Posts made by OlivePit

Agreed. You could easily focus an entire build around the synergy of two skills you just picked up.
Talents may have a bigger factor than 15% in my opinion, but they are also the easiest to switch around, followed by equipment and skills last only because you have to go out and learn each skill from mobs and can take a moderate amount of time, especially if you are going to some 'optimal' combination you saw posted somewhere.
Once learned skills are as easy to swap around as talents and then the most time is spent on equipment changes.

Heheheh, there are many different flavors of 'mage' in fractured. Each would have very different enchantments on their different favored equipment pieces and would be used in different specific situations.
Are you going;
single target build? aoe? bounce?
Auto attack focused or spell focused?
Melee? medium range? long range?
high mana cost burst? sustained moderate mana cost? low mana cost?
High mobility? low mobility?
Crit build? high min damage? High max damage?
Battle field shaping/ debuffer ? Team buffer? Taunter ? Healer? Tank? Glass cannon?
High defense ? high evasion? high sustain?
Which elemental focus? Arcane? Electrical? Acid? Fire? Cold? Poison?
Remember that you have to fight mobs (or trade) to get gold coins to upgrade equipment, have to harvest materials to make equipment, have to wait for crops to grow, hides to tan, metal to smelt for all of that.
And have to repeat the process every 40? hours of game play (not pvp, it wears stuff out faster) to replace the equipment.
How do you plan on getting the materials for that? use your good equipment? some specialized mob hunting equipment? or run around naked armed with just your spells? (patched, not so possible now)
As you progress and find new skills and talents your preferred or 'optimal' play style will change and your equipment will have to change to fit.
In all of the tests I played in I rarely actually wore out a piece of equipment. I was far more likely to phase it out as my build grew and expanded.
In many ways mages are blessed and cursed with choices compared with archers and melee (for now). Presumably each archetype will have as much variability and choice as each other and -some how- balanced (good luck DM's!)
So the only static build in game will be the one that you decide to settle on while ignoring all the other possibilities. Happy in your rut with your specialized build against your specialized target, happily farming away on them for the materials (which is totally valid and possible, one guild of 10 ppl did this and were hugely successful, in their niche) but not venturing far from the familiar.

they are moving databases and what not, may be buggy until the first week of febuary.

The last alphas had no significant lag or disadvantage to EU players despite server being in US. I think a Brazil player only had minor lag.

unlikely, they already have tiger kin.

Well a patch did just come out for the launcher... so that is something !

@BECKFAST
Bodo is a deliberate, careful, and considerate person.
He did multiple draft checks with the guild before posting to make sure it would not be adversarial. He is worthy of the benefit of the doubt most get without a second thought.
We may disagree on points, but they are still good points.

@GamerSeuss
You could still give open access to the resources of a region once claimed, that way anyone could still go harvest them but they would be at a disadvantage to those who have invested in the region and have a shorter trip.

Note that there is nothing preventing a solo player from buying a house in a region and getting the same special access to a restricted node in my original proposition.

As always solo and small group players have the most freedom as they can just move between cities to get the benefits of the region and tech without doing any real work (building the town, feeding the town, ranking up the town, defending the town) other than paying the 4k for the plot.

I would love to see different colored canvases for the carts ! Like take cotton cloth, imbue it with reagents, and use to build a cart that is a different color !

How did you spend 2 hours? each box was limited to a max number of characters. -confused-

But any way...
One big suggestion and takeaway from this alpha was the need for node exclusion. If an ore/coal node is not in a -=Claimed=- territory then it should not be harvestable at all. This would encourage the spread of towns and increase reliance on trade instead of the 'why should I buy/trade for it when I can just go get it on my own'. I believe this was the standard case two alphas ago and while there were problems, lack of trading and resource scarcity was not one of them.

Please, please, finish the implementation of the 3rd city upkeep crop - vegetable/greens- without it we all are getting a incomplete picture of how city growth and management will be. If the current field count, 60 external, and fertility levels are balanced with 3 necessary crops then having us test the system with only 2 necessary crops implemented is just giving us false information and makes fertile territories useless in comparison to high ore concentration territories.

The "Raycasts" graphic may be blocked by your friend but the effect continues and does damage. This visual thing was present last alpha. Also watch out for bushes blocking shots as if they were trees or rocks.

Accessibility- The wads argument is long and continuous. The problem with animation canceling allowing higher attack rate is an example of something they didn't want to deal with and which wads would exasperate. They want to slow down combat and separate actions vs movement instead of allowing both at the same time. There are games that do this by locking down input channels during ability animation so you cannot move and act or interrupt an action... (note that right now you cannot interact with many things while in combat mode, if they were to extend that a bit more it may make wads movement possible but would greatly increase botting) but they have not gotten that figured out. I hope they do. Until then I just got an ergonomic mouse- yes my apm and accuracy was reduced, but only to the point that I represent more of an 'average' player which the game is built towards and not the twitch happy professionals.
You can already rebind action bars to different keys by the way...
I fail to see how clicking action bars is a must especially when many of the abilities are skill shots and that is the prefered mode of action backed by the devs saying that there never will be tab targeting or auto targeting.
Other quality of life changes are in the 'we hope and expect them to be dealt with down the line' category. This is alpha and is going to be messy.

I am sad to see the carry weight foolishness be finally patched, but it is good that was done !
Thanks for the bug fixes !

glad to hear it !

Again with a different field, this time inside town.

For some reason after this patch a portion of Zeniths outer fields got reduced to 100% fertility.

Talents before provided players with far too much sustain and tank abilities which turned most combats into long drawn out slug fests or quick burst boom events.
I agree with the devs that this is not the desired play situation.
Moving these sustain and tank abilities to equipment is a good move in my opinion as it requires more investment of time, money, materials, for an 'end game' build. While before the equipment was cheep and the build mostly relied on tallents which were free to move once acquired and never lost.
There are also many missing pieces in the talent tree and list of abilities along with more resources for crafting equipment. We only have part of the picture.
There are still many pieces of equipment and materials which give stat bonusses. You may just not be looking at all the options.
The imbuing process does have limitations as there is not any direct damage increase that I am aware of. But this is ok as one of the issues was the ease and quickness melee, and with more work mages, could get to damage cap. This is put off by the enchanting method whos cost and bonusses may be adjusted later per testing results.
The flat progression works fine, at any state there exist challenging mobs to fight and at the top end there is city vs city pvp via Sieges. All of which is gated horizontally by gear, not verticaly by talent points.
The point of the cities is to encourage group play. Switching to individual tech would defeat this and thus will not be done. I support the devs in this decision.

To your unique build challenge I am currently playing a mage who uses staves and abilities which can crit along with a high perception and crit chance, thus a mage archer thing.

They had this in one of the previous tests and did not work out well as a base line of 10 people with standard scheduling issues can easily fall apart from lack of critical mass. Note that in this test even Blue Army was saying that the city was being kept up and built by only 6 people while the rest were out adventuring. I can attest that our city was also built, and now maintained, by a small fraction of the number that signed up to allow us to claim the spot.
At the moment a group of even 4 players could easily access the tech of 4 different cities and, in effect, gain all the tech avalible in the game.
One of the purpouses of the siege system is to allow a group of 20 players to gather to raid a low activity city and conquer that city. Again the target number of 20 was chosen by the devs such that they see it as the minimum number of 'registerd' if not 'active' players to keep a city alive and active instead of just a dead blight.
This is further frusterated by the low turnout this alpha due to competing games and the timing (begining of school systems in USA) such that high numbers is unlikely.

looks to be fixed, if for a minor visual bug .

Thanks Prometheus !

is not right !!!!