Let’s put it bluntly. Conan Exiles Sorcery sucks.
Nobody uses it unless for RP purposes.
The AoW put the last nail in the coffin for the already barely viable builds you could make.
All people care about are transportory stones and illusion.
If nobody is using sorcery for combat, it means it was a fiasco of an implementation.
PvP is glad to have the demon bat to raid those pesky fly-base hackers XD
That’s about it ^^;
You don’t even need to be a sorceror for that, @SpherisCore . That’s the thing. You don’t need to be a sorceror to use any of the good stuff.
This is a well written post and I do agree with it for the most part. And this is honestly why I was from the beginning against the implementation of sorcery in Conan Exiles. I knew that it would never really work in any meaningful way while still being accurate to the lore of the source material. What did most of the Sorcerers do in the original stories? They certainly did not do anything like flinging lighting (Emperor Palpatine Style) and fireballs so anything combat centered is pretty much out of the equation. So what was it that they actually did? Commune with and summon demons and creatures from the outer dark, sending them to seek and and destroy those who crossed their path, but not actually physically going there themselves. Is that possible in Conan Exiles? Nope. Creating elaborate traps filled with death chambers filled with deadly creatures (both natural and unnatural) to ensnare any foolish enough to attempt to enter their domain while they played the political game of intrigue often holding more power than the king of the realm themselves. Is this really possible in Conan Exiles? Nope. Well I mean theoretically you could build something filled with pets but they are pretty much useless and you would just get offlined anyway so your whole tower / castle / whatever would be destroyed overnight when you were not even there to help defend it so what would be the point?
The fact of the matter is, there is no real way to play a sorcerer in the way that they were in the source material in this game, except in an RP server and even then you are still extremely limited and doing such. You still have to physically go out and do everything even if you just send your minions to fight while you run around and kite the enemy the entire time. That still is not really the way sorcerers in Hyboria would have acted and that is a far cry of the power in which they held. No longer are you able to summon a demon from the hells and send it to someones bed chamber to suddenly appear out of the shadows, paralyzing them in fear due to it’s demonic nature, and tear them asunder in a cruel and bloody manner all the while telling them WHO had send them their doom. No, no you are just left to run around in circle while your barely sustainable meat sponges (for a few hits anyway) HOPEFULLY manage to kill your target before you have to go back and raise up a whole new batch.
This is why I had been against sorcery in Conan Exiles from the beginning because I knew it was never going to work, while maintaining the lore. And it hasn’t. That does not mean that we should just throw away the lore and add a bunch of garbage that belongs in LOTR and WOW as some people on the forums have suggested since well before Age of Sorcery had even come out, or even been suggested it was going to come out. It honestly just never should have happened at all. But it has and it should be tweaked but I do not think it will ever truly work.
To be fair, most of that garbage doesn’t belong in the LOTR, either. I’m a much bigger Tolkien nerd than I am a Howard nerd, and it bothers me that people think that fireballs and lightning bolts belong in Tolkien’s universe.
Going back to the original topic, I agree that sorcery falls well short of its potential. It could stay true to the lore and be much more useful.
However, the idea that one should be able to go toe-to-toe in PVP, on your own, against a barbarian-type sorcerer, and trade blows with them – or even take blows from them repeatedly – is absurd and people need to let go of it.
Even so, sorcery could be made a lot more viable in PVP, but I’m pretty sure it won’t be, for three reasons. One major reason is because other PVP players will immediately scream about it. I personally like the ideas @DelRioServerMaster wrote about:
All good ideas, but ask yourself what would happen if any of those were implemented? The forums would fill up with “Sorcery is OP” topics faster than you can say Thoth-amon.
Yeah, the second major reason is that some of these things require more work than Funcom is willing to invest. Indeed, they seem to require more work than Funcom was willing to invest over the course of 9 months of Age of Sorcery.
And the third major reason is the shift in Funcom’s priorities. I recently heard someone say that he thinks that 99% of the feedback Funcom listens to must be from content creators, and it resonated with me. Funcom’s top priority nowadays seems to be to sell, sell, sell.
How would improving the sorcery mechanics in the base game drive more Bazaar sales? We all have our opinions on how it would make players happier because the game would be more fun, and therefore more people would be willing to spend money on Bazaar offerings.
That, to put it bluntly, is bullshіt. People don’t buy stuff from Bazaar because they’re happy or unhappy with the game. They buy it because they like the cosmetics. And the most important Bazaar customers to cater to are the so-called “whales”, people who spend significant amounts of money. One whale is worth more than 10 or 20 of us who argue here about the gameplay, and if you look into the motivations of a typical whale, the actual gameplay has little to do with their reasons to buy.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to shut down the discussion. I think that most of the stuff we talk about here is pointless and won’t be taken into consideration by the present day Funcom – or, as some people call it, Funcent – but that doesn’t mean we should stop talking about it. As long as we’re not really holding our breaths, it’s fun to discuss these things
Well sorcery was truly awesome at one time. But then a certain group of folks cried bloody murder that it’s too much and ever since then, it was nerfed more and more to go back to the normal bomb, god bubble, avatar.
I’ve agreed with this point from the beginning. PvP for True sorcerers (not the blokes running around with full corrupted strength acting like chaos-roided tanks) should be a game of deception, debilitation, and deflection.
How would that work?
Deception - Tweak Mirror Mark so that 3 more images are summoned surrounding surrounding the caster that mimick his actions and take lock-on priority if they stand between the attacker and the caster. Let Sorcerer’s summon phantom illusions that act like their real minions but do no damage.
Debilitation - Snares. Movement alterations like grease orb effects. The effects are all in-game. Give us a reliable way to utilize them. We can’t even cause small earthquakes to give a random chance at a knockdown effect. Creeping Darkness could have a lot of potential here.
Deflection - The only one actually implemented, damage is split to our minions (does anybody know if the summoned demons from Demon Lord are subject to this split and if not, WHY THE HECK NOT).
These 3 concepts should form the base of a Sorcerer’s toolbox to avoid direct contact with a foe and TBH, game mechanics are already in-place to prevent infinite-use via the reagents required. The Sorcerer should have two options: delay the foe long enough to run or delay them long enough for your minions to kill them (assuming your minion is geared and leveled enough or you have undead zerkers, because pets are a joke and demons are laughable).
I personally abhor the fact that I have to take such an active role in attacking in combat. I want to be the one who deals the killing blow, not the one who did the majority of the damage.
The armor needed nerfing. Lightning Storm needed tweaks but I stand by my view that players just needed to be given a passive base defense against it. Call of the Dead was neutered. The ideas were awesome but it feels like they just gave up on it.
Don’t get me wrong. Sorcery brought a lot of good stuff. I didn’t expected half of what was delivered.
But the devil lives in the details. It was very poorly implemented and this rendered it useless. With some tweaks it can be recovered. I think @DelRioServerMaster has excellent ideas. You all know I don’t want pew pew magic on Conan either.
One other thing I would love to see is a temporary invulnerability (or very high damage reduction) when casting a spell. It would be applied during the casting animation, so you don’t get torn to shreds while your toon is doing the animation, and it would have a long cooldown. If you cast another spell while the effect is in cooldown, you get no special protection.
You clearly don’t play on any high level pvp servers that utilise sorcery, because it’s far from weak.
20 stamina, 20 grit, 20 corrupted authority, and you are tankier than most normal pvp builds. A small stamina pool doesn’t matter all that much compared to in Age of Sorcery, because you get stamina back so quickly and can roll and attack infinitely with rolling thrust.
The armour and weapons are higher grade than nearly all legendary and epic tier equipment, and costs far less to craft.
In a 10 vs 10 pvp fight, sorcerers can play a huge role in stun locking opponents with lightning and sniping with the bow. In Age of War, great axe and bow have the potential to 2 shot players, so the stun provided by lightning is more than enough to set up a kill, especially when it’s just chunked 30% of their HP.
as for conan lore most sorcerers were mastermind archetypes with few being the war wizard archetype most if not all had a big bad henchman that would fight Conan but after the big bad henchman died the sorcerer would either run, die, or turn in to a big bad monster and that is what i was hoping to have a war form you could transform and be a werewolf or something.
Hum hum. Tell me more…
Steel thewed perk and damage share with thralls.
Because they rarely use steel thewed, normal pvp builds can get 2 shot by great axes and bows. With steel thewed it doesn’t matter your max hp, you can’t die in less than 4 hits if you start at full hp.
Ofc it’s not without its weeknesses. You’ll need antidotes on hand because poison will hurt like a bitch, and you don’t get passive hp regen, but with feasts, and the fact that you can use cheaper aloe pots to heal to full, it’s actually quite easy to stay healthy.
I have a video from Age of Sorcery where I went 20 Agi, 20 Grit, 10 Vit and 10 Expertise so I could carry pouches.
It was a lot harder to fight in Sorcery builds back then but I never died for a full raid and you can take a hit.
LOl this is bull. I have fully corrupted authority and vitality. I die in seconds in pvp. It’s just not true.
You need full Grit, Steel Thewed is what saves you.
Plus you get stamina from it, so you can fight
I can vouch for the corrupted authority/steel thewed build. Especially on modded servers where animationless healing items are available, it’s incredibly powerful in the right hands.
I do agree with the premise of this thread though; sorcery isn’t very useful, especially the stuff that requires a heavy investment. The process of unlocking all the spells is very cool but disappointment follows. The sorcery spells can have a significant impact in PVP; my server runs bi-weekly large-scale battles and there’s always at least a couple of darknesses or lightning storms up. In PVE they suffer from the problem of not actually being necessary: there is no situation in which killing something with a lightning storm or sneaking past it with illusion is a better choice than just running past it or bashing it to death.
I found DelRio’s post to be quite interesting. The concept of Sorcerer gameplay revolving around deception, debilitation, and deflection is on point thematically. Unfortunately the first one, deception, can only ever work in single-player or against an RPer who wants to be deceived and is playing along. No matter how good the AI for the mirror images is made they will never move like a player, so they’ll never fool enemy players. The best you can hope for there is that a few creative people figure out how to move like an NPC, a skill which I think would take a lot of practice to perform convincingly. And of course if you’re moving like an NPC then you’re probably not accomplishing anything of value.
Debilitation is sort of what we have now, with spells like darkness and fire wall, but they don’t really deliver. Part of this is that they just aren’t that hard to play around, so maybe there need to be a couple more CC-ish spells that are unavoidable if successfully cast. Unfortunately I fear that the way the menu is set up, we can’t have many more spells because there isn’t horizontal room for them, and going vertically will push the already-long cast times even longer.
It would be good to see the corrupted attributes finished off. However they’ve always felt underwhelming due to the way they replace uncorrupted perks which are often better than the corrupted ones. If we want heavy investment in corruption to bring more power, one idea might be to allow corruption of attributes regardless of how many attribute points have been spent on it, granting the corrupted perks but not the base stats from that attribute. For example a player might have 20 strength, 20 agility, and 20 grit, and they might corrupt strength and vitality. The corrupted vitality would give them no extra health, only the corrupted perks.
As for the spells themselves, if I were to make some changes, they would include:
- Make Detect Resources aid the player in finding star metal, blood crystal, and maybe heroic treasures - in a similar fashion to how the lotus potions point the way towards important story content.
- Make the Darkness zone disable the night light for anyone inside, if it doesn’t already.
- Allow the caster of the spell to see more clearly than anyone else inside their own Darkness or Call of the Dead fog.
- Add a second concentric layer of rocks to the fire wall spell oriented so that direct line of sight is blocked from outside; attackers have to enter the ring if they want to harm whoever’s inside. And make them unclimbable - climbing freshly erupted magma is just silly.
- Add some sort of protection to spellcasting (the menu part). Maybe the sorcerer could take reduced damage, or rapidly corrupt anyone who comes close. Or perhaps it could take some specific technique like the unarmed kick to interrupt the spell instead of just any attack.
What saves you is having some SAV fighters covering your ass.
The video was great and I loved seeing you use sorcery, but those guys fighting you were a joke.
Duration of “Feather fall” usualy ends quiker than “Call of Nergal” - so ground will punch you badly anyway.
“Seriously folks, this is Conan not warcraft or LOTRO. Conan sorcerers were more fanatical leaders with a bit of back up from some old evil god. They weren’t the AD&D blow a dragon out the sky wizards.”
But we are playing game in Conan setting - not a Conan story. When I corrupt myself i wanna feel usefulness from that. Half of my stamina and health is preatty much. 90% of anyone who are not corrupted will gut you like a pig with no problem.
And that’s the issue right there. If you make the system able to fool players, then it’s OP and everyone wants it nerfed. There is no middle ground with sorcery because either you can affect other players or not. If you do, everyone cries foul. If you don’t, every cries lame.