I fail to see how making the stats more competitive messes up rewards for noobs, im not saying it should be 100% realistic just a little closer
And i do love the game, but it doesnt mean that i dont feel like certain aspects are lagging. Such as a good portion of the game being irrelevant after one play through if your on pvp
But this is what forums are for, discussions. Everyone has their own point of veiw.
Kinda agree but iron sword 45 vs legendary 50 would make legendary and other weapons kinda pointless and kill progression. Maybe 40 iron vs 50 legendary or something like that - so progression still would be a thing while not making low tier weapons useless in pve / pvp.
Theres also the factor that on some servers the alpha clans like to raid everybody from day one, this would help with that alot given the fact that epics take some time to get a few sets
Yeah, I remember. It was back when the legendary chests were top of the line gear. There was nothing better. And they continued to be level-gated even when the new, better stuff came out. Then people started grumbling about how it makes no sense to require level 60 for gear that is mostly āuselessā, and after a while Funcom realized that they werenāt quite wrong: even though the gear wasnāt useless, there was really no need to make you wait until the endgame. If youāve learned enough about the game to defeat a world boss, you should have access to the skeleton chests.
This ties into something else Iāve been seeing floating around the forums: complaints about how newer content makes older content obsolete. While those complaints are not completely without merit, they fail to take into account two things:
So yeah. The game changes. Some of the gear we cherished will become less important and less useful when compared to the newer gear. I still use legendaries from those chests all the time.
And yeah, I can choose to kill some world bosses while Iām still using iron or steel weapons, and sometimes Iāll get something that I really like and use that. I wonāt even be able to repair it until Iāve got legendary repair kits, though, so I donāt often bother because I prefer focusing on other things while Iām leveling, but thatās just my playstyle. There are many others, and I donāt really see anything wrong with them, either.
I mean, yeah. Obviously. PVP needs to be balanced, just like PVE needs to be balanced. The problem with balancing PVP is that the devs have fewer choices than when balancing PVE. Sometimes nerfs are necessary. Sometimes theyāre egregious. Iām still incredibly salty about Lifeblood Spear, but that doesnāt mean they should have left it as it was. Iām just salty that they didnāt take the time to make it worth keeping.
When the healing waterskin was the big thing on Siptah, I didnāt even bother to try to get it, because I could already see the shadow of the NerfHammer over it 
Those sound like serious problems, but they wonāt be solved by messing with lower tiers of weapons. Even if you make iron, steel, hardened steel, and star metal do almost the same damage, youāll lose to the guy with Yogās Touch or feroxic weapons or whatever the meta happens to be at that moment.
Why would it be an insult? Youāre not attacking anyone or being rude or anything like that. I also hope you understand Iām not attacking you, I just disagree strongly with your idea, and Iām explaining why 
Maybe thereās something I failed to understand, but to me it looks like @stelagelās proposal is to make the damage for different lower tiers (iron, steel, hardened steel, and even star metal) virtually indistinguishable, i.e. off by 1 or 2 points of damage between tiers. And that does mess up rewards for newbies, for reasons I already explained in my wall of text 
How can I disagree 
? My numbers are plasmatic, a simple example. I am a simple player, I donāt understand numbers and multipliers. All I suggest is a big difference between stone and iron and not huge, competitive enough, among the others. Still keep the pve aspect interesting, like @CodeMage said very correctly to seem rewarding.
Itās just a rough idea from someone who knows nothing about presentation and programming. Itās on your hands to make it look interesting, or bury it. Either way it works for me 
.
Ahh i got you. ive been aproaching this as putting them closer together, not necessarily at the increments initially proposed.
Something Iām going to point out in this thread. Many of you are taking a position of this ruining or changing the progression too much. I want you all to think and I mean really think about the need of said vertical progression.
Right now the vertical progression we have serves as a bit of a goalpost for new players. When I started playing, I would look at what I could make and be like, āI need that level so I can make that.ā It gave me a goal, and with how you gain experience, there is multiple avenues to achieve that goal. I doubt that experience is much different than many if not all others. And for that, it works.
The problem with that is I have not had that experience in over four years. Experienced players do not utilize the tier system any more than they have to. And for many of them (if not most) it is a merely a speedbump whenever they are leveling a new character.
For those who are playing the same character they created four years ago, they do not utilize the tier system at all except when they reset feats and have to remember to get some feats as prereqs for others.
There is a bigger problem at play here. One that the solution @stelagel presented doesnāt 100% solve, but gets it on the right track. At first, as I said earlier, I didnāt like the idea. I was quick to dismiss because it strayed too far from what the game is. But what the game is, is a problem.
Think about all the areas that challenge a level 60 player compared to the areas that donāt. The areas that donāt are for those leveling up. Literally 80% of the map is devoted to the leveling experience. Yet less than 5% of a players time on a character (even if they play seasonally with wipes, which many of you donāt) is spent in a leveling experience. This is compounded by the exp gain being quite fast on 0.5-1.0+ rates, but not caused by that.
If the tiers were minor upgrades from one another (and you donāt have to buff lower tiers to match higher ones, you could lower the stats on higher tiers too for the same effectiveness), that would allow a few options to the developers. They could rebalance the areas to pose a bit of a threat to even veteran players. Of course the areas would still need to match the intended tiers, so easier areas would need to be easier than harder areas. But it would be a function of AI and patterns, not HP and Dmg.
Granted this needs a whole revamp of lesser tier NPCs. Thankfully that can be down mostly in two tables in the devkit. This is actually something a mod could potentially handle. The hardest part is of course, the design phase and coming up with dev intent of gameplay to match this. So it is not a hard thing to do in a technical manner, but hard in the design side of things.
The biggest hurdle would be how does a level 1 player with 200hp and a 40 damage stone mace deal with a imp with level 50-60 stats. Or maybe its not a hurdle at all. If you can kill it in a single combo (as normal), and it can likewise a ton of damage back if you let it. It might be fine for most (letās be honest, it takes them a while to hurt even a level 1 with no armor). Crocs would definitely be scary. But maybe not, they may not need much damage adjustment, just armor pen and leave them be. These are all things that would need to be considered obviously.
But at the end of the day I wouldnāt dismiss the idea entirely. Yes it requires a redesign of 80% of the maps of Exiled Lands and Siptah. A redesign that I personally do not think would be bad for the game. Especially when a playerās knowledge of the game will matter more than the raw stats. Progression would be still there for those who want to edge out an extra 10% here and there.
PVP would definitely feel more like Planetside 2, where a good player at level 1 could easily defeat a mediocre one at max level. But I could see how that could rub some the wrong way. 
Im glad you stated most of the points i wanted to hit but was to lazy to type.
Yeah Iāve been watching this thread because of how close it resembles my other one with a more subtle approach. I like it and I like the idea and agree with Taemien that its not that it strays too far from the gameā¦but what we have all defined the game to be.
But the revelation that I had in my thread does hold weight here as well. Leveling and BP are very similar and seeing how FC doesnāt really care how you get through the battle pass I hypothesize that they hold the same opinion on levelingā¦take as long or as short of time as you like but get get playing seems to be FCās intent here.
However I also agree with Taemien that the game design is more towards leveling (while I cannot prove it, I agree with Taemienās estimates on map % and say a seasoned player really only utilizes about 20% of the map on a daily basis while the noob is exploring and gaining XP in every nook and cranny. Lets be honest, we fly by the majority of the map like itās fly over country.
While I donāt believe we can recover our virginity as far as the awe and wonder when we first played, I do believe that thereās gotta be a way to rekindle it.
Now this is something I can get behind. Iām very, very interested in this problem, although I donāt see a good solution to it yet.
What youāve described there is the main reason why I always end up growing tired of Conan Exiles. Thereās just not that much to do on a PVE(-C) servers except build, play the slot machines to collect stuff and thralls, or go for some completionist goal (e.g. get all the POIs). Donāt get me wrong, I know these things represent other peopleās playstyles, and Iām not belittling those. Iām simply stating my own motivation for tackling this problem: of all those things I mentioned, building is the one that appeals to me the most, but that has to be limited, by necessity of sharing the server with others.
In the past, Funcomās cadence of new content releases was enough to stave off my boredom. But then came Siptah and its excessive RNG and I went on a hiatus because I didnāt have stuff to do.
Being able to engage more meaningfully with a larger percentage of existing game content would be a nice improvement, and I think everyone would like that.
Thing is, it does require a huge amount of revamping and rework.
Iām not sure I understand this. Are you proposing to decouple the gear tiers (and the progression system) from the map areas? Right now, due to different damage ranges of different gear tiers, your first run through the progression system will have a significant overlap between your current gear tier and the regions of the map youāll be able to handle comfortably.
If I understood you correctly, youāre proposing a system where these regions offer increasing challenges that donāt actually require better gear ā or indeed any advancement through the progression system.
I donāt think that idea is necessarily bad or wrong. It has its pros and cons. It does give people more freedom to advance through the levels and gear at whatever pace they choose, and similarly gives people more freedom to visit different areas at their own pace. So thatās a plus.
On the not so positive side of things, it kinda subverts expectations and makes the game even easier than it is right now. I mean, letās face it, I donāt see Funcom adding spectacularly challenging AI to Conan Exiles. Iām willing to bet thereās some kind of limitation with their engine that theyāre running into.
Another drawback is that it would still require a lot of revamping and rework.
Anyway, you gave me a lot to think about and there are some vague ideas forming that I might wanna explore if thereās interest.
If you pull everything from the bottom tier up and everything from eg down, make the leveling more of a fine tuning with diminishing returns as you level, and scale all the npcs around this i think it would solve alot of problems and still keep even noobs relevant.
Of course ai fixes would help a ton with this
Then my only complaint would be that npcs should be more threatening beyond flat damage and hp pools
Based on the proposed concept of changing the maps to be more challenging for the level 60 players.
While I think changing the world to more playable/challenging for the level 60 sounds like a great idea for all the veteran players, probably not be something Funcom will do or will take a large amount of time to redesign the NPCs accordingly.
EL might be easier in a sense, since you have the Exiled River area which is pretty much the starter area of the game, where it does not have to change and make all the changes farther in the map. IoS will have more difficulties making changes since the starter areas are 4 corners of the map to make it work well for new players and veterans alike. I guess you can designate which ones are the true starter areas.
Please note, I am not sure everyone would want all the mobs to be equally tough as Sabertooths, for example. So, I am guessing there will still be some easier mobs and harder mobs that you face on the map.
I think it would probably be better instead to make a new map (future release) that is made for veterans right off the bat. Maybe a tiny starter area then it moves to the high levels. Since we have server transfers, you do not need to be a new player to start on this map. Veterans can transfer to play on the map when they want.
That is my thoughts I have so far. Otherwise, revising the tiers of weapons/armor seems a lot of work for little use for majority who are 60, which would use top gear instead.
Hmmmm why not just randomize the locations of the finds every 6 months or so? Each server would be different and while the scenery is the same, no one feels that they are just running bases.
Well, the new event system will randomize somethings on the map. Randomizing the map itself (where bosses spawn, certain NPCs, etc) would be immense amount of work and will make little sense in many cases. Animals in regions they normally do not habituate for example. Frost Giants in the Savannah, Lions or Tigers in the Icy North, the NPCS from each capitol region moved to another capitol region would break immersion for one.
I think the event concept will make the map a bit more random without redesigning the map completely.
While a flattening of early game gear is not traumatic for this oneā¦
A side suggestion.
Certain tiers of material can only benefit from certain levels of craft thralls.
No matter how good a Smith is, an iron weapon can only be improved so far before those processes render it Steel.
Likewise, a steel sword tempered by a mastersmith is most certainly āHardenedā Steel.
No matter how good one is, they still are limited by the medium being used.
As for epic gear, personally, this one feels it needs to be more distinct. Starmetal, as the ready craftable via skill points gear should be the bottom of the epic rung. Everything else should be better, but perhaps not just by having more dam or pen or durability. Perhaps Obsidian always causes bleed. Serpentman gear is always poisoned. Dragonbone inflicts corruption or fatigue. Khari just has the highest stats, or perhaps is extremely light weight/uses less stamina. If they are epic, let them be distinct.
One thing to note about early gear.
Until the dismantling bench is unlocked, gear is either repaired or ditched. Feat points are at a premium in the early levels as well. This one regularly repairs Iron grade weapons until Epic gear becomes available. There is no compelling reason for this one to spend feat points on a weapon type that is just going to be erased later with a drug induced vision quest. Gas Orbs are so much more efficient for ending human foes anyway.
Even if this one does invest in feats for the individual weaponsā¦ It would usually only be for shortswords or javelins.
This one blames the early release of shortswords having only iron and epic tier for this habit. No weapon this one personally wanted existed between Iron and Starmetal grade, and thrall gets whatever loot drops.
@Sera67, forgive my delayed response.
I believe that your idea is way better than mine, I just wanted you to know that.
I cannot know what needs to be done yet op does not help pvp in any ways. Your idea stabilizing way better things. Thank you for sharing it, I really appreciate it .
Let me however expand a bit to the original post and explain why (I believe) something like this has to be done.
I spoke with plenty of players thatās been totally wiped from their early days and quit the idea of pvp.
I founded plenty of players in my pvp days that tried to hurt me with an iron sword, and after multiple efforts I swinged my axe twice to leave in his inventory some goodies.
How can a new player can go against this? When he is early wiped and almost impossible to grow. So what they do is two things, either go pve to learn a bit the content of the game, or the most common quit. Always there will be players that āreadā competition there with great levels of stubbornness and one way or another stay and continue against all odds.
This however is a low player base. Our dreams for this game is to get the regognise that deserves. The only way is pvp. The largest player base deals pvp. What league of legends has more than Conan exiles? Skilled pvp .
Sort of. By practice this would be correct. Especially if a stone weapon is only doing slightly less damage than a hardened steel one. Youāre talking most creatures taking only an extra hit or two which makes then roughly the same difficulty. Or close enough for players to not really notice.
Again yes and no. Iāll tell you how the system works. When humans and humanlike creatures (that use regular weapons as we do). Use weapons, they use the combos assigned to those weapons. I donāt know exactly how they select between light and heavy attacks, Iāve not looked that far in the devkit. But I do know preferences can be made judging by the weird bugs that happen with some NPCs on custom maps.
Creatures on the otherhand are weird. Theyāre almost the same. For example a crocodile has a few attacks. They have a lunge, a bite, and some have a tail swipe. Each of those attacks is a weapon. Every creature has one or more āweaponsā that they carry to use for their attacks. Theyāre AI is to select which weapon to use given criteria. For most I believe it is selected at random (if not all). This should explain why sometimes you see creatures drop this weird looking bag thing that is glitchy. Thatās their weapons, and they should NOT be part of the loot table, but they used to randomly drop to the loot table at one point.
This weapon is where the damage and armor pen is located. These values are not saved to the creature themselves. It is also why thralls have hidden stats. Thralls and creatures literally only have a HP, Armor, and exp value attached to them. The weapons they use determine their damage. With thalls (and I think creatures can too, but donāt), this can be modified by the modifier (like 2.21 for Dalinsia Snowhunter for example), to increase their damage.
I donāt have enough experience with making new attacks for creatures to give you any information on how AI works. I donāt know how we get them to choose stuff. But I do know some simple things already exist such as an archer equipping a melee weapon when you get too close. So distance is a factor.
I could have sworn creatures like crocs (non-boss) used to use tail swipes when you got behind them. So I believe your position in relation to a creatureās facing is a factor too. So distance and facing can give quite a few options.
I donāt see why it would be hard to give them specific ācomboā sets to give them a variety of attacks. And then have them choose which set of combos to use based on facing and distance. But I believe turning speed is a thing for creatures as well.
After adding a revamp of weapon/tool tiers to a mod for a server, I can say the majority of work is design. I spent way more hours in spreadsheets and staring at datatables than actually making datatables, filling them in, and linking them.
One person could probably sit down and hash it out. It might take them a week (well it took me a week, and I didnāt do it for 8 hours a day), or two. The longest part would be to get the creatures as dangerous as you want them to. This would take a little longer as you need to run tests against the creature to make sure the values are doing what you want them to do.
But that last one may not be that bad. Everything will roughly be doing the same damage. For example, if a wolf does 80 damage a hit. And a Imp does 80 damage a hit. And both have sayā¦ 800hp for sake of argument. Which one is more dangerous? Obviously the wolf because heās harder to hit and the Imp wonāt likely connect their hits as much as the wolf can.
But what that does do is say you go into an area and youāre feeling confident because you have starmetal tools. But half a dozen imps spawn in front and behind you. That gets a little scary if the bastards can hit for 80 a hit. Just to clarify, Iām not saying the damage values SHOULD be 80, just an example.
Another thing that can help balance the tiers is that lower tiered areas while having similar HP and Damage would have less armor pen. So armor would be more effective there. So in the above example, having ~500 armor turns those 80 damage hits into 26. But higher tier areas may do like 40, 50, or even 60 still. The idea here is equipment matters. But not to the same degree it does now.
The inverse can happen too. The higher tiers could have stuff with higher armor values and less hp (think rocknoses), or a mixture of high health and low armor stuff. Thus requiring an Exile to carry a variety of weapons for the intended targets. But lower tier areas, that might have high or low armor stuff, wouldnāt have them mixed together as much. Hey might make axes worth it for PVE again.
One benefit this all would have is reintroducing the survival element, without putting in boring aspects of survival. No one wants to search for food and water every 5 minutes for example. Instead of those arbitrary challenges. Risk vs Reward should be the goal.
One of the great things about this is for those players who do run into issue hitting up bosses or dungeons/vaults or whatever. Wonāt feel the need to slog through them. If they donāt want to get all that crazy stuff, the stuff they can craft will be good enough for most of what they do intend on doing. They wonāt feel so left behind.
If this is done properly, the game can be made more accessible, without being made easier. But donāt get me wrong. For a player like you or I, who have thousands of hours in the game. Using a stone weapon at level one that hits not too much lighter than starmetal WILL make the standard areas feel easier. Thatās just the nature of not having to hit things like 50 times and instead doing it in like 8.
Just remember a brand new player canāt do that. Because those things will still be able to wipe you out in 2-3 hits if youāre not prepared. Theyāll still have a progression that wonāt feel much different as they learn the game normally.
Yes to most.
The reason why different tribes perform differently is because some have better damage modifiers. As far as why they do full combos or not. Iām not sure. I know there is a table or blueprint for it, but I havenāt personally delved that far.
I donāt see why not, but I donāt know how to do this. Iāve only made half a dozen NPCs and I just use existing blueprints and copy items, havenāt made anything new yet. But Coup de Grace works in those situations. Weāre also getting a tad bit off topic here.
This is one point I hated the most on private servers. Canceling humidity and hunger factors is making a great content of the game pointless. I surely agree that in pvp, this pve issue is not necessary yet I can assure you that āthisā is wrong because it degenerates the ID of the game. Building a base in rough areas like volcano or frost areas, the āraidersā must have this concern too. What is the point for someone to go and do the effort to build something in difficult lands if his opponent has capped his humidity for an hour? Cold, very cold and hot, very hot, the only penalty is humidity loss, so canceling this, you just cancel a beautiful content, a necessary difficulty that this game has.
Last but not least, I donāt judge in any way players that want to avoid some difficulties this game has, their choise is respect and this is why devs have given the option to adjust at will.
Ps, donāt worry about off topic please, everything is connected one way or another, what matters is the conversation and the will of members to have one.
I agree cancelling hunger/thirst factors would take a piece away from the survival aspect of the game.
Although you could argue, not getting as hungry / thirsty as quickly or food lasting longer could be beneficial.
For private servers, you can change the timers for hunger/thirst, but oddly, you will need eat or drink more to refill your satisfaction meter. They are linked together. So, if you increase the timer to 2 times as long to get hungry, you will need to eat 2 times more food to be full. (Some people like the extra time but hate you need eat/drink twice as much) (Note this is server setting slider available)
On Taemien concept of changing weapons and NPCs to be more balance as level 1 as level 60 sounds similar to ESO One Tameral concept where everyone is scaled to level 50 (CP 160) so game play is fairly balanced all the way through the leveling process on the most part. This was a huge overhaul, but made the entire game playable at any time instead of at certain levels. It does have huge benefits. If can be pulled off, then the Exiled River starter area will give players at level 60 a bit more of a fight and newer players a bit more of struggle to survive (survival game concept). Just to reset everything (2 maps) would take a ton of work / balance issues, testing, etc. This is not a small task.
If they do go in that direction, it might halt any new development for the game since this would need to be resolved before they could add new features (excluding new pieces).