Posts made by spoletta

Those tales are tradable. You can easily buy them.

If I remember correctly Shimmering Sphere and Mind Daze are from the new school of Illusionism, yet I can't find a tab for them.

Welcome!

Earth elementals are indeed immune to bleeding.

Can confirm this bug.
Also, by trying to place an iron buy order, the other buy order I had (hide armor) got bugged and could no longer be edited or cancelled. It also appeared and disappeared from the UI.

I know that I'm a bit of a broken record on this point, but I think that we really need a more deep system of refining resources for non metal materials.

The main resources can divided in those 4 categories:

Metals
Woods
Cloth
Leather

Currently, the metal is the one best characterized. It requires a facility to process it (land area cost), it interacts with other resources (Fuel cost), it requires time (time cost). This complex process gives value to that resource.
This is the gold standard to which the other 3 should be brought.
In particular:

Leather

The leather resources right now respects 2 of those points. It has a processing facility (tanning tube) and requires time. Problem is that there is no resource involved in the actual refining. You just put your hides inside the tubes and wait.

Now, the actual real process of tanning is not something that we want so see implemented, this is a game not a simulation. At the same time though, since the actual process requires tanning agents, we can make use of it as a resource. In particular, since as a tanning agent you can use pretty much anything from leaves, to barks, to minerals, to chemical products, I propose that you put up to 8 hides inside a tanning tube just like we do now. Those hides depending on the number and the tier (tanning a troll leather is harder than tanning a deer) fill a gauge that is the required amount of tanning agents. Just like we have a required temperature for smelting, except that it depends on both type and quantity. As a tanning agent you can put up to 4 items inside. These should be logs of wood. The higher the tier of the wood used, the higher the value as a tanning agent.
After you have reached the required amount of tanning agents you can start the tanning process and 16 hours later whatever hides you have put inside are now tanned. This means that in those 16 hours you can tan a lot of low tier leather, or a few high tier ones with the same amount of tanning agent. You spend more in time but less in "fuel" or the other way around. Choices are always a good thing to have. Optionally we could also allow stone inside as a tanning agent, so that we give a meaning to stone in late game. It contains minerals.
In short, the better tanning agents you put inside and the more and the better the leather that you can tan at the same time. Right now rare woods are used only for a few crafts, and there isn't much trading of those. This would increase the value of locations close to rare woods (earthwood and deserts), and increase the trading of wood.

Wood

Wood respects none of the points of our golden standard. You cut down the tree, saw it into a plank and craft your bow. Like this, the wood plank resource will never hold a real value. At the very least, the wood must dry before being used. Now, this can be done by air, but for our purposes I think that borrowing the concept of wood drying kilns would be best. The process would be simple. Put wood inside, add some kind of fuel like charcoal or coal, wait some time, retrieve dry wood which can now be cut into planks. Technically you could use even other wood as fuel.

We would use a process very similar to the forging one. The only difference would be that since we can't exacly say "Higher tier, higher temperature" because it would be absurd to put Yew wood at 2000 degrees, we go with a concept of "Higher tier wood requires more time to dry" and so you need to put more fuel inside.

Cloth

Cloth production respects no part of the gold standard. Kill the spider, craft the item, the end. Again, cloth products will hardly get a real value this way. Again, we need some process to prepare the resource, which requires areas, time and other resources.
In this case, what is usually common to all fibers before being able to spin them, is the cleaning process. Since we already have the tanning tubes for leather, and leather and cloth tend to be considered a single processing area, we could use the tubes also for cloth cleaning. It then would work in the exact same way as the tanning process I proposed, except that instead of tanning agents you put cleaning agents (soap). More fibers and of higher tier at the same time would require more cleaning agents.
Now the most obvious source ingame of soap right now is obviously animal fat, but we could make it obtainable from all those edible plants out there (oils), so that we give them more of a reason to exist. Lately, we could add a research to the tech tree under the herbalism branch, to make high power cleaning agents from reagents.

Too ambitious?
Using the previously proposed methods, we could give more value to all those resources while adding just a few facilities to the game and reusing the "smelting" process for all of them with small variations. Put material in the facility, depending on the material you get a required heat/tanning/cleaning/drying level, put the "fuel" and start.

I'm going to provide my feedback on all aspects of the game as of the current alpha. Sorry, this will be long.

What did I test so far:

This time I've played with a quarterstaff mage with a focus on luck.
Fortunately this game is quite open to whacky builds like that, and in fact it turned out the character works very well. It's a good bruiser with good mobility, decent tanking, decent damage and good support abilities. It plays well both in solo and in group.
Together with a group, we decided to make our own city. The wonderful Koala Lumpur!
At this point of the test I'm out of the young player protection, and I'm probably around 90k KP. I've explored a good part of the continent, except Shadow Vale and the Southern regions.

So, with this basis, I will now provide my feedback on all areas of the game that I touched, starting from the ones which were more impacted by the last changes.

New talents

I think that this needs to be put as the first topic, since it has a huge influence on the next ones. The fact that the talent tree had been completely rewritten wasn't announced in any of the videos or blog articles, and yet it is probably the biggest change in this alpha in terms of impact on gameplay. Strictly speaking, the characters were hugely nerfed. All builds, without exception have seen their durability, damage and resources severely limited compared to the last alpha. While previously you had mana regen talents, lots of damage bonuses, huge health buffs, poison immunity and stuff like that, you know have a few mild bonuses for specific builds and some meager generic buffs.
I've had many discussions on this topic and I know that other players have different opinions on this (I'm sure you can find that thread if you look), but to me, this felt wonderful. Simply put, the previous talents were too strong and made you grow into a rabid killing machine which knew no challenges in the game. You were punished for learning too many skills, because those KP points had to go in talents. It was dumb to do otherwise. Now they are still there as a buff and they still provide you some progression, but they are mild enough that there is an actual choice between knowing more skills or having more talents. Obviously this is just a first draft of the new talent tree, half of it isn't even implemented, but as a general direction for them I fully approve this iteration.

New skills and redesigned skills

We had a huge amount of new skills. We all know these, I'm sure that many of us did in fact pause Jacopo's video at least a few dozen times as he predicted. I know I did.
What to me was more interesting though, is that many old skills were redesigned. In particular, all cooldowns based on attributes were turned into fixed cooldowns. This had a huge impact on builds. While previously you had some skills that gained both effects and CD reduction from an attribute making its scaling quadratic and hard to manage, now skills are usually quite linear. You got 12 INT? Good, your fireball is 2/3 of the effects of the one cast by that guy over there with 18 INT. Easy and linear.
A huge number of skills also became more restricted. In particular some skills were moved to heavy weapons only, some skills were disallowed from heavy armors, many were moved to spell channeling weapons only and so on. This is fine, but if I counted them correctly, we currently have around 100 skills, and only a third of them can actually be used without a spell channeling weapon. If we consider that many of those skills also require very specific weapons, then the choices available when you make a warrior type character have become quite narrow. Some restrictions could be lifted, or we need new weapon skills in my opinion.

Changes to attributes

As was already previewed, we have new effects for attributes. The most notable differences are that strenght no longer provides weapon damage, which has greatly diminished the damage of warriors, dexterity no longer provides movement speed, perception no longer provides critical damage and most of all, there is no longer a bonus when you reach 20 in a stat. The effects of this are again a decrease in the overall power of characters and that it is no longer that necessary to go high on a single stat to chase that bonus. Opens more builds, I like it.

PvE difficulty

The 3 previous points tie together into this one. How has the PvE experience changed in the game?
In one word, it is now brutal.
As I said many times already, characters are weaker. The world is a more dangerous place now.
Previously you started being unable to fight against a couple of goblins and ended up being capable of soloing a legend.
Now you still start being unable to kill a couple of goblins, especially considering the new issues with mana, but no longer scale that much in power. Currently, with a very specific build and after an extremely hard and long fight, I managed to solo a mountain troll. It was a real challenge.
In the previous alpha my mage archer could kill 2 of them while semi afk.
There are some things in the game now that you should never get close to if you are alone. The guys that I instead found too weak were the new ogres. We went in with an ill prepared group of 3. All melee, all crushing weapons (ogres are resistant to crushing damage), tier 0 equip no gems. We had no issues at all in there. For one of the hardest areas of the game, it felt quite disappointing.
Apart from hiccups like that one, I'm liking this new PvE. A lot.
The issue that I have with it though, is that it is poorly presented and it scares a lot of players. The game starts hard and stays hard. I've met a lot of confused players that didn't understand what were they doing wrong, or if they had to find a better weapon (spoiler: No, your primitive weapon already has the same damage of a forged one) or they selected a class that sucked or something else.
In general, nothing prepared them to this experience. Nothing told them that PvE wise this game was quite hardcore and that players wouldn't grow that much in power compared to other games.
This then mixed together with them not knowing what a lot of things meant. What is that purple on my health bar? Why did I start walking and taking damage from fatigue? And so on. This led to a lot of frustration in approaching players.
The tutorial needs to be more complete on these topics.

Imbuing

Now lets move to those mechanics that are supposed to provide the players with an actual increase in power. The first one is imbuing.
Now, I really like the reagent system of fractured, but I had a few issues with the imbuing mechanic. Sincerely speaking, it isn't worth it. Finding chipped gems is not so hard, and the bonus that a tier 1 imbue provides is actually good. The problem is that a chipped gem costs less than 100 gold and the reagents for a tier 1 imbue cost less than 50. This amount of resource invested are in line with the buff provided. Too bad that a flat 500g tax is applied to every imbue, even the tier 1! No way that those bonuses are worth investing so much gold!
On the other hand, a flawless gem easily costs you 2k, and the legendary reagents necessary for a tier 3 imbue probably another 5k. And yet the tax on tier 3 is still 500g.
This needs to be scaled based on the tier of the enchant. Very few players are going to bother with imbuing at that gold price, and that is a pity because the reagent system of Fractured is one of its best features.
Tier 1 imbuing should be easily accessible. Having tier 1 imbues should be the norm, you have to entice players into collecting all those reagents. The gold tax should be very low, 50 or 100 gold.
It should go up to 250g for a tier 2 and then around 1000g or even more for a tier 3.
Yes, I understand that we had issues with low gold sinks in the previous alpha, but let's not swing the pendulum to hard in the other direction.

Note: Please add a way to know in which type of equipment you will be able to socket the gem after the imbue process.

Enchanting

Unfortunately I can't give much feedback on enchanting. That is because I never enchanted a single item. Building a city takes a lot of gold and we never had enough to bother with enchanting.
That said, even if I had the gold to spare, I probably wouldn't have bothered increasing my leather armor's armor values by 30% at the cost of 3250 gold. It would have given me a damage reduction of around 15% compared to the tier 0 against slashing damage. Considering that an armor lasts around 1 week before having to be changed, I wouldn't have found the cost to be right. Probably the cost for enchanting the armor must get lower, at least for the tiers that don't provide a new socket.
Completely different approach to weapons instead. Yes, a weapon lasts you only 3 or 4 days of use, but at the same time we are talking about 1000 gold for a 30% damage increase. That's juicy.
I feel that if we find that the price for enchanting a weapon is the correct one, and I think it is, then the price for upgrading the armor should be at most the same.
The other problem is that mages don't scale in damage with the enchant system. Since it is an inherent property, the "Spell channeling" should scale with the tier level of the item. In this case I suggest that for each tier of the spell channeling item, the spell effects are increased by 15%/10%/15%/10%.

Now let's move to city level stuff:

City Progression

The city progressions has been changed in a way that in the end all cities will be either tier 4, 9 or 15. This is because there is no difference between food requirements at the inbetween ranks. This means that a city which is not at those ranks is simply a hamlet/town/village under construction.
Sounds good, it can work.
In this way when you go into an hamlet you know that you will find all the basic necessieties: bank, shrine, market, inn, basic crafting.
Now, how many hamlets/town/villages we are going to have is strictly related to how much food it will be possible to produce. In my opinion out of the 35 cities of Myr, we shouldn't get more than 5 or 6 rank 15, and then we should have around a dozen rank 9.
I'm sure that our resident Lord of Famine (@OlivePit) will be able to provide a better feedback than me on this matter, so I will leave this to him.

Tech Tree

As was promised, the new Tech tree promotes more specialization.
Interesting the fact that you need at least rank 5 to get the tanning tubes and rank 10 to get the advanced smeltery. You also need rank 5 to craft mage apparel and rank 10 for assassin clothes.
It kind of works, but we had too few cities to really understand how it would all mesh together.
What I was instead surprised to see, is that there was no t1-t4 branch for jewel crafting, they were instead put inside the blacksmith tree. The blacksmith tree already provides enchants on a huge number of crafts, ranging from weapons to armors to shields. Adding jewels to it may be too much. It could have used its own separate branch. Jewel enchants are extremely powerful. On the other hand, the carpentry branch only works on a total of 6 items, but I guess that the bow and crossbow section will get expanded a lot. Finally, there is the witchcraft branch, which is useless. It is used to enchant only the 4 mage staffs. Maybe that witchcraft and jewels could become just one single branch of enchants?

On another note, right now the flawless gems are quite rare, so having them be required for both jewels and staffs feels a bit too much. Maybe that the staffs could instead require 3 fine gems?

Market

Not much to say about the market.
It works.
I don't have particular comments about it. It is fine like this and I don't think that further changes are required.

Residents

The link between residents and cities has been changed.
Previously your rank was tied to the number of residents, now as long as you have at least 20 citiziens (10 in this alpha) then you can reach any rank.
This is good and bad.
It is bad because the previous system made it so you were forced to cooperate with solo players and small groups so that your city could grow. Strenght was in the numbers.
The flaw of the previous system was that winner took all. If you had more residents, you were also more likely to get more because you had more techs and benefits to offer.
In this new system, you don't have this issue, since you don't need residents. At the same time though... you don't need residents! So there is nothing stopping you from locking your city services to your citiziens and completely monopolize the city for your guild.
For this system to work, you needed the residents to actually provide you something. And that something couldn't be those meager 500g per week of their taxes. So first of all that tax is now doubled. We also have a more deep tax system which allows to make residents pay for the use of city services. By the way, I didn't find a way to tax the enchanting. Considering that it requires a lot of research points, I think that the city should be able to profit on it.
So now residents are strictly an economy resource. Ok, can work I guess.

What I don't like (but is not something from this alpha) is that resident plots should look like resident plots. Not factory backyards. There should be a limit to the number of refining facilities on a plot! Some look very dumb.
Since we have now defined residents as coin bags, then I think that the best solution to this, is to increase the weekly plot tax by an amount that depends on the number of facilities on your plot. You are using the city techs, so you should pay the taxes for it. At leats there's a reason to keep the number of forges on your plot to a sensible number!
Also, the plots inside the city, should have no refining facilities at all. You shouldn't be able to use the land plots as just additional space for your facilities. If you want more forges, build another blacksmith.
This in any case is tied to the next point.

Refining

This isn't something related to this alpha, but it is (in my opinion) a still unsolved situation.
I will make a different thread for it though.

Ok, I'm mostly done for those that are still reading.
Two last points that I want to touch.

1. Rare monsters are now too hard to study. Things like bandit archamages are very rarely found and give too few knowledge point. It takes an eternity to get their skills.
2. Many mage spells were changed in effects, and now there are very few direct damage spells. That is fine, but there are some iconic spells out there that now have really no place. I'm looking at you fireball. Low damage and much smaller area of effect for 3 memory points. Please show some mercy to our beloved fireball!

Another update:
A spider lich could hit the totem in melee, probably due to chilling touch. So I guess that for some reason the totem is incorporeal.

Welcome!

50% speed bonus is the most you can get under any condition. I already noticed this in the last alpha.
Roads gave you 30% speed bonus and I had a 24% passive speed bonus due to Dex and Frenzy. I could not get past 50%.

I think that at this point this discussion has run its course. We are now discussing semantics.
It is clear that we all have a different concept of what a "vertical progression" is, so trying to discuss how much of that is good for the game is fruitless.

Thanks for the discussion, I'll see myself out.

When I went to this ogre camp , it told me "Shadow Goblin Camp Discovered", and on the map it discovered me this location.

Update:
The totem seems to also have a 100% dodge chance.

No I think you are getting really confused here.
In Dota at the end of the game, you don't carry your level to your next game.
You don't play a game of dota to "progress".
You simply play it because it is fun.
Dota has absolutely zero progress.

Players play a game for 2 different reasons:

1. To progress
2. Because it is fun

If the game is fun, then offering a progress isn't needed. I don't play a game of Warhammer because I progress, I don't play a game of LoL because I progress, I don't play a game of Overwatch because I progress and so on. If the game is fun, then there is no need to offer a progress.
It is a game and it is fun to play. That's it, it is working.

Alternatively you can force someone to do something that they don't find fun (i.e. grind) because you offer something in return. That's a progress driven game. That's good and well, but that's not what me and many others here like.

And again, this game already presents a lot of possible "progress" in terms of equipment, so it's not like we are missing that aspect.
I often find that offering a progress is just the easy way out for a rushed job or a bad game design. You can't make a game fun so you need to grab player's time offering progress.

No, I want more than that from this game. I'm greedy. I want it to be fun to play.

@grofire I said 1 week to give a number. Personally after 1 week and half of play I'm out of the young player protection, so that could be a good reference.

As for examples, the first ones that come to mind are UO and LoA. After you were "done" with your char, you played it for years without going after some kind of powerup, but simply because you were engaged in the competition. Be it PKing, guild competitions, trading or whatever you liked doing, you played day after day without any mind to vertical scaling. Also, don't forget that this game is an hybrid between an MMO and a MOBA, and in MOBA there is absolutely no kind of vertical scaling, yet players have been playing it for 10 years. If the game is fun, there is no need for that kind of carrot.

By the way, it isn't like this game has no big vertical scaling. You still scale with equipment. You equip yourself in primitive gear, then together with friends put together a city to make better gear. With that better gear you finally can face that big troll, take his toenail and use it for a +180hp enchant on your armor. All of this is scaling.

By new player I don't mean literally a char that was just created. We have a young protection in place afterall. Someone who has played for 1 week has that minimum amount of talents and a few sets of skills already.

Also, vertical progression and longevity are not strictly related. While there aren't many games without any progression, there are a lot where you reach the cap quite fast and then you play for different reason than progress. As long as there's some kind of content in game to keep you in it (and for sandboxes that content kind of creates itself), you don't need a continous vertical progress.

We agree on the necessity of some amount of verticality. We disagree on the amount.
For me the right amount is few enough that a new player can beat an old player by outplaying him. The mechanical advantage must not be oppressing enough that that fight becomes onesided. A difference in resistances, hp, damage or whatever within a +10/15% of the base value is probably acceptable. More than that, you are making it a onesided fight.

Guess that we have different expectations depending on when we joined the travel. For me, what I saw and what made me back the game was the very first image presented on the website:

So yes, for me the no vertical progressions is quite a main feature of the game. I do agree that fully horizontal is impossible and that there must be a little bit of verticality, but point stands that this is first and foremost an horizontal progression game. So I expect from the talent tree a mostly horizontal progressions.
I can accept that the equipment is very hardly going to be an horizontal thing, and with this test it really became evident, but the equip is by its nature something not permanent, so I can accept it.

Nope, that bonus has been removed.
You can find all the effects of the new attributes on the wiki.

https://fractured.fandom.com/wiki/Strength
https://fractured.fandom.com/wiki/Dexterity
https://fractured.fandom.com/wiki/Intelligence
https://fractured.fandom.com/wiki/Constitution
https://fractured.fandom.com/wiki/Perception
https://fractured.fandom.com/wiki/Charisma

Tried with Slow and cobweb. All those effects reduce the attack speed for characters, but seem to have no effect on mob attack speed.
This is probably due to the fact that the slow effects slow down the animation of the attack, and characters are in a constant attack animation when at full attack speed. Mobs instead seem to do attack - wait - attack - wait. Slowing their attack animation wouldn't impair their attack speed if it doesn't affect the "wait" part.