Dodging - FUNCOM DID NOTHING WRONG

Conan Exiles General Discussion
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Dodging in the current build of Conan Exiles is a failure in all possible aspects, and I for one gladly welcome the new changes coming in December. I write this draft with the explicit purpose of addressing the shortsighted complainers in the community who appear to have jumped on a bandwagon of criticism without thinking the situation through.

(TL; DR at bottom)

This draft concerns the upcoming changes to dodging in Conan Exiles, coming with the Mount Update that has been streamed this week, in two separate steams, specifically pertaining to dodging and NOT mounts, and the other less major changes in the upcoming update. I will specifically focus on PVE and the advantages that the new dodging system will gave on this aspect of the game, considering that the bulk of the complaints appear to be coming from PVE players and the advantages to PVP are extremely obvious. It should be noted that I rarely agree with the decisions of Funcom but in this aspect they have bested my greatest hopes for the game. The introduction of mounts and the improvement of the tragic dodging system has earned Funcom my forgiveness, and even perhaps, my support.

There are several reasons that the old form of dodging was flawed, ranging from the fact that you look like sonic the hedgehog while rolling, to the fact that it was simply overpowered. Rolling away from an enemy is so easy that the only way they can really hit you is if they are either lucky or if you didn’t concentrate. I understand that this isn’t the case for late game PVP, but the PVP meta turned into a cartoonish roll / spamvest. Specifically with regards to the rolling system in itself, it seems obvious to me that this system took inspiration from other, similar games such as Dark Souls. In DS to CE, there is clearly a difference between the rolling. Conan exiles had a mock copy of Dark Souls rolling, and because of this its combat is way easier than Dark Souls, I will go into detail on this under PVE.

-PVE:

Boss fighting is a total joke, dodging the attacks of most bosses could easily be done by a sleepy toddler. Killing a boss should be a massive achievement, you should feel accomplished, not as if you just finished another small part on your progression to the end of the game. Dodging will now be difficult, making the PVE in CE more like that of Dark Souls.

Alex, the lead designer, said in a stream that just passed (2019-11-28 at time of posting) that the dodging will not be changed as excruciatingly as we would think with regards to PVE, especially if one invests fully in the agility skilltree, which has received a massive and significant buff, further contributing to making ALL of the skills in the available skilltree worth a consideration for investing.

Balance might be an issue, granted, but I reiterate my previous position that the PVE of CE desperately needs an increase in difficulty, before a retention in convenience.

I don’t know about the rest of the community, but I think it’s nonsense that I can solo clear an entire camp full of enemies while paying minimal attention - fighting should be easy in the sense that a solo player should be able to manage but it shouldn’t be child-level. Simply boosting enemy HP and damage is not a viable solution.

-PVP:

In short, PVP is a joke. Runspeed is ridiculous and any person can turn around and leave a fight at any given moment. The mobility nerfs such as windup from the next update will help to mend this, and I presume that cavalry will play a significant role to kill of stragglers.

According to the aforementioned lead designer, Alex, one can perform an action and then dodge away immediately, without taking any risk. It’s a safe way of fighting and is skill based in a bad sense.

Another point to consider is that heavy armour will now finally be useful again. The developers stated in the stream that dodging with heavy armour with the new system is already better than it would be with the old system, and clearly just from watching the streams this is clear. We can now as both PVP and PVE players utilize the heavy armour sets in our builds and figure out ways to optimize them to our playstyles. This is a good day for people, like myself, who hate being forced into light armour.

In conclusion, Conan Exiles has finally had a crucial flaw in its design fixed, and fixed adequately. I urge members of the community to withhold criticism and to withhold all sentiments of negativity until they have played with the new system for at least two weeks, because this is truly a change for the better. I can’t believe I’m saying this but hats off to Funcom.

TL;DR
New roll system will be better because PVE will actually be challenging now, especially with regards to bosses.

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Good post and thorough post, which I would have given a lot more respect to if it didn’t start by categorising those that you disagree with you as shortsighted complainers. Nice one.

My main observation would be that you may find soloing bosses vanishingly easy (gratz!) but some people don’t, myself being one of them. You can make your game much harder by gimping your build, maybe fight the bosses naked, without requiring that the game also be made more difficult to me.

Sure, I can bring a Thrall along to help me fight, but that will relegate me to supporting cast where before I could use some measure of skill as far as I am able to beat them on my own.

As I said in another post I will try it out on testlive, but I’d rather not have had to


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In my defense, it is common for people in gaming communities to complain vigorously when old systems are changed, purely because people dislike change, without considering the potential benefits.

But again, I reaffirm my stance that bosses are easy, and from the most Youtubers and streamers that I have watched they seem to clear bosses with relative ease. Killing a boss should be an achievement.

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Agreed, you should have to earn it, I just don’t want it to get too close to impossible for me. I’ll test it out when it is released, on testlive or otherwise


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To start off 
 I don’t like the toxicity here. But I’ll ignore it and talk about your post.

These are only opinions. There are also other points of view. Not just me but also quite a few others have talked about them already.

Maybe in PvE, yes. But in PvP it’s nothing special, you might have to farm 30+ bosses a day if you’re really grinding for a special legendary armor piece that you need for your build.

It’s already used in PvP. When you’re using light armor you use 10 agility for longer sprints; if you use medium armor you use 40 agility to get light dodges.

That’s why you carry bows or throwing axes with you. They deal damage and cripple which makes it way harder to run. And even if one manages to flee 
 that’s part of fighting. You don’t always get every enemy.

TOTALLY disagree. It’s a core feature of the game and especially of the PvP. Just because you don’t like it, it doesn’t mean that’s a “crucial flaw”.

This is exactly what will happen even more now. I used to farm the bosses on my own because it’s kinda boring to stand there and shoot a healing arrow every five minutes. But with the new dodges it’s way harder which will result in a massive increase in thrall usage in boss fights.

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In the last week stream, or perhaps in Multigun’s recap, it was said the healing arrows will be nerfed too. Letting your thrall do the fight for you while healing him / her, might not be as aeasy as before with that. And you’ll need to commit to the fight.

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I never relied on roll as a defense or an alternative to heavy armor because more often than not I found myself rolling in place and getting slaughtered by anything but trash mobs. I don’t know if they can gorph the heavy armor jump back any more than it is now or if they plan to. I do use it on mobs like the Red Mother but since I came back everything combat I ‘knew’ is trash anyway. I might not need it.

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Hope not :slight_smile: Had a quick look through last couple of stream recaps and didn’t see anything. Haven’t had time to watch the streams yet though


Edit - Found it in the test live notes :frowning: “The healing from healing arrows has been reduced.”

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I write this reply despite being called names just because I have a different opinion, in hopes of changing your mind about my presumed myopia :wink:

I agree that fighting most bosses is a total joke: give your T4 fighter some flawless epic heavy armor and a decent weapon, and let them do it for you. Or just climb onto a perch and pepper the boss with arrows. Or find a spot where you can cheese the boss.

As for dodging being “easily done by a sleepy toddler”, that sounds like you’ve never had any issues with high ping or being mysteriously stuck inside an enemy mesh or playing on a server with subpar performance. For me, it goes like this quite often:

  1. See the boss preparing to execute a sweeping AoE attack I need to dodge.
  2. Press the dodge button.
  3. The dodge animation starts.
  4. I get yanked back where I was while simultaneously executing a falling-down animation.

Then again, it could also go like this:

  1. See the boss preparing to execute a sweeping AoE attack I need to dodge.
  2. Press the dodge button.
  3. Roll away.
  4. Suffer damage and fall down anyway, because the game still registered a hit.

And of course, it could go like this, too:

  1. See the boss preparing to execute a sweeping AoE attack I need to dodge.
  2. Press the dodge button.
  3. Roll in place, because I’m somehow stuck.
  4. Suffer full damage and fall down.

This goes hand-in-hand with a whole laundry list of PVE combat problems stemming from the fact that the game is not completely server-authoritative, but that list isn’t the point of this discussion, so I’ll just leave it at that.

My point is that I often have to dodge roll preemptively, to avoid different bugs and glitches in combat. Making the dodge slower and shorter will make that even less useful.

Of course, it wouldn’t be such a big deal if they didn’t make some bosses deal so much damage, because brute forcing the combat through high damage is easier than balancing it :wink:

I disagree vehemently. What PVE in CE needs is not an increase in difficulty, but rather fine-tuning so it’s an actual challenge. There’s a difference between things being hard and being challenging. These two concepts overlap a lot, but they’re not identical.

Here’s an example that’s exaggerated on purpose to highlight the difference: you can increase the difficulty by making the boss deal enough damage so that one attack will kill you when you’re in heavy armor and at full health. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t find that challenging.

When the increase in difficulty comes at the cost of suspension of disbelief, it just makes the game worse.

Depends on what camp. When I’m level 60, with a legendary weapon and flawless epic heavy armor, of course I want to be able to waltz through an Exile camp on the newbie river or through a Darfari camp (other than the Summoning Place) and slaughter them merrily like an unstoppable force of nature. It’s fun, it’s cathartic, it’s all of those good things you would expect from reaching the endgame stage :wink:

Sepermeru, Mounds, New Asagarth, Volcano? Yeah, no. Those are some of the places with highly skilled, cunning and well-prepared NPCs. If I waltz in there without proper tactics, I should get creamed worse than Sasha Grey at the end of a shoot :stuck_out_tongue:

That is something I can wholeheartedly agree with.

Whether it’s “adequate” remains to be seen.

Good luck with that. Trying to silence criticism never works, and would be counter-productive anyway. As long as people post constructive criticism with actual explanations of what they perceive as a problem, it can be a valuable source of feedback for Funcom.

Of course, constructive criticism tends to go hand-in-hand in a whole bunch of less-than-well-formulated complaints, but that’s just what things are like on any public forum. Funcom has had years of experience sifting through the stuff.

But even if I agreed that it would be a good thing to silence the critics, you won’t get them to do so by being condescending at every turn:

Those things add together and I can think of no way to add them together to get “Oooh, this person is totally right, I changed my mind!” :wink:

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Play testlive. PvE is still easy as hell. Can go naked with zero attribute points spent into a dafari camp and clean it out. I still remember the time when hyenas, spiders, kappas and crocodiles required some tactical approach to get them down. Ever experienced being hunted to death by a pack of hyenas and their cripple attacks? I think this was the adequate PvE difficulty lvl. Still need a huge reaction time and AI improvement to make any computer opponent a threat.

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Yes. Many times. So has anyone who, like me, was there on day one of Early Access. IMO that was not very much fun though, and it was changed for a reason.

True. Unlikely to happen though, but I’d love to be wrong about that.

Incidentally, I’ve tried the new dodge mechanic over on TestLive, and it’s not nearly as bad as it seemed on the stream - I don’t think Funcom did themselves any favors by showing it in a vacuum like that.

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Ever experienced not being able to go more than a few paces into the Skittering Caverns because the spiders would stack 10 poison on you within seconds and they respawned insanely fast?

Go back far enough into the EA and you’ll find all sorts of extremes. Doesn’t matter it’s fun for the players.

I agree that there are certain aspects of PVE that really need to become more challenging, but if I want to play Dark Souls, that’s what I’ll load up and play.

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Yeah I did. And it was really thrilling. And you needed to be well prepared to do dungeons. I played Testlive yesterday and you can literally ignore all wildlife now. Spiders just run around and occasional stop to hit the air.

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If you find it thrilling to literally be unable to explore one part of the map, regardless of your preparation, because the difficulty is not properly balanced, then we have very different playstyles.

It’s a moot point, anyway. The thread was made before the change hit Testlive. We can all draw our own conclusions from the real game now, instead of speculating :wink:

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I personally don’t think it’s an adequate difficulty if you succeed at the very first attempt and alone. It’s ok that some parts of a game map are not immediately accessible to new players.

Imo it’s very good game design if the difficulty lvl of a certain area is the threshold and not having a key or a token to enter.

I honestly think the PvE difficulty was fine in EA maybe except for some spawning rates that needed adjustment.
Getting iron and equipment was somewhat the condition to leaving the noob river. Although gathering iron was no easy thing then because it used to be only in areas with hyenas and spiders and other monsters: North was infested with hyenas, north east with rocknoses already, and to the west the NPC camp used to be difficult. So there was a requirement to group up in order to succeed.
Bosses like the spider queen in that dungeon were extremely hard to kill. Like a real dungeon boss, not a worldboss nowadays that gets killed by one of your fighters alone.

For my taste the game has become far too casual with the new combat system, monster nerf and thrall follower system. Could have at least reinstated the ranged poison attacks and made crippling a thread again.

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Same. Having now tried some of the changes on Testlive I think I can adapt, but I still don’t like them. I’ll carry on testing at different armour/Ag attribute levels, but I find the stagger start and dodge changes jarring. May just be unfamiliarity, but


I’ll try that. What level at, and did you have a leveled thrall? What weapon/armor?

Edit - doh! What weapon. I guess naked means naked, right :stuck_out_tongue: I should learn to read :stuck_out_tongue:

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Nope: naked is not naked naked! No thrall needed, no attribute points needed. All you need is a bunch of insects and a stone pike. So lvl 8 is enough if you still have to craft the pike.

Lol actually I went with my horse into the sulkers end dafari camp. Dismounted and watched the lvl 1 horse take out all of them :roll_eyes:

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I really wanted to call you a fibber, but I’m not afraid to admit when I’m wrong.

https://youtu.be/PlXTP1_90-M

“Fresh” level 60 on testlive, Star Metal 2 handed sword, swinging low as nature intended, with no attributes set. It was very liberating :slight_smile: Still don’t like the dodge though :stuck_out_tongue:

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Ur lame xD Go take on a bigger camp with worse equip

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I will :smiley: That was the first camp I found where anything had spawned. Going to hit the Summoning Place when I am awake :slight_smile: