Returning player, how have folks adapted to the dodge change?

Conan Exiles General Discussion
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I took a long break, just as they were releasing mounts into the game. No reason in particular, but I had 2000+ hours in and figured it was time to broaden my horizons. But I got curious about the current state of the game, so I booted up the game for the first time in months this weekend. Holy h*ll, this is not the same game anymore.

The dodge nerf is a huge change. I haven’t made up my mind on it, but it’s removed a lot of options as I’m leveling up a new toon. My impression so far is that it makes gear far more important than it used to be, and slows down overall game play.

How have folks adapted to the change?

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By gritting my teeth and wearing heavy armour - which I didn’t do with the original roll. Have changed my fight style completely and I prefer my old style of fighting. But, now that the roll has changed, I have to say that the original roll was too fast, but the new speed is way too slow and looks awkward.

What do you think of the new 2 handed sword animation? Full combos are really hard to connect now. I grit my teeth so hard with this that I’m surprised my teeth haven’t snapped.

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I returned like 2 weeks ago and I adapted to the new roll change pretty quickly.

You can’t use it anymore to catch running players, but it’s generally still the same: light armor rules in PvP. You can now use any weapon now in foot PvP but, there is a big but:

Horse PvP.

Yes, horses are OP and they dominate the PvP servers if the people know what they are doing.
Right now you only have advantages when fighting on a horse:

  • Speed. You are simply faster
  • Increased damage. You do 1.5x of your normal damage
  • Increased hit radius when using a spear
  • Bleed on every attack with spear (heavy attack)
  • No stamina cost at all for your attacks
  • Bonus trample damage when charging
  • When charging, you have a 2-3 second stun when you trample players that are on foot
  • You can attack people in water

Here is me fighting in an arena event:

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I’m getting pretty decent with it. As Halk said, it’s not a disengagement tool anymore, but you can still avoid damage, which is supposed to be its purpose anyway.

Mind you, some bosses are pretty much undodgeable these days. Some of them always were, though, such as the giant snake. This is an acceptable game design in my opinion - the same tools shouldn’t be effective in all situations, just like some weapons are better than others against certain types of enemies.

I don’t really use shields, so can’t really say much about them, but I do use daggers, and the backflip is still great.

And sometimes, especially when mobbed by multiple human NPCs, the best defense is a big weapon with hyperarmor attacks and hitting everything that moves until they stop moving.

I do regular thrall-training trips to the Unnamed City, and I can pretty decently dodge the big skeletor bosses, the wight and the Red Mama. The Winged Death is a difficult thing to dodge, but doable once you get the hang of the timing - the trouble against it is getting any hits in because you spend most of the time rolling. A good archer thrall works best. The Brute is annoying, its swipe attacks are too fast to be dodged. The Giant snake will kill me if I try to kill it.

Daggers + backflip and dodging sideways works great against Giant Spider and Sand Reaper Queen. I can solo both without taking damage.

The main difference, compared to the old dodge, is that you won’t get out of the attack’s range anymore, so you need to time the dodge precisely right to evade the damage. Against slower opponents that broadcast their attacks, backflip can take you out of reach (but beware, both the Reaper queen and Big Spider lunge pretty far).

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I drastically cutted down my hours in this game, thats how I cope with it.

Funcom sacrifized the doge roll to be able to implement the horses. They needed to nerf movement speed drastically otherwhise the horses would fall through the world. Thats the hugh problem they had for a long time until they came up with this “nerf speed down solution” as a work around. For 7 month now we have overpowered horses, that destroyed the open field fights completly, juhey… So if you wanna play, get a horse as soon as possible and build way up high or your will be screwed. Sounds great, right?

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I will be completely honest. I came back to the game in January after a few month hiatus due to RL stuff. And it was rough. I got my tail handed to me on content that I used to breeze through. Couple this with the server I was playing on using the Age of Calamitous mod adding in some hard creatures, and it made life quite difficult.

But what was giving me issues was that I didn’t understand what exactly had changed. So I had to learn to adapt. Instead of dodging attacks, I was using the dodge to cancel combos on me, and was using sprint to avoid many attacks by a variety of sources. It wasn’t perfect, but I was getting better.

I saw a random post somewhere, either on reddit, youtube (maybe even a comment), or on here. I don’t remember where. But it said something about Agility affecting dodges. So I decided to research further.

I found that Agility lets you recover from dodge faster and that 20 Agility was the sweet spot before diminishing returns kicked in. Well 20 Agility gives extra fall distance, so I was like, why the hell not? Put 20 points in…

And holy crap the world changed. 20 Agility basically makes dodge like it was with medium armor before the change. Not quite, but close. Now it was useful and I was back to where I was before that change.

Dodge is different now, it takes attributes, it takes new tricks and stunts to do things. But in my opinion its better now. There’s more thought to it. Its not so reactionary now. I think about dodging before doing it. I dodge to set up another set of actions.

Whereas before, if you miss with an attack, dodge. If something doesn’t feel right, dodge. Don’t know what to do? Dodge. If your opponent dodges, you dodge too. Now if you dodge at the wrong time or in the wrong direction, you can get caught in a flurry. You have to really consider when its appropriate to do. And now it’s usable with heavy armor as well.

I currently use a set of light armor for a archery/magic build (need AoC mod for magic). And I do quite well. I have to becareful pretty much with dragons (breath attack occasionally downs me if it catches me just right), or with a scourge rhino/mammoth charge which can multihit for 200dmg a hit). But outside of that, I don’t really have any issues with any bosses, except its hardest boss which has like a dozen hard hitting adds. Pretty much group content there. Or use alot of thralls.

I don’t know if I would use light armor with a melee build unless I stacked a ton of Agility. But that is only because I don’t play with primarily vanilla content, but stuff that can hit for 400-900 base damage or higher in some cases. The highest hitting vanilla content hits for a fraction of that, so light armor in unmodded gameplay is still very likely viable.

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Wow, tons of great info. Thanks everyone, a lot to absorb and work on. And very encouraging to see a lot of familiar names.

I’ll admit, I didn’t read anything before I logged in. The first I suspected something had changed was when a desert salamander handed me my behind in what I assumed would be a very routine fight with cloth armor and a stone pike. After that, I checked the boards, and realized I had a lot of re-learning to do.

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Easily…new roll is more tactical than the sonic the hedgehog roll we had before… U need to coordinate it with incoming attack. I found out that not only the back roll but the side ones r really usefull as well… So u will get used to it… Just do not think it as a move away move , but rather as i avoid one hit move

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I wish it would go away in a pit in Lava like useless thralls who waltz into it. =3

It looks so weird… like slow-mo and it bugs hell out of me. Not mention even in light armor + items… can never seem to find a sweet spot. -_-’

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How much Agility do you have?

If you have 0 then the dodge is painfully slow. The higher the Agility the faster it is.

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Just letting you know, the diminishing returns on this are around 20 points. The difference between 20 and 50 is so minimal, you’d be crazy to sink all the points in there.

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I like Agility 50 for the double-jump. The extra armor and a slight improvement in dodging is just a bonus. But yeah, it’s at around Agility 20 where dodging starts to work well.

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As many other members would be aware I was previously a vocal opponent of the dodge changes. That said I have more or less learned to adapt to the new system. I still prefer the old dodges, but as someone who plays purely Offline Singleplayer and rarely uses followers it is doable. Timing is a much more pertinent factor now. One true unsung hero which sweetened the deal for me was the recent rebalance which increased the number of dodges which Medium and Light armor users can perform before depleting their stamina bar.

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