Posts made by spoletta

Mob attacks that target your totems do not collide with them. Webs, frost blast... whatever. It looks like the totem is a friendly target for them.
This is particularly reinforced by the fact that your totems get healed by enemy Inspire.

Ouch, the on hit abilities were already quite mana demanding.

We just have different expectations on the vertical component I guess.

Read my previous point.
Talents with powerful effects like the one we are discussing, should be restricted in the application.
Talents with less powerful effects like reduction in debuff duration, should be more broadly applicable and will represent the advantage between a new player and a seasoned player.

I don't use that talent, but I find it good specifically because it applies only to 1 build.
I can't use the advantages of that talent and of the accuracy talent from strenght at the same time, so the power level of the char can't get out of hand,
Now, there are some concepts of build that don't have a lot of support from the talent tree right now, but a lot of the talent tree is not implemented.

I will elaborate a bit.

I do feel that SOME of them are too powerful, while others are spot on and some are indeed a bit on weak side.
The STR talent and the DEX talent which give accuracy with 2 h or evasion with 1 h are probably at the right level. They give you a total of 300 accuracy and 18% bonus damage. This is a very significant advantage over someone who has no talents. But it still in the realm of not deciding the fight by itself.

Same for the bow talents which in total give you 12% damage and 6% critical chance. Again, quite significant but still manageable.

What really matters here is that those 3 talents cannot interact with each other, since they cover very different setups.

The bad ones are Fortunate and True Striker. Those provide a very very good bonus (12% modifer on saves) and can stack with each other and with the other ones. Now you are making the difference between having and not having talents really overbearing. Similar for the cooldown reduction talent.

So, someone at 60 talents can technically have 18% more damage, 300 more accuracy, 30% CD reduction non MEM 1 skills, 12% more likely to pass saves and 12% less likely to be resisted.
The fight is set right there. You can't win.

All of this to say that talents can be good, but they shouldn't provide effects that stack with each other. If they are of the stacking type, they must have marginal effects, like all the talents that provide a duration reduction on effects. Those are the correct level of effect.

So, your toon has just a dozen talents, while mine has 40. In a fight between each other, and the difference between you and me is that debuffs on me last 36% less. That's good, it is an advantage that you feel during the fight, and rewards you for having progressed your char, but it isn't enough to put the other guy out of the competition. That should be the correct level of vertical progress in this game in my opinion.

I could say that the reason many have stopped playing for now is that a certain other game has been released, which has been registering some very impressive player numbers.

Yes, players want some sort of vertical progression, and that's what talents are for. You need to find the balance on those. Previously they were excessively poweful. Now I feel that they are still a bit too powerful, but others have different opinions, so we are probably near the right compromise.

Like it was in the last alpha, it is currently possible to bank on research points to use them on higher rank techs. For example, you can avoid selecting 2 hamlet level researches at rank 4, then rank to 5 and select 4 techs from Village level techs, using Hamlet points for Village Techs.

This leads to cities without shrines, banks or marketplaces.

I think it should be impossible to rank up if you havn't used all your current research points.

Targeting is impossible, but many have asked for some way to mitigate the short view range on the screen, especially because it provides a significant advantage to some monitors compared to others.
The best proposal I heard in this regard, was to get the direction indicators from Ultima Online, and tie them to the Detection and Stealth stats. This way the distance at which you get an indicator toward a target, depends on how high is your detection and how low is his stealth.

IMO it creates a good interaction, gives more value to 2 stats that right now exist only for 1 specific build, and removes the hardware disparities.

I'm still going around in primitive wargear. No enchants, no sockets, no nothing.
Stat wise I'm running in the same exact state I was at char creation. Yet, as soon as creating the char, I had very big problems killing a dire wolf.
Now I farm sea trolls without any issue, and am working on a build to solo mountain trolls.
The only thing that changed are the skills. I have 62k kp, I got a lot of skills and can create a lot of combinations. Yes, I have a dozen talent points, but they have just a marginal effect.

Horizontal progress is still progress. Your char still gets more powerful and makes you feel powerful, but you have to approach it in a different way.

Are they worth working for? If talents were the only goal probably not.
But they are just part of it. Mostly I progress by developing new skills which allow me new builds. Talents are just a bonus on top of it.
You are probably approaching this in the wrong way, with a specific build in your mind, chasing after those skills you want and putting everything else in talents.
The game doesn't work like that. You shouldn't go after a single build, you should go after a wide range of them. That's the progress, having more possible builds. More builds means being able to tune better to the specific PvE and PvP challenges.
The previous system punished this. I hated it. You progressed mostly by talents, which meant that you had to spend as few points as possible in skills, because those KP were needed for more talents. You were punished for expanding your options and exploring new builds. It was a very bad experience.
Talents should be a very marginal element of progression. Skills are the main progression.

Then there is also gear obviously, but that has different issues and requires a different thread.

@splitmentality said in Newbie Feedback from old UO Vet:

Hey all,

This is my first step ever into Fractured ever so I apologize if some suggestions were already made. My background comes from early UO / heavy PVP Chesapeake shard.

Overall the game is great and I enjoy the play discovery style and lack of hand holding, but there are some initial frustrating mechanics that will easily detour players if not addressed. I can't imagine enjoyable PVP or end-game events when simple mechanics are debilitating to use.

• Forgive the way I say as I am not trying to be mean but instead trying to convey my initial frustration. The spell/skillbar cancellation/queue cancellation of skills makes me want to vomit. The crude-stop of having to cast spells balancing between right clicking and spell casting almost made me rage quit at first. When I first started attacking wolves I didn't understand why half my buttons were/are cancelling each other out. Half my spells still never even cast to be honest when I play even after I've gotten used to it. It makes no sense to me why I have to stop moving to cast a teleport spell or an attack spell. If anything, it should be the other way around, the spell should take priority and potentially stop me in place. At least give me some sort of a "channeling" or meter buffer to understand why half my skills or spells are cancelling out / not working. Simple but highly frustrating mechanic as a mage starting out and feels super clunky/not player friendly. Sometimes I even feel like i need to hold the button down for a few seconds to cast or perform the action. I'm about 8 hours in and still hate it. FYI my latency is between 20-50ms and FPS 90 so I don't think it's a connection or framerate issue, but perhaps it still could be the case?

I do feel the same about the casting. Many times you think you have casted a spell but you didn't. A casting progress bar would be very appreciated to better understand what is going on, especially when you are under effects that slow your casting.

• If I stand in place attacking and right click its exponentially slower if I move + attack -> move + attack. If I strafe move and right click my attack speed goes up about 80%? Odd mechanic to me. I'm constantly moving left right up or down and rapidly right clicking. Is there a reason for this?

This is a serious issue that will have to be addressed. Right now you can interrupt the attack animation by moving. Something must be done to prevent it, like locking you in place during the attack animation or prevent you from initiating another attack until the cooldown of the previous down has ticked down. Or maybe we can make use of it and make it part of the combat system, for example allowing interrupting animations on attacks but eating into your stamina everytime you do.

• I still have no dang clue what the lightning bolt is next to my health and mana? Nothing ever explained it. Maybe a tooltip or hoverable help there? The same goes for death "need to go back to town" for full health mechanic. I thought I was poisoned with the bubbly purple bar and had no idea how to cure it. A hoverable tooltip that says "You need to return to town to restore full health" would be helpful as a new player. As far as the lightning bolt after scouring the forums and googling I think I saw the word endurance which is what it might be, but I still don't have a clue has to how it affects me. Maybe it doesn't as a mage-like initial build? No idea, still don't know. I could ask global chat but I don't get why it would have to be that complex.

• Why when I create a campfire do I have to sit down 20 times to restore my full mana bar? Why not just let me sit down once and have faster passive regeneration?

Agree on this one. A mana regeneration buff while at the fire would be good. I would actually make it so also for health and energy. Instead of a click and fully heal approach, I would like the campfire to provide high regeneration of mana, health and energy while sitting at it. The current one can be abused.

Some sort of verticality must be there, I agree. That said, you can put in just the right amount for your system.

If a typical game takes you from 1 to 1 milion from early game to end game, a game like Fractured can take you from 1 to 1.5 from early game to end game.
It is still a goal, it is still progression. Just not as explosive as vertical progression games.

Here I am! Someone who didn't like the previous talent tree and wanted it destroyed!

Yes, I'm LOVING the current talent tree, I think that it is the best feature of this alpha. It provide small but meaningful buffs, while the previous one was straight improvement over straight improvement and quickly made players spiral in power until there was no possible challenge left.
Now I'm having to fight creatively against all challenges of the game, which is how it is supposed to go.
They finally took most of the verticality out of the talent system, which as I would like to remind everyone it has been stated that should be mostly non influent on a player's strenght, and should provide just a little overall bonus for those who like to min/max. IMO we are still not there, some talents are still too strong, but for sure this is a step in the correct direction.

I have a few thing that I don't like about this test, mostly in the enchanting and imbuing area, but talents are good like this. This doesn't mean that there shouldn't be some tweaks obviously, but as a general direction I think they nailed it.

I have seen some weird events with those charge counters.
Sometimes they recharge only 1 charge, with the counter still indicating zero. If you use the skill, it will work correctly and then it starts recharging correctly.

A few mobs need to increase in quantity.

I can confirm the point on the treasure chest loot. There is something very weird with the quantities. We found 120 tarot cards in one.

I do also agree that the progression now is really too slow on some mobs. While it is in general good for common ones, for rare ones needing to kill around 30 means spending really a lot of time just for that one mob. This is pretty bad with very contested mobs like the fire shaman, and is even worse with those extremely rare mobs like the bandit mages.

I can see that they gave KP too easily in the previous test, but now we have gone too far in the other direction I feel.

Which one? Can't see it on the tech tree.

Items poisoned right now are depleting a charge on every attack, not only the ones that actually trigger the poison.
Not sure if this is intended.

Shouldn't the global wallet be available by default now?