Hello! I’ve been playing the game for a very long time and I feel confident enough to express a few suggestions about the perks and stats. It’s not going to be something minor like “Move this here, add that there”, I wish to approach this from a wider perspective and how the game could have more viable, interesting builds if some changes would be made.
The issue with Stats
It’s clear to everyone that currently there are several stats that feel very lacking and are often viewed as meme/highly situational. Agility and Survival are the two coming to mind. It’s undeniable that they have some very useful perks, especially the deep ones, but the stats themselves seem very lacking and uninteresting.
Both of these stats (Not talking about perks) are aimed at increasing the survivability of the character but in a different way. Agility covers the physical damage taken by adding raw armor, Survival reduces the DoT durations. Now comes a simple question – what’s the point of investing into one of these defensive stats, if the health pool suffers because of it? By putting a high number of attribute points into one of these stats, you take away points from all other attributes, including the most valuable one when it comes to survivability – Vitality.
Purely stat-wise, Vitality beats both Agility and Survival. By having larger health pool, you can take more hits, even if your armor is not as high. By having high health pool, dots can run their full duration on you, and still deal less % of damage than they would if you have high Survival and low Hp pool.
My soggestion
I think it would make more sense if all 3 survival related stats (Vit, Agi and Surv) would have a more even role. Leave Vitality as it is, to add 8 points of HP, but make Agility and Survival also add some HP. 2-3 per Attribute point, not as much as Vitality, but still – better than nothing. This would make these 2 stats much more appealing to take, and would make deep Agi/deep Surv builds somewhat viable when it comes to raw stats.
The issue with Perks
Perks in RPG games are often the most interesting aspects of character progression. The best parks are those that don’t just add some raw stats, but actually change the way you play a certain build. Stat perks are fine too, when they make sense and enhance the strength of a build.
The current situation with Perks in Conan exiles is… dire. There are too many completely useless, weak and uninteresting ones. Some are ok but they are not where they should be.
My suggestion
I think it would make sense for many of the number-based perks to have a progressive nature depending on the amount of Attributes put into their stat line. What I mean is, for example Thuggery, the first perk in Strength tree, could add 50% increased stagger damage when the character has only 10 Str, but the percent could rise 2% per Str point put after that. Thus making this perk add 100% stagger damage if the character has 35 Str total. And 150% when it’s 50 Str.
Same model could be used for many other perks like:
Cat-like - fall damage would lower with more Agi
Deep breath – longer breathing with more Vit
Fierce Vitality – more regen each tick
Strong grip – even less stamina used during climbing
Barbaric tenacity – more stamina regenerated each tick
Iron-hard muscles – more bonus armor
Pack mule – more carry weight bonus
This approach, when applied to low tier Perks, would make them progressively better the more stat is invested, and also would keep them fairly weak, if the investment is low.
Now, about some Perks that are not in their place. I mean Perks that should belong to a different stat than they currently are:
Imperious – should be in Survival. Obviously
Iron-hard muscles – should be in Vitality. Could actually fit instead of Impervious
Gluttonous gains – should be in Survival. Even the description of the stat says “It affects how easily you metabolize food”. This perk could be placed at the top of the stat instead of Bronzed physique
Bronzed physique – Could be moved to either Vitality or Agility.
Perks that should be removed/completely reworked:
Salting the wound – the issue with this perk is that a lot of weapon are in high disadvantage, as starting attacks don’t add any debuffs, and some can’t use it at all. Short swords for example don’t add any negative effects, thus don’t benefit to this perk at all.
I would suggest to change this perk completely and to make it more effect-specific. Make it increase the bleed damage that you apply with your weapons, with the bleed becoming stronger the more Str is invested. This would make Bleed much more dangerous in PvP, instead of just being annoyance. And it would make sense, since if you hit harder, you apply deeper wounds, thus the enemy bleeds more. Just don’t go crazy on the numbers.
Blood-mad Berserker – the buff from this Perk should be permanent for as long as your HP is below 25%. Not last only several seconds. If someone out there wants to run a glass cannon build and risk being killed in one hit – let them.
Nimble tumbler – this perk makes no sense. When a person dodges, the intention is to avoid damage, not take less of it. This perk should either add a few extra i-frames to the dodge, or to be completely removed and changed on something that makes more sense. Bronzed physique could fit here pretty well for example.
Receptive – Now this is an interesting one. Currently it boosts all healing items and effects, which is great of course, but considering that food regeneration has been severely nerfed in the last patch, I think this perk could be split into types of healing and shared with Survival.
How about this? Receptive could only affect healing received from Potions and also to make “Sated’ buff not go away when non-direct damage is taken. While the healing from food and wraps could be moved to Survival and merged with the “Waste not” new perk… which is absolutely useless right now. We’ll touch it soon. Again, this separation would work for the idea of the Survival stat – you metabolize food better, and get better result from the healing it provides.
Fluid swings – useless Perk. Having 40 points in Grit already makes energy pool so large that the reduction of swing cost is redundant.
Balance and Counterbalance – remove this. Something new, not very strong but that would make some sense could be placed here. How about the progressive decrease of stamina use penalty when the load is becoming yellow/red?
Raw and bloody – remove this. Put Waste not instead of it, and add the progressive healing effect from food and wraps, depending on the amount of Survival points invested.
Hard worker should be moved back to 20, where it always belonged. No changes needed.
Antidote of one – So… a lot of you would not agree with me, but I think that complete immunity to poisons is way too strong. I mean, it may be not too strong right now, with the Survival stat itself being pretty weak, but if we would take into consideration my suggestion to buff the stat itself, this Perk would be too overpowered. So, what I suggest to do with it, is to simply reduce the damage poisons and bleeds deal by roughly 30-40%. Considering this perk is already high in the Attribute line, no progression is needed.
And finally, the top of Survival line could be completed by the Gluttonous gains Perk from Vitality.
Now, as you can see I didn’t touch any of the Accuracy Perks. I think they’re fine as they are, plus I don’t play with bows, so I don’t feel like I have any expertise to talk on this Stat.
As for the rest – is up to you, both Devs and forum readers to decide if any of my suggestions are good or not. Opinions are welcome.
but your suggestion would at least be more reasonable than the current version.
There’s plenty of things I don’t mind putting time into testing, but that’s never been one that feels like a priority.