Tried experimenting with archers and the damage they do. 3 NAMED archer thralls with ancient bows and obsidian arrows takes a long time to kill even a low level prey.
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You might want to try again with some legendary or some flawless starmetal bow with some damage kit attached to it.
Of course ancient bows wont deal as much damage anymore.
The worse issue lies in the system behind archers.
Them having infinite ammo - but of only one kind. That is a loss of 14 damage compared to dragon bone arrows. (Or obsidian arrows.) As thrall archers will always only shoot stone/flint arrows.
Just make 90% of damage coming from bow - then that problem would be solved…
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Too little information… What named thrall and what area are they from? Who are they shooting? For example, you can have a DotD Named thrall like Tarman or Sully that are actually easily killable by a moderately geared level 30 player, whereas a simple Fighter 2 or 3 from New Asagarth with the same amount of gear is harder to kill.
Hey Nuria,
Are you certain? I always trust your info, but early yesterday (on TestLive) I gave one of my archers a dragonbone bow with advanced damage kit then placed a stack of dragonbone arrows in his inventory and applied them to the bow (I had just crafted the bow and never used it or loaded any ammo to it) then I removed the stack of arrows and spawned a medium scorpion nearby.
Visually, it was dragonbone arrows being fired and sticking out of the scorpion (which it actually took her four or five hits to kill the little guy). I am playing a local game and have purge disabled currently, so was not really concerned. I just shook my head at the results and walked away. Though I was admittedly thrilled that it appeared as though I was able to load specific ammo types.
EDIT: I wasn’t paying full attention to damage or anything as that was not my interest. I was really just playing dress up with her and seeing what all I could change or add. She was just a simple T3 archer captured within the Black Galleon.
Certain?
No! As I didnt record it and didnt pay too much attention to it.
But basically this is how archer thralls seemed to me to work in general. They got an unlimited amount of arrow, but those are the basic flint arrows. (Just try to fetch some of them when shot at some place where you can pick them up.)
But as I never really enslaved archers, I only saw archers protecting some thrall camp. (kind of bad manners putting those up on pve - at least before purge was live)
Also I tried putting dragon bone arrows into the inventory of my archer and then started a purge… but the arrows werent used up.
DeadSpine has it right…well mostly right. If you give them an unmatched bow and no ammo, all tier archers will default to flint arrows. However, if you give them ammo and apply it to the bow, they will fire THAT type of ammo.
The trick is? The ammo isn’t consumed. You can give each Thrall ONE of that type of arrow, and they will fire an unlimited amount at foes. My own purge defense use a combination of Dragonbone and Snake (for the poison tick, since they nerfed applying poison to arrows.)
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Again. While being admin on a server. Spawning in level 4 named thralls. Equipped with a ancient bow(as my experiment) and the bow correctly equipped with obsidian arrows. All 3 of them was shooting a normal crocodile and using a long time to kill it. Sometimes they dont react when I get attacked near them either. I was not complaining about the damage the thralls can take. All of them were dressed in silent legion armor and the crocodile was not attacking them. I had no damage increase kits enabled.
Edit: I logged on and checked their names: Lissa O the Longbow, Alren Storm, and Galter of Bossonia
Combatant thralls is far to underpowerd, spec when all the jobb to bring, brake and equip them.
Bossonia, eh? He’s a looooong way from home!
Ran-san is right about the arrows. I give my thralls the same that Ran mentioned. My dancer frequently shoots me in that back with snake arrows, which poisons me. Also, it frequently lets me pick up the arrows she fires, so I get a lot of free snake and dragon bone arrows.
But regardless of the bow and type of arrows thralls use, their damage is extremely weak. I only give my follower a bow so she doesn’t get in my way and get her head lopped off.
Snake Arrows do apply poison when equipped on thralls, arrows not needed in inventory. Just load into bow, and equip bow. Give a Freya (100% respawn rate) a Hykarian Heavy Armor and Harden Steel Bow.
Combattants thralls are underpowered?
they are glitchy, buggy, many things but not underpowered.
During my last purge, i had 6 top lvl fighters helpin me.
They all died during the process except one who got somehow glitched into one of my building and thus survived.
BUT, before dying, they took out several mammoths, frost giants, + the frost giant king (who i was not fighting myself because to busy with the horde of mamoths) which gave me the achievement “kill the frozen giant boss” BTW 
So all of that with only 5 fighters but best ones i admit.
Archers is an other story that i’m still workin on, but it seems i have finally manged to get them acting.
Last thing, i saw you guys were talking about arrows damage on thralls.
You should check and make testing about that. Several months ago, the arrow damage had no impact at all on the damage output of your archers thralls, only poison was a thing. We did some testing with some players and found out that you could give a crappy bow and star metal arrows to an archer, give a crappy bow and flint arrows to the same archer later and he will do the exact same damage.
it might have been fixed though, since it’s quite a long time ago.
Personnally i’m not in the optimisation phase yet, so i don’t care about arrows for now, but when i get there i will 100% test it.
Yes in purge they are helpfull on som way but only ther. But they have to be alive when the pugre starts and not have bean totaly farmed by other players. And you dont realy have the time to put everyone out when the purge come and def vant putt the survivers back…
WUT?
Just pre-load their bows with a higher tier arrow and leave 1 in their inventory from the same type they will shoot that not stone arrows.(unless what you said is a new bug changed since EA…)
Speaking of thralls “state” at the begining of a purge i have to add sthing in that regard:
Often time i go to one of my other bases on the map and many of my thralls have very low health (like if they had just been place in the world right away).
It does happen with thralls who have been placed recently mostly, but even after serveral server resarts and waiting each time for their health bar to resplenish, many of them keep loading on the map with low health if your character was not in the area before.
I have already lost some lvl 4 thralls in the desert right at the start of a purge thanks to this issue which is annoying me.
I completely agree they are quite useless 
It would be nice if their aggro distance was adjusted for switching from bow to hand to hand combat. It might just be because of some server lag but it seems to take forever for them to switch to hand to hand combat when I am close to them.
coughthrowingaxescough
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