Funcom, please do something about the difficulty

Conan Exiles General Discussion
1

The game at the moment is way too easy. This is supposed to be a survival game, but of all the survival games i have played Conan Exiles is by far the most easy one. In fact, the game is so easy that the only time you die in this game is when you stand on top of a mountain, get a lag spike and fall to your death. When you get lag inside vulcano when you try to jump over lava and you die. And when you get stuck in geometry while you are fighting mobs and you cant get away.

Since release of the game this is about the only times I have died. I have never died to something in the game that was challenging or difficult.

Some of the mobs and bosses in the game doesn’t do any damage to you at all. The Barrow King is so easy that you can kill him naked with a stone pickaxe. He doesn’t do any damage at all to players. The well of Skelos dungeon in the vulcano is a joke. The mobs and bosses in there doesn’t do any damage to you whatsoever. The last boss is so easy that is must either be a bug or a mistake from the devs. The Witch Queen is also so easy that you can do it solo in fiber gear and a stone weapon. Both Well of Skelos and the Witch Queen gives you lvl 60 recipes so you would think that they would be tuned for lvl 60 players. I don’t understand why Funcom has done it in this way. It makes no sense at all.
The Black keep is also flawed since you can just run in there naked and get all the recipes without even killing the boss. Since silent legion is the best armor set in the game, this doesn’t make any sense either.
Some of the world bosses hits you like a 5 year girl. The only challenge with the world bosses is to endure their huge health pool without dying from boredom.

The game was much more fun before the content rebalance. I don’t understand why they removed poison from so many spiders, made all the caves way too easy, and removed to cripple from mobs like hyenas.

I don’t understand why they made the swamp a low level area either. We already had the whole desert area as low level area, we didn’t need more. When you reach lvl 60 you just run around one hitting everything. There is nothing in the game that can kill you when you reach 60 and you get proper gear.

When I play a survival game I want survival to be hard. I want brutal monsters to kill me, and I want to struggle to stay alive. Atm, there is nothing in Conan Exiles that warrant use of the term “survival game”. Conan Exiles is a pvp building game maybe, but its not a proper survival game.

Please make the game harder and more brutal Funcom. This is supposed to be Hyboria after all.

14 Likes
2

What’s easy to you is or may be difficult/challenging for many other players. Personally, I think the combat difficulty is about right (and can be adjusted in single player or on private servers).

What I’d like to see is environmental damage, e.g. temperature, having a greater effect.

2 Likes
3

What platform are you playing on and is it single player or on an official server?

If single player you do realise you can adjust the difficulty on mobs, health / damage / aggro range. As well as your damage to mobs / your health / stamina and so on


All official multiplayer servers are set a specific default.

Quite a few private servers have been tweaking these values to make the game a bit more challenging.
From your post You say you only die when you lag, maybe you should try to play on a PVP server?

3 Likes
4

How long have you been playing the game?? I only ask because at one point temperature DID have a greater effect on the game. There were many places in the starter area where you could easily overheat and die if you didn’t have proper gear combined with lots of water.

Imagine building a hut down near the southern river. Once you go just a bit north up on the cliffs, into the more sandy regions, then the heat would start getting so bad that if you didn’t have gear with heat protection on it you started to over-heat. It was actually more annoying than fun because not only did it seem a bit over-exaggerated, but it came with a lovely bug as well.

On one server I made a darfari character and I built a small hut village a bit northwest of the darfari camp that houses the dregs. There’s a little winding path that leads from the river to the top of the cliffs. The moment you made it up there you were constantly over-heating. Wasn’t too bad, but imagine anytime you enter your crafting room that had furnaces in there. You literally had seconds before over-heating kicked in and you started dying just by crafting. That was with the furnaces turned off, too. It was worse when you were smelting.

The bug that came with it, oh, that flippin’ bug. Imagine the moment you start over-heating, nothing you do after it would stop you from over-heating. You could leave the desert area, strip down naked and jump into the river to wet yourself down, yet you’d still over-heat. It could be night, raining, in the water, wearing your best heat protection gear
and you’d still over-heat. The only way to stop it was to die. On servers where you keep your stuff it wasn’t bad, I can only imagine how aggravating it was on servers where you don’t. The dregs was almost unbeatable, too. It was a race against time. Could you run through it, hit all the water buttons, and kill the boss before you over-heat??

I could be wrong, but I think the reason over-heating doesn’t seem to be a problem anymore is because they couldn’t figure out how to fix it, so they more or less removed it. Another band-aid fix to things they like to use. Another example are diagonal support beams. Rather than find a way to fix them to prevent people from abusing them, they just made them worthless and let them lose stability upon every server reset. Sure, it ends up breaking abusable buildings, but also destroys legit buildings where people don’t want pillars everywhere.

At least one can over-heat in the volcano, so there’s that. lol

1 Like
5

You should try on a Barbaric settings server.

6

i play on official pvp server. 1300 hours played.

7

all official servers should be set to barbaric setting. I suspect that they put all official servers on easiest setting possible, which was a terrible decision from Funcom.

1 Like
8

I’m afraid that Funcom cannot please everybody simultaneously.

If you want to play on harder difficulty only way right now is to host own server and crank NPC damage wayy up and player dealt damage wayy down.

9

Yeah, I remember that :slight_smile:

Properly balanced, temperature and weather effects would add to the survival feel. I know it’s not easy to achieve that, but the current effect is a bit too low.

1 Like
10

That’s fair, I do actually miss having to have good heat gear for the south, but that would all depend on if they can figure out how to do it without the bugs. As one can tell from many threads here, that’s one of their biggest challenges. lol

1 Like
12

The main problem of the difficult in the game is not the damage itself, but the A.I.

If npcs/bosses had a proper a.i , the challenging aspect would be totally different. (More interesting)

Exemples: Like OP pointed, most of the spiders and scorpions should have a dangerous poisoning bite as before, so ppl would fear them. And btw they should be able to climb too, I know you guys hate me saying this but lets be honest, Spiders do Climb :stuck_out_tongue:

Hyenas, Wolves and Cats should outrun players, if you want to escape them there is no way just running, they would catch you and aplly snare. Only way is climbing or jumping thro objects.

Some Human NPC’s when near death should run for their lives or surrender, non fighters and archers mainly.

Water Combat
Crawlers like crocs and salamanders should be way dangerous, their bite should do a lot of dmg as they are slow. They should have a special attack when near or inside water to drag you down, and to escape you would have to use kick or punch them to release.

There should be combat underwater with small weapons as the javelin. No need for fancy moves , just regular ones.

Exiles should fear entering waters filled with crocs.

10 Likes
13

I couldn’t agree more.

2 Likes
15

The issue has been that clothes gives a temperature modifier to your current temperature. It may be difficult to implement but heat protect and cold protect should work differently. Cold protect should function pretty much the way it does now, providing a modifier to your temperature. Heat protect should lower you temp cap, so you cannot get hotter than a certain point rather than modifying your temperature. That way, cold protect will still protect you from cold and overheat you in warm areas and heat protect will protect you from heat but not make you colder for wearing them in a cold area.

2 Likes
16

Im sorry, but this answer doesn’t make any sense to me. I play on a PvP server which makes your suggestions impossible. There is a fundamental flaw in Funcom’s game design here and they need to adjust it.

I play this game for the pvp. I have played on 7 different servers, reached max level on all of them. Bulldozing to the end has nothing to do with it. They marked this game as a survival game, and currently its not.

3 Likes
17

Honestly, this game has a very steep learning curve. There is absolutely no hand holding. Crafting things isn’t explained to you, nor do all of the crafting stations have recipes for everything they make. i.e. how to make gruel or how to make steel. Or that you can put feral flesh or human meat into the fire for edible food. Then other crafting stations have just completely wrong recipes. Fluid press shows putting hide in.

Then the crafting requirements for a low level player are pretty astronomical. 100 wood for a simple box? You’re innundated with a plethora of different materials that as a new player you have absolutely no idea what they are for or do and have very little encumbrance to hold them all.

However, once you get passed the initial 5-10 hours of playing the first time, the game goes from brutal/having no idea what to really do to straight out easy mode. This isn’t a phenomenon just associated with this survival game though. 7 Days to Die is much the same way where it’s brutal and then you get to a point where you simply can no longer be killed. If the purge worked properly then that may change as this game isn’t as heavily defense oriented.

Except that may not really do much as the rest of the time the game will still be easy mode. You could make crocs or salamanders or komodos grab you and take you into the water, except you can literally just walk passed them and they won’t catch you. You can outrun every other creature in this game and simply jumping on a rock ends the pursuit. The enemy will eventually just walk away from you and do something else.

TLDR; Game starts off brutal but then turns into easy mode quickly once you understand the mechanics of the environment/crafting/and that enemies are flat out stupid or have the attention span of a gnat.

1 Like
18

I really agree.

I’d like to preface this by saying that I’m talking about end-game difficulty for hardcore players. Early-game difficulty is excellent for players of all kinds. But the difficulty (and therefore challenge) of the game does diminish once you get to the end-game.

It’s very difficult to work on ‘Artificial Intelligence’. Once players find out how to ‘exploit’ the enemies’ AI, it becomes piss-easy. In the end it’s just a matter of noticing when the enemy will attack and dodging out of the way. Once you have that formula down, combat against AIs is simple. Add a zillion different attacks, but that formula is still the same.

It would be cool to see some other dynamics at play. Let enemies dodge, or weapon-block, for instance. Punish players for swinging wildly when that attack certain enemies. Demand players to think more in combat against human NPCs.

After release I proposed an idea about how having less health should be incrementally punishing. When you are at 50% health, you should move slower, perhaps dodge less far, and so on. As soon as the player receives an attack from an enemy, that should mean that the game gets harder for them. Right now, you can weather a few strikes, but you are always able to simply dodge-escape as soon as you realize it’s too much. Run away, pop some grind juice, and then do the fight again once you’re healed.
Instead, the player should be afraid of taking every hit, because it might lead to another, and another, and being ‘stunlocked’ unless they are paying attention. Being hit once should wake you the hell up. Being hit again consecutively should really rattle you, as a player. You should feel like you’re in a fight for your life, rather than reaping a harvest.

You also shouldn’t be able to escape so easily when you’re at 20% health. 20% health should mean that you only have a 20% chance of escaping. You should stand a much better chance if you stand your ground, and fight until the end. Players will run away less in PvP, and be forced to make combat decisions with greater weight to them.

Another issue is the player skill cap. You level up to 60, and then (for hardcore players) that’s when you start to play the game. Wolves are child’s play, and none of the creatures for the majority of the map are all that challenging. I’d suggest ‘shrinking’ the progression, by lowering the ramp-up of scaling. That way, hyenas are still a problem, even into late-game, and all areas of the map remain relevant in terms of difficulty.

My final issue is the gear scaling. Once you’re established, and have access to a tier above steel, most of the PvE content becomes too easy. The Purge is a challenging mechanic to develop, but I’d love to see it functioning correctly. Personally I wouldn’t have added so many tiers above the essential 3 for weapons (there are maybe 8 weapon tiers?) because now the player can use gear to advance far beyond the level of most PvE content. The gear causes problems in that it makes the game too easy once you obtain it.

Think of the game in terms of difficulty. Each decision should make things easier, or harder for the player. Attacking a thrall camp? Harder. Harvesting wood and fish? Easier. When the player approaches the game, second-to-second, they should be thinking about the easy route and the hard route. That would let them customize their difficulty as they see fit, minute-to-minute.

6 Likes
20

Now you are just being stupid. This contributes nothing to the discussion.

6 Likes
21

one problem is animals are very slow, slower than player, he never hit us if we run, and even if we are out of energy, they have to stop running to star their attack animation
Please, add running animation for monsters/animals, and player too. And make some animals speeder. panther, tiggers, hyena what run slower than humans,
It’s a little bit stupid, and make all too easy.

1 Like
22

I agree with the weapons and gear. The weapons is way too powerful for the current content. When you have dragon weapons and silent legion you are totally overpowered for all PvE content in the game. This is also why I was so disappointed with Funcom when they made the swamp a low level area. The game needed level 60 areas not low level areas. I have no idea what they were thinking. I thought maybe that the vulcano was supposed to be lvl 60 area, but content in vulcano is also way too easy. I dont understand Funcoms logic here at all.

1 Like
23

Yes. I think volcano was intended to be level 60.