Go all in with thralls

Conan Exiles General Discussion Feedback
1

So let’s just go all in with thralls. As it stands right now you are pretty much your thralls sidekick which is fine, people don’t seem to mind too much. So, use this to facilitate sorcery and more defined character classes. Have very specific fighters that benefit from certain armors or weapons more, sorcery thralls that cast spells, buff up the animals and make a hunter thrall.

A gameplay system that focuses on finding specific thralls who you in turn specialize by crafting very specific armor/gear to accomplish certain tasks/abilities unique to thralls. Impose survival aspects on them like extreme temperatures (maybe not to the extent it harms them like player characters but it could unlock or prevent certain actions on part of your thrall)

The player decides to get obsidian, but obsidian to be mined effeciently requires a thrall wearing good heat resistance armor and equipping it with a pick allows it to aid you in mining this resource. To make the best armor for this thrall who prefers say medium armor you know need to unlock/find the epic armor for say relic gear (not even sure that’s heat resistance). To craft it you need to hunt certain drops, to increase the rate of certain rare drops you should probably get a hunter thrall, this thrall will benefit from certain gear/armor…so on so forth.

Other thrall ideas could be:

Assassin thralls (gear em up and send em out to kill other players thralls without you having to be present)

Various sorcery thralls each specializing in an element perhaps. (An ice mage thrall can be used in the volcano to great effect but not the cold north and vice versa for a fire mage)

Hunter thralls that can be specific to a biome, having one join you increases likely hood for rare drops from skinning specific animals from certain biomes

Fighter thralls that specialize in armor/weapon type combinations. In fact have special abilities attached to armor that unlock with certain thralls. Ex: a dmg boost to nordheimer thralls when they are in the cold state.

Imagine showing off your T4 Hyborian sword/shield thrall wearing full epic cimmerian that unlocks skills like dmg boosts in cold weather, a random party defense aura, a taunt ability, etc.

Or a ranger thrall that is useful as a ranged healer with healing arrows that sports armor with anti aggression stats and a passive camouflage effect to prevent them being targeted.

You get the idea

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I disagree. I think we’re the sidekicks and the thralls are the mains. While I do support the idea of specialized thralls, I don’t think they should be buffed in any way. They do so much more damage, at least against environment (thralls, animals, monsters), and can absorb so much more damage. Durability and other negatives that come with weapons, such as Sword of Crom, do not affect thralls. They don’t benefit from stat boosts but they benefit from weapons far more than we do. They are far more accurate with bows than average human counterparts. If anything thralls need to be nerfed.

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This idea somewhat sounds like you want to turn CE into one of those “idle” games. Where you don’t really have to do anything.

Either you’ve got thralls doing the work for you. Or you are trying to twist CE into some sort of D&D clone, with magic that is way too much for this setting, or highly magical gear.

Just a hard no on all of these. It’s not necessary and certainly wouldn’t be fun.

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Sorry if my suggestion was confusing but this is actually in agreement. We the players are the thralls sidekicks, as stated. As such we shouldnt allow thralls to be just overly general bad ■■■■■ at everything everywhere. Let’s go all in with thralls as specialized unique expressions of the time a player dedicates. Specializing is in a sense nerfing as now you will need to hunt down and work towards very specific goals centered around your thralls. You will not be bringing one thrall (bearer T4 9900 go let’s be honest that’s what we all want) and a sword of Crom to everything, everywhere, everytime

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5

Nope not my intention, the only “idle” suggestion would have been the assassin.

Everything else would require you and your thrall to still be a team going out doing activities together. As for DnD inspired spells, never suggested any spells not a one, simply that different sorcerous specialties may be more effective in certain scenarios then others. As for magic in this setting, it exists, the developers have always expressed their desire to include it, and this would allow a system of Introducing it without player variables that may make it unbalanced as that’s what they are trying to figure out. Right now the system doesn’t encourage any unique approaches, in the end everyone is racing to the same character and breaking the same thralls.

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I like it. I mean, meta is to now have a thrall run with you everywhere. Why not at least use the class system on them. Archers, Alchemie (Mage of sorts), Tank, and fighter.
Certain named need certain armors to be reach thier full potential for fighting. And you could then station them outside of a rivals base for warfare.

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That’s the spirit!

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I do very little work in fights now…almost any fight…

Eina the Light with her dragonbone axe just completely slaughters everything in her path.

The Red Mother in the Unnamed City? I draw its aggro by putting 10 snake arrows into it. Make sure Eina starts attacking. Then I go climb nearby in a spot I can’t be reached by the dragon. I walk away, come back in 5-10 minutes and the Red Mother is dead or close to it. It really depends on how much bleed she stacks.

At most the Red Mother will take Eina’s HP down to 7000.

CE already can be played as mostly an idle game…you just have to initiate the fights and wait for the poor AI to actually kick in.

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Agreed, but since it has become that, his idea is to make it more of a thrall army, and you have to grind for specific armors and weapons to get the most out of thralls. Weapons would stay as is for humans, but thralls would have a sort of table of best weapons and armors for buffs, and actually have debuffs if using certain weapons. Make it at least semi strategic.

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10

Seems like Thralls are way too powerful as it is. And this just makes them even more powerful.

I think a better solution is the ability to customize thralls.

T1-T3 fighters and archers with 2 or 3 trees with 4 or 5 options on each tree. Like that seen in Mass Effect. When you pick one upgrade in the current column, the other two get locked out for that Thrall.

So you can customize your fighting thralls to work differently, or for different situations.

Like for archers, you could spec one thrall to be better at a longer range, and sacrifice close range damage, or the ability to use fire arrows. Just ways to tweak how they work.

Fighters are the same. Tailor them to work better with specific weapon types, so they work better with sword, rather than spear. Maybe better defense when surrounded by enemies, or superior in fighting a single enemy.

Crafting Thralls could theoretically get a similar system. Since you have several options when working with these.

  1. Crafting Speed (how fast they craft)
  2. Superior Crafting (ie, better stats on Exceptional/Flawless/Epic gear)
  3. Cheaper Crafting (using less materials)

So if you had trees for this, you could customize your thralls. You could balance them, or else focus entirely on a single tree.

Do you want better gear, but without the customary boost to speed and cheaper materials, or do you want to grind out faster stuff?

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I think we are on the same page. I would suggest thralls be toned down, and using some sort of tree with weapons, armors, etc would buff them to what they are now.

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Also, Conan led armies in some of the lore. This would be the same for us. Enslave them then make them our soldiers.

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13

The whole army idea probably isn’t going to fly, for the simple fact we can have clans.

Conan was a lone general with an army.

That’s why it needs to stay as only able to have one thrall or pet following us at a time.

Just imagine if we could lead even as few as 2 or 3 apiece.

A lone player has 3 thralls and himself.

A clan of 10 come against you and it’s 10 players plus 30 thralls.

40 vs 4, game over.

It just wouldn’t work.

I think the tree idea would work great. Give each Tier a number of points to spend upon breaking them.

Tier 1s get 1, Tier 2s get 2, Tier 3s get 3, and Named/T4s would get 4 points, and T4 Purge would get 5 points.

Then make the trees. Using Armorer as an example. The numbers use the highest available, they don’t stack.

Tree – Rank 1 – Rank 2 – Rank 3 – Rank 4 – Rank 5
Speed – +50% – +100% – +150% – +250% – +350%
Cost : -10% : -20% : -30% : -40% : -50%
Superior: +5% – +10% – +15% – +20% – +25%

The superior tree would be, in this case, an Armor Boost because it’s armor.

So let’s say you take a T4 Purge thrall, you get 5 points to spend.

You spend points like Mass Effect, so you don’t need a previous rank to purchase a current one.

What matters is you have 5 points to spend. So logically, you will end up with a thrall that has a Rank 5, Rank 4, and Rank 3 skill, if you spend them right.

So let’s say at Rank 3 you purchase Speed. Your thrall armorer now crafts 150% faster than normal.

For Rank 4, you then can purchase the Superior tree, giving you a 20% increase to armor on anything this Thrall crafts. Some of the flawless heavy armor has 48 armor on it as a rating. That means you’d increase it to 57 armor if this thrall crafted it.

That leaves the Rank 5 skill of Cost at -50%, so your thrall would craft basically two for the price of one.

It doesn’t have to even be limited to three trees as options.

You could also add a Durability Tree:

2% – 5% – 10% – 15% – 20% added durability based on the base. That would add around 200 durability to a Flawless Vanir Heavy Boots, essentially the thrall is skilled at making more durable armors, if you chose to use Rank 5 on it.

You could then add a Weight tree, that lowers an items weight through skilled smithing techniques.

-1% , -3% , -5% , -7% , -10%

The numbers on this might be adjusted, but the higher level could drop a pound or so from each armor piece.

It’s more balanced, because you spread the bonus out, the same as with the Perk system, basing it on your playstyle and needs per thrall.

Using just those first four listed, you could have a T4 thrall that had the following:

Speed 2 for 100% faster crafting, Durability 3 for 10% more durable armors, Superior 4 for 20% stronger armors, and Cost 5, for 50% cheaper crafting.

Compared to now, when you have 300% faster crafting and 50% cheaper automatically.

The numbers could be tweaked a bit for more balance, but it’d go far towards adding variety.

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15

I like the skill tree approach but the path you choose would be permanent? Meaning going out and finding the same thrall again if you don’t like the skills you chose?

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It should be, yes.

It would be unbalanced if you could just shove a potion down their throats and reset their skills whenever you felt like it.

You could use Superior and Durability for high stats, with a somewhat lower cost. Then respect them to high craft speed for repair actions. It’d be abused.

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This system of unique thralls does not buff them further, it actually nerf’s them. When I titled it Go all in with thralls that does not mean make them more invincible and stronger and higher HP pools. It was meant in the sense that the developers should focus on a complex and fine tuned system of “character customization” that’s facilitated by the choices you make concerning thralls you capture, bring with you, and gear you give them.

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But regardless! Thank you everyone for contributing to this conversation. I think Conan is great and love discussions about it with my fellow exiles. Have a great game always, may the named thralls bow at your feet, the legendaries drop like rain, and your raids be full of I’ll gotten gains and the lamentations of your foes!

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perhaps it could be reset… using a potion… but it could reset the NPC’s XP bar to zero requiring you to retrain them for their new specialty… perhaps also have a debuff on the NPC until it regains its previous skill level.

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Alternatively we could put them to a different training station instead of a quick utilisation potion.

For example while their experience bar toward one expertise rises at a station, the current expertise depletes. Essentially the gathered experience is transferred slowly between gauges and to gain more experience, they would need to apply their found skills thorough their gear; trying to behave the way the role requires.

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21

When i said army, i didn’t mean for 1 player to have multiple thralls follow. I meant more as the way it is, but with the skill tree, and not consider them slaves any more. the army woudl be in base as is now, just with more work to make them as buffed as they are now.