Pet Rebalance: How Long Could It Take?

First, I want to acknowledge that timelines are not deadlines and plans are not promises. With that in mind, do we have any idea how long the pet rebalance will take or the direction it might be heading? I’ve seen plenty of threads regarding the first step of the pet rebalance, how some were nerfed and others were buffed. But as far as the plan going forward, I haven’t seen anything that gives me a firmer idea of what the devs intend to do or when they intend to do it. Does anyone have any ideas, or is it all just speculation at this point?

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Well, they already started rebalancing pets (with mostly nerfs), so it would make sense that they’d work on it some more in near future.

That said, I completely agree with your notion that we have actually no clue how Funcom prioritizes their updates and fixes.

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They happened on December 22nd.

Now the Patchnotes on the subject don’t really tell the whole story (mostly because most players wouldn’t even understand them). But effectively they were able to buff and nerf pets independently from their wild versions.

Let me see if I can spell that out (and I’m going to do my best from what I’ve been able to affect in the devkit on this subject). Prior to December 22nd. Pets derived their abilities from wild versions. There’s two mechanics at play here, the Monster Stat Table, and the Item Table. The Monster Stat Table has the NPC’s health, armor, and exp value when killed. The Item Table also has their weapons, and thus their damage and armor penetration.

So that last one is confusing. The item table is also where our weapons are located, as well as armor, building pieces, potions, and just about every item that can be in an inventory. So it means that animals still use weapons. But they’re not using swords, axes, and bows (well not normally… looking at you snakemen). They are using claw attacks, bite attacks, and such. All of these are weapons.

If you ever use admin commands, the reason you won’t see these animal weapons is they have the no admin tag. I don’t believe this is to prevent us from seeing them, but more so to prevent them from cluttering the already bloated Gear tab.

So what is special about the December 22 Patch is they divorced Follower Pet weapons from their wild counterparts. This had to happen in order to buff certain pets. For example, if a Scorpion was buffed to do the DPS of a Tiger prior, then you’d have scorpions in the wild wrecking the face of lower levels who encounter them. Not to mention if you buffed everything to be like Tigers, you’d have Tiger level DPS on everything. Again anyone under level 20 would be getting wrecked by anything not an Imp.

This allows them to rebalance follower pets without having to disrupt the balance of NPC animals in the wild. It also allows them to rebalance NPCs in the wild without affecting player owned pets.

Extensive rebalancing to animal companions:

  • Previously weaker companions have received a boost in their stats making them more viable (i.e. gorillas, elephants), while previously stronger companions (i.e. large felines and canines) have had their stats reduced.
  • Gorillas, Mammoths, Scorpions and Yetis have received the biggest boosts to their DPS (233%, 200%, 178%, 121% increase respectively).
  • Sabretooth and Yakith have received the biggest decrease (-40%).
  • The rest of pet companion types have seen changes as well. (between -27% and +35%)

Those patch notes show that ‘mostly nerfs’ claim isn’t true. Its just a few people got used to using Sabertooths exclusively and now there is a wider variety of options available.

Hopefully the changes in the December 22nd patch help you understand the reasoning and idea that the devs have going forward. They gave themselves better tools to finely tune the balance between pets. As for when you will see further changes, that could be as soon as the next patch hits, or it could be longer.

So far we’ve not really seen any hard data on how pets are performing. Just people who are bitter about their sabertooths not killing things in 1-2 hits. There’s quite a few more pet types out there and there’s been little interest in using them, mostly out of stubbornness and ignorance.

We have pets that were literally buffed by over 200%. And yet no data on how useful or not those pets are.

I’ve had feedback and ideas on how to make pets more supplementary to thralls specifically on the mechanics of obtaining certain versions pets. But that goes beyond the scope of this thread which is how pets balance towards one another.

Thank you for the explanation. It certainly gets to the how of what the Dec. 22nd patch did. One thing I’m curious about is that you said “they happened” on Dec. 22nd. It was my understanding that the changes were only the first step in an overall rebalancing process and more changes are coming in the future. But from the way you phrased this, it sounds like the changes on Dec. 22nd might have been the only rebalance that FC had planned up to that point and the rebalance is not an ongoing process. Just wanting to make sure I read that right.

That would be odd, because the fact that they not only divorced pet stats from wild stats but also changed those stats to be lower/higher depending on the animal implies that they do have a step 2 in mind. That or they are simply covering their bases in case they decide to alter pets further at some point in the future, even if they have no plans to do so at this time.

As a side note, I had assumed that gorillas, grey apes, and black and white yetis were poked with the nerf stick, so it’s good to know that now might actually be a good time to try leveling my gorillas and yetis. I’ve been avoiding leveling any of my pets, but now I can start traversing the exiled lands with one pet and one thrall, the way Crom intended.

I did not intend to give that impression. I have no idea what changes will come in the future. They gave themselves a tool to work with so I would believe they would utilize it beyond just a single patch.

I doubt we’ll see much in the near term, simply due to lack of data and feedback. But they may have their own way of determining things. I mean some of the devs DO play the game so they’ll have -something- if they decide to test it. So who knows?

Just wanted to make sure. There are many ways to read into things. I was hoping the next phase of the pet rebalance was coming soon™, but I guess not. But this does in its own way give me a better idea of what the plan is, so grazie.

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To be honest I don’t actually see any reason for them to work on Pet balance as it relates to pets being compared to pets and not thralls. And what I mean by that is if you compare one pet type to another, they’re not as far apart as they were. Which is good. But they’re still a far cry from being balanced towards thralls. Which isn’t as good, but its also not as easy to do by simply manipulating values.

There’s a whole host of issues between how ‘easy’ one is to get over another, locations, and other means that causes the whole thing to need a serious looking at. Its not something that can be done over night.

Yes on which point Dennis couldn’t have been more wrong in their dev stream :slight_smile:
A Sabretooth cub is objectively harder to obtain than ANY high tier thrall since it’s up in the frozen North area, which is one of the most dangerous parts of the map and generally guarded by at least one greater sabretooth and packs of normal ones.
A low-mid-level player without significant game experience would not survive that, on top of that there’s significant RNG involved in actually getting a greater version.

On the other hand people can buy high-end thralls with simple gold coins… or knock out the first darfari cannibal in their way, give that a truncheon then go and hunt down any of the fixed spawn high tier thralls, like that poor old cimmerian berserker all alone in the middle of an empty lake or a RHTS or 2 in the wine cellar.

So they’re not even comparable :slight_smile: yet pets take up a full thrall slot, despite being potentially harder to obtain, with more RNG involved and being way worse… at pretty much everything :slight_smile:

Ofc we’re not talking about the shaleback baby you can pick up as soon as you enter the map, even that has more RNG and is weaker than your average cannibal you can easily get.
And that shaleback shoul NOT be on par or even remotely similar to a sabretooth imo.
But I don’t subscribe to Dennis’s idea of pets being only these measly “early-to-mid game” “easy mode” followers… I’m pretty sure he never ran into a bear while camping :joy:

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There’s also the Midnight Grove. That’s where I go to grab sabre-kittehs. Since I almost always go there alone, it used to be more dangerous than the Frozen North, because of the passage-closing bug that they introduced and never bothered to fix. Now that I can summon my corpse with sorcery, it’s not as dangerous anymore.

At any rate, it’s still not something an inexperience lowbie could easily achieve, but I just wanted to throw it out there before someone else pointed it out.

Your point remains solidly true: getting a greater sabretooth is actually harder than getting a Cimmerian Berserker.

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Harder than a Relic Hunter Treasure Seeker… the best thrall and follower in the game. Just give level 10, a lesser wheel of pain, and go knock them out. Doable even by a new player if they have 10 in authority (for the boost in concussive damage). Only thing preventing a new player from doing this normally is simple ignorance from a lack of experience.

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Aw, crap. I’m operating on dated assumptions. I haven’t bothered much with thralls after the sorcery came out, so I haven’t yet figured out that Dalinsia and Zerk aren’t the best anymore :smiley:

Thanks for setting me straight.

Those are pretty close behind though, either of those are pretty much top tier thralls.
RHTS can get up to more HP, doesn’t have the starting strength the Berserker has, however it gains twice as much damage per str point so by the time they’re 20 (especially with well trained) their str based damage can outscale a berserker too.
People quote the Berserker as the best simply cuz of it having the highest damage modifier from the tameable thalls, but they rarely notice that the amount is just 0.002 higher than that of the RHTS.

Either way, both of them are significantly better than any pet :smiley:

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What Xevyr said. What makes the RHTS so easy is that there’s pretty much multiple guaranteed spawns of them up in areas that aren’t exactly endgame.

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Well said
As I said in my other thread, if they are not going to buff the pets, might as well just get rid of the whole pet training and save some space on my harddrive…

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How long?
Until the game sunsets.

Is the current version how it will remain?
Extremely doubtful.
The version we play is not the version currently in development. We hear so much noise about how the version of the game the devs are looking at is quite removed from the version we are playing. This one understands that to mean there are several (likely incomplete or almost complete, possibly one ready for testlive with the understanding that whatever is reported on testlive may not be corrected before implementation now that Funcom is on a much more restrictive update schedule from their owners) updates sitting in queue.

It wasn’t mostly pet nerfs if we count all pet types. But if we look at the pet types that were viable, that’s where we see the nerfs. The whole early to mid game non-sense is one of those comments that give rise to the understanding that the speaker doesn’t play this game nor does he consult those who do. The sabertooths in the frozen biome being a prime example.

However, this one smells a trap choice. Just like Survival is an aspect of the game shelved, so to does Beastmastery as a play style (rather than an aesthetic for those who want house pets) seem to be legacy content that is largely being put down. This one would love to be proven wrong, but statement is from on high indicate they want beasts out of high level (read: majority of) gameplay.

If they intended to shelve the pet system, they would not have spent the time and effort into setting up the tools that they did. I don’t think you realize the effort that took.

Back in 2018, I made a mod to fix some problems with Archery. After Conan Exiles was released from early access, the culture in FC decided that Archery was meant as a supplement to melee, and not its own thing, yet Accuracy cost as many attribute points as Strength. So I set out to fix those shortcomings. This required me to import every bow and arrow at the time and rebalance them within their own tier.

There was far less bows and arrows in 2018 then there are now. But even still the amount of work took days of work over a period of two weeks. Inputting values, testing them, and then making sure it was all balanced where I wanted it to be.

There is a helluva lot more pet ‘weapons’ and then they just turned around and doubled them. Pet weapons for animals in the wild, and pet weapons for animals that were tamed. Now they had to tweak them around so they were balanced to each other.

Sorry to say, but Greater Sabretooths doing 800-1200 damage on a pounce was never going to remain in Conan Exiles. So what people call ‘viable’ is a gross understatement.

I think soon is a relative term in this case. They probably are collecting data, using that data to inform a bit of unnerfing, and will then rinse and repeat a couple times, much like changes to thralls over the years now. So if I were placing a bet, I’d think we’ll see some changes to pets with the next chapter and following chapters of the next age. Now that we are on a three month cycle, I’d call that soon. Just speculating mind you, but I would probably accept a bet on the matter.

I have this from when I was developing the mod :stuck_out_tongue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV1Tgn0cq0s
as you can see the pounce damage is 200-300 even against non-armored targets… and when things go well… they can do ~20 dps more than a human thrall.

So the issue wasn’t that… they could’ve been balanced quite well even before this through their templates, even with wild weapons, but rather that 10% damage per str point etc.

To put it a different way, the issue was not Sabretooths being overpowered, because they really weren’t… I did other tests for the fun of it after my mod was finished, that’s where I’m getting that ~20 dps difference on average when they actually manage to face and hit their targets, on the other hand they roughly take 4 times the damage as a properly armored thrall and almost had them die or come close to it facing a giant croc in some tests.

The issue was rather the very large interval in which they could scale to be min-maxed because of gaining a lot of damage per point. So if you got a “lucky” one and threw a well trained on top of it, that’s when things started to get crazy, but that did not represent the norm and your average Sabretooth was quite a weakling.

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This devstream seems to be particularly infamous. Having not not seen it myself (and being too lazy to go look), it seems to reflect a particular vision that isn’t in line with much of the player base. Although pets may at one time have been intended for early- and mid-game use, it doesn’t really suit the current state of the game. Even high-tier thralls can be severely restricted if the player cannot or does not properly equip them. And flipping that, even low-tier thralls are useful if given the right gear.

Personally, I would like pets to carve out their own niche for late- and end-game play. Have a small area of overlap where thralls and pets can be interchangeable, but then create areas where one excels over the other while still not being completely useless. Tall order, maybe, but entirely doable. The simplest way might be to create an equipment system for pets (barding for armor, reinforcements for claws or biting attacks, etc.). It does seem like FC has their plans, but, well, there’s that aforementioned infamous devstream to consider.

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If it isn’t end game viable, it’s relevance is fleeting at best.
When from one side of the mouth it is said that leveling to 60 should be brief, and from the other, this content is not for “high” level play… What they have said is that this is a waste of resources, tim,e and effort, for the player at least. It may not be shelved, but an effort is being made to cut it out of the majority of game play.
As someone who has had to swim against current in regards to archery, certainly you understand that feeling.

They likewise squandered resources making a very lovely tier 1 build set augmentation that is useless in PvP and PvE, unless in single player creative mode.

This one does not underestimate the effort. This one merely doubts the wisdom with which they sometimes apply their focus.

Against what? An unarmored infant sleeping soundly?
On the extremely off chance that someone managed to get RNGesus to come down and bless every single step of that feline’s life… It’s still scripted with beast AI, which somehow manages to be even more idiotic than Thrall AI. Then we get into it’s extreme fragility, only exasperated by the loss of the Survival stat for shaking off debuffs. Anyone in PvP who is losing to this creature is just as likely to lose to a Mario stomp, or their desire to harvest Brimstone without a mask in the Shattered Springs. Oh no, this one stared at the cat that took 3 seconds to decide to attack this one, and then when it pounced, this one’s poke and roll wasn’t the invincible shield it is against the sha- fine and erudite exiles of cunning and skill this one is used to cheesing. It’s broken and must be nerfed! Den, Den! Someone used a follower that isn’t a Treasure Seeker or Cimmerian against me and it was effective, if they aren’t cheating, it must be nerfed!

As for PvE content, it expedites fights that could have been handled with stone daggers. Perhaps it is faster than a Snowhunter or Treasure Hunter, but the chances of it dying are also significantly higher and the chances of getting it in the first place, significantly lower.

In both cases the point is, it has situational, inaccurate raw attack power, but lacks even the pretense of durability or flexibility. Blunting it’s claws takes away the only asset it possessed. There was no noticable HP and Armour buffs. Oh, and then there was the stated intent to lock them out of higher level content.
Which they succeeded at. Something that maybe could possibly be useful sometimes now never has a time when it’s anywhere in the list of right answers.

Again, this one would love to be proven wrong, that Funcom does want Beastmastery to be viable in the game, but that flies in the face of both what we have seen so far and statements from on High.
To be certain, decoupling the pet weapons from the wild weapons is a great step for allowing finer tuning. Could this tool be used well? Absolutely. Will it? So far, that tuning (and statements of intent) indicates the opposite.

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