Tried out the testlive on a private server with just me playing. I’m not using any mods.
My fighter thralls (tried with Lian and Nordheimer Fighter II) will no longer use their truncheons consistently to help me knock out other thralls. Lian was first equipped with a shield and truncheon, and before would always take them out and knock people out dutifully for me. Now, most of the time he stands with his fists up as if he’s not equipped with anything.
I tried taking the truncheon and putting it in Lian’s main hand. It will inconsistently “stick”, but often just flashes in his hand and then out. The same happens with a shield. If I can get one to stick, I can place the other and he will have them equipped out of combat. This seems to be easier if they are not following me.
If i do set their truncheon + shield, they seem to knock out the first thrall I start to attack, but sometimes put them away and with others just put their fists up. NPCs are now MUCH harder in testlive, at least from my perspective, so this is really not good!
I’m not sure if they get confused less with a normal weapon or not, generally I use my fighter thralls to help me collect new thralls. Pretty pretty please don’t say “we didn’t intend truncheons to be used like this”, I need this crutch! Lian is so much better at knocking people out than I am XD
I can try to take a video later if you need more clarity.
Thanks a lot for the report! I’ve let the devs know but if they need more info on this or can’t reproduce it I’ll let ya know. This should be enough though.
What I find interesting is the NPCs, before becoming thralls, seem very good at drawing weapons and using them. There are a few that remain idle when I am near, like some bearers near the black ship, as well as most of the volcano, but I’ve never had an NPC come at me without a weapon in hand.
Could we somehow apply the same mechanic that NPCs have to thralls? Give them an actual agro range, rather than just waiting for an enemy to attack us first?
I did a little testing with archers today. I loaded up on archer thrall with blunted hunting bow and a blunt arrow. Also a blunted truncheon. My archer used both pretty reliably, until my server crashed out on me. Then I set up a second archer with different results. I did not have a cheap blunted bow handy, so just equipped her dragon bow with a blunt arrow. She fired one blunt, then she switched to a damage arrow of some type. I blunted her again and she switch to damage again. So I think you have to replace their default bow. 2am, so I need to sleep, but will test more tomorrow with different thrall types and blunted equipment.
Archers doesn’t change weapons In melee in close combat.
Fighter thralls won’t use weapon consistently, especially truncheons
The first one we were able to get a reproduction case and working on a fix for. For the second one, looks like QA are having some trouble reproducing. If there is any other info we can get on this it would be appreciated. Thank you!!
both archers and fighters seem to do a decent job of swapping between bows and truncheons at the appropriate times.
when you put other things in the thralls inventory, it can break them and cause them to not draw their weapons anymore. So don’t use them for storage.
when loading arrows on the thrall, as soon as they run out of your supplied arrows, they revert to infinity flint arrows (or so it appears). When used with a really low damage blunted bow, on medium to high hit point NPCs, it still works fine for stunning, but on lower level NPCs, you will likely kill the NPC before a stun. So if you want to take lower NPCs, do it with truncheons or make a lot of blunt arrows for the thrall.
So, on a fresh server boot, I like the way thralls are working.
Next I need to test what someone said in another post: (loosly quoted) “when teleporting, thralls start to lose track of the player” - this seems like it could be true. I pop around a lot from base to base in a day and that would explain why I usually have thrall troubles. Will report back after a lot of teleporting.
Edit: After several teleports, a death or two and relogging from a lockup, my follower thrall is pretty buggy. I’m battling a boss and she is shooting at a phantom in the wrong direction. I move her and she goes back to shooting at the same phantom. Boss is dead and nothing in close range and she keep shooting at a phantom.
This is one of my guilty pleasures, filling up my wheels and watching the lols. Does this happen with shield plus ANY truncheon or just the fiber one? I will test this later, but truly I avoid loading anything onto my thralling thrall but a truncheon, so it’s something I haven’t tried on TL.
In the past, thralls would go “punchies” with a weapon they couldn’t understand. We had a fugue of this with the throwin axe. Now that the shield is a weapon we might be seeing shades of this.
From experience, to stop this behavior:
a. Remove all weapons and shields from thrall.
b. Shift-click a two-handed sword to them or simply drag it onto their inventory, not a weapon slot.
c. Once they’ve engaged an enemy, you can shift-click the sword to your inventory and shift-click a truncheon to theirs. They should work predictably now, but I would avoid the shield while thralling.
