As we all know pets had taken a big time hit in their viability a while ago (over a year now?). Thralls have been taking a beating all throughout the Age of War with their HP being reduced, with Bearers now having their HP hacked down by the thousands (though many T1 and T2 Bearers still had more HP than a fully leveled T4 due to “oversight”). The very fact remains that our followers, our companions, have become a mere shell of what they once were.
Now, that is not to say that certain human thralls with the best gear in the game were not a bit…much. They were. When you could walk into a dungeon and go into sleep mode while your thrall killed all of the bosses for you, that was overkill. HOWEVER, as per usual, Funcom went and overcompensated for this and went crazy with the nerf hammer, making pets mere decorative objects (with way more resource intensive than decorative objects generally have) and most thralls are not much better without the absolute best gear in the game.
At least that it how it would appear on the surface. That is unless you have read this comment from @AndyB
Re: Bearers - The long and the short of it is they’re disproportionately tanky compared to other thralls and that’s not the direction we want to take them. That said, some context for the change was with an upcoming feature in mind - one that would allow you to recover a defeated thrall (with limitations) to mitigate or avoid losing someone you invested a lot of time in. We’re not quite ready to unwrap this feature yet, but stay tuned.
You can find that on this thread if you are so interested, I believe it was post #11.
So this is basically the the short of it. They have been, for over a year now, been gimping out pets and our thralls due to a new “system” they want to implement at some “later date” (date not yet verified). These nerfs are all intended to coincide with this new system to be able to basically resurrect your followers who have died, and they will die, presumably with their levels, their perks and (hopefully) their gear (with limitations [limitations not yet specified] ).
So @AndyB and the devs, why are you making changes which have dramatic effects on game play and in very negative ways in preparations for a “system” which is not even ready to be implemented yet? Why would you not wait until said system was ready to be rolled out to make these changes to pets and thralls as one big overhaul of the follower system instead of doing piecemeal changes that, by the time this system to “recover a defeated thrall to mitigate or avoid losing someone you invested a lot of time in” there are no longer any worthwhile thralls to recover at all? What exactly is the purpose of releasing these changes in such a fashion when the only responses you are knowingly going to receive are negative ones? Help us all to understand the decision behind all of this, because they do not make any sense at all.
DBNO sounds like a great feature, if they can get it working properly. However, and I say this with a big BUT, they need to do it in a way that followers (both animals and thralls) are not so squish that they are essentially guaranteed to die and be revived. DBNO should be a last resort if things go horribly wrong, not an all but foregone conclusion of bringing them along.
And yes, I do agree that it would have been better to roll it all out as one update, rather than doing a bit here, a bit there, etc.
I really not a fan of this. The loss of a favored thrall is something that brings more connection to the character story and one of highs and lows. The more we allow a reset to remove the lows, the more we turn CE into a fancy version of pacman where we just put another quarter in the machine and it’s all good.
I am pretty sure at the beginning of AoW they wanted to make thralls expendable. Because you can gain an army of good T4 thralls in a few purges. In fact, I am OK with their health and damage (not including the pets). But at least make it 3 times easier to level them cos that’s what expendable means.
Wait…
the Al-Merayah Captain instant Lv20 trick? That wasn’t a bug, it was intended?! Praise the foreseeing FC!
The Down and Not Out feature is interesting, and I would say that it does work as advertised. I think the main reason we don’t see it yet is they have to develop animations for everything that intends to use it. That way you can visually tell when a pet is down and not dead.
But I want to point out that it is not a miracle fix people think it is. If you get into an overwhelming fight and your follower goes down. You have a certain time before they die. And if you’re still fighting or running, you will likely not be able to revive them in time.
Its actually quite niche, and more for those fights where you’re winning but your follower gets unlucky near the end of the fight. If you get into a fight where you weren’t going to win or win quickly, your follower is going to die. And this was before thralls got hit with the Age of War changes.
Its going to be a welcome feature but don’t get your hopes up. You’re still going to be losing followers with it. Just maybe sometimes you won’t.
Pets & Thralls are supposed to be sidekicks – not tanks or substitutes for actual players!
Some pets (for example, the Sand Reaper Hive Queen) were hilariously strong. I remember a bunch of people who used them to nuke bosses while they went AFK to get coffee or smoke a cigarette. Originally, Thralls had no perks. However, the perks made them even stronger. Combined with epic heavy armor and legendary weapons, they were more formidable than some players behind them.
Don’t get me wrong, this game still has many unresolved issues that have persisted for years. Nevertheless, nerfing Pets & Thralls seems like the right step forward towards a better PvP balance and a more challenging PvE experience.
True - but it is worth noting that a sidekick is also not the same as disposable cannon-fodder, which seems to be the direction they are being taken. I’d rather have sidekicks… Don’t get me wrong, I’m not denying that they (or at least some) were distinctly over-powered in the past, but I think in many instances the pendulum has swung too far the other way.
There is no doubt that thrills/certain pets were too powerful previously. That is not the point, nor is the question of nerfing them. The point is that they are doing this in bits and pieces over the course of a year or longer all for the purpose of a new system that still is not even ready to roll out. Meanwhile followers have gone from indestructible tanks to the most fragile glass figurines with no redeeming qualities. This leaves them utterly useless for pvp defense and for pve as well other than a source of frustration over how fast they die. So again, why make these changes so far in advance of this new system and leave everyone with a negative experience?
Thralls and pets arent sidekicks They are the MAIN weapons from autority build If funcom want pets and Thralls to be Just a sidekicks They shall remove autority perk from the game.
As always, Funcom turning the game into SHIT.
Messing the thralls, messing the jogability, doing a lazy work by adopting the same sertings configurantion between pvp and pve.
It’s good to know that I’ll have more money saved in the end of the month now, cause I won’t spend a single cent on it anymore unless they fix this shit.
And good to know I’ll have more time for other games also.
The changes might be hard to swallow…
However, the Accursed/Cimmerian Berserker is still a beast! While they are already strong, there are even stronger named Thralls. Sure, the AI behind them is lousy or at least all followers behave many times in ways at least I can’t understand. Even if the changes might be overdone, they may or may not still need more data for rebalancing it.
To make my point, I am not salty. What I experienced in the past, I have not seen ANY PvP. What happened was, rather this: 3 in a row on 3 different servers in just 3 months, I got OFFLINE raided. To me, it’s nothing but cowardice and nothing else. Maybe we should not forget that already adjustments in the past, before the Chapters System has been introduced, changed the game in one way or another. For example, my last base was on a really big tree. I had my base in the middle and kind of a panic room on the top of the tree. Still, both got wasted. Aside from the combination of Explosive + Oil Arrows, which would work to burn a hole in the middle, there came another feature simply changing a siege, which was the Flying Bat. Is the flying bat a good feature?
From my point of view, well, it counters any sophisticated tree build.
See in the topic bellow for more:
So if we just hypothetically assume that everyone should be everywhere vulnerable during the raid time and this might be a plan FC is following, then they have already achieved it. As this is not an MMO, but a Survival Sandbox with just 40 slots servers, each server, regardless of how empty or dead it may be, has a dominating clan. So even if the “archers” would attack every target properly even with more damage, they still could be sniped with ease. This is why I can’t see the changes as something as bad as it is proclaimed here all the time.
Don’t get me wrong, but all I can imagine is simply your frustration that you can’t gang up on anyone anymore with your 2 Thralls, as anyone else with their 1 Thrall still can defeat you. No offense – META is changing, and as much as I remember, the AUTHORITY build was imbalanced in the beginning.
I dont use autority in PvP and i think no one shall use It maybe Just noobs.
I always used strenght and agility build since They always are meta and still meta.
If we have strenght build to use strenght weapons , agility build to use agility weapons autority build MAIN weapons are the Thralls since all perks are about Thralls in autority tree its no dificult to understand.
About you getting offline raided If you cant stay online in Raid time you can move pve conflict or search a Clan stay online in Raid time , They never will put a offline protect mode Because people Will abuse It using secondary accounts like They do to have hight numbers Thralls in Clans.
Also stop building in trees , after age of sorcerer Just noobs build in trees since we have the bat.
Right I’m a N00B 'cause can’t stay in game on daily basis from 1800-2300.
Oh and joining perfect strangers in a clan… right to get banned, if one of them pulls some s**t
Well, based on how long it is taking them to get pets up to speed after the nerf…
Do recall they were going to also be revised at a “later date”…
This one would say the amount of time to be expect for followers to get these “new systems” will be similar to the amount of time it took from the game’s launch to when it got the new system of Sorcery.
Maybe if we are especially lucky as long as it took to get mounts.
But don’t hold your breath.
For some quality of creature, a promise of something in the future is constant.
Constant in that at no point will that promise come true in the present and it will always be waiting a few updates away.
FFS i have lost more thralls this few days with the last chapter than my 2500 hours. Top thralls like Dalinsia, Cimmerians, and Volcano T4 are falling like flies with the beat armor nearing 2k armor.
Not to mention some NPCs that used to be defensive now attack you on sight to add to the body count.
This is most likely not an oversight, but a consequence of a more general policy. If you look at the NPC table, you will see that in almost all factions, the lower the thrall’s tier, the higher his vitality step, and therefore the higher the chance of getting a higher vitality value.
Most likely, the developers intended this to compensate for the lower combat statistics and shortened combos of Tier I - II warriors.
But if they are “not happy” with how “tanky” bearers are, which is why some T4’s have had their HP cut by 2,500 to 3,500, why would T1 and T2 bearers start at over 1k HP and have vastly higher hp per vit gains. Will this not make them “not happy” with people simply using T1 and T2 bearers as “tanky meat shields”? Sure their combos are not going to be as good but give them the best armor you can and legendary weapons and they will do a job for sure!
But again, all of this is being done in preparations for a system that isn’t even ready yet, and who knows if or when this system even will be ready? So would it not have been wiser for Funcom to wait to make all of these changes to the live servers UNTIL said system was also ready?
Definitely your play style lol. Get out in the world. Bring your thrall to the mounds, take a walk to the volcano, a few votaries of skelos npcs are enough to decimate your thrall in seconds. Purge npcs are nothing compared to the buff the cimmerians npc got and it feel like thralls armor is less effective. A lot of players talking about this, so yeah, its your play style that doesn’t really take any risk with thralls eh
