A few observations post 3.0

After doing a few attribute tests, I noticed the only real benefit to authority is to max it out and not use the 2 follower option at the end.
Stamina needs a revamp, it is crazy low now. One block with a two handed axe used 90% of my bar.
One heavy attack with a one handed axe uses 1/3 of my bar. ( I may play with attributes some more for this issue )

The NPCs are rediculously easy to kill now, but no health adjustments were made on the mobs, especially the three skull mobs. There is no way I can solo any dungeon at this point.

The event at the ice bridge is stupid hard, the three skull that spams the worms has killed two of my followers so far, and me once. Again, no more solo play.

Every time I turn around something is trying to kill my horse. At least gives horses an attack please.

Why are short swords stamina based? They should do a bleed in this case.

The sword of Crom is a piece of crap and worthless. This is SOP for Funcom, they have ruined about every decent weapon in the game.

Summary: I would love to be able to do dungeons with friends as in the past with Codemage and others, it was actually great fun.
Unfortunately, I know of nobody that plays this game other than myself. I do not spend as much time as I used to playing and getting to know others on my server, and I am sure I am not the only one in this situation.
I really hate to be a “nerf-crier” but since Funcom took away our thralls as tanks, that leaves a lot of us helpless to play the game.
I get that some people are “uber” killers and spend a gazillion hours getting the perfect gear/weapons etc, but some of us have a RL to attend to.
Hopefully Funcom will adjust some of the mobs in game, so we do not have to carry 3 dozen health potions around.

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In an hour I will try the event and confirm the difficulty! So far I didn’t test everything, so I will trust your opinions about it! After the update, which I believe it’s a hot fix, cross fingers, I will jump in a server with end game armor and thralls to test it. Thank you for your feedback JJ.

@ Thralls and Dungeons
At least for endgame, the thrall nerf doesn’t feel as bad for me. With maxes authority, two human thralls or one super-buffed single human thrall are able to best the the Kinscourge, the Arena Champion, Thag, the Red Mother and every other boss I found so far.

They are at danger from any boss that poisons. I had to pull my thralls off the Giant Snake, for example, to reset the poison counter. The Scorpion Queen also is quite brutal now.

One boss that I doubt thralls will succeed to kill is Rotbranch, Slayer of Thralls.

@ Events
Haven’t seen the event at the Ice Bridge. Is the boss the Moonbeast? If so, yes, that’s a thrall killer. I encountred that thing in Sepermeru several times.
Once, I dragged it into the human NPCs, and the Sepermeru milita helped valiantly to kill it. They all died, of course, but their bravery allowed us to master that enemy. Was an epic fight.
Maybe try out if the Silent Legion skeletons are hostile to the Moonbeast. If so, they should be very strong against it due to their high health and poison immunity.
The larvae spawns are a problem for thralls. They don’t deal that much damage, but stagger them. And thralls have difficulty hitting them. So, it helps to take care of them yourself while the thralls deal with the boss.

@ Stamina
I agree. The stamina pool should be increased. Also, corruption shouldn’t lower stamina.

If you’re playing multiplayer, try asking in global chat for help on some of the bosses. If you’re playing singleplayer, adjust the settings to compensate.

Just a word of advice, when you play a multiplayer game, and do run into situations where you are not going to complete content on your own. This sort of passive aggression isn’t going to help you along in that endeavor. It goes without saying that better geared, better experienced, and better along players have lives outside the game too.

Case in point, one of the best players I’ve seen in this game who can solo (without a follower) the leviathan bosses (bosses that make vanilla and Siptah bosses look very easy) with as little as a week playing on the Savage Wilds map has a wife, kid, and works a shift schedule that frequents between day, mid, and swing shifts, as a servicemember (with enough rank that not only does he have to take care of a wife and kid of his own, but several dozen others also). The short of it, is people with lives far more demanding than yours are able to complete this stuff.

And there we are, Taemien knows how demanding my life is compared to others. My point, that you just ignored completely, was that, newsflash, I COULD complete all of the content on my own and now I cannot. So I am asking the devs to tone down the huge hitpoints on the uber mobs. As usual, your input is belittling, and worthless, thank you.

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If you don’t want your input belittled, start by not doing this and belittling others:

You belittled everyone who isn’t having as hard of a time as you. Thousands of players you belittled with that statement. I merely critiqued the attitude of ONE.

All I did was point out that if you didn’t do that, you would have an easier time getting a group and completing the content. You’d even make a friend or two along the way. You get way more done with honey than vinegar.

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I dont know what it is, but it looks like a cosmic horror.

Yes, that’s the moonbeast.

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This one cannot say about capability at the current juncture. On this one’s platform the game is still…
Shall we say…
Suboptimal.

That said, this one is definitely still trying to get the hang of the stamina bar. While damage is up (for the Exile, not thralls of course, they now have wet pool noodles to match wet tissue HP), stamina consumption seems to also be up? Or perhaps this one has a smaller stamina pool.
Either way, this one finds that using normal Shortswords for combos, this one now gets about the same mileage they got out of Grey Ones Shortswords, as far as how many attacks a full stamina meter allows.
Blocking also seems more expensive, but this one has not had an excellent opportunity to test for confirmation.

For what it’s worth, sympathy that this update is definitely a more than a bit jarring.

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The 5 Grit perk now gives you 20 bonus stamina on top of the already gained amount from the stat. I find that this perk is pretty much a no-brainer in every single build and provides enough stamina for fairly okay general functioning even if you don’t put any more points in it.

Didn’t they use to have one which caused them to be murdered all the time since they charged in like heroes but were instead horses? The evasive script they gave them seemed much better in keeping them alive unless they’re stuck somewhere imo.

You mean agility weapons? Probably cuz you already have the regular and the 2 handed swords on strength so they needed something for agility too. I don’t quite see the relation why that would mean they should cause bleed though.

Yup, it was in the patch notes NPCs can’t use it anymore, but there are plenty of other weapons in the game so not a huge loss imo.

Thralls are very very far away from being useless, even with 0 Authority they can have around 6k health easily and still solo bosses, thou they’re gonna actually take some visible damage now.
The only way it would really be an issue is if you were used to just giving an attack command and then tabbing out to do other stuff while your thrall takes care of the bossfight for you. If that’s the case though then maybe you need to adjust your playstyle a bit… but basically thralls can handle themselves, you just have to give them the slightest assistance.

I am gonna point out something here again though. I know I sound like a parrot at this point cuz I mentioned it in like 3 threads :smiley:
Followers did not get converted in any way with 3.0… that means if you had a follower prior to the update they simply do not have a database record for the Grit stat so they’ll always have it at 0… - which coincidently is the new stat that gives them armor instead of agility like before… So there’s a good chance that if you’re using an old follower… they are missing like 300-400 or even more armor because of this issue. So keep that in mind!

I haven’t tried the events though yet, so I cannot say anything about that

This doesnt seem right. A second thrall is literally 100% increase on all the thralls stats (since there is literally a second one of them). Even if you lose the damage boost which I havent looked at, its a fair trade.

Only if you are using two thralls who are exactly the same - basic stats, equipment and perk wise.

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Dude.

Well, it does depend on the thrall which of those two perks is better, they’re not that far apart as you may think.
Picking the increased stats perk will give literally 20 points to every single one of the thrall’s attributes so depending on the thrall and how they benefit from the individual attribute points, it CAN be quite ridiculous. Here’s an example, and this is actually from a pet where each point of str actually gives them 10% damage.
image
So yes, you actually can get a thrall that is twice as strong by itself than 2 of its kind without this boost

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What’s an event?

Same situation here. I totally depend on thralls. Combat is not what I like about the game, and I love the feeling of commanding a strong soldier who protected me as I explore the Exile Lands. Apparently I’m the exception. Today I can’t even beat the boss spider, which I easily defeated with a level 20 thrall (Basically I just watched the thrall do the work).

I agree

I understand you and I agree with you. I tend to die many times even with op thralls, even in situations considered easy by other players. I just don’t like combat, I use the same sword and wear the same armor for any situation (because they make my character look good), and that worked really well. I like the authority system, now I can assume I’m a master of thralls. I don’t mind being strong. But the max authority perk should make my level 20 thralls invincible in a PvE enviroment (at least I wish it were that way as it used to be that way). I will focus on farming and building and hope that one day this will change.

I missed you so much! :heart_eyes_cat:

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This Beta opportunity for me was a little like A Boy Named Sue: I knew I couldn’t be there to help it along, so I made other choices. Y’see, during the last 6 months I’m making the most consequential changes to our core business interfaces, and just don’t have the time to test with full vigor. Siptah taught me a hard lesson, that while it’s an honor to partake, it’s also a heavy burden when one feels as though he didn’t do as much as he could. That’s the reason I declared my happiness in your participation in the Beta, simply due to your workman dependability.

Therefore, you’ve had much greater access to the core game, in both time and insider info, say from the Dev Kit. I don’t know that you could look reasonable criticizing another player for the game’s apparent unscaled hardness.

By itself, leveling is different, and that’s totally fine. I’m on my 3rd new toon and it’s considerably more difficult to level, we’re talking about 35 hours for 40 levels. Enemies are tough, Sandstorm effs you up, life is rough. However, the dramatic difference in the necessary “bosses” is out of scale.

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Well tbh, combat in this game never left the alpha state. Its clunky, bugged and by no mean finished (and most likely never be). I don’t think players play this for the combat itself. It really is the lowest point of the whole game.

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If you prefer to just stay behind and have your thrall do the tanking and don’t wanna get in close and personal with things, maybe you could try an authority / archer build now?
Archery received a massive buff… to the point where you’re one-shotting most normal enemies. So you could simply have your thrall tank and just assist him with a bow to make sure things die faster.

Like I pointed out earlier, followers are still quite strong, you just have to pick the right ones and make sure their stats are in check, so they can still solo bosses, but even if that’s the case and while archery might be boring, I reckon it’s still more involving than just standing there and waiting around :stuck_out_tongue:

Here, I made a short video for you in case you have any doubts just how OP bows got. I don’t know which spider boss you were talking about so I just went for the end of all hope

If you’re having trouble aiming at moving stuff, you can actually lock on to them and still deal massive damage like you see me do there a few times.

Also, in the video I’m not wearing anything special… regular aquilonian armor (gives extra bow damage), not even epic… I do have the red mother’s reach bow though with obsidian arrows so if you have something weaker, it’ll deal a tiny bit less damage, but still quite good. (If you get the skelos master armor that gives bow damage but also 40% follower damage so your thrall will become even more OP)

Here’s the build I have there:

And Anders is a quite OP relic hunter treasure seeker, so like I said followers can still be good (he’s also not wearing epic armor and haven’t even swapped out for a strength one, his armor is giving him like 100 HP instead of a potential 30-40% damage boost and he’s using a regular non-upgraded legendary mace. So all in all, there are still lots of things to tweak in this setup and it’s not even remotely close to some “hardcore” “endgame” scenario that most people would have):

Also, a bit offtopic for everyone else… Notice that GameTweak update thing? :open_mouth: :thinking:

Edit: On further inspection I may have had God mode accidentally left on from testing other stuff, however I’m not really getting hit so I guess that part’s negligible in this case :smiley: It doesn’t affect my damage output and I was avoiding most of the spiders, boss never hit me

The boost is huge. It adds like 4k health etc. I will post a pic here soon.