150 t4 Berserkers NPCS to take down 1 scorpion KING

Was just curious to find out approximately how many top tier fighters thralls you need to have in order to kill a boss in purge scenarios.

Scorpion king was my choice,since he is not the taughest boss but is interseting in the way he can’t be knocked back/ staggered.

For those who don’t know yet, Berserkers npcs are t4 fighter wearing cimmerian heavy armor (forgotten tribe faction) and are using either hardened steel or starmetal 2 H weapons which are dishing out the most dps for fighter npcs/thralls.

At the begining, i only spawned waves of 5 berserkers since only 5 of them maximum can be fighting the same target at the same time…untill i realised i wanted the scorpion king to be constantly hit and thus be losing health constantly.
So after the 4th or 5th wave, i started to spawn berserkers with waves of 10 guys.

What was my surprise to see that 150 berserkers had been needed to kill this boss.

So, considering world bosses can spawn during purge scenarios (it happened to me and others already before) it means that everytime this happen you will have to lock your thralls behind walls and do the job yourself or with friends in order to aggro the thing and thus get your buildings safe.

This was done with regular npcs and no well equiped thralls who can become about twice as good if geared and placed efficiently.
Eventhen, this would approximately mean you’ll need to loose about 75 berserkers thralls to have the scorpion king dealt with.

in my eyes combat thralls are supposed to be used to defend your base or to escort you on your adventure helping you to carry stuff. So for me it’s out of question to lock my combat thralls behind walls, i want them to fight the purge and it’s ok if i loose some in the process but i don’t want to be loosing an entire army to a single boss.
So funcom might reconsider the boss spawn in purge scenarios. In my opinion this should be optional (for players who already know that THEY will be defending their bases themseves and who don’t count on thralls to do the job or, for players who like to see a whole butchery :smiley: happening to the entire work thay have done).

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I agree, since the first time I have seen boss in Purges I questioned myself how unprotected bases / thralls could survive something like that. They have way too much HP and no thralls can take that out… if you happen to get attacked while offline you can kiss goodbye to every thralls in range and a big part of your base, the bosses will just bash it until timer expires

So as you said, Bosses should not spawn unless the player is online to take part of the Purge.

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The question interrest me, because with a friend, we are using thralls to defend our base.

I agree, the only viable defence currently is archer thralls with elastic defence when not having a human on.

Berserkers is just top3 fighter thrall. Volcano t3 and t4 are better than berserkers due to increased HP. And as I understend all fighter thralls are doing the same damage depending of weapon dmg. At the other hand scorpion is one of most hard bosses due to poisoned attacks and can kill a lot of thralls.
I’ve tested the same as author but have been chosen Rotbranch instead of scorp. My 3 fighter thralls wearing in Legion and Obsidian weapons + 5-7 archers with hs bows easily killed that boss. But the test was before latest path.
Most terrible thing is just 3 fighter thralls can hit one target simultaneously. So doesn’t matter how many thralls do you have they will die one by one in a fight with boss. Without that constraint I guess would be possible to protect a base.

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Volcano thralls are indeed better but the named ones are using a one handed weapon by default wich is meh dps wise and most important thing voltaries NPCS are non hostile towards most of the wildlife wich is def not what i want to test such things.

BTW berserkers are t4 fighters that’s for sure, and they belong to the 2nd strongest faction in the game + they are regulary spawning with 2H starmetal weapons by default which is good for this kind of testing.

I’d like to test such things with my own well geared thralls but i kinda already now the result and i just don’t want to do my thralls hunting thing all over again and watch painfully all my beloved chicks dying one by one.

Beleieve me, it’s not the poison that makes this boss deadly for thralls, it’s more its AOE and his immunity to stagger effect. But when you think about it scorpion king is amongst the easiest bosses in the game…for a human character of course. Same story with black bears, they are ones of the easiest animals ta take down without taking a single it but are incredibly deadly and funny for NPCs AI. i recommend everyone to watch a battle between black bears and npcs it’s just golden :smiley:
One question though what are you calling “rotbranch”? do you mean the swamp king (wooden giant rocknose thinggy) ? Because if you mean this one was killed by only 3 well equiped fighters and 7 archers i would be really surprised . I’m 99% sure if i spawn 10 times that number this boss would still be standing strong (of course i’m talking about non geared thralls: regular NPCS you can spawn through admin pannel)

And do you know what, i’m gonna try right away :smiley: because i admit it’s pretty funny to send hordes of npcs to their doom :smiley:

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Honestly, infront of my base there’s the swamp king/groot boss. He’s really nasty against thralls because he constantly does the jump attack aoe which knocks all the surrounding thralls. He wiped my whole defense and I never bothered trying again. His hitbox is wonky, extremely high health and high damage.

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tamed npc are better than not tamed npc

Totally agree, this hasnt become a widespread issue as there are hundreds of reports of fail purges, so they arent totally working.

Otherwise we would have seen dozens of reports of destroyed bases due to this.

Problem is thralls, walls, spikes, fences are supposed to be a reliable offline defence for purges.

They would, if it wasnt by the boss.

On my only working purge, I had a demon spider boss to spawn, and was laughing at my 50+ archers shooting from all sides.

It was possible to kill it only with patience and getting it stuck…

Ok update,

i tried the same thing with undead dragon and swamp king.

About the undead dragon, as expected he is too big and his hitbox seems to be beyond the AI possibilites.
i saw 1 fighter SOMETIMES landing 1 hit in and there but this test was a total failure as expected…
The swamp king never aggro anything, so, faillure too but kinda expected as well.

Then i decided to do the same thing with more accurate conditions.

so i spawned 16 voltaries named fighters + 4 t3 voltaries fighters (i just couldn’t bear to have no chick fighting :smiley: … so t3 fighter it was but only 4 of them)
i also placed as many named voltaries archers behind each fighter (so, 20 named archers)

I decided to equip them with good stuff:

archers had dragonbone bows and dragonbone arrows. Fighters had a mix of dragonbone hammers/spears/ and 2 H swords.

Let’s have a look at the set up:

All are wearing full silent legion sets since i know you guys love this set…although i don’t personnally :smiley:

ok let the battle begin…

and about 5 min later, maybe more:

The thing is dead and only 1 t3 + 3 t4 fighters died in the process.
i admit i was really impressed.

make your own conclusions but it seems armors are helping way more than i was expecting and dps is crucial but this is nothing new. I wasn’t just sure if the armor rating on thralls was actually taken into account for damage calculation on thralls but it seems to be the case.
I wanted to do more testing about armor rating on thralls to make it sure but i don’t know if i still need to do it considering how it went with this test.

if someone has already made a test about high tier arrows on thralls i’d be glad to know about it, otherwise i will have to do check it myself, since during the EA the damage of arrows was NOT taken into account for ranged damage calculation on both archer thralls and human characters. Hopully funcom has corrected it, but with this game, you can never be sure unless you test things yourself.

ok thanks, will try the spider boss later on then, but i’m afraid it will be a faillure again for fighters…too big !!!

BTW, one question, did your archers shoot all at the same time? because this is sthing i have never seen once you have more than 10 of them.

yep, exactly what i was thinking with that one but look:

i was trying to get hit by this guy in order to get the thralls involved but he never managed to hit me even with its jump, and same story with the thralls… we were all kinda etheral, weird isn’t it? all his attacks were going through our bodies but without any damage taken at all.
i remeber having had a hard time to take this guy down right after the official release with a friend, but something seems to have broken him…maybe last big patch, maybe sthing else i have NO IDEA so if you guys could tell me how is it going in your game with this boss at the curent time, i’d be glad to know about it.

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The problem is that you are using extremely high tier thralls in a perfect scenario. A large plain area where they can surround and attack a boss with the archers in the back, that will never happen.

Bases have limited space and room, specially for archers, enemies will constantly get into no shooting angle
Bosses can spawn even against low lvl players, in low level areas with low level thralls. I have had two locust boss spawn in a Purge near the pirate ship

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My suggestion would be to simplify the behavior set. If you observe the area known as Stormwatch, you will see T3/T2 Nords with 1080 HP being decimated by a single wolf. If you then take these same numbers (T2 archer @ 1080, T3 fighter @ 1080) and spawn one in, plus a wolf, you can then categorically study the effect of each armor piece by accessing the thrall in real time as he takes damage. It seems then to be a matter of scale, and cost, when defending vs high HP attackers.

Flawless Hyrkanian Heavy Epics have 800 Armor by default. Triangular-looking or not, archer or not, you come to my base there won’t be a flood of thralls in Silent But Unused. :smiley: *

* I actually like the look of Legion, it’s just the pants, man. Somebody needs to get that scourge a tailor.

If I understood correctly, Forgotten tribe berserkers are tier 5 fighters. They have 10% more dps from that modifier than the volcano t4 fighters, but 10% less from the regional modifier, with the results cancelling each other out.

So they should have equal damage to the named volcano fighters, but less hp. Since the berserker at the mounds is a guaranteed spawn (iirc), they represent a better time investment in terms of acquisition vs the named fighters in the cano. The cano tIII fighters have 10% less damage, but more HP and so might be the best fighter thralls to farm overall from a cost/benefit perspective, but even then, YMMV.

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I have to revise my numbers from above, they are clearly pre-patch. :blush:

Archers and Fighters of a tier are the same HP now, at least as far as Nords, Cimms and Votes go.
T2 Nord = 810
T3 Nord = 1080
T3 Cimm = 1620
T3 Votes = 2460 (Hyborian T3 in my case)
Cimm Berserker = 2025

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It doesn’t matter actually… you could suround a world boss with 500 fighters, only 3 or 4 of them would actually fight him at the same time, it’s just how the game is working right now…probably for better performances in big fights but i’m not sure, it’s just speculation.

And about archers, if you manage to get more than 10 archers shooting the same target at the same time, please tell me your secret :smiley: because the max number of archers i was able to watch targeting the same ennemy at the same time, was probably something around 7 or 8 and was during this last testing session and some of the purges happening on some of my bases.
It’s definitely better than fighters but you can’t expect your entire line of ranged defenses to open fire as you would like to. i might be wrong though, you might have different results in your game but that is what i have been witnessing over and over during about 10 purges and all my testing sessions.

Be glad it was only locust queens you had to deal with during your purge because it’s by far the easiest boss to deal with for a thralls AI. i had 4 fighters and 2-3 archers dealing with this thing without any single loss (all my thralls were equiped with lemurian queen outfit lol). Only one of these fighters was midlife at the end of the battle. All others were at about 80% max health.
I’m not saying that this boss is no challenge at all whatever your setup is, but if you have enough good levels fighters (faction is key) with good weapons (at least hardened steel/starmetal ) you’ll see one of the worst AI dealing with that thing pretty easily, and that’s pretty entertaining to watch/listen to… :wink:

lvl 5 ? i’d be happy then :smiley: . berserkers are just the same as dalinsa snowhunter but spawn with better armor and 2H weapons as default, so only regular t4 fighters from the forgotten tribe, nothing more and nothing too fancy. Volcano named fighters are still better (with 1 000 more hp) when equiped with 2 H weapons. The only sad thing about them is that you can’t get any female version of them. But you can still get t3 hyborian female fighters from the volcano with about 400 more HP than the berserkers and they look prretty gorgeous too :D.
But where you’re right, it’s when you say berserkers are guaranted spawns whereas t3 and t4 fighters from the volcano are def not guaranted. moreover berserker thralls have better “saying” when fighting than voltaries but that’s a personnal preference, especially since i guess you guys only care about numbers and efficiency…
me on the other side i am looking at much more factors when creating a defensive squad:

  • efficiency of course
  • look of the thralls (hair/eyes colours + size of the breast :smiley: and how cute is the face)
  • words an the ton they are using when fighting (like “you’ll never return to your den”) because it’s fun and entertaining imo.
  • and of course the gender !!! female squads for the win !!!
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It’s not efficiency for it’s own sake though. T4 cano fighters are much harder to get and so much harder to replace like for like. If you go on a mission to get only the “best” cano fighters, you’re gonna spend a disproportionate amount of time running around checking spawns for a 4% chance of success per spawn (2% for each of the fighters), and your base will be duely unprotected.

If you do want to do that, then I have no objections at all, but that doesn’t sound like fun to me, and I play games for fun.

It’s the same when people talk about DPS or maximum damage without factoring damage opportunity. You might have a portable nuke that does a trillion damage, but if you can only fire it once a year, it’s not generally useful.

Snowhunter is a T4 fighter, fwiw.