No you’re wrong there @DaVice the original post was about SoC, sure… But its part of a much bigger systematic problem it’s been around for years and is only getting worse. SoC has now become the poster child of every legendary weapon in the game. A warning to all, waste not ye time farming lest ye be bitterly dissapointed.
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I agree and as I think you rightfully put it, it is symptomatic of a much bigger problem. I’ve just put a plea out to the devs sayign exactly this.
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Or at least, a warning to people who haven’t played long enough 
It’s been like this for years now, and I’m not exaggerating. I remember the time when the skeleton key legendaries were the best, along with Kinscourge stuff. Then they revamped the Unnamed City, and the skeleton key legendaries took second place, and the UC legendaries were the best. Then came the Warmaker’s Sanctuary and Wine Cellar and the Sunken City, and the UC legendaries stopped being the hottest stuff. Then came Siptah, which again took the top spot, first on one map and then, with server transfer, on both.
I might have glossed over some details, I might have been imprecise about the timeline, but the gist remains the same: new content always dethrones the old content. Sure, there might be some outliers, Funcom might tweak some things, but they don’t seem to be focused on trying to balance everything.
And I find that perfectly understandable. Game balance is hard. Making sure the game is balanced and fun is even harder. The amount of effort they would have to spend on making all “endgame” stuff balanced, while continuously adding new stuff over time, would be insane. And we do want them to keep adding new stuff, right?
So instead, they don’t. They just let the endgame stuff get more stratified. Just like early game gear has progression tiers (stone, iron, steel, etc.), you can think of the endgame gear in terms of tiers too, except that new tiers get added over time. Think of the process as “sedimentation”, if you like 
Where does that leave us players? Well, there are two paths we could take. One is to keep getting frustrated and demand that Funcom balance all endgame gear properly. The other is to play in the moment and adapt to changes. If X is the hot stuff today, use X and enjoy it if you can. Sooner or later, X will not be hot anymore, because Y will supplant it, and then Z will supplant Y.
A couple of final notes. First, don’t take any of this as some endorsement or justification of the SoC nerf. Like I said, I see no good reason for the nerf. It’s not like SoC is currently the LBS on live.
Also, I’m not trying to say that balance doesn’t matter at all. If the new gear comes and there’s one thing that is ridiculously overpowered, that’s not something to shrug and let go. That’s a problem that needs to be fixed. All I’m saying is that “new stuff is the meta, and I’m pissed off that the old stuff I have isn’t anymore” is probably not going to be productive 
EDIT: Looks like I have to emphasize certain things when I write a long post 
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I think it’s more like just make the gear at least SOMEWHAT useful, and let it go already. It doesn’t have to always be endgame tier quality when new stuff is being added.
But nerfing it into the ground to deliberately not make it useful, just so the current stuff can be useful, is kinda ridiculous.
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lol I know that feeling 
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I hope that it will be better with update 3.0.
But it definitely won’t.
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The time axis you give is correct.
The new stuff always superseded the old and wasn’t balanced.
It has been nerfed more and more and is only lying around in the already dusty chests.
And I think with Update 3.0 it will be no different.
The sorcery will replace everything and so all weapons are then ready for the dusty chests.
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Not if you are disciplined and fight the urge to present kew-all gear when you get a new major update out.
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Game balance is still hard, but it definitely makes it a lot harder when the devs want to present kewl new gear (as you said). It’s actually more the players fault than the devs though, the devs are just giving the players what they want. It is probably a very small fraction of the total player base (much larger in games with PvP aspects) that really want actual balance. Most players just want the new gear to be more powerful than the older stuff, otherwise they feel no need to obtain it. However, game balance is certainly not why the Sword of Crom was nerfed. This nerf feels wrong. They didn’t just bring it’s damage down to a level that upset some people, they effectively took it away from us altogether. 
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There is no feeling, it’s give it to a thrall and let then swing without damage or give it to a player and swing once.
Might as well just removed it from the loot tables.
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See I just don’t get this because IMHO PVE and PVP are just different aspects of the same game. Getting something OP in PVE is just as bad as in PVP because the game looses meaning as you just cut through NPC and monster opposition and so the only recourse is to make everything more difficult and you just get into this self-inflicted arms race between over-the-top gear and extreme antagonists. I mean what about weapons with new effects? Not damage but something like a faster sprinting boots? a pike that can block? a sword that draws all NPCs towards you in aggro and a shield that repels them? These wouldn’t be over the top balance killers and still fit in either current mode or 3.0 future.
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Yes, power creep is very real and can get out of control fast. You and I are of like mind, game balance is important to me as well, but we are part of that small fraction of players I mentioned.
Yes please! Although we both know new effects can be unbalanced as well, which is why all the “kewl” stuff gets nerfed.
- Spear that leaches life… nerfed
- Water skin that heals… nerfed
- Sigil that prevents the loss of sigils… nerfed
There are of course others but those three, off the top of my head, all had unique effects and were supposedly unbalanced.
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I wasn’t around when the LB spear original effect was active (or wasn’t that vested in the game at least to get involved in forums etc). How fast was the regen? Looking at some of the videos about corrupted vitality regen rates when you do the complete corruption vitality, I’m having a really hard time understanding how it’s worth half your stamina and HP. I guess my point here is that there is definitely a disconnect from what I think bonus regen is vs FC.
Actually this one makes sense to me just because of the transfers. I load up and off I go and I only need to collect fiend sigils after that as insurance if I die. Also it feels wrong that the fiend sigil is nothing more than support for all other sigils. So I can understand that one.
The healing ones, as long as it’s in periods of 3 sec intervals, I don’t see what the issue is and even if it was abused, you could simply create a method where damage prevents the effect for 5 seconds and therefore you still get to cut them down without worrying about the regen.
Personally, I want more gear at ALL levels of the gameplay experience.
Problem is that nearly all the gear in the game is “cosmetic” based, in that the gear at varying tiers has the same essential stats with little to no variation. And you’re only using the one you find the prettiest, out of the chosen type you like to use.
Instead of adding DLC cosmetics like they did in the past, they need to add more weapons to the base game, and vary up the stats more. Offer more variety to the game.
But it’s mostly a problem from the ground up in the design of all the gear.
Especially now since the 3.0 update is focused on attributes over gear. But that may not be a bad thing either as our uniqueness is expressed in the cosmetics.
I do agree that more variety is always good. The only issue there is that by adding a larger variety, you potentially upset the balance you have established in the various weapons as far as combat strength and weaknesses and therefore Meta gets established easier which cuts the functional variety even though there are so many options to select, only one or two are effective.
Yeah, which is why I said it was a problem from the ground up.
I don’t think “meta” is a bad word.
I’ve been gaming for decades. I’ve seen any number of them. There is ALWAYS going to be a preferred weapon at times.
It’s why I still keep telling people FC needs to step up and separate out PvE server and PvP server settings. So Meta weapons can be dealt with in PvP without ruining them in PvE.
Because PvE will always be player-choice on stuff like this. And PvP will always be use the best/broken you can get your hands on, because you have to.
I mean, sure, game balance can be easy, even trivial, if you don’t care about actually adding anything substantial. Rock-paper-scissors is perfectly balanced, but I don’t see a lot of people boasting about thousands of hours they’ve spent playing it.
Of course the new content has to be cool. It has to be “the shіt”. That’s how you keep people engaged. If your long-awaited update brings some lukewarm changes involving gear that is largely a reskin of existing gear or a slight variation on the same themes, people are going to move on.
Most of the players who complain about it think they want actual balance, but they just don’t want to be inconvenienced by whatever their complaint du jour happens to be. A much smaller group simply wants the game to be “balanced enough”, i.e. not egregiously unbalanced.
Precisely, people want incentives to get the new stuff, and I include myself in that group. For me, personally, it doesn’t have to be more powerful, but there has to be a reason other than novelty, because novelty wears off incredibly quickly.
But I’m a minority. I still use Glimmermoon because it gives light. Imagine if Funcom released a major update where most of the new gear came with incentives like that. The PVP crowd would be howling about how Funcom only caters to PVE players.
A non-negligible portion of the new gear and mechanics in every major update has to come with noticeable tactical advantages. 
Maybe the devs nerfed it for “game balance reasons”, but I believe that those reasons were flat out wrong and that SoC didn’t need any more nerfing.
It didn’t leach life, it healed the wielder. It was especially crazy on thralls. This was way back before you could heal thralls with potions and bandages, and the LBS was a game-changer: you went into (for example) the Unnamed City with your thrall, and when it got dangerously close to death, you just gave it the LBS to wield for a minute to restore it to full health.
So yeah, I get why it had to get nerfed, but it didn’t have to get nerfed into a paperweight. Life-leaching would’ve been a better change.
There’s a lot of gear in the game that has some really useful effects, but almost everyone turns up their noses at it and calls it useless. That’s why I agree with @DaVice in that the gear power is the only language the majority of players understand.
I’ve been hearing about how skeleton key legendaries are “useless” for a long, long time now, and how there’s “no point” in doing UC bosses anymore. And yet, some of my favorite items come from those sources. I already mentioned Glimmermoon, but Lovetap is another example. Sure, it’s weaker than Szeth’s truncheon, but it has the mace moveset and can knock NPCs down. Festering One is another one of my favorites.
I could go on, but it’s pointless. People want power. If the new gear doesn’t bring power, they complain about how it’s “cosmetic”. If it brings power, they complain about how it’s “the new meta” or how it obsoleted their old gear.
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OK I’m just going to hide in my VtM LARP hole where RPS was the way things were done and hours wasn’t the right length of time…years would be more accurate.
People are dumb. Individuals are smart considerate and highly adaptable. But People are dumb herds that are never happy and refuse to adapt.
I’m a simple guy. I want a game to be fun and new stuff has to be new but if it’s introduction wanes the fun down for the game (And that includes others on the server because who likes to play with a bunch of soured and disgruntle players? I know that wasn’t a fun family game night growing up) then it’s not value added.
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In general, I agree with the principle of that. In the particular SoC case, I agree wholeheartedly.
But in the context of Conan Exiles “gear sedimentation process”, I don’t know if I can agree. Maybe it’s because you play PVP and I play PVE-C, so the people on the servers react differently. My experience has been that, barring sledgenerf cases like this, people on PVE(-C) generally don’t complain that the new gear supersedes the old gear.
In fact, I’ve only seen this whole “so many legendaries are ‘useless’ and that sucks” thing on the forums, never when chatting to people in-game
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Those are the types of creat8blve ideas i like. It allows for variety of already existing functions.
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