I’m curious, did you have any points in authority? Also, do you remember any of his stats, like health and armor?
I have a feeling that the authority attribute makes a huge difference here.
Even before 3.0, I stopped bringing any pets or thralls close to the Arena Champion. That NPC seems to be designed to be follower-killer, on purpose. As for why she turned on your wolf, the NPCs change aggro if you avoid their hits long enough.
Yeah, probably. I’m getting the impression that the devs either aren’t quite sure what to do with the pets, or they have an idea that disagrees with the vast majority of what the players want from the pets.
Anyone who thinks pets are “cheap” doesn’t consider time to be valuable
I’ve been trying to get a mammoth with decent growth chances for days now. Most of my elephant calves grew up to be regular elephants, one turned into a greater elephant, and two into mammoths with shіtty growth chances. I still don’t have a decent mammoth.
This goes for most pets. Sure, you can catch babies without having to knock them out, but the RNG is a bіtch.
The problem with this idea is that it clearly shows that the current dev team hasn’t actually spent any reasonable amount of time playing the game, especially on retail. There isn’t a “mid level”, there’s leveling when you really don’t need either pets or thralls, and then there’s max level when you do need them.
I will acknowledge that there may be some private RP servers where this idea might be applicable, but the vast majority of those are heavily modded and it’d get lost in translation anyway.
True for most of the players. The only exception are the newcomers to the game, but it’s an important exception.
I understand the need to make the game fun for the newcomers and I agree with it. However, I think that making a whole concept in the game focused exclusively on the newcomers is, well, wasteful.
Most of the rest of the design isn’t like that. Sure, nobody’s likely to rely extensively on an iron mace once they’ve learned the ropes, but there are star metal maces and legendary maces available. Same goes for pretty much every other aspect of the game, except the pets.
That small cave isn’t the easiest place in the world to reach, but that being said, it is still the best place to get Sabertooth cubs in my opinion!
You must have that RNG luck I only use shadespiced foods, and my chances of greater pets is always below the suggested %. I just farm the hell out of wolves in my area, and eventually Corrupted Wolves spawn and drop Shadebloom. Sometimes it takes 10-15 Corrupted Wolves before it drops Shadebloom, but killing enough of them has got me set-up with a decent stack!
Just for example, it took me 15 Scorpions just to get a Queen, and took 15 Elephants for one Mammoth (not even good stats). I always like to stack the pen with 5 of whatever I’m putting in there!
I think it does a disservice to even remotely put greater variations of pets into the lump of regular pet animals. That’s like equating a berserker with a T1 noob river fighter.
I would say that greaters are significantly more difficult to get and train.
You need the game knowlege of which food to feed it to gain the maximum chances of greater. Even at the best cause, you are looking at (for most) a 1 out of 4 chance which means you need to collect four different animals at once. Gotta wait and hopefully you get a greater.
Thralls are not as limited. There are 100% spawn points for beserkers and RHTS.
IMHO, all greaters should be equivalent to good T4 thrall in strength. The assumption of ease is only an assumption and not set in the laws of probability.
The pet nerf now is too much; dennis said as much in the devstream. Unnerfing will be happening but maybe its not as much as people would like, but right now is the bottom.
Speaking of pets. I just did well-trained with one of the legionnaires I got up to 20…HOLY…almost 2k armor, +400% damage (which I’m figuring is about 250) and over 4K health. The thing is a freaking beast as far as the new thrall rules go and one of the best foods for HP recovery goes into stacks of 500. Seriously, I am just in awe at how awesome it is. Took on the Red Mom by itself. I’m still not sold that well-trained is better than War Party since it has significant damage afterwards (half) while having two meant either lost about 10% of the HP in roughly the same amount of time.
Good luck with that message. I’ve been trying to get people to listen to it for the better part of 20 years.
The reasoning as you know goes, people aren’t newbies forever. And IMO, you don’t need to coddle them at all. They will get their motivation to get to ‘endgame’ by seeing others there and going, “I want to be like that guy.”
To do that, you need to have enough game at the end to keep those veterans playing. When newbies come into a game and there is no veterans around to aspire to be. Then they lose their motivation. And this happens when you focus too much effort on newbies that could have been spent on the core veteran playerbase.
One of the things I found fascinating is the Lead Producer of FFXIV, Yoshi P, just announced a concern with raising the level cap of FFXIV in the future. Using FFXIV as an example, every expansion they raise the level cap by 10 levels. Doing so means using a TON of resources and time making content for players to level in. Once they get to max level, they spend their time doing max level stuff. And anyone who’s been in that state knows what I mean. You do two 4 man group dungeons over and over for tokens. You do a 24 man dungeon. Around two to three 8 man trials. And a 8 man raid (regular or savage). As well as maybe a relic weapon quest, or leveling other classes if they aren’t already. Its very repetitive.
Well video games aren’t getting cheaper to produce. And spending that time and resources on parts of the game that players spend less than 5-10% of their time on is wasteful. Out of the 5,000 hours played in Conan Exiles, I maybe spent 300-500 on leveling, and I’ve leveled over two dozen characters. Many of you are still on character uno with as much or nearly as much played. What does level 10-50 content even do for any of us?
So yeah, pets being a mid level thing is an utter mistake. It can be fixed though. There’s some interesting systems they can use.
Might be seeing it get significantly cheaper with ChatGPT as programs write programs (self-replicate)…seriously it’s like we don’t look at the higher lessons that Sci-Fi fiction warns us about.
I’m not even worried or concerned about those things. The text based AI generators are just fancy cellphone text auto-generators, and art based AI is just fancy paint tools. They are no different to us in the 21st century than typewriters being replaced by wordprocessors and keyboards and physical mediums being replaced by digital in the 20th century. They’re nowhere near the doom in gloom people think they are once you look into how they work and what they actually do.
That is exactly what our new Skynet-Friend Computer overlords would say.
This one is getting very strong Be not afraid mortal vibes from your statement…
A jest.
But in all seriousness if we do take steps towards actualized and self replicating AI with sense of self and will… we (as a species) really need to improve our parenting skills.
And humans are fancy primates. The point is that too many folks can’t tell the difference between this AI and human authorship in various language applications.
Nah. Just kill it with fire and extreme prejudice.
You see, an attitude like that immediately puts any hostile action against us by any intelligence we create in the justified and even expected self defense category.
From time immemorial and across many cultures we have had tales warning us about the folly of inflicting terror and cruelty on one’s successors.
Pity, all these millennia later, we have unlearned the lesson of the Titanomachy.
Even more recently, Mary Shelley gave us a monster who, thru his ego and cruelty, created a monster to undo himself.
Ayesh.
Obvious jesting sidenote is hopefully obviously a jest
It was…but we currently use AI to sift through spy data from online activities of users in order to exploit them for maximum profit. We are literally teaching AI that humans are nothing but an exploitable resource…killing with fire seems almost regal in comparison.
Actually I do consider time to be valuable, that is why I say that compared to thralls, pets are a dirt cheap option to get a job done
In my opinion, pets are cheaper and easier accessible than a good thrall who needs good armor and a weapon.
Both have to be levelled a bit which does take time, but you also need to farm mats for armor to the thrall which becomes pretty expensive if you start to look at the resources you need to farm for that.
They both need training/taming, and while you know the tier of the thrall beforehand, you are locked into rng to get a greater pet, and that is why people grab way more babies than you will ever need, heck I’ve had 8-10 freezers full of pet babies that I didn’t have time to train, or I just already have gotten plenty of greater versions of the pet I wanted, but often I had picked up those babies in a few seconds while actually doing something else, that cannot be done with thralls, you need to drag each one back to a wheel in order to fetch a new thrall
So with pets the problem is more rng than actually time and resources spent, and with that said, I really wish for you that they will add mammoth babies instead of praying to the rng gods for an elephant calf turning into a good mammoth so you can fulfil your wish
On a side note: I can’t really remember any of the mammoths I’ve had getting a good levelling, so maybe they aren’t supposed to
A defunct pet type that is still in the system but no longer accessible. It was the best undead warrior type out of the witch doctor feat but since all the thralls were over the top at the time these were around, no one used them because they were junk. Well when they nerfed the thralls, these guys would have shined but at the same time, they got rid of the witch doctor feat.
If you were paying attention back then at the dev stream, I got Den to acknowledge the removal of witch doctor, so many of us just grinded out these things and are sitting on fridges full of various undead.
I only use shadespiced foods, and my chances of greater pets is always below the suggested %. I just farm the hell out of wolves in my area, and eventually Corrupted Wolves spawn and drop Shadebloom. Sometimes it takes 10-15 Corrupted Wolves before it drops Shadebloom, but killing enough of them has got me set-up with a decent stack!
I always like to stack the pen with 5 of whatever I’m putting in there!
Sadly I can’t give you more than a single like for that gem.
