misery loves company! It really was unlucky, @WaistlessAxe18 . Getting lag against the AC is a death sentence, now even worse as she tracks you better.
1 Like
Honestly though, I own a server now I gave thralls the buff they deserve because they’re so underwhelming currently in official.
1 Like
You don’t need to deal with the hassle. Great for you, @WaistlessAxe18 ! 
According to @Eradicati0n 's latest video, FC will implement DBNO for thralls (down but not out).
Giving us the chance to resurrect thralls if they get defeated.
But honestly though, i‘m totally against this.
Being able to resurrect them won’t change their bad performance.
If a thrall gets stunlocked to death, we can resurrect him to see the same result again.
I can’t help it, but for me this comes across like FC fights the symptoms but not the disease. 
Or am i just too cynical?
What do you guys think about this?
2 Likes
Thanks for the mention!
I kinda see DBNO as more of a safety net as opposed to trying to fix a specific issue with thralls. I’m far from the most experienced PvE player, but even I’ve had thralls die in circumstances that I just couldn’t predict or get them out of. In the stunlock example you gave, you could presumably clear out the enemies and then revive your thrall, depending on how long the revive window is and the actions necessary.
There’s definitely other improvements to be made on that front, but having that safety aspect for your valuable T4 thralls sounds decent to me, especially when crafters become world thralls eventually
3 Likes
I really hope it works out as you say.
But i can‘t help myself, i‘m sorry if i sound cynical or maybe even schizophrenic.
But the game itself is a bit schizo at times.
A giant beautiful sandbox in a cool setting where your imagination and creativity is the only limit
(Your content, and many other content creators proves that).
And an average but still fun combat system on top!
That’s the reason why most of us stick with it for so long.
On the other hand it’s so buggy and inconsistent.
I‘m just confused, shouldn’t FC try to solve the problems first before implementing the next thing?
I just don’t know, i hope for the best but i already see a number of huge red flags. And i just hope i‘m wrong.
But anyways, thank YOU for sharing your insights!
P.S. Woe bather is really awesome.
Love the simplicity of his track titles on his last album.
I, II, III, IV 
2 Likes
I am pretty sure they can’t fix thralls AI in such a way they become as good as we want them to be. However, if they give them a buff, we may end up in a situation where they become too strong when performance is there. This is sort of a middle ground. Better than nothing, eh? I hope they just keep trying to improve them, because you completely nailed the problem @UNfun . This is a band aid, but a welcome one.
1 Like
You’re right. In a lot of situations, the rewards are rubbish compared to the risk.
That said, I finally took the risk I had been postponing for years, and triggered a high-level Surge on Siptah yesterday. I had with me two thralls at ~level 17 at the time - Imiu of Derketo (a Black Hand dancer) and Varpnir (Nordheimer archer), both in high-tier heavy armor (~2000 armor on both). Both were armed with truncheons for capturing thralls, so I had to take care of killing the dudes who couldn’t be KOed - and at that level Surge, there are a lot of those.
Neither of my followers came even close to dying (do note that even though there are two of them, the War Party perk negates an bonuses they’d get from my Authority), even though I spent some time dragging captives to a nearby Wheel of Pain. I had to bandage them (and myself) a few times between waves.
This anecdote is, of course, heavily biased. My thralls had about the best armor you can get in the game, and most of the time the odds were 3 vs 7 at worst, so none of us got too heavily mobbed. The only one who came close to dying in a stunlock was me… And importantly, the enemy didn’t seem to have many dagger-wielders, so they didn’t get to stack bleeds on my thralls.
But my point is, that’s one case where high risk also yields high rewards. I managed to capture four decent T4 fighting thralls as well as two named crafters (including a named Yog priest, who isn’t easy to come by on Siptah), as well as loot over a dozen legendary weapons. You don’t get motherlodes like that anywhere else.
Then again, if I send these same two followers against a one-skull Grey One boss, it’s likely that they both get seriously hurt, and possibly killed. For a fragment of power, which are dime a dozen on Siptah.
The overall balance between risk and reward is so out of whack in the game that fixing thralls alone won’t help with that.
I agree. It encourages less skilled player to rely on thralls rather than learn to fight, because as long as you need to choose between your own combat stats, and better thralls, it’s an easier way to invest in the minions rather than yourself.
I like the way Authority works, but I’m not sure if it should be a stat among others. Instead, it could be tied to the Journey system, for example. So to improve as a leader, you shouldn’t need to sacrifice your own combat stats - you should prove to the world that you’re capable of taking care of yourself, and know your way around, to inspire others and make them respect you.
2 Likes
I think that’s probably why the fourth chapter has been added to the ages. The devs perhaps jumped into this new system a little too head-on and it’s affected the quality of some things negatively. I’m hopeful that will improve with the fourth chapter taking some stress off, alongside the more defined content drops per chapter.
Also, I didn’t quite expect to see Woe Bather mentioned in this context 
I’m very excited for his next project.
2 Likes
Well, we’ve been talking about music just recently. So i thought i had to mention this.
Metal is NEVER off topic. And everyone who can’t relate to that had a sad childhood…
… And probably sucks at the game too!
Nah, just kidding.
3 Likes
So I agree with that, today I lost the Nimbletoe I captured in the last purge.
Lvl 11 , 2,7k HP , 1800 armor , epic weapon - just didn’t guard her for a while on Mounds and let her run into the building alone with a T3 warrior and T2 alchemist inside. When I walked in after about 15 sec I just watched her in the corner taking so many hits she had no chance to fight back , by the time I killed them she was dead.
My mistake , I shouldn’t have taken a thrall under lvl 20 into such a dangerous area , on the other hand before removing the stun immunity she would have killed them herself in no time.
1 Like
Or possibly the devs were pressured into unrealistic timeframes by marketing and/or investors, and the crapness of recent updates has finally started to affect sales. That’s when the chosen approach needs to be reconsidered, and the thought of “oh, how about we make sure the developers have enough time and resources to do their work in a way that doesn’t result in a stream of refund requests?” may appear in someone’s head.
Releasing a broken update just before Christmas and holiday season, then telling us they wouldn’t have the opportunity to release a fix until Mid-January must have gone oh so well, business-wise.
I want to believe in the Conan Exiles dev team. It’s the greedy investors, or perhaps a marketing team that lives in a fantasy world, that tends to get stuff screwed up.
4 Likes
So I lost a thrall last weekend. Let’s investigate the situation.
I had been training a couple of low tier thralls (Barnes of Asura and Valares - the latter is a named, Purge-only Exile fighter, in case the name feels unfamiliar) doing random stuff. They were both level 18 when, returning homewards, I decided to check out a leyshrine for some Cimmerian loot and maybe a named thrall.
I was in luck - there was both a Dalinsia, and a Darmok the Accursed, at the leyshrine. My thralls attacked them, at which point I told them to stop, because I didn’t want them to kill the named NPCs. I then went to whack them both with a Knock, but got stuck between them and almost died.
So I ran away a little to get a potion into my belly. Of course, in the meantime, Dalinsia and Darmok went to town against my thralls, who wouldn’t defend themselves properly because I had told them to stop. I couldn’t have been out of action for more than 30 seconds, and returned to see poor Barnes on his last legs - I had no choice but to kill Darmok quickly to save my Asuran dancer. Then I went to relieve Valares, but Dalinsia managed to get the killing blow in just as I finished her off.
Not only did I miss the opportunity to recruit a Dalinsia, I also lost a hard-to-replace Valares.
At the time of his death, Valares had over 2000 max hitpoints, and just over 2000 armor on him. Dalinsia was armed with a hammer, which of course had good armor penetration, and she hits hard.
So, consider the circumstances. I have a thrall with excellent armor but mediocre hitpoints, not defending himself, against one of the strongest human NPCs armed with an armor-breaking weapon. And it took about half a minute for my thrall to die after I abandoned him to save myself. Is that an acceptable durability for a fighting thrall?
Once again, a heavily biased situation. I wasn’t there to help him fight, and I had foolishly told him not to fight, either. Of course, losing the thrall annoys me greatly, but mostly because it was my own greed, situational stupidity and lack of fighting ability that got him killed, not because he sucked. (And even then, he was an Exile thrall, even though with better stats than a regularly available T4 Exile fighter, against Dalinsia.)
Had I armed my thralls with truncheons and let them fight, or if I had let them use lethal force against their opponents, I’m sure they would’ve survived long enough for me to eat my potions. Heck, I may not have needed the potions if I had let my thralls fight.
At least Barnes survived to level 20, and is now improving the morale on my treasure ship, while I have some more T4 Exile thralls to train.
3 Likes
That was tottaly on you @Kapoteeni .
I lost thralls like that too and we should lose them when we make such blunders.
However, the game is not without blame, IMO. Thralls should have the command “defend yourself”. More, that should be their default behavior when they lose the following status and adopt the scouting mode. Usually this means we died. If we just asked them to stop following, and want another behavior, we should be expected to choose it. By default, a “defend yourself” mode would be appreciated. Them standing still while getting hit makes no sense. The funny thing is that such behavior already exists. It’s “stand and defend”. It should kick in when scouting mode becomes active.
It would avoid these situations that happen when we make the kind of decisions you made on the fly and things go sour.
You improvised. A game that allows you to do so has achieved something. Improvisation, sometimes, costs us dearly, but also means we can get unexpectedly rewarded by being creative. You could have pulled it off.
Anyway, look at it from the bright side. It could have been worse, @Kapoteeni .
You could have died, lost both thralls and your body could have bugged out, losing your gear too. 
Did you place a bedroll nearby before undertaking your little exploratory endeavor? I bet you didn’t. I never do.
Then we repent or hasty actions.
All in all, you were lucky that Murphy’s law spared you to her whims.
Yep, it totally was.
Yeah, it could’ve gone worse. Also, since this was on Siptah, I would’ve had to replace some of my Sigils. And losing Barnes would’ve been awful. Purge cages are really the only place to get a new one on Siptah, and the odds for that aren’t exactly favorable.
Of course I didn’t place a bedroll. Haven’t you read on the forums that nothing in the game is challenging or dangerous anymore, no skill is required and any noob can complete the game in six hours? It has been so long since I last died (and that was from falling from a high place) that I don’t even remember where my respawn point is.
Then again, I do have a decent network of transportory stones, so getting to interesting places shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes, max.
(I also lost one of the naked T4 crafter thralls I got from a Surge recently, when a Spider of Leng decided to spawn inside my foundation during a Maelstrom, and managed to break my armorer’s bench before I had time to dismantle enough of my base so I could reach in and thwap the spider.)
1 Like
That’s really annoying when that happens.
But i have a solution for the future.
Always have two truncheons in your horses inventory, and hand them to your thralls whenever you enter a camp. Just in case there is some t4 you want.
It might be a bit clunky and complicated the first few times, but it is really helpful. And you don’t have to tell them to not attack.
T4 thralls are usually surrounded by a lot of other npc‘s.
If i try to knock out a t4 myself, usually i either kill the t4 by accident, while i try to take out the others. Or i get almost killed because i try to knock the t4 out no matter what.
But if you do it like i said, that’s not an issue anymore.
I do it this way for years and it works perfectly fine.
Even on official PvP servers without authority perk i did it that way. My one thrall knocked everything down, and i just killed everything that’s useless to “clean” the spawn point.
I have extra truncheons/Lovetaps with me at all times. It’s just that I had not changed their weapons at this time because this was supposed to be just an ad-hoc detour, not a thrall-hunting expedition. I also didn’t have potions on my quick bar because I didn’t expect to be splattered, which is why I had to withdraw to a distance where I could access my inventory.
It was a collection of multiple should-haves. But that’s where a setback turns into a learning experience, when one identifies the should-haves and changes their behavior accordingly.
(I could, of course, admin-spawn a new Valares and level him up, but that would devalue the learning experience. That’s why I never admin-cheat unless whatever I lose is caused by an unknown bug.)
If any thrall needs a buff it’s Lethandra , for how relatively hard she is to get she’s not a very good thrall/dancer - Lianelle has the same stats and more HP and can ( with a bit of luck) be easily captured.
Overall from what I’ve looked at the thrall stats documentary online, a lot of “purge only” thralls are rather (below) average
Lethandra is dancing in our pub , I’m afraid to take her into battle and besides her our clan only kept one Hunter Dennu and Narcissa Farsight , both because of their HP
so anyway, to sum up our clan’s (and sometimes my solo’s) gain from the new purges.
1x Hunter Dennu
1x Narcissa Farsight
1x Nimbletoe (killed at lvl 12)
1x Lethandra
The rest of the thralls we gained were useless/uninteresting/untrainable and 3/4 of the thralls in cages were dancers and bearers.
This cost us 6 berserkers (lvl 15-20) and Oyvind (4.7 HP , 2k armor) , all losses when the higher level purge showed up right next to our base , the last one cost me the best berseker I ever had and Oyvind I’ve been hunting for a month.
I know I’ve posted this a few times here but this time I’m really done with purges until they fix this minimum distance bug , these losses and the time spent with new and new berseker training is just not worth it nowadays - not for mostly subpar thralls just because they have a different name/look.
1 Like
High risk, low reward doesn’t tend to work well. Funcom should correct this point in everything in the game.
Fights, no matter the experience of the player can go really unexpected. Even worst when you play online and the bad performance plus lags can make easy situations devastating.
But yes, i find it extremely wrong that a thrall, no matter the origin, after lvl 10 with this gear can die from half naked npcs with low gear. Because a star metal hammer or mace is nothing in front the weapons your thralls carry.
I do accept to pay mistakes, but the way it is now does not allow the slightest mistake. So i believe that it needs consideration from devs because it’s not pleasant as it is.
2 Likes