Usually when I request more challenge to be added to the game, I get a ton of backlash.
Before Siptah, your thrall could solo everything. You literally get an easy T4 thrall from one of the guaranteed spawns in near noobriver and then you’re golden.
After Siptah, well you can do the same thing if in Exiled Lands, if in Siptah, you have to nab a cub from the NE island.
But after Siptah you don’t even need to do that. Stuff is still incredibly… lets not even call it easy. Lets say simplistic. So they lowered the HP, which was a good thing. It reduced the sponginess of the encounters. They lowered HP of thralls, which was a good thing. But they could go further. Personally I think they should half the HP of thralls and pets as they are now. That would put them with being threatened at the least.
But that doesn’t solve the simplistic problem. Cause you don’t need to even have a follower. Right now you can attack twice, block, and repeat.
Fights on boss creatures need to have some mechanics added to them. And I don’t mean cheese where you die in one shot. Though I wouldn’t be opposed to a stacking debuff that can eventually cause you to be one shot.
Mistakes should have consequences that grow over time. That’d be one way to handle it.
Adds are another. The Thag fight was interesting because of this. Assuming the adds can be killed of course. When our server was on the old map, we had a number of dungeons. The last boss was a demon spider with about 6000hp. It was meant to be a boss encounter for a level 40-45. It by itself is quite easy with someone using ancient weapons and such. But it comes with some tough spider adds, 2 on each side. They had about 400 hp each and hit 2x as hard as normal spiders.
However I also had 4 sets of 3 very small (0.6x size) spiders who can spit crippling poison each, and they have about 50hp each. They go down in one hit, but you have to deal with them otherwise the boss will be able to get ahold of you due to the cripple.
These would respawn every 60s. So they would keep coming throughout the fight.
The encounter was alot of fun from what the players had said (and the 100+ spawn counter indicated that it was engaged… alot). And that is what I was able to do with Pippi tools. Imagine the encounters Funcom could make? Thag and Witch Queen are just the tip of the iceberg.