3.0 Feedback: My thought so far after 30 hours

Conan Exiles PC Discussion Public Beta Client
1

I posted this originally in the mega thread but I make some points here I really want to get across so am posting again in its own thread. Apologies for duplication but I do think it’s for good reason.

Let me start by saying I think you guys have done a fantastic job with 3.0 as it stands so far. I’ve encountered a couple of bugs and i do have a couple of complaints but I’ll get to that in a bit.
Seriously, seriously well done for what you’ve achieved with 3.0 so far. I have just completed 18 hours of testing on the current build and going into it I expected the game to be riddled with all sorts of problems and I’ve been pleasently surprised. The new content is great, there is plenty there to keep me grinding for months. I’ve enjoyed playing with some of the new spells and placeables, I like the progression system for learning new spells. No complaints there at all. I love how you’ve given corruption a purpose, this is how it always should have been and the way your character is visibly affected by corruption looks great. The temporary mounts and followers are a really nice addition to the game I’m especially fond of the undead horse, that thing is a gem dont change it :slight_smile:

I would like to see more options in there when it comes to weapons and armour though… most people who run strength builds wont use a 2h hammer and not everyone who runs agility will want to use a bow and this brings me on to my first complaint:

I’ve tried out various builds, Strength, Agility, Charisma/Authority… (both of those terms are a bit naff, take a hint from JE Jones and rename that attribute “FLESH” ) Ive tried those builds with and without corruption, ive also tried out the more non combat orientated builds too. What became glaringly obvious to me is that Agility is a much weaker build than either Strength or Authority. Personally i really like playing with javelins and shields. I was very excited by a more clearly defined rule set governing javelins as they’ve always been a bit of a grey area, however as it stands they are incredibly weak and there are times when a backup weapon is needed. Without speccing into strength swords, axes, pikes and most other weapons are a lot less effective but so are the shields, they are not so clearly defined, are they controlled by vitality or grit or is is strength seeing as they have a damage value?

Daggers have always been fairly over powered so yes you can switch to daggers but what about throwing axes and bows? These are pretty weak too currently, in fact i tested a range of different thrown weapons and they were all pretty pitiful. I can see a meta forming where no one will run an agility build unless they are using daggers and i am confident that this is something you will wish to avoid, so something is needed to bring agility builds up to the same level as Strength and “Flesh” (yeah Im calling it flesh cos hell yeah :heart_eyes: :laughing: )

The spells - for the most part I had a lot of fun playing around with different spells, going in search of different types of enemies and seeing how things played out. But I do have some complaints here too:

  1. Raise the dead in the fog, great spell, a lot of fun to mess about with when IF you can actually get it to work. I found that unless I was on perfectly flat, open ground without any obstructions the zombies would simply spawn under the ground and stay there. I could see the health bars occasionally but not a lot else.
  2. I understand that you want to keep sorcery balanced so that PVP players dont get all burt hurt but having temporary “allies” attack your thralls was a really bad idea. Why? Because heres me fighting, Ive got my thrall or thralls with me. Im attacking a large camp and I’m specced into “FLESH” so I send my thralls in and then I cast the foggy zombie spell… well now my thralls are too busy attacking the temporary zombies to attack the targets I want them to fight. The result is totally chaotic and more frustrating than fun. The same applies to the demon spawns from corrupted attribute perks. They are temporary anyway, they have low HP and only last a few seconds so I dont think it would be too much to have all of my allies fighting on the same side… think about it right; on a live server no one is going to opt to cast a spell which is more of a hindrance than a help which means that spell wont get used and thats a shame because the idea is great and the fog is really cool.
  3. Spell cast times and interruption… OMFG this was annoying! Again I totally understand the need to balance sorcery, but if I can’t get a spell off because Im being constantly interupted then whats the point? I might as well just run a strength build like Ive done for the last 2326 hours of game play, sorcery then gets put on a shelf and forgotten and before you know it your whole expansion is now being ignored by the player base. My suggestion here would be to either speed up cast times considerably, its already slow enough as it is because we need to cycle through multiple options to find the spell we want to cast or; Give us a castable shield that will last for a short duration or maybe even a longer duration but have that shortened as the shield takes damage.

Well those are my main thoughts for now there are a couple of other things I wont go into, i’ll wait and see how things go with further testing and development. Keep up the good work guys, the last 18 hours have been the most fun Ive had playing Conan Exiles in a very long time, I’m excited for the future!

2

Just did some testing with the harvesting spell Vs using a star metal pick. Found the results very interesting. Im on a single player server with the standard gather rates. For the purposes of this test I am not including, wood, bugs or any other materials other than iron and stone. Using the pick took a little longer than casting the spell but not really by much… a minute or two maybe.

I went to a small ledge just below tower of the bat with a large amount of iron ore and stone. I cleared the area using the spell, then I logged out and logged back in to reset and cleared the whole area with the pick. The results were:
Spell - 895 iron ore and 2379 stone
Pick - 2139 iron ore and 3395 stone

As a game mechanic I love the spell, it looks great, its fun to use and those things are important. But if Im honest with myself by the time that novelty has worn off I’ll go back to using the pick because i know Im going to get twice as much from the same area.

Im really trying to be as positive in my feedback but the more I play around with the sorcery the more I think its just meh and once the novelty is over i’ll go back to playign the game the same way I always do. So please devs I’m begging you, don’t throw away your hard work. The new stuff is fun and it looks great but you’ve still go some tweaking to do.

3

Throwing axes… why are they based on strength instead of agility? There is a perk under the ability attribute specifically for thrown weapons.

Also Ive searched and searched and couldnt find any food that gives a bonus to agility, quite a few for all other builds though.

4

The answer: dual wielding axes, thats probably why its strength based, other than to keep all range weapons out of agility, gives strength users one shot at crippling a run away

5

Then surely that perk should be moved to strength…not complaining, these are just my thoughts.

6

in the spells i like two options like these:
you cast the spell then it stays on your staff for some time like 5-10 seconds and then when u click again it cast, it could make more viable to pre-cast it and then used it in a better time…

The lack of damage in spells, the magma wall is useless for me, takes so long to cast and do no damage at all, In my entire playthrough I haven’t used it, because it’s simply useless at certain times (it can keep you warm in the cold at least, but carrying leather bags around isn’t worth all that) and it does little damage(the spells looks being composed of ultramafic magma, so it should go to 2,900 °F how someone is able to climb that ? and receive 10 dmg.) as one of the only TWO spells to do damage is pretty useless, the lightning storm is cool, the animation and the time to cast sounds good(not perfect, but good) for some damage(random) but really ? only two damage spells, why i would make a sorcerer ? i would just use the sacrifice stone to corrupt my strengh and then use the teleport stone only that, i primarly used only that in my entire playthrough.

Sorcerers are supposed to be weak but dangerous enemies, where is the fires of gehenna from the AoC ? there is no spell that do damage like that in conan ? also the lack of religious spells…
The second attack from the staff is useless too, the opportunity for you to imbue your staff with energy and be able to cast it destructively(no need to be a fireball or a magic missiles, dont close your mind to just that) on the second attack would be interesting

As Grim Dark(Half Off) said if you want sword & sword be honest that’s what you want but dont attack someone who loves sword & sorcery and would love to see it, just because it is you are unable to represent it accurately

7

I believe its there to differ between the two since agi throwing would be knives and javelins, and of course the perk affects bows too, strength users have one thrown weapon, and it will not be as fast as agis throwing weapons

8

Interesting, yeah. It’s just I think they are trying to keep the sorcery in line with how it actually was in the lore. It will probably get expanded more over time, since this is just the initial release.

9

It’s kind of hard to consider what’s canon and what’s not, on the one hand it’s something and on the other it’s something else…

if you take for example age of conan the developers said similar things to what was said:

“The traditional fireball-tossing magic users in pointy hats, with puffs and multicolored robes, are not part of the Hyborian universe. In Conan’s age, magic is dangerous, hidden, and dark.” - Gamespot, 11th May 2005 (Gaute Godager)

“There aren’t any magic missile tossing clowns with funny hats. Instead we have more “real” magic, manipulating reality, shaking the Earth, and summoning the odd demon from an unspeakable Hell.” - Gamespy, 17th May 2005 (Gaute Godager)

In one game there is fire of gehenna and in the other a lava grub. I know they are two different games with different premises however if it is considered what is canon or non-canon, related to lore or not, all the fun is thrown aside. :disguised_face:

I loved the magic and what the developers managed to show us what they are capable of with this glimpse but the lack of magic in combat or damage and defend that there is no why? they say they want to keep conan in melee combat, which can take a lot of potential out of the game, bows are not even used that much anymore, ignoring even more an important fundamental of the game the diversity of combat, going to a place and facing a warrior and then dealing with an archer are very interesting things to happen and heat up the combat a little more where not everything would be black and white…

Seeking only one scope can bring this game to ruin.

10

To be clear Im not overly concerned with damage or even using spells offensively. From a game perspective what do I want? I want the game to be fun, I want it to look, sound and feel cool and sorcery ticks all of those boxes right now… but perhaps most importantly is I want a reason to use sorcery, especially given that this whole update with so much of the devs time and energy going into this. I dont want any of that to be wasted.

If presented with a choice of standing there, getting hit a bunch of times and not being able to cast anything or just defaulting back to the play style that has become so familiar to me over the 2000+ hours Ive played on this game then yeah Im gonna take the path of least resistance. But if I have a good reason and an opportunity to cast a spell then Im far more likely to use it and it will be a relevant part of my game play.

11

About the gathering spell:

  • Characters with high Expertise profit a lot less. So, it’s better for characters that don’t take Expertise, and actually quite useful then.
  • Characters without good tools also have higher relative benefit from it.
  • Players who don’t like bringing along good tools and hacking rocks will prefer this mechanic.

In other words, the balancing shouldn’t be done my comparing it to optimal tools, but by looking at it as an alternative to the whole gathering routine.
A movie and playing soccer, for example, both provide fun. But it’s hard to compare them, as they are for different use cases, appeal to different people differently and so on.

I do agree, however, that the spell is a bit sh…ty for gathering anything but the most basic resources (stone, wood, plant fiber). You get very little iron, bark and so on. This might set false incentives for spamming sandstone buildings on official servers.

12

yeah Im not looking for more resources with the spell or even a comparible amount. Im just looking for a reason to use it. A month after launch we’ll all be bored of it and go back to what weve always done which defeats the point of new content…

13

Crystals are easier to collect than ever before. 20k+ are possible with one spell.

14

Alternative should look like this -
gathering spell should be tuned to gather a single type of resource - like you get a 1200 stone in one cast from 10 stone and 5 iron nodes - you destroy the all nodes but get only stone, so you don’t have to clear your inventory and throw away the iron you don’t need. If you decide to hammer the same nodes with a pick axe - you will get 800 stone and 500 iron. This is where “alternative” is - "“do I want 50% more stone or do I want iron as well?” And no, you want be able to attune your spell on the fly - you should return to your base to do so.

If gathering spell yields lower resources then best tools while not providing any other significant bonuses - it’s not an “alternative” - it’s straight up garbage game design. No one needs another “iron weapons tier” thing they will stop using in 30 minutes of game play.

15

I understand your thinking here @tin_egg but i dsagree with the attunement. What I love about the spell is its raw destructive force, its wild and uncontrollable once unleashed… I dont mind the fact that it gathers less resources than you can with a pick or that it also picks up every other useless resource in the area.

My only concern is that because the difference in resources aquired is so large compared to using a good tool, there is no incentive to use it. 3.0 isnt even released and Im already getting bored of it, a month after launch we’ll all go back to our tried and tested ways of playing and sorcery will be forgotten and that will be an enormous shame!

16

But how much time is being spent. If farming common resources, is the efficiency of the harvest spell better because you can get them faster? For rare mats like gold ore in obsidian, I agree that pick is the way to go, but I question the common stuff because of the time you spend harvesting all of that

17

Yeah i kind of envision this being used in areas with large deposites of basic resources, it shines when you have 6 squares of dense forest and can max your load every few seconds as compared to minutes, like you said gold, brimstone ect, will probably be using picks… i can see it now though, the servers completely void of trees :laughing:

18

It’s incidental. When you need iron do you go out and chop down every tree and bush you come across or do you throw all of that stuff out of your inventory to save weight? Same goes if youre farming wood… do you hit every rock while youre at it? I doubt it.

Again I dont object to the raw power of the spell, that is how it should be. But from a game play perspective… why would i use the spell when i can get 3 times as much resources of a given type using the appropriate tool of sufficient quality? I wont use it and after a month no one will, so the whole idea goes the way of SoC… a forgotten relic people will pick up and say oh I remember this, before tossing it away.

19

Because you can get the same amount in half the time and have excess of other things, which is always good when entering a new server, usually the first couple hours after hitting 60 got to strip mining sections of the map its not really for the “rarer” resources, but the basic resources in large quantities faster

20

This reminds me of the book Clear and Present Danger.

One bit in particular. After a bomb is dropped, blowing up a house in order to kill drug cartel leaders, but also killing the family members of one, ie “innocents”.

And the line goes “You don’t do surgery with bombs.”.

Current tools are surgical instruments. You pick what you go after to harvest, like wielding a scalpel.

A spell like this, is more like a bomb. It blasts off an area. It shouldn’t be attuned because that comes across as more in the nature of high magic and very much out of bounds for Conan. It’s not a scalpel. It’s a nuke going off and blasting the sh*t out of everything around you for a rapid harvest.