The problem most have is that if i get a desirable roll % lay out on placement of thrall, the stat that one is leveling will eventually have a higher chance to roll (-) perks. The system seems to try and nerf a stat if one is getting lucky rolls, with is counter intuitive for the time (esp on PVE) spent. Gaming is about fun. And CE is about progression. from player level 0 to level 60, to progressive recipes, etc. Yet progression is fought by a RNG number meant to undo some of your work. IE, if i get 100% on a STR and roll 20 points added, there are 2 perks that kick in that can make it a 12 instead. Yes, is it stronger, but the last 8 rolls of the STR i got will be undone, which is where the majority of my time is spent leveling it.
Back to player leveling, what if the 4th and 5th perks available were RNG’d and more than half were (-) effects to you? that is what is happening with a thrall from level 15 thru 20.
Lol, I was going to respond but it looks like everyone else made my point.
But I do love how you went from pointing out how great Cannibal Brutes were for their health bonus (which is obviously broken, they shouldn’t be getting 400/Point any more than Teimos should be getting 300/Point) to pointing out how bad their damage is regardless of their strength.
If anything comes of this thread, I would just hope that the devs would sit down and look at the pool of available perks at each level, and balance them a little better so that as you get to the higher level (and far more XP intense) perks you wouldn’t be losing as many good ones and still retaining the ability to get the negative perks available at 10 in your level 20 slot.
That right there is arguably an even bigger problem with the leveling system than the unconstrained perk RNG or the uselessness of certain attributes.
The way the system is implemented, you can’t compare the attribute values for two different thrall archetypes in any meaningful way. For example, if your Janos has 59 strength and your Dalinsia has 40 strength, you still don’t know how much damage each of them will deal with the same weapon. Not unless you’ve dug that info up using the devkit. Or, I guess, unless you watched Firespark81’s video, which will become obsolete the very first time a patch changes the thralls’ hidden multipliers.
So how exactly are we supposed to reason about thralls? Back before the leveling system, things were relatively simple: we knew that factions can be arranged in a progression from worst to best and that was it. The only number we could compare was the health. The rest was hidden, but that didn’t hinder our reasoning.
Now, we have a whole bunch of numbers to work with. Naturally, we want to reason about thralls in terms of these numbers, but we can’t. A Kisthis is always going to have better base damage multiplier than a Janos, but you can’t know that without the devkit. And now it matters, because you’re trying to make an informed decision about whether the next thrall to level should be this Erii or this Janos or this Cimmerian Berserker, and you can’t without the information that’s hidden from you. And it’s an important decision – the closer you are to your follower cap, the more important it is.
I actually suspect that those numbers didn’t come from the dev kit, but rather from a little messing with the system and editing things.
If you notice in the beginning of his video, all of the volcano thralls are edited to have 0 Strength instead of the 15 they should spawn with. What my clan mates and I theorize happened is he edited all thralls to have 0 strength (removing the bonus melee damage), then created a predatory blade that does 1k damage, jacked his health up, and let them hit him once. That way the amount of damage done could be divided by 1000, and used as the base damage multiplier, which could then be checked against the numbers of a thrall with strength and a lesser damage sword. Just a theory, but I’d bet that’s how he got them.
But yes, damage numbers on the thrall stat page would go a lot further towards increased understanding of thralls.
Sounds plausible and reasonable. So it might be info we can extract without the devkit, but it still requires a bunch of fiddling in singleplayer and, optionally, some modded content. The barrier to knowledge is still there
For PvE, because I’m sure it would/could matter in PvP for min/maxing against human opponents, I’m okay with some things being hidden as long as what I can see and reason is suitably informative and the content I face doesn’t demand that kind of fine tuning for thralls. If we ever get content that requires that level of thrall building, then I would wholly agree.
For example, assuming that an archer thrall is base level better than a fighter thrall with bows, and assuming that a t2 is better than a t1 and a volcano archer will be superior to a Dogs archer, I’m okay with not knowing those exact values - as long as I’m not constantly fighting RNG in all other areas. I’m not against some RNG, I can see the benefit in making unique thralls and in giving lower end thralls at least the possibility to compete with higher end. I can also understand why ppl want to know that information too.
What I don’t like is RNG all over the place.
1.) %chances are RNG and there doesn’t seem to any rhyme or reason to them. The number archer thralls I’ve gotten that have like 80s-90s percent to level other attribs and 40s to low 50s to level accuracy (and same for fighters but replace accuracy with strength) is just out of whack. I went through 20 thralls - 10 archers and 10 fighters - and finally I got one of each that had decent percent chances. That was several hours of gameplay just to get a thrall that had a starting chance of leveling the way I wanted.
2.) The %s can still screw you over. I’ve got a thrall with a low AGI (44%) and much higher in ACC and VIT (80-90s that I boost more with food) and yet, after 6 levels, she’s gotten more points in AGI than VIT and more VIT than ACC. Is she worthless? No, but it’s still frustrating to have my one decent archer not level up with some consistency in the skill that will affect her damage the most.
If this keeps on, she’ll be a high armor damage sponge that hits like a wet noodle. Again, hours of game play for frustration.
3.) We’ve gone over the RNG of perks enough that it doesn’t need to be recounted.
So tl;dr, I mostly agree on most points and only slightly disagree on one.
In the last week or two we’ve done over 40 archers, since I’m still holding out hope that Funcom makes the “Archer” tag mean something instead of leveling 40 Fighters with high accuracy and having them end up being junk if they ever change the Archer stats to what they should be, but I digress…
Point is that a lot of the Archers I was leveling were RHuTS, and they seem to spawn with a pretty low % chance to increase Accuracy, despite having a 20 starting stat. Take this with a grain of salt since there is perception bias involved and it’s a relatively small sample size and I didn’t keep exact stats on it, but the interesting thing was the the 45% thralls seemed to end up getting more points in Accuracy (excluding perks) than the 60% ones (steady diet of cooked fish for all).
Now like I said I didn’t keep stats, I may run back through and check the 40 we kept to see what the Accuracy increase (minus perks) ended up being in relation to the % increase. I mean I understand how percentages work, and on a population of 40 it’s not like I would expect to see them exactly 15% higher on the 60% ones, but overall you would think that the higher percentages would generally end up a little better.
Mine is a T2 Black Hand archer. Unfortunately, she’s the only archer I’ve gotten that had percentiles that were overall favorable and thus the only one I’ve bothered to level. I’m at the point, where out of sheer curiosity, I’m about to just start spawning in a crap ton of thralls in my SP game and doing research for y’know science.
I was wondering what will happen if they ever and I say that loosely ever fix these messed up Thralls?
All the ones we have spent a month leveling, will they all be no good again and all the stats change will we all need to throw them out and start again.
We have many wanting them fixed but just how bad will that be for those of us who have spent a month trying to get decent thralls. Will they all become useless like the legendary thralls we all lost with this update. I was thinking of that as I was reading down though this forum.
The only thing I can come up with is to fix the issues which do not get me wrong they need fixed and now would be good but I think it will again break what we have done so far. Kind of depressing!!
The only thing I can say to give a shred of hope is that the nerf they applied to thrall damage was retroactive, even thralls deployed and leveled before the patch had their % damage increase reduces, so maybe future changes will work the same way (probably not perks tho).
I think it depends on how those perks are applied. If the values are applied when the perk is selected, and therefore “baked in” to the thralls stats, then I think we’re screwed. However, if it’s dynamically calculated, a change to the perk would be automatically reflected in the stats for the thrall. I’d hope that the approach they took would be the later, but … well, you know.
The damage modification is something that is likely built in to the core of specific thrall types, so changing that changes every thrall of that type. But perks are random, individualized and permanent, so I’m less confident they can change a perk and have it retroactively reflected in all thralls with that perk.
To me, the hidden thrall attributes are the same side of the coin as not telling you up front what to use to harvest bones versus skin from a corpse. Funcom made a style decision to make us as players figure it out by trial and error. After awhile, we know who is good at what; thats all that really matters.
Except that they give us a real damage number on the player stats page and on the pet stats page, and we get real info on armor stats and health stats. But human thrall damage must be steeped in mystery.
I assume and maybe I am wrong but you are talking about what thrall is better at what and I have to disagree, after awhile is not good enough, how many do we have to level up to be able to know what Thralls are worth working on to start with. Its all over the place, some newb river thralls are massive bad ■■■■■ and some bad ■■■ volcano thralls are worthless. Its like betting each time you take a thrall out of the wheel. Its like throwing away every thing we have learned about thralls in the last 2 years on a update that is still broken. I myself and many others are like me do not want to waste our in game time on trial and error over and over and over. I enjoy playing the game not playing thrall leveler.
While I completely agree that @jot29 got a great roll on Daicas, I would say that Dalinsia could go either way at this point. Getting a good roll at 10 is nice, but there is only a 29% chance of getting a perk with a negative value, so it’s not uncommon to get a pretty good perk at 10.
That was the point of this thread, that at 15 and 20 you have a 45% chance of pulling a perk with a negative stat. While some of those are fine on a fighter (negative Accuracy) and some of them you can live with (negative Survival or Agility), it’s still a reduction to your stats at the two perks that are much harder to achieve. On official PvP you can level a thrall to 10 in a matter of minutes, since the highest Factions only require a little over 2 million XP. Even getting to 15 only requires an additional 6 million, which is a chunk more but can be done in half an hour or so. Getting a negative stat at these levels sucks, but at least you can just dump the thrall before you invest the largest amount of time required, going from 15 to 20, which requires 11 million XP and is what will take the most time during the leveling process. Since the chances at 20 of pulling a negative stat (again, it may not be one you care about but it’s still a reduction) are again 45% at this highest perk, it just seems like a slap in the face.
What I’m really proposing is that they change the requirements for the perks to remove at least the first 9-99 group (-3/-5) from the level 20 perk pool if not both 9-99 groups (-5/-8) so that your chance of rolling a negative number at that level are greatly reduced or entirely eliminated.
If I had my choice, I’d also say that the NONE group (+3) shouldn’t be in the level 20 pool, and they should change the requirements on the 3/5-10 group (+5) to make them achievable at both 15 and 20.
Hopefully @jot29 will let us know how Dalinsia turns out, but I’m betting she gets shafted at one of the two remaining perks, the odds are against her.
