Post 5/5 Patch STR vs AGI Current Balancing Issues

Conan Exiles General Discussion Feedback
1

This is not just a suggestion, but also me looking to have an open conversation about the game balance post-patch. Particularly I’m interested in the standing of AGI vs STR within the frame of PvP, but also about the game as a whole at the moment.

First and foremost, the combat glitch fixes are incredible. I could not be happier about those.

As you probably know, two big changes happened with this update when it comes to the perk lineup. Both deal with the Perk Quickfooted.

Official Changes

  1. Quickfooted (previously 15 AGI) swapped places with Defensive Posture (previously 15 GRIT)
  2. Quickfooted also no longer works if you are wearing Medium or Heavy armor. Edit: I heard this, though I am unsure it’s actually true.

Intention

I’d like to bring this to devs and have a real conversation about why this is unbalanced, but I want to have a solid solution before doing so. I would prefer one that caters to both AGI and STR and requires skill on both sides as well.

I do like the perk swap a bit for diversity, like the fact that STR can more easily use bow now, but it needs a couple meaningful changes in my opinion.

My Proposed Changes

  1. Stop stagger from certain AGI weapon lights (or at least the first two in some of their combos). This should apply to at least claws, daggers, and katanas. It could go to additional weapons too though. Overall most strength weapons are just going to be interrupted because of how much the are outpaced by AGI. To be fair to AGI players, though, it may be worth slightly reducing stamina cost of rolls for each point invested into AGI.

  2. A change to Quickfooted where it instead makes your walking speed faster. It would not influence your sprinting, climbing, and swimming speeds. To go alongside this, all players get the “current Quickfooted sprint/climb/swim speeds”. This would be a perk that is still very useful in combat but not an end-all-be-all as it currently feels.

Other Considerations

Roll Speed
Losing a great deal of roll speed feels significant. At 0 AGI, this difference is catastrophic. It is much less significant if you can squeeze in 5 or 10 points into AGI, but if you’re looking to get Quickfooted as well, you’ll have to find a place to pull those points from.

Encumbrance Builds
They have huge tradeoffs in this patch. They sacrifice either all their damage or some other key pieces of their build if they want to keep Quickfooted. They also can’t reasonably use heavy armor.

Bomber Builds
These guys have the same as above, but the Armor part means even more to them than a standard Encumbrance build.

Heavy Armor Users
Heavy armor in general has a choice to make. I personally might just not chase Grit since I can’t use Quickfooted anyways, but Running it with 20 AGI still will feel more limiting than ever. I personally think that Quickfooted still should be usable by heavy users if they would require investing into GRIT. Feel free to let me know your thoughts.

TLDR: What do you think about the game balance after patch?

2

Everybody its forces to go with 15 grit now If you are looking for any sort of PvP build, nothing really changed and people will simply go 20 str 20 vit 5 Agi and 15 grit for the greataxe spam

3

On paper I liked it as it put the largest combat perk into the most useless physical attribute.

I still think there should be antagonist pairing of attributes. Where if you go up in pen, you limit the maximum of the other. Strength v agility, grit vs vitality, expertise vs authority. Corrupted attributes are the only way to break this but comes at the cost of corruption

4

As of now:

For AGI,
20AGI
20VIT
20GRIT
(Or similar) builds don’t change and are fine.

All Strength builds either chase Quickfooted and

Gain: Stamina
Lose: Attack speed following every roll, 10% Pen on all attacks, and potentially 25% additional pen with Rolling Thrust.

or ditch Quickfooted and

Gain: 15% damage resistance when swinging
Lose: speed when running, swimming, climbing, etc…

5

You can’t drop 15 Grit, the extra movement speed in a game like Conan it’s everything.

Even if it was 1% it still would be Bis.

Honestly they should simply remove the extra speed perk and work on something else, but if they nerfed the 25% damage reduction maximum per hit, they’re completely clueless and tells me that they don’t know their own game, that perk was malevolently useless.

6

I kind of agree. I liked when AGI and STR were not so much different damage attributes. STR just flat controlled your Damage but you needed other things too. I like that you could find a personal balance there. In this case though we already get speedy people with high stagger potential and setting what I see in the fights I am part of or watch, I have noticed a steady shift to Claws and Katana on training servers in both 1v1s and team fights.

There are many who still choose STR (especially in the team fights), but when things are exclusively taken from popular STR builds and everything remains in the popular AGI builds, I think we may be running into an issue. I’m up for fighting differently, but not being able to swing due to slower post-roll attacks against AGI spammers is definitely going to become an additional burden for STR users. I feel it may upset balance.

7

That’s what I suggested above, yeah. Reframing that perk altogether.

Steel-Thewed being nerfed was actually a rather large hit to some, though. Especially so for corruption users.

8

It made no sense, I played that build because it was trash but funny and they nerfed it as if it was “overpower”, I guess some people couldn’t hit four times in a row, spam arrows lights or even gas and collect free loot kekw

9

An alternative to the loss of stagger on AGI lights would be the reintroduction of hyperarmor to several weapons (especially heavy attacks) that have been lost over time. Hyperarmor has overall been a dearly missed feature anyways and has made certain weapons like the Greatsword unreliable in PvP.

While I completely agree that Hyperarmor should be added to several heavy attacks in the game again, I would be equally happy with Light attacks of certain weapons (like those mentioned above) losing their ability to stagger. That way heavy attacks would still stagger a person attacking.

Perhaps my ideal scenario is the following:

Hyperarmor should be added to most heavy attacks, however that hyperarmor can be staggered by a heavy attack.

10

Oddly enough, STR may be the most reliable at the moment with how the servers are handling at high population. I suspect if servers stabilize, we will see a shift.