… prefer the pacing, content and skill level that’s appropriate for them…
And how would this be invalidated by reducing the uber-thralls to mere mortals?
Can’t play Dark Souls, would take time away from Conan 
basicly when bugnan glitchile was released it had in mind the idea of grouping and bulding a team to rule over the devastedly bug riddle lands of the exiles…
that concept pretty much went downt he drain when pvp player realised they could do anything without killing each other, the fact that you can only apply 10 poison 20 bleed 5 sunder 5 cripple, and 1 gas cloud, i actually love that since they made a good use of common sense but it also nullified the gamestyle of many players. and it managed to kill a part of the CE game community…cant have alot of players. 1 axe and board, 1 spear and the rest in w/e they want
thralls pre current content were more enjoyable limited hp 1 buff no stats no overpowerness. gear them up and keep em alive,
also most world bosses can be solod with a little creativity and dedication( a lacking quality since 2000)
Well, the way I see it, elite-level thralls at the top end are as close to Admin powers as possible without having to invoke Admin powers, when it comes to dealing with enemies. Sort of like the machine gun for people who, for either RP reasons, or disability reasons, or other reasons don’t wish to aggressively fight the bosses we know and love. I think it’s better they’re not denied the experience, because in many respects this can be a very punishing game.
It’s SUPPOSED to be a punishing game. It’s a SURVIVAL game, where we’re supposed to struggle to survive.
Me having a cuppa and a smoke kicked back leaning on a rock watching an uber-thrall get stepped on by a dragon for five minutes before the dragon gives up and dies of boredom is obviously not very punishing, not very exciting, not very heroic, and pretty far from punishing.
Unless the tea gets cold. That’s terrible.
Just out of curiousity, why do you prefer being forced into a certain playstyle instead of having a choice which path to take?
They may not require as much skill as they require persistence, and some people don’t have the dexterity or grip-strength to sustain 10 minutes of repetition. Right now I’m working with a stroke patient* who has use of one hand, and with the help of a Razer mouse with a thumb wheel, she can do almost everything with her mouse hand without switching to keyboard. That’s an extreme case.
Imagine you’ve just had a lousy day helping guests at Panera, arrived home to assemble Godbreaker and you’re just 35 scraps short. Sure it’s like standing around with a bow doling out pink arrow clouds, and some might say much too Valentines-ey, but if you just want to clear that dungeon for the unpteenth time, I dig it. Not for me, though, I’m like you – an absolute skull-crusher. 
* ETA, health issue anonymized for privacy, btw. 
Agree completely. They are for the most part monotonous drudgery after figuring out their attack style.
Hey I’m just going by the description of the game, the genre it’s listed under, and the dev’s discussions of their intentions that have been going on for years.
If you want to pound a square peg in to a round hole, I’m not suggesting anything to stop you.
Conan Exiles is an online multiplayer survival game, now with mounts and mounted combat, set in the lands of Conan the Barbarian. Enter a vast, open-world sandbox and play together with friends and strangers as you build your own home or even a shared city. Survive freezing cold temperatures, explore loot-filled dungeons, develop your character from a lowly peasant to a mighty barbarian, and fight to dominate your enemies in epic siege wars.
Conan Exiles can be played in full single-player, co-op, or persistent online multiplayer.
After Conan himself saves your life by cutting you down from the corpse tree, you must quickly learn to survive. Weather scouring sandstorms, shield yourself from intense temperatures and hunt animals for food and resources. Explore a vast and seamless world, from the burning desert in the south to the snow-capped mountains of the north.
Forge the legacy of your clan as you fight to reclaim and dominate the Exiled Lands. Use the powerful building system to create anything from a small home to entire cities piece by piece. Wage war using swords, bows, siege weapons, and even take control of giant avatars of the gods to crush the homes of your enemies in epic battles.
Fight vicious monsters and other players using an action-oriented, combo-based combat system. Dodge, block, and learn to master the true art of combat to become the greatest fighter in the Exiled Lands. Slay using bows, daggers, swords, axes, and more.
It does not say “Fight vicious monsters and other players by maneuvering so your ridiculously overpowered fighter thrall will kill them in a hit or two while you focus on avoiding being hit by their thrall”
It also doesn’t say that even as a lowly peasant we can climb like spoder-man, and that halfway through our progression we can easily farm endgame goods and services to really crank it up a notch in multiplayer. 
Can you envision running down the gravel and grass driveway toward the bottom Nord Tower, and telling your follower to hit that pesky archer? She runs off toward the tower base while you heriocally dispatch the Heavy-Vanir-clad tag team on a little knoll, with pine cones all around… Your bodyguard leveled like you, with 60 shots at greatness.
I’m not sure if I understood that correctly, but the mental image I got was really, really awesome! That’s what I would really like from my thralls – to complement me in combat, not to replace me or force me to do ridiculous little dances to make things work. I guess I just realized that half of my complaint is that “thralls is soooooo stupid”1 that having to rely on them breaks my immersion. Thanks for helping me realize that
I still think that they’re too damn strong, but maybe when they’re smarter they won’t need to be that strong…
1
Agree 100%.
Detractors and trolls seem to be implying that I want something else entirely…but this is exactly what I envision.
Excellent point about the AI ability and perhaps over-compensation by the devs…far easier to crank up the damage & health multipliers than to re-work an already oft-reworked AI!
Now you have me thinking about an Ark-like ability to give commands to followers. Followers that I have to work to help (and vice versa) and give me some tactical control of the engagement instead of hoping my thrall does something constructive instead of running away to kill the moose 100 yards away that is NOT trying to eat my face at the moment, ignoring the wolves surrounding me 
I understand now, you are forced into this playstyle by your peers and you don’t like it. In PvE you have various options available to you and since you don’t have to compete with anyone but the AI you can decide which path you want to take. You can go alone, you can take a thrall, you can take a weaker thrall, you can build a cheese platform and walk the boss to its death. You can play this sandbox game in whatever way you like. PvE content can be made more interesting by improving the mechanics which however is easier said than done. Maybe focus on what mechanics you want to see implemented rather than removed.
In PvP you are forced in a certain playstyle because of its competitive nature. You can’t go without a thrall because you will be in a disadvantage. This needs to change. However, the problem is not how op the thralls are in general but how op they are in PvP where players have to play in the most efficient way if they want to survive and dominate. This can be “easily” achieved by separating pve damage from pvp damage that the thralls inflict. PvE on PvP servers is supposed to be easy otherwise why the boosted rates. The focus should be on PvP and raiding.
Now that we agree that forced playstyle is bad and options need to be available, we can find a solution which suits both the casual PvE players, the PvE players seeking for a challenge and the PvP players who need to compete with others. Obviously, making the thralls obsolete is not a solution as this would be another forced playstyle for all the players regardless of their preferred playstyle. So instead of the consonant cries for nerfs, we should try offering workable solutions which won’t alienate half the playerbase but achieve that diversity we are all looking for.
I roll out of 1st Person all the time, and the target lock often pops on – that boom sound, and the focus drift – a similar effect could be applied when you hard-E on a follower.
Selecting the “target” tab on the rotary dial would do the boom-zoom, allowing you to quickly pick an in-range enemy with your pointer, or by rolling up and down with your mouse wheel. Select the enemy of choice, click to acknowledge, and your Becky the Nord is off to the races!
We occasionally have part of this functionality now. Sometimes when I pick up my bow and target an enemy, my follower will engage before I’ve fired a shot. I’m not sure how to repeat this just yet, all I know is my Barnes almost always gets a head-start just by my lifting my bow’s reticle. I know @jot29 has reported this, so it’s not just ebullience for the eponymous entertainer entity.
I disagree entirely.
Even PvE servers (which I play on with my kids) have a level of competitiveness to them. It is different, it is more social and less destructive, but it is there.
The point is more about the game design/mechanics choices that make one choice clearly better than others (ie using the few thralls that have the highest damage output…berzerks being the FOTM). From a game design and balance perspective if one ‘thing’ (ie choice) is clearly and demosntrably better than others (whether it be weapons: see current state of Spears; or armor: see current state of Heavy Armor; or buildings: see current state of black-ice; or thralls) this game is rife with inconsistencies that generate hugely decidedly imbalanced choices. It’s a game-theory applied to real games issue.
I am not forced in to any playstyle. I choose how I play. Those choices are dramatically affected by efficiency (i’m an engineer, forgive me!) and making the best use of my very limited time as an old guy with many kids, full time job, multiple servers i play on, etc.
I do not agree with your assertion that the sandbox game can be ‘played whatever way you like’, as that is too broad a statement and you imply using things that I consider exploits…a ‘slippery slope’ that I don’t think you intentionally implied but is there none the less.
I do agree that improving the game mechanics to make the PvE aspect of the game more interesting is the goal. That is the primary goal. The PvP aspect is secondary (at least in this Thrall discussion) as there are so many other glaring unbalanced one-sided “best” options that choosing just one (ie Thralls) is hard to do. However, I think reducing Thrall overpoweredness (is that a word?!) in PvP would go a long way to setting a stage where PvP is more about the Players and their abilities (and to be frank, my 50 year old reflexes do not give me great PvP ability!) and less about what thralls they’ve gotten!
I also very much disagree with your assertion that PvE should be easy on PvP servers. Easy is perhaps too nebulous a term to be applied to such a large scope, and perhaps is just a semantics argument, but I do not think making it “easy” is the intend of the boosted rates. Instead I think the boosted rates are more about ability to recover and get back to ‘normal’ and continuing to be competitive after a wipe-out. If that’s what you mean by easy, ok, we agree.
Nobody, and I mean NOBODY in any of these threads is arguing to make thralls obsolete. If that’s what you think anyone has said, I invite you to scroll up, read the other threads, and understand again that that is not what anyone is asking for.
This is about limiting the role of high-end thralls, not making them obsolete. This is a balance for all, all these niches and categories you seem to think players neatly fit in to (a huge fallacy, btw). Everyone would have to participate and be a partner to their thralls more than they do now.
If you mean by ‘casual PvE’ players that they sick a lvl 20 mob on something then AFK while it fights, then repeating ad nauseum, then yes…I would like to limit that. That’s not a playstyle. That’s not good for the game. That’s not what’s selling copies of the game. That’s half a step from Candy Crush, and this game is a very different genre. So yes, I guess I do want to make thralls that can solo the entire contents of the Unnamed City without pause obsolete. I struggle to see how having the capability to do that is good for the game at all for many reasons…this is already a wall of text so I won’t go in to it but you seem to have a brain so I’m sure you understand.
I want a system where the thrall compliments me and my abilities, not the other way around. Players and thralls should be commensurate in ‘firepower’ and ‘survivability’, where players have the ability to control the tactical situation (i’m enamored with the idea of follower command system now, similar to Ark) and must participate in the fights alongside their thralls to get through the tougher fights. Where thralls do not dominate both the PvE and PvP aspects of the game.
If you think that’s taking away options, forcing playstyles, and calling for nerfs, so be it. That’s what I’m calling for.
If you have some valid reason why you think it’s good for the game that players can sit back and watch their thralls kill the hardiest things in the game-world, let’s hear it!
@Malagant, you really are a dyed-in-the-wool PvP player and I salute you. This is how detractors on servers treat solicitous or supportive players, by and large. I hope you won’t feel going forward that anyone is trolling you.
And I’m right there with you on the thrall brain buff. It’s a sad state of affairs when I’m playing the role of server tour guide/thrall reboot tech for new players who are relying on a stable follower to survive the relentless surge of purge. I crack heads, not fill them!
Actually believe it or not I’m not a PVP player much. While UO was my all-time favorite, nowadays I just can’t get in to the hardcore action like that. I enjoy a good solid mix of everything the game has to offer, and wish others did as well.
@Zeb Go post some more sarcastic gifs, eh?
Dude, come on 
Zeb’s gifs, even when they’re sarcastic, are never personal attacks. They’re just a fancy version of emojis.
I might disagree with her occasionally, but she’s always been polite to everyone, much more so than I have.
The winky-smile was supposed to imply that it was a joke, not serious 
I have to agree. I am doing some expirementing on a PVE official right now. And the first thing i notice is multiple clans competing to build in one area. Basically, He who claims first, gets the land. And i am seeing very abusive building techniques where 2 - 3 blocks of the Map are already sandstone claimed for that uber base design. so if i want to survive, i will have to out harvest the other clans and hope to somehow not get blocked in my base. But PVE is not toxic 