Let's have a discussion about power balance around thrall vs monster vs player

[xmechwizardx]

So my thoughts in general is that thralls should not be stronger than a player’s maxed out hero.

Basically my idea is that the game should be changed in the ways as follows:
+Player health increased by level, and stamina amount be increased by level
-In exchange, healing items effects be decreased
-Experience needed to level up be increased
+All crafting requirements should be decreased so that player is able to craft all at level 40
+Player can go up to level 80 but it takes time (lot’s of time i mean)
+Perks or gains from attributes per level be increased
-Decrease stamina regen by a slight amount
+Decreased experienced needed for thralls and pets to level up

Reasons for that:
My pet: 11000 hp.
Me: 500 hp.

Me: 200 stamina
My pet: Unlimited stamina.

Damage:
Me: 74
My pet: 250

Probably we all want to be epic. And by that I mean leveling up to a level beyond thrall’s power.

[Lole]

What pet has 11k hp?

Btw can thralls dodgeroll? can they react properly and smart?

Sry but a player will beat every thrall in a 1on1 if they are not dumb
Thralls without beeing on follower with the player beeing skilled and geared for them are allrdy useless, dont know what more you want…

[cyosth]

This is only good for pve imo. If u go on pvp and everyone has the same hp/stamina that why do u have them in the first place cuz its equal. Hp and stamina should be a choice. I don’t think people like to even level up to 60, but to 80 and way harder that would be a pain in the butt. Stamina regen it’s at perfect rate since there are stamina damage weapons. And the thralls why should they be weaker than you? Then you shouldn’t have them in the first place since they’re useless

[Xevyr]

@xmechwizardx

Damage:
Me: 74

(How are you able to do 74 damage post 3.0? Authority-Expertise build with Iron skinning knife? jk)

Aside from that, everything else you listed here has server settings too… well… levels and feat points etc need a mod, but if you don’t like the game that much you can increase player health… player damage, decrease thrall health… thrall damage etc.

(I realize that some play on consoles / officials but you specifically mentioned in your other thread that you dabble in dedicated private servers, even had / have one)

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However I think your list is just not that great of a suggestion list here. Why would you want to reduce the effectiveness of healing items for example? They’re not THAT strong - seems a bit personal like maybe you don’t prefer to use those?

If player health and stamina are increased by level (like in a MMO) then what are we gonna do with Vitality and Grit? They literally just revamped the attribute system.

The experience needed to level up increased part is the only thing I fully agree with… the default rate is laughably fast. Yet you see most private servers opt to take it further and increase the rates hmm…

You propose lowering all recipe requirements to 40… but then increasing the cap to 80… so… you have 40 blank levels there that doesn’t give you access to anything… - that sounds more like an unfinished game to me

I don’t know… all of this seems very random and chaotic to me and most aren’t even related to the topic you filed them under… How does lowering the crafting requirements to 40 make your character relatively stronger than your thrall?..

Edit:
Oh… and… that:

@Lole

What pet has 11k hp?

I’m curious too!

[Johanis]

T4 named fighter zombies with level 20 authority perk Well-Trained can end up over 20k, and you can get 3 of them. I have a 17k, 19k, and 20k, following me around. Sure they only hit for a little bi-, oh wait they hit for 150+ vs unarmored targets and have insane hp.

[Xevyr]

Yea, but they’re not pets and they expire…
Pets now have less HP than thralls - my 4k hp white tiger after the update landed at like 2.7k
But yes, zombies are super healthy

[Taemien]

If the way you use thralls and pets is causing them to die a lot, and you have no intention on changing that playstyle, I heavily recommend using Zombies. They’re quick to make, have good enough stats, you get three of the bastards, they get buffed stupidly well by the 20 to all perk, and you won’t fret over losing 1 or 2 of them for each boss you fight.

[Kapoteeni]

@xmechwizardx

My pet: 11000 hp.
Me: 500 hp.

Me: 200 stamina
My pet: Unlimited stamina.

Damage:
Me: 74
My pet: 250

Remember also:
Player: can dodge so won’t lose as many hitpoints.
Follower: can’t dodge so takes all hits to the face.

Player: 200 stamina and ability to optimize how to use it.
Follower: Unlimited stamina but takes random breaks from attacking anyway, probably more often than I need to.

Player: ~100 damage
Follower: 250 damage but uses suboptimal combos, or no combos, or continues a combo even though the enemy jumped out of the way.

In each case, the equation boils down to
Player: has brain and knows how to use it.
Follower: has no brain, whether it’s a zombie or not.

[tzaeru]

Balancing thrall vs player damage and health is hard as long as the AI is so unpredictable, glitchy and unresponsive, and while health pools are as high as they are.

There are some pretty ridiculous damage sponges in this game and I don’t even bother killing world bosses and the like before I have maxed out gear simply due to how long it takes - just not worth the effort.

I do however generally agree that the situation is far from being optimal and is currently one of the major pain points about Conan Exiles.

But at the same time I worry that there’s no real solution other than systematically improving the AI behavior and server performance and to then go through all the health pools of all the monsters in the game and adjust them accordingly.

I mean it’s doable, but with the salaries of experienced game developers and designers, it’s a project that is going to cost a lot of money.

Personally I would consider it a good starting point if lowest tier damage outputs from thralls and pets are increased by ~10% and the highest tier damage outputs from thralls are decreased by ~20%.

The problem is really mostly those T4s and undeads. Achieving the above change would probably be quite easy by increasing the base damage of thralls and pets while decreasing the damage that strength gives for them.

[Pfanner]

I feel like the glitchy isnt limited to the thralls alone but also regarding the netcode, playing single player the game honestly feels really good but already with a 50-60 ping the game starts having issues. You are gonna have to predict attacks and roll early at times. Some stuff becomes undodgable and a thralls help (or plenty of healing pots) can become mandatory.
I feel like a proper rollback system which gives higher priority to what happens on your screen and less to what the server says could save us alot of frustration.

Admittedly that is quite a thing to ask so here is another idea:

• Perk Tier 2 Strength Choice Lone Wolf: gain +60% damage, +200 hp and armor, 10% movement speed and +50% stamina and hp regeneration. Your active companions gain -60% damage and -50% hp regeneration

[Taemien]

@tzaeru

Personally I would consider it a good starting point if lowest tier damage outputs from thralls and pets are increased by ~10% and the highest tier damage outputs from thralls are decreased by ~20%.

So you want the weakest thrall to do 4 dmg with a 10 dmg weapon instead of 3. And the strongest to do 9 dmg with the same weapon instead of 11?

I’m sorry to say but I think you’re arguing from a point of ignorance here. I’ve already shown that the best damaging T4 thrall (and that was assuming God-roll perks) is only equal to a 6 Strength player currently.

[tzaeru]

@Taemien

So you want the weakest thrall to do 4 dmg with a 10 dmg weapon instead of 3. And the strongest to do 9 dmg with the same weapon instead of 11?

Anything that makes players stronger in comparison to Thralls really, I don’t care too much about what it exactly is.

@Taemien

I’m sorry to say but I think you’re arguing from a point of ignorance here. I’ve already shown that the best damaging T4 thrall (and that was assuming God-roll perks) is only equal to a 6 Strength player currently.

They 100% aren’t. I’m not sure how you arrived to your stats, but if I simply look at the health bars of enemies, it’s pretty obvious that the thralls do more than you suggest.

[Taemien]

I’m able to verify it with floating combat text. Sorry but thralls are not as strong as you think they are. You have to go out of your way to get them to do more damage than you’re capable of. And even then, an active player is going to pull ahead in DPS in either case.

[Xevyr]

This is the closest topic resembling the one that was closed, so I guess I’ll post here.
We were talking about thralls and their HP there as well in a similar fashion.

Basically despite the initial complaints, imo the final takeaway was that thralls are still pretty overpowered, the nerf wasn’t really a big thing for them and you can optimize them further with an Authority build, proper food and the adequate weapons.

For example I have a video there with a Cimmerian Berserker soloing the bridge event, with all the NPCs, the 2 demons, the Blood-Moon beast and all the worms it summons without any sort of help from the player. He was using normal non-epic heavy armor and a stack of gruel along with a regular star metal mace.

The topic then shifted to the other event at Scavenger’s Berth where the OP of that topic lost a couple of thralls and several people pointing out that said event can go horribly wrong simply because of RNG as enemies can spawn on you and it’s very easy to pull more enemies than you can safely handle coupled with their shockwave ability.

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I went there myself with a RHTS still in non-epic armor (a mere armor value of 777) and zero points in Authority - essentially my agility / farming build. Given our discussions with @Jimbo about food though, I wanted to try something fancy so I gave my thrall Cooked Pork Rinds instead of the usual regular Gruel.
Why? Because me never bothering with anything other than Gruel, made the mistake of going to the wrong wiki page, where said Pork was listed as a high hp/s food, when in reality that page is for PLAYERS only and thralls have a different page where Pork is listed as 1 hp/s so… it’s literally the worst food for thralls and even Gruel is at 6 hp/s - which coincidentally means that my thrall would’ve had 2250 more effective HP during this fight just from using Gruel and even with that poor setup, that change alone could’ve given us a way better chance of survival.

It took me hours before I could trigger the event but when I did, despite being totally clueless of the event mechanics (never played Siptah so far and this was the first time I saw this event) it was going fairly smoothly at the start, despite the thrall slowly losing hp and not healing back properly. - we were winning.
However I then made a massive pull of 5 Migos plus a demon, with an additional one spawning behind us… and soon after those surrounded us the Boss spawned on us too. - I died from being ambushed by the boss shockwave then ran back from my bedroll, but shortly after both the thrall and me died horrible deaths. (and while I could’ve kept that to myself, I felt like it could be informative so I still posted the video - it’s a sad video)

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My conclusion of this whole ordeal was that thralls are sill NOT weak… not even close to weak… it’s just that this particular event is simply different / more difficult in ways than the content we are used to, especially since most EL enemies do not have similar abilities as these, but only basic attacks. So I repeat, despite my thrall dying there, I think he is quite strong. (he can kill pretty much any other boss probably even solo if I let him - I don’t let him fight alone thou )

I also went there with the worst setup… worst food, non-epic armor, zero authority and the thing was still doing great till I had him surrounded by enemies - even then I think I still had the option of trying to call him back and run - I didn’t as I wanted to see what would happen (being the server admin and nobody being online I knew I could just roll back the database, so Anders is alive and well). He also basically tanked like 6 of them plus the boss till I ran back from my bedroll… (video in the other thread if you want to laugh at us )

Anyway, now I made him some epic armor and cooked up some Enhanced Gruel (9 hp/s) and went back to see if I can get the event again. The rest was the same, I didn’t change my build or gear. I was way more cautious at the beginning and fought more poorly after last nights experience since I was a bit anxious about it. However later I pulled the same big group, this time on purpose though to see if we’d fare better.

And we did… much better… So despite me making way more mistakes, just the better food and armor made quite the difference…
@tzaeru My settings regarding combat are the same as officials however I have some UI mods so you will be able to see the exact damage my thrall (on the left) and me (on the right) do…

I think this will also address all the questions regarding archery, as while I was doing melee last night quite successfully with the short-sword, I was using the bow more often today and as you’ll see with a couple of buffs my bow damage exceeds 300… I even use it to kill the final boss as it seemed like he was hitting through my block so I didn’t want to risk dying at that point. So anyway, long story short… here’s take two of Scavenger’s Berth

Farmer vs Yuggoth - take 2 :D

TLDR:
What we’ve learned from all this is:
Do your research!

• Use proper food
• Use proper armor
• Use Authority if you want to rely on thralls
• Help your thrall as much as you can, if you don’t want to get close to bosses, archery can be a really good option
• Shields are important, carry one (you can see it blocks even all the shockwaves)

[CodeMage]

@Xevyr

Use Authority if you want to rely on thralls

I liked and appreciated your whole post. It’s extremely informative. However, I want to underscore this little bit that I quoted, because that’s the key takeaway that the original post in this (and another similar) thread ignores.

The more you want to rely on your followers, the stronger they need to be, because they’re mere AI. They don’t even dodge or use combos appropriately, much less know how to synergize with you as a player.

This is what the authority attribute is literally for. Funcom listened to all of our complaints over time – “thralls are too OP, I want to be a hero” vs “thralls got nerfed way too much” – and decided to give us a way to choose how we want to play.

You wanna be a hero? Then you have to invest into attributes that allow you to take and deal damage, but your followers will have all the power of wet tissue paper. Single ply. You want to rely on your followers? Cool, but then you have to give up being so much of a badass yourself.

The power balance is in a pretty good place, at least when it comes to PVE. I don’t play the PVP mode, so I’ll leave that to experts.

[Xevyr]

@CodeMage

The more you want to rely on your followers, the stronger they need to be, because they’re mere AI. They don’t even dodge or use combos appropriately, much less know how to synergize with you as a player.

Yup! There’s comparison videos in the other thread for that too for the bridge event. At first I did an attempt with zero authority. The boss sadly evaded, but it’s clear the thrall would’ve died eventually otherwise (and regarding the lack of dodging… God it was painful to watch him being chased by 4 worms and not help )

Second attempt with full Authority and Well trained… same flimsy Berserker wiped everything and still had over 1k health left. And then the funniest bit was that I tabbed out to upload the video during which the event restarted and when I tabbed back he was just cleaning up the main boss with even more HP left than before.

[Taemien]

@CodeMage

You wanna be a hero? Then you have to invest into attributes that allow you to take and deal damage, but your followers will have all the power of wet tissue paper. Single ply. You want to rely on your followers? Cool, but then you have to give up being so much of a badass yourself.

I think the thing I like most about the authority attribute is even though you are giving up being stronger, you are still the hero. By being in command, you are making your followers stronger by your very presence.

Its literally the best of both worlds.

[Usernameextra]

As a pvp player the only time thralls made a difference, was when they could one shot you… it doesnt matter otherwise since the ai is bad and most pvpers will put them down weather it takes 15mins or 10 seconds… this is almost always after the players are defeated

One shot era made combat about avoiding thralls wile hitting the players then using your thralls to tank thiers into the ground

Now i can say as for the pve side of pvp this creates a way better dynamic than being able to grab a thrall and steamroll everything pve wise almost instantly

As far as people screaming no offlining defense: thralls didnt provide it to begin with and anyone who said they did is a liar

But thats just my take on it, i love the way the updates been playing out

[Pfanner]

Im really confused why this discussion is so focused on human followers did you not test animal followers yet? Theyre absolute monsters with the +20 attributes and certainly by far outdps anything a player can do

[Tuffman]

Your thrall is not more powerful than you, those numbers are not a measure of power.

Your greatest weapon is the one that put humans on top of the food chain, your brain.

If thralls were more powerful than you, you wouldn’t be able to kill them. Yet any half skilled player could 1v1 any thrall in the game with little trouble.

PCs with thrall stats would be severely overpowered. Thralls with anything close to player stats would die in every single battle.

This comes up over and over. “Wah my thrall hits harder and has more HP than me.” Yeah, they’re supposed to because they’re mindless drones. You’re expected to dodge and utilize openings to attack.