After returning to Conan after a few months, I feel like so much has improved. I personally play on Official PVP servers, which are notoriously hard to please. But I’ve been getting the impression that so much has been done to improve the game and respond to the hardest challenges.
In this post I’m not going to make any requests — I just want to acknowledge the great work that has been done very right by Funcom over the past few months.
Combat Thralls
- Now they matter! They now have much more HP, making them better protected against arrows or burst damage. With more HP, it is more difficult to ‘finesse’ them to quickly kill them without taking a hit.
Multiple thralls in a base are now very threatening, and it isn’t so simple to dispatch a pack of them. They are now well-worth the time and equipment. Perhaps even moreso than equipping a player?
Siege Mechanics
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The reduced weekend raid timer (now the same length as any other day) really helps with giving more downtime on the weekends. Now I don’t have to wake up extra early, or feel like I need to spend the better part of my day keeping an eye out for raids. Much less exhausting than before.
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Recent nerfs to orbs means that they are no longer the best way to raid. They were too easy to acquire, and not as interesting as other siege mechanics. Now, we are much better off building trebuchets and demonfire barrages – which are much more interesting and fun to play with. The “meta” shifted from small-scale direct attacks —burrowing into a base with orbs— to full-scale sieges with multiple trebuchets and offensive thralls.
Activities
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Giving people more to do in the game than raid really does help improve conditions on PvP servers, especially for new players. People are less likely to raid “because they’re bored” now that there is more to do. Exploring the different areas, like the swungle ruins and the volcano, killing world bosses for legendary items, building secondary bases and map rooms, are great alternatives to bombing Tier-1 bases on Noob River. These “constructive” activities really help improve community health and reduce toxicity.
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Prolonging warfare between large clans is also benefiting the game. Rather than being able to demolish a clan within a single night, now we have to be concerned about map-wide empires, using teleporters to establish secondary or tertiary footholds. The larger map size also benefits PvP in that weaker empires are able to hide; the “See All, Raid All” alpha mentality from Early Access is fading away.
Crafting Recipes
- I’m not sure when these were added, but there seems to be many more ways of crafting certain things than before. For instance, Hardened Steel is much easier to smelt. Bark is easily acquired as a byproduct of Shaped Wood. The most troublesome bottlenecks have been fixed!
These have been my thoughts lately – I’ve been very impressed! It’s extremely satisfying to return to a game that you once loved, only to learn that it’s gotten better with time. Yes, that’s right, Conan Exiles is like a fine wine.
