Feedback: Repair Button Should Also Reduce Max Durability

Conan Exiles General Discussion Feedback
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As of right now, AoW Ch1 HF1, the current state of repairing is

  • Hitting “Repair” button in inventory or bench NEVER reduces max durability
  • Using a repair kit ALWAYS permanently reduces max durability by an amount depending on its quality (2.5% to 20%)
  • Using Grindstone ALWAYS permanently reduces max durability by 10% (equal to an Advanced Repair Kit, ie Steel-tier repair kit)

I know mine might be a controversial opinion, but for this new repair system to work, the Repair button also needs to reduce max durability. By NOT doing so, by being the only source of keeping weapons in pristine condition, the Repair button becomes the ONLY reasonable choice for repairing weapons.

The issue of a decay system is, truthfully, still something I’m on the fence about. You put in so many options supporting it that I wanted to give it an earnest go before forming an opinion on it being good or bad. Having to do some maintenance in a survival game only seems natural to me, so I’m not inherently against it. But I never had a chance to experience it, because the only reasonable option is to avoid it. Why would I ever choose to deliberately ruin my item when I have the option to not? This option needs to be removed; the Repair button needs to also decay so that decay is the given experience, not a bad choice.

I want to look at this from a few angles. For example, in the patch notes you mention

  • Cost for crafting repair kits have been doubled

as a way of de-incentivizing repair kits. But this is beyond silly. Even if you reduced their crafting cost, even if you made repair kits FREE (as is the case of Journey rewards), I still won’t use them. The reward for Warrior Journey is “Here, now you can ruin your weapons by -15% for free!” but I could instead just repair it without the decay for mere stone at that level. As for crafting them, doesn’t it take more iron bars for a kit than it does to just Repair button an iron weapon? And avoids the -15% as well? It just doesn’t make sense. Even the free Grandmaster kits from Unnamed City bosses, which are technically a better deal to use multiple times and recraft a weapon than it is to repair button a weapon to full multiple times, still feel bad to use because I don’t want to set out on new adventures with quarter or half-reduced weapons, only fresh stuff. But that’s only when those kits are free. Actually crafting the kits to me is an expensive way to create a problem I could have avoided.

I witnessed someone else suggest that the advantage of kits is repairing in the field at permanent loss, while the repair button is a trade-off by offering full repairs at the cost of needing to be at base with your bench. But this fails with the Grindstone, which also requires you to be at base yet stacks a steep permanent cost, and the only difference between holding kits and holding repair resources is the weight - which is meaningless with a horse or thrall to hold the materials for you.

I don’t hate the idea of a decay system. I also think the change

  • Returns from dismantling items has been greatly increased

is a really good support for it. I like the idea of items accumulating wear over time, and as prep for a fresh adventure needing to recycle down and recraft fresh equipment. I think the IDEA of the repair change could be good. I want to engage with it. But engaging with it is the fool’s option, and all the incentive is to never engage with it. The end result of the present change is turning the entire Repair Kit mechanic and the Grindstone Journey reward into trash to be avoided, and all repairs are done solely through the repair button.

If you just gave the Repair button a decay feature, whether it was that 10% RNG chance idea thrown around early on, or just a flat -5% (my personal suggestion) every time, then the playing field instantly becomes level and all the new features become options worth engaging with. Using that 5% as a basis, then the Grindstone becomes an option as double decay but only costs oil. The Grandmaster kits become truly the work of grandmasters, always a superior choice to player repairs. It makes hunting down that special T4 artisan thrall or killing those bosses a desirable pursuit. Hardened Steel repair kits, the best self-taught kit, are a kind of “lossless” choice compared to player repairs, which opens up the intended goal of this change in late game (roaming out with a bundle of kits in your inventory). You could even throw a "grandmaster’ perk under Expertise attribute increasing the repair button flat loss from -5% to -2.5% to even it out with Grandmaster kits, hitting the “crafting” side of that particular attribute.

I want to like the decay. I think it could work out. I think it suits the Survival Game genre. But, as the title says, the repair button should also reduce max durability.

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No, it doesn’t. In fact, for many items you’ll use a lot less resources if you repair them until the low durability forces you to craft another one. Do the math.

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This is the core of why I dislike your suggestion, so I thought I should address it.

I don’t understand why, but it looks like there are people out there who believe that “survival game” means pointless grind, chores, and busywork. Whatever the reason for this belief, it’s wrong, because of the word “game” in “survival game”.

To quote Sid Meier, “A game is a series of interesting choices.” What you’re proposing removes interesting choices, just so you can feel more challenged because you have more busywork to contend with.

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Ever since repair kits have been added, they have been more or less useless in most cases. You have to craft them and then carry them around. They had a niche use if you forgot to repair your stuff while in your base. But chances are, if you forgot to repair, you forgot to stock up on kits. Meaning you need to repair anyway.

Also if you knew how to repair an item, it was far easier to just keep the mats on hand for most things. In some cases it was cheaper to repair an item using its repair cost instead of a kit. Hardened Steel Bars are more of a pain to stock than most ‘rare’ metals. Especially Star Metal and Eldarium.

So the only use of repair kits (outside of pretty much forcing yourself to use them out of principle) was Legendary Weapons and other things you couldn’t craft. Now that is gone, repair kits are superfluous, and even more so since they reduce durability.

I would actually go a step further and remove the repair buttons entirely. Requiring repair kits for all repairs. You even start off knowing how to make the most basic repair kits with basic survival knowledge. Also all repair kits would repair to full minus the durability damage they inflict, and cannot repair items above their tier while also being apart of the tool tier Knowledge instead of their own thing.

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That’s a funny definition of “useless”.

I’ve personally had no problems whatsoever carrying kits, using them in the field, and then restocking when I’m back at my base. And up until the Age of War, they have been absolutely superior to repairing the weapons in the crafting station or by hand.

I mean, most craftable end-game weapons require star metal bars for repairs. So if you wanna repair them in the field, you gotta lug those bars around with you or you gotta do it in your base, where your crafting stations are.

Kits are way lighter to carry around for field repairs and you’ll always use only one of them no matter how damaged your weapon is (unless it’s broken). Not to mention that you don’t even have to craft kits a lot, because they drop from many bosses and can even be found in some chests.

Not in the least. Like I said, do the math.

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I have. With my method, I hit inventory cap before needing to go back to base on 2x harvest. With 1x its a handful of bars of starmetal or eldarium for tools. Quite a few boss loops for weapons. And several days if not weeks for armor.

Legendaries were literally the only things I ever used kits on. Now I don’t use them at all.

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I did, and that particular point is mentioned with Grandmaster kits. But likewise, the inverse is even more true. Every kit better than its target is even more of a loss - not just in resources but now in permanent decay that would have been avoided by not bothering. A broken Iron Broadsword costs 23 iron bars to repair for -0% max loss. An iron kit costs 23 iron bars to craft but hits -15% max durability. A steel kit costs 23*5=115 iron bars to craft for -10% max loss. Whether it is using cheap kits like stone or iron on high weapons like star metal, or using high kits like grandmaster for the lowest max loss, the current implementation strongly discourages the use and creation of kits through the early and mid game and only becomes a technical option in the end-game. The Journey rewards for Warrior, Armorer, Blacksmith, etc. aren’t rewarding, instead diminishing.

I understand your complaint. If that’s your thoughts, we won’t have a common ground, but I’ll answer with my own. One of the appeals of the genre isn’t the “pointless work” but the immersion of being in that world. Items having crafting times are indeed useless delays. There is no reason for it but to make you wait. But having that raw steak take a moment to become cooked steak in a campfire gives it a flavor of how cooking works in the real world. A game like Valheim makes that same cooking process even more tedious and busy, having you prop up racks above a fire, hang the meat from the rack, wait for it, and even risk burning it if you let it cook too long. All pointless chores and tedium against the flow of “push button, get reward” rat mentality, but those touches are what makes me enjoy games in this genre more. If animals just dropped ready steaks in Conan, or if cooking raw steak in Conan was just a button in the inventory with instant conversion, the game would to me be worse for it even though that’s removing “pointless work” with the campfire and fuel and crafting time. There has to be a balance between gamification and reality; I also wouldn’t enjoy a game steak taking 10 real minutes for each one, flipping at the right times, hitting my target rarity, and then after all that my character getting a debuff of food poisoning for 48 real hours because it turns out the tools used were dirty.

This is getting a bit off-topic, but every player is going to have a different take on where the line needs to be drawn. The devs wanted infinite repairs to full for 5 years now. Now they’re testing the line drawn on permanent decay eventually needing to recraft gear. The verbal quote in the devstream was that all equipment needs to be recrafted “eventually,” not that there would still be a way to avoid decay entirely. Like I said in that post, I want to actually experience their idea of that before forming a final opinion, on deciding where my own line is drawn. As things are, the current system makes me personally avoid the optional decay by default. Hence, my feedback.

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…where you spend the vast majority of your play time :slight_smile:

I agree. Maybe they should offer better rewards for those.

Immersion is good, and I like having it, because it adds to the fun. Like everything else, it has to be balanced so it doesn’t detract from fun. I’ll revisit that shortly.

“To make you wait” doesn’t go deep enough. There’s a reason why the game designers for those games want to make you wait. It’s not “just because”, and it’s also not only for immersion’s sake.

If properly done, it will lead to establishing a tertiary game loop that presents an additional challenge, a separate layer of fun, and something to get more skilled at.

But it requires proper balance. And that’s something that Funcom has proven incapable of, at least in this game. I don’t say this lightly, and I also don’t say it to imply that it’s a bad game or that I’m not having fun with it.

On the contrary, I’ve been playing Conan Exiles since February of 2017, and I’ve stayed with it since. It’s been fun – although that’s been changing lately – and I’ve enjoyed thousands of hours in it. But the fact remains that at no point in these 6+ years has the game ever been properly balanced.

And I’m not just talking about weapon damage and stuff like that. I’m talking about resource production rates, material costs, and many other things.

Just one of the many reasons I gave up on Valheim. They went too far in search of “realism”, at the expense of fun.

If you’re in it for superficial “touches”, then you’re right, we’re not going to find a common ground. One of the best survival games I’ve ever played is Don’t Starve. It was brutally challenging and tons of fun, not because it made me fiddle with stuff for the sake of perceived veracity, but because it required me to struggle to overcome challenges and find the optimal way to do things if I want to survive.

You’re drawing a line from my pushback against adding more grind for grind’s sake – and removing interesting choices – to asking for trivialization of the game. No offense, but I find that a tad disingenuous.

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I still stand by my original conspiracy theory that this is all about removing Siptah gear from EL in a passive way. I either use kits and eventually decay out and make new which deplete my eldarium stock or fix em with my stock and deplete it that way. Regardless, eldarium is finite and so this change makes it depleting

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But they made Eldarium weapons useless since Legendaries are OP :face_with_hand_over_mouth:
Now there is some really cool armor from the vaults I’ll give you that :snake:

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For me, that’s not a good enough reason to make a system that covers the game beginning to end only work at the end. That same mentality is why I left World of Warcraft a decade ago. Don’t get me wrong, the previous iteration of low tier repair kits was even worse, like actually worthless in any use case. The current problem I feel is readily solved by doing what the devs said they would. At the very least, I want to try it out and see if it meets the dev’s stated objective or if it is indeed just pointless grind.

I was strictly addressing the point that obstruction isn’t just grind. It can add flavor, and it can add balance. Right now, repairs are out of balance. There is a hybrid with both the lossless old way and the new way with permanent punishments, crafting turnover, and unbalanced costs that vary from disastrous to slightly advantageous. You accuse my suggestion as “removing interesting choices” when increasing choices is in fact my only purpose. You need a level playing field for choice to exist. I’ve already outlined why I don’t see repair kits or the grindstone as viable choices - using the Repair button is too beneficial. It’s not a choice to me at all. Either the button needs to decay in some way or decay should be removed from the kits. We’ve had years of the latter; now that the devs stated they want to try the decay and recycle system, I’d like to try the former to see how it works. If tomorrow the King Beneath starts dropping a legendary spear with the same damage as the other legendaries but never needs to be repaired, I’d make a feedback thread about the same problem. The existence of that spear removes the others as options, because it has the supreme advantage of letting the player avoid the decay system and defeats the purpose for which decay was added.

I’ve been defensive so far in each of my posts to you, but now I’m going to ask of you. Your position so far is a contrasting mix of “repair button causing decay is tedious and pointless grind, never do it” and “repair kits and grindstone causing decay and requiring recycling is fine and balanced - it’s actually the superior option!” The impression your posts have given is that you personally choose to use repair kits and recycling now as the mathematical better option, so if you’ve already accepted decay and turnover as worthwhile parts of the game, why are you so resistant to the repair button also engaging with that system? It doesn’t affect you or your grind personally; you’re already using kits, not the button. And since the recycle system with the kits is fine, isn’t it still fine if the repair button also utilizes it?

Since you’ve made such a fuss about how grindy, tedious, and busywork it would be for the repair button to also reduce max durability, I’m suspecting you actually don’t use the kits anymore, that you have also been pigeonholed into only using the repair button as I have, and that you are afraid of losing that option if it gets changed. It’s fine if that’s the case. Disliking a decay system in principle for its grind is also valid feedback. That seems to be your central point, even if you’ve never quite said it. But that would mean your complaint is with the current kits and grindstone and should be stated clearly, not defending the kits, as was your first post.

Can you clarify your position, just so I know what I’m dealing with?

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I agree that there is no point to the permanent durability reduction if it is only optional.
I personally dislike the mechanic itself, at least its current iteration (RNG based, and with massive durability reduction, as you said a flat 5% would be okay-ish).

But what is even more stupid is that there is no reason to repair anything aside from your amor, because you’re gonna go for Legendary Weapons that cannot be repaired but are straight up OP.

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That never made it to Live though, right? The RNG loss was supposed to be tied to the repair button, but no matter what I tried it never happened. That line was also in the Public Beta

  • Items have a 10% chance to suffer Max Durability loss when repaired. This chance increases to 100% when using a Repairing Grindstone, so make sure you really do want to use it for everything on your hotkey bar.

but the line was removed from Live’s patch notes, replaced by

  • Using a Repairing Grindstone will repair all items on your hotkey bar, also reducing max durability on all of them

To my best knowledge and testing, the current iteration in Live is that the repair button never reduces durability, no RNG to it. Meanwhile, the grindstone and repair kits always do, also no RNG to it.

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I want to say that you are a monster for making this known and thus increasing the potential of it getting fixed. However the forums often prove to be a void for thoughts so maybe they won’t notice.

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Now that Claws of Jhebbal Sag no longer get free repairs, everything else can burn. :heart:

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Your suspicions are unfounded. I’m still using the kits, but wishing they didn’t degrade the maximum durability, the way it was before the update, when they were called “legendary”.

My complaints about the grind stem partly from my memories of what playing was like before I switched to legendary kits, and partly from the grind of replacing unrepairable legendaries.

I dislike adding grind for grind’s sake, especially when there’s already plenty of unnecessary grind and the game doesn’t need more.

Grindstone and lower-tier kits are worthless, except in early game when you don’t have access to better ones, and I’m not defending them.

As for grandmaster kits, I’m defending those only because you don’t realize that your suggestion is based on the flawed premise that repair button is always better than using kits, instead of being a tradeoff that can sometimes work better and sometimes worse than alternatives. In other words, your suggestion incorrectly treats the repair button as a strictly dominant choice, and proposes to remove an interesting choice.

Both you and Taemien are insisting on kits being a strictly dominated choice because you won’t use them. I am perfectly happy to use them to extend the life of my items before I have to re-craft them and reduce total costs.

I hope I clarified my position, but I’ll go a bit further and try to give you wider context.

As I said above, I believe this game has way too much grind as it is, chiefly due to overuse of RNG. Too many features of this game have been implemented using slot-machine mechanics. Trade a fragment of power in the Esoteric Library? Random scroll. Open a chest with a skeleton key? Random legendary item. Look for a thrall? Random, random, random.

This all adds to the grind, and what it adds up to is frustrating tedium.

And now they decided to make it much, much worse, by buffing legendaries to an extreme while making them unrepairable. On top of that, they made the repair kits reduce maximum durability every time they’re used.

In the middle of that grindfest comes your suggestion to add some more grind.

I’ve written at length elsewhere about the imbalance between the intrinsic and extrinsic incentives for engaging with the content. I’m not going to repeat it here, but you’re welcome to read it if you want to. Suffice it to say that I disagree with the devs’ efforts to force us to “repeat content”, in their own words. They’re resorting to their favorite game design doctrine: “balancing” the game with a sledgehammer.

We really don’t need a change that would make things even worse, especially if it’s based on a flawed premise about the efficacy of kits.

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No it shouldn’t. Why would repair spoil things that I can craft? Remember that you can repair “by hand” just some of your gear which you can craft. If you play alone you don’t notice this difference but if you play with your friends then one of you could learn armor recipes and another has recipes for weapons (and some of your gear is looted from your enemies). So you have to use repair kits and spoil some of your gear, but you can repair the rest without compromising durability - it’s fair.

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Hmmm interesting. Allow me to put forth a counter proposition:

How about we adjust so neither benchs or repair kits reduce maximum durability?

And to further compliment this, how about we also revert Legendary weapons back to being repairable using kits?

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This!

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Thanks, CodeMage, for the explanation. That does help focus it down.

I think these two lines are important. The top half is practically the core of my point. These items, both rewards from the Journey, are worthless because they engage in the decay system while the repair button doesn’t. As Croms_Faithful and many others point out, they could remove the decay and it’s fine. Not just fine, the Grindstone becomes ridiculously broken. Could you imagine repairing all the best weapons and tools with just 1 Oil each? Even legendaries, as he suggests. At least in that case, it seems like the Grindstone would need to keep the decay, like it did last patch. But that once again creates the discrepancy of ruining items one way, keeping them pristine another. I never used the Grindstone once, even before this patch, because of its decay. I know others are the same.

But inversely, if the change is that the repair button also decayed - even if just a bit - neither the grindstone nor the low kits are worthless anymore. They become options. A player has to accept in his heart that decay is going to happen regardless, so what flavor of it do you want? More decay, cheaper materials? Less decay, more expensive materials? Maybe get lucky and find the best kit in the game, which is even less decay for free (or relatively cheap materials). It’s an open buffet. It also makes hunting down a T4 to craft your own grandmaster kits a prime motivation, for a benefit as unambiguous as a T4 blacksmith is to your weapon’s base stats. The change I proposed is beneficial to the balance against other means of repairing at every stage in the game, including end game.

Now the drawback, which is the leveling experience. I think you’re over-exaggerating the impact. Unlike end game, where you stick with one thing, a leveling player sheds lower weapons. At say a -5% loss, what max durability will a player’s stone weapon still have when he replaces it with iron? And that iron when he replaces it with perfected steel (because steel is now completely skipped over)? And perfected steel, with its large base durability, how long will that last before it’s replaced by an epic weapon? And even if at some point in here it does decay to a difficult maximum and you recraft it, these low materials aren’t painful to get. You can use those free iron kits from Warrior to repair that iron weapon twice, to 70% max, before feeling the need to use your hard-earned iron on your weapon again, instead of feeling motivated to dump the kits and keep burning iron to keep it tip-top. Past iron, you can dismantle (boosted returns) your reduced durability steel weapons to recraft steel for a probably painless transition. I genuinely think it would not be tedious or grindy compared to the base experience, especially with an increased willingness to mix in repair kits at those levels.

I keep using the word “think” though because I have no way of experiencing this or testing it. I’m just going off of my latest playthrough for this patch. I didn’t repair my Bone Claws, made a darfari club which I repaired 3 times before making an Iron Mace, which I repaired twice before making my Steel Short Sword (for the Journey) and Perfected Steel Mace (for thrall). I’ve yet to repair my Short Sword yet, but I’m only lvl 37 so far (just unlocked Dismantler last night). The point is, even if all these lost -5% each regular repair, I wouldn’t have been suffering or made to grind because of it, and I would probably have looked at kits seriously instead of canning them and thinking about making this very thread each time I repaired during that time.

So if there is to be an added grind as consequence, a real drawback despite the much more favorable balance and open options elsewhere, it would be at the end game - where we both agree grandmaster kits are already better than lossless repairs.

That brings me to the bottom half of your quote. I take some offence to “you don’t realize,” “flawed premise,” “incorrectly,” and all your other assertions here. I’ve already pointed this out, but let me directly quote myself from the opening post to remind you:

In my very first post I already pointed out that using grandmaster kits multiple times before recrafting a weapon is “a better deal” than using the repair button multiple times. It is a better deal. I’ve agreed with you on this since my first response to you and before it. I commented on the feeling of setting out on an long adventure with a partially damaged weapon. I hate that feeling. It feels bad, and just outright recrafting a weapon with 87.5% max durability to satisfy that itch feels worse - because I knew it was avoidable. This was in the beta, I lamented to myself, “Why didn’t I just throw a stack of bars on my horse? He has so much inventory space. I didn’t need to use the dumb kits.” If you were there, you could very likely console me with math about how 5 repairs and a recraft was definitely a good trade, but I’m just a human driven by irrational emotions. I’d be more consoled if there wasn’t a way to avoid the decay - or if there was no decay.

But the one important thing here is that when it comes to end game, where we both agree mathematically that a player should deliberately move into using the best kits instead of the repair button, having the repair button incur that small decay doesn’t injure the experience. The player is already focused on kits, whether that’s self-crafted with that T4 or just farming Unnamed. The last place the proposed change could hurt most is actually the place where you are avoiding it regardless of the change.

This is outside the scope of the thread and my given feedback, but I truly agree. That’s also why even my proposed change took out the RNG. In the early proposed repair button decay by the devs, it was a 10% chance of a -10% max loss. A -1% average each repair over time. Mine is 5x higher than that and still preferable to me because I’m tired of RNG. I don’t want a chance for decay; either make it decay or don’t. With the legendary focus and changes, I wish they’d also work on the RNG in that and let certain chests have small tables for targeted farming. The Library is the worst for this for reasons we all know well, but man I can’t stand the fact that it can keep giving you recipes you already know. I truly want the RNG to be reduced in this game too, especially in the cases regarding targeted farming. I have faint hopes for Chapter 2’s loot redistrobution and chest rework, but we’ll have to see what that actually entails at the time.