Posts made by spoletta

As many of the players that played during this test had way to notice, currently poison is in a strange place balance wise.

On one hand, it is extremely powerful. Being hit with poison once can be enough to kill you many times over, especially the higher grades of poison.

On the other hand, it is kind of an all or nothing skill. You can get immunity to it from a talent, or simply have an herbal remedy on hand, making it all void.

Since poison tends to be a topic which is dear to many when making a char in an RPG or similar game, I think that it should be given a little more depth.

In particular, I would propose to reign in a bit of its effects, making it less damaging overall, but at the same time also mitigating the effects of its counters.

In particular the effect of both the talent and of the remedy should be to lower the grade of the poison, not to remove it outright.

I think that having a powerful effect with extremely hard counters makes for a binary and uninteresting meta of have/have not.

Yes, but with a clause.

Only in the starter towns if you are not a citizien (for the new players).

Only in your city for the citiziens (because we are actually feeding them already!).

And here comes my feedback! I've playing quite a lot in this alpha and I got to duel many many builds with my INT archer.

First of all, I would like to remind the other people in this thread that right now warriors are running around in full plate armor and are using metal 2handers. That's 80 iron ore and who knows how many coal. Not to mention the smelting time. At the same time the archers/assassins are wearing an unfortunate wolf that happened to spawn in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The over the top performance of warriors right now is due to the gear disparity in this test, don't confuse it with the warrior class actually being that strong. I'm actually worried about them being too weak.

Now on to my actual feedback:

I've been playing an INT based archer on a really balanced and versatile build. My stats are 15 15 15 15 10 10. I know, the 15 STR would have been better as 15 CON, but I like to have some carrying capacity.

This build so far has been hugely fun to play. You don't have extremely high damage, you can't dodge all attacks coming at you, you are not ultra mobile or ultra durable... but you have a lot of options. I'd been worried that in the end this build would fall back in terms of PvP and PvE efficiency, but multiple tests have shown me that I was wrong and it can go toe to toe with more focused builds. You just have to be creative during the fight

I will probably use this build also outside this test, because the stats are so good, and allow me to switch from Archer to Assassin to Mage where needed. Within the archer build you can switch between light armor and medium armor builds and within the mage build you can go for classic or punchy versions. As a general purpose (but still good) build, I think that I've really hit the jackpot here.

Now, let's start listing my current balance worries.

1. Currently the "Inevitable" talent is disabled. AND THAT IS A GOOD THING! The first day of the test it was working, and I could oneshot players. The effects of this talent on an high crit build are simply OP, especially when applied to the double shot! Something here has to change. (by the way, it can be blocked with shields right now, so it is not really "inevitable" :P). The problem probably lies in the critical system itself. High crit multipliers bring these kind of quirky effects and can insert a huge RNG factor in fights, especially in a game where the crit chances cannot be made high enough to become something you can account for. You can get impossibly high bursts coming out of nowhere during a fight. I would suggest to smooth it down. Critical multiplier should be capped to 50%, and all the extra damage over that should become a bleeding dot over 12 seconds (which stacks in case of additional crits, similar to the concussive strike effect).

2. Healing is overtuned. I've had fights going on for an eternity simply because when you stack together multiple healing skills, you start regenerating way too fast. Heals should interfere with each other in some way, with diminishing returns.

3. Acid arrows as a skill is too strong. It is a nice idea, and I would love to see more skills like that which tie together different archetypes, but the effects are such that even pure DEX/PER builds will always use it. I suggest to increase the memory cost to 6, to make it more of a choice OR apply a mana cost to every arrow fired.

4. Longbows don't have a place. They cannot benefit from the light weapon damage bonus and prevent you from using a lot of skills. We need more generic ranged skills, so that the longbow becomes the standard weapon for pure archers, while the shortbow becomes the choice if you want to mix in some assassin/mage skills. Right now there are not enough skills avaiable to a longbow to create a3 build. Some of the Warfare skills that currently apply only to melee weapons could maybe be allowed also on heavy ranged weapons.

TTK is currently not a design issue, since it is due to the excessive healing and overabundance of high end armors. Currently, if 2 dps builds without plate armor face each other going all out on the offensive, the fight closes in a matter of seconds. The fights last long because once it is clear who would win in a direct confrontation, one of the contenders switches to a dodgy style of figthing, poking and baiting the opponent trying to create an opportunity. That is a good interaction. Fights between 2 pure warriors are kind of boring, but there isn't much you can do there.

A couple of ideas introduced in this test that I liked particularly:

1. As I said, acid arrows. These kind of skills that tie together the attributes of different builds are extremely efficient in creating more builds. I would like to see more of those. Things like a flaming sword skill or spells whose effects depends on strenght. Stuff like that.

2. For the same reason, adding critical hits to spells was a nice move. Now perception based mages are a thing.

3. The second wind skill now depletes your rest bar. This is a good concept, skills that are powerful but tiring. I would like to see it applied to a few more skills, or have skills that tire the opponent (blight?). Having your opponent out of stamina would be a nice alternative win condition.

Yeah, tank classes that go all out on tanking/self healing can be almost impossible to take down, especially for mage classes which will run out of steam at a certain point. At the same time though they are not doing much.

Legends are currently not spawning.
Checked Lord Eoron, Groover and Zephyr locations. They are indicated on the map with the red exclamation marks, but they are missing.
This has been like this since yesterday.

Update: Tested also if the additional damage from chilling/shocking touch gets amplified.

It doesn't.

The power shot skill is correctly crippling and penetrating targets, but the damage inflicted seems identical to that of a standard shot.

Also, not sure if this is intended or not but it is not being counted as a projectile for the purpose of acid arrows.

The Inevitable talent from the Perception tree isn't working.

If the first strike after 20 sec is a melee one, it will add an exclamation mark to the damage, but apart from that it will be a normal hit. No armor penetration and no critical damage.

With ranged weapons and spells it simply does nothing.

This talent used to work before the crit hotfix.

Fighting another player using low range weapons like a dagger or fists will result in attacks not connecting, even if you click on the other player name and even if he correctly sees you next to him. If both players move around a bit and try many times, it is possible to find a position where the attacks start connecting.

This sometimes happens also with arrows. They will be shot, bump into the target and nothing happens. This occurs both in PvP and PvE.

The damage increase of the mark of death does not seem to apply to ranged damage, even if the tooltip says "attacks" not "melee attacks" and the skill is available for light ranged weapons.

After the last hotfix, the trades are no longer possible.
When you ask someone for trade, he receives a notification. If he accepts, the windows will open for him, but not for the one proposing the trade.

Not so sure.

Actually, many archers builds have a talent which makes the first shot automatically a crit, so if you were getting one shot then this isn't going to help.

There was a bug with crit chances which made everything more killy.

This was particularly felt on ranged damage since archers have an increased crit multiplier.

Pretty much what the title says.

If you activate PvP mode, then when you get onto a road you don't get any benefit.

I've always been a second line player. I like to grind/trade/craft to allow my other guildmates to play without care. I do enjoy pve and pvp activies, but only as a group activity with friends, and in general I play support.

You can't make it a fixed number of skills, since some skills are more powerful than others and balanced by the fact that they cost more points.

@Ostaff said in Damage bonus: it could be so easy:

@spoletta

I personally prefer having only a single "good" class build per character. If someone wants to be able to multi-class they should have major disadvantages for doing so.... such as a bard being a jack of all trades but mediocre at every one of them. Having to have other players in a party to fill roles, improves parties and keeps down game imbalances.

Then this whole game system is meaningless.

Everything is built around the concept that you should learn and adapt. Having one "good" class is fine only as long as the "non good" classes are still acceptably good.

Right now it isn't working, the secondary classes are too inefficient compared to the main one.

I would prefer stats to matter less overall.

Right now they matter a lot, in some cases almost breaking the game (check the thread about the high CON effects).

If I make a "warrior" char and want to change playstyle and go hurling around some spell, I can't do it, because I'm seriously bad at it. I should be able to change roles more efficiently. Having one role where you char is best at, is fine. If your char is high on STR and CON, then he will be better as a warrior. You shouldn't suck that much though if you stray from that path.

I envision the difference between someone in his favorite class and someone else, to be around 20% of overall effectiveness (damage/durations/endurance...). Right now it is more similar to 100%, you need 2 players in a secondary class to equal someone in his best class.

Under these terms, you simply don't stray from your main class.

This was my first Fractured Alpha, so I guess that I just enjoyed... well, the game.

For sure it has been fun, much more than I expected an Alpha to be.