Disclaimer: This is the collective views of a group of PvP and PvE players who have been playing for multiple years. Some opinions may vary from that of the reader, but we request that you keep your responses on topic and civil.
The newest patch has been released for several days now, and while we can see many interesting changes with it, we believe that some areas still need some fine tuning. There are, of course, good changes as well and we wish to attempt to address the ones that stand out to us the most through this post. We hope that this post will reach the staff at Funcom, but also reach the players who may share our views, or have interesting counters to those views.
Firstly, the weapon stamina consumption changes;
While the changes made to item types such as daggers are welcome and encourage players to develop new, more diverse fighting styles, there seems to be a core issue with how fighting works now. Regardless of how diverse a fighter might wish for their style of combat to be, they are severely limited by the number of swings they can do before running out of stamina. With most weapons being around 4 swings, excluding the stamina used for dodging and jumping, fights generally end up being long, drawn out skirmishes against both other players and NPCs. This also means that, should players wish to have more swings before running out of stamina, they are forced to lock into either specific weapons such as the spear, or very specific build paths to keep stamina consumption to a minimum. This has resulted in an even narrower build path for players, especially because Grit doesnât currently help with the % of stamina used per weapon swing.
What could use some tweaking here;
Adjusting the stamina used to be slightly less, allowing even one or two extra swings, will encourage players to try far more interesting fighting techniques, as well as use a wider variety of weapons. Keeping this adjustment small will give a wider variety of strategies to the players for fighting, and build path (their stat placement) without taking away the adjustments completely for those weapons.
Allowing Grit to affect the number of swings a player can perform before completely depleting their stamina bar could also be an interesting approach, especially considering the second Grit perk option âYour stamina regenerates 25% fasterâ doesnât really do anything for players anymore.
Next, about the changes to NPCs and creatures;
The changes made to NPCs and creatures is, in our opinion, a welcome one. Creatures hit harder now, and the health pool on them has been adjusted according to their intended level of difficulty along with their damage output to make for a much more interesting encounter. Even as a higher level player, things like hyenas and rocknoses in large groups can still be quite frightening.
What could use some tweaking;
We find it difficult to answer this as we havenât played the patch long enough to really experience the full list of encounters possible within the world, however some small things do stand out to us. Namely, the damage our personal thralls take as they still havenât figured out how to avoid attacks. Our own thralls, even high level ones, take a rather terrifying amount of damage from these newly adjusted creatures, especially world bosses. Perhaps a small buff to either their health pool, or their natural armor could help with this issue?
The final piece we wish to address presently is the speed of stamina regeneration;
Stamina regeneration is a tricky thing to get right, to find that sweet spot with so to speak. Whether it was the PvP players of the group creating this post, or the PvE players, everyone agreed it is a difficult thing to balance. Unfortunately, this patch feels like it has adjusted the speed of stamina regeneration too much, and has thus made fighting feel âtoo easyâ. It has also affected people who run full encumbrance builds (20 points in encumbrance with the perk that allows regular movement while encumbered) in that their stamina now regenerates nearly as quickly as a regular playerâs. Even running is now a very simple task and, if managed properly, stamina will never run out while a player is running- even with the base 100 stamina.
What could use some tweaking;
We all agree that the adjustment of stamina regeneration is a good idea, but we feel that it is regenerating too quickly now to allow us to enjoy playing the game. It has taken most of the difficulty out of most tasks, and thus it seems the only solution would be to continue testing new stamina regeneration speeds until the âsweet spotâ is found. Our suggestion is to try something between the old stamina system and this new one, leaning closer to that of the old system. Have stamina regenerate a set amount every so many milliseconds as it currently does, but not as quickly. This would return a level of difficulty to the game that was lost with this change, while still keeping some of the benefits to the faster regeneration speed.
We hope that this review will help the staff at Funcom with future updates, and also open the door for other players to contribute their own opinions on the changes this patch has provided. The patch has a lot of potential, and we hope that everyone- players and Funcom staff alike- can work together through reviews like this one to make Conan an even more amazing game.
Thank you all for taking the time to read this completely, we just want to quickly remind you all that these are our own opinions (Our group is around 30 players, with 12 PvP players, 15 PvE players and the rest enjoying both PvP and PvE) and they may vary from your own. Thatâs ok, weâre not expecting everyone to agree with us. All we ask is that people take the time to consider what we have said here, as perhaps some of our opinions could result in changes that benefit the community as a whole.