TLDR: Survival as a follower attribute has to be either reworked (not tuned in sence of numbers, but reworked in terms of what it does) or taken out completely (like encumbrance and grit) as it provides no real value.
Survival as a follower attribute is utterly useless. There is nothing wrong with the idea itself (although I personally find it bland). The idea of reducing the timer on negative debuffs is OK on paper but applied to thrall game mechanic it holds almost no value.
When follower is engaged in combat, it can’t disengage from it and fight until they or their opponent is dead. Thralls can’t heal and healing is generally interrupted by damage.
Negative status effect is applied for a set amount of time, but the timer is reset the moment debuff is re-applied.
Negative effects take some time to “ramp up” to reach dangerous level of damage.
Knowing this we can see in fights against regular NPC’s debuffs won’t last long enough to play any significant role. You follower will either kill an NPC or will be killed by an NPC before debuffs can reach any significant level to be a threat.
Even if we pit a follower against an npc with large HP pool (aka Boss), the damage taken from direct attacks will still be much higher then bleed or poison damage and said debuffs will be reliably re applied on the regular intervals through the entire fight. This is why it doesn’t matter if bleed lasts 10 secons or 7 second if it will be refreshed every 5 seconds.
Talking about slowing debuff - there are no creatures in game, employing “hit-and-run” behavior - spiders can slow follower up to 75% for all they want, but if they are going to stand stil and wait my Berserker will eventually get to them and they will be dispatched in 2 hits
In my experience, my thrall friend gets Sundered because she’s fighting too close to an enemy and I, being the nice and helpful person that I am, try to whack the enemy with a big mallet and end up applying Sunder to them both.
But in general I agree that Survival is somewhat unimportant for a thrall. Certainly it doesn’t feel like I want to find a thrall with the maximum potential for raising Survival.
This sounds like a reasonable idea. It’s useful, but balanced. Healing our thralls has always been a logistical challenge (except for the brief period of time when Lifeblood Spear was, erm, a little too useful). Making regeneration faster for thralls who specialize in a stat that doesn’t grant them direct performance boosts could make them more attractive in attrition-style situations such as dungeons or raiding NPC capitals or the Unnamed City.
To make this balanced, a very high Survival would need to grant a significantly higher regegeration rate than average Survival, so that the example thrall above with 41 Survival would regenerate a lot faster than, say, an average thrall guy with Survival 26. So make it increase in a curve rather than in a linear way.
