I haven’t. The boot drive on my personal computer crapped out, so I’m mostly posting on forums from my work computer while I’m getting that taken care of.
Yeah, it was refreshing to see some new mechanics and some actual challenge. Of course, there were complaints about it, but most of the times other players would jump in and point out that the complaint was unreasonable and give some advice on all the different ways to tackle Thag.
Most of the other bosses are either HP sponges, like you said, or glass cannons (like the Arena Champion). Neither of those two patterns presents a challenge.
Outside of the bosses, there were occasionally bits of PVE combat that required at least some skill. For example, it used to be so you could just run into New Asagarth and spam attacks until everyone was dead. Then they revamped the combat and you had to actually manage stamina and dodge attacks to avoid getting stunlocked and be smart about healing, but that was before they revamped stamina again and make Sonic roll the way to win PVE fights.
To be fair, it’s not easy to make PVE combat in Conan Exiles challenging. The AI isn’t very smart and making it smarter might be hard for technical reasons. So that leaves messing with the players’ mechanics and stats, but they can’t do a lot there either without messing up PVP (even worse than it is now).
It seems that the best they can do is vary the NPC group dynamics, and that’s mostly what they’ve been focusing on. Thag introduced phases and summons. Kurak dungeon had phases, too. Old purges came in two different types – the normal one that came in waves and the “swarm” purge (e.g. Cimmerian Berserkers). The new purge adopted the “tower defense” style. And so on.
But I’m a little bummed out that everyone always focuses exclusively on combat when talking about skill. There are other aspects that can require learning and skill. For example, there used to be a measure of skill involved in learning how to optimize your crafting pipeline to produce all your materials efficiently and in quantities you need. There were advanced building techniques to learn; some of them still exist, others were removed because they were being abused on PVP servers.
There’s so much that Funcom could do with the existing systems to provide additional challenges. For example, imagine if different foods provided different bonuses, but also had effects that cancelled out some other foods or complemented them.
Or take thralls, for example. Some people complain about Sinner’s Refuge and how you can get a bunch of T4s there without any effort. But removing easy T4s sends us back to the dark ages of neverending slot machine mechanics, where you repeatedly grind the NPC camps hoping for the blessing from the RNG. Imagine if it wasn’t a mind-numbingly repetitive grind, but required some kind of effort from the players that didn’t merely rely on random numbers.
Legendary items are another example. Those follow the same pattern: grind, grind, grind, until the RNG generates a random number in your favor. No challenge involved, just persistence. Meanwhile the Volcanic Forge and the Forge of Ymir are just quaint places to visit. What if getting legendary weapons required you to fight bosses that drop rare components and then you could combine those components and one – or even both – of these forges to craft some legendary weapons? The bosses could have guaranteed component drop, but the components themselves could be random, so there’s still randomness in what you can get, but you have some control over how you use those components to get the weapons you prefer.
And I haven’t even touched on how sorcery could be really fun instead of a gimmick with a couple of useful mechanics.
There have been tons of good ideas on these forums on how to tweak or revamp the existing systems to make them more cohesive, to synergize better, and to provide some challenge.
But ideas are dime-a-dozen. They’re worthless if no one ever implements them.
, on the beta server today for a bug report and was reminded just how disappointed I am in sorcery.