Suggestion: Stamina Rating for Thralls

Conan Exiles General Discussion Feedback
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Thralls do not have stamina, and giving them stamina is not really a good idea. However, there is an imbalance that arises from their infinite stamina, allowing them to use weapons that have stamina cost multipliers with no penalty, or, in the case of the Sword of Crom, are prevented from using it at all because it would be too powerful in their hands.

The solution I propose is what I call a “Stamina Rating” for thralls.

A Stamina Rating is not stamina, as it would not deplete, but be a static number for each thrall.

How it might work is every thrall starts with a Stamina Rating of 0. Then they can receive initial bonuses depending on their faction and tier. Perhaps something like +2.5 if they are in the Medium experience category and +5 if they are in Hard. +1 if they are T2, +3 if they are T3, and +5 if they are T4. Thus, a T1 in the Easy training category would start with just the base 0 Stamina Rating while a T4 in the Hard training category would start with a Stamina Rating of 10.

For every point in Grit, their Stamina Rating could increase by +1.5 and every point in Agility could gain them +0.5.

So, what would the Stamina Rating actually do? It would weight the thrall’s attack decisions. A thrall with a very low Stamina Rating would be more likely to do light attacks rather than heavy and fail to complete combos. The higher the Stamina Rating, heavy attacks would be weighted more and the thrall would be more likely to follow through with combos.

This would only be a weighting, a thrall with 0 Stamina Rating could still do heavy attacks and full combos, but it would be less common. I think a Stamina Rating of 30 or so (Hard T4 with 10 Grit and 10 Agility will be at 30) could be a target where the weighting for a light attack and heavy attack are 50/50 - below 30 favors light attacks, above 30 favors heavy.

If a thrall is given a weapon with a stamina cost multiplier, this multiplier would penalize the thrall’s Stamina Rating. E.g. a thrall with a normal weapon and a Stamina Rating of 30 would have the same attack weighting as a thrall with a 1.5x stamina cost weapon and a Stamina Rating of 45.

This idea would add an inherent benefit to late-game and higher-tier thralls, increase the value of Grit and Agility, and, of course, make weapons like Momentum and even the Sword of Crom more balanced in the hands of a thrall.

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I really like the idea. Unfortunately, Funcom most of the time takes the path of least resistance when it comes to things like this.

Examples:
Taming Animals = Just collect them and have them crafted in a crafting bench.
Fishing = Just put a crafting bench somewhere and put something in it!
Horse Breeding = Collect a foal somewhere and put it in a crafting bench!
And so forth.

At this point, I no longer expect Funcom to put a lot of work into elaborate systems like a stamina system for thralls.
I was surprised that golem crafting was more than just packing rocks or iron in a crafting bench! Choosing the individual body parts was really refreshing. Apart from that, it was again: put something in a crafting bench! :rofl:

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Honestly, I think this would be the path of least resistance aside from doing nothing at all.

At least as far as I understand the systems involved, adding weights to attacks, as well as a Stamina Rating variable to thralls, would be fairly easy.

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Honestly, it’s better if they leave thralls alone. With their track record, I fear they would break them even more.

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Should they cease all work on the game then? I think that is not a very useful stance.

It is quite possible that a new system, even one that is seemingly simple, would not be perfect at release. But Funcom actually does fix things over time, even if those who think they never do conveniently forget every bug as soon as it has been fixed.

I believe many of the latest issues we are currently dealing with will be addressed in the next Chapter as well. Be patient.

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Looking to things as they are, probably.
It’s not that I don’t like new content. It’s that what I like even more is having a playable game. I’m actually very tolerant about bugs, but I can’t remember the game having this many problems since I started playing it.

To be clear. I like you suggestion a lot. But I tremble to think on how they would implement it.

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they should improve their AI to an average player skill capable to manage the stamina use, dodge, block hit and run, and so on. On the actual AI state they will simple deplete their stamina and keep trying to hit or wating under the boss to the stamina regen, depending on what is programed. I think as they love to nerf thing they should nerf some creatures that gives insane amount of damage. Toi bring a thrall to some fights do not worth the risk, you can lose hours of lvling, gearing, and the rewards if you sucessed with ot without your thrall (in case of him death) dont worth the risk an effort

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Agreed. Bare minimum effort.

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I have mixed feelings about this suggestion.

On the one hand, it’s a thoughtfully designed mechanic. It’s neat, it sounds feasible, and it would give additional benefits to leveling for agility and grit.

On the other hand, you’re talking about “balancing” the weapons in the hands of our thralls, and I have to wonder whether that’s a problem that needs solving at all.

Leveling a good thrall is already getting grindy. Sure, they sped up the wheels, but it still takes a lot of time to get a thrall to level 20, and you still need to capture and place several “copies” of the same thrall to get a decent distribution of growth chances.

Growth-chance-hunting is bad enough without having to agonize over grit growth chance because you don’t want low stamina rating to make your thrall even more of an idiot than it is right now. Maybe if they reworked the thrall diet so we weren’t limited to picking between +14% to one attribute and +7% to two attributes.

That stance is strictly Funcom’s fault and no one else’s. Many of us were willing to tolerate even the most egregious quality problems because we felt that the new features and new content were good enough overall. Sure, there are always bugs and imbalances and other kinds of WTFs, but it tended to work out over time.

The first chapter of Age of War has pulled the rug out from under that notion. We got a new mechanic that currently has no use whatsoever, we got a few crumbs of free content designed to drive the sales of monetized content, and a few half-assed revamps that nobody asked for and that made the game genuinely worse.

And the release of that ignominious update was accompanied by huge technical problems.

Should Funcom cease all work on the game? If they can’t get their act together, then yeah, they should. But even if they can get it together, they should first focus on putting out the dumpster fire they lit up before implementing a mechanic like this one.

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The responses here disgust me.

If you think Funcom is incapable of improving the game in the future, then get a private server with an old game version and never update again. For the rest of us, allow us to continue getting game updates.

I am not going to avoid ever suggesting improvements just because Funcom doesn’t always provide what I want.

If you have nothing useful to add, get out of this topic.

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no-i-dont-think-i-will1

Whether Funcom is capable of it or not depends, again, on Funcom. I couldn’t care less if stating that disgusts you or not.

If you think any of us want the development to stop, then you’re either not paying attention to what we’re really saying or you’re letting your emotional reaction get the better of you.

To put it bluntly: we don’t want Funcom to stop developing the game, we want Funcom to stop screwіng up.

“Allow” you? Like we had that power. Dramatic much?

Ah, yes. Everyone who criticizes Funcom is doing it because they’re not getting what they wanted. I swear we could make a bingo card for this toxic positivity stuff.

If valid criticism of Funcom bothers you, don’t post on a public forum.

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Unfortunately, what they have displayed recently points exactly at this possibility.

How hard is it to increase the StaminaRegenPause values from 0.1 to 0.2 to alleviate the infinite rolling problem? That change could have been made between testlive feedback and AoW release; that change should have been made!

But there have been three opportunities and Funcom hasn’t even changed a little variable to base server settings (which you know is forced for official servers):
• Time between beta testlive and AoW release.
• Post AoW first hotfix.
• Post AoW second hotfix.

Of course I’m just taking a specific little example, but I think it really shows the “Funcom is incapable” part that you brought up in your question.
→ Devs are capable or doing changes, of bringing new content.
→ Devs appear incapable when it comes to doing something solid and reliable, the game has seriously been out of balance in many ways, be it combat or resources, at every iteration I’ve known it (I only started playing post Siptah for context) and whenever new things are being introduced, they are usually unpolished, unfinished, bugged, and we’re lucky if everything else doesn’t break :notlikethis:

That’s good, it’s a constructive pass time, whether the feedback is ever heard or not :+1:

Still, people will always comment on those suggestions based on the current context of the game and its development, so when we get a ridiculous patch like AoW, the criticism towards the devs and the question of their competence/incompetence is legitimate.

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Short answer: No thank you. Get them responsive should be theyre priority numbah ONO.

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What disgusts me is the present state of the game and the time funcom is taking to fix it.
If you were playing on a PS5, you would feel the same.

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