Our server recently started scooping up a few Relic Hunter Treasure Seekers from the Unnamed City. This came after watching a few of Firespark and Wak’s videos on best thralls and seeing how well they performed. So here is our observation after leveling a few and using them.
Why bother with named thralls?
Sure, there are a very few specific ones like Teimos and Delinsia that are just monsters but for how easy it is to get one these Relic Hunters are the clear winner. Heck I was on a new server and had one knocked out in the first day. Starting with 5K+ health and 3 bonus stats they are cheap easy monsters.
We now find that the Ooh and Aww of finding named fighters is pretty much gone as we know they aren’t going to be as good unless you are super min/maxing for the Cimmerian HP or maybe a few Skelos. So my questions is, is the cheap easy accessibility of Treasure Seekers damaging the overall worth and desire to obtain general named thralls and would a change to their stats be healthy for the overall game balance. Something to make them on par with the other factions with their own uniqueness without overshadowing most.
Now I know everyone wants easy mode, though we are never going to admit it, and is most likely going to rage at the thought of anything being ‘nerfed’ because (insert random reason FC is the debil). But seriously, thinking about the balance of the game should an easy to obtain thrall available on day 1 basically negate the value of 90% of any others and once leveled trivialize the vast majority of game content?
Why bother with any thrall that has no good damage multiplier? Well, because it takes ages to level them up and no one wants to waste time on thralls that still deal barely any damage and can’t take 2 hits from a crocodile. That’s sadly how it is, balancing in most games boils down to something like
“That thing is useless, it just exists to be there, you should use the other instead - like everyone else does”.
Same goes for food, why bother making the expensive feast items if they are just as slow, require lots more resources and can get their healing interrupted instantly as well?
RHTS used to be my go to fighter thralls before the update, now they are again. I do not bother with berserkers anymore. It is easy to grab a few treasure seekers and shove them on the wheel and presto. I think some of the purge thralls could be made better and rarer named ones also.
We cannot deny that funcom has always done a terrible job balancing game mechanics.
In exile lands it is ridiculously easy to capture T4 thralls.
On the first day of the game you can already have T4 crafters that spawn in the exiled camps or even darfari.
And in relation to these Relic hunters, it is the easiest and easiest method of building a large army. Before the update that included Levels for the minions, it was even more ridiculous.
But there are still some slight differences between the thralls.
The ones on the volcano are the best in general
Forgotten tribe are very strong and a little easier to get;
Heirs of the north (Lian, janos …) are a little weaker, but they are easier to level than everyone those mentioned earlier.
So if you want 1 thrall to help you get things right at the beginning of the game, they are a good option.
But at the end of the day I think these easy and fixed t4 thrall spawns of any kind are totally pointless. takes away much of the fun of the game, I wonder how quickly the fun of chasing thralls on PvE servers is lost.
I have even played the island of siptah and one of the biggest motivations of my clan is to get these T4 thralls, even on a PvP server.
*Just some notes: all of them have a pretty similar damage multiplier, so i think the best stats for a combat thrall are Vitality > survival > strenght/accuracy/agility.
each strenght point gives 0.04% ~ 0.0825% damage increase
each vitality point gives around 2~3% extra hp based on its base hp.
There are different levels of thralls, the named one listed are low level. Firespark and WAC are cheesers. Thats what they do.
Relic hunters come in several levels too. The Slave takers are great at what they do, and they are only level 3.
The fighters are middle to upper rated.
We have a few but prefer the Cimmeron warriors.
There are some odd balance (imbalance?) aspects here, but most striking to me is all the purge thralls with poor damage modifiers (usually 1.7 or less compared to 2.0-2.2 for non-purge top tier thralls). It takes away the fun of purges for the purge thrall fighters to be relatively limp
I am not thinking the treasure seekers should be nerfed so much, as others should be buffed up -particularly purge thralls, give them top tier damage modifiers at least I say. Also, I would like to see more diversity in valuable thralls, I would like to see at least purge thralls of all factions be competitive (yes, even darfari purge thralls, dogs of desert, etc.). Maybe make purge thralls of every faction have some Teimos factor Most of the game sees our characters at max level, I’d like to see more variety in thralls we can make good use of at the “endgame,” and again make purge thralls a worthy reward to capture, so odd that they hit softer than common berserks/vocano fighters & treasure seekers.
The whole game needs a broad sweeping rebalance pass. Everything from thralls to crafting materials to attributes and perks to feat points to damage to healing to food/drink to buff items and so on.
Relic hunters are t4, so they should be considered named thralls. The best part about them is that they are randomly generated so you actually have variety. Why not just get 100 Snowhunters? They’re better than Relic Hunters and they all look the same if you’re into that.
Either way, the ‘best’ thralls keep jumping around with updates. Looks like the old Captains from Sepermeru hit hardest now (after Siptah) and recently got a buff (at a whopping 3.9 dmg modifier [according to the wiki] with all other stats identical to Relic Hunters) - and I still have a crate of those. May as well put those out now. Last time I checked on those they were at the same power levels of the Relic Hunters.
Thing about rare named thralls and purge thralls is that there is effort and challenge to their acquisitions. Snowhunter is not just sitting there every 16 minutes waiting for you to take her home but RHTS are. They are guaranteed every spawn. Even Teimos who shows up just about every single time isn’t 100%.
We were moving our main base up north so I wanted some heavier thralls for the purge so I headed over to the Unnamed City and in just a couple hours I had 20 RHTS on wheels. Can’t get 20 Delincias or 20 Captains. Many in this thread have expressed a similar feeling that once you know they are there and are so easy to get, 90% of the combat thralls in the game become meaningless. Yes many areas need balancing but my post was specific to these thralls.
IMO, I’ve always thought the named thralls (non-crafters) need a serious overhaul. My specific suggestion has been to put them all on par with each other. I’m fine with the T1 through T3 being unequal based on location in the Exiled Lands. Funcom has always been clear about the various regions and what level toon they are intended for. But I think they’ve missed the boat on the fact that this is a sandbox and no one plays based on Funcom’s intended vision of each area. As the OP said, and many others have demonstrated, much gets bypassed by going straight for Relic Hunters (or other bypass strategies). All named fighters and archers, regardless of region, should be on par (give them stat variance, and maybe some unique buffs based on region). They all take the same amount of time to train, so they need to be worth that time. For all the dozens of times I’ve rolled a new toon in the Exiled Lands, I NEVER train T4 archers or fighters unless they’re from the Volcano, Sepermeru, or Mounds. It’s just not worth the training time.
Never training other T4s may be why you think they all take the same amount of time to train - the reality is there are considerable differences in the amount of XP they require to level up. Dalinsia, RHTS, Cimmerian Berserker, Volcano thralls all tend to be ‘slow levellers’ whereas others can be considerably faster to level. That’s actually one of the complaints people have about Teimos - in terms of results he is on a similar power level to the ‘top tier’ thralls, but levels considerably faster. Lian/Janos are also faster, and hit as hard as any, but their lower HP makes them more vulnerable. At the bottom end, T4 exiles or darfari are unquestionably weaker, but they also level way quicker, and can still handle most of the content in the EL. There’s advantages to each type (though the slow levellers are still ‘the best’ ).
That said, I’m not going to disagree that they could do with an overhaul - that certainly seems true - and the comparative rubbishness of many purge fighters is a definite disappointment. I’m 100% with @Ozymandias on that one.
I am from XBox and before our last patch the Dalinsia had much power & reasonable life (9-10k).
while rhts had around 7k
after last update, Dalinsia has only less then 6K while rhts still have almost 7k . wtf.
also now they die much faster. why should i waste my time level them up and keep them alive when i can get a dozen of rhts in the same time. it is a pity and total frustrating when i think how much time (weeks!) and effort i invested to get dalinsias and now I have them and start to level them up and at once they get nerved. Somehow this is the whole story of this game for me. I manage to find a reasonable way to play - the next patch renders all worthless and i have to start again. the more the often i ask myself if the fun playing this game is not outweighted by the repeated frustration (beside the momentary situation on xbox) and stress caused by these - at least for me - unwanted game changes in the last year. It began with the horses & level system for thralls…
Not everything changed - any Dalinsia that you have from before they got nerfed will have lost HP, but they will still have around double the melee damage multiplier that new thralls have. (I’m sorry, I have no idea how you can view this information on Xbox - on PC you need to be in admin mode, have them following you, open the Command Console and type GetFollowerStat DamageModifierMelee but I have no idea how that would work on any other platform, if at all.)
The nerf didn’t just change thrall HP, it also reduced the damage modifiers of all new thralls, but did not apply that part of the change back to existing ones. World bosses also got nerfed to balance this more, so that with one of the new thralls the fight should take around the same time as an old thrall vs an old boss. What this actually means is that all those Dalinsia’s you worked to get are still the best thralls in the exiled lands, and are more powerful than anything that anyone can get now.
My old Lian and old Cimmerian Berserker both lost HP in the nerf, but afterwards they absolutely murderised everything, because they were still doing damage at the old rate, but bosses only had hp at the new rate. I eventually retired them because they were just too darn strong
I think you misunderstood what I was talking about due to semantics differences… train/tame/break… I was talking about the wheel of pain. Yes, after you break them and start leveling them, sure, there’s different leveling paces. But I would not waste my time capturing a Janos when I can get my hands on a Berzerker, for example. They take the same amount of time on the wheel, yet one is vastly superior to the other.
Ah yes - I did misunderstand exactly that point. Yeah breaking on the wheel is the same time span. We all use too many different words to describe the same thing, lol. I guess I just don’t consider the time on the wheel to be the biggest factor - for me the xp time feels more important - but now I get much more what you meant
The problem with this game is that it’s a sandbox, and nothing in it’s world is made thinking about some sort of progression, at least for thralls.
You can get level 35, make 30 stun arrows, head over mounds and get your guaranteed spawn cimmerian berserker, with a wooden bow, a few arrows while naked.
You can even knock it down via stunlock with two players, or player + any thrall.
That’s basically skipping 60-80% of the content in terms of thralls, and nothing stops you from doing it.
When things like this happen (And I unfortunately can’t even think of a solution), there is not much discussion around balancing.
Why use the word “balance”, and why make FC aware that there’s a preferential thrall out there, when their track record is nerf anything the players think is OP. Also, newsflash, not EVERYONE wants easy mode, your assuming .
Most of the game sees our characters at max level, I’d like to see more variety in thralls we can make good use of at the “endgame,” and again make purge thralls a worthy reward to capture, so odd that they hit softer than common berserks/vocano fighters & treasure seekers.
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