Firstly, I’m really really mad. I’m going to try to write this as civil as possible. You guys just wasted a week of my time. Like, my whole chunk of free time totally gone for nothing.
Why… why do Thralls not attack players? What the hell sense does that make? I spent a week building up a base, capturing thralls, gearing thralls, setting them to attack all enemies, setting their chase distance, etc. I’m a returning player from a while ago and I’m sitting there thinking “Wow! They really went all out on things. There’s so much to the game now.”
Mind you, I knowingly joined an official PvP server. I want PvP. I want my base raided. But I want the Thralls I spend hours and hours setting up to actually defend my base from enemy players and not just stand there staring off blankly as they get killed. The best I can tell, it isn’t a bug it’s a feature. Apparently Thralls are now only active during building damage times or something? That’s stupid. And if that is the case, it’s not working because the Thralls stand there like statues even during raid times. Who at Funcom was like “hey, I have an idea… let’s make thralls worthless” and then who at Funcom was like “yeah! That’s a great idea!”
I am so angry at having so much of my time wasted. I will never be back. I cut you guys out of my PayPal wallet and I’ll never buy a Funcom product again. That was a stupid, stupid game change. Stupid. All that time I put into getting those thralls set up properly for defense. I know they used to fight properly when I played last time. Worst game design decision I’ve seen in a long time. So damn dumb.
Thralls have been heavily nerfed against players. I am assuming you are from the early 2020 or older crowd where thralls dominated pvp. That was an update years ago that made them only do 50% damage.
However they should still aggro during raid hours. If you are from an earlier time the thralls have a wide range of stances and commands you can give them. If you set it at “attack nothing” they will stand there and die. If you set the chase and or aggro distance too low, they will effectively stand there and die.
The pvp game has evolved past thralls as a viable option for defense. One could logically argue that almost all options of defense from that age are gone now.
Pvp is now just a game where you have to be on and actual defending or you will get wiped.
I’m from launch day to just before Animal Taming came out. I heard that Thralls got OP at one point when people were first having them follow around so they nerfed them. I wasn’t there for any of that so I can’t complain there.
I’m talking about my base thralls standing there, doing nothing, even in the heat of PvP combat. They do nothing. They stand there taking hits, staring off into the distance, until they die.
I tweaked all the settings for “attack all enemies” and maimum chase and engage distances and all that. We (me and my clan) even kept changing settings during the raid we were repelling but to no avail. It was active raid time, so even if Thralls are only “supposed to” fight during raid hours, they still were just standing there broken.
Reading your reply, though, it sounds like combat Thralls are literally worthless now. Thralls were a huge part of the core game mechanics. That’s a terrible, terrible design decision.
P.S. -
we won the raid and repelled the enemy players. I’m mad because I took a week of time off to play a game where I thought (from experience) that I could build a cool raidable base with Thrall guards and all that jazz but… well I can’t lol.
Now that I think on it… It makes even more angry. Like, why would you go that route? What part of having effective base thralls is “unfair” or needed changing? Most base raiding I see done is offline raiding to begin with (or at least it used to be and has been so far except this one engagement).
If you’re raiding a base you can set down bedrolls right there and the bedrolls aren’t a 1 time use anymore. Hell, you can build a whole little siege camp with extra gear just in case. You used to be able to kill Thralls through walls with spears and stuff (don’t know if that’s still true) and any guards you place inside would crowd the door trying to get to the enemy, thereby taking a jug explosion to the face when the enemy blows the door. There were tons of weaknesses to using Thralls from the get-go.
What was the reasoning behind turning combat thralls into furniture decoration?
Non-following Thralls inherit building immunity and limitation. Meaning they are invulnerable to attack and cannot attack during raid hours. During raid hours they can attack and are vulnerable to damage.
If you don’t defend your thralls during raid hours, they die. They are just NPCs with loot on them without a player to support them. This has always been this way. They never were substitutes for real players.
My clan and I were physically present, fighting other players inside our base, during raid times.
The Thralls do nothing. They can even be hit by enemy players and still they just stand there doing nothing until they die.
We tried all the settings. All the chase distances. Various placements, etc. They will not engage in combat.
Base-bound combat Thralls literally exist for only 1 reason (not including purges) and that’s PvP because PvE does not come to your door and it especially doesn’t climb cliffs or take your elevators.
This isn’t the game I bought and spent money on for updates. If I wanted to play a survival game without Thralls I would’ve bought Rust or something.
The official server we were playing on never had a ping over 98 as far as I saw. Often it’s like 70-something. Average population of maybe 5 to 20 players on at a time. I think there were maybe 12 on when we defended the raid I mentioned.
I take it then that the Thralls are actually supposed to attack during raid time? That’s still horrible, even if it worked. So, best case scenario, my base-bound combat Thralls are only maybe useful 4 hours out of the day?
Awful. Just awful. Why even have them?
What’s to stop higher level players from griefing lowbie bases? Like, what’s stopping me from just camping the crap out of some lowbie’s base? Just kill em over and over in front of their worthless thralls because it’s not building damage time lol.
There are ways you can build that sort of forces raiders into difficult choices or, even better, planned directions to where you can set various traps and the like. Don’t discount decoys just because they can’t fight.
But no, that is why I went hidden on my last years of pvp because you couldn’t count on thralls to defend while you were offline.
I’ve seen a lot of videos on survival game base building and stuff and from what I can tell, just like the MMORPG genre, all the survival games are “updating” down the same path towards the same play styles.
I know I can just build an ugly full foundation block base with multiple layers and random rooms to try and get raiders to waste their explosives guessing but, frankly, that’s lame as hell (to me anyways), it looks like crap, and in reality there is always another player or clan on any given server that puts serious time into the game to the point that there’s no such thing as making them waste resources. I’ve yet to see a server that doesn’t have at least 1 clan that simply does not run out of explosives.
I’m also aware of how to build “unraidable” bases but that’s like playing with cheat codes. Like a hanging sky base where you hang pillar foundations from the ceiling of an overhanging geological formation and have them keep up a floating floor off the ground. If you do it right, other players can climb all over it but there’s nowhere to set bomb jugs, explosions can’t reach your structure, and that new battering ram won’t help because there’s nowhere to stand.
Actually, the thought just occured to me that this might be a moddable issue. Does anyone know if there any good mods yet that restore Thralls to their rightful glory? If not, I may just write one myself.
I just hate playing other people’s private servers. We’ve had admins fly over our bases to spy on us. We’ve also had admins delete the door off of our base to let their friends raid it.
So now I’ve got to spend the time and money to mod the game and run my own server just so I can play some semblance of the game I actually bought.
Unfortunately people can actually lagswitch to effectively deaggro thralls or even just have a laggy connection to the server for the same result. If you’re fighting someone who is teleporting around there’s a good chance your thralls won’t do anything unless they’re following you. Bases are effectively sand castles too. If you can’t be on all raid you will likely be offlined if there’s hostile players. Tbh raiding is way too easy. Defenses need to be buffed but for now the reality is have numbers and be online or hide
Ya that sounds reasonable. You get into big issues with multiple placeable heavy bases and 40/40.
Thralls are absolutely supposed to attack during raid hours. Being you have already troubleshooted on your own with thrall settings it is safe to say it’s not your fault. Always make sure they’re on attack all of course.
The thralls don’t attack during non-raid hours because the settings seem to be attached to PvP settings if memory serves.
Not like anyone can raid you outside of raid hours and people can’t damage your thralls as well unless they’re following you.
There’s nothing stopping players from griefing low levels or noobs. You have to decide what you want to be in regard to that.
I would recommend uninstalling at this point and use a Christmas sale on the platform of your choice to purchase the exact game you are looking for. You are entirely correct that Conan Exiles is NOT the game you want to play.
Conan Exiles, the Conan Exiles I pledged to in Early Access and bought when it came out is exactly the game I want to play. I want to play the game I was sold. That’s why I installed it to play it.
You are right in your suggestion that it’s all me, though. My buddy tells me I’m wrong for this too. I guess I got spoiled growing up in a time when developers wrote their work in stone with confidence. There were no “major updates” or “hotfixes” to NES or SNES cartridge or a SEGA CD. There were expansions to PC games but those only added things on. It used to be that you could buy a game, experience it, then come back years later and relive the experience, maybe try things you didn’t get to try in the past, etc.
Now-a-days it’s like you own nothing and nothing ever stays the same. It’s like you put a game down and someone sneaks into your home and modifies it in all sorts of ways then you go back and you have no idea what’s going on for one, and for two you are physically incapable of reliving any of the experience you returned for.
I don’t buy a sandwhich then drive home and unbag it to find it has somehow transmuted itself into a bowl of soup. I want the sandwhich I got. If it wasn’t that sandwhich to begin with, I wouldn’t have gotten it if you know what I mean.
Yeah I could take the time to mod it back to what it was, pay the money to run my own server, etc. It feels like more and more developers are putting the onus of fixing problems and filling design holes on the player community and then acting like it’s some months-long chore to get 15 minutes of coding done to fix anything.
I was being serious. You’re not wrong and it isn’t you. And its fine to move on from something developing into something you don’t want to play. I’ve literally dropped games with far more time (and money spent) than Conan Exiles.
Though its kind of ironic you mention NES. I’ve probably spent way more than I’m willing to admit to get mine up and running in the way I have in the last year. And I’m still eyeballing a flashcart that has 4x the RAM of the current one I have for some of those beefier 2MB romhacks.
Hahaha! Man, that takes me back. I recently found an old 1.4 MB floppy disc and was reminiscing about how much space that used to be.
Oh god… I just realized… I’ve been ranting about “back in my day”. It’s finally happened. I’m old lol.
You’re right, though man. Maybe it’s time to move on. I doubt my complaints will do much to fix Thralls and for all I know everyone else loves the changes.
I appreciate you all hearing me out and letting me vent.
“And its fine to move on from something developing into something you don’t want to play. I’ve literally dropped games with far more time (and money spent) than Conan Exiles.”
That seems pretty obvious in hindsight but maybe I just needed to hear someone say it. Excellent point.
Easiest bases to raid. They crumble like crackers.
A good pvp base always has several layers of protection and never relies on thrall defense. Not to say that what we have now is ok because its not. But thralls where always unrelieable back then and now. Like Kiki said, server performance is a big factor right now as is the use of explosives and sorcery. Npc´s in this game are stupid and there are a lot of things that can throw them off.
Best use to thralls in my eyes is putting them in narrow corridors. Even if they don´t fight they will block the passage and gives you some time to circle around and attack from behind.
Explosive jars have an insane range right now and bomb pvp is still a thing. So even if thralls would attack properly you can kill them from far with jars and explosive arrows. Also there is socery now in the game which lets you fly and do other things in the game that thralls won´t act properly to.
I agree that Funcom f… thralls up but at this point what pvp features didn´t they layed hand on to screw us over. We went through several combat reworks. There are weapons now in the game that deal twice the damage as we had back then in 2018 where we went crazy with the mitra spear and thought it was way to op. Now people laugh about that damage values.
Pvp went from one broken state and one meta to another over the years. I stopped playing after 3.0 came out. Pvp always is a waste of time, no matter the game as all other games are a waste of time one way or another, no matter if pvp or pve, in that sense that nothing stays as is forever. Things change over time and you need to adapt or find another game to play if you don´t like the direction a game is progessing or you try to engage in communities like this to voice out and hope for another change.
Yes, pvp is a joke these days. 4x rates, all of the defenses diminished while attacking gets buffed all the time. In my opinion one of the dumbest changes was the ability to snap on the explosive jars like any other placeable. Now you can’t even build a base that’s a bit harder to raid. The game has become a sandbox for impatient children who don’t care about actual gameplay and want everything handed out to them instantly.
