I need to hop on and test the changes but I disagree with the staff attack speed change. It's easier and more effective to kite with low attack speed + high damage than vice versa. I say this as an almost exclusively PvE player and someone who has played a lot of games like mobas where said kiting is common (and some of them even have slow turn rates to make it harder)

What I definitely would've wanted is lower base windup and higher base cooldown/wind down (hopefully those are separate, ye? :p) for slightly lower damage instead of lower both for moderately lowered damage

I think instead bandages and remedies should be made unviable in the middle of combat and then increase health regen per con. Change them to be a heal over time that disabled upon taking damage from a direct hit.

• It has no thematic or flavour purpose being used in the middle of a fight
• If too powerful, it has the potential to ruin build diversity by giving an advantage to high memory point cost abilities
• There is no strategic use of them, the optimal strategy is to use them off cooldown and make sure you have a lot of them (this will be easy once large cities become common)
• Because of this, they add to the amount of required repeated inputs (that are unnecessary due to having no effect on strategy) a new player has to keep track of, and another required item for them to keep in mind.
• Too high healing in high level pvp was already a problem and they had to nerf minor heal. This is literally the same thing except it costs 0 memory points or investing into int.

I just found and supported you on the map, let's goo

I tried the staff changes and it definitely is much easier to kite with staff alone. But much harder to do so alongside firebolt and similar abilities.

Please revert the changes and add a buffer to the end of animations to cast the next ability or move after instead of cancelling the current action, it's really difficult already when the game drops inputs out of nowhere (like standing still trying to healing wave and nothing else). These changes are just making me consider becoming an archer or pure staff damage mage.

In general, this game is lacking un interruptible end frames and it means needing impossible frame perfect timing sometimes.

Also add a very small attack timer bar so players know when their next attack is ready

@GamerSeuss then there's no point in being evil then other than trolling people and RPing without giving progression alongside PvE. It should be that killing an actually experienced player has good results and attacking someone helpless means next to nothing.

Make it punishing and rewarding so people actually do it for a reason, instead of making it a function purely to frustrate PvE players for the small percentage of people who want to disadvantage themselves to annoy others. Or remove it entirely, I don't care honestly.

And PvP isn't an "easy way to bypass the rest of the game", it's literally the hardest part of almost every game by far

Also please address out of combat map movement and mobility! People took blink as a bandaid, simply nerfing blink is a bad choice in my opinion since it lowers opportunities to gain terrain advantages in fights, and it just re-added the problem of ledges being annoying

One of my last posts a while back had some suggestions but in short: I'm of the opinion that ledges should slow down, not act as walls. Climbing should be an option.

(https://forum.fracturedmmo.com/topic/13945/removing-relocate-and-battle-jump-s-ability-to-traverse-cliffs-is-a-mistake-in-the-long-term/2?_=1626582787267)

@Prometheus said in Roadmap To Fall Alpha 2021:

@Hathos said in Roadmap To Fall Alpha 2021:

If neutral is better than evil in almost every way, what is the incentive to be evil? The one thing we can do over neutral is kill good players, but as mentioned, they drop the least amount of gear and will probably be the least encountered in the world. I feel that you have to have pros and cons for each, making them evil as possible. The way I see it, neutral and good have mostly pros where evil is now mostly cons.

Hi Hathos We actually don't want to make the alignments "balanced" on Syndesia. Neutral is more rewarding than Good, because it's more dangerous, and we want most of the population be one of the two. Evil is the very hard path you take if you want to be a PK, which allows you to kill random merchants trading around the world for instance, or players gathering resources. You can make a huge profit there, but the punishment is indeed equally huge, because we want as few players as possible to take that route.

@grofire said in Roadmap To Fall Alpha 2021:

and i think its very good you guys added the changes, but i do not think its enough, its still feel like you will not make changes in your gear frequently, nor that you would not want to work hard for getting something that will help your gear.

We'll see, it should be quite different now. Come back in the next test and let us know how it feels!

@Logain said in Roadmap To Fall Alpha 2021:

Interesting update, thank you, I'm looking forward to participating in the test.
Do you think that the 'interaction limitation between evil characters and cities' is really going to be a hindrance? The only 'annoying' part I could see in that is not accessing the tavern, the rest is easily mitigated through smurf accounts.

As for adding neutral to the mix, it seems like this is basically altering the 'beginner protection timer' to people being able to determine when they want to engage in 'complete gameplay'. Is there still going to be a 'beginner protection timer' and what happens if you choose to go neutral before it ran out?

Can 'evil players' not simply 'camp the vicinity of busy city hubs' instead of PoIs to get players who're returning from the 'random events'?

It's actually mitigated by creating alts, you don't need separate accounts. The purpose of the change is not to exclude Evil players from crafting etc, but to prevent them from easily banking the loot they've just stolen and such

The Young status is still around and you can't change alignment if you're in it, you need to renounce it to go Neutral.

Evil players can camp city hubs, sure, but there are a ton of cities in the world, they are easy to guard, and so on. We may even expand the protection area a little to make it hard to just "camp" exits.

@Meziljin said in Roadmap To Fall Alpha 2021:

I see no mention about cities and how they worked into spring alpha...

I don't think all accepted and are agree about the resources management (free access to all).

I hope there will be a tweak about this point

There will be, but we're not sure we'll have time to implement it before the next test

There's a certain realistic aspect of this I like, but I think it needs a bit of work.
Being evil has its advantages and very huge disadvantages but the advantages sort of need to be sharpened a bit

The main advantage of being evil is of course, profit, and bypassing progression by taking it from others.

I think the evil alignment itself is actually really well made, but the systems that apply to everyone inherently make it harder to pull off.

This is what I think should be done to fix it, these changes apply to all alignments as inherently neutral actions (or only evil if done to non-evil):

1. Add the ability to size up players and gauge their general state. This includes:

   • general speed description relative to your own (Similar speed, slower, faster)
   • general encumbrance (carrying a lot, travelling light), possibly even general traits of the items (something metallic clanks when he walks, or there is a glimmer from his pack)
   • Highest physical stats (he's faster than he is strong, he looks like he can take a hit, etc)

   this allows evil players (and bounty hunters, and simps who want to be a sidekick for easier progression) to pick their targets well, and incentivises not just killing random low wealth players and noobs (who have similar power levels due to the flatter, horizontal scaling of this game and pose a risk regardless)

2. PVP is faster than PVE when doing progression. This one is easy and difficult to mess up, but killing a player, taking their loot, and using it for yourself should be faster than grinding mobs and mining metals to turn into armor. Just keep this balance in mind and avoid unrealistically long fights, favour quick and decisive fights as the default to balance around.

3. PKs and possibly even duels (at half benefit given to both players) give knowledge points and progress towards new abilities faster than mobbing. Not special pvp only points, but rather it should copy some of the killed player's most recent gains (or perhaps looting bodies of their crafting drops such as raw leather gives knowledge points based on what enemy drops said items?) and remove the need to pve alongside them (since evil playstyle allows less opportunities to farm in peace as many good players can attack them with no downside, their main activities will be stalking lone neutral/good players and hiding). This one I think is one of the most important since it will make tartaros less miserable and more exciting for pvp only players

I think instead bandages and remedies should be made unviable in the middle of combat and then increase health regen per con. Change them to be a heal over time that disabled upon taking damage from a direct hit.

• It has no thematic or flavour purpose being used in the middle of a fight
• If too powerful, it has the potential to ruin build diversity by giving an advantage to high memory point cost abilities
• There is no strategic use of them, the optimal strategy is to use them off cooldown and make sure you have a lot of them (this will be easy once large cities become common)
• Because of this, they add to the amount of required repeated inputs (that are unnecessary due to having no effect on strategy) a new player has to keep track of, and another required item for them to keep in mind.
• Too high healing in high level pvp was already a problem and they had to nerf minor heal. This is literally the same thing except it costs 0 memory points or investing into int.

@yneternum you say the list I provided was too powerful then turn around and describe how the current list has the best spells in the game

@spoletta one of each cast should clear most weaker mobs and teach mana management at the same time, or relying on staff as backup single target damage

yeah starting mage skills are either weak or really really hard to use without messing up in some way. The shotgun ice spike + spam minor heal playstyle is really the strongest but doesn't play like a mage at all. I think they should be changed to the following to be much easier and suit the mage playstyle and theme better:

firebolt -> shocking lash
ice spikes -> fireball
poison -> tectonic outburst
minor healing -> word of power: healing

mind you, fractured progression should be horizontal so don't tell me this is "too powerful" because the answer would be to nerf the abilities themselves.

@Prometheus haha true, I knew for a fact that lag was playing a huge part in my frustration.

I think it's important for MMOs to have lots of servers, but not to the same level as MOBAs, instead MMOs should focus on making latency as little of an issue as possible (especially since MMOs suffer more from splitting up player bases and naturally will get high latency with large raids even if all players are in the same country as the server)

at the very least I wish the game client differentiated an animation cancel from a non-cancel action, so if the input to cast ability A was sent late to servers, then I timed ability B to cast at the end of ability A animation on my screen and it sent on time, it wouldn't interpret my A-B inputs as A-cancel-B but rather A-wait-B

I tried the staff changes and it definitely is much easier to kite with staff alone. But much harder to do so alongside firebolt and similar abilities.

Please revert the changes and add a buffer to the end of animations to cast the next ability or move after instead of cancelling the current action, it's really difficult already when the game drops inputs out of nowhere (like standing still trying to healing wave and nothing else). These changes are just making me consider becoming an archer or pure staff damage mage.

In general, this game is lacking un interruptible end frames and it means needing impossible frame perfect timing sometimes.

Also add a very small attack timer bar so players know when their next attack is ready

So a bit of background, I bought fractured almost entirely because of the idea of a game where both pve and pvp combat are dynamic and require strategizing to defeat even the most basic mobs, something that's common in the souls-like genre but mostly unheard of in top-down/isometric games

When I first heard of relocate, I thought crossing cliffs and other terrain was an intentional and part of the above design philosophy. Obviously I was upset when it was removed but knew in its current state was OP both in and out of combat.

Where I disagreed was nerfing relocate instead of buffing the baseline options, and I hope that's what's planned for release/beta and this change is only temporary, but I'm not sure.

This is what I suggest for the next alpha to fix relocate, make both pvp and pve more exciting, and make the world navigation more interesting:

• Instead of impassible and flat terrain, change it to four levels based on the angle from the ground:
  • flat (0-20)
  • inclined (20-45)
  • steep (45-65)
  • impassible (65-90)
• inclined and steep terrain can be walked through, but they nerf dex based stats (evasion, attack and movement speed) by a base amount that is then reduced based on str (so high str low dex characters almost ignore terrain, while low str high dex characters want to circumvent them or remain in stealth while passing them.)
• inclined and steep terrain have different animations (similar to the difference between walking up stairs and climbing a ladder) and the penalties are doubled for steep terrain.
• blinks and jumps ignore all but impassible terrain
• being knocked to the ground (or killed) on an incline or being stunned or ensnared on steep terrain moves your body to the bottom and the time spent moving does not count down their duration
• ranged attacks are easier from above steep terrain while melee attacks are easier above an incline
• implement certain skills that interact with terrain like hookshots from pirates; they pull enemies closer to you, by a long distance if it pulls the enemy into steep terrain, but being easier to hit if above them by steep terrain for less movement

This would be a great first step in making fractured more dynamic than it currently is in combat, and out of combat it raises interesting questions on what route is faster and what route is safer (do pvpers/bandits block the flat roads where wagon-goers will bottleneck to? Or do they wait atop steep cliffs for stray travellers? it also makes stealth scouts valuable for large groups then)

Also, please mark roads and impassible terrain more clearly in the maps, the gray and green really blend together when I'm not focusing on them

Edit: Something that might be cool would be to add the above hook skill, and let it target allies as well. So a designated 'guide' can speed up travel with low dex/str characters by climbing quickly then pulling their allies up