Half-done sounds like what most people do nowadays, not exclusive to hackers or developers or anything else really, but I’m not here to debate the entirety of society’s issues, I’m here to point out what I believe is wrong with this game, and sometimes also help other players.

Got a problem with that? Go be anti-constructive in another place, thank you.

I think the idea on that was the more desirable weapons would be on harder bosses (maces on Rockslide, for example while bows are on spiders) so you didn’t get a Momentum on a spider boss.

Granted, that does mean that if difficulty changes with bosses or what’s good changes, what you get where may either become unbalanced or need to be shuffled around (creating then possible bugs in the code). Either way though, I definitely think something should be done to reduce the number of items in a pool since the grind for one particular thing can be rather horrendous.

Right, but what I was pointing out is that you can’t tie desirability to the weapon type, i.e. you can’t say “maces are more desirable than spears”. (Or at least, you shouldn’t be able to do that. If there are types of weapons that are entirely undesirable, that’s a bigger, separate problem.)

Indeed, within each weapon type, you have more and less desirable weapons. Momentum is more desirable than The Wyrd, and Axe of the Lion is more desirable than Battle-axe of the Berserkers.

That’s why I like @Xevyr’s approach, because it proposes putting more desirable weapons – regardless of their type – on harder bosses.

Couple that with an idea I’ve read elsewhere – I think it was @MarcosC, but I could be mistaken – to establish an organic progression by making sure that each successive weapon tier can only be reached by going to an area where the difficulty requires the use of preceding tier, and you have a much nicer system than what we have now.

But that’s a big lift. I’ve yet to see the team sit down and do something like that properly, dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s. Right now, the design approach seems to be “let’s fire a cannon ball through a specific aspect of the game, that way the game doesn’t feel stale” :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Yes! For the love of Mitra, yes! The grind is abhorrent.

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So many things are wrong with the balance of Legendary Weapons, it’s astounding…
Like really, Funcom didn’t make them “Truly Legendary” as they stated, instead they’ve made almost all Legendaries better than craftable weapons, but there is still a huge disparity between the best Legendary of a weapon type, and most other Legendaries…

Like, would you really want the Blade of the Adventurer (Agility 2H Sword) when Baal’Pteor’s Razor is just better on every stat, be it damage, armor penetration, or carry weight?

Legendaries of a weapon type should have the same power level, and that means:
• Same base stats.
• One additional effect, or a slight stat increase.
→ For these effects, they need to be meaningful enough to justify not having the stat increase; for instance, it would be fine for one Legendary to have higher armor penetration while the other inflicts poison, or another applies sunder, etc…
On the other hand, it is not fine for the Paper Cut (single stack of bleed with 2 dps…) which is basically garbage :notlikethis:

I do like that the devs tried to add special effects to Legendaries with the Age of War, although they only used already existing effects (sounds a little lazy to me) and they did not balance anything, thus those effects are useless for the most part, since there are some Legendaries with much better stats, and raw damage wins in the end :thisisfine:

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Blade of the adventurer has a better skin than baal-pteors!

Anyways, at no point was there a mention of balancing legendaries against legendaries. In every case regardless of the effect the legendary you find in a chest will do more damage than the same type of weapon you can craft. That’s as much as they guaranteed.

Bingo!

To be fair, you can still use it for aesthetic purposes, now that we have the thaumaturgy bench, but it’s definitely weird to have a so-called legendary weapon relegated to that. And even if that’s a deliberate decision, it still shouldn’t be in the same loot table and/or have the same difficulty to obtain it.

This is just one of the myriad examples of why I say the design is always half-done.

I think it’s also acceptable if they vary stats more than that, as long as they keep it at the same “power level”, as you say. A couple of examples of what I would find acceptable:

  • lower damage, but higher armor pen
  • lower damage and/or armor pen, but a more advantageous moveset

Right, basically that! :smiley:

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Yes, those of us who read the patch notes asked friends who actually are part of testing about certain things. It’s how I ended up with 20 Voidforged Gladiuses, Gladiators, Gladii,…short swords with master fittings for 95 damage and pre-AOW penetration. My Godbreaker boots repair them quite well, thank you.

But, I have a serious question concerning Legendary weapons. When they were first available, we could not repair them. If we did use them, we would try to stop before they were broken so we could give them to a thrall. However, in the very likely event we did break them, we dropped them on the ground because there was no dismantling bench. So, unrepairable weapons do not bother me.

What I am curious about, however, is when you can access the weapons? Can you open a Legendary chest before you reach level 60 now? If so, when did that change? We used to drop a weak Legendary for a newbie every now and then, but they couldn’t open chests.

If that changed to below level 60, then no, I do not believe that is a good thing at all.

Also, is anyone else experiencing difficulty opening the chests? Sometimes, the chest just will not open, even though I know no one else has opened it recently. I will log out and back in, and I can then open it.

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Well, to be fair, this was one of the best swords in the game, and one of the few I did not relegate directly to the dismantling bench since I already had 10 in storage. And, I did start AOW with 70+ (5 years, 5000 hrs on the same server), so, yes, I would and do use it. Which is odd, since prior to the start of this new phase, the only Legendary I used was Yog’s Touch.

I know players who like spears. I do not. I know players who like bows. I do not. I know players who like horses. I don’t have any. I refuse to tell anyone what weapons they are supposed to like. I just recently picked up a Katana because a friend loves them. I tried it, and I like it as well. I dropped my 5 year axe and mace fighting for a gladius and a katana. Completely revamped my fighting style. You never know what you will find that you like better. I still like a pair of daggers. I still like the great sword. I now have an agility build, so the game is relatively new as I refine my style.

Rules change. You either adapt, or die.

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It was a Strength Weapon, now it’s an Agility Weapon; and yeah its stats are good but there is Baal’Pteor’s Razor which is exactly the same but better on every stat.

It has nothing to do with playstyle or what kind of weapon you like, if you do not like 2H Sword you will not use any of them, but if you like them and find the Blade of the Adventurer, it’s basically “a shame, it could have been Baal’Pteor instead…”

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The level requirement was removed a few years ago.

That was never the real problem however. If a level 10 can obtain a skeleton key on their own, then they should be able to open the chest. No one really sees an issue with that. What they see an issue with is the level 10 can get the skeleton key.

Mind you a new player who’s level 10 may not be able to do this (though I have seen exceptions to this). But its quite easy for an average player on a new character to be able to pull it off and for many its a quick way to a decent weapon to start out with. You even have our small speedrunning community getting a legendary weapon from such sources within 12-15 minutes of starting a new character… well… this was before the changes to health. It could probably be done quite a bit quicker now.

But the issue isn’t all that itself, its just a symptom of a greater issue of how easy these weapons are to obtain. If a player can obtain one within 10-30 minutes of making a character. How much easier is it for someone who’s level 60 and established?

We expect things to be easier when we’re established. We don’t expect them to be THAT easy. When you look at the time investment going into legandaries, what is the point of using Serpentman, Khari, Obsidian, or Starmetal weapons, which are all going to always be lesser than Legendary weapons?

And since we’re talking about the ease of use here. Add Hardened Steel, Ancient, Steel, and Iron to that list. Stone to Legendary or bust. Some people still use the crafted stuff for personal reasons. But the game definitely as it is right now encourages you to farm out a bunch of legendary weapons and just use them.

I would point out that there is two possible solutions to this and both are really not great. One is to increase the health and/or damage of world bosses. This only adds a few minutes to the time to obtain each legendary. The added damage then simply makes things more tedious, not harder. Of course that’s also a step backwards from Age of War as well. The other is to make these bosses spawn less frequently. And while this will make the weapons less common, especially on populated servers, it doesn’t address the ease of obtaining. These weapons should be moved to the dungeon bosses instead.

On the subject of dungeons, these could be made a little more complex as well. Or some of them could receive their dangers back (like Black Keep traps), or even become more dangerous (like the Dregs being moved to a level 60 dungeon, and giving the Remnant’s spit a higher velocity, requiring a dodge or block instead of moving to the side).

Its a bit of a stretch but I wouldn’t mind seeing some of the dungeon bosses have more complex attacks and mechanics. Right now we have Thag (in a nerfed state) with a simple telegraphed attack, and a simple add phase. And while some regard him as one of the tougher bosses in Conan Exiles. His attack patterns and mechanics are very similar to those used by bosses in tab target MMORPGs that are used in introductory low level dungeons.

The ease of bosses is mainly because they are tougher normal enemies with slightly different movesets. The movesets are chosen randomly and thus can’t be too crazy because they kind of come out at random and can’t be predicted very much. The movesets enemies have are determined by weapons’ (even animals have weapons) combos. They kind of cycle through different weapons and attack randomly, like the big boss croc has the lunge attack, the spin attack, and the quick bite attack. Its literally just picking a different weapon to use.

In reality it should be using these attacks based on conditions, not randomness. Lunging when you’re in front and a distance away, biting when you’re close, and spinning when you’ve been not in front of it (but close) for some time.

All this would help with this issue drastically. But more importantly it will help with the boring nature of these bosses as well.

Fixed it for you :slight_smile:
We need all bosses to have decent movesets!
Get rid of the boring Giant Spider that can never hit you if you just walk left or right :rofl:

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That’s the impression I have… um… 2 skull bosses, right?

Careful what you wish for. I still remember the first time I saw the Red Mother rotate in place like she was in a microwave. :rofl:

There are plenty of possible solutions to this whole situation, but they all require the level of effort and attention to detail that we have not seen in a long, long time, if ever.

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As Xevyr pointed out to me some time ago, the ground work of more complex AI has already been done and not advertised. Whether that was an update intended for modders to take advantage of, or a system for them to use in the future has yet to be seen.

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Giving bosses better AI is just one step towards solving the problems with legendaries.

In truth, most of the so-called problems with legendaries aren’t really problems with legendaries, it’s people being dissatisfied with much bigger aspects of this game and channeling that dissatisfaction into a single pet peeve.

In case of the legendaries, most people complaining about them are simply dissatisfied that the game is too easy. But that’s not a problem for which an easy, half-assed solution can be proposed, so let’s narrow it down to “legendaries are too easy to obtain for someone who has played this game long enough”, leave out the part about playing the game long enough, and then post the genius idea to make their drop chances lower.

Truth is, this game has gotten a lot easier over time and not just because we’re veteran players. It objectively got easier. But even worse than that, it got seriously messed up. It’s a mess. It’s not a game where you can look at how something works and say “oh, yeah, that makes sense, I see why they did that”.

So yeah, I totally support better AI for bosses. And who knows, maybe they’ll actually follow through on that some day.

But I’m tired of all this BS about legendaries. People keep clinging to this preconception that legendaries should be put on some pedestal and worshiped, all because they have a little tag in their description (and now a fancy border around their icon). And because of that, they keep asking for shіtty changes, and then we get those shіtty changes, and then people are surprised that the game is shіttier because of that and ask for more shіtty changes.

Oh, most of the craftable weapons are now obsolete? Yeah, no shіt, that’s what I kept telling everyone crying for legendaries to be buffed like this. And now people want to make them grindier to “solve” that problem? Why not just freaking remove them and be done with it?

But yeah, we could give the bosses better AI, and stick the legendaries on the bosses. As a result, bosses will be more fun, which is an improvement I wholeheartedly support. But legendaries? They’re still going to be a grind that either obsoletes the crafted weapons, or makes legendaries irrelevant. As long as we’re sticking with this nonsense of non-repairable, RNG-gated legendaries, there’s no middle ground. Either you must have them and therefore you’ll grind for them no matter how miserable that makes you, or they’re just not worth it and you won’t even try.

We’re trying to solve a fundamental problem by stirring the alphabet soup in hopes of it spelling out a Shakespeare sonnet.

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Well, I timed it at 22 seconds for the croc, but I do kill the bosses a great deal.

Do a Sand-Reaper Hive Queen, so little HP they melt like normal enemies XD

And there you have it. I have some Legendary weapons where I have both strength and agility versions in the same weapon. Bane of Khostrel Can’tspellIt is one. Blade of the Adventurer is another.

But, I prefer Agility (20 points) over Strength (5 points), so I do more damage with an agility BOA than I would with a strength Baal.

A Hanuman’s hammer is a monster, but I would use the Bec de Corbin, because agility. If I were to re-spec with strength, I would re-equip.

EDIT: Clarified that I have a strength version, and an agility version.

17 seconds on that one, but I did walk into the swinging tail.

It’s not that it’s just too easy, but that a lot of content and mechanics are useless. So much time spent coding a research tree for almost nothing. All weapons but legendaries are mostly pointless, most armors are pointless, most elixirs, potions, food, pets, thralls, etc, etc.
The game lacks decent progression, scaling and so on. It lacks a well placed structure.
It’s like a dumpster of good stuff all very poorly connected.
The “things” are there, the potential is there. But it’s all wasted. It’s like having a nice set of lego made of great pieces that don’t fit.

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