Best posts made by spoletta

This topic regards a low priority change. For the purpose of testing, the raids in their current shape are perfectly fine.
For release though I fear that they will not offer as many pvp activites as we currently hope, so I'm opening this discussion to analyze this aspect.

My point is, the raids are very fun activities and are going to represent one of the main attractions for pvp players on Syndesia (and who knows, maybe even other planets). They are also cheap and easy to declare. Winning a raid is a nice bonus for an attacker, while not being very crippling for a defender. In short, these will happen all over the place on a daily basis. And this is excellent.

My fear though is that once the power balance on the continents has set, "weak" guilds will not bother to fight the "strong" guilds, since the outcome is a given. You are only damaging your equip, so just hand the attacker his resources and keep playing. This will void many potential fun fights.
To avoid this, I believe that there should always be a purpose in defending, even if you know that your side is not going to win.

To pursue this, I think that we can burrow the same concept from the Conquest fights, so that most of the development can be reused. In Conquests, the defenders have multiple objectives to defend (3 lesser flags and one main flag), and the city loses loyalty based on how many objectives were taken down during the fight. Raids could use the same idea.
The resources gained by the attacker could be based on how many flags were taken down during the raid. So there is a difference between not defending, losing all flags and getting a crushing defeat which gives full loot to the attacker, or figthing back and obtaining a minor defeat were you protect some of your resources. This could take also attacker flags and lesser flags in consideration, with the final loot being based on the difference between flags taken down by defenders and flags taken down by attackers.

This provides a reason to always defend. No one likes games where one side ends up conceding, so even when a win cannot be achieved the defenders should have a reason to stay in the fight.

We are starting to have quite a lot of skills in the game, and the amount of builds which can be done is really benefitting from that.

The new imbues also have opened many more options.

Unfortunately there is one element left which is restricting possible builds by a lot. I'm talking about armor sets.

We currently have 2 light armor sets, 6 medium and 2 heavy.

This unfortunately isn't enough, especially cause most of them are very specialized in what they do, so you are usually left with very few options. This is especially true in pvp, where 90% of players are forced into battlemage armor, even if they don't use its bonus, due to a lack of real options. If these armors had more generic applications, there would be no need to add more sets, the existing ones would be more than enough.

I will go over each of them, and highlight why they work/don't work, and how they could be improved:

• Assassin armor: After the recent changes this is fine. It used to be a pvp only armor, due to the very long time it required to charge. Now that the bonus is smaller but much faster to charge, this is useful both in pvp and pve. It applies only to stealth builds. but considering that it is a light armor, this niche isn't that small.

• Scholar armor: This armor is mostly fine too. The bonus given isn't so huge to give issues in pve, and is achieved fast enough to be usable in pvp. It's pvp applications though are very limited, since the defenses are very low. The physical defenses can be covered with a mage armor, but the magical ones not. I would propose to increase the magical resistances of this set from 220 to 320. This would make it more usable in pvp, without impacting the real effect it has in pve. Right now mages are forced to run in battlemage, this would make it a choice between the better defenses of battlemage and the lower encumbrance, lower mana cost and bonus damage of Scholar.

In medium armors we have the hunter armor, the ranger armor, warlock armor, rogue armor, cleric armor and the battlemage armor.

• Hunter armor: This armor here has a specific purpose, which is to grind. It is pve only and not applicable to real pve challenges (legends). This is fine, but why not pair it with a bonus which is relevant only in pvp? This way you add an option to pvp builds without changing the overall power of the armor. A good bonus here would be increasing movement speed by 20% for 3 seconds after being hit. This is very marginally useful in pve, but very good for pretty much any build in pvp. It would make the hunter armor a generic purpose choice in case that you don't need the specific bonus of any of the other ones.

• Ranger armor: The ranger armor is again pve only, and honestly quite OP at that. Auto crits is a bit too strong of an effect, I fear that soon the DPS role during legend fights will become rangers only, with an acid mage and a knife fighter to lower the armor of the target. The bonus though is very slow to build up, and hard to maintain in a real fight. This means that this armor in pvp will never be used. At the same time, this armor exists for medium armor archers and that's it. A possible change here would be to make it applicable to all projectiles, not only bows. Have the stacks provide 10% bonus crit each stack, stackable up to 5. Each hit projectile adds one stack. Each missed projectile removes one stack. When you crit, reset the stacks. This is a net nerf to its PvE power, which is sorely needed, and makes it easier to manage in pvp. It also makes it an interesting choice for projectile based spellcasters.

• Cleric armor: Ultra specific armor set which has one and only one application. Making it harder to kill your party healer in a pvp fight. Zero reasons to use this in pve, and also not very interesting in pvp either. This armor could be extended in purpose to cover all support cases, not only healers, and to provide a supporting bonus to the party. In particular, using skills from the schools of leadership and restoration would provide one stack per tier of the skill to the user. Stacks disappear after 10 sec if not refreshed. The user grants to party members of bonus of 10 to fortitude/willpower/evasion per stack on him. Max 15 stacks. The bonus is doubled on the user. This way, the cleric armor gets used by support players both in pvp and in pve, and paladin builds may want to use this even in solo to leverage the good amount of bonus saves.

• Rogue armor: This armor has never found a practical application. In pvp the bonus is too difficult to exploit, and in pve it is technically very strong, but makes you burn mana too fast to be useful. This is partially because when it was introduced, many short cd combat skills did not have a mana cost. Now that they all do, this armor has lost its niche. Now, this armor should technically be the main armor for melee brawler builds. Its first issue is that the magical resistances are too low for it to be a melee armor. The magical resistance should go up to at least 280. The bonus set must be something good for brawlers, and I believe that a good bonus would be that when you are afflicted by a negative status effect, your next combat skill for the next 5 seconds cannot be dodged or blocked and is automatically critical if it can be so. Both players and mobs make large use of those effects, so this set would be relevant for both.

• Warlock armor: This armor does see some use, mostly in pvp. First of all, this set should be rounded a bit in the pve application. Adding to its pieces an item property of Life Recovered on Kill, would fit like a glove with this armor, while not giving it much of a bonus in pvp. At the same time though, this bonus set has always been a recipe for disaster, you never know when you introduce a new skill and this armor breaks it. Its cooldown reduction effect should be reduced to 45% (the usual cap for that attribute). At the same time, to give it back something in its pvp utility, the bonus set should also halve the pre cast time of spells. Many mages did like the highly reactive nature of the low pre cast time spells. This would give them a chance to access it again. This way this armor would be for pvp casters which enjoy high reactive fights with minimal restrictions, while in pve it would be played as a constant cycle of using life to machine gun fire your spells, and using the kills to refill your health.

• Battlemage Armor: The most used armor at the moment. Technically this is a very specific armor, which is made for dex/Int builds. In reality, due to a lack of other options and since it offers excellent defenses, it is the default armor at the moment. I wouldn't touch battlemage armor, it is working fine. The issue is the lack of alternatives. I cannot avoid to wonder though, why the change to its set effect was rolled back. It was nerfed (for good reasons) to have its damage capped at the base damage of the weapon used, but that change has been apparently rolled back (bug?). More than for pvp, this is a big issue for pve. A battlemage with a fast weapon can do really mean damage without that limit. Considering that this armor has such high defenses, the damage cannot be that high.

Finally you have heavy armors, and here I believe that there aren't many issues.

• Slayer Armor: The bonus is generic enough to cover all melee heavy damage builds.
• Knight Armor: The best tank armor, almost immune to physical damage. The bonus set is a bit niche in pvp, but can still find its applications.

We should put all this in the New player guide page on the wiki.

Don't take Mr. Silk out of my living room! He is part of the family now!

I've always been a second line player. I like to grind/trade/craft to allow my other guildmates to play without care. I do enjoy pve and pvp activies, but only as a group activity with friends, and in general I play support.

I've had to fight the sproutling which used this skilll, so I think I can answer a few of your questions.
When you hit someone with a melee weapon that has the barbed skin, you get hit by the barbs. They hit only you, they don't shoot all around. The range of the melee weapon doesn't matter. If you hit with a melee weapon, you get hit by the barbs, simple. I managed to fight them by using spells and ranged weapons in melee range, in which case, the barbed skin doesn't hit you.
Barbed skin cannot critically hit, you cannot dodge it since it is not a melee attack, and can't block it since it is not a projectile or a melee attack. As the spell description says though, you can limit the effects with an evasion save.

@Eidans This is the system used in Legends of Aria, and while it works decently, it has one major flaw.
You can't defend first. Even if you know that the guy right there is obviously going to attack you, you can't attack him first. You have to wait while he casts his buffs and casts his biggest spell on you, or he simply follows you and waits until you are low on hp. It puts the victim at a severe disadvantage.
The system currently implemented, makes it so that if you want to be a bad guy, you have to flag in the city. If I see you approaching, I can attack on sight since you already declared your intentions.

By the way, PK already drop their full equip right now.

Known (and fun :D) bug. Thanks the same for the report.

@grofire

You literally said:

"if a solo player got to a level he can do a boss then there shouldn't be a game mechanic that prevent that"

A solo player will NOT get to a level where he can do a boss alone, specifically because THERE IS a game mechanic preventing that, called horizontal progession.

Sure, you can grow in options and many fights will become easier, but those are fights that are in a scale supposed to be tackled by a single well prepared player.

"Bosses", whatever we mean for these, are not something that falls into that category.

Ok, detailed guide:
Kneel at an inn
Create a new preset
The skills you know are on the first row
Click on them and they get added to the right
Now Save Preset
Click on the preset to select it

And press memorize
When you do that, a second skill bar will open
Drag the skills from this bar onto the main bar

You are done

I actually took that info from their Linkedin profile, but indeed that was me reading the info incorrectly (the page was redirected and I didn't notice it). Apologise for the mistake.

I can see the merit in something like this, but I have the following concern.

It is too soon to talk about this.
The last alpha had a really restricted market system. It required a tech, it was local only, only worked with direct posting of the item. The result was that the markets didn't work. In no small part that happened also because gold wasn't useful.
This next test has swinged the pendulum in the complete opposite direction. No tech required, possibility to have buy/sell orders, possibility to have a global vision on the market offers, gold seems to be a lot more useful.
I would first look at the effects of this system before looking at alternatives. Even if at a first look I like this idea, it represents a compromise between the old markets completely local and the next ones which are fully linked. Without looking at the issues generated by the next iteration of markets, we can't really devise a good proposal on something like this. We really risk missing something important.

I believe that the two accounts are linked.
I'm only guessing, but last time Steam just launched the launcher with your Fractured account.
So clearly if a reward is on your Fractured Account, you will get it while on Steam, because it is the same identical account in the end.

Going melee is considered in general harder in pve, and this is even more true when starting with it.

Let me be clear about one point.
I don't like the global wallet and I don't like markets being linked by default. I preferred it like in the older version with fully local markets and requiring a tech to allow cities to look into the smaller villages markets. It made sense, I liked it... but it didn't work.

This next system allows much more freedom and will for sure increase the trade activities. Having many trades going on is the first priority, everything else is secondary. This suggestion adds a lot of flavour to trading, but flavour comes second. First comes actual trading.

That was the reason of my concern. I first want to see if these changes make the trades happen or not. If they still don't happen, then we must make it even more easy to trade, or try to understand what is wrong. If instead we see that in this coming alpha there is plenty of trading going on, but as we can expect, not much risk involved with it, then we can start thinking about something like this suggestion.

Previous test was the black and this next test is the white. Let's see what are the features of this white and then we start thinking in scales of grey.

The skills and builds have changed a lot since the last time the game was accessible. I will probably make a post about them.

Don't misunderstand, I'm not against discussing ideas like this.

I'm just worried that until we see how this test shakes up, we are bound to be missing too many actual gameplay info to have a clear picture.

This will be the first time (hopefully) where we see trading actually work like it is intended in a player driven economy.

Who knows what will happen? Maybe that we discover that it gives too much power to guilds, or to cities or to solo players or... whatever. We don't know the actual issues that come with it. We are trying to fix a car before knowing what is wrong with it.

I'm a huge fan of Spice and Wolf novels, so I obviously love the idea of Merchant guilds in Fractured as a second power parallel to nations, but until we know in which scenario they are going to deployed, we can't understand if they are a good idea or not for the health of the game. That's where my concern lies.

Ok, since at this point we are discussing about possible alternatives to the full linking of market visibility, then I'm sorry you broke the dam and I'm going to express my idea too!

I'm going to wait the results of this test, but in principle I'm against the full visibility of marketplaces. As was said, I can attribute that to hearsay... and hearsay it should be! You should have an idea of what is in the other markets, but shouldn't have exact info.
What I would like to see, is that you can see buy orders, items being sold et similar in other marketplaces, but with a percentage of error on prices and quantities. For example, if town x buys 10 gold short swords at 2000 gold each, I will see something like "Town x buys around 12 short swords at about 1920 gold". You have the info. You know that there you can buy/sell that item, but the exact conditions are slightly randomized in what you see.

Merchant guilds are implemented as a tech tree element. If your city has a merchant guild, then from any marketplace you can always see the exact data of your marketplace, increasing the trades toward your city, and you also get an higher share of profits on each trade in your marketplace. For example, if usually the marketplace tax is 8%, half sink half to the city, having that tech would turn it into 3% sink, 5% to the city.

You can never see what is being sold or bought in a lawless city. Those are meant to represent the high risk/high reward content for merchants. They are sure to offer looted items at good prices, and need a lot of things to go by since they have little trades going on, but there are obvious risks in going there and you have little info in what they actually sell/buy.

Optionally: If we see that there is actually enough interest by part of the players to justify making the system more interesting, then the merchant guild tech allows you to register as a merchant of that city in the city hall. By doing this, you have to pay a fee every week to the city (again, half sink, half to the coffers), but after registering, you can always see the full and accurate info on all products being sold everywhere (except the lawless cities).

Looking at Myr, I would expect the coast to have a different temperature than Shadow Vale's desert.

When I say "Fight", I mean politics, I mean trades. Don't consider it limited to bashing heads.

In the last test I played in Koala Lumpur and we actually had a good activity until the last day. Sure, it wasn't the rush of the first 2 days, but that's to be expected.
If you were in Zenith, I can understand why you say that you had no need to trade. You had a nice food production and were close to copper, silver and coal mines. It was a great position resource wise.

For us, we were swamped in coal and really wanted something to smelt with it. At the same time the area of Criminal Den was rich in iron and poor in coal. Trades in that case were very possible. We had a few bugs with marketplaces which prevented most of it unfortunately.

In any case the amount of players in that test was too low to properly assess the trading mechanics. Resources for 1000 players laying around and around 50 players to make use of them. Obviously just grabbing them is easy.

About crafting. Sure, crafting somewhere else is possible, but then you are paying taxes and just buying them from a citizien of that city is probably more convenient. It's a tradeoff. Higher taxes will scare others from using your facilities, which means lower gains for the city, but will protect the products of your citiziens/residents. Politics and strategies.

Games like UO played perfectly without NPCs. For a more recent game like this, look at Legends of Aria. It had no NPCs at all except basic vendors, and yet it was played for years. If it hadn't been for the atrocious design decisions of the devs, it would still be played.
You don't need NPCs in a sandbox. You just need to create an environment which fosters interactions between players. That's all it takes for a game to last.

For beasts, as I understand it, you want more skeletal dragons. To which I agree, they are cool.