As the title says.
Many patches ago, the hidden values attached to all thralls regarding their Ranged vs Melee damage modifiers were standardised and effectively made into just a single value. Because of this, the denotation of [Fighter] and [Archer] are all but meaningless.
In the current system, the names fighter and archer are meaningless.
If I donât know the stats of a new thrall, I have to go into the reference materials and look for hidden multipliers to figure out how best to use it. And the inscriptions âfighterâ and âarcherâ are only confusing.
I still donât understand why the developers donât want to make archers archers, and fighters fighters. Itâs as simple as a stool.
How about just remove the hidden multiplier completely. Itâs silly to begin with and makes 0 sense to manage another variable that the player canât see instead of adjusting the variables that you can see. They literally complicated it so that they can have less transparency in how to regulate thralls.
This is unrealistic because it involves completely rebalancing the combat system. They wonât do it.
But I would support making hidden multipliers open with three hands)))
Put all multipliers to 1.0, it wonât break Thrall balance more than it is 
If their goal was to make the Darfari the strongest warriors, then if you implement the option you proposed, the Darfari will become the weakest, and it will be necessary to give them additional strength points. And the pirates will become the strongest archers, and they will need to be weakened. Etc.
Absolutely unrealistic.
This is what needs to be removed, and immediately, IMHO - these are different leveling speed multipliers. It should be the same for everyone.
Dont really care since they will be designated what i want them to be.
There is a reason why they havenât done this (sort of), but there is no reason why they will never do this.
In fact theyâve been slowly pushing these values closer to 1.0 for a while now. The best thralls used to have a 3.5-4.9 modifier on their respective combat style. This has been whittled down patch by patch to see how it affects things.
So many people donât understand why these modifiers exist. They arenât here to trip us up. They are part of a legacy system that was used to make some NPCs stronger than others in the wild. Its why higher tribes hit harder and in many cases much harder than their weapons usually would.
Remember that NPCs in the wild have zero stats. They arenât set to 0. They just donât exist. When a NPC is converted to a thrall it gets a template overlayed onto them that gives them stats based on attributes.
In fact all NPCs have templates. They have a base human template, a tribe template, a tier template, and sometimes a unique one. Adding all of these together gives them their final modifiers. These modifiers are how much extra damage they do with either ranged or melee, their Armor from Grit, and Health from Vitality. Iâm sure Iâm missing something or two, here but this good enough for brevity.
This is why we see so many NPCs have issues of being overpowered or underpowered. Thereâs too many links in the chain and modifiying one has ramifications in dozens if not hundreds of places. For example modifying the human template will make all thralls stronger. Where modifying the template for Heirs of the North will only make the Nordheimers stronger. In theory, assuming no random thrall in other tribes were intentionally (to make things spicy) or unintentionally (selecting the wrong template) set to something else.
Hereâs where Funcom went wrong. This system worked because it was a quick and dirty way of making NPCs of various difficulties. Fighters and Archers did not have levels, and were mostly not expected to be used in most cases like they are now. The strongest thralls only had around 500-700hp and relied more on the quality of the weapons they had than their modifiers.
NPCs were the same. As you all noticed prior to the update that allowed them to drop their weapons, they would use weapons, and sometimes not have them when they were broken in. All NPCs (animals and monsters) have weapons in their NPC inventory. This is an inventory that doesnât drop when they are killed. Animals have animal attack weapons. And I say that in plural because they have multiple weapons.
When you see the Red Mother bite, that is one weapon. When you see her breath fire, thatâs another. If you see her tail swipe, its yet another. She selects a move/combo by switching weapons. But when sheâs killed she doesnât (or shouldnât) drop her weapons. They are there just to give her functional attacks.
To my knowledge all animals and monsters DO have 1.0/1.0 Melee/Ranged modifiers. Their damage is ENTIRELY on their weapon. Its easy because they donât drop them. Cimmerians from the Forgotten Tribe have higher modifiers because they need to hit just a tad harder than their star metal weapons would.
Prior to the update their weapons were apart of the same NPC inventory that animal weapons were. And you would only get loot from a standard pool. They changed that so their weapons drop from their inventories when killed.
Setting all NPCs to 1.0 across the board would cause these NPCs to be less dangerous (kinda). This is why and the only reason why they havenât set them 1.0 across the board. Of course I said kinda⊠because Exile NPCs have less than 1.0 and with stone weapons at 1.0 would pose an interesting challenge to newbies. I say interesting because while some of us would welcome that, others may find it not so appealing. Tomayto Tomahto 
(in case some donât understand the phrase there⊠letâs not go off topic on the subject of how difficult the newbie river should be).
With that said, they probably should very much consider doing it anyway. Its a suggestion Iâve made years ago, and I would love to see NPCs normalized so that you can simply use the thrall you want based on aesthetics and your ability to train them is what makes them strong (also their tier, tier 1-4 thralls would still be a thing). If I can train different people from different backgrounds for war in real life, then Iâd like to think my character is at least as capable.
As for the tags being removed as the OP suggests. In the current state of the game, I would say no. I wouldnât do that. If they ever did away with the hidden attributes then I would definitely consider it. Or at least changing it up a tad.
Instead of Fighter and Archer, I would change it to Fighter and Scout. Fighters would indicate some bonus to STR (the attribute itself), and Scouts would have bonuses to Agility. Could even have different ones for Grit and Vitality.
The idea here is that two thralls with the same STR score would hit just as hard with the same weapon, even if they are from different tribes. Two thralls with the same VIT would have the same health. And so forth. The attributes alone should affect their stats, not hidden modifiers.
It must have been a very long time ago. Iâve been playing for a little over 3 years, and in my memory there have never been multipliers more than 2.23.
And then immediately 3.1.
I think I remember the last days of that. It was a trip where thralls ruled over the landscape and could kill you in one hit. I remember our first battle in PVP and i was trying to haul transport significant loot. This was back in the day where there was an expectation that alpha clans provide services to the server overall like public map rooms etc. Well our public map rooms had fighter thralls to ensure we could manage a purge. Any ways the volcano was where this all went down and I noticed two people coming off the obelisk and they werenât my clan. They were running straight for me as I inched my way to the safety of the maproom and the door underneath where we have small crafting areas for each biome. I thought for sure I was a goner but I got the door open right when I heard their toons cry out their attacking blows. Then I hear the familar squishâŠbut I was still standing. Both of them were in pieces with my two thralls standing there with their 2H SM swords. Luckiest and most entertaining time I had in the game. That series was just fun all around and I compare all PVP to that time.
What makes the archer better than the fighter using a bow is two things.
ButâŠ
Imagine the horror visiting a camp and each archer is shooting you ten arrows each, providing you cripples and head shots all the time.
You cannot just change thralls without changing the npcs.
The game already did this move. With the release of Siptah gave us Ulrich.
99,99% of the players used this archer as fighter and he is by far the best thrall you can get even now. The real reason we do not train archers as archers is because itâs expensive.
The most necessary thing we need to ask for archers is quiver.
We shouldnât use all the inventory of archers for arrows. We should have a quiver that can be equipped ONLY from archers and place at least 500 arrows in it. This way archers will take a more serious role in this game. And archers donât really need vitality, you can make a lvl X purge with lvl 0 Dinas and lost zero of them.
Iâd like for this to happen too, but:
^ This. I doubt FC wants to effectively rewrite stuff from the ground up. If the multipliers were added into the stats menu under âCulture Bonusâ or something thatâd do for now.
Having some auto filled formula there would be cool too. Like if your thralls has a 20% strength bonus, it shows it being multiplied by 1.8 or something in brackets, then the final value shows at the end.
See, thats the thing. I do put whoever wherever, but it annoys me to see an âArcherâ on the ground without a bow and a âFighterâ on the wall with a bow.
First of all, this one entirely agrees that the hidden figures should be out and observable.
Like they did a few months ago?
If you had posted this before the Age of War revamp, this one would have agreed. After seeing how much they torqued the system recentlyâŠ
No, they seem to be quite game for reinvention.
I voted leave them, but that comes with the opinion that they should not be the same.
Thralls can be tweaked by initial stats, attribute bonuses, and hidden multipliers.
Initial stats are utterly underused, being based solely on faction and, to a lesser extent, tier.
Attribute bonuses are utterly underused, with only three variation existing on every thrall in the entire game with every case of Agility and Strength having an equal value on the same thrall.
Hidden multipliers currently dominate thrall variation entirely.
Unlike others, I do not agree that hidden multipliers should be completely done away with, but I do believe they should be heavily standardized.
T1 should be 1.0. T2 should be 1.1. T3 should be 1.2. T4 should be 1.3.
Archers should be +0.2 in ranged damage. Fighters should be +0.2 in melee damage.
All other uniqueness between thralls should be handled through initial stats and attribute bonuses which are visible on the thrallâs stats page.
Unfortunately, I believe the reason why the hidden multipliers are so heavily used is because wild thralls are tied to converted thralls. There needs to be a better way to adjust them independent of each other in the same way they separated pets before anything can be changed in a useful way.
They didnât rebalance it completely enough, from the hidden multipliersâ perspective. They still adjust human NPC threat level by these âhiddenâ multipliers that are still transferred to the thrall version. In order to make it work, NPCs in the wild should have access to these multipliers, and thralls should not (because they have stats).
So, the wheel of pain should stop making a thrall inherit the wild NPCâs damage multipliers. Thatâs the only way wild Darfari with their bone weapons could be a threat to lower-level players without becoming powerhouses as thralls.
As far as I understand, they simply changed some parameters for some races, and the system recalculated all the values ââusing the old formulas.
Of course, I didnât express myself precisely: I didnât mean rebalancing, but creating a new system with the characteristics of each NPC manually.
Considering there are archers with better melee multipliers and fighters with better ranged multipliers, the distinction seems arbitrary in a lot of cases. I got an Ulric Bearbaiter from the purge, an archer with an ranged multiplier of 1.65 and a melee multiplier of 2.06 (as well as 3600 starting hp!), and quite rightly, I put a sword in his hand and snapped his bow on my knee 
As a few have said here the multipliers should be visible for both stats. I mean whatâs the point in displaying the attribute stats explain a fraction of damage output?
lol - i guess i dont see it aesthetically anymore since i dont use that as a metric to determine what their role is once i cap them at 20.
Ive actually swapped some when their agility and strength are close and i do that based on what their vitality is.
So in other words if their vitality is under 2k - archer. Over 2k melee.
I donât think this would be reliable. Right now I believe the archers and ranged NPCs in general âaimâ their projectiles at the middle of a model. Usually giving it the highest chance of hit. Moving that up to the head would in theory generate more headshots, but also result in more misses as the head is a smaller target. Remember when a thrall uses a weapon they use the same combos as we do, but without the intuition.
I wish there was some system where the game was a bit better at predicting where you are, but itâs not very good at that, and I donât know if we actually want this, since like you said later in your post it affects NPCs too.
Now this is something they could probably get to work. Get the thralls to attack with shorter delays. This would result in more damage over all and more hits by sheer volume. And I definitely agree this should be done. It would result in NPC archers being a bit more dangerous, but not to the extent of constant head/leg hits would be if they could somehow be more accurate.