Lightning storm raid review

Solo players and small clans can be jerks too. You give them the fairy-tale and be nice and helpful. Then when you have left them alone long enough to stock pile enough explosives to wipe out an entire planet they offline you. This happens and then the next clan wonders why the Alphas are so aggressive. This is how pvp works, it’s not always a personal attack on the noobs by the big nasty Alphas but rather just a mechanism for survival.

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Again, I agree with the sentiment of doing away with offline raiding.

It creates all the issues we’ve seen from overbuilding > ToC issues to unhealthy gaming habits.

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Oh ofc! I did not mean to imply in any way that solo players or small clans are any better :smiley: Humans are just gonna be humans :smiley: The difference it they have less power to misuse, but yes that’s one scenario that you describe there which can be annoying for sure! But coincidentally, that one would also be solved by enabling offline raid protection!

I do not get your logic. You pretend as if those players didn´t had to farm for their stuff. Yes, beeing in a bigger clan always will gives you an advantage. You can not mittigate those, no matter what you do. Numbers always means more ressources, more menpower. And yes, I agree, that new players and small clans often have a rough life since their is no offline protection or other punitive measurements for big clans to raid smaller ones. I am a big advocate for drastically lowering the clan sizes. But the truth is no matter what clansize it is in the end, if people wanna play together they will find a way to do so and this means if a server gets overrun by 10 or more players there isn´t really something you can do to stop that right now.

Lightning storm is not the answer to the problems pvp has. People simply went on a spray of server destruction. Lightning storm killed serverpopulations so fast that private admins had to wipe twice a month to keep the population up. You can not pretend that smaller clans only raided bigger clans with lightning storms. People raided everything. It was a cheap way of destruction.

If you wanna play pvp in this game you need to allow people to have a base. Not just to build one for a second but also to defend it so they can keep it. A Base has meaning and should have one. If people think its not worth it anymore then raiding will be gone. This part of pvp will be gone. Therefore we need measure that allow people to have more defense constructions. This game has gotten more then enough stuff for the raider over the last years. That is a fact. When we started in 2018 raiders simply hadn´t anything else then bombs and gods. Then we got orbs, explosive arrows, trebuches, through the isle of siptah map and servertransfer, the way op siptah gear. Now flying bats, lightning storm and ice brigde. And what do get people got to defend their bases? Nothing. Where do you guys think stuff like the stacking methode came from? This game has no balance and you know that, but still you are calling for more destruction, more imbalance just because you hate bigger clans. What you want is revange, payback, because you feel they terrorize you. You take every attack on you, every raid very personal. This is not the games fault, its your own.

I get it, its hard. I experienced it many times myself. I don´t know how often I had to rebuild bases after raids. How many nights I barely slept, because I had to refarm and to rebuild. I knew they would come back again. But this never stoped me to play. It gave me a chance to do better next time. To see where my weaknesses are, where I had to reinforce my base. I found out how my enemies tick and what they really want. There is something no clan can take from you once you have it, and this is beeing able to read them. Their arrogance is your biggest advantage. Lightning storm took all of that from us. It was running around naked destroying everything in a second with almost zero costs. This is not the pvp and not the raid I want. I want raiding to have a meaning. To be more then just simple destruction everything out of arrogance and boredom.

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its a funny thing actually how a big clan often gets formed is mergers, you have 3 smaller clans that are on friendly terms, and then they get smashed by an “alpha” they merge for advantage, again and again, now they have pooled size and resources.

So if the Alpha is that bad reach out to other clans, form merge pacts or just decide to merge together for advantage, trade, socialize, share knowledge.

I get you want to be “the hero” of the story, but very few heroes are lone wolves no matter their ability.

the fact is read most of those archetypically stories, so often it is through trial and tribulation, then a band, pact or fellowship is formed through the combined struggle, and they help each other towards victory.

And the funny thing is, the so called alpha’s likely already followed this pattern.

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Honestly exactly this
I don’t play pvp and even I was thinking this
You want to overthrow or take on a big group then form one of your own
If you wana be the lone wolf then you’ll have to accept that superior numbers are often gonna do you in especially when they’re more experienced

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In all fairness. This is easier said then done. In order to merge several small clans you need to establish a certain trustlevel and you still often get one clan that will stab you from behind. Give information and ressources out to the alpha clan in order for protection while playing the friendly guy in front of you.

The biggest problem I see right now is that raiding has no restrictions. All there is to it is mass destruction for destruction sakes without a purpose and no real goal and thats it. Raiding shouldn´t be like that in my opinion. It shouldn´t be possible to raid more then one clan a day, so they need to choose their raidtarget wisely. After that the raided clan should be able to get some automatic raidprotection for some days to recover. This way a server can not get cleaned easily by big clans in a day or two. There are a lot of other measurements Funcom could implement if they really wanted to.

If a clan that gets raided is outnumbered by a lot, the raiding clan should do way less building damage. So they get some sort of punishment. They can still raid that clan, but it will cost more. Funcom also could restrict the amount of explosives a clan can produce per day. This would also help with the duping problem since people only could dupe that much as to what the daily limits are. It wouldn´t be possible to dupe unlimited explosives anymore. The battlepass shows that it is possible for the system to do that easily. And they could finally downsize clans to 6 and make a timer so you can not just leave a clan and rejoin another back and forth unlimitedly. It doesn´t change the fact that people can still merge play together, but it would make it much fairer on the battlefield and for smaller clans easier to survive since bigger tribes would need more then one base to watch and protect since they could not constantly hopp between clans back and forth.

Let me be clear: all systems can be abused one way or another. No matter how hard you try. But that doesnt mean that there is no room for improvements. You can not and you should not allow players in pvp to do whatever they want to do without expecting total mayhem breaking loose.

In fact there is no unraidable base, all bases in conan are raidable.

the only thing that can prevent you to raid a base, is if a large clan always stay online, in this case yes there is not a lot to do if you don’t have the same amount of people or more people than them. but that’s pretty normal, no ? but what i never saw happens in 5 years is that kind of big alpha clan staying more than 2 months on a server. Usually when they start to dominate and be alpha, and are full of loot, they simply play less or stop to play. and jump on a new server. if they play less you have open window to raid. the big clans that stay on pvp server more than 3 months are always kind people who are more pve and like to build and defend their base for pvp part only. that the kind of people that keep alive a server, and help others, and if you attack them they will give you a war. and in past there was more of this kind of people on offi server than the one that want to destroy all. but this particular community have been hitted hard by FC with their ban policy for building. As reminder i’m a solo player, never been in a clan on official, and playing on the exact same servers since the start as never an aplha clan wiped me for real (i mean i have been looted and killed many time, but with strategy, that i learned with time, i had always succed to save part of my assets in every situation and war, i even survived cheaters large clan of 10 people using stat 50 everywhere and the hack of the giant toon). so well if i was able to survive, defeat big clan alone with time, i don’t really think there is a problem. problem is more when someone that just started to play want to be alpha without wanting to spend the same amount of time than others to acheive what they have. and now yes a solo player life on conan is tough on pvp server, but well if you don’t like this challenge, you can also join the big clan, but for sure, a solo player can do a lot in this game and harm really hard big clan (and no need of bugged LS to do that).

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This one would like to opine upon this.
Perhaps elaborate on it a bit.

The update says it was fixed because the damage was more than expected, indicating the glisten sword of heaven that rended the ground and left naught but char and mangled dreams was doing more damage than intended.
Some players had said this, but did we have confirmation from on high that it was bugged?

This one hopes the tearing up stuff subterranean was an oops. But the damage?

Something that would be, perhaps, helpful, would be a regularly updated Known Bugs list.
That way we know whether something is working as intended or if it’s not. We can prepare stockpiles, ect, based on knowing what is hopefully going to be fixed soon.

Playing very close to the chest with updates to a Live Service game is, perhaps, not the best of policies.

For this one’s part…
They found the storm, especially in bottled form, too easy. That it carved all the way through terrain and layers of defense was excessive. But the damage, if it didn’t also have trample and rampage 9, wasn’t too egregious for what it is.
On PlayStation platforms, it came with the extra drawback that one’s game was very likely to crash for daring to cast it… Which is a form of balancing and added an element of danger to using it.

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simply search on youtube, you will see how balanced it was… damage were over 200k on some hits, and it was able to blow 3 square to 2 wide from ground to top in one hit, intention of dev was to have damage of one explosive jar on random hits, not 200k.

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That’s the crux, isn’t it?
Where did you see the devs express that intention?

denLead Designer

Katniss

24d

they will continue to do building damage, but we can adjust the frequency they target buildings. we’re investigating exactly how much damage they’re doing per strike - anecdotally people say they’re doing more than an explosive jar and “one shotting” t3, but the numbers internally suggest they should be a fraction as powerful and large as an explosive jar.

tl:dr - we’re looking into it

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Gratitude.

It possibly should have been pinned or a sticky as often as the topic came up.

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yeah communication have never been strong point of Fc, they should have officially annouced it and ask people to not use it as in fact it was a glitch, like the bomb exploit.

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Why would dragon horns be a issue? I mean, you can kill baby dragons as soon as u get the stone daggers.

Still have the issue on why I supported LS damage though
…like it’s just fine because it should be this way…3hours,100 m …each layer built accordingly to the tos…is this what you support as balanced raiding? If so, then this will continue to kill pvp because that isn’t fun…not even remotely and people will just walk away servers this built up. Sorry but that’s the cold hard facts. Yeah the dupes and exploits will drive the handful of vets in the servers that may get owned but the currently accepted raid mechanics will ensure it numbers remain low.

with what are you raiding ?

explosive jars, gas and explosive arrows in a deep cave. Front has build up so you can’t place treb to fire inside without blowing all t3 foundations. Avatars only get so far in and then you got to start the real work. Each foundational layer has two gates associated with it (front and middle which backs up to the next front) The foundations are raised so that if they crumble, the doors don’t get hit with the brunt of the damage and only the foundation does. This took well over 3 hours to get through ~ 20-30 layers of this. Perfectly legal and nullified almost instantly when the defender logs in and starts repairing the current layer. Completely removed all work when raid time ends. This may have been because of the splash damage issues but it’s still completely OP and unreasonable to work. Sure you can say they earned all of that with design…and you can also point to the server population of an average of 2 per night which means it’s dead and they have been on and doing this for well over a year…so please enlighten me how a normal person that can probably only put in 3 hours a night is going to play PVP against that? And if you say they can’t, then you are admitting this style of play isn’t a sustainable business model…the product can’t just be supported by those that have no life outside of the game. Defending that play is just suicidal for the playstyle as more and more folks get preoccupied with life and leave.

This is the ultimate issue with PVP in this game…those that have the time to kill dominate and push away those that don’t but those that don’t have more disposable income and therefore are more open about spending. Eventually , if this isn’t figured out, PVP will just fade away as people venomously defend their “earned” rights to have build-up to the point of utter dominance over the server. I’m not arguing on here because my team can’t get in, I’m on here arguing that the target demographic is going to continue walking away because seasoned vets don’t have enough sense to step down and let someone new take charge and makes an entire server unplayable for these folks because of it. The tired old mantras don’t provide revenue and actively work against company interests.
‘PVP needs dedicated and special folks willing to put in the time’…kinda forgot that this is a game and not a career.

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I’m actually confused on what is the dev intent of the entire PVP play style for officials are.

Is it just an effort of balancing which will always cater to those that have built up and those that spend 16 hours a day on?
Is it a high turnover game that have large swings of power dynamic changes?
Is it just a server that has a larger risk than the other two styles?

The year of updates have given mixed signals of the intent and future of PVP in this game.

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I actually do understand your point, but LS was the wrong way, you need to implement a raidingmechanic designed exactly against alphas and spam.LS was pretty useless against big alpha clans and ruined the game for smaller clans…

For example make it so that you can break a godbubble with gods, meaning the bubble will have hp and should be able to hold against a single god, but not for a second etc. That would be a mechanic directed only against bigger clans and won’t make any harm to small clans and solos.

I have seen what an alpha clan did with LS on our server, making literally 80% of solos and small clans leave… and we with other small clans made an alliance to get them of the server, without using a single LS because they had always people online to stop LS.

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