Maybe nerf Arena Champion a bit?

Conan Exiles General Discussion
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Usually, I just put my wolf on “Do not attack anything” and keep her stun locked with sword and shield. But every once in awhile, she gets in an attack. I think it’s pretty insane that she can kill a player with one combo. But this time, while I was avoiding her to drink a healing potion, she turned on my passive wolf and killed him in 2 combos. A level 12 greater wolf with a vitality perk, and she killed him in just 2 combos…that’s a bit ridiculous. I don’t mind a tough fight, and I don’t mind her insane health so the fight takes time. But her damage output is just so far beyond anything else in game it seems unbalanced.

I finished her off afterwords and retrieved my poor wolf’s carcass. :frowning: I could have avoided this tragedy if I told my wolf to stop following me at the back of the room away from the fight. So I bear some responsibility for his untimely death.

But am I the only one that thinks her damage is unbalanced from everything else in the game? Even the final boss of the Warmaker isn’t anything compared to her. The only other damage I’ve seen that might compare is the final boss of Wine Cellar if you fail to avoid the blue light. But even it isn’t as much as one of her combos.

To be clear, I don’t have exact numbers for comparison. Maybe there’s a setting or mod that shows damage, I don’t know. But just going by the damage I recieve in fights, I have to say she’s so much more than anything else in game it just seems very wrong.

In the end, as I said before, this could have been avoided if I’d had my wolf wait for me somewhere safe. But as this is the second pet I’ve lost to her (first was a level 20 Bruno I brought from Siptah and I didn’t think to put him on passive for the fight. RIP, Bruno), I felt I should at least mention this on here to possibly get her damage balanced. Or maybe just to warn the uninformed that don’t want to lose their furry companions.

As for thralls vs Arena Champion, I never use them. Maybe they make the fight much easier. I just prefer being the “hero”, not the pokemon master.

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I wouldn’t. Sure, their armor will allow them to stand against the Arena Champion longer, but it’s still a big risk. If you get killed due to lag, the Champion will turn on the thrall and most likely kill it.

I generally don’t take a follower through that door unless I’ve killed the Arena Champion. If I don’t want to fight her, I’ll just slip through the crack in the wall and make sure my follower doesn’t engage her. If I do want to fight her, I’ll solo her and then take my follower in.

I don’t know if they designed her to be a follower-killer on purpose or by accident, but that’s how I treat her.

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Did you say nerf!!

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Yeah, that’s on you. Thrall or pet, they stay by the door.
The Arena Champion is so predictable that if you nerf her damage, what’s the point? Besides, you can just avoid her.
This game lacks challenging opponents in my opinion.

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The only thing imbalanced about the Arena Champion is that she is an optional mini-boss without much reason to engage. I’d like to see her loot table adjusted to make her worth fighting.

In Savage Wilds, she’s not even one of the hardest human-like NPCs. There’s a Hyperborean Witch Queen who is much much nastier. She hits as hard as the Arena Champion, but with daggers. She’s also a hyperborean which makes her much taller and her attacks hit a wider range than normal NPCs.

Players who play on that map are capable of routinely killing her as well. So I don’t believe a lesser NPC in the base game needs a nerf. If anything, we could do with a few more encounters that are more complex.

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I wouldn’t mind the encounter being more complex, but this one isn’t. The call for nerf makes sense when a lag spike – something that happens quite often on official servers – can get you killed in a matter of seconds.

Don’t get me wrong: if they don’t do anything about her, it’s no skin off my nose. Even if I get killed by the Arena Champion, I always take precautions to keep my follower (if any) safe, and I can summon my corpse via sorcery and go try again. So this is not exactly a pressing need. I just believe that she is one more among a myriad of things they should polish and improve.

Giving her better loot, like you suggested, would be a nice thing.

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I take any opportunity to skip the Arena Champion. She’s a drain on resources and doesn’t even drop all that many armor scraps compared to the much easier Warmaker.

As for it being a difficult fight, I mean, sort of, but not in the right way. It’s a common but altogether lazy way of creating an artificial difficulty scale to just up the health/damage/armor for “hard” enemies. I would say that the final boss of the Wine Cellar dungeon does a better job by introducing new mechanics into the fight. I think the Witch Queen palace also throws AoE attacks that you have to dodge, but it’s not as successful in making it an engaging fight. I would be all for just recreating the AC fight to include similar or entirely unique mechanics to the fight.

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I always thought that the Arena Champion was over-powered. I do not mind a challenging fight, but to be killed by two hits when you have end game items is ridiculous.

We only fight her as a group of players taking turns to draw her attacks while others heal, but we are not all always in-game together so I do not fight her very often.

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Off-topic nitpick: that ain’t the Warmaker, that’s the Champion of the Warmaker. You can find Warmaker Klael in Unnamed City, but you can’t fight him.

Sorry for going off-topic for a bit, I just find the lore to be fun :slight_smile:

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No this boss is easy, the skeleton mini bosses are hard!

The only fight that’s still extremely difficult (solo) is the rockslide!

Arena champion has a purpose like most of the bosses have, to teach us something important for this game! If you want to be champion in this game you have to do 2 things!

  1. Fight alone, without thralls!
  2. Learn how to keep the balance of a fight.
    These are the lessons that you take from this boss!
    For this lesson Arena champion must remain the way she is and if you ask me, she is perfect!

It’s a fight that you really don’t have to take and avoid really easily!

I am sorry, really sorry for your wolf actually!

Yes this boss is teaching you lessons in a hard way, like only a few in this map.
Your gain from this fight is this lesson, I know it’s great prize but I am pretty confident that you ain’t going to make this mistake again for sure!

Other players in the past lost their concentration and lost a lot more than a pet! We didn’t knew that before we take this fight we need a second key! Back then of curse your God Thrall could easily defeat the arena champion, but still you wanted time and concentration to gain another key. Frustration was winning with the outcome not to be able to be on time back and you were loosing your whole gear plus the loot you were carrying… Hard lesson :wink:.
Now almost everybody knows that it is not safe to start a fight with just the key you are holding, so the Arena champion, is truly a champion, our thralls cannot be champions anymore, only us! For this reason only, the Arena champion is perfect as it is! So defeating her you can call your self a champion of this game!

Again I am really sorry for your pet, but I am happy for you for two reasons!
First you killed her alone, congratulations champion!
Second, it’s the last follower you will loose in this fight for sure!

What I do? I say stop, not stop following, just stop! This way if I see that I lost the balance of the fight and my follower is in danger because the arena champion is heading to kill my follower, I run and command my follower to move! This way your follower may loose some life but surely won’t die! Lags is always part of the game and can become reason to loose the balance of a fight, so “flee” is the best option, no reason for your follower to die from your mistakes :wink:.

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Oh hoooo. And the PvP calls for nerfs are something different?

No. The Arena Champion should oneshot people. And also take your loot. So you can get a taste of how it’s like…

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I hadn’t went there after 3.0 dropped.
She is ridiculously easy now. Probably I could have finished her in half the time.
I just took a mace (momentum, nothing special) and coarse trousers.
Please, buff her! :laughing:
@stelagel with these new builds we became monsters.
I recorded the fight. :wink: 1st attempt, default definitions. No shield.

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Exactly @MarcosC, we are monsters now and I love it more than ever :grin:

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Definitely it was an improvement. Tonight I’ll solo the wine cellar naked. :smile:
I just hope the bosses aren’t invisible… that might ruin my plans…

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You’re only hit by the Champ if you fall asleep! :smile: That fight is truly boring. She’s slow, she’s predictable, she’s basically a punch bag. They could make her one shot players that it would be the same. You can’t compare AI fights to human fights. But when you get in player vs player fights, you know what you’re in for. :wink:

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Well I have ignore this long enough…just ignore and run past. The only thing that should stop your trek for armor shards is getting some black ice on the way so you don’t have to go up there

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I mean, I did say a lot of other things there, too. I could point out that I said I understand why people are calling for a nerf, but that I would rather have her behave in a more complex way rather than just being nerfed. I could point out that I said I don’t really mind it even if they don’t do anything about her. I could point out that I agreed that giving her a better loot table would also be a good solution.

I could point out all those things and more, but you’re clearly only interested in trolling me, because you don’t like it when I point out when PVP players call for a much larger nerf than necessary. Just like with PVP nerfs, these things should be discussed, instead of simply asserted as necessary or dismissed out of hand without discussion.

But I guess it’s more fun to “PVP” on the forums than have a discussion. :man_shrugging:

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You can kill with your hands ? xD

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Just out of curiosity, is that online or single-player?

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From what I understand she already HAS been nerfed…
Her melee multiplier is like 2.6… rumors have it prior to 3.0 it was close to 10? (I don’t know for a fact as I didn’t mess with thrall stats then, but I’ve been told :stuck_out_tongue: )

That’s the thing… she does NOT have insane health… she has like 5k health…
What she DOES have is insane armor… more than anything in the game… almost 19k

So if you approach the fight with that mentality… the story is vastly different and she becomes an absolute pushover…

Here’s a cute video of me killing both her and the Judge (Siptah version of her with a spear instead of mace) in a mere 2 minutes one after the other…

And I must point out that I did this for damage comparison purposes as people were wondering how much heavier the AC mace hits compared to the Judge spear so I had to let them hit me… In the case of the AC you can very easily avoid all her attacks just by stepping to the side… or walking in a semi-circle infront of her… you don’t even need a shield, just wait for your moment and hit her.

Now here I used the Blade of Seven winds katana, with the katana special that’s going to be nerfed / removed in a few hours (basically it’ll do way less damage on the dash), the weapon itself will still be really good against these targets with regular light / heavy attacks as it ignores armor.

If you don’t have that, then Bleed / Poison ALSO ignore armor… so poisoned daggers are cool against her… but I would simply recommend the best 1h mace you can make (armor penetration wise) and simply do a LLHH combo till you knock her off her feat, then back up a bit to regen stamina and repeat.

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