems made by crafters which people could buy and socket instead of having to go to all the extra busy work and RNG of enchanting a piece of equipment.

This is a rant, not an edited work.

The system as is does not work.

Item durability is so high they never get replaced, no replacement means no market activity, no resource drain, no reason to harvest resources.

Recipe and other resource drops are so random and rare that getting what you need could never happen or cost obscene amounts of money (if anyone has any spare to sell) and once you do get the set then you never have a reason to hunt for or buy recipes again. This also reduces desire to farm resources... why do it if the chance of getting it is vanishingly small?

An argumet that was put forward to justify this was that the cost to enchant and make the equipment is so high that if it did not last a long time then it would not be worth while...
Then just reduce the cost to enchant and make the items.
If you really want to reduce the avalibility of the items then it is much better to have limited use recipes than high cost materials.

It wont matter if the market is flooded by cheep dragon souls if you can only make 5 pieces of equipment per recipe you find/buy.

This same restriction is inherent on enchanting if you keep the current drop rate of gems and use the imbuing system... the enchanting resouces may be plentiful, but the restriction on the gems keeps the rarity and value up. Using the imbuing system would also create a valued market resource as people are much more likely to buy the imbued gem they want then fiddling with enchanting each piece of equipment.

Also, if you wanted imbuing to be a bigger resource sink, make them like poison is on weapons. Socketing an item with a gem gives it a counter for how long the imbued effect will last. You could do a timer or charges (times hit?).

If the resources to make the item are cheep then it also encourages merchants to use their recipes to make quality items with their limited recipe uses. This means less basic leather / linnen/ copper crappy tiems for sale in the market and more usefull items that people will actually buy because they are good.

Making the bottleneck the recipes means that players can farm whatever mobs they like for other reasons and have a chance of getting a recipe which they can either use or sell.
With the bottleneck being crafting materials (like death crystals) you can spend all your time farming mobs you already have at 100% just waiting for that 5% chance to drop, which dose little good for you and makes the mob unavalible for others who may need the kp and skills.
Anything that promotes market activity is something that contributes to the resource drain of the economy which allows you to see where there may be economic and market problem areas which might need buffs or nerfs to obtain ballance. No or low market activity means no data to work with.

Items need value and cost. Value measured in demand and use, cost measured in time to obtain (at this time measured as 6k/hr average).
Right now not all things have this and itis the responsibility of the devs to ballance the economy so that everything does by manipulating sinks, supplies, and bottlenecks.
Right now food has little to no value. The sinks are vanishingly small compared to the surplus that can be created such that they cannot justify their cost in time from watering, harvesting, bagging, transporting which would suggest about 1k/bag.

Wood weapons -should- have no value since they are also very easy to obtain and make, but they still carry moderate value simply based on convience of buying the item of the material you want instead of going to the hassle of harvesting and transporting that material. This is the effect of convenience, not of recipes, as once one bow recipe is found it is easy to flood the market with the product and as soon as there are two recipes found there is market competition to drive the prices down to their practical cost. If their durability was lower, causing need for regular replacement, this would be the ideal situation; lots of production, lots of demand, and value held primarily by convience of material avalibility not scarcity. If you introduced limited use recipies as a bottleneck then you could create artificial scarcity while at the same time increasing overall mob hunting in order to keep up supply of recipies which is far more sustainable than specific mob harvesting for specific rare drops.

Right now Gold has no value as what you can get for it is entirely restricted by the avalibility of the drops. It dosent matter how much gold you have if will stones are so rare that everyone keeps them for themselves. The market price and value of an item cannot be negociated when the item is not avalible in sufficiant quantities to make trading practical.

If I cannot reliably get what I need with gold then I will be spending time doing anti-social activities like pk'ing around the areas where the item does drop or going with a group to camp those areas thus denying the kp/skills and resources to any others. If the resource is rare enough then this may continue indefinately.

The whole idea behind gold/currency is that it can be traded for goods and services... but if the goods and services are rare then the currency is worthless. Just as you cant eat money in a famine, you cant make Mithral slayer armor with gold coins...

I would argue that mastery would be more valued if it increased enviromental resistances. A person would be much more willing to gind/buy an item they can use in more enviroments than one that they can only use in hot or cold enviroments.
Some durability increase is all well and good, but anything above 400 is just silly.

Thoughts?

I am certain that horses are not meant to be used to blatantly rush through mob camps, if they get caught then that is using the wrong thing for the wrong purpose.
Horses are fast travel tools in open lands.
If you want to ignore mob camps use stealth... that is what it is for.

oh, and your talents and stats do affect your horses resistances and effects.
Charisma tree, indominable, ignores first effect every 10 sec and improves resistance chance greatly.

@spoletta
the flattery is overwhelming.
I am most certainally -not- the most experienced tank in the game.
But they are not posting.
which -sadly- makes me defacto the most experienced since I am all people see ..

Spoletta, you are a patient persistent saint for having documented this problem so well.
The enchanting system is hugely important to the game and sadly has only been reduced over time.
I hope that your post increases awareness of the sad situation and that we get some variety back.
It would also be nice to see gem enchanting also come back with your other previous thoughts on that (t1 socket cost 100g, t2 1k, t3 2k?) because then the few of us that can and do enchanting can provide it as a pre-packaged service to the rest of the players who are thoroughly confused and/or frustrated by it.

could also have it so successful defense gives the defenders the money the attackers used to initiate the siege.
Since we do not drop equip in sieges any more and the defenders cant just collect that to use as trophies.

Unlearning the tech points for walls should reduce the durability of the walls. You are not paying for it so you should not get the extra benefit from it. Due to the one point per day unlearning of tech points a city can easily re-allocate points in the 3 day window before a siege into stone walls to get the hp increasing effect.
60 stones to take down a wood wall is good, but it should take -at least- 90 for a stone wall, if not a full 120.
This also assumes that catapults have object collision and people cannot hide in them and thus be un-targetable.
I have both attacked catapults and defended against an attack on my teams catapults and the hp seemed reasonable, what was unreasonable was the ability to hide in them -=AND=- the fact that lemming like behavior of suicide rushing the catapults over and over again was a valid tactic.... -WE NEED SOME EQUIPMENT LOSS- death needs some meaning, the war chests need to have their purpose restored (extra gear for the side as was the intent).
I have not been able to test it, but catapults should be deployable after the start of a siege. An attacker should be able to bring in X catapults and hold x-1 in mobile form in their tent as replacements should the ones they deploy earlier be destroyed. It will take extra resource commitment and time which seems appropriate and allows for the -possibility- of battle to continue after the first suicide rushes are able to kill a catapult.

As far as player abilities able to damage a wall... If players can attack from on top of the wall then I guess it would be ok for other players to try to use specific abilities (like the short ranged summon big stone above your head and smash it into ground thing) to damage walls.... but defenders -need- to be able to retaliate from the top of walls... which they cannot do.