Nerf raiding again please

Conan Exiles General Discussion Feedback
1

I have already posted this under the last two hotfixes´ threads, but since those are not very good places to debate this in depth, especially with more people and for a longer period of time, here comes this separate, specific thread.

I want to second several players´ comments about how broken raiding is right now because of bombs being practically half cheaper (not quite ofc, but steelfire has always been by far the biggest issue with bomb farming, and that has been halved), AND all doors and gates having half the hp.

So first off, I think it is good that doors and gates have significantly less hp than the rest of the building blocks - doors and gates have always historically been the weak points of any fortresses and castles, or any defensive structures, really, and it makes sense from a gameplay perspective as well, because I don´t think it is good if players have barely any incentive to go through the weak points and instead bomb the crap out of several meters thick walls, potentially taking down a large portion of the base in the process. It definitely should be possible to destroy any structures, but at the same time, if those structures are T3 foundations, walls, pillars etc., it should be a rather heavy investment to take them down compared to just blowing up the doors. It should never be easy to more or less wipe/level a large T3 base, because then, what is the damn point of even playing the game as was clearly intended? Building large, cool castles has worked well up until now - as it should - but I do not think it will work very well anymore. Now I can solo farm enough dragonpowder in a single day to raid ANY base on my server, and we got some ginormous bases here. Which is some BS and totally unbalanced.

I believe raiding/defending was fairly balanced as it was, now raiding is just way overpowered. Keep in mind that the advantage should always by default be with the defender, not the attacker, because that has always been the case and is really the only reason castles were ever built. If castles could be raided as easily as they are in this game (especially via offline raiding), they would never have been built, ever, because that just would not be even remotely worth the investment. Do not let this happen to CE. I suspect large bases will start disappearing out of fear of being cheaply offline raided by any noob who so wishes, and will be replaced by low-investment small bases that are well hidden (further increasing the payoff of exploiting and cheating by undermeshing and similar techniques).

If the attacker needs to invest more to destroy a base than the defender did to make it, that actually makes sense and is good for the game. If you spend 300+ hours farming and building a base on official PvP as I have, you do not want some ■■■■■■■■ to come with a 1000 relatively easily farmed bombs and blow your base to oblivion just for the lols or because you killed them that one time. Raiding was perfectly fine the way it was pre-update, and now it is simply broken.

So what do I suggest? Well, either, like others have suggested, introduce some kind of offline-raiding protection/nerf, since offline raiding is lame and stupid anyway, yet is predominantly what is currently done. Then maybe this change to bombs and doors can actually be acceptable. For example, as suggested, make raiding any structures owned by a player/clan 75% dmg resistant 30 minutes after the last person from that clan has disconnected. That should prompt players to defend themselves if attacked online, while making it very inefficient for decent PvP players to offline raid compared to online raiding.

Or, just make bombs cost more again and give doors a bit of hp back. I would say 100 dragonpowder per bomb as was before and 80% of the original door/gate health would be reasonable.

Now, this isn´t even all - the avatars have also been buffed, and, granted, a small buff would probably be reasonable considering it has become significantly harder to farm zeal, but if they are now all around the destructive power of Jebbhal Sag, well… :smiley: It almost seems like Funcom´s vision for the game has shifted from “let´s build awesome structures and assault others´ structures and have conflict and have it all balanced and hard to monopolize by a single clan” to “let´s f@ck sh*t up, nothing must be left standing for longer than a week, lolz”.

But seriously, the only way to stay somewhat safe now might be to farm a crapton of bombs before someone else does, and bomb everyone who might possibly be a threat from the server… and then keep doing that every couple of days, because of fear of revenge. This is not how I want to play this game, and this is not how I want to feel playing this game. If raiding stays vastly superior to building up defences, I will likely quit the game sooner or later, because especially as a solo player, I do not stand a chance to really defend myself, regardless of how many defences I put up, just because I cannot be online constantly.

Also also, I wanted to note that I have not spammed doors and gates everywhere I possibly could in my base. But that will change now, because that is the only way I can feel at least a bit safe, so Imma have to go through a billion doors to get out of base. Which is going to suck, but worse even, it is going to look like garbage and not feel like a real castle anymore. I guess a lot of players would stack as many doors as possible after one another (as is commonly done in Rust, where PvP gets even way more brutal and ruthless, and requires a lot of efficiency on the side of both the attackers and the defenders), but I simply felt I could do without it. Not anymore though. So thanks for ruining my castle´s aesthetic, and further encouraging this idiotic door spam way of building (or even walling off any access to the base each time one goes offline, which is going to be absolute cancer for everyone involved, gg), Funcom.

6 Likes
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Riwillion is absolutely right. The changes are way over the top. And the impact on the player base is pretty bad already. Because more raiding is letting the community become more toxic while people are quitting faster on top of it.
The reason why I play on official PvP is the nice and kinda friendly PvP community. People mainly play honorable on our server and the server equilibrium is awesome since all the aggressive and toxic players are getting bombed into oblivion. But the patch is starting to mess this balance up.
If I would want to hardcore raid 6 hours a day and blow everything up, then I would play on a private PvP server with increased harvest and monthly wipes. But I don’t want to. And my clan doesn’t want that either. We want - probably like Riwillion and most of the other players on our server as well - just build something up, defend it, keep it, raid in a balanced way (without griefing, without fully wiping the opponent and letting him keep some of his stuff so he can recover quickly) and pick some honorable fights here and there while chatting and hanging out with nice people. This is why playing on official PvP is awesome in my oppinon. And Funcom is messing this great experience up right now.

I suggested and still support this kind of change. Offline raiding needs to be dealt with. Maybe the values need to be tweaked a bit. But I think that this kind of solution would be good and healthy for the server community. More opinions and a straw poll about this topic after would be nice.

2 Likes
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I actually did the basic math on that and with 75% resistance, it would take 10 bombs to take down a T3 door. So it is as if it would take something like 6-7 bombs, economically speaking, before the update, to offline raid a T3 door. Just slightly more expensive than raiding (doors at least) was pre-update, so it sounds good to me. Problem might be with other pieces, as it would take 40 bombs to blast through a T4 foundation, which is a bit of an overkill imo, even with how cheap bombs are now. (It would still be vastly preferrable this way over how it is currently though.)

This could also apply to offline purges, if the devs wanted so. After all, for gameplay purposes, purges should definitely be harder to fend off if you are actually there to do it yourself.

It is tripping me up how easy PvE is in CE for the most part, hardly any challenge at all, but when it comes to being offline raided/offline purged, the devs seem to really enjoy ■■■■■■■■ with players by making it borderline impossible to defend their base in any way at all. Maybe start upping the difficulty on levelling, bosses, npc farming etc. and then start thinking about player genocide via offline raiding/purging, no?

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The biggest problem i see is after 9 months, officials have become scarce and no new player wants to deal with a PVE hoarded dead PVP server alpha’s 6000 stashed bombs and 50 tokens.
If bombs are brought back up to what they were, then they also need a fast deterioration. Or we will be back at square one. New player joins, gets his 1st 20-40 bombs, decides to hit a T1 lazily built alpha farm base (because you know 6 months of no one else on server you just put crap out there). Alpha, being bored, and feeling really swole from the 6000 bombs, wipes the base of newcomer because he took a t4 smelter or robbed animals from a pen. Newcomer tells friends of the trolling bullying alpha (in his eyes), they all decide to stick to Fortnite, Realm Royale or Apex, where they feel they have a chance to have fun on more level playing ground. Game has no one on, Funcom moves on, the few that really enjoy the atmosphere of this game are left wanting.

Dragon powder should have decay of 2 hours, 10 stack max per. If you can’t use it, then it needs to decay. A many of my friends have decided not to even invest time in playing catch up.
Crafted bombs 30 minutes (even after being placed). This reduces naked bombing.

and to those that say thier server is fair, that is a matter of opinion. Fair because you have huge castle on a pvp server that has very little conflict? PVP means fighting. yes it sucks to be raided and lose your build. But if you are looking to build huge structures with no consequences, then PVP may not be waht you really want. You want raid time at your leisure. I play in big clans. We get bored. We nomad. We have found the game more fun when we are fighting (sans exploits and cheats). I know everyone has their own taste, but i see no fun in logging in, crafting 100 bombs over 2 days, then putting them in a vault.

I believe Officials (pvp especially) should be a place of high player turnover. Player buys game, joins PVP official, enjoys the quick raids and short investment, decides they want to invest mmore time, join privates, where they can have fun within community guidelines.

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I am sorry, but it is clear that you put very little thought into some of what you wrote. It takes quite a while to make say, 100 dragonpowder, and you say it should have a decay timer of 2 hours?? If you use one firebowl cauldron to craft, then you have to stash a lot of steelfire in advance and then use it to make the dragonpowder. If you have multiple (and also multiple T4 alchemists), you must also have a pretty solid, well-established base that has been around for a while. Which goes against your idea of quick conflict and players coming and going. So is stashing steelfire any better for anyone in any way than stashing dragonpowder? I do not think it is. Sure it will delay a raid a little bit, but not much at all, and this system will also rob the defender of their chance to actually profit from defending against a raid - any dragonpowder they might get this way will decay in a short while, well below 2 hours that is.

So unless they already have a target, are ready for a raid, and aren´t afraid that the raiders are not done yet, there is no way they can actually profit very much from defeating raiders. Which of course takes away a part of what makes the game fun and enjoyable.

Additionally, why not just put dragonpowder in freezers then? Or would that not be allowed as is now not with true names? Why even go to those lengths just to make people stash tens of thousands of steelfire instead of thousands of dragonpowder? Also, what is the point of making the stack smaller? Yes, it will screw a little with huge alpha clans that have 6000 dragonpowder in a vault, and now they can only have 3000 dragonpowder per vault. Well done :smiley: I mean, this isn´t even going to inconvenience them, really. If you have this many resources and manpower, having to get twice as much storage space for your dragonpowder is pretty much a non-factor.

I have a huge castle on a pvp server because local alphas are not dicks and since I treated them well, they reciprocated. They do not harass small clans or even solo players unless they cheat/are toxic/attack them in a dickish manner/harass newbies etc. I built it slowly over the course of a long time and enjoyed the process, and even so, I must say, your call for server wipes does have a point to it. At the very least, some officials should definitely get wiped regularly (I would say 4-6 months), because like you say, what is working on our server is not necessarily working everywhere and most people probably do not enjoy fighting impossible odds guerilla warfare against a massive clan with 15 large bases and 20k bombs in storage. And also there is a number of other reasons why wiping servers regularly is a good thing.

But at the same time, I very much disagree with your notion that all officials should be about quick action, no storing of explosives, regular and often wipes etc. That is the way you like the play, not how everyone wants to play. Do no try to force your preferences on others.

PvP is definitely what I want, but I also want some semblance of balance between how much the defender needs to invest into protecting himself, and how much the attacker does into obliterating that protection and effectively erasing the defender´s investment. That is, balance that is not equal, but rather at least a bit in favor of the defender - if you fail to attack someone, whatever, you are the one with the initiative, you enter the conflict (and let´s be honest, as of now, you usually enter “conflict” of raiding an empty base, because you are too much of a pus*y/pragmatist to try to online raid), and you can try again, no big deal there. But if you fail to defend yourself, which is currently extremely likely for countless reasons, mainly offline raiding, but many, many others, you are just screwed. You have lost either everything, or at least all/almost all resources, gear, thralls, and pets. If one side has way more to lose if they fail and way less to gain if they win, then they must also have vastly better chances to win than the other. Otherwise, we are just talking about a crappy game that makes no sense and is inherently unfair and imbalanced.

If attacking in a sandbox game is more efficient than defense, which doesn´t really make sense in any way as I have already explained, then there is basically no incentive to build a decent base other than to be able to make good gear and bombs, basically. Which feels extremely reductionistic and lame in a game with as much gameplay potential as CE has. I just want to PvP, but I do not want people to be able to wipe each other easily, because that just ruins the experience way more than it enhances it in my opinion.

Btw, I do not really understand the point about crafting bombs 30 minutes, please elaborate.

1 Like
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There is a much easier solution for most of the problem you mentioned: Weekly/monthly server wipes. Problems solved.

Fun fact: It is exactly the other way round. Private servers with regular wipes and increased harvesting/exp rates are already providing exactly the experience that you are looking for. We often play during vacations for a week or two (like right now) on private PvP and really enjoy the fast-paced all-out wars and permanent fighting. Especially starting right after a fresh wipe on a server with 70/70 players is very, very lovely.
But the official servers always were different. It was something permanent, something constant. You don’t lose your character, your stuff and all of your progress every few weeks. You don’t have the high player turnover that you mentioned. People are there for months, a few even for years. And I like the contrast between this kind of PvP and the “real PvP” that you described. Whenever we want to play “real PvP”, we just pick the highest populated and freshly wiped server, stay there for a week or two (while not doing much on official), have our fun and then return to our regular server after.

But I personally can’t stand this horribly toxic community that you face on this private servers. It’s too taxing. Everybody is insulting everyone in global all day long and playing ‘annoying chinese song’ via voice chat while trying to naked bomb your base. Without the relaxed official servers I would barely play this game and rather move back to Rust or Ark private PvP. Same toxic community, but better and more balanced gameplay.
But the Conan Exiles Official Servers are different than that. On our official server we can kill each other in open world, raid during the evening and still treat each other friendly afterwards. It’s an awesome experience that no other game was able provide so far. Fighting, killing, stealing and still being friends after. For me this is the best part about this game.

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all these responses, but not a solution to help the casual gamer. You do all realize, no gamers, no more income for dlc to cover costs, no more game. I have been on the hoarder side. Ia msaying that officials should be an area where we (the communtiy) traps the new gamer into the love we have so they stay.

You say the alpha controls the server. You more a fact that a casual gamer or group of them weren’t pushed off your server. And what you call toxic could be some one elses idea of fun in this game. Is it toxic because you use the actual mechanics and raid? again, eye of the beholder. But if alphas are indeed “good” and are only removing toxic players, why is the base dying off so quickly? I have met alot of gamers on different servers, and most just quit because the alpha decided they were toxic. the same one we would trade with and random melee for fun, and the alpha didn’t like the fact they didn’t have control of us or them.

I have told my friends don’t bother with the game tbh. You are too far behind in resources to even get a glimpse of the actual fun. As soon as you hit 60, get a T3 base up, alpha needs to rotate the tires on the months of boring hoarding they done.

BTW, never said wipe. Just give the solo and newbs a fighting chance by reducing the enormous resource gap. If you can’t raid/wipe with 2 gods and 200 bombs, you aren’t an alpha imo. Any more than that, is nothing more than an entitled rich bully clan.

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Jesus Christ, if you are going to bother fighting strawmen, please, make sure it isn´t just a pile of straw with a T-shirt tossed over it. I never said alphas are not toxic, I said OUR alphas are not toxic, specifically and explicitly remarking how I do not mean to say that that is the general state of affairs.

Well I do think that some officials should be regularly wiped, and I do believe that would address the issues you are describing very well. There will always be alphas and non-alphas, because not everyone can or want to play in a large clan, not everyone is a good gamer, and not everyone has the same amount of time to pour into the game. Which is all fine imo. But it is true that it becomes rather discouraging and pointless for everyone involved when the gap becomes ridiculously large. Hence, wiping the servers occasionally (some of them).

But I do not see your actual point anywhere. You accuse me of not providing a solution (I kinda did with the wipe proposition), but I was merely pointing out that your proposals are not going to solve anything. And you still have not explained to me how is it in any way better if people have to hoard steelfire instead of already finished dragonpowder.

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And you haven’t said how you know your Alpha is not toxic. Becuase you say so. I have ran across many a non toxic alpha. In thier eyes they aren’t at least. So only wipe servers you deem toxic. Hoarding Steelfire is alittle different, in one, waaaaaaaaaay more space would be needed to keep just 100 bombs worth.
Dragon powder for 100 bombs 5 stacks (tar and jugs will be the same number either way)
Raw mats for 100 bombs (T4 best case scenario)
Brimstone=500 = 2.5 (3 slots) stacks
Demon blood=100 = 5 stacks
Crystal=2500=25 stacks
Steel fire=2500=25 stacks
So we have 5 stacks vs 57.5 stacks. that’s just for 100 bombs. now make it for the 6000 i have seen hoarded. so 60 times that. 300 stacks vs 3450 stacks, 11 times the space. Plus to craft 100 bombs one would need at leaast 3 T4 alchemists ready to go close by. Creates a way more dynamic styel of play during PVP hours. And makes the raiders get steelfire they can use to build up if wanting to.

And being a long term fat alpha doen’t necessarily mean you are a good gamer, it just means( in my experience with conan, you have more grinding time. nothing wrong with grinding 14 hours, but don’t twist that with skill. I have ran into Alphas who are s**t at melee, and bomb tactics, but they have alot, so they just naked bomb after naked bomb after naked bomb. Run up plce 5-8 bombs, die, re-spawn an return in 5 minutes, place more. You can’t remove their bombs, so where is the skill in that. I guess they are great at running and placing. Like running away is hard on this game.
If they didn’t have a seemingly endless amount of premade dp, they wouldn’t be so callous in tier naked bomb approach.

Or I like when they use thier great skill to raid offline, and wipe a base with all those hoarded mats. Awesome!!!

1 Like
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Ok, fair point about the stack size/amount needed to make a bomb, that really does seem fairly considerable and might actually be a good solution to this extreme hoarding of dragonpowder - it would still be possible, but less appealing and practical, and I guess that is enough.

But I do not really understand your first paragraph at all, and as for the having time to play = skill, I never claimed that omg, I merely said that skill x time x clan size = results. Not that those are the same thing.

And yes, offline raiding is exactly what I am mostly complaining about here myself, as well as basically everyone else. No one here is disagreeing with you about that.

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Honestly, with the way PVP raiding is now, it is more of time x clan size > skill to the point that most “gamers” don’t care to play. My clan and i usually look for alphas tath want to fight melee. All the great work that went into making weapons unique is wasted, as it has nothing to do with gameplay in PVP servers. I think we both want the same thing, but different approaches. At least their is a dialogue about correcting the unbalnced nature of game.

Also, remember, Anakin thought with all his power he could take pain away from his family. But that was the dark way of thinking. that is where i always take the my alpha is nice comments with a large grain of salt. Nice,fair, non toxic depends on which side of the looking glass one is on.

Absolute power corrupts.
With great power comes great responsibility.
God cannot be all powerful, and still be all good. God can’t be all good, and still be all powerful.
These sayings all hold a lot of truth for a reason.
Power is too much if only one controls it. I aim to bring balance to those servers when i arrive.

If there is an alpha on a server with a bunch of sandstone everywhere and open pet pens, i see that as more toxic than me blowing it to oblivion just because i want to use the game mechanics of PVP and light a fire under the players on the server.

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Yeah, that might be true about skill being less important than time and clan size, but this is just a theoretical model, if you wanted to use that in practice to for example estimate who will come out on top in a war between two clans, you would have to operationalize each of these variables, meaning you would have to define what exactly it is and how to measure it, and in what units (it would have to be regular numbers ofc in order for the model to work, and they could range differently - for example, clan size could be 1,5 for one player, 2,9 for two, 5,8 for three etc., while skill could range 1-3, making it ultimately less of a factor). But all of that aside, skill definitely also plays a substantial role, as being better can make you defeat a noob and take away much of what they grinded to get, saving you time and effectively erasing their time in turn.

And sure, lots of people would disagree about our server´s alpha clan being good, but the fact is, they have wiped out a lot of exploiters, extremely toxic (insulting, disrespectful, spamming, griefing etc.) people and other trash that no one wants on their server for anything other than the pleasure of bullying them out of it. And most people who would disagree would fall into these categories and did indeed get wiped by them.

And what is toxic about having open animal pens?

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No, I don´t think you understand - I don´t want another nerf because I am sore, I want to nerf the raiding back to where it was, or at least closer to it, because in the last update, they effectively made raiding at least 3 times cheaper, which is absolutely ridiculous and game-breaking in my opinion. Raiding must never ever be cheap in any game where being raided means losing a lot of time investment, which CE definitely is. There needs to be a balance as I have explained before.

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I saw a note about brimstone harvest rate was cut down. I can’t confirm, as i am a lowly Ps4 player. but if that is so, the would explain the reduction a little, as harvesting will take longer.

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This is without a T4 ALCHIE FOR DRAGON POWDER.
using 5000 damge for tnt. (numbers still back doors as only real change with 6000 damage )

Just doing some number crunching, it takes 12% of a brimstone run (4500) to blow off 2 doors(airlock) and 24% to take out a foundation.

Before the patch (9000 brimstone per lake run)
32% airlock
vs
23% foundation

so reality is, they didn’t strengthen bombs, they actually made doors the weaker point based on time and cost to farm and the smarter tactical way, as it should be imo.

1 Like
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#Signed on NERF THE DAMN RAIDING.

  • Thx for “fixing” the one thing that was NOT completely broken, Funcom
18

I sign my name on re-nerfing the raiding. Lowering door HP and making it easier to craft bombs?

They clearly didn’t think that through. Blatant and obvious what will happen to anyone who actually plays the game and doesn’t just sit there sifting through the code.

Wish they playtested these effing updates first. Vigorously.

19

Ok, if brimstone farming has been “nerfed,” it might make sense and be reasonable after all, but I do take an issue with at least some of those numbers - before the foundation had 100000 hp, meaning you needed 10 bombs per foundation, and doors had 50000 hp, meaning you needed 5 bombs. Therefore, if you needed 32% of the brimstone to blow through 2 doors, which doesn´t seem right to me just looking at it btw, but will check that later, then it would have to also take 32% to take out the foundation, because splash damage through building blocks is basically nonexistent (which is good imo), and 5+5=10, and 10=10, so if 10=32%, then the other 10 of course must also mean 32%.

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unless damage has changed, it is 5000-6000. That is what i used. But i haven’t bombed in a while. More the fighter for our clan when we raid.
Also, i for some reason used the old 70,000HP on doors.
Numbers tweaked to the 10,000 damage + NERFED BRIM FARMING.

HP BOMBS BRIMSTONE %
NEW #'S 50000 5 275 6.11%
100000 10 550 12.22%
OLD #'S 100000 10 1050 11.67%
100000 10 1050 11.67%
3-5 PATCH #'S 50000 5 525 11.67%
100000 10 1050 23.33%
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With that now double checked, it means it takes half as many resources to get thru the door. Technically with the latest tweak back that they did to 100 steelfire, it now takes more of your % of brimstone to blow 1 found vs 1 two door air-locked door way.