Could we please have thrall perks be relevant to their skillset? What use is it for a strong melee oriented thrall to have “Deadeye” perk when their base accuracy is poor, at best?
Another issue is how perks tend to sabotage any previous gain it provided. Take for example this:
This thrall is a performer with a strong melee skillset, yet it got an accuracy increase, and then was immediately sabotaged in the next perk gain. I would have prefered a perk that helped it, even in a minor way on some other area, rather than see it become weaker on its main strength.
I would prefer for thralls to gain an extra skill, even if a minor one, like prefering blades over maces. Or an affinity to a certain type of armor.
The perk system needs work for sure. But if they fixed it with a patch right now, like before I am done writing this, you wouldn’t be able to tell a difference in how your thrall performs. The reason for this is how little the attributes actually add. The only two that really matter is Vitality and Survival.
The main stats that matter for damage you cannot see without using the wiki, dev kit, or admin access. Those are Melee Damage Modifier and Ranged Damage Modifier. These are mutilative
To give an example, Freya, the named Nordheimer Archer would need 61 Accuracy in order to do a point of damage more than a 0 Accuracy Relic Hunter Treasure Seeker archer if both were using the same gear.
While I do wish for the perks to make sense and lessen the sabotagy nature they have. I would like to see the issues of hidden modifiers (there’s others that affect armor and health) removed or at least made more transparent. I believe this should happen before any perks are adjusted.
No, agility gives just straight up armor points. The amount of armor per agility is different from thrall to thrall. It should simply be the same across the board with ‘better’ thralls having higher agility.
Same with MDM and RDM, they should be removed or set to 1.0 and simply increase the STR and ACC with everyone getting the same amount per, just better thralls get higher stats that you can see.
If a Darfari Fighter 1 has 10 STR, 15 VIT, and 10 AGI, a Relic Hunter Fighter 2 has 5 STR, 12 VIT, and 15 AGI, and a Votarie Fighter 3 has 15 STR, 20 VIT, and 15 AGi, how much damage does each one do, how many HP does each one have, and how much damage reduction does each one have (assuming Heavy Armor and Hardened steel Greatsword, both with no kits)?
You would need to look at about a dozen tables to figure that out. You should be able to tell by looking at the information given. We can already do this for players. Why do thralls need to be so convoluted?
Weirdly enough pets don’t have this issue (as bad) as their stats are standardized. They only need their base damages to show up on their equipment page to account for not being able to equip weapons.
I know a couple of T4s because I’ve basically memorized them. But that isn’t information the normal player can find easily, or worse, even know to look for it.
I’m fortunate that I have a mod that tells me how much damage my thrall does and how much damage he takes in real time. Not everyone has access to that.
People have been asking for the game to be less hateful for years, but also people have been asking for it to be more hateful for years. There’s hardly a thing everyone can agree on, guess we just have to accept a bunch of our fellow gamers are masochists and Funcrom is happy to play sadist.
There are some T2s with higher MDM’s than some T4’s.
Also the Armor Pen guide you listed is a bit out of date. Armor Pen used to be applied to armor. So 25% armor pen against 800 armor treated it as 600 armor or: 76% damage reduction becomes 71% reduction.
But the way it works now is Armor pen is assessed directly to damage reduction. So 25% in this case would apply directly to that 76% to make it 51%.
Its why when you use a stone mace against a Rocknose you don’t see negligible amounts of damage increases (if it was the old way I doubt you’d see much if any at all). But it damn near does double the damage of most other weapons.
And Agility for players gives 4 armor per point. That is all it does in regards to armor. It has other benefits for players as well, but not thralls. For thralls it gives anywhere from 8 to 12 (maybe more in some cases) armor per. Depending on thrall.
I’ve already done quite a few tests. Its a bit off topic, but here’s a funny little bit of knowledge about bows and arrows. They do not add any of their attributes together. Bows and Arrows do their damage and armor pen as if they were separate attacks. It calculates as a bow and an arrow attack and then adds the results together (even before a mod can pick up on it). When I was making an archery mod a few years back, I was trying to have a system where arrows would have little damage but arrow types would determine armor penetration. Where the damage would be imparted from the bow.
Problem I ran into is the expected damage was not happening and was doing quite a bit less than I expected. After hours of testing it was a random thought that maybe the attacks were separate. So when I tested for that, it gave consistent results.
One of the things that helps us PC players is Hosav’s UI. It has a function of floating damage numbers that show’s what’s happening. The old way of doing it was to have PVP on, can damage structures on, and friendly fire damage at 100%. Then we’d attack a thrall and quickly check their health to see how much happened. It was tedious. And we were using weapons with different stats. If we wanted to use test weapons, we’d have to mod them in.
Now we have the numbers pop up and we have admin commands that allow us to change the damage and armor pen of any weapon in our inventory. For example if I want to use a spear with 100 damage and 15% armor pen for a test, I can do so. I can then change the armor pen to 30% and see the difference. I can also change armor values to get the damage reduction I am shooting for.
That last one I use a table created in a TI-83 (hey, I spent like $200 for it for college over 20 years ago, I’m gonna get use out of it) for different armor values in sections of 50. By the way the formula for damage reductions is (the article you linked had a chart, but not the formula):
Won’t be me. My knowledge isn’t as extensive as some others. I’ve only recently gotten into editing and creating blueprints in UE. I know just enough to be able to break things.
Well, I don’t think I’ll be much help in making a guide, but I am very good at breaking things, if you need a hand with anything like that, I’m your man.
For what it matters, this one would infinitely prefer if the damage modifiers were at least as visible as the hp gained from vigor section. (This one would much prefer if it wasn’t by tier and faction and instead was solely built off stats, but that seems improbable to the point of implausible)
There are some things where mystery is good.
This is not one of those situations.
And even if the information is already data mined, one should not have to dig around a wiki to find out something so fundamental to the functionality of the prisoner with job.
This is a QoL that would be very worthy and shouldn’t be very difficult to implement.
That’s an interesting idea. So like putting a Stygian thrall in Stygian armor will double the armor perks or something? Or giving them tribe appropriate weapons increase attack speed or etc. Might be interesting…
I would like to see a thrall rebalance for sure. I’m no expert nor did I put that much though into this but maybe something like making all thralls of equal tier relatively the same effectiveness, and then only the starting stats and perks will make them differ. That way regardless of what faction an archer is, they will all be effective as long as they leveled well and you chose the right perks (more on that in a second). But if you wanted the tip-top archer thrall for example, then the Relic Hunter’s or Black Hands would be your go-to because they start out with more accuracy.
Also would be nice if when leveling a thrall, you get to choose a perk at each milestone based on the perk you wanted the attributes for, but the randomness would still come in the rarity of that perk. For example the top tier perk you could roll 3 different options, but the vitality option might have been the best one at +15 whereas the strength option was only +10, and so on.
Not sure how I feel about growth chance, maybe that could still be the same but with some manipulation but maybe it could go away. Just some thoughts. I’m excited to see what’s in the next update, it can’t come fast enough!
One big thing though would be nice, if thralls could level up on their own. Base defense thralls for example, every time they participate in a kill they should get some exp, that way they can level up during purges and stuff.
