Game will never be truly fun until the player is stronger than his thall/pet

Conan Exiles General Discussion
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Two issues combine really in that the NPCs and world bosses are too strong without pets/thralls and with pet’s thralls they pets do the lion’s share of the work.

I play alone PVE with 2 others and there simply is no real challenge. Whenever there is, back up and let your thrall handle it. Sure you can go without thralls but balancing that world is hard with the setttings available.

To be truly fun, the player should be the stronger than the thrall and the NPCs never so strong they One hit kill the player from max health (or even two hits really). I mean I never use healing in this game because hit=dead in most cases even with heavy armor. At least on brutal.

The game should be challenging, and thralls should boost you in battle (high hp low dmg) not do most of the fighting for you.

But they removed the thrall dmg/hp modifiers from the server variables as far as I know.

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Before I type all the agree - disagree points that I have my friend I need you to give me some info about you.

  1. Pc, ps4 or Xbox?
  2. How long you play this game?
  3. Alone? Private server or just online with friends?
  4. Did you try the barbaric mode?
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I am confused. What NPC one-shots you?

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@Grunt1 yes I agree with you but sit there and really think about what your saying are you suggestion funcom should go in and try to balance things to make it better? Cause I’ve crashed a few times trying to kill certain bosses 1vs1 and died to that boss while trying to log back in … so till funcom fixes the crashes no need to balance anything having a thrall is a safe bet even if you crash … thralls are life savers

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Dont min/max the thrall or pet.

Profit.

Alternatively: dont use a thrall or pet and run without one.

Equally profit.

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Nerfing thralls is a tricky thing. So a hard nerf to Thralls for PVP would cause issues in PVE. While the bosses are easy with or without thralls. They are designed with thralls in mind. When a world boss has 15,000 health. It can a long time to kill without a thrall. Its harder that way, its just tedious and time consuming.

So there’s two ways to go about this.

First one is to leave PVE alone. What you do is adjust the damage formula for thralls to NOT include their Melee/Ranged Damage Modifier when attacking players. This way a Dalanisa Snowhunter with a Sword of Crom doesn’t do like 300+ dmg a hit. Players are still rewarded for giving their thralls hard hitting weapons and boosting strength.

For animals, lower their base damage and give them MDM/RDM to bring them back up to current values. So a Greater Sabertooth does its dumb dmg to mobs, but hits for like… 30 against a player.

The Pro to this is players won’t die to thralls in one or two hits.

The Con to this is the Thralls are still sponges when it comes to HP.

The Second way is an overhaul of bosses and thralls in general. Now I am NOT suggesting that we put thralls back to what they were. They used to not have bonus stats on their own, and only got say STR from armor. And their HP was bad. Like Dalansia had the most at only 750.

750 is still higher than a player’s HP, but she died quickly when used in either PVP or PVE.

But I wouldn’t be opposed to seeing Thrall health cut at least by another Half across the board (well not exactly half, maybe 25-50% depending on tier and tribe with the higher ones getting the biggest cut). In addition I would remove their hidden Melee/Ranged Damage Modifier stat entirely. Put the focus entirely on the STR/ACC stats (by making each increase dmg by 2% like for players).

In addition make it so they have HP from VIT be the same across the board. None of this some thralls get 60hp, some 75, some 90, some 120… mess we have now.

Then rebalance bosses HP across the board (again) to compensate.

The Pro to this is substantial. You wouldn’t have thralls doing all the work (right now a decent named thrall or any named thrall, can solo every boss in the game without input from the controlling player). You would have an understanding of how well a thrall will hit without having to consult datamined tables online to see which ones are better. You won’t have thalls two-shotting people. And you wouldn’t have thralls dominating the PVE scene either.

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Why is this a pro? I like how thralls do the work. It’s a bit a strategy in base defense. – something not in pve/pvec.

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Sieges were a helluva lot more fun before the Thrall buffs. With offline protection in the works, you don’t need to rely on thralls for ‘strategic’ issues.

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Something like this is in the current Testlive patch. There’s going to be a new server slider to change the damage thralls cause to players.

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I forgot about that.

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One of the problems with nerfing thralls further is that it will give even more of an advantage to large clans in PvP. Currently small clans can use thralls to effectively hold off a large number of raiders if they know their stuff.

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That implies someone might whine and cry because their first base gets destroyed.

Maybe we need a point system to make differences in stats. I doubt this is well thought out for categories/achievements.

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Strength is a matter of perspective.

Thralls are idiots. Sure, they hit hard, but as long as they don’t know how to dodge, or time their blocks, or otherwise adapt to a changing combat environment, a player with a brain will always defeat a thrall.

The player’s strength is in their ability to make decisions, adapt, use the environment to their advantage, etc.

Chimpanzees are stronger than humans. But they didn’t end up ruling the planet.

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Disagree. Thralls will never make the game more friendly to clans with less players.

Been there done that. If there shows the players my team raiding starts to use thralls, we gonna use our thralls. So no, it wont help to hold off a clan with more players, since they will just use more thralls for the offense instead.

A player should not rely on their thrall, either in PVP or PVE, there should be a reason to find ways or improve at the combat instead of having it being served on a silver plate. Thralls break the fun a lot in PVP, in the way they work now.

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Defender can have way more thralls on defense than an attacking clan unless being attacked by 31 people, in which case you probably should lose.

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Ofc, in that case. But it’s rarely happens that you fight a group of 30 thralls at the same time.

Most likely will some be used by players that tries to defend, and some at the outside of the base or what ever. And also, attackers have the oppurtunity to bring more thralls into the fight if needed aswell.

But like I said, players should not “RELY” on the thralls, neither in PVE or PVP. Player should be the main damage, or whatever and thrall is there for backup. Now, it’s the oppsite or even worse, player is the audience for the thrall that does all the work.

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Thats a matter of opinion really. Your thralls have undergone hardship on the wheel like conan and as such, could easily be reasoned to be tougher than someone who hung on a cross for a few days at most. Thralls are a weapon like any other; it adds a level of variety to attack options beyond weapons and armor (without which you will certainly not survive a fight). Reducing thrall effectiveness to less than the player would render them irrelevant and we’d just have another hack and slash game. Thralls make CE unique and need to be useful. As stated above, they dont dodge and have to tank hits and are a little derpy in a fight anyway. Generally speaking I out damage my thrall in dps so I argue the player is effectively stronger than the thralls already.

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Really u outdamage your thrall unless it is a lvl 1 thrall kinda.

And yes, im not saying they shouldnt be tanky, im saying that they should not do that damage they do.

How does thralls make CE fun? Relying on thrall instead of yourself is just meh. Would be better if damage on thralls was lower and hitpoints on bosses got less. And also they are “derpy” in fight yes, wich makes them impossible to read. It really sucks in PVP when a thrall is just doing a random swing and takes out 60% of your hp or more.

But I guess I understand, there is some people in this comlunity that want’s their thralls be able to farm for them. What kinda point will it even be to play if that was the case.

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This is untrue.

There was a point in time where Thralls were not the equal of the player, not even close. It wasn’t simply hack and slash at that time either. Some would even argue that is when PVP was at its best, and I couldn’t disagree with that assessment.

I do not entertain nor take those opinions seriously.

One thing I would say is returning thralls to the pre-revamp status is probably not a good idea. We used them as speed bumps in bases and nothing else. We didn’t travel with them because they would simply die.

Even Dalinsia Snowhunter with her beefy 750hp would go down in a few hits from several mobs. It wasn’t good.

What I would do is make it so that T4 Thralls have around 2500hp max. They would still be tanky enough to take hits. And they’d need a bit more than the player because they simply don’t dodge. But you would have T4 with 2000-2500hp modified by VIT, and at a smaller rate similar to the player. T3 would be around 1500-2000, T2 1000-1500, and T1 with 500-1000 (see I’m even calling for a slight buff of some of these).

Their damage would be modified by STR/ACC only. At 2% bonus damage per point like a player. No more hidden multipliers. STR/ACC scales with Tier and type (so some tribes have higher STR or ACC than others, kinda like what they did with Siptah).

So the end result would be tanky thralls (since they cannot dodge) and their damage would always be lower than a player (they can’t see the same STR/ACC as we can get), unless the player is ENC/SUR build. But I’m alright with that. Let the thralls do a bit more damage than non-combat builds.

Then lower the HP of bosses again by the same amount of dmg lost. Now the bosses still die as fast, so no change to PVE in TTK. But the difference is the player will need to be a bit more active.

I would also unnerf healing arrows a bit. Maybe even add another command in the thrall command wheel that tells them to use potions in their inventory.

The end result is thralls that can’t do everything for you, and you’re more active in the combat. And the thrall can still tank for you if you want to play glass cannon.

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Except they would die so often no one would bother leveling them. 2500 for the best thrall would be dead within hours. All they’d have to do is stub their toe on spikes.

Its false that everyone who likes thralls to not be nerfed uses them to carry the load. My thrall is a buddy that I make it a point to do more damage than, just to speed up combat. Its a weapon to be used. And besides, if someone does want the thrall to do work for them, thats between them and their thrall; my feels on the matter have nothing to do with it. I find it amusing when people imply there’s some kind of “more honor” to be had playing their way. Its a game. You play it using the games rules however you want.

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