Posts made by Yalah

I was running through the list of buffs/toggle skills and I found a couple that had issues. The "Spell Unicity Group" tag appears to be what the ability system uses to make abilities exclusive to one another. Meaning two abilities with the same Spell Unicity Group tag cannot function at the same time. i.e. you can only use a single elemental arrows ability at a time because they use the same Spell Unicity Group tag (Weapon Modifier in this case).

Death Bargain has no Spell Unicity Group tag. Right now this is probably okay since it's the only on death ability I can think of. Might just need a new category of Spell Unicity Group tag like "On Death"

Counter Strike has no Spell Unicity Group tag. The tag that most makes sense for it would be "Ready Strike" but since the skill requires a block to occur before the usage of the skill, it might need a new category of tag like "Counter" or "Block"

Ricochet currently has the "Ready Strike" Spell Unicity Group tag, but should probably not have any tag since it does not have any continual/lingering functions.

I'd like to see some more ways to improve housing. Some non-crafting options that give some kind of benefit that people would choose over just slamming in another crafting object.

I wouldn't at all mind seeing a "Housing Skill Tree" where you can actually upgrade your house and or the stuff on it.

If Fractured Online allows a single person to learn every combat skill ever possible and they can switch them on demand at any fire, why do people that want to dedicate themselves to crafting need a limit placed on what they can do? That's an honest question.

I'm all for improving housing so that there is a real choice between having another crafting station and literally anything else. Right now there is no choice. We need viable alternatives to crafting stations for housing. If they throw on an artificial crafting station limit, they might as well just be cutting all the lots in half because it would be the same result.

P.S. Even if nothing changes, housing needs to have all of the items you can build in them standardized in size. Its silly that a Charcoal Pile is a 1x1, but cannot be built in a 1x1 grid because the "extra" parts of it hang over into other grids (meaning you cannot even build a Charcoal Pile on a standard lot if you have anything bigger than a 2x2 house). Or that two half grid items cannot fit if you place A then B, but do fit if you place B then A. Or that a quarter grid item fits when rotated one way, but not the other.

There's a lot that can and has been said on the topic of cities - I don't have any massive new ideas so I'll just try to be brief with my experiences, as a friends/small group player, having played with and without the city tech.

My original feeling was that cities needed to be linked to item progression because without that, there's no reason to build/maintain a city. City tech for item progress was a necessary evil. Now that I've played without city tech, there's got to be a better way to incentivize the city building aspect of the game.

The gist of what I would like to see with city tech, for crafting, is for some sort of a bonus/reduction rather than a flat hard cap. I.e. Rather than, "you cannot create bows unless the city has bow tech of the right level," you'd have something like, "city has invested in smelting technology so smelting ores takes 10% less time." Whatever bonus you wanted to do that is a bonus, not a hard restriction.

Beyond crafting, and I have no idea how feasible this would be, maybe city tech could be used to grant specific buffs. City has researched better healing techniques. Spend 1k gold for a 1 hour, 15 health regen buff. Or the city has spent a lot of time on wildlife research - all mobs in their area spawn 10% faster.

TLDR: Don't limit players/homes based on cities. You can make cities important, and tied into the other systems, by granting cities the ability to buff, improve, or otherwise give a bonus to those other systems.

Would like to see an option to block invites/trades. Just had someone spamming me with popup windows and kinda made the game unplayable until they got bored and stopped.

This is not a guide or how to. It's just some notes from leveling an alt and a melee build that I think new players might find helpful when they're planning a build and they want to read a wall of text.

I wanted to make a melee character and ended up choosing a Chadra with Dex/Int/Per maxed. I started as a Street Rat basically because everyone said it was the worst starter.

Using a Dagger with a cloth set and the basic street rat skills, the first three things I did were: get Verdant Regrowth from Sproutlings to protect my Dex/heal; get Battle Jump from Bullfrogs as a movement (Battle Jump because I planned on trying Battlemage set); get Chilling Touch from blue frogs (mostly because I found them first versus the fire frogs).

At this point I switched to unarmed with cloth. I tooled around the jungle with this build but really struggled killing anything without enough talent points to get Martial Mastery. Bought a Scimitar off the market because it was cheap and close by then picked up Bleeding Strike and Bloodlust from lizards and then Barbed Skin from Sproutlings. At this point I switched to Dex/Int/Con because I wanted bandages to work better than they were.

Scimitar, cloth set, Verdant Regrowth, Battle Jump, Strike Wounds, Rend Armor, Bleeding Strike, Barbed Skin, Bloodlust: Full cleared the southern Grokoton area picking up Spike Trap and dropping Battle Jump. Had almost no issued clearing this area. Talent points went down Dex, picking evasion, and then to Single Weapon Mastery. Also mana regen.

On the way to Bandits, I picked up Crippling Strike off Crabs and dropped Bleeding Strike - using Spike Trap for Bleed synergy with Bloodlust. I also made a bow to pull bandits. Full cleared the main bandit island without much trouble. Bandit Leaders were difficult, but I was able to kill em.

At this point in time I had made about 33k off farming and drops and there was a Battlemage set for 30k. Swapped to Battlemage and Rapier. (I did a bunch of testing with unarmed, scimitar and rapier. Rapier felt better and won out. Unarmed never felt good.)

The Battlemage stacks do not get increased or refreshed from mana over time costs (i.e. from Barbed Skin). After looking at 5 second CD skills I decided to get Cure Wounds because I already knew it and it could be used with medium armor. I built up and maintained Battlemage stacks with Verdant Regrowth and Cure Wounds Spam.

Rapier with Battlemage and: Cure Wounds, Verdant Regrowth, Spike Trap, Crippling Stirke, Strike Wounds, and Battle Jump. (Barbed Skin dropped sue to mana issues.) Getting the hang of Cure Wound spam took a little, but with 300 stacks of the Battlemage buff, I absolutely decimated all of the rest of the bandit camps. Four bandits at once could get rough, but never died and blew through all the rest of the POI. Leaders were still difficult because they stun and bad timing would end up reseting my Battlemage stacks.

Feeling confident, I skipped all other content and went strait to ogres. Ogre Brute hit me too hard with their sword attacks, but I was able to kill all the rest just fine. Dodging the ranged attacks from Witches an Druids made those super easy. I learned Empower from Druids and maintained Battlemage stacks with Empower, Verdant Regrowth, and Cure Wound (I picked up mana regen enchants to facilitate the spam). Dropped Battle Jump for Empower.

From here I decided to get Weaken from Obsidian Crabs in the volcano so that I could try Ogre again as well as the big dragons. I learned Protection from Fire for the volcano monsters. Both Dragonlings went down fairly easily though mountain was not super easy. Earth Elementals were fairly easy. Greater Earth Elemental was my first k/o since picking up Battlemage - too many stuns that would break my Battlemage stacks. Everything else in the volcano was easy to trivial except for the big dragons.

TLDR on big dragons: Weaken only has a 50% uptime for me and Ember Dragon hits like a truck. If I went back and practiced more I think I could maybe kill it by kiting between weakens, but oof, hits hard. Did not try a Mountain Dragon knowing that they do not hit quite as hard, but guessing it would still be too much (plus they also stun).

At this point, alt is probably benched. I will probably dust them off once Stone Skin can be learned and then I'll give the hard content another shot (and probably update here). Edit: I wont do this since Stone Skin is light armor only >.<

Since the EA launch, specifically with the game now having two different worlds with very different resources, I've thought more and more about trading and the economy. The conclusion that I've reached is that I would like to see an increased ability to trade raw materials over longer distances.

In the current system, due to the weight of raw materials being many times more than finished goods, it is incredibly inefficient to transport raw materials when compared to finished goods. I have been told that the design intent is for this to be true - that trading be done in finished products rather than raw materials. Whether or not that is the case, I'd like to make an argument in support of increasing the viability of raw material trade as a primary activity.

The reason I think raw material trade should be changed is simply because it adds another play style to the game (shipping) that is not currently very well defined/supported. Additionally, it adds depth to being a merchant and participating in the economy.

The suggestion I would make is to add the ability to "bundle" x amount of raw material (leather, hides, cloth, metal, wood, etc) into a single "heavy" item that can then be placed into a wagon and transported like any other heavy material. Upon arriving at your destination the items could be un-bundled and sold (or perhaps the heavy bundles could be sold on the market and un-bundled by the purchaser).

The primary example behind thinking about this suggestion came from playing on Arboreus. I have leather coming out my ears, but no interest in using it. Even hauling it from my house (where my tubs are) to the closest city isn't worth the effort because I can carry so little of it. And leather is one of the lighter raw materials. I can never imagine myself hauling it through a Stargate 150 pieces at a time.

The big disclaimer here is that allowing bundles in the above manner would potentially increase supply of items globally. Since the transport and sale of raw materials would be easier, people might be less likely to just let items rot on corpses and would be more willing to gather raw materials since their transport and sale would be easier.

The counter argument that I've heard against this suggestion is that distance, time, and fees are an important part of the game and that it shouldn't be easy to transport items. I don't disagree with this assessment at all and I agree those are all important considerations; however I do think things are out of balance when the finished set is worth more than the raw materials and also 5 to 10 times easier to transport for trade (meaning 5 to 10 times lighter than the raw goods).

The efficiency of transporting raw materials can be fine tuned (balanced) by changing the amount of materials in a bundle, adding a maximum weight to wagons, or adjusting the fee to transport while hauling a wagon (via harbor or stargate).

I don't want raw material transport to be easy, I just want it to be a viable activity relative to finished goods. Let people who want to buy low where the supply is high and sell high where the supply is low do it in a manner that is comparable to other forms of making money (i.e. hitting goblins with a stick and generating gold from thin air).

All of the above being said, if the developers wanted to change recipes, here is what I would suggest: Change crafting so that recipes become "patterns" and are both limited use and optional.

Making them patterns is simply a name change that better explains why they wear out. Knowing how to make something is different from being able to create them freehand. You need a pattern or template to cut or construct an object and this pattern or template becomes less durable the more you use it. Again, just a change to have it make more sense on why they would degrade.

When making them optional, I would simply suggest that having a pattern would decrease the mistakes made and increase the efficiency of your crafting. Making up numbers:

Crafting a leather helm might take 20 leather, 10 thread, and 1000 gold to do it by hand. If you have a pattern you can make them with only 10 leather, 5 thread, and 500 gold. (It is important that the pattern reduce the materials and the gold needed so that pattern values are more ambiguous. If they're changed to be limited uses then it's to inflate their value. If it only reduces the materials then you don't actually inflate their value because material value is subjective. If you only reduce the gold then the value instantly becomes gold reduction times uses.)

If recipes were changed in the above way then they still act as a coft supply cap on a fresh wipe and will also have some minimum/lingering value throughout the game's lifetime.

I'm not saying the above is what I want, just that if the devs were to change them, this is what I think the best solution would be.

I like recipes because they provide some kind of gate that prevents everyone from crafting everything. They effectively provide a supply cap on the newly created economy. Providing a cap on supply protects the economy from being flooded with cheap (read as literally cheaper than the pure gold cost to craft) equipment when the market is at its weakest after a wipe.

I think this is why recipes exist. I think it is important that they serve this function because, I believe for the game to thrive it needs to have a healthy population of crafters and merchants. Part of getting and maintaining that population is adding systems that require players to actually invest time and effort into the system - which recipes do. If everyone can do everything then the people who actually want to focus on crafting and the economy have less reason to play and probably wont stick around long term.

I do not think that making recipes have a limited use is helpful to crafting or the economy in any meaningful way. Firstly, once the economy is established, the necessity of an artificial supply cap disappears as the players themselves will be in a much stronger position to effect and control the economy.

Secondly, if the goal is for recipes to act as a money sink, then simply making them have limited use does nothing to make act as a money sink since the money is just shuffled between players and does not actually leave the economy. The extra cost is simply absorbed into the sale value of an item. (i.e. if a recipe costs 10,000gp and works for 100 uses then a responsible crafter will simply increase the cost of the item by 100g to offset the recipe cost.)

If the argument is that recipes should be made limited use so that people who farm them can sell them for lots of money, then I simply disagree that this is the point of recipes. There are plenty of things that can be farmed for money and the developers should not be taking steps to artificially inflate the value of any dropped items outside of making them more or less common drops. In a player run economy, it is not the job of the developers to inflate values.

I have two questions that I think need answered before you even address the topic of whether or not recipes should be changed.

1. Why do recipes exist at all?

2. In a completely player driven economy, why should the developers make changes to ensure that any specific item does not lose it's value?

@spoletta said in Feedback on the new durability:

I actually like that the % is the same for all items. It makes the poor and gold items more similar to each other.
If it wasn't for this % loss, gold items would have double the durability of poor ones, which is too much of a difference. Instead, gold items tend to live more since they suffer a lot less from day to day usage degradation, but have the same durability loss on death. This in my opinion is the right amount of difference between the two qualities.

I would agree if increased quality did anything beyond improving the durability, but it doesn't. In the current system you are actually punished more for getting k/o or dying while wearing Exceptional gear than wearing Poor.

For example: (purely making up numbers) Lets say that for every hour of gameplay you take 30 points of durability loss from being hit or using your items. This number is the same no matter the quality of gear.

If you are wearing Poor quality gear (say 300 base durability), every time you get knocked out causes you 15 durability loss. In other words, being knocked down gives you a 30 minute "durability penalty."

If you are wearing Exceptional quality gear (300 base, 600 max durability), every time you get knocked out causes you 30 durability loss. In other words, being knocked down gives you a 60 minute "durability penalty."

If you want to argue that quality is giving too much of a bonus to durability that is fine and can be addressed by lowering the durability bonus from quality to something less than 25% per level. You can even argue that people should be taking more durability loss from being hit or using items. However, the current % loss on K/O and death is illogical, backwards, and literally more punishing for using better items.

Edit: I'm not suggesting that higher quality items are not better than lower quality items. I'm stating the fact that being K/O or dying is a bigger punishment for people wearing higher quality items.

The only feedback that I have with the new durability "costs" are that I like that K/O and death adds a durability loss, but I think that the durability loss should be a percent of the base/poor durability rather than whatever the max durability is which scales up to double with legendary/gold items.

i.e It makes no sense that a legendary/gold item loses twice the durability points of a poor quality item. If the durability loss was changed to be a % of the base value then you'd be getting a consistent durability points loss for all qualities of gear.