Posts made by Yalah

@luminos77 Try placing down a charcoal blueprint in/around the root and that should make it disappear. Once it's gone, you can delete the blueprint and build normally.

Currently, your damage and DPS are only shown in the tooltip of the weapon you're using. If you are unarmed, there's no way to see what your "weapon" damage and or DPS are.

Please add this feature somewhere to the character sheet.

I've been working with Spoletta on possible bugs related to using Touches and Strikes at the same time while in Primal Form. I think they're handling the bug report (if not I'll post it separately).

Today I found out some new info that makes me think that when the "Primal Form claws count as any 1h weapon" part was added to the game, no one considered whether or not it was ok for Touches and Strikes to be used at the same time while in Primal Form. (Because it was actually impossible for them to be used together before.)

So yea, maybe this isn't a buff request, but rather, "please decide whether or not Primal Forms should be allowed to use a Touch ability as the same time as a Strike ability." (My opinion is still that it should be allowed. It's a good buff for unarmed and Primal Forms.)

TLDR: Even with max possible investment in Health Regeneration (which is not realistic, see below), you get ~25 health Regen from 4x Enduring II. In anything realistic, you get 3-5 health regen from 4x Enduring II. Please improve Enduring II. END TLDR

Available Health Regen:
Base: 5
Iridra: 5
STR: (25) 0.5/STR
Enduring I: (4) 2 per point
T3 Health Regen Imbue: (4) 4.5
Arboreal Dragon Leather (set): 10
Potion of Vitality: 3
Verdant Regrowth: 60 (I don't know if Endrance II even effects this)
Iridra Primal Bonus: 200 (I don't know if Endrance II even effects this)

Enduring II: (4) 2% per point

• If you combined all of those at once (which you can't), you would have ~320 Health Regen and 4x Enduring II would give you ~25 health regen.
• If you dropped Iridra Primal Bonus you would have ~120 health regen and 4x Enduring II would give you 9.6 health regen.
• If you then dropped Verdant Regrowth you would have ~60 health regen and 4x Enduring II would give you 4.8 health regen.
• If you were a basic Human with 20 STR, 4x T3 imbues, 4x Enduring, and a Poition of Vitality you would have ~39 Health Regen and 4x Enduring II would give you ~3 health regen.

Realistically, a single point in Enduring II gives you 0.5 to 1 health regen. That is 50% to 75% worse than what you get from Enduring I.

I don't know if the fix would be to up the % or just make them a flat bonus, but currently they're pretty terrible.

Even for a build that is maxing out STR, this talent is very bad. (I mention this specifically because the usual pattern of the 2nd tier of talents is meant to be more effective if you'd actually invested into the base stat.)

Today, 31 AUG, I finally got around (remembered) to check to see if the original set of summons got any changes when the new ones were added. They did. Almost all of the original set got 50 to 150 buffs to various resistances (a few did get minor nerfs to resistances). These were mostly in the various magic resistances making them all a bit tankier than they were when this Not a Guide was first written.

The most notable buffs were probably given to the various Primelings which should tank a lot better than before - especially magical damage. (These also got a big HP buff.)

I'm not going to go back through and update this Not a Guide with these new stats because these kinds of rebalancing changes can happen often and it's a lot of work to retest and the update all of the posts. The big thing to know is that most of the summons I talked about will be tankier.

@Irven said in Free Play Extended & Summer Roadmap:

Despite the previous update bringing new minions, the game still doesn't support the use of minions, such as "sets".
It's very common to see mages (and archers) using elementals as a "tank" while casting powerful spells causing absurd damage, or tanks using ranged minions to complement the damage. However, there is STILL nothing that supports playing only with minions (like in the Lineage series, or FFXIV in the early days, and even some ARPGs like Titan Quest, Diablo, Last Epoch, Poe, etc.).

I'm not commenting on the suggestion to buff/tweak minions, just on the description of how they work.

If people are wanting a "minion army" style of gameplay where you can run around basically ignoring your minions and letting them passively kill things, you wont find that in Fractured Online. Combat in FO does not work like many of the example games listed. It is a slower and more intentional style of gameplay versus running around at full speed, screen lit with explosions, and just snapping up loot. It is not an ARPG and does not pretend to be.

The max count of summons you could have should be 4, but a more realistically, because of skill limits and such, you're probably going to be using 1-3 tops.

Anyone wearing light or medium armors (meaning not heavy armors) can use summons. This means that a very good use of them could be to tank for you while you kill something. FO's skill system is setup so that you can learn every skill in the game and mix and match to your hearts content as long as you meet the other requirements of the skills.

You can in fact reach max rank and kill every non legendary monster in the game with only minions and healing spells. I have personally done it. However, just because you can do it, doesn't mean that it's necessarily the best way to play summons. In FO, you have 8 skill slots and there is no reason you shouldn't throw some damaging skills in there, in addition to your summons and heals, to help kill stuff faster.

Minions are not perfect (not being able to keep up with you is really annoying), but they are totally viable as a gameplay style - at least in PvE.Just don't expect minions to do everything for you while you stand there 90% afk.

Without logging in to check, there should be materials that will give that stat if you make armors out of them. (Or there used to be.)

While in Primal Form, you are unarmed, but the Primal Form allows your claws to count as any one-handed melee weapon. This means you cannot get any stats from your equipped weapon or shield, but you can use abilities from any weapon school (as long as you meet the other requirements).

If you wanted, you can use the elemental Touch abilities for your auto attacks and, say, axe abilities while in your Primal Form. The problem is the various elemental touch abilities cannot be used at the same time as the various "Ready Strike" abilities.

For example, if you used Burning Touch it would cancel any of the following abilities:

Counter Strike
Bleeding Strike
Concussive Strike
Crippling Strike
Debilitating Strike
Disrupting Strike
Double Shot
Heavy Blow
Lethal Strike
(possibly others)

With two additional Primal Forms coming "soon," it would be cool if the various elemental Touch abilities were changed so that you could use them at the same time as you used the Ready Strike abilities. That would help unlock some new build choices and give a buff to Primal Forms which, basically, no one ever use.

(This would only effect Primal Forms because of how their "claws" work. It wouldn't buff any weapon schools.)

The idea that I have is to give every summon a short cooldown, but increase that cooldown based on how much health the summon is missing at the time it's unsummoned or dies.

For example, lets use the Bear and say it's base cooldown is 1.5 seconds:

It gets unsummoned (dies) at 0%. The cooldown is 1.5x10 = 15 seconds.
It gets unsummoned at 50% (you wanted to resummon to get one at full health). The cooldown is 1.5x5 = 7.5 seconds.
It gets unsummoned at 100% (because you ran away from it). The cooldown is 1.5x1 = 1.5 seconds.

In this system you could still set the different tiers of summons to have different cooldowns, but not as harshly punish people that are having them unsummoned for non-combat reasons. (I.e. running from pack to pack)

Not A Guide: Druid Background (Summoner) - Post Script 2: And then there were dragons

TLDR: The character from this Not a Guide was able to solo all Dragons to unlock Dragonling summons. END TLDR

Recently, new summons were released and while most of them were easily obtainable with the information already available in this Not a Guide, the Dragonlings require getting their larger versions to 100%. (Probably because these are considered "Ultimate" summons and it was decided they needed the higher requirement.)

Sticking with the overall theme of this Not a Guide (supporting your summons and letting them do most of the work), there are two main ways to go about getting your Dragon Knowledge. First, is just to find a buddy, or two, and go team up against the Dragons. Two people is enough and three or more makes it super easy. The added bonus to doing them this way is that you're done reading here and can go kill stuff.

The second way to do this is what I went with for the character I used in this Not a Guide and I'll go into details below (with some recap to avoid rereading).

Note: Dragon respawn timer is 10 minutes, double normal respawn timers.

Character: Rank 50 Erwydra. I started with the base stats of 20 INT, 18 DEX, and 18 WIS. (Stats will change later).

Gear:
Chain Mail (Steel), No enchantments, grey and green quality, imbued with T2 Restoration and T2 Mana Regen.
Mending Staff (Hardwood), No enchantments, grey quality, imbued with T2 Cooldown Reduction and (added after Arboreal Dragons) Lower Mana Cost.
Added after Arboreal Dragons:Amulet (Rabbit's Foot), imbued with T2 Cooldown Reduction and T2 Restoration.

Talents (used the whole time):

Arboreal Dragons:

Skilled used:

I started with these because they are probably the easiest Dragons to kill, have especially low weakness to fire (for a Dragon), and are even easier if you can ignore poison, which skeletal summons do. I would not call these easy to kill, but they can be reliably killed with close attention to detail to your positioning and cooldowns.

The basic strategy is to first kill off any potential adds. We're not going to move during this fight so you might be able to just pull them to the side. Next send in your skeletons, heal the Knight, and wait for it to "move in" under the center area of Dragon to what will be it's final position. While your Knight is getting in position, you need to position yourself towards the front-side of the dragon, out of the frontal breath attack, but at max possible range.

The reason for this is that it's Entangle ability has a very large AoE and will basically cause too much damage to yourself for you to be passively out healing it. The problem is that your Life Link has barely longer range than Entangle. The easiest way to explain it is to say that once you cast Life Link on your Knight, you want your character to have to move closer to the dragon to get into Life Link range. This will naturally put you outside of the Entangle range, but still allow your Life Link. (If you're getting rooted, you are too close.)

You can ignore your Skeletal archer because their range is longer than the Entangle and they're immune to the poison. If they do die, just resummon them behind you (farther away from the dragon than you are) and they will engage from a safe range.

Once you've got this set, you're golden. All you need to do is manage your cooldowns, maintain Life Link, and you will drop the Arboreal Dragons. You will need to pay attention, but it's not hard from this point on.

After Arboreal Dragons: I had a lot of time to stare at my character sheet while finishing these off. Originally I took DEX because I wanted the Cooldown Reduction and thought I would be letting my summons do most of the work so I could ignore the other stats. What I realized was that I had pretty limited imbues that I wanted for this style of play and that I could drop all of my DEX and still maintain the 40% cap on Cooldown Reduction.

I decided to replace DEX with PER because that stat would help the most with the 2-3 attack abilities that I was using. Specifically, the Accuracy would greatly improve the debuffs that I was applying myself. My new stats are now 20 INT, 18 PER, 18 WIS.

Mountain Dragons:

Skills used:

On these skills, I chose lightning because that is the element Mountain Dragons are least resistant to. Shock stacks also help lower their Cooldown Recovery and that effectively makes my shiny new Arboreal Dragonling tankier. I chose Cloak of Lighting, Thunderbolt, and Thunderclap because they offered the most stacks of shocked and would be the easiest to maintain if I needed to focus more on healing (or anything else).

I did want to work in Word of Power: Heal instead of Healing Wave, but Life Link and the Arboreal Dragonling are Ultimate abilities and you can only have two of those on any skill set. Note: There's almost certainly better damage skills out there, but this was my reasoning.

Outside of their breath attacks, Mountain Dragons have two skills to watch for - Epicenter and Aura of Oppression. Both of these should be ignorable if you stay at max Life Link range, but I was relying on three fairly short distance abilities (Healing Wave, Cloak of Lightning, and Thunderclap).

Basically, I positioned myself in a similar front-side position out of their breath and then I tried to stand just outside of the Aura of Oppression, but close enough that all my short ranged stuff would land. Every time there would be an Epicenter, I'd have to reposition, but the fights were not hard. I probably had too much healing and would have needed even less if I had chosen abilities that I could stay at range with. There's really not too much more with them.

Ember Dragons:

For these, I actually did them on my way to Mountain Dragons so my skill setup is the same, and less optimal than they could be since Embers are weaker to ice than to shock. I intended to just try killing one to see how it went, but ended up just finishing them (and was too lazy to change my skills).

The strategy I used was the same as Mountains. The only ability you need to worry about with Embers is their Fireball which will hit you if you're standing close (which I was because of the aforementioned skills). But you should have plenty of healing to top both you and your Dragonling off with.

Conclusion: And that's it. I would comment more about the new summons, but I have not had time to actually test them. The Arboreal Dragonling is a clear step above all prior summons and I would expect the other Dragonlings to be about the same, but with different specialties.

@Silynx My counter point to that is a newb starts the game, goes to Arboreus, and has no summon progression. Most things usually have options on both worlds. Plus, a Warthog summon would be awesome

@Prometheus I'm not saying Arboreus needs some summon love, but, uh...

Red is Syndesia
Green is Arboreus
Blue is both

Not a Guide: Melee Fighter - Conclusion

TLDR: Axes are not only viable, they are very strong for reaching rank 50. It would have taken me about 30 hours to hit rank 50 and that wasn't trying to speed run, just buying gear and being focused on what I was doing. END TLDR

A lot of people feel like melee is lacking when compared to mages in this game and I'm one of those people. However, melee can be very strong for PvE and are able to take down virtually all of the monsters in the game with relatively low investment (for a melee). You could quickly improve on what I did just by throwing on a Rogue set for that stacking damage buff.

Because of the fundamental difference in melee versus ranged, melee will always need more investment than mages, but you can still get by with relatively low investment as I did. Hopefully, we'll get some improvements to melee sometime in the near future, but until then we can make do. It's worth pointing out that some of the decisions I made will not be the most powerful option. I would encourage people to try other stat combinations and find what works best for them.

Different Weapon Choices

I think Axes are either the best melee weapon or at least in the top 1 or 2, but I don't have a ton of experience with the others since the Combat Endgame Changer (EGC) patch about 6 months ago. I'll talk a little about the others below.

Fencing is the one I have the least experience with, but I know pre EGC, people were showing off some impressive single target damage with the spear and the rapier is a popular sword and board option because it has spell channeling. My primary problem with the school is that the Spear's AoE is a line and that makes it hard to effectively use against groups of monsters. Additionally, their skills are single target or a line. If/when the Halberd is reintroduced, that might make the school more appealing to me. (Assuming that it will use Fencing.)

Knife Fighting used to be my favorite melee weapon. I, and others, were quietly using it to take down every non legendary monster in the game. EGC changed some of the skills, specifically nerfing Strike Wounds, and it's not as strong as it used to be - at least not in the same builds. I'm not saying they're weak, just that they took a hit (from what I would have considered to be the strongest option). Daggers have spell channeling so you can work in some magic with them and even use the Battlemage set to buff their damage even more. The Assassination tree has some obvious skills that might interest you and I would specifically look at Death Mark in combination with all the debuffs that are available to Daggers (including weapon poison). One last thing I will say about Knife Fighting is that you can only have one active strike at a time, but there is nothing stopping you from having multiple on your hotbar and rotating through them, keeping each on cooldown.

I would argue that Mace Fighting is probably the weakest weapon school. I did a Not a Guide (Druid Background) right before the EGC patch that used Maces and I did not enjoy my time. The big draw of Mace Fighting is that the weapons all have the Bashing property which is a on hit stun. In my Not a Guide the gameplay where my Quarterstaff really shined was when farming fairly big groups of lower level monsters. It was basically a looting simulator. I think Maces need some adjustments, but to be fair to them, The Quarterstaff is probably the weakest 2h option and so it wont excel with weapon skills (but it is the only 2h option that allows spell channeling). Also, with the advent of summons allowing reliable back attacks, Spine Breaker Blow might be significantly stronger than it was for me.

I would probably argue that Swordmanship is the more defensive and versatile option when compared to Axes, but overall very similar. I have not used them post EGC, but I would expect very similar results as what I got from this Not a Guide and axes. The one notable difference is that swords have a 1h option that allows spell channeling (and that's a big part of why I think they're more versatile. Not too much more to add.

Non Weapon Options for Melee
Note: The following comments are made under the assumption of having no Proficency in their respective schools. Orbs are a long term goal and by the time you're able to use imbues to max one school and start getting respectable levels in a second school, you should have figured out what works best for you and your style.

• The first thing to point out is that Poisons are a great way to add damage to any weapon that has the "Poisonable" tag. The tree has talents that help with poisons and I would try to work them into any build using poisons. Familiarize yourself with the different poison crafts and keep an eye out for those materials.

• Warfare has some good skills. Shockwave, Battle Jump, and Bloodlust are probably the top 3. The big problem I have with most of the others is that they have pretty low uptime and long cooldowns (due to PvP balancing). For example, Second Wind sound good, but you get a 15 second 50% penalty to healing which includes health on hit imbues and Bloodlust if you are using them. It's pretty easy to math out how many attacks you'd make in 15 seconds to figure out if it's worth using.
  Frenzy sounds good, but even if you have the talent for two sustained abilities, you can still only have a single Battle Stance at a time. You have to choose between Bloodlust, Frenzy, Strike Wounds, and Viciious Attacks. And that's if you have the two sustained talent, if not then you have a lot more options you have to put it up against. You'll notice I stuck with Aura of Oppression at the end of this Not a Guide.

• Hunting has some options. Hunter's Mark is a good way to make sure that your auto attacks always land, but if you're skipping real accuracy, your debuff stacking will suffer. Most of the traps are new, post EGC, so I don't have a lot of experience with them. At first glance, they might be worth testing to see if any are worth the debuff stacking.

• With the exception of Strike Wounds (which is solid) Assassination only works with Light Armor and one handed weapons (and not when you have a shield). These are fairly restrictive and I'd argue most useful for PvP. I will throw out there that Death Mark would make debuff stacking much better.

• Leadership has some good options, some good options with terrible uptime, and some options that are more PvP focused. I really like Aura of Oppression as a "generically good" toggle ability that is useful for many different situations. This is when compared to something like Bloodlust which is only useful when you can apply bleeds and your target isn't immune to them. (Which is to say this Aura is not "the best.") I like Challenge a lot, but arguments can be made for other link abilities. Everything else in here gets kinda Iffy. Inspire and Shields up? 33% uptime by default and with 40% CDR they're still up less than half of the time. Everything else is situational or balanced for PvP.

Concluding the Conclusion:
You're going to need to invest in a Melee build for it to feel good. At a minimum, you need a T2 (metal) weapon ASAP. Buy your first one and try to avoid Copper, Tin, Iron, Silver, and Gold versions unless they are very cheap or very easy to get. You can invest in Medium and Heavy Armors, but be aware of what encumbrance does (it's in the lower left of the Character Window). You don't need the special set armors to progress, but several of them will help depending on how you choose to play.

Don't be afraid of starting by using axes and then switching to your preferred weapon after you get some of the skills. The Tutorial gives some great Axe skills.

Day 7 Results:

I ended up deciding to just run all over and kill a few of each monster to confirm that I could kill all of them so that I could wrap up this series. To make a long story short, I killed everything except the large dragons (which I didn't try) using the strategies I've already mentioned. I used the bear right away on the Ogres and baby dragons just because I was going for speed and not really testing "how little" I needed to do, to kill them. Some of them definitely did not need the bear and none of them were as challenging as the Jotunn Stormborn.

I outlined most of the remaining knowledge targets in my Day 7 planning post so I don't have too much to add here. You only need about 415k knowledge to hit rank 50 and there should be about 560k knowledge available. Post rank 50, there's no point in getting more knowledge other than showing up higher in the rankings. (You might still need to unlock more skills, but that's sorta separate from your total knowledge points.)

One final thing I want to mention, but keep forgetting to add in, is that if you're not able to maintain your Execute buff, you should consider using it when the monsters are below 30%, but before the killing blow. That lets you get the double damage bonus from it and the full damage potential. I was seeing 1200-1900 on the very end game stuff without any Execute stacks. If you can maintain the 10 stacks, I would do that, but food for thought.

Day 7 Plans:

TLDR: Head to Arboreus and hit some combination of Termidians, world spawns, and Ogre. END TLDR

With 366k Knowledge, there are a lot of options left to hit rank 50 while skipping a lot of other stuff. I have a plan for what I will do, but since this might be the last Day for this Not a Guide, I'll list everything out that we're missing on Aboreus.

Termidians are the easiest POI and should not be any challenge. Many of them will stack Corrosion so you'll want to be careful of that, but otherwise you should not have any issues. The bear might help with the Matron, but I'm not even sure it will be needed.

The next thing would be the various world spawns. The main groups are Lizards, Insects, Treants, Forest and Mountain Trolls, Acid Elementals, and Earth Elementals. (There are a lot more, but things like frogs and crocodiles don't have any good/dense farming spots. These, and the rest, are more of a skip or kill when you see them)

You have options for farming Lizards and Insects, but I think the best spot for them is inside the Treehugger Ogre POIs. You'll find packs of all of them that you can quickly take down. Teants, trolls, and Earth Elementals can be found in the jungles of eastern Terra. Mountain Trolls and Earth Elementals can be found in the mountain area surrounding the Volcano. Acid Elementals are in the green area south of the Volcano.

All of the random red POI in the jungles of eastern Terra are Arboreal dragon POIs. You can easily ride into them and ride out.

The red POI in the mountains around the volcano require a lot of riding. You can honestly skip them, but I usually take a campfire or two and ride the loop at least once to get them.

The volcano is the last set of POIs. Not too much to say except that expect fire damage and fire debuffs.

About Baby Dragons: Arboreals should be fairly easy for this build. They will stack poison, but we aren't swinging a wet noodle. If you have any problems, a Bear will fix them. Mountains should not be hard, but they are tanky. Again, a bear will fix any issues. Fires should be the hardest because fire is OP (if you hadn't picked up on that yet). I think we can get them without the bear, but we do have a bear so...

About Big Dragons: I have no plans to even test them. They all can be killed solo, but they're a clear step above other content and should require specific gear. They're just not something these Not a Guides cover.

I'm not sure what my plan will be. My normal strategy would be Termidians into world spawns and then Ogre after, but I'm tempted to kill some Ogres to test and see if they're too hard to kill. Given how Jotunn went, I think most or all of them will be killable. Archdruids and Lords will be the hardest.

If I'm being honest, I thought about ending this Not a Guide today because we're easily strong enough to finish this last 50k knowledge to get to rank 50 and I tend to end at rank 50 or when, "there's nothing left but grinding." With the success on Syndesia, I'm very clearly at the second point, but I decided to go ahead and do one more day.

Day 6 Results:

TLDR: 5 hours today (28.5 hours total). 362k Knowledge, rank 46, about 15k gold. Jotunn and all Elementals 100%END TLDR

Gear: Same gear, but for Fire Elementals I replaced the imbues on my amulet with Evasion and Willpower.

Skills: Used the Day 5 skills for everything except Fire Elementals then I switched to the following:

Talents: D5 talents and then the following for Fire Elementals:

What Happened: I started by grabbing the last 7 Jotunn POI that I needed and finishing off Sorceress (skipped Stormborn). Fire Elementals had a PvP event so I went to Crystal Elementals instead. Primelings and normal Elementals were easy. For the Greater Crystals I would jump in, Challenge, and unload until they use Primal Storm (their channeled AoE). Once that started, I jumped out, summoned the bear (I should name it shouldn't I?), sent the bear when the channel ended, ran back in, popped challenge again, and finished them off. Once I got that strategy down, I didn't have any problems with them. (Only got the Greaters to 50% because I didn't want to waste time farming them.)

All of that was actually fairly quick, but we had a lot of riding today and that ate up a lot of the total time. Anyway, PvP event was still happening at Fire Elementals so I went over to the Storm Elementals. (Loading up a wagon of crystals while I was there.) Primelings and normals were even easier than Crystals (Storms have lower resistances). For the Geaters, I would mount up to bait out their Lightning Strike and then immediately dismount, Challenge, and drop them. (I did 100% the Storms because I know a good rotation for 4 of them.) Note: It might be easier using a stun instead of Battle Jump for the Greater Storm's channeled ability Thunderstorm.

Took the crystals back to my main's house and then went to Fire Elementals. I had intended to swap to a Scimitar and use Protection from Fire, because the warm and burning debuffs are just that much worse than the other elementals (except maybe corrosion from Acid). The problem that I ran into was that I did not bring an extra set of Leather with Sword Proficency and between the damage loss from that and the damage loss from switching to a Scimitar, it was just too slow to kill stuff.

Instead, I switched to the skills and talents shown above and I swapped on a necklace with Evasion and Willpower Imbues. This brought my Willpower up to 460 or 480 and that was enough of a reduction in stacks that I was able to mostly avoid Burning on everything but the Greaters. I was actually chain pulling groups of 2-3 and maintaining Execute stacks fairly well. The Greaters took some testing, but I eventually worked out a strategy that let me down them every time fairly safely.

Start by summoning the bear and then keep your distance from the bear as you send it into the Greater. The bear is just strong enough to eat an Explosion and Fireball. As soon as those happen, or the bear dies, jump in, Challenge and drop them. Use Shockwave to stun them out of their channeled ability Firestorm (more to prevent warm/burning than to stop the damage).

Note on Syndesia volcano: Previously, I mentioned that the only monsters unique to this area were the Fire Primelings. I want to add a note saying that you might also consider finishing off the Forge Snappers here as well because there's a lot more of them here than there will be on the Arbroreal volcano. The Fire Lizards also might be more common on Syndesia, but you will get packs of them on Arboreus too.

And yea, that's about everything there is on Syndesia.

Healing Ghosts is not a bug (as far as I know). Instead of doing damage to Elementals they will heal from damage that is their matching element. (Fire heals Fire Elementals, etc). Energy and Mending staves do Energy, or pure magic, damage and that will heal Crystal Elementals and Ghosts.