OwnedThralls and shields need to change

Holy hell any of your thralls with shields are just annoying, like let’s block for 5 mins when you could be attacking and taking advantage of a gap in combat to get a few strikes in, nope let’s just block (or kick 3 damn times in a row)

ON TOP of all that, let’s make our own player bounce off our thralls shield………

We have enough stagger, we have enough group fights, we have enough thralls that spam block, can you please have our own thrall not block our damn attacks, like honestly if an npc blocking doesn’t block his own allies then neither should my own thrall for me.

Let’s just have thrall shields effect all except the current person they are following

Wait for it, just wait for it

“Don’t use thralls with shields”

“Don’t use thralls”

If that’s all that’s you’ll end up saying just go else where, a lot of us are not going to fully change how we play because some dude in the forums who lives the meta game says to stop doing something, it’s like target lock, if someone decides to use it that’s their choice, doesn’t make them bad or good, but you still get folks going “ooooooh you don’t know how to play or oooooooh you use target lock”

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Don’t use shields on thralls. I know you absolutely don’t want to hear that, but it’s sound advice for the game in its current state.

That doesn’t mean your complaint isn’t valid. They’ve talked a bit about improving NPC shield use so there is at least an awareness about the problem.

I also hope it gets fixed. It’s not just shields, they sometimes get stuck in block mode when using the battle axe, and sometimes they just won’t stop kicking.

They seem to have no problem using throwing axes, and I don’t see them get stuck in an axe throwing mode so Im not sure it’s just a matter of left trigger abilities being weird.

As for the thrall shield blocking the player, is this happening in PvE or PvP settings or both? I have experienced it but I play on a mixed server that’s PvP some days and have long since stopped giving thralls shields for my own sanity.

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What the… Wuuut??? Sorry, no. Just no… Maybe instead you should suggest not even loading the game - it would make about the same amount of sense. :confounded:

If they’re a follower you can tell them to move. That seems to help. You can also momentarily remove the shield. And finally you can make them drink a stamina and health potion before you go out fighting with them.

I would definitely like to see my thrall use a shield properly. Perhaps 3.0 turns A Idiot into functioning AI for our thralls.

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Did you read the rest of my reply? I’m not sure but it seems like there is a misunderstanding.

I agreed with the OP the npc shield use needs fixed, but in the games current build I recommend against using shields on thralls because they lack the AI to use them properly.

You can manually unequip the shield, but it’s not easy to be doing so in the middle of combat, and sometimes thralls just won’t unequip weapons or shields in their hands.

It’s broke, and that’s a bummer. Hopefully FC can get it fixed. Until they do I personally won’t be using shields on thralls and will continue to recommend other players to do the same, especially if they are having frustrating problems with it.

If you’re ok with dealing with the frustration that’s also fine, but when games frustrate me regularly I tend to stop playing them. Life is stressful enough, I personally don’t want to get more stress from my pretendy fun time games.

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Yes.

As I read it (and now reread it) you offered one suggestion and then just listed a number of complaints. I disagree with your suggestion and your complaints are of no real concern to me.

I actually went into detail about thralls having issues with blocking with other items, and have issues using other certain offhand items/abilities. I wasn’t complaining, I was adding context, which may be helpful in identifying why the problem occurs

You can feel free to keep using shields on your thralls. I’ll keep not using them and recommend anyone who doesn’t want to deal with frustration to do the same, especially when they come on the forum and state their frustration.

Two of the three solutions you gave haven’t worked for me, at least not consistently. Telling them to move has never made them stop blocking for me. Removing a shield or weapon that is currently equipped sometimes just doesn’t work, I’ve had a guy stuck with a weapon in hand that he wouldn’t put away and I wasn’t allowed to remove for well over an hour.

Stopping before every single encounter to feed my thrall a potion sounds like it would be pretty tedious. I have never tried this method.

I’m not sure what a stamina potion is? I know of some drinks that give stamina regen but it’s odd to give thralls stamina buffs as they don’t have stamina

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I think it is a way to make them change animation more than the effect. any potion that causes the animation “resets” the ai. But that is just a band aid for the bug, and really too much thought. Whenever my thrall gets brain freeze, I either leave and force the teleport catchup if it is a boss fight, or just clear the button mash nocs myself.

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I dunno, after you make them drink, it shows up in their stats so I thought it affected…

And I was under the impression that the only reason they were holding block for so long was because their stamina was low or zeroed out.

That’s probably wrong though, I really dunno. It seems to work for me is all I know. At the same time though, I recently equipped all my fighters with two-handed 90-Dmg swords - as those seem to cut through multiple enemies much better - and it seems it’s pretty much only multiple enemies that can kill a T3 fighter.

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I will just put here my own view on the shield matter.
Let’s say that you play the game by lvlling low hp thralls for your own reasons. A shield on your thralls hands is giving your thrall a good chance to stay alive and you don’t need to mind (babysit) for it through the battle.
So I am really happy that this mechanic works this way, because it gives a chance to low level thralls or bearers to live and follow more “careless”. Imagine a bearer with great hp and shield must be almost invisible, so this gives the advantage of your cargo to be safe, which is very important.
If your strategy - role, is to be “the fighter” and use your thralls as healing pillows only, then the way shield works now is very good.
If your strategy - role is to be the farmer, then it’s best to take a really good fighter with you who wields 2h sword to destroy everything on your path.
Maybe the extensive shield use from a thrall looks a bit annoying and weird, so in this point I agree with @HrothgarFrosthound, but I really like the chance it’s been given to low lvl thralls or non fighters to survive either on pve world or pvp. Most of the thrall assassinations on pvp world is from daggers, so shield is a good counter on daggers :man_shrugging:.

If this is an unintentional behavior then I will once more accept it but… I really enjoyed the fact that I could see inside the legendary chests before I farm them.

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Me too! So sad that was removed!

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@HrothgarFrosthound, forgive my off topic chat here, but yes @TeleTesselator, it felt more rewarding and fun to have skeletons keys with this feature. You know, having an adventurers blade, or a lion axe, or a glimmer moon, etc… means that you have to open a lot of chests to gain just one of these weapons you really need, even if Siptah is so op on weapons, some legendaries still didn’t loose their glamur or necessity.
In every pve server I have 10 chests for each legendary type of weapon, that in most cases are full with weapons I will never use. So imagine that almost every veteran player is holding in his house - base, this amount of legendary weapons at least with the same reasons of mine and without an actual prospect of use. This is against the memory issues we have in the new server rules isn’t it? So it might be a very good relief to the server performance if you had just one chest instead of 10 with legendary weapons.
I believe that this feature will help a lot the server performance and I think that it is far more rewarding to gain the weapon you really need from these chests. It was really nice in the Tower of Siptah to search all these chests and choose what you want, I really felt awesome that I could actually do this.

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One thing you can do with all those extra legendaries is the dismantling bench - you probably get 5 star metal each (not sure about the bows). It’s not a lot, but I’ve started dumping the really unused stuff in there and it gets a bit back. (Of course, you probably already have plenty of starmetal, so it may not even be worth the time it takes to dismantle them :laughing:)

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Wait, what? There are chests in the tower? :frowning:

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@TeleTesselator Not inside the tower but all around the tower it must have more than ten. On the top stairs left and right and around it.

Oh, those, I think you can still see inside those. They’re not the legendary chests - unless I missed some?

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So I’ve done a bit a checking, and from what I can tell the issue of your thralls block effecting your weapons is PvP related. This was the case on Xbox with the new battleaxe block at least.

I know that doesn’t really help anyone having a problem with it, but maybe it can help pin down the cause

Happens on PC with PvE too. I guess they’re talking about when your weapon hits the follower’s shield and it cancels you out? Probably blocks arrows too. I didn’t think of it as a problem though, just how the combat system worked. -=shrug=-

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