Favourite THRALL and most sought after THRALL

I disagree with this very concept. Purges are equalizers for the servers. You build up too much? You will be taken down. Difficulty needs to be based on foundational and placement amounts and there is going to be a level where you just can’t win and you are forced to watch your tower of babel fall. If you do set it to your building metrics, then it is self regulating and noobs get it easier than vets…until the noob gets overboard and has to be taken down a peg. The reward is the fight. You may loose but the fight was worth it.

2 Likes

For me, getting the Purge takes a lot of effort (I suppose by effort I really just mean time) as I’m a solo player on an official server, so my situation is different from others. There is a lot of RNG, but I feel like currently the Purge thralls are in a pretty good spot. It’s incredibly tough getting the right purge, and as a solo player, handling a Purge up in the North is no simple task. Sure, you need the right Thrall to spawn, but if you can’t come up with a good strategy on how to defend your base and knock out the thralls you need, the Purge can really run a muck!

@Xevyr I think Purges serve a purpose greater than just that they come to destroy your base, I know technically that’s what the lore says they are doing, but some Purge thralls used to be the only way you could craft certain items, so it seems it was intended as a way to bring you special thralls that you couldn’t find anywhere else. They’ve changed that now, but I think because many people complained.

The Purge thralls are better than pretty much any standard T4, but this wasn’t always the case. My purge thralls all have higher health than any of my best RHTS, Berserkers or Dalinsia’s, but they used to be the same. The crafter thralls only advantage is that some of them look different, that’s about it I believe, it obviously used to be different.

“If you do decide to risk it the rewards might be worth it, but you should definitely take the time to build up your defences.” this quote from the dev blog leads me to believe Purges were intended to bring rewards as well as be a mechanic that comes to destroy your base :slight_smile:

I actually think if we removed the ability to get them from the wine cellar it would make it much more rewarding to have those RHTS. Personally when I went to grab two, someone was farming the cellar, so I went to the Unnamed City and challenged myself to get the RHTS that are guarded by the one skull Hero. It was definitely more difficult, but incredibly rewarding, now my Boromir and Faramir “Seekers of the Treasure” are two of my favourite thralls because the fight to get them wasn’t so easy!

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 :smiley:

Edit: there we go, found the thread

3 Likes

Lianeele is my favorite. She’s hot, and rarely spawns… I get maybe 1 a month.

It would be great if we could use the Orb of Nergal on thralls. Lubba The Luscious needs some “enhancement” to really live up to her name.

2 Likes

Not really. I mean, it’s trivial to prevent a purge. On Siptah, you even have a placeable for that, but you can also prevent a purge in Exiled Lands.

More importantly, we have Funcom’s word about them. I once asked what the purpose of the purge was, and got an interesting answer:

That’s just the recap, by the way. The complete answer can be heard in the video and has additional details, but it boils down to what you’ve read in the recap above.

I’m not sure whether this answer is still considered valid by the devs, as the dev team has seen some significant changes since then.

However, if we assume it hasn’t changed, then the purpose of the purge aligns more with @erjoh’s idea that “the reward is the fight” than with the perception that it’s a Thrall-Dispensing Santa Event :wink:

That said, I don’t really mind the purge being rewarding for the players. What I mind is gating that reward behind multiple layers of RNG.

If every purge was guaranteed to have T4 thralls in it, that would be better, but that’s not the case right now. (As a side note, the fact that you can get several waves without any human in them goes directly against the in-game lore for the purge. This should really be fixed at some point.)

If you could have a heavy influence on where the purge was going to strike, e.g. it picks the base that has the most relics in it, that would also be better. Or hell, just give us an equivalent of the Convergence Trap in Exiled Lands and make the purge target the base nearest to the trap.

Implement both of those changes, and you have a purge that can be as rewarding as you want it, because it doesn’t involve playing a row of slot machines before you get to the main event.

2 Likes

all depends where you build.

if you build a house near the obelisk of B11.

sometimes enemies will attack your neighbors.

I had this problem quite a few times xD

2 Likes

Vathis the Hierophant… Still got my last one sitting in a chest… I also name as Vathis the Hierophant every new fighter thrall that i obtain since the rename patch…

After that thralls r meh… I may like my new cat when i take the decision to place a pen down to grow her…

3 Likes

Yes, the word “chance” is the key word there. I don’t mind rewards. I mind having to gamble over and over for them.

And like I said, the in-game explanation for the purge makes you expect a raid organized by NPCs who are out to steal your relics. What you often get instead is a bunch of scorpions or rocknoses or crocodiles or whatever.

3 Likes

I guess because I’m a solo player I do things a little different. I have one thrall following me, and four thralls I feel comfortable with stationed outside of my base. Because of where I’ve built the Purge just does a nice little stroll towards my base and I take them out before they even reach it. My only real challenge is that my thralls have truncheons, while I carry around a weapon and try to kill everything haha it can be a bit annoying, but still a challenge for me! I’ve had my thralls accidentally kill fighters or crafters I wanted, so I remove that possibility completely.

From my previous playthrough on a different server pre 3.0, my Beast Tamer thralls seemed to max out around the same as Dalinsia and Berserkers in terms of health. Even though the Vitality and Strength stats are still the same (30 and 15), on my new playthrough, the Beast Tamers have at least 1000hp more than any of my Dalinsia’s or Berserkers (at lvl 20). It could just be they all got lucky this time, but I think the Purge thralls must have a higher health multiplier or something? I know you’ve got all the data, so if that’s not the case, I guess my Beast Tamers just got lucky! My Aesir Berserker on Exiled Lands also seems to have a massive amount of health, even more than my Beast Tamers!

Strength wise Purge thralls are around Lian or Janos? I actually have quite a few of both cause I find them to be super OP, the only negative being rather low health, but they definitely make up for it!

I 100% agree each purge should have human thralls. I used to get the Frost Giants purge all the time, it was basically all Frost Giants and a few Sabertooths. Now, the Frost Giant purge is largely Aesir fighters and crafters, and sometimes Sabertooths as well. If they added in guaranteed T4 to each purge, I think it would make people a lot more interested in the purge, cause as it is a lot of people avoid it!

2 Likes

Nah, the beast tamers have a starting vitality of 30 so they start off with over 4k hp. So in terms of HP they will be better than an average berserker / dalinsia / nordheimer, they do deal less damage than either of those though. However RHTS can be built beyond thier HP if they get a lot of vitality points while leveling since each point counts more for them. I have stock RHTS fighters with over 6k health which Berserkers or Dalinsias would struggle to reach.

In any case all of them are listed in the spreadsheet I linked above and it’s quite user-friendly so you can just look them up yourself :slight_smile:

2 Likes

For some very good reasons. The worst problem with the purge is that it can spawn inside or on top of your base. As far as I can tell, this is meant to ensure that no base is safe from the purge: if you build a base that tries to cheese the pathfinding algorithm, the purge will still get you by spawning inside or on top.

If those were the only conditions under which this happens, that would be acceptable. Unfortunately, the way the game tests these conditions is by trying to find a path to your base and, if it can’t do so within a limited time, it just gives up and spawns the purge inside.

The problem with this approach is that the pathfinding seems to be subject to AI throttling that happens when the server is having performance problems. Basically, if your server FPS is low (in “red” or even “orange” range), the AI starts to suffer from this, across the whole server, and the result of that may be that the purge can’t find an otherwise perfectly viable path to your base.

So yeah, even though I enjoy the challenge of the purge, I reset my purge meter if I’m playing on a server that’s overbuilt and suffers from performance problems consistently.

3 Likes

Agreed. Having Thralls stronger than Dalinsia, Berserkers, and RHTS just show up at a base to get wapped by 100 thralls with truncheons while the player picks off the mobs immune to concussive damage with a spear is not a challenge.

The way T4 thralls should be gained is raiding fortified outposts. Potentially requiring sieging to crack open. Not simply finding one outside a hut or walking around by themselves.

2 Likes

Agreed but also that was an ancient time before the thrall revisions. The design of thrall obtainment changed drastically when they redid thralls and we weren’t held to the same collection mentalities that we were used to (IE when individual thralls were responsible for specific epic gear and legendary kits could only be crafted by purge thralls).

That all changed but the purge specific stuff remained and I would bet real money it was just easier to keep it that way vs change that entire aspect of the purge. I think lack of time was the reason purge thralls remained.

1 Like

God…of course they did…why not? Why have any sense of logic or clear direction?

I guess I come at this from a different perspective. I do believe thralls are an intended perk of the Purge: “If you do decide to risk it the rewards might be worth it, but you should definitely take the time to build up your defenses.” I don’t have 100 thralls, I can’t possibly use even a fraction of them on the purge as it would take forever just to place them, plus I’m a solo player (that may be the biggest factor for me in how I fight the purge).

Maybe I’m not that great at combat, but when I have 3 or 4 Sabertooths chasing me, as well as a one skull mob, it ain’t easy, at least for me! My 3 or 4 thralls are busy knocking out whom they can at this point, but I still find the high level purges in Mounds area to be challenging for the most part. If I had someone else fighting with me, I probably wouldn’t find it all that challenging, so I understand your point that for some the purge seems like too easy of a mechanic to deliver such rare rewards :slight_smile:

I think we all have such different playstyles that it would be near impossible to make the purge seem fair to everyone, cause I know of many people who complain about it being too difficult, whereas others think it’s far too easy!

Working your a*s off to get a bunch of Skeletons that can be found in the Unnamed City is a real bummer, that’s happened to me three times in the past two months haha I’m very happy they changed Frost Giant purge to add human thralls (the Aesir are awesome). I think they should it for every Purge!

Sorry it was a rhetorical thing. Anyways. Thralls.

I actually love T3 thralls more than not because they are so easy to get, tame, and level. While everyone else works on that zerker, RHTS, or DSH I got 6 T3’s up to level 20 with war party pumping out the levels. In PVE, the T3’s are adequate defenders and are completely dispensable. In PVP, the sheer volume that can be made in the short amount of time means I recover quickly and it is a big ole pain to deal with that many thralls…giving me more time to bug out.

1 Like

Sometimes I forget when levelling up new thralls that at one point they all used to take twice as much XP to level per level. Around 2.4mil from 19-20 for Dalinsia was quite the slog!