Posts made by OlivePit

If you want special effect arrows why not just treat it like poison is treated now?
Create a consumable item, when applied to a bow it gives X charges and for that time the bow is shooting something special.

Inspire boosts evasion and fortitude, and gives immunity to fear.

also is a counter.
as is

There are ways to use your stats / skills / equipment to nullify and ignore CC. Just because you choose to not use them does not mean they do not exist and that CC needs to be removed or changed.

It is unfortunate that population is low, in that it is difficult to build a team that can cover all the possible weaknesses of any particular build. but that does not justify the call to making the game such that there is no challange.

If you take the time to observe the enemy, figure out its weaknesses, abilities, and then ways to counter them (or just look at the wiki) you can totally build a char that can solo the targeted mob with no problem. This is shown in ppl like Rife, Ace, Bullen, etc etc etc..

Do as they do and figure it out, or work together with a group, it is totally doable.

also no shield block skill. it was op.

Had the same problem at Zenith the past few tests.
Again in this test.

I suspect it may have something to do with overlaping mob spawn areas?
Last time it was also not working near a black widow spawn point.

all this.
And the fact that channeling abilities are simply not worth it and are basically 'kill me now' advertisements.

Having players the guided opportunity to enchant and socket a chipped gem should be not a big deal to add into the tutorial >.>

choosing to not use any of the defensive abilities to avoid or reduce CC is up to you.
There are consequences.
As there would be for choosing to fight a mob with no armor, no weapons, no stats...

These last few days the game seems to be totally dead.
This might be a great time to go and farm mobs for those rare mats !
But I just cant get the motivation to do even uncontested mob farming due to the knowledge that the drop rates are so low that even 2 hours don't get me many -or any- of the drop I am looking for.
At which point that time just feels totally wasted. At which point why even bother?
and that is a big problem with some RNG systems.
TTTTTTTTTHTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT is just as probable as HTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHT
But when you are on the receiving end of 'bad luck' the consolation that it is still holding to true probability is of no comfort at all.
The perception and expectation of some fairness is always going to sneak in and cause problems.
That 5% drop rate is for the server as a whole, not for you, and calculated on each kill, not for all of that mob type on spawn. Such that even if I kill -all- the mountain trolls spawned on the map, probability says that none will have the drop. And that is an ok expectation?
There needs to be some connection between expended effort and expected reward. If not then the system is demoralizing and arbitrary to the point of ambivalence to the whole system.

@spoletta
HEh, i totally forgot that this has been argued over before and still we have no response from devs.

very sad.

Thanks for the link and reminder.

Devs need to listen !
We keep talking about this !
https://forum.fracturedmmo.com/topic/15259/a-rant-on-crafting-and-market-economy-problems/4

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?

You mean the two Dev made cities that players can choose to start in?
I would argue that since we have the tutorial island and the fact that within 24hours of a server start there will be towns up to service players, there is no need for these Dev made 'starter' towns to have anything but a bank for players to have as their one truly safe place to store stuff and access to the global wallet.
Allowing tax free crafting should be a marketing tool to differentiate between player built cities, not the expected norm handout.
I am sure that there will always be a number of towns which will choose to do this and as such the starting Dev made towns quickly become redundant, inefficient, and empty.

wait... so advanced smelters and the alloy tech does not allow for alloy making in the forge? just reduction of time and fuel? double ouch.

I am sure that the number should be different.

Crafting fees and taxes were always needed, if just to help the town to recoup something off of their investment and to help pay for their ranking up.
The amount of grind for mastery is a bit ridiculous, and adding gp to that process is kind of insulting. I would hope to see less grind for the mastery process and armor/weapon production in general to compensate for this additional cost.
The main problem behind insufficiant gold sinks can be tied to low population, low activity, and low drop rates such that everyone mostly keeps what they get or puts them up for astronomic prices. Higher drop rates would encourage more of them going onto the market for lower prices and then the market transaction fee and tax (which we are still waiting for) could make a nice impact on the gold sink issue.
The high cost and risk of crafting expensive equipment for public sale also decreases opportunities for this kind of gold sink.
I may want a leather rogue armor set, but if the one on sale is not of the material I want for my build then I will not buy it... which means the crafter may have wasted the expensive reagents. This results in the offers of "making XYZ with your mats" which has far less risk and cost, but cannot be part of the gold sink system.
I will plug -again- how imbued gems would make perfect items for markets and gold sink opportunities as it costs gold to socket them and are much more convenient to buy/sell on the market in comparison to reagents.
A proper environment of crop scarcity with 3 crops would also encourage market and harbor use and all the gold sinks possible there... so get to that.

The change to land claims and carts is very very much appreciated as is the harbor immunity ! Being able to use harbors and not discover myself dead on the far side is quite a relief.

Umm... 100% crit chance out of stealth + up to 170% crit damage + concussive strike = one hit kill >.>
Is that intentional?

@Rife said in Mage abilities and equipment needs a change:

I'm with Spoletta on this one - where I believe unarmed as well should have a "weapon" which can be cloth wraps or gloves or something similar.

I am not Spoletta XD

Sorry, yes, Vice governor is the term... Lt gov is another short hand equivilent.

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.

In the current system farming is necessary for city ranking and upkeep.

Frankly it is extremely easy to do this what with only having to worry about 2 crops and having 60 free fields outside of (most) towns. Alone it takes at most an hour a day for watering, harvesting, and rotation of these fields. I know, I have done it every test the last 4 tests and am doing it currently in Zenith. Yes you have to up this time commitment if you plant rice, but lets leave that aside. As long as there are no outside influences, and you dedicate the time, then there is no problem.

Introduce the outside influences - citizens.

Cities -require- citizens for them to exist. Both a minimum of 20 or face de-ranking and practically for placing houses in town to up the prestige of the town to then rank up. Because houses outside of town don't count, duplicate city buildings don't count, and even some city buildings just don't count... which is totally sustainable and reasonable what with everyone only getting 1 plot per account -sarcasm-.

Citizens get full access to the crafting facilities inside of town and at a seperate tax rate than residents or transients. This is great and a good incentive to join a town in of itself. They are also allowed to buy a plot in town at a special rate with no rent, also good hurrah hurrah.

But then we get into the marsh.

Citizens get access to all chests/smelters/tanning tubs/ and fields. And this is where the trust problems come in.
Ever since city population requirements went from 5 to 20 there has been the required need to make unknown people citizens, just to make things possible. And ever since then there have been people who steal from chests, replace -your- tanning warg hide for -their- animal hide, and replace the wheat growing with cotton (cuz they want cotton armor and this is the only way to get it).

The consequences of this theft and undermining activity have been felt by just about every group. Bussy infiltrated multiple towns and stole grain, opportunists take city resources and sell them in the market for personal profit, crops that are hours away from harvest get replaced thus wasting -days- and causing a town to loose ranks. We have been begging for activity logs for these stations in order to help separate the good people from the asses. It seems this will never come.

Instead I propose that access to these very sensitive and necessary functions of towns be limited to the lieutenant governors.

This way cities can be more generous with their recruitment, creating bigger and better communities, while also being secure in their huge investments. It is much simpler and more reasonable to scrutinize 5 than 25. By removing the temptation the environment will also be more pleasant. By raising the bar it makes the successful infiltration and betrayal all the more satisfying for those who are motivated by that stuff.

Thoughts?