Now let me say I have 7k hours, I know grind as a way of life, but I have seen other changes further make the need for specific thrall grinds, such as shield wright and blade/edgesmiths for example, to facilitate competitive pvp arms and armors, sure the grind can be easy because it is RNG based, but it is by far my biggest barrier to pvp on a server and it didn’t used to be.
So why have the current changes led to this being a bigger issue? well the skill factor has gone down in pvp, less it is about preserving stamina, movement, dodge roll timing, more it is about, buffs, builds, gear, numbers and status’s (potions, poison removal etc) so as the skill factor has gone down the reliance on and needing good equipment to be competitive has gone up so its less important about having a t4 blacksmith to process your materials or get purge recipes now you need a very specific blacksmith to make the same weapon as your enemies in order to compete on the same damage level.
This also leads to a lot of unnecessary raiding, I have raided complete noobs just because I have heard a blacksmith, needed a good one and given its RNG, just as much chance they have the one I need as a T2, when I have done this, it isn’t competitive I am just trying to shortcut things for time.
repeatedly camping a spawn over and over again to get a specific Armor smith, weapon smith or priest to be competitive gear wise just isn’t fun and is overly time consuming and leads to people having to prop up wheels all across the map.
So what are possible solutions to this?
weigh the scales towards more skill and less towards gear
Up the RNG rate of the T4’s/Thrall respawn rate
Have Players able to choose or influence a Thralls specialization
Note:I meant on Exile lands in specific, I know Surges can wildly change things on siptah
There is another option…someone (sorry can’t remember right now) put up there that crafting thralls should level like combat thralls. I think this would solve your issues here as well. As they level (1-20) they move through and past the T1-3 benefits and then you make a selection on the final path they will level through (maybe at level 15) into the various classes for that occupation.
Now as far as the blacksmith thing…did you at least tell them that they need to put their blacksmith away? We need to tutor the noobs more.
thats kind of what I meant by the influence thing, maybe with food or something ? lol though who knows how much more grind that could introduce XD, as for the noobs I find they best learn through hard experience as I always did, the blacksmith pounding iron is a dinner bell sound to any raider.
it more demonstrates how wild the RNG is given it makes a less than lucrative target in terms of resources worth hitting on the off chance, and it isn’t really pvp, if you are at the level you have a t1 shack leaving a noisy thrall on a station.
its a really wild set of RNG progression which lands on potentially anybody which is way different then any other aspect of the game if you know what your doing, even getting thralls for fighters, theres the RNG of stats sure, but you have guaranteed spawns of lians, and temios, you dont need to go kill 2k nordenheimer fighter 1 to get a lian.
overall the raiding factor I think doesn’t make it good for the new player experience as they instantly become a shortcut target, and it doesn’t make for a good experienced player experience as its hardly any challenging pvp, its almost like a new RNG of noob shacks.
Another thing we used to do 25 years ago is tell the ‘new player’ to get their experience in PVE first. Because once they enter PVP they are fair game.
That’s what I did…played single player and started really liking the game but thought of how slow it was and then realized the opportunity of keep the game running from playing online a few sessions on PVE but ended up wanting PVP for the risk of it. The rest is history as my base designed from single player were vetted and found completely worthless…a few months in and I’m warning noobs and vets are messaging me to spar (because they couldn’t find me online…sneaky hobbits)
Now, I’m not a PvP player specifically, but I have come to appreciate game systems that reward planning and preparation.
I agree with you that in Conan Exiles, RNG is an unnecessarily dominant part of the “planning and preparation” aspect of fighting. No matter how hard you try, you may not get the top-tier weapon/armor/thrall/rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle you’d want.
But in most games, if I can win a combat before the enemy knows there is a combat, because I’ve been able to stack the odds in my favor with good planning and preparation, I feel the game is rewarding me for my hard work.
Let us lvl to 60, but have a seperate skill lvling bar independent on lvls. - And make new perks, with no acc for thralls. - More like the dogs on siptah - Aries/ Brutus.