If Funcom changed this because of too many complaints, then that would mean enough people didn’t appreciate that mechanic. (though I agree that in these cases it’s not always the majority being loud, however if they disagree they should voice their opinions, which they often don’t… )
Personally I don’t like the mechanic of making purge thralls good enough to be worth knocking out for several reasons…
The main one being is that it encourages needless spam, which is ironic as the purge was designed specifically to combat that…
When your base is a small house with 5-6 follower thralls total… you’re not going to be trying to knock thralls out… you’ll be instead enjoying a potentially challenging base defense scenario.
It’s usually only when people have their needlessly oversized base with plenty of bait obstacles for the purge and several dozen defending thralls with truncheons when people knock out purge attackers instead of killing them… and at that point the purge itself is not even a challenge, completely defeating the purpose and nullifying any idea of that “risk reward” concept you attributed to this imo.
Well, health is not everything, but I am going to hazard a guess and say that you captured these pre-3.0, since stat points like vitality / str etc are saved in the database and do not change with game updates, only their effectiveness, but it’s entirely possible you had some old purge thralls with an overly stacked Vitality amount.
Currently the best purge fighter thralls are around or slightly worse than a Lian of Janos… not to mention a Dalinsia, Berserker or RHTS, the Beast tamers have a higher starting health due to their starting 30 vitality, so you might have one of those, however they do way less damage.
They are not “bad” or unviable by any means and totally usable ofc.
Yea, I agree that it makes it a bit too “mainstream” just being able to carry those 2 out… maybe even removing those first 2 would do the trick since the others are in groups with a boss in there as well, it’s just those first 2 in the first room that are easy pickings
Actually “some” of them retained some benefits, I looked them up for another thread a while ago, gonna see if I can find it… the Cook for example has way more recipes than your standard T4 cooks (they have all recipes except the fish thing from the lone fisherman - which is the best cook) and some have some increased speed or something? idk going to check 
Edit: there we go, found the thread