The modifier doesn’t have anything to do with them being thralls. Its a side effect. Those modifers are so that NPCs such as Votaries and Forgotten Tribe can be quite a bit more threatening than Exiles and such.
In conversations I’ve had during testing I actually asked why they could remove or set all modifiers to 1.0 and the reason behind this was it would make harder areas too easy and easy areas to hard. There is a desire to remove this, but it would take an extensive amount of effort to pull off.
They did something similar with pets if you all remember. But that was a bit more simple. To explain why, the damage pets do comes from internal ‘weapons’. Pets don’t have a ‘damage’ stat. They have the hidden modifiers too (they are actually all set to 1.0, thankfully, or at least to my knowledge from when I last checked, might be some outliers). The hidden weapons are what give them their combos and unique attacks. When they die, these weapons disappear. You also cannot see them when you view their follower windows. There used to be a bug where they’d randomly appear as little bags.
So the change was to make two sets of weapons one for wild NPCs and one for tamed. So when you tame a Wolf for example, it gets a different weapon than when it had before. Its also why Pets got hosed when this change went through, they literally blanket changed (somewhat) to get the update out. They were supposed to go back and readjust these values. And while its not hard, its still a time consuming process. Hopefully they can return to that.
But now thralls, these are different since both NPCs and Followers use the same method. Its an equippable weapon x the modifier = damage. With Followers adding their attribute bonus (wild thralls have 0 attributes) and follower damage and athority bonuses from their owner.
The method to fix this is pretty easy. Just even more time consuming than editing weapon values like for Pets. Its to change the templates that Followers use when tamed to all use a 1.0 modifier. The problem that makes this worse, is there isn’t a singular template that gives them all of their modifier its from their tribe, their tier, and if they are a special thrall like named. There’s at least 3 sources if not more that add it together. Xevyr has done a great job putting together a spreadsheet that shows these all added up in something easy to read. Its an absolute mess in the devkit from my experience. (also I don’t remember if the templates are additive or multiplitive, I think they’re additive, but I don’t remember since its been a long time since I made a NPC, last time I did we still had Witch Doctor feats)
So they’d have to basically zero out all of these modifiers and then choose one template (I’d assume the basic human template) to have the basic 1.0 modifier, and then select like… a wild NPC template with different tiers to add too it. Then when the thralls are tamed, the wild template is removed.
Then after that they’d need to adjust how attributes add to damage to make up the difference.
Seems simple, and well it kinda is. But with the number of templates and NPCs available, its a task that would take a pretty dang long time. And like I said, I do think they want to do this, the issue is one of time. The person making these changes wouldn’t be making changes in other important aspects.
So I wouldn’t rule it out that we wouldn’t see these things done. But the question is ‘when’ and ‘when’ can be a long time coming. And well has been, since these conversations I mentioned go back over a year or so. But you never know. I’ve seen stuff get added to the game that were said would take too long to implement or too ‘crazy’ just get added in some random chapter update. When FC says no sometimes, they don’t always mean it.
Sometimes asking for the world gets you the world. If of course its possible. And something that is datatable edits for the most part, is definitely possible. Personally I would love to see a mod handle this to see a proof of concept. I believe its theoretically possible. Its just that… its a bit of work. And I have considered trying it, but damn do I not have a great workflow when it comes to working all that out. So its a bit daunting for me. Its harder for me than it would be for FC (or any modder who routinely works on that stuff) I’m sure.
