What exacerbates the issue is the game still runs on some legacy systems. In 2017, Conan Exiles was a totally different game. It was a simpler game, and thus systems where you can just throw mats into a furnace or pot till something comes out worked. Now with over a thousand recipes, that isn’t feasible.
One of my biggest complaints is the tiers of weapons between levels 10 and 50. That is the most Pain in the Ass newbie trap I have ever seen. A newbie is going to want to upgrade their iron broadsword to a stygian khopesh. Why not? Its 2 more damage. 16 dmg to 18 dmg. Sounds alright.
Then they will get the cutlass. Then the longsword, the falcata, and then the ancient sword. If they’re not paying attention (which is easy for a newbie to do), they’ll get the hardened steel sword too.
49 knowledge points spent on all that. In a level range where they really could use those points for more important things.
The smart newbie when they get to epic weapon tiers will realize… hey… I don’t need these 49 points spent. Use a lotus potion, get Warrior and One-Handed Weapons Epic and spend only 14 points instead of 63.
And that irritates the crap out of me. Like the weapons NOW have a use with illusions. But not 49 knowledge points worth.
In my server’s mod, I rebalanced the weapons into tiers. And you need all the tiers. They’re grouped up into types and tier, so you have one handed weapons, two handed weapons, skirmisher weapons (daggers, javelins, and throwing axes), shields, and bows. I didn’t want to change TOO much how things were categorized and I wanted mod compatibility. But in addition the weapons are grouped into tiers. Stone, Iron, Steel, Hard Steel, and Star Metal. You need the previous tier to advance to the next.
Thus if you focus on swords, you get all the one handed weapons across the different tiers in one line of feats.
THAT is how the weapon feat trees should look.
Now I had to compromise on some weapons. Like for example the Stygian Khopesh and Iron Broadsword are Iron Tier. I lowered the Khopesh’s damage to be lower than the broadsword, but increased its armor pen slightly. This way there is a choice beyond just visual. Same thing with Ancient Weapons in Steel Tier, they no longer have more damage than Hardened Steel, in fact they have less damage than most steel weapons (same tier) but have more armor pen then before. I justified that since Armor pen isn’t exactly king at those lower levels unless you’re fighting rhinos and rocknoses. So you the choices aren’t so pigeonholed. And of course Hardened Steel and Star Metal are in their own tiers already so I left them alone. For bows, I included non specialist ammunition into the bow feats.
The end result is you can reliably focus on two weapon trees while leveling and still get the basics of survival and construction. If you want deco, you’ll need to sacrifice a weapon tree. So there’s still choices that need to be made.
The end result is eliminating this weird, “I’m going to focus on making this particular thing, until I’m 60 and then can know ALL endgame stuff.” And instead gives something a bit more progression oriented. And with the illusion addition, those mandatory feats don’t seem as arbitrary.
I’m actually surprised Funcom hasn’t done this themselves yet. The weapon feats are legacy from early access. From a game that very few played. But it isn’t exactly a quick process. This actually took me the better part of 2 weeks and a few spreadsheets to work out.
