It’s right there in the post I linked to:
I interpreted that as “Okay, this change was both too hasty and too unpopular, we’ll need to think about it properly and decide what to do about it.”
The way I see it, there are three outcomes of that, in order from most likely to least likely:
- They won’t have the bandwidth to come up with a proper solution. Because it’s not really a big deal, especially when compared to other problems Conan Exiles has, they’ll end up leaving it like that.
- They’ll nerf it again later. Perhaps they won’t completely remove the karmic effect, but make it virtually useless. Perhaps the nerf will be overshadowed by even worse nerfs and problems, so people won’t make as much noise about it.
- They’ll come up with a proper solution. They’ll either come up with an effect that keeps these items useful while mitigating whatever problem they thought the effect produced in the first place, or they’ll remove the effect but offer a better replacement (e.g. a better, less grindy source of repair kits on Siptah).
As far as I’m concerned, the proper solution is really simple. I never used the karmic effect in Exiled Lands, because I never needed to. The Unnamed City bosses provided all the kits I needed, and more. I considered Nemedian to be just another gimmicky item, added because someone asked “hey, wouldn’t it be fun if we […]”, but ultimately non-essential. Then I started playing on Siptah, and repairing legendary items became a serious problem. I was glad to see the Nemedian actually serve a purpose, and shocked to see it nerfed.
I heard about the healing skin from other players on the server. Everyone was grinding like crazy to get it. When people described what it did, I decided I wasn’t even going to try. There were only two things that could happen: either they would nerf it to uselessness before I managed to get it to drop, or I would get used to it and then get hit by the nerf. It was a lose-lose situation and the first time I realized I had become a fatalist when it comes to Funcom’s way of dealing with balance issues.
I don’t think I will ever “forgive” the nerfing of Lifeblood Spear. There’s no better illustration of what you’re talking about than that. There were so many ways they could’ve changed it into something that remains useful, but all of those ways required more effort, so they ended up making it useless.
And before some nuance-challenged chucklehead jumps in to tell me to look up the dictionary definition of “useless”, let’s not forget the context: there are other spears with much better combination of damage and armor pen and they drop more frequently (or can even be crafted). Given that, and the fact that the health regen effect of 1 hit point every 5 seconds is useless for all practical intents and purposes, there is never any reason to pick this weapon over its competitors.