it is a known repeating bug which sneaks in sometimes on hurried patches.
It has been reported and would have been fixed quickly had the test not going to end as soon as it did and the bug was not effecting the primary purpose of the test which was pvp balance.
I agree with MidniteArrow.
We had a problem of all weapon skills being useable by all weapons with minimal restictions due to armor type.
but then they restricted weapon skills to weapon types and that created lots of different builds with no one being the clear favorite. Yes there is some hot swaping with tab between axe and mace or sword, but that is a player choice that now has downsides of the user not being able to use part of their skill bar at any time for the luxury of using different weapon skills.
However now that most mage spells are useable in medium armor we have the same problem that we had when all weapon skills were useable by all weapons; an over reliance on a certain combination of skills to the exclusion of others. because why would you if it is OP and allowed?
as such if they did the same thing they did with weapon skills to mage skills then we could avoid this problem again and encourage a more diverse build enviroment that is not cherry picking the top CC from each different school or such.
As spoletta mentioned we already have elemental staves and could require that those be equipped if you want to use the matching elemental attacks.
but that runs into a major problem via the elemental fist and arrow abilities.
It also does not sepperate the abilities from the necro, druid, geomancer, abjuration, alteration, enchantment, illusion and restoration.
As such I suggest that we either create new one handed mage weapons (orbs, fist wraps, wands) which unlock one, two , or three schools for use or have rings do that work.
if you have to have three different weapons to use the currently popular CC chain of fire pillar (fire staff), epicenter (earth orb), and sprouting pulse (druid fist wraps). then at the very least there would be the pause between each spell when the user is switching between weapons. While this may seem to be a minor barrier to prevent such OP combos I would point out that it worked just fine to curtail the same such problem we had with melee weapon OP combos.
I am putting here a consideration i posted elsewhere.
there are also just too many CC abilities for -spell channeling- users, they can easily pick a whole preset of nothing but CC.
The increased restrictions of abilities with weapon type worked really well for melee and I think something similar could be done with mages.
There would need to be more variations than just 'mage staff' for this to work however. Things like cloth fist wraps, one handed wands, orbs, etc...
Then you could have different schools of magic limited to different mage weapons. That way you would have to swap between mage weapons to get access to more than a few CC abilities from a few schools. This would decrease the cherry picked combos and chains.
By having these extra mage weapons you can further restrict the mage abilities you can pick from when making a skill build and thus avoid the situation where an entire skill build is CC.
@Rife
CC immunity is in with Enrage.
But having it be the only one, and with such high restrictions, is rough.
Battlemage armor might be too good.
Ranger armor feels quite underwhelming in pvp. - not enough defenses to stick around and not enough offense (the slowly stacking crit chance) to play the same game with all the burst going on.
Nice socketing change. Might actually bring enchanted gems back into the economy. But i'm not going to hold my breath on that as the seller still is out the gem.
Currently Fractured allowes freedom of choice with time gates between changing said choices. This is seen in how any character can have any point buy stat block they like but have to wait a week before making a change. This allows freedom to change but with enough restrictions so your choice is meaningfull and long enough of a time gap that when you find a good build you can enjoy it for a while before others counter.
By 500kp this freedom of choice continues as you have access to all skills and all talent points and can swap quickly without any loss of your hard earned KP.
I think that this pattern where you are restricted to using a subset of your total earned skills, talents, or a specific stat block could be extended to crafting in order to create differences in crafter builds and thus diversity of market goods avalible and scarcity.
If you were restricted to, say 6, of your known T2 recipes (the ones with set bonuses), for a period of two to four weeks then it is more likely that your goods will not be swamped by others as they too need to pick 6 for the time period and if some items are not picked then the demand for those will go up and every few weeks people will change their choices in order to adapt.
If you are not a serious crafter playing the market then the 6 will be enough to craft the armor set you use as well as the weapon/shields you use.
This way serious crafters can have a market with specilization and diversity and if they really want all recipes active and avalible to them they can have multiple accounts.
Another side, but related, issue is the current system of item grind required to increase mastery.
While a good resource sink it can be frusterating to use all those resources just to trash the item or use your limited market slots in an attempt to sell the low rank items.
We could take a page from the orb system and give recipes a longer life and demand instead.
Like orbs the first recipe could unlock the item and increasingly more of the same recipe would be needed to increase your crafting mastery of that item.
Then when you pick your, just for example, 6 recipies to use that time period they are crafted at the crafting mastery you have obtained through collection and use of those recipes.
It would give more demand for the recipes in a specific subset of the players -crafters- who value it greatly while other players can be satisfied with unlocking it and crafting their own lower rank items for grind and buying special higher rank items from master crafters for special situations.
All this time your effort and work is not lost, you just are restricted to a sub set of what you have earned in order to allow diversity in builds such that your choice of specilization has meaning since not everyone will have it.
Thoughts?
Will we be able to summon wheat, beans, cotton, etc.. or will we need to farm them?
or will we need to raid others for the resources needed to upgrade our towns?
Either way is fine... tho I would find it very funny that you would need to spend 0 gold to raid a rank 1 town in order to get the food necessary to rank up your town to get the tech needed etc...XD
Also will all city tech be unlocked or will we need to rank up to get access to different things?
@spoletta said in Server War Event & Test Review:
I really need to make some time to fight this war.
yea, life is quite inconvenient at times like this. 
Does everyone start with all the skills unlocked too? or do we have to go out and collect them?
Thanks for clearing up my misunderstanding and concerns.
good move.
But I am against treating negative resistances as a bug not a feature.
It would mean there is not that disadvantage when going with low con scores, that the warm and shock stacks have no meaningful effect on unarmored opponents.
We know that some mobs have negative resists on purpose so they take more damage from certain sources, so why shouldent it be the same for players?
I think that this shows that people will be happy with a game that functions with 3 worlds over a game that is polished but only has 2 worlds.
After that there is the constant work of content creation and balancing which people are used to in most all games.
So give us Tartarus and open it up 24/7 with the understanding that all the systems may get changes, but you can play through them.
I am in favor of the high effort solution.
The orb system is perfect model to adapt recipe system to.
It gives long term meaning to recipies, gives niche crafters a place to shine, reduces item spam from grinding for rank, makes entry easy enough that players cant complain much.
Have recipes drop more often in chests and this could work fine.
@BearRod will the shadow empire be participating in the next arc of fractured?
Even more great reasons to group up.
I am a bit worried about solo players or those who play in low population time windows.
@spoletta have you tested that or just hoping to test that?
surely you all have maxed the points needed for all the rewards, so why keep posting?