Pets facing a further nerf for no reason - Devs seriously out of touch on this

Conan Exiles PC Discussion Public Beta Client
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So it got mentioned on the dev stream they are nerfing the cats pounce.

Fine whatever, completely unneeded as they are trash already since the latest nerfs, but pets overall are useless you may as well not added them to the game at this point they have been nerfed so badly by the rounds of thrall reductions applied to them.

so Why are pets so bad?

*No gas and poison resists

*Low Health pool even on greaters

*All pets have a uniform damage multiplier

*Slow to level

*Take up a thrall slot with follower limits this hurts you.

*Can’t have as many follow as you can zombies

Now we have zombies, a zombie isn’t even temporary on private servers thanks to the bug, instant 14k health lvl20 42 damage attack creature.

Opposed to say a white tiger I need to likely farm shadespice for, build a big pen, gather 5 cubs and maybe get 1-2, then ages to level.

My suggestions:

Give the Pets damage multipliers relevant to the pet, low shalebacks, high sabertooth etc.

Give a beastmaster/packmaster perk as alternate choices for authority, which could allow say 4-5 pets under a command (a pack of wolves or dogs would be pretty sweet!)

Make them faster to level or remove the levels altogether, instant lvl 20’s like the zombies.

And look at adjusting their healthpool across the board (they aren’t armored all they have is HP) so they don’t get killed the first time you take a greater to a dafari camp

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I am complete and unequivocal agreement with you here @Raskhaul. In fact I just made a post in the chapter 2 discussion thread trying to disuade Funcom from this decision. Here is what I had to say, hopefully it wil give your own thread some further traction.

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This isn’t a “nerf” in the traditional sense, it is the first stage in a rebalancing.

Pets should become better again at some point in the future, but they have to go through a temporary weakening first.

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40% is a nerf.

10% is a rebalance.

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Sadly they have never been ‘better’ since their inception into the game. The have been substantially behind thralls in the follower department every step of the way. So if they become better now, it will be a first. And adjusting them downward is not the way to achieve this.

Regardless, I am sticking to my guns on this issue. And as I said earlier, I fail to see ANY pet in this game needs even the slightest amount of downward adjustment. So unless their plan is to adjust cats and canines down, then back up afterward, which would be nonsensical, I maintain that the pets being, what was that word
“rebalanced” downward can do without it.

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They also spoke about it during the dev stream, again, making it clear that this is only the first step of a ongoing process to make pets viable.

Nonsensical only if you look at it from one perspective. They didn’t just make cats weaker, they reduced the range between pets to make all of them more evenly matched with each other.

The strongest were reduced and the weakest increased to meet in a middle ground. Since this is already planned as an ongoing process, it makes more sense to start at an average and buff from there rather than buff everything and nerf from there.

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So let us create a rough verbal model using a number scale based on viability. Thralls are and 8 out of 10. Cats and canines are currently a 6, gorillas, elephants, scorpions, etc are a 2. So basically thralls stayed an 8, cats and canines will come down to a 4 and gorillas, elephants and scorpions go up to a 4. So now they are all equally underperforming and undesirable. It is like taking a new line of Fords, increasing the speed on the slowest models, eg-station wagons and vans somewhat, drastically lowering the speed on sports and performance models, then touting it as making cars better across the board.

If by that that you mean one which takes mathematics and common sense into account. Adjusting something downward does NOT under any circumstances equate to better, no matter how you try to spin it.

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If you want to play the analogy game, then rather imagine it this way.

Instead of making all models of cars, regardless of engine, run like a luxury car and burst into flames, they put governors on all of them so that all cars can’t run faster than the speed limit while they remodel them.

Making cats weaker isn’t the goal, it is one step in a process.

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the problem is “in the future” seemed an abstract reaction to the Live chats initial reaction to hearing about the Nerf (they used the term Nerf in the stream no less so it is a nerf) pets right now have uniform damage multipliers and low health.

with the health values sure it involves more work, changing databases with some thought, but it is a bit hard to understand when the dmg multipliers are uniform which isn’t the case with thralls, why they couldn’t say increase them across the board while doing whatever they are doing to the cats pounce attack.

it seems crazy to me they are destroying the last aspect of a feature while saying they MAY rebalance or build it up in the future, but they will never be comparable to a thrall etc.

I dunno why gameplay has to be so controlled if people prefer pets over thralls, the average tiger could rip apart a trained human in armor with a spear irl and sure, game needs balance but why do we have to conform so hard to someone’s idea of “how we should play”.

Any pets I get now I cant take them out to do anything remotely significant as they might die, and they are so slow to level I rarely am leveling any to 20.

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They have said a lot of things in that live stream, about how it is easier to get pets, it is easier to grow them in the pen than it is to break a thrall in a wheel, and how it is easier to level them. None of that is true however. Sure, it is easier to pick up a baby pet than it is to knock out a human thrall, but to actually obtain a greater pet than to find a T4 fighter, many of the better ones whom have guaranteed spawn locations? It is vastly more difficult. Sure, the pet requires 1 piece of food as opposed to hundreds of gruel, but you have to farm a dungeon to get shadespice to make said food worthwhile to up the chances of getting a decent pet to
TWENTY PERCENT!!!. So with the requirements of having to run specific dungeons, and still having an 80% failure rate, where is the benefit there? And then when you take into consideration that they come out of the box with lower HP and you cannot equip them with armor or weapons, AND they take just as long to level as a human thrall, leveling them is actually vastly more difficult. So, to be honest, none of what they said about pets was accurate.

In conclusion, to temporarily weaken some pets in the hope that they will maybe someday make them all somewhat better, but as they clearly said never as good as a human thrall. Why? Pets will still be weaker, harder to obtain the desirable ones, and harder to level due to the inability to equip items to them. What is the point of making any of them worse now?

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Maybe my memory is failing me, but I seem to remember Dennis saying in the stream that pets aren’t intended to be equal to thralls. Thralls were always intended to be stronger.

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You mean, the puny thralls we have right now? :laughing:

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Found the 0 authority player

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:smile:
Jimbo, dude

You’re the kind of guy we can never borrow our car, because you would think it’s your own!

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Very sad as I love my pets.

thralls are easy to catch, even named ones, and strong weapons and armor can be made quickly.
Pets have to be caught, and the probability of getting a strong individual by making food for the night scented flower.
And yet.
DPS is lower than a thralls equipped with a two-handed sword.
Shale backs and rock noses have lower defense than thralls equipped with heavy armor.
・Their physical strength is the same or lower than thralls.
・There is nothing unique about them.
・The status should be somewhat superior to match the image of the pet.
Please review not only the status but also the attack power of the pet’s techniques.
Why are yetis and scorpions so weak


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Making them better by almost halving their damage?
It’s either a:

  • huge miscalculation, and an unnecessary plus step to remove their damage and HP, than increasing it
    or:
  • the enemy AI will be improved by A LOT! So they won’t have to be that overpowered but stupider than a handful of dead butterflies.

Considering that the AI is still heavily underperformig, showing zero “intelligence” (and no, the commands, the behavior settings that YOU have to change, aren’t improvements in AI, those are just functions), and the history of balancing, the animals will be forgotten as fighting companions.

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New player with only about two months put into this game, so take my thoughts and opinions with a grain of salt.

For now, I choose to remain cautiously optimistic. I agree that narrowing the difference among pets does nothing to address the difference between pets and thralls. However, if this is indeed the first step toward making pets more viable as a group, then I’m all for it. This is just my guess, but if the devs are planning to implement a universal pet buff to bring them closer to par with thralls, then it might be necessary to first create a more uniform standard between the pets.

There are two potential buffs I can think of that would have this approach make sense. First, increasing the number of pets we can have to, for example, two without WP and three with WP. Maybe even more, because I agree that running with a pack of four or five wolves would be awesome.

The second possible buff would be a change to pet class modifiers. Just like how bearers, fighters, archers, etc. have their own damage modifiers, create or alter the values for pets. It could also give all pets a buff to damage reduction, because if their hide is good enough to increase our armor, it should do the same for the ones we’re taking it from.

I’m hoping that they don’t leave things half-done, but I can understand that they might just be laying the groundwork at the moment. Implement this initial nerf to avoid accidentally making certain pets or certain pet combos overpowered once the main rebalance comes into play. I know a lot of people complained that sorcery “ruined” the game with things like lightning storm, so this could be a sign that Funcom is trying to avoid similar problems with a pet rebalance.

All in all, this attention to pets brings me hope (perhaps false hope, but hope nonetheless) that there’s an upcoming Age of Beasts update that will greatly expand upon pets’ roles and functions within the game. Or maybe it will ruin my poor wolf pack forever. But for now at least, I’ll choose naïve optimism over callous cynicism. For now.

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The only way i’ll take a pet along with me right now is if i could rope one along in addition to one or two thralls. I even started relegating the pack animal duty to bearers as it is. I remember some of them having some use as either crowd control cannon fodder during Purges or other specific combat scenarios way back before Siptah came out but when i tried to get another greater leopard and (regular) Rhino this time around it was quite underwhelming. No way i’m swapping out a thrall for one on excursions or trips through Sepermeru.

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Patch notes:

Stream (timestamped):

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Well, it was nice while it lasted.

For a while there, I was playing Conan Exiles and enjoying the pets. After 3.0 hit live, the choice of taking a pet or taking a thrall finally became an interesting one. Not a difficult one, mind, because pets are still weaker than thralls in most aspects, but at least it isn’t a no-brainer. At least it isn’t “Pfft, always take a thrall.”

Thralls can wear armor, wield weapons, execute combos, and be healed by potions and bandages. Pets can
 well
 if we compare greater pets with high-end thralls, the best I can come up with is “pets can level faster”. Oh, and they’re more expendable, if you’re willing to keep catching babies and taming them and discarding the garbage you get and putting whatever’s worth in a fridge as a replacement.

Sure, pets can do more damage with a single attack, but when you take into account the cooldown on those attacks and the combos that thralls can execute, the DPS comes out similar.

A handful of pets have attacks with useful effects. For example, a cat’s pounce can knock down a human opponent, or a canine’s attack can apply sunder. You can get the same with a thrall, but it depends on what combo they decide to execute, so it’s not as often as with a pet.

All in all, the choice of bringing a pet vs bringing a thrall comes down to “does this pet have some specific attack that will be helpful against this specific enemy” and “do I want to risk my thrall and its equipment”.

Like I said, not a difficult choice, but at least it’s not always the same. Sometimes it’s better to bring a pet.

I fail to see why any pet needs to be made weaker, but hey, maybe I missed something. Even if I did, I fail to see why the rebalancing process has to start with weakening of the higher-end pets, instead of the strengthening of the lower-end ones.

I suspect that this has something to do with what the devs imagine PVP players want, because it makes no sense for PVE.

Oh, well. Like I said, it was fun while it lasted.

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