I’d like to open a discussion on the current “meta” based on Sorcery - Corrupted Authority
combined with the Siptah Sigils. We see countless guides showing how this build crushes PvE content, but the real problem starts in PvP and on PvE-C servers, where this setup has become completely broken. Let’s be honest: in its current form, this build makes players practically immortal. You can have 200 HP, but you are still immortal in PvP.
Why is this broken?
The “Invincibility” Effect: The damage-sharing mechanic, combined with two thralls (e.g., Elite Black Corsair) with 25k+ HP, means that when you attack such a player, you aren’t fighting a human—you’re fighting a massive health pool that simply refuses to go down. You can land a full combo, but the opponent barely feels it because the damage is distributed across their pets, and they themselves take negligible damage even from the best weapons.
Healing through Aggression: Thanks to the third Authority perk, every hit landed by your units heals you. Fighting such a player is a losing battle: the more their thralls attack, the faster the player heals. In practice, you are fighting a boss with absurd passive HP regeneration, not another player.
Total Status Immunity: The Petrified perk provides immunity to Bleed, Poison, and Disease. This completely nullifies the main tools we use in PvP to counter defensive builds. While I can understand the presence of such a mechanic, in combination with all the other bonuses, it’s just overkill. How are we supposed to win a fight?
Zero Stamina Management: Thanks to the Sigils (Demon, Fiend, Twice Drowned) and the Gloves of Jhil, these players don’t have to worry about stamina at all. They can sprint indefinitely, spam attacks, and dodge without any risk. There is a complete lack of balance here.
Why does this ruin the fun?
PvP in Conan Exiles should be based on skill, positioning, and punishing mistakes. Currently, all that matters is reaching level 60 quickly, setting your stats, getting the buffs, and catching two “OP” thralls. You are then untouchable. Any sense of risk has vanished. You can be the most skilled player on the server, but you will still lose to an average player using this build because, mathematically, they are almost impossible to kill.
On PvE-C and PvP servers, groups of players only run this one setup – the old, honest PvP has been forgotten. This kills the fun for anyone who wants to play fairly and is looking for a real challenge. It is no wonder that this build is banned on many private servers; it simply ruins the game’s balance. It is time for Funcom to fix this and make playing on official servers meaningful again.
My proposed solutions:
Sigil Limit: There should be a hard cap on how many Sigils a player can have active at the same time. (Like elixirs)
Authority Nerf: Nobody used this perk before because it was “useless,” but the current scaling is completely over-tuned and requires a solid balance pass.
You say the PvP in conan exiles should take skill
Meanwhile people just spam sprint attacks with punching daggers and hammers while q-locked. Even without q-lock (thanks to the weapon rotation mid animation, which is complete nonsense if you ask me) it does not take any skill to have an impact on the battlefield. Just spam running attacks over and over.
Btw, there are 2 ways to kill corrupted players. You either use black claws, which apply acid, or use the weapons which apply gouging effect (The Impaler pike or Heartsblood daggers). But overall yeah, if they use grey lotus potion, it’s pretty hard to kill them.
Yea. You can kill them but it’s not normal pvp, as you say, but you have to admit it’s unbalanced.
Well, the game likes to give you various metas. If not the gray fox, then the one-hit mace, the heavy attack sprint, the Liu Fei effect, and many others…
Therefore, Funcom should balance it.
Don’t forget Freya with the infinite bleed. At least that can be addressed with wraps. She can inflict it on herself too which kills her if you’re not watching. I don’t think any of these special companion perks are meant to be infinite.
The 2 follower thing is incredibly annoying especially using followers like you mentioned. Additionaly, the snake issue… killing them is what needs to happen but then they can be resurrected 3 damn times or can’t be killed at all.
Then there’s the Liu Fei corrupting curse, if anyone knows a cure please let me know. Cleansing, dancers, etc.,… don’t seem to affect it. Have to pull bracelet.
If running attacks don’t count as “having any skill”, then Conan apparently never had any to begin with. Lot of PvPers out there really like to pick and choose what counts as skill while completely disregarding others.
I really hope we’re not going to pretend the old heavy spam spear days were skillful, or warhammer light spam.
If Conan takes skill, it’s through knowing when to dodge and how to manage stamina, which many don’t seem to have. Way too many out there seem to think “aiming” is the only skill.
As for the actual topic, any times thralls are an actual serious threat to players, PvP turns genuinely unfun. I think perks like Steel Thewed should be calculated BEFORE corruption, meaning 33% of their actual maximum health pre-corruption. Might have to include dodge costs as well in that.
It’s not about running attacks themselves, but about the weapon rotation during the attacks. You don’t need to predict were your enemy will move, because you can adjust it during the attacks. As for a spear, you had to predict where to land your hit.
I thought you were serious up to this point. Nothing you have mentioned is new to the game. All I am seeing is someone had a setup that you couldn’t beat, so you want it to be nerfed. You want a limit to sigils because someone used it against you. You want authority nerfed because someone used it against you. There is nothing there that you cannot obtain yourself, given like most PVPers you seem to have a thing about the “current meta”. You should watch some of Ceronethses videos - he sure as hell never used the “meta”, yet managed to take our entire clans.
It’s amazing that you state “looking for a real challenge”, as that is exactly what that sounds like - an actual challenge that you may need to think differently to defeat.
Don’t worry though - I am sure next week the new meta will be decided and you can complain about that then
There’s a very large difference between being beaten by a meta build, which requires the player to still utilize and play it correctly, versus being essentially beaten by thralls. The current OP falls within the latter.
I don’t know of a single PvPer that actually enjoys when thralls start making up the meta.
This is such a dumb and silly thing to even be condemning the OP for in the first place as well. Should players in WoW not be allowed to complain when rogues or monks run rampant for weeks straight, and no other class can compete? What about when the spear used to be the ONLY weapon anyone used since everything else couldn’t even come close?
Players ask for balance because they want to see ALL playstyles be viable. This whole “fight fire with fire” I’ve seen multiple times now doesn’t address the issue that players would prefer playing in the style that they want, rather than being pigeonholed into one they don’t, and I would wager most players prefer having to do the fighting themselves, rather than have this turn into a glorified Pokemon battle.
The Meta Really sucks right now, sucks to play, sucks to play against, the combat desync issues are trucking awful.
I have had to abandon using a shield because the block detection just isn’t working anymore, and I used shields for years, hell I swear there are even times I go to block and he starts doing a partial T pose.
Part of the reason why claws are so good is the perfect storm of damage, Hit speed, Desync (important to hit first) stunlock, and ability to turn the attack in swing, there are other weapons that are good too but everythings so broken right now, its not fun to play, even when you win, the skill metric has gone down the toilet.
To be clear - I am not claiming any knowledge or solution to any of this. I’m just asking questions based on what I’ve seen over the years. (I also have absolutely no side in this debate - not only do I not PVP, but I also don’t use sorcery/corruption or authority, so I am not arguing in defense of anything that I have any personal stake it.)
(First, I want to say from a PVE perspective, this is much more the sort of approach I am pleased to see PVPers taking - calling for balance, rather than nerfs.) While I agree with this in concept - how viable actually is it? From what I have seen there has never (or maybe almost never) been a time when PVP wasn’t dominated by one single approach over all others - horse & cat, poke & roll, (feroxic) dagger spam etc etc It would be great to see balance, but maybe that is something that is beyond what can be achieved in this game?
Would it perhaps be better to aim towards some sort of rock/paper/scissors approach? Deliberately aim to create 3 to 5 ‘meta’ buids/tactics that effectively counter each other in interesting ways? I don’t know what it would take to counter the situation laid out by the OP - it’s so beyond my experience that I just don’t know where to begin. So instead I’ll use other examples to try to help get the concept across - what if mounted combat received a buff against basic ground fighters (say dagger users or sword and shield), but then spear received a buff against mounted (taking advantage of its reach, as in more real combat), and then sword and shield received a buff against spear users (being able to knock the spear aside and get inside their range)? Obviously details would have to be worked out, builds would have to be taken into account, and the same sort of concept would need to be applied to the more complex example OP presents - but would this general apporach have any potential? Aim not for full balance (which might be impossible) but instead for layers of different counter tactics?
Also - it occurs to me that nothing the OP lists is actually new to the game - sure the joining of the maps makes the sigils more prevalent - but all the rest of it has been around for a while, but we weren’t hearing about this build/tactic before (in fact, until recently corrupted builds were seen as generally weak). It seems to have only recently become meta - is this truly just becasue of the addition of the sigils? Or has something else changed? (And if it is just the addition of the sigils, might that hint at a possible solution - corruption and sigils not working together?)
That is good insight. Like if you are above 25% corruption (accounts for TP and random small gains) sigils are removed? Or having sigils adds a debuff and can stack, so the more sigilsbactive on player l, the quicker corruption is cleansed. There is already a debuff in th game, just attach itbto sigils and allow stacking. I also believ they could add a perk to weapons based on class and tier. Armor damage. That way a less viable damagd weapon can at least destroy armor fadter over time in combat. It could be the easier equalizer instead trying to balance damage, armor pen, attack speeds, i frames, aoe, and reach. Add it amd then of certain weapons seem inferiorndamage wise, boost the armor damage more for it
This seems like a rant from a player that got beaten using the punching daggers meta by a different build.
The “Invincibility” Effect:
Follower absorbs 33% of the damage dealt, the absorption it is not split between 2 followers, if you have 1 or 2 followers, only 33% of the damage will be prevented and 33 of that damage will be dealt to 1 or 2 followers each
Healing through Aggression: the Thrall AI is so bad that players are basically never hit by a follower in a pvp fight, and if you are hit and those big Health pool thralls hit like wet noodles
Total Status Immunity: Thats the trade off of halving your HP and stamina
Zero Stamina Management: You can equip all of that too, its not exclusive to corruptiuon builds
Sharing damage with your thrall and Being immune to dots (not cripple) leaves you with only 20 attribute points to spend outside Stamina and Authority, most builds use 10 ST and 10 HP
thus can be one shotted easily if you hit smart and hard enough
I too tested everything to avoid losing my sigils, i did managed to save myself, i put on a full set of sobek gears to have 940 hp. logged out by my dancer for about 3-4 min - when i logged back in my curse was gone and i was down to about 300 hp. so if you log out long enough for the server to stop counting your character it goes away, but you need alot of hp to tank the buffer or you will die logged out. this was the only fix i found after using wraps to heal myself for 30 min testing everything i could. a short log out (like 20 secounds) did not work. has to be at least 2-3 min.
horrible bug, and a worse fix! but at least i saved my sigils lol
side note i also had glutton for punishment which helped my hp last longer while logged out
If not the gray fox, then the one-hit mace, the heavy attack sprint, the Liu Fei effect, and many others…
