I like the op’s first suggestion of different perks for Fighters ad Archers. There are already lots of different sets for different pets. It’s actually pretty strange that humans all share the same set.
Hopefully this is not off-topic as it’s still about followers and leveling, but why do you not like the hidden modifiers? Personally I like them, they leave an element to be discovered by experience and also are a powerful balancing tool for the developers should they choose to use it. I always get a nice hit of schadenfreude when the meta-thrall gets nerfed and it takes a while for people to notice
They weren’t discovered by experience, but by modders in the devkit. Most console players are frustrated because they can’t reliably use experience to see what is and what isn’t a good thrall, they pretty much have to either take a PC-Player’s word for it, look at the wiki to see devkit mined information, or download the devkit on their PC’s and look themselves.
Without using those resources, can you tell me a method you can use to tell me if Captain Ioushuwa or Waros the Breaker is a better fighter thrall? They’re very similar in tier, but even with that there is a decent enough difference in the hidden multipliers that a perk will be rendered obsolete.
Personally I have a variety of tools available to me that allow me to pinpoint the best thralls on whatever map I’m currently playing. Even without admin commands and devkit, I can use Hosav’s Custom UI to be able to see how much my thrall is doing.
Well… not everyone runs that mod (there are private servers that don’t). Not every can run that mod. And as pro-mod as I am, I don’t find that acceptable.
And someone who has used the devkit, I would like to say that it is NOT a powerful tool for the developer. Each individual entry (each named, each tier of each tribe, and each variation thereof) has its own line in a table. They are NOT always named after the thrall either. Some are. But some are just something like Lemurian_Fighter_4b
So when a player says x thrall is broken (lets say their meleemodifer is set to something like 7.4 instead of 1.4). They have to go and look up the thrall, go oh crap, what tribe is that? If I’m not mistaken, they use alot of the same resources we do.
No. Instead of all that there should be some standardization. Now… I’m not suggesting normalization. But hear this out so you can get an understanding of what is being suggested.
I’d like to see hidden modifiers done away with. This means the hidden modifiers for attacking with weapons (the melee and ranged modifiers). But this also means the ones that determine Health for Vitality. This varies from thrall to thrall. Meaning a thrall with 10 Vitality could potentially have more bonus health than one with 20 Vitality. That doesn’t really make sense, does it? Same thing for Agility, all thralls should get the same Armor bonus.
This doesn’t make every thrall the same. On the contrary what they could do is standardize the thralls across the board. The tribe and tier determines the starting attributes. And the better tiers would have better growth chances. Growth chances could also be modified by different individual named thralls.
So in this case some tribes would be better archers (accuracy), some would be better bruisers (strength), some could take more hits (agility or vitality), and some would be better at exotic conditions like poisons and bleeds (survival). And even within their own tribes some of their heroes (named) would be better in other ways within that tribe too.
But the player would be able to see this on their stats page. If you pick up a Thrall with 30 Strength, they would do more damage than one with 10. If you get one with 30 Agility over one with 10, you know their armor will be better.
You would still have the discovery element, but it would be easier to discover by simply finding and breaking the thrall to see the stats. But we can do a little better than that. There’s a suggestion I’ve had for a while similar to a question you asked. But I normally don’t express on the forums (because I don’t wish for the perk system to be focused on UNTIL the over all system is fixed). But I will for your sake.
So the special dogs like Brutus and whatnot have unique perks. I could definitely see every named thrall having its own set of unique perks. And I would like to see non-unique thralls have general pool perks similar to how animals have them. So archers would have archer perks, fighters would have fighter perks, and bearers would have bearer perks (maybe survival could increase pack sizes).
Yeah but that doesn’t matter. Passive advancement would mean I simply harvest and secure the base while the Teimos factory churns. even if I get 1 leveled every other day, that simply means within the week I can have maxed my thrall count with level 20’s all sitting at over 13k hp and had the time to level up my base to T3.
I think you misinterpreted my rate of leveling. I meant 2-3 days per level with it possibly taking even longer past level 10 (or even capped).
This wasn’t a suggestion to entirely replace leveling, just an option for those who want to level more than one at a time or for those who can’t dedicate every day to taking a thrall out on an adventure but would like some way to progress a thrall, albeit slowly, while offline.
OK I can see that but also so no one actually using it (like the large watering well) since the function isn’t incredibly beneficial.
However something that just popped in my head, thralls are treated as inventory items until placed. That works great when using crafting tables and storage etc. There may be a snafu in trying to go backwards. So your new pit idea would just be holding and slowly learning until you get to them and do the quick leveling…that i can see of more value to someone like me that is methodical.
Yes. The thrall, once placed in the world CANNOT be placed in the training stations. There’d be too many code gymnastics involved for that to work. My suggestion works only when the thrall is freshly tamed and unplaced. And TBH, I’m more in favor of capping the progress the more I think about it or at least capping it between the two tiers at level 10 for a basic trainer and 15 for the improved trainer. Level 16-20 can only be gained through real-world experience.
I don’t see it needed. In your 2 days/ level, I would get sooooo impatient knowing there are unleveled thralls…wait there is a huge abuse that can occur so your limiter is warranted. Without the limit, you could have a fully leveled thrall army in your back pocket…and you could transfer into a server…level 60 with all the building requirements, crafters, and fullly leveled defenders on the ready. Yeah keep the limiter in fact I would say 1-5 nad 5-10. You can get to the first perk without normal leveling and gotta do the rest the old fashion way.
Part of the code gymnastics required is the fact that thrall-as-item does not have any individual attributes (e.g. strength and such). Your idea requires adding that.
I’m not saying I’m against your idea, I’m just pointing out that it involves a problem you might have overlooked.
To be fair, it’s not a bad idea, but it’s a textbook example of scope creep: the thread started as “fix the undesirable perk allocation” and now it’s “let’s revamp the whole leveling system and add new stations”
Again, I don’t dislike the idea at all, but I think there are ways to solve the problem that are easier to implement.
i’ve been having a go at this issue in my head for some time. I’ve been thinking, what if, STR and ACC benefited a thrall’s melee and range damage bonus simultaneously? the increments don’t have to be equal–they remain as they are for the specific thrall eg. +1 str/acc to a berserker will give a 0.4% increase to melee, and a 0.8% to ranged. if that’s somehow too powerful, maybe lower the increments. the point is, nothing feels like a truly wasted perk, since even a HP nerf from Warden(generally a bum deal even for archers sometimes) at least gives a melee boost from the accuracy bump.
That’s probably why I don’t see Expert Survivalist as much of a nerf as Warden, since I’ve come to appreciate the bleed/poison reduction, but what the heck is range bonus going to do for my melee companion after getting robbed of HP?
I’m just gonna copy & paste the suggestion I made, like I always do on these threads about thrall perks:
Make strength also give a bonus to armor penetration for ranged weapons.
Make accuracy also give a bonus to armor penetration for melee weapons.
That way, the “useless” perks are not useless anymore. Got a -ACC, +STR perk on an archer? Awesome, your archer gets more armor penetration. Got a -STR, +ACC perk on a fighter? Likewise, more armor penetration, yay!
On Siptah just as an example, the easiest “Elder Vault” brings a T3 to level 8 and a T4 to level almost 7. It takes about 25 to 30min to run that vault if you kill everything (as you should if you’re in there for leveling). A second run brings T3 to level 11 and I’m not sure about T4 - as I haven’t run a T4 through twice yet. A more difficult Elder Vault like the easiest one of the two Wolf Men vaults, brings a T3 to level 11 and almost to 12. It you kill 3 or 4 dear in addition it’s level 12. That vault takes about 40 to 45min to run.
How come it’s taking you 2 or 3 days to hit level 10, is my question?
If you’re on EL it’s pretty much the same speed in the Unnamed City or that dungeon with the portal entrance with the various animal packs and the bull at the end (I forget it’s name).
Because the proposed concept is literally you doing nothing but putting gruel at a station and letting the game passively level a thrall for you. Your reward is minimal effort in leveling a thrall and the option to level more than one thrall at a time. The drawback is that it takes forever.
What? I’m confused. Are you talking about something you’re proposing that doesn’t actually exist, or some way you have found to passively level thralls in the current game? If the later, could you explain it (again)?
Yep. Earlier in this thread I proposed a new workstation that would passively level a thrall so long as 1) the thrall has not been placed in the world and 2) you continued to put food into the station so it would work. Adding a taskmaster speeds the process, but it’s supposed to be slow to mitigate abuse and ideally should have a level cap so you don’t get level 20 armies without some effort.
Sorry I got busy. Thanks for the response. And yeah, that all makes sense to me. Particularly the bit about normalising the stats, it’s very counter intuitive the way it is now.
I’ll just add though that when I said hidden mods were powerful tools for the devs I meant Funcom devs, not modders, to balance the game on the fly. Everyone is using Tiemos? Secretly nerf them and make Tessa the Blade or someone top dog. This is just a guess but I presume the devs want players to use various thralls. The hidden mods are a way to get people to take a chance (not that they seem particularly great at using them
for such a purpose). I mean combat mods only, not vit etc.
