Why is Black Ice worse than Hardened Steel, if you need Hardened Steel as an ingredient for Black Ice?
Why is Star Metal slightly worse than Acheronian? Both are level 60. But you can just make an Acheronian weapon, Star Metal takes some effort.
Why is Dragonbone worse than Hardened Steel, and obtained at a higher level?
Why is the Khari Great-Sword worse than Telith’s Sorrow, Star Metal, and Acheronian when obtaining the recipe from the wine cellar is so much more the suck?
All your questions only have a single answer: because Funcom has gone crazy.
I don’t see any other explaination for all these nonsense we’re getting since June !
Didn’t they said in the live stream. Before leaving.
They’d answer all the questions,?
Also, if I recall correctly. Didn’t they say any change they make have a good reason behind.
Well, according to the most recent stream, Black Ice weapons will no longer require Hardened Steel weapons as a core.
Which is the most oblique fix to an “upgrade” actually being a down grade.
Potentially, the thought was Black Ice, with it’s cold snap ability, would be a PvP power house and this needed a stat nerf. Mind you, anyone who plays PvP with any regularity would note that cold snap is mild inconvenience at worst.
Dragonbone weapons now apply stacking Sunder on each hit. That, unlike Cold Snap, is a useful status anomaly and this one is happy to give up a little stat for such easy access to Sunder on weapons that normally wouldn’t have it. Your mileage may vary.
Also, farming Dragons is about as easy as gathering materials for Hardened Steel. While the feat was (is it still?) Level 60 gated, that’s done in a few days.
As far as Telith’s swords…
This one knows not. Perhaps they thought they are just upgrades on Hardened Steel, and consider the Heart a trivial component.
This one disagrees because of how long it takes to farm such materials, but that could be the tortured logic.
Moving on to the Khari gear…
Who the cluck knows, perhaps they consider the wine cellar it’s own reward and the RNG recipes to be for cosmetic purposes only?
If it were up to me. I’d have Hardened Steel be the top tier for crafting that you could make on the regular. Effectively becoming the standard weapon, or beginning of the ‘endgame’. Very common weapons until the majority of the population of a server becomes established. The only weapons that could be repaired in this list.
Star Metal would essentially be a slight upgrade (a few points of damage tops, and a moderate armor pen bonus), but the materials needed to make would be far more expensive, require the hardened steel weapon counterpart, and the meteors would drop ore the moment you cracked the shell (no bonus from pick). All other recipes requiring star metal would instead take hardened steel instead (such as DLC, and DLC would have their stats be the same as Hardened Steel). These would have like half the durability as hardened steel, making them a short boost when you get enough ore.
Khari, Dragonbone, Obsidian, Black Ice, and Eldarium weapons would have less damage than Hardened Steel, but have unique effects. Other special crafted weapoons will fall into this subtier as well.
Unique but non-legendary weapons would be effectively weak Legendary Weapons. Less damage than Hardened Steel, but similar (but maybe watered down) effects as Legendary Weapons. Just to spruce up some drops here and there.
Legendary weapons would be rare. Like really rare. Like on PVP, if one is stolen, there will be effort expended to try and get it back. Obtaining one requires killing and harvesting parts from dungeon several bosses. You use these parts to spawn a legendary boss. These bosses will require significant effort to kill and likely want a team of players to take down. They’ll have roughly the same stats as now, though weaker ones will be buffed to be in line with the others (no nerfs to the best ones, these are Legendary for a reason). They would still be random as to which one you get.
These will need to be truely impressive to make these anything other than a complete waste of time.
Especially Khari weapons, the recipes for which are Rng gated as is the material to make them, at the end of the longest dungeon in the game.
What sort of super power would justify all that hassle?
Obsidian is in a very similar boat in that it is a pain to get. Not as bad as Khari steel, but still a massive annoyance to farm.
Were you planning on allowing the Player to craft Black Ice weapons at home with a smith?
Dragonbone gear is all gated behind being able to craft weapon handles, a restriction Hardened Steel lacks. Would you also remove this restriction? Or add the weapon handle restriction to Hardened Steel gear?
So, the Unique drops would be universally worse than the dreck that has been crafted since level 30 something?
Again, we enter why bother terrain. Especially as they cannot be dismantled, these run the risk of being just trash cluttering an inventory.
The ability that most legendaries have is being a big ole stat stick.
The glowing property is weak enough as is, diluting it would make it not noticable compared to the new personal innate light.
Light weight, but not as light as Baal’s? Sorry, that sliver of weight is not going to matter.
Severe is a legendary trait, and very useful, because it is super cripple. Water it down and it’s just cripple… Meh.
The only potentially useful trait would be using a different stat than the usual stat.
Now we are talking!
Nevermind. Pointless time sink is pointless.
Unless one of the legendaries is a Bow that shoots actual explosive jars, there is no way it would be worth the effort in PvP. That time is better spent making IEDs. Especially now that there are no Godbubbles to save anything.
In PvE, the only real utility would be the adventure to acquire it and then leave it hanging on a wall as a trophy, too rare and precious to risk using, because once gone it could take years to acquire again.
Give each Legendary it’s own specific formula of boss harvests and rare materials, then this is a grand idea.
The bigger the effort, the less tolerable RNGesus crapping on someone is.
Exactly this! Status effects sound cool? Okay but you cannot escape math when it comes to DPS, and raw damage stats just win by a huge margin against all the current unique effects we see in the game, which is why we call Obsidian weapons “useless garbage” with their little 6dps bleed
Stacking bleed would imperil the niche they want to give daggers. This one recalls when Gray One and Incarmine weapons applied regular bleed rather than the silly little non stacker we have now.
On the other hand, Sunder is worth the effort, very often, as it contributes to damage very quickly and very directly. Lower raw damage against a sundered enemy catches up very quickly.
Crippled has uses, but mostly in PvP niches.
So many others seem like they would be good, but just don’t break their way into relevance.
But we must speak quietly of such matters, lest someone with more zeal than comprehension decide that all damage needs to be reduced until a single stack of a paltry dot be considered impactful.
Because dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s is too much effort. Attention to detail has never been Funcom’s strongest suit, but the situation has gotten much worse lately. The popular speculation these days seems to be that Conan Exiles isn’t receiving a lot of resources for its development, both human and financial. Every new update lends support to that theory.
Conan Exiles is slowly fading into history. It’s becoming unsustainable. The Age of War concept didn’t quite match up to reality. They hyped up a grand war, complete with sieges, soldiers, knights, trebuchets, and war cries. Then in the Test Live phase, they introduced this base-spawning camp that spawns soldiers who mindlessly charge in a single-file formation towards a player’s treasure vault. This can be called many things, but “war” isn’t one of them. I’m genuinely curious about the original concept that didn’t manage to materialize before the deadline, and that will likely never see completion due to Funcom’s policy of not fixing or improving what’s already been released. Adding new features, even on top of broken ones, seems to give them more room for advertising and monetization.
That might be their logic, but it would appear it’s not working out as they hoped. The state of chapter 1 strongly suggests that they didn’t have enough resources to finish what they planned before the deadline, so they released whatever they had. And if that’s the case, then the monetization isn’t working as well as they planned.
To be entirely fair, many people have never experienced modern warfare, nor are scholars of pre-modern war.
For those who have received a slanted understanding of what constitutes War… A foreign, hostile hegemony throwing combatants, some skilled and hardened, others basically conscripts of no note, at settlements to steal their resources, in a seemingly haphazard way, may be exactly what they think of when they think of War.
And honestly, that description, if we add a little light genocide, and land grabbing, does stack up for most modern conflicts. Brutish and sloppy intrusions, on flimsy pretexts, to violently rob others.
But those are not declared wars, and they absolutely are not what we saw in Hour of the Dragon, which would be the Canonical source for war in the Hyborian Age.
Right now, this one would call it an age of banditry and bullying.
Or the Age of Greed, because the crux of the Age revolves around the Hoard.
But always keep a few things in mind.
There is a select group that gives direct feedback to the devs, they don’t gloat as much about it now, but it’s a known.
Look at certain opinions posted, then look at the recent updates.
In all possibility, these atrocities against balance are the insidious whispers of a wannabe Grima Wormtongue. Perhaps. Whose motivations for such have been previously spelled out. Or the musings of someone with a very specific view of how the game should be, one that clashes so hard with the past half decade, but their position lets them champion revision over refinement.
There is “player” and “community” feedback supporting these changes, if you look close enough and curate the list sharply.
Edit: Also, to address the original topic.
One small issue with the chart.
DLC Greatswords require Starmetal.
So everything required for the Starmetal Greatsword applies.
The base DLC Greatswords are Iron equivalents.
