Regular Pets Became Worthless in AoW? And Greater Pets Nerfed?

Conan Exiles General Discussion
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I’m not sure if this was intentional or accident, maybe related to the “Thrall Damage to NPCs Multiplier” new settings which also impacts pets, but the regular form of pets (not Greater) have become remarkably terrible. They do -80% damage compared to the Greater versions at the same stats. I first noticed this with a lvl 20 wolf pet which struggled at killing an Exile NPC, one of the weakest enemies in the game who has no armor.

Let me show some damage comparisons. Since my first wolf had 22 Strength, I used that as my standard for testing. All numbers here are with lvl 20 pets with 22 strength, fighting a humble crocodile. Player is lvl 0 authority, no armor, no buffs. No pet food buffs either, and pet perks were rerolled until no +Str. This is just their raw damage of one hit against a croc.

  • Regular Wolf: 23 damage
  • Greater Wolf: 128 damage
  • Regular Jaguar: 15 damage
  • Greater Jaguar: 77 damage
  • Regular Sabretooth: 20 damage
  • Greater Sabretooth: 113 damage
  • Regular Bear: 22 damage
  • Greater Bear: 104 damage
  • Regular Sand Reaper: 16 damage (arm swipe)
  • Sand Reaper Queen: 85 damage (arm swipe)

Someone else can correct me, but I don’t recall the difference being so incredible in AoS. I tried going full 20 authority with 2 regular sand reapers, both lvl 20 stocked full of black lotus food (13 hp/s), into New Asagarth, and both died in the second wave despite me fighting at the front. I took 2 wolves into Skulker’s End (lvl 20, no food, no assistance), and the first wolf died before the first darfari did, and the second wolf died after the third darfari. Pic

AoW Pet
AoW Pet1920×1080 258 KB

Regular pets are unusable at seemingly any stage in the game. In contrast, taking one Greater version with 0 authority in the same scenarios tears through no problem. The Greater Wolf one-shots darfari, while the regular needed 6 hits to kill a single one.

I feel this could be a consequence of the new settings for “Thrall Damage to NPCs Multiplier,” which also applies to Pets in addition to Thralls. The default in singleplayer and online official is “Thrall Damage to NPCs Multiplier” set to 0.5x, ie half damage. With NPCs doing more damage and pets doing half, plus pet hp being nerfed, the already struggling regular version of pets have now collapsed completely.

AoW seems to have hurt pets as a whole. Although Greater pets are handling better thanks to their greatly boosted stats compared to the regular, I’m noticing boss fights with Greater pets are taking significantly longer now than they did in the public beta. Red Mother has the same hp as she did in the beta, but two Greater Rocknoses just took 2m 20s seconds to kill her (timed), compared to 40s in the beta (timed). I’d expect twice as slow just due to the arbitrary -50% damage, but this is over 3 times slower. It really reverses the advertised “shorter but deadlier fights” of this update, yet this nerf only affects Pets. T4 thralls ended up with mostly the same damage they had in AoS, but all pets ended up heavily nerfed with no benefits compared to AoS.

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You could try playing on a server or in singleplayer with adjusted values to see if they play the way you think they should. This would actually give some pretty decent data and feedback all round if people actually did this.

There’s quite a few more server settings in AoW, which is a great thing for our console friends who cannot resort to mods.

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Adjusted in what way? I did all the testing for this post in singleplayer; that’s how I was able to uniformly set their strength value to 22 across the board to compare damages. These numbers I posted aren’t theory or calculated, that’s from testing it in-game against an enemy.

The sudden “Thrall Damage to NPCs Multiplier = 0.5" change seems to be the dev’s solution to the thrall buffs, but I don’t think they realized or considered that server setting also influences pets, which weren’t buffed alongside their wildlife counterparts. Speaking theory now, as a result, NPCs losing -50% hp is matched by pets losing -50% damage, so no change, but NPC’s gaining +100% damage is multiplied against pets losing -50% hp for a truly miserable end result of dying 4x easier but taking the same time to kill. And some bosses like Kinscourge actually had their hp double this patch, so that’s 4x longer to kill mixed with this.

Since it’s singleplayer, of course I can just raise the “Thrall Damage to NPCs Multiplier” back to 1.0x, but I do like to play online in official PVE-C with friends and there’s nothing that can be done there, except bring attention to it here.

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If its a server setting issue, you need to report that to the server owner/administration, assuming the setting was made in error. That’s the server’s discord if it has one for most, or Zendesk for Funcom’s server.

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Pretty much yes.

The reason the greater versions of those few ones do more damage is actually because while they created pet versions of them… they forgot to swap over (or intentionally left a few?) but basically greater wolves, sabretooths, jaguars, wolves and bears still use the attacks of the wild versions, while regular versions use the nerfed pet versions.

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I thought that was redressed in AoS Ch2? Sabretooth was singled out by name in the patch notes

  • Sabretooth and Yakith have received the biggest decrease (-40%).

and I recall testing it individually at the time, with a decked out Greater Sabretooth’s lunge attack doing ~900 in live against Red Mother, while the same lunge attack with the same build/buffs/stats doing ~600 against Red Mother in the AoS Ch2 public beta, which I took as confirmation at the time. Was it really missed over? I mean, that would 100% explain the massive discrepancy between regular and greater, so the ball is in your court here, but I really did see some kind of difference at the time.

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They got nerfs then as well to their Strength damage contribution and other stuff.
And yes, they missed it, which tricked me too the other day as I was expecting them to have pet stats, which did not make sense.
A greater jaguar at level 0 should be doing like 12 damage if it was correctly set to use the pet version of attacks… yet it was doing like 46 so it confused me since I calculated it beforehand to know what to expect.
So I looked and indeed there is an override that sets it right back to use the wild versions… they did change it in the primary location though, but not the override.

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I see. Well that’s a small blessing in disguise here, because that error is the only thing keeping the Greater versions relevant in AoW. I really do like pets in this game, Sand Reaper Queen especially. This realization has already doused a portion of my excitement this patch. It would be a huge shame if all my favorite followers were totally bricked.

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Yeah normal pets are completely unusable after the age of war update. Across the board, just dont bother. Some of the greaters can last briefly but still get slaughtered very quickly. Its a brutal nerf on pets for sure.

Im going to try to find a a possible fix with server settings to offset this for my wife as this has caused our tribe to quit the game, which is a huge drag. :frowning:

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I think this is a big enough of an issue that it’s worth copying this post and posting it on the “Bug Report” forum. It genuinely feels like they didn’t take into account pets when making the thrall update.

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