Best posts made by DCCCXIX

So I was watching Fractured for a good while, 198 level foundation and all that, and finally there is a PvP focused test that I can enjoy, and I can finally whine about PvP balance in a prealpha like I threatened to do months ago.

I'll try to not to be biased, but I'll probably fail, so what I write is written from a perspective of a assassin-wannabe character with 16/20/1610/7/13 stats Abilities are: Shadow Step, Shadow Walk, Shadow Dance, Crippling Strike, Death Mark, Strike Wounds, Blinding Strike. Talent wise - stealth and dodge is maxed, rest is dumped into the perception tree, with an "inevitable" perk.

The most annoying problem to date
So the first thing that I'd like to notice right away is that it's way too easy to esacape a fight. You can simply walk away from almost any build. Instant bandages paired with huge passive HP regeneration ensure that even if you'll manage to get some hits on a fleeing target, it the long run, it'd just regenerate all the health back.

The most annoying glitch to date
Next, a weird glitch prevents proper testing, as sometimes attacks just stop connecting for no reason. No blocks, no dodges, no ability procs, just poking the air. It often happens in PvP, less often in PvE if PvP flag is on. In the latter case, turning the PvP flag off helps, in PvP - nothing helps. Apparently this glitch only takes place with daggers and fists, can't even imagine how's it possible. But it's annoying as hell and makes me shriek at the screen like a little angry schoolgirl. Please fix this shit.

Popular archetypes and lack of flexibility
Overall character roles seem to have split into three categories for now - archers, warriors and mages. They're all played more or less the same, but differences are noticable. I haven't met many people who play assassin-like archetype, probably because of the glitch, and little to no people creating anything outside of the standart roles.

I personally think that the reason for this is abilities being too restricted. For example, all the invocation abilities are bound to int and can't be used by any character that isn't int-heavy, while they could have some secondary effects which would scale with other stats as well. Touches are restricted to unarmed only, but they could be made to be used with any weapon, giving unarmed builds an advantage in attack speed.

Most assassination abilities are not that strong that they should be bound to light armor only, besides, some of them are outright bad at the moment, like Assassination, that eats up a whooping 6 memory points and deals a flat damage multiplied by target's missing health percentage.

There are some rather unrestricted abilities, sure, but for the most part, many, many abilities are very restricted, especially to int-heavy characters.

General PvP flow
What feels good is relative freedom of building, even if quite restricted. What feels not that good from a perspective of a melee character, is that pretty much all the fights are either three button presses + hold click and waiting for who dies first, or one of the participants running away with no chance to catch him. It gets more fun when you play against ranged characters, but it's very frustrating to try to catch them, as melee weapons' reach seems to be so little that even if you reach a running target and perform a hit - it runs away before the hit is landed. Not that it makes ranged characters impossible to kill, no but the whole fight is centered around trying to get a hit in, I mean, not fighting the enemy, but fighting weak weapon reach + ping.

TTK
This is a matter of preference mostly, but I feel that TTK is way too big. People are simply not dying. Especially if you're fighting a tanky build - it takes literally forever, very often this fight just never ends. Quick fights may take place, but they usually involve a newbie mage with bad awareness.

TTK and CC duration
Mycharacter has very low charisma, not much constitution, so it should suffer from CC quite alot, however it doesn't happen. With TTK we currently have, CC doesn't do much. Say, bash only lets you get one more hit in, when you often need well above 20 hits to hope to finish the fight. IMO either TTK should be reduced or CC duration - increased.

Purely assassin things
Just some feedback on my own character.
I tried to make something resembling a usual assassin. It should be a burst heavy character that's bad at sustaining prolonged fights.
First disappointment was the huge TTK that doesn't quite allow creating a burst-focused character for quick fights.
Second one - lack of a proper opener. That doesn't allow to create a burst focused character at all.
Third one is stealth. It's bugged and for some reason people can just see me from time to time, from any distance. To be really invisible you must use Shadow Walk when you're already rendered on an enemy screen it seems, as rendering a character (like if someone logs in onto your head) shows it without stealth.
Shadow dance is bugged as well, and it's animation can be seen even if you're invisible. Which is ironic, since it's expected to make you more invisible, if anything.
Forth one is Assassinate. The icon looks cool, the name suggests that it hits hard but really that's not the case. It consumes insane amounts of mana for a str/dex build, requires huge amount of memory points, and results in 12*missinghp% damage if you have maxed perception. So if an enemy is at 30% hp that's about 800 damage, which seems good on paper, but in practice this ability requires so much mana and memory points that you're handicapping yourself a ton. With constant bandage use, single shadow dance will give tons more damage overall, strike wounds + any wound of choice will give tons more damage as well, with much less requirements. I'd suggest to make this ability a very strong opener instead of a finisher. And in it's current state it looks especially bad if compared to WOP:Kill, which is simply better in everything.

Also, primitive dagger description says that it ignores 40% of enemy's armor, but it doesn't seem to work.

Overall gameplay is to just click someone and press wounds abilities from time to time, not very dynamic if you ask me.

General balance
From my personal perspective, the strongest builds are con-based fighters, followed by archers and mages. Can't place thief-like characters anywhere because of bias.

Fighters are clear winners because of second wind, plate armor and frenzy. Second wind replenishes full HP to anyone, be it 1.5k hp squishy character, or 3k+ hp armored one. Con based fighters have lots of HP, armor and resistances, so they can use second wind more than once during the fight, and frenzy basically gives lots of DPS and movement speed. In both cases, those abilities require no mana, so int can be dropped, and as evasion mechanics are really weird (0 accuracy character hits a 700 evasion character with about 50% chance), perception can be dropped as well. Some people said that full plate will probably be expensive if it would be crafted and not given away for free, if that's the case - fighters will have it much worse, as they wouldn't be that strong without plate.

Archers have good burst damage and kiting capabilities.

And mages, well, since the crit chance fix I didn't see many of them.

Overall, second wind/frenzy seem overpowered, word skills probably need to be looked at, and there are some trash abilities like assassinate or bleeding strike, well, apart from that game feels relatively balanced and very playable.

Misc
Lots of love for friendly fire. It helped me to 3v1 once, and will, in the future, help to fight zerging.

Personally, I just hope that devs will stay true to their vision. If you look through Albion's patch notes you'll see that it had good direction at first, but since Carleon update they've butchered their economy, capitalized more on instanced areas, which is the opposite of what should've been done, and there's also little to no new content, by which I mean once the "meta" has settled and all cookie cutter builds has been found, there is little to no ways to invent any new playstyles, etc., etc.

All problems with Albion are rooted with devs losing their vision and having wrong priorities as a result.

I just hope Fractured won't repeat their mistakes, which is going to be rather easy because of the unorthodox gamedesign.

I have this bug with a dagger, it feels like sometimes attacks are just not working, which is not only harmful for game enjoyment, but for testing. Can't actually approximate my strength against various builds when 2/3 of my attacks are just not connecting for no reason.

@gothix gave them some numbers so now it's easier to read.

Happy to see and greet a good community of a promising game. I'm looking forward to hunt you later somewhere in the alpha :^)

I'm a veteran-timewaster and a MMORPG enthusiast, with a bit of EvE and Ultima, and lots of Ragnarok, Rift, SWTOR, Aika, Aion, Warhammer, Albion, Lineage II, Allods, Royal Quest, Tree of Savior, Guild Wars II, Neverwinter, World of Warcraft, Skyforge, Perfect World and probably more, experience behind my back. Hope to spend a couple of years more, enjoying this game with you guys.

@gothix Pretty sure that if implemeted, wasd-controls would be only for you. Of course it's a bit of hyperbole, but wasd in isometric games is so impractical and uncomfortable, it's the same as asking devs to make the game playable with gamepads. The amount of players who would actually use this is so small that it won't worth the effort to work on.

Isometric WASD could be seen in Tree of Savior for example, and it was horrible, was one of the major downsides of the game, while classic isometric point-and-click is a well-established standart which is working for 20+ years already.

@Tuoni atlest we can hope for it.
Vanilla wow's best plus was the atmosphere the community created, it will be a fake time travel.
But atleast PvE enthusiasts should try oldschool Naxx.

Best PvP is naturally occuring solo or small scale PvP. 1v1, 1v2, 1v3, 2v2, etc.
Even better if it has a reason. For example, I want to gather magic mushrooms and catch fairy butterflies that can be found only in this area, and here is a guy that's giving me a competition for those. Of course he should be forced to leave this spot in a gruesome way.

Second best is coordinated small scale fights for resources. Say, 5 guys are mining carelessly. So another group appears and attacks them, and a fight ensures. Whoever wins, gets a cart full of good stuff.

Third best, is a siege scenario. Where you participate a town/castle/whatever siege as a guild member, as a mercenary, or as a guy who asked to join just for fun.

This might be the best PvP absolutely, if implemented right. Requires correct town/castle planning, various tasks, objectives and possibilities, so that every build will have something to do. Some hold the main gate, others press them. Some guard the smaller passages with smaller groups, some are doing infiltration, espionage kind of work, doing some kind of sabotaging and killing behind enemy lines, etc.

And this might be the worst, if it's implemented in a bad way, where sieges will end up as an AoE spam galore, with only "Tank", "Ranged DPS", and "Healer/support" type of characters having place in this clusterkek of a PvP (See: Albion).

@jetah said in What’s the difference of Fractured with Diablo 3?:

@dcccxix
level to 70, bounties, rift for gear while running grifts for leg gems.

i don't see that as a theme park. you can skip bounties (if your build doesn't need the royal ring).

It doesn't matter, you don't affect the world and you have no freedom. You just walk through fancy corridors until the game storyline is over, after that you grind rifts until your fingers fall off.

@kralith said in What can we learn from other similar pojects?:

Don‘t let the community too much influence your path of the game, especially not if the requested features don‘t follow the vision you have.

This pretty much.
Albion got destroyed because of bad game-design decisions, because they didn't filter their feedback well enough. So the most whiny people got what they wanted and the game became much worse.

I hope devs do read the forum, and this thread in particular.

I'll double the "keep your core vision". For example, I'd really like to see any vertical progression of a character, even if just a tiny one, and many other people will want the same, and many other things on top of that. Filter the feedback you gather, and don't try to implement feedback-based changes as fast as possible. Even if 80% of playerbase whines on some topic, it doesn't mean that you should change it. Analyze it all, come to conclusions, and then find the solution, gradually. Having some problem in your game that you've made yourselves, won't affect your playerbase as much as catering to some chosen fraction of players, which may be seen by players as changing of the game's direction, which may cause many people to leave, and in MMORPGs it's very hard to get your players to return, if you lose any of your initial fan/playerbase - it will be very hard to regain those numbers.

So don't copy others' mistakes and just make what you intended to make in the first place.

I wonder if horizontal progression will include actual gear progression.
I don't see how you can make an itemization system that will make sense economy-wise unless there are atleast some bonuses to some gear pieces. But if they'll be equal in power and only differ in different features they provide, then probably those pieces that require materials from the least populated spots will cost more. But on average I think gear will be fairly cheap to replace and it can be a problem IMO. If basic and most advanced gear will barely differ it their stats, it's unlikely that they'll differ in their cost too much, apart from the best items possible.

It comes down to fine tuning the balance of resource, currency and item flow into the game and removing it all from the game. There were no details on how it all works even approximately, so I think we won't get to know that until the game hits beta or even further, when it will have atleast a decently populated world and established ingame economy.

@jetah it's still a bad compromise because information is money, and you get information for free this way. Of course it's to be looked at because even if such system won't exist in the game, it will be made on 3rd party sites.

But if, say, we have a player who's traveling between towns to buy something he's looking for, than free access to such information will decrease the amount he has to walk drastically, which will reduce the amount of people in the open world if we'll extrapolate it on others.

And for one more example, let's say that we have a merchant type of player who's ready to conduct researches on the market prices for different items and different towns. Without such access to this information - he'll have to walk to other towns on foot and look the prices up himself, or, atleast, he'll have to communicate with others to get this info. In one case - same as before, number of players in the world increases, in the second case - socialization is encouraged, which is generally a good thing for an MMORPG game.

Plus, if said guy will have access to all the info on prices, people will just look it up, and prices will be much more equal between various towns, and it will almost entirely remove a chance for someone to find an opportunity to sell something for 10's the price he's bought this stuff, as people will see those price gaps and equalize them asap. Thus almost removing an entire type of activity in the game, discouraging travel and reducing amount of players in the open world.

As a general rule, if you make a niche game which is MMORPG (and Fractured is an MMORPG, not just an MMO), you just take the most popular approach and do the opposite with no compromise.

With this wow-like auction house - to any game it will never bring anything good, same as LFG and many more features. It will just turn the game from an actual MMORPG into a session-based game where open world will be essentially empty and useless.

I think I'll post here again so I won't clutter the forum with useless threads about purely dex-assassination melee problems.

Evasion
So here is an chance to avoid an attack/evasion graph, where z is accuracy.
https://www.desmos.com/calculator/spdpzdyws8

We can see that even if character has zero accuracy, he'll still hit targets with 500 evasion with 60% chance.
A character with a decent accuracy of 400 will hit a target with 400 evasion about 78% of the time.

That means that evasion and accuracy are not balanced with one another.

This makes sense since otherwise characters with low perception/accuracy wouldn't be viable unless they're casters. The problem arises from the fact that evasion is the only protection of a dexterity melee character.

Ranged characters have range as their main source of defence, str/con based melee characters have high mitigation from armor and big HP pool, however for a dex-based character his only protection is evasion, and it can't compete with range or heavy armor.

So in order to be semi-viable one should either be either a ranged charater, or go deep into con/str, which places evasion in a position of a complimentary bonus.

From what I see in the game currently, balance wise, it should be outweighted by abilities that benefit from dex/per and can't be used with heavy and/or medium armor, however at their current state those abilities fail to do so, infact, they're not strong enough to be limited to be used with light armor only.

Those abilities are expected to either provide a huge DPS boost to compensate for lack of survivability, or some ways to increase character's longevity in the fight, current dex abilities fail to do so. They're pretty much centered around attack speed, applying pure damage, applying debuffs and crit (talking mainly about assassination abilities here).

Attack speed only increases with pure dex, unlike strength where weapon damage increased both by the stat itself and relative talents, for example. my character with maxed dex has 10% attack speed (and 700 evasion) with several enchants, so attack speed scailing is limited. Strike wounds and assasinate provide relatively weak (in practice) damage, as they deal flat damage that has almost no scailing. Shadow dance only scales with stealth, and in return, stealth doesn't do anything combat-wise apart from scailing SD. Abilities which are guaranteed crits are simply not strong enough to mitigate said problems, investing in crit in general seems a waste of resources at this point.

To put it simple, assassination abilities don't outweight warfare abilities, but they're locked for light armor and light weapons only. And if warfare skills are not much worse dps-wise than assassination ones, why lock yourself into light armor?

Stats
For a decent caster build you need int and con, for decent melee build you need str and con, for a decent dex build, however, you need str (to actually deal damage), con (to live for a while), int (because shadow dance, mark of death, assassinate require tons of mana), and dex itself, which is a bare minimum. There are not enough points for all of this, unless you go unarmed with touches which allows you to dump str and kill two birds with one stone (int).
If light weapons would scale their damage with dex instead of str it would help a ton, but as it is now, there is simply not enough stats for this kind of build.

Misc
Mark of death and strike wounds break stealth when used. I don't know if it's intended to be this way or not, but it makes stealth even less useful.

Strike wounds and shadow dance have animation time that eats up precious combat time and doesn't allow to turn them on and off on demand to, say, fight mana problems and only use them when needed, without rooting yourself for a second while turning them on, and it actually matters alot as well.

Primitive dagger recipe says that this dagger ignores 40% of enemies' armor, but it doesn't work for primitive dagger, or the basic dagger you can get from the bank currently.

Assassination ability branch is almost the least bursty branch of all at the moment, it has no good openers, no good CC, barely any survivability and it works best to make a bag of trash lurking in the shadows kind of character, that or a PvE DPS. The only ability from this branch that actually sees any use is shadow walk.