I can see both sides on this because there is one dungeon I refuse to bring a thrall in (wine cellar) because they die each and every time I’m in there and another that is completely maximized in it’s effectiveness with minimal risk (warmaker but skipping the AC). I don’t use authority builds much because I like getting into the thick of it.
As for PVP yeah it just what’s the point unless you have a tiny 1 high base, your opponent will just jump on stuff to avoid the thrall.
I disagree that he was right, but I agree he made a terrible case. Ad hominem attacks are useless. Had he bothered to explain exactly how his build was “screwed”, perhaps he’d have a point. As for thralls, I haven’t found them too weak to bother. Granted, I use them for base defense in PvE, and I only travel with a thrall if I am actively trying to level her.
I don’t understand this. Again, I quit PvP because of the absolute babies I encountered in that mode. But, I use any type of thrall in a run. Lots of play testing tells me to set the attack and chase distances to 10m, follow to 5m or 10m, and Attack All. When running through Sepermeru, unless I want the whole town fighting, I set to Attack Nothing.
“What about the Arena Champion?” you may ask, I will tell the thrall to stop in the adjacent corridor so I can kill her myself. I find that thralls just get in the way in that fight. I do have plenty of armor scraps, and killing her just isn’t worth the effort anymore (not enough XP for the time), but sometimes I just want her dead.
I agree the first part wholeheartedly. In purges, I disagree. I went through a learning curve and lost a thrall here and there in the early days. I learned how to make sure my thralls are just fine.
I set their attack/Chase distance to 5m. The base is designed with a large entry courtyard so the enemies gather in there for slaughter. There are 8 archers on the walls with full walls behind them so anything outside the base does not distract. Archers are set to 50m attack range, Stand and Defend mode. They don’t move. They just shoot.
The entry has both regular cauldrons to slow them down, and flaming cauldrons to do damage. I have two archers with an open LOS to the entry. One shoots noxious arrows, the other mostly obsidian because they’re cheap.
Thralls are given weapons and armor based on their stats, agility or strength, and gruel for healing.
There’s no secret. It’s just understanding how they function, and how the numbers add up.
I do realize that there are plenty of people who are going to say “It’s too much work”. It’s 15 minutes. If you just want to run the purge and not do anything to give your forces the advantage, you will get dead thralls. I lost quite a few before I finally figured it out.
EDIT - I have 6 cauldrons with weak dancers on them. 8 archers, and 5 melee thralls. If they manage to actually enter the main building ( I leave the door open), there are 4 melee in the treasure area.
And I do that once in a while, but Conan Exiles has always been a game about combining your skills with followers, it actually felt pretty good at some point and worked somewhat well.
However try currently going into for example a medium sized Stygian Invader or Black Corsair camp on siptah or even a camp same size in Exiled Lands without follower, the chance of you getting out of there alive isn’t good once 5-6 or more start to swarm you, hitting you from 1-2 foundations away with a 1 handed sword, sometimes even after you have passed them or while they are running sideways or backwards away from you, they got an unbelievable accuracy with their attacks, they can decide to break your surprise attack in the middle of it and stagger you while they often don’t.
It is quite clear that npc’s have an advantage in melee that you will have problems dealing with unless you got a follower or 2 to distract them.
The days of being able to solo things because of good fighting skills aren’t completely over, but you will encounter so many weird situations where you think, How the hell can they do that?
Dunno if it is possible, there are many reasons for AI failing, struggling servers and hardware, bad coding etc.
However they don’t really need to improve follower AI that much, in fact they were at some point working pretty ok then it suddenly went into a negative spiral where it seems that the more they tried to improve them the more buggy and glitched they became.
Right now the biggest problem with followers isn’t that their wild version feels stronger, faster and hits more reliable, it is the fact that followers quite often do completely weird stuff like, hitting air and even combo finishers long after a npc has moved away, standing still considering to fight or not while being pounded by one blow after another, putting weapons away and start fist fighting, deciding to run in a direction where there is no one to see or simply just get stuck on something while being swarmed and killed by enemies.
Maybe they shouldn’t try to increase AI this much if the game cannot handle it or at least spend more resources on fixing the bugs and glitches about them because the latest updates has not been good 
Oh, it took a scandalous post for the problem with slaves freezing in the middle of battle (for me the main problem) to finally appear at the top of the forum. Thanks to the author of this topic.
Although your whole post has right points, you totally miss the op.
It’s not what a lvl20 Lian with top notch gear and correct authority build can do.
It’s i am on a pvp server and i need to build literally everything really fast to be competitive.
On pve we have all the time we need.
On pve nobody can steal your loot and harm your thralls, so you can practically be a hobo with a blocking fence and no worries.
People in pvp must be ready for fight at once, so they cannot “risk” their build for authority.
The one who plays authority on pvp, either starts now, either role plays.
And for gods sake, there’s no honor neither brag for using end game gear and authority perks with lvl 20 thralls. Devs fixed this option for the ones who were afraid to leave the starting river for years 
.
Ps. Go afk in a lvl 3 purge and let lian handle it alone . Arena champion is an easy boss to purges comparison.
Even better, go afk on a pvp server and leave Lian face @SirDaveWolf lvl 5 with stone daggers. Give to Lian the best you got 
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Weak slaves hit weakly, strong ones hit hard. Give any. The current ones don’t hit at all. They just stand there and don’t respond to commands.
I think I am not the one who missed the point of OPs post…
He literally says that his problem is that tamed thralls are weaker than equivalent ‘wild/untamed’ NPC. Go and read his post carefully.
I don’t know what are you talking about, something about PvE servers being easy.
I literally told him to play without thralls as it is more fun. Myself I never play without PvP mode AND I THANK THE DEVS that I can just smash someone’s head without asking for permission which the other party has to accept.
I don’t run authority build, I posted here a video with level 20 Lian in dragnbone armour + ranissan hammer destroying Arena Champion solo 1vs1.
And it’s just a common thrall, nothing fancy like in Wak’s videos with stats.
So my point is - how the f**k thralls are too weak when common thrall which spawns every 15 minutes in the same spot can solo harders NPC in that game?
Funcom should stop listening to people with horribly bad gaming skills as it ruins the game for others.
Go play Sims with your younger sister.
It’s called shield.
I am doing a single player session and i am using only javelins and shield. Now the shield is more necessary than ever, you just cannot dodge all these attacks, without shield you are doomed. There are no skills to teleport attacks. Even scorpions are getting magnetized by you and hit you no matter where you are.
Then grit build. A pve player who will build, grit agility and light armor, holding a shield can defeat literally everything alone.
Strength build without shield is risky.
Thralls?
Like @Karlsony said…
You do a war party build and you see one of both not to react at all, literally slacking or fighting with the wind.
On official servers, thralls perform a bit better, but you have lags and crash that no matter this better is lost.
In front the edge and behind the river we say in Greece.
4 days left from the scheduled hotfix, lets hope we have a fix in the thralls behavior, because as it is, it’s really frustrating.
Maybe. I am not arguing, i am just trying to explain what i get.
The problem of op is while leveling thralls, not end levels.
The possibilities of having lvl 20 thralls with you are minimum, targeted. Mostly we play with thralls to lvl them up. These thralls cannot defeat arena champion unless they gained super perks and they are over 15 at least. But personally i do this fight alone, i love to kick her butt , she is mine lol.
That makes us two.
Thralls are pain in the a…, i wish there was a command “hide your self” or make them invisible with sorcery, so i can do my fights and call them to load them the loot. Solo boss fights are magnificent, you totally control the area, the agro and sometimes the boss reaction. Thralls leveling is just “necessary evil” you need for purges, nothing else.
Lian is a bit buffed in this update. I remember testing the new purges and i accidentally spawned Lians, gave them end gear and they managed purges until lvl 7 easily, all of them was lvl 0 . From lvl 8 however things change dramatically, they need to be full lvled and it’s not so sure they’ll survive.
But i find them really good, it’s true. Yet, i don’t like to fill my base with clones 
. I like to play with all the thralls, test them all and loose them all why not. In this game the feeling of loss giving a different taste, new goals.
Is it good, lol. My younger sister is over 40, she doesn’t play video games .
No offense taken, have fun.
You don’t get to tell others how they should have fun, buddy. It’s fun for YOU. Others may think differently.
That’s new then. No thrall could beat the Arena Champion solo until recently. Pre AoS, some could, if the game didn’t act up and they got lucky. Besides, the thrall killers are mobs, not bosses. AC is a piss poor fighter. Anyone with minimum skills can beat her.
You can drop the chest thumping. This game is easy. It’s not a polished combat game and will never be. People who want hard fights are better suited playing something else.
This. Stunlock is the thralls kryptonite because they are too dumb for strategies like tactical retreats.
ah, that’s not just me it’s happening to with thralls then
All of mine are set to 5m for both attack and chase. I reset them before every purge. This unfortunately does not stop them from yeeting themselves out of my base. I’m also using six cauldrons. 
I think they just crave the sweet sweet AI void at this point.
Three years ago, at the end of 2020, named warriors from Vulcan at level 20 usually had about 6 thousand hp.
Now, only by leveling them up to the hundredth (!!!) level using the appropriate mod, I can get a warrior from Vulcan with 6 thousand hp.
This is simply a question of how much the creators destroyed the thralls as a class.
6000 HP Volcano thralls were the result of the initial leveling change.This last revision cut that in half and added Grit to the mix.
The little secret that came in Ch 2 or 3, is that officials have the thrall damage to NPCs and players at 50% on consoles in the Combat Settings.
But that’s not even the problem, @speedice . Their dmg is fine. They buffed it after the nerf. The problem is that they don’t get to deal it. The AI was never good, but high hp made up for that. Even if thralls became unresponsive for a while, they could take a few hits until they snapped out of it. Now, when this happens, they die. So, when everything went well, we had ourselves a situation of op thralls, near unkillable. RHTS could go easily over 10k hp. When things went south, they could manage. It was rare losing a high end top tier and gear thrall. You would really have to screw up for that to happen. I think this mislead the devs to nerf them way too much, because shit is always happening performance wise. We ended up with crappy thralls, variety went out of the window, etc. You can still use them, but they are a source of frustration, while in the past they were a source of joy. I liked to see them fight and come on top. There are a few places where even back then you could test their mettle to the limit. Now, luck plays too much of a role. Will it be stunlocked? Will the game act up? We never know. This is the WRONG kind of difficulty, not the enjoyable one.
does it owrk on thralls? reset their attributes?
No, afaik. It allows the player to re spec. For thralls you want the potion of rebirth and some luck getting the best perks. You’ll need a few, most likely.
A tad off topic, but this dancer was 10 gold, and she seems pretty buffed. She was normal when sitting down.
She’s buffed alright, @speedice 
