Best posts made by Yalah

Day 1 Plan:

TLDR: Get 2k for house. Decide if I want to craft myself or just farm and buy. Decide house location based on previous choice.
Ability targets: Hunter's Mark is my #1 goal (Goblin Trapper and Groko Hunter). I think Goblin Warchief (Inspire, Staggering Shout, Enrage) and Groko Chieftans (Shields up, Ram Through, Challenge, Execute) are the secondary goals. End TLDR

My first real milestone will be getting a house. That means 2k gold and an idea of where I want to put it. While I'm working on those, I need to decide if I want to craft myself or just farm and sell to buy gear. I know that with EA just starting that there could be a lot of low prices on buying stuff. Crafting myself is cheaper in terms of gold, but it will take far longer in time spend gathering. I will decide later.

The first thing I think about is what abilities I want to focus on. No axe has Spell Channeling so that immediately cuts out all he magic stuff. That leaves me with Axe Fighting, Warfare, Leadership, and... Hunting as my options. <Reminder that this is a PvE guide.>

Leadership: Possibly useful later, but not focusing on: Aura of Oppression, Challenge, Crushing Shout, Inspire, Intimidate, Shields Up, Staggering Shout. Note: Call to Tenacity is bugged and does not remove bleed. It would be a top priority if it did since bleed is common on Terra.

Warfare: Not a lot here that I definitely want that I don't get from Gladiator or the tutorial - Bloodlust and Shockwave. Frenzy and Vicious Attacks cannot be used with Bloodlust. Overpower has poor uptime and I'd rather have accuracy built in. Resolve does not clear bleed, but it's an easy obtain when killing bandits. Second Wind and Enrage are two oh shit options that have long cooldowns for PvP reasons - skippable.

Axe Fighting: We start with Sharp Strike, Lacerate, and Cleave Armor. The first two have bleed built in so that is our Bloodlust synergy.
Execute seems like it's the key to upping our damage. Groko Chieftans (100), Direwolves (80), and Polar Bears (80) are our options. The best option is probably the Groko because they have a few other abilities we might find beneficial.
Decimate kinda looks terrible and has no super good farm options. Skipping for now.
Hack & Slash I don't know if this will be good or not, probably better on a 2h. The problem is Felghouls are the only option to learn it and they f'ing suck to fight (mostly because of this ability.

Hunting: Spike Trap is not going to be good damage for me, but it is an extra source of bleed if I need it for Bloodlust. Hunter's Mark negates target evasion which can help my auto attacks land. It's restricted to Light and Medium armors, but it might be good early on. Groko Hunters have both skills (40 and 80). Goblin Trappers have Hunter's Mark (80).

Not gonna lie, the skill options don't knock my socks off. As long as I am not using heavy armor, I may use a weapon toggle to something with spell channeling so that I can pop off a couple of very good spells. I have not considered what, just that it's an option.

I think it might be neat to untie Primal Form from specific Wildfolk races and instead make a set of Primal Forms that any Wildform race could pick from. For the lore, you'd just say that the Primal abilities come from something specific to Arboreus rather than a specific race.

Primal Form options:

1. Regeneration
2. Melee speed
3. Crit
4. Caster
5. Movement/runnning away
6. etc etc etc

You could still only have 1 Primal power, each primal would have it's own duration, and maximum stored uses - all as the current system use. If you then tied these powers to specific events/locations/"quests" around Arboreus, Wildfolk could choose/change their Primal Form by going there, doing whatever, and getting a new power/Primal "affinity." Maybe to change your Primal Power, you take X energy crystals to Y location of a/b/c/d/e Primal Power and sacrifice those crystals to change to that power (an Energy Crystal dump).

Changing Primal Forms to me more generic and tied to the nature of Arboreus would give Wildfolk better specialization options (while still being balanced around having less total stat points). Each race would still have it's own distinct focus because of the stat limits and secondary racial bonuses.

In my head, you could be a caster deer that could double up on power by getting a "caster" Primal or maybe get a "tanky" primal to help them in those emergency situations. Or maybe you're a big plate wearing bear and you could choose to get a "regeneration" primal to help with the lack of casting or maybe a "movement speed" primal to help you overcome your slower speed.

Just an idea that I thought was neat and might make it easier to balance the Primal Forms by tying them to Arboreus rather than each specific race.

Not a Guide: Gladiator Background - Postscript:

TLDR: I had time so I put 4x t2 fire imbues on my leather set to test out the elemental clear plan. Worked perfectly with no issues. END TLDR

There was supposed to be a patch with archery improvements and I was going to start a Bowman after that. The patch was delayed so I decided to go ahead and run the Gladiator through an elemental area, with resist imbues, just to confirm that there wouldn't be any major issues.

I decided that fire was the hardest to deal with so I popped on four T2 fire resist imbues, 400 resist each, and went to the volcano on Aerhen. (Bloodvein, Bloodvein, Fire Essence, Goblin tongue, Rogue stone.) I just bought the materials because I'd left my own on Terra. They were not terribly expensive given the cash I'd made so far, but ore importantly they were all available in the northern starter city where I was standing at the time. Less than 2k total. Once again I bought a house plot, built a quick imbue table, and then dropped it after.

No changes to skills or talents from the end of Day 3. Just the fire resistance imbues for gear changes. To make a long story short, the imbues put me over 2k fire resistance, which is the cap, and I blew everything out of the water. I basically ignored warm stacks and burning and just killed anything I ran into. The only time I dropped below ~75% health was on a Greater Fire Elemental that I charged into with 4 primelings around him. They got me to ~40%.

I'm very confident in my plan of leather set + resist imbues to full clear the various elementals (note: you can only have one resist imbue on a single item.) Shock and Frost might not be as smooth as Fire, because of the nature of their debuffs, but as long as no one attacks you while you're mid fight, I don't really anticipate problems.

I picked up all the POI of the Aerhen Volcano and then went up north to farm some furs and wool (for future projects). Maybe 90 minutes worth of time and got up to 207k KP. After buying imbue materials, and paying for boats, I probably only ended up making 2k plus materials (~150 furs and 100 wool). Oh, I did end up dropping my magic defense nodes to get more carry weight - that stuff is heavy.

@spoletta

Overall, it's an interesting idea. Maybe more importantly it is standalone and could be added on top of other systems. Meaning you could use this with the current system or say the one proposed by Goreth (or whatever new system the devs came up with).

The one big change I would like to see with this idea is that, in addition to the passive regen, there should be some way for active players to restore their crafting points by in-game play so that their entire progression system is not just passively controlled/limited. Without time to really think about it, some things you could do would be:

1. Require a player to gather and then turn-in X amount of resources to regain Y crafting points.
2. Require a player to go to a location, do B, get C item, bring C back to restore Y crafting points.
3. Require a player to use J skill to "gather life force" from a target that must be killed in K seconds. After L gathered life force, restore Y crafting points.

Any of the in-game means of replenishing crafting points should require active play of some kind. i.e. Not anything that would allow a group to just feed more points to the crafter. The crafter should need to be active in the world to recover the points. (p.s. i don't think the devs should allow account sharing.) The starter quest system shows that the game has the ability to track some of the suggest actions (kill, gather, make) already.

If you take the above idea, you could tie these "active regen methods" into player cities. Make them start/stop in the cities, give the cities some kind of bonus to the city for people doing these events, and create some kind of city tech that has an effect/bonus on these events. There are several options that could allow cities to become, "hey we do this, come to here instead of there."

This idea or some kind of active crafting regen method prevents dedicated crafters from hitting an artificial wall in their progress. Guilds or groups can still help a crafter by helping the crafter complete their active regen method, but they cannot just feed materials to force advancement. It requires a real person being a real player in the game. Let crafters no life if that's what they want to do.

Some questions and comments about the suggestion:

Under this system would increasing proficiency with T1 still give a mastery bonus for T2? Or how would this change, if it was kept at all? Would you need to fully master T1 before moving on? (My concern is with feeling the need to burn crafting points on T1 just to be more efficient at T2.)

Would crafting experience/mastery gained be directly proportional to the crafting points used? Weapon smiths would probably be upset that they get half the progress.

On restoring points, I think it would be a lot better to have points restored every hour or every X minutes rather than at a set time (once per day). So rather than you get X points at server restart, you get X/24 points every hour. That way you're not waiting for an arbitrary time of day. (I also think you should be able to remove resources from processing as they're completed rather than only at the end - under the same logic.)

I am a little concerned that a 5x5 city plot would give more crafting points regen than a 4x4. A 5x5 has ~50% more area as a base value and then you have to figure the extra room you have to place other bonus effects). You can make an argument that it rewards people for the risk of being in a city and gives more benefits to be in a city, but that's a pretty big difference.

I don't have any idea, but since cities on Arboreus do not require walls is their size reduced to make up for the difference? If not, you could be giving a passive crafting bonus (by allowing more 5x5 plots) to all Arborean cities because they just have more room (read as opportunity) for larger crafter houses. I'm not sure I like giving Arboreus more incentive to be "crafting central" over Syndesia.

Overall I like the idea and with my suggested "active crafting point regen" idea added in, I kinda love the idea. You can prevent the "one person does everything" scenario while still letting people really dedicate themselves to pushing their skill. You also give a distinct choice between more house or more processing. (And in the best way that I've seen anyone suggest.)

Not a Guide: Druid Background - Conclusion:

TLDR: I do not recommend anyone start as the Druid background. Druidcraft has few options for damage until you can hill the hardest PvE monsters and the Mace Fighting options, which also have Spell Channeling, are very limited and subpar when compared to just being a pure melee build. I have shown that you can hit rank 50 by starting with this background, but it is slower than several other options. If you wanted to try making a Druid build at endgame, I would suggest you pick a different background, grind ranks, and then try making a Druid build after rank 50. END TLDR

When I picked this background I did so with the opinion that it was the worst background currently available. At the time, several new players were complaining about starting with it and struggling to maintain the "feel of being a Druid," while still trying to rank up. My goal was to stay as true to the "Druid feel" as I could while still progressing to rank 50. Getting to rank 50 was achieved, but there is basically no Druid left.

I'm going to break this Conclusion into three parts, "Why you should avoid," "Suggestions to make it work," and, "Endgame Druid Possibilities."

Why Druid you should avoid the Druid background:

I guess to start, in my mind a Druid is a tanky melee/casting hybrid. The combo of Mace Fighting and Druidcraft (and spell channeling in general) do achieve this feel, but the reality of Fractured is that the game does not truly support a capable melee that can also cast spells. The reason for this is that many weapon skills scale partially based on weapon damage. For example Crushing Assault, a Druid starter skill, is, Weapon Damage plus 8x STR. This means that the optimal weapon for this skill is the weapon with the highest base damage. In Fractured that means a 2h weapon with a slow attack speed.

(The one exception to the above statement would be a Knife Fighting build that stacks on hit effects (poison, Strike Wounds, ect) and then casts spells. If and when Martial Arts becomes a thing, Unarmed might also achieve the same status. All other melee/casting hybrids, that I can think of, are not really utilizing melee weapon skills. They do exist, but they do not fit "the feel of a Druid.")

Melee Skills:

If we take a look at 2H weapons with the Slow speed, to take advantage of melee skills, and also Spell Channeling, because we want that Druid feel, we find exactly zero options. Quarterstaff and the Shortbow are the only 2h weapons that even have spell channeling. Both are medium speed, the Shortbow doesn't feel very Druid to me, and Quarterstaff is the highest damage option of any of the rest melee options. To give you an idea of the melee damage difference between the Quarterstaff and a "true" 2h melee weapon..

At 22 STR:
Quarterstaff damage: 143
Warhammer damage: 238

That means, even staying in the same weapon school, each and every Mace Fighting ability that you use, the Warhammer is flat out 95 more damage. That's 60% less base damage on every single Mace Skill. If you followed the guide, you'll notice that I was choosing to use Shouts for damage over Mace Fighting abilities. The reason for this is that Shouts scale purely off of STR and, with similar cooldowns, they were actually more DPS than using Mace Fighting.

This information applies to 2/5 of the Druid starter skills and 5/6 Mace skills (two of which are passives and cannot be used at the same time).

Druidcraft (and casting):

On the magic front, Druid starts with Verdant Regrowth, Sprouting Pulse, and Crushing Roots.

Verdant Regrowth is a solid spell for a couple of reasons. First, it clears bleed stacks and provides immunity during it's effect. Second, its "heal" is not actually a heal. It's a bonus to your heath regeneration. This means that talents that give a bonus to healing will not work on this ability, but it also means that debuffs that block healing, won't effect this skill. On any Spell Channeling character I play, I get this early.

Sprouting Pulse does crushing and applies a root (snare) effect. Crushing Roots does crushing damage, has stacks, but only to a target that is rooted. This means that Crushing Roots is totally unusable on anything that is not currently rooted or that cannot be rooted at all (Ogre come to mind right away). In practice you hit a monster or monsters with Sprouting Pulse and then spam Crushing Roots. If Sprouting Pulse only hits one monster you only get one use of Sprouting Pulse. If several monsters get hit by Sprouting pulse, you usually only have time to hit two different monsters with Crushing Roots before the root ability wears off.

As individual spells, I don't actually have a problem with them and I think the synergy of Crushing Roots is kinda cool. The problem I have is that as a new Druid these are the only two spells that you have, One has a 12 second cooldown, and the other is only castable immediately after the first. Other casters can pop one spell, run around, pop another, and repeat. Druids slam two spells as fast as humanly possible and stand there for 12 seconds. It's not fun to play. (Additionally, when half your skills are melee, the root doesn't actually do anything because you want to be right next to the monsters anyway.)

Looking at the other Druidcraft spells:

• Barbed Skin is great for a melee that doesn't use evasion. It's attainable early on Arboreus.
• Cobweb and Entangling Web are non damaging snares. Both are attainable early on Syndesia.
• Bramble Wall is a non damaging root/wall that would offer synergy with Crushing Roots. Attainable only from high CR Ogre Druids.
• Entangling Roots is a damaging roots spell with a fairly large AOE. Attainable only from high CR Treants and Arboreal Dragons
• Insect Swarm is a non damaging area effect that confuses and gives poison stacks. Attainable only from high CR Ogre Archdruids.
• Arboreal Dragon Breath is a channeled damaging spell that also gives poison stacks. Attainable only from high CR Arboreal Dragons.

Of the 7 additional Druidcraft spells, 4 do no damage (one does apply poison stacks), one is a good, early, passive option, and two are only attainable from the toughest monsters.

Like I said at the start, you can start with the Druid background and make it work, but it's going to be slower than other options and much slower if you don't branch out into other ability schools.

Suggestions to make starting with the Druid background easier:

1. Don't start it. That's my number one advice. Start with a different background and try to switch over to "Druid" once you have many more skills to pick from.

2. Starting as a Druid, and focusing melee: Start with DEX instead of STR. Immediately focus on getting Strike Wounds and switch to a dagger after. Use poisons. From there, go for any other Strike skill from Knife Fighting. Bleeding strike has many low level options and would synergize with Bloodlust if you wanted to do that. If not, many of the other strike abilities are good. Daggers, with poisons and Strike Wounds will do a lot of work for you. You can supplement those with whatever spells you want.

3. Starting as a Druid, and focusing casting: INT/WIS/CON to start. Get any magic that is not Druidcraft and be a mage.

Endgame Druid Possibilities:

If you wanted to use melee weapon skills or rely on melee damage, I think the only option is daggers. Poisons and Strike Wounds are on hit effects that do solid damage, if a little slow in ramping up. Scimitar and a Shield are an option, but they are defensive options.

I think the more realistic option is as a pure caster that has WIS and INT. In this build, your roots will help you keep distance and the two strongest Druidcraft spells offer Poison synergy. Your INT will let you more effectively use Venomancy skills, specifically Infectious Burst, to ramp your poison damage even higher. From here, the world is your oyster. You can fill in your other slots with supports, heals, or other damage types. If you wanted to avoid INT, you do have other damage options, but you're mostly going to be limited to Energy damage.

Concluding the Conclusion:

While I don't recommend starting as a Druid background, this, Not a Guide, proves you can start with basically any background and make it to rank 50. I tried to lay out the weaknesses of this background and the "feeling of playing a Druid" as it is presented in Fractured, but you all have to make your own choices.

As said in an earlier post, I will be doing another Postscript for this Not a Guide where I explore the Endgame Druid I described just before this. Maybe not immediately, but in the next couple of days for sure.

If you have any questions about this specific build, I'll watch and can try to answer them. You can also post them in the thread for this Not a Guide, over in the share-your-builds channel of the Discord.

For other questions about the game, #player-help on the Discord is a good place for general questions.

@Hoser On some of your points, I don't disagree. I would have liked all of this stuff to be in the game already. I don't want to take my house down and put it back up later with the new skin (if that's how it works).

As far as your understanding goes, that's your right to think that. I tend to think that the people that have stuck around are all the most dedicated. The people that most want to see the game work and those people are ok with waiting to get their perks. As Spoletta said, these things might be coming sooner than even I thought - sometime during EA. Personally, I think VIP will come as quick as they can get it done.

Day 8 Results:

TLDR: 4 hours today (49.5 hours total) with ~30 min on gathering. 371k Knowledge, rank 46, ~10k gold. 100% to Industrial Ogres plus some world spawns.END TLDR

Gear: I started with the el cheapo (Iron Chain Mail and a primitive mage staff) and switched to the Steel Chain Mail and Mending Staff mentioned in Day 8 Plans.

Summons: Skeletal Knight and Skeletal Archer all day.

Skills:
I started with the same skills as Day 7, but I felt like my DPS was lacking so I switched to the following:

Talents: I will post a pic below, but basically when I switched to the above skills I dropped a chuck of my right side points and went into PER for more accuracy (warm/burning stacking). Carry Weight because I'm not a hoarder.

What Happened: Started with 30 minutes of charcoal piles and ore runs then switched to my main and ran out to Industrial Ogres. In this Instance, I literally ran out (and back) so I could kill all the world spawns that I ran across and pick reagents.

At Industrial Ogres, my el cheapo set with the basic skills were enough to kill everything there - really really really slowly. I decided to pop on my better gear and drop one healing spell in favor of Ignite so I could throw out even more fire stacks and get burning damage. It was a nice improvement in damage and I'm too lazy to try more when it was working (and I was keeping up with respawns, sometimes even have to wait a few seconds).

Ogre Masters were the hardest thing to kill, which should be obvious because they do the most magic damage of the Industrial Ogres. I'm honestly not sure Ogre Lords are using all their skills which, if true, would have made them much easier than they should have been. (I did not 100% Armored Bears just because they're not super common and not worth grinding out just for the knowledge.)

I did try to kill an Elder Forest Troll with my "dps skills" but they still out regenerated me and my minions.

Talent Pic:

@Rickman The Discord is the best place to get information or communicate with the Devs/GMs.

Right now we're waiting on them to restore all the cities and fix some privileges.

Day 9 Plans:

TLDR: More world spawns and either Treehugger Ogres or maybe a loop around the volcano. END TLDR

Not much to say that wasn't described in the Day 8 plans. I'm very quickly approaching rank 50, and the end of this Not a Guide. Thinking about that, I'm almost certainly going to hit up Treehuggers just because I want to test killing all of those to see what is possible.

The only two Treehuggers that I'm even remotely concerned with are Druids and Archdruids. Both of them are magic heavy and the Archdruid is legitimately a tough kill and can put out some damage.

The Treehugger area is also a very good place to 100% basically all of the lizards and insects that are world spawns on Terra.

Yea, Jacopo basically said it was a shit map and that Aerhen and Terra were so much better that it needed to get the boot.

I have lots of memories of Myr, but I kinda agree, it wasn't up to snuff when compared to the new maps.

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.

I started up a new bowman and the first 5-6 camps I ran into (both POI and not POI) were all ghosts. In contrast, I've seen no ghosts in the highest level areas when I've been running around on my higher level characters.

The weapons needed to damage ghosts are not newbie weapons. Ghosts spawns and POI should not be showing up until somewhere around medium level difficulty areas or whenever you think it's reasonable for players to have obtained those weapons.

Right now, I don't think they are a positive factor in the newbie experience.

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.