In a game where thralls are so much more powerful than the player and the best combat tactic is to assist your thrall, what genius mind came up with the idea that “the new cool thing” for pve would be enemies psychotically aggroed to the player? This is the opposite of fixing the longstanding complaint that pve is boring because you just watch your thrall fight.
Sure you can gear up and get potions and get into the thick of battle… but you’re still going to risk dying and kill slower than someone just standing on the ledge while their thralls kill everything. At least with the rest of the pve in the game I can jump into battle when I want. At the summoning pools the best tactic is for me to just hide on a ledge while my thralls kill. If I try to join the fight at all myself I get all the aggro and that is just not a fun place to be with my tiny health pool.
So we’ve gone from complaining about how it’s boring to sit on the sidelines and let thralls do all our work, to complaining about how there’s this place where we can’t sit on the sidelines and let thrall do all our work?
Yesterday I had exactly this conversation with @AxeIsAnnoying in private. I told him that the last year I do not trust the thrall AI and I build to make my own fights. So Axels suggested me to have at least 20 agility for better combat reaction and he was totally right. The same night I tested my new build on Arena champion and it went flawless, beautiful fight.
I do not trust my idiot thralls. They hit hard, yes but they hit less. I cannot expect them to do my fight, I use them only as healing pillow. If you don’t have lags, Grey pools are awesome. There are some useless bosses, but some of them are unique, especially on the loot side.
My only “disagreement” with Siptah is some recipes, especially the midnight alchemist should be easier to be found or gained in a visit, like EL.
To much rng to everything is tiresome, so back to EL .
One game for which I spent a lot of time in a very simple way made the player the most important during the fight and at the same time catching the best companion, leveling him up and collecting best equipment for him was the most important thing in the game. Aside from what game it was…
The companions were like those in Conan. However, by selecting the appropriate upgrades, some companion stats were passed on to the player. And “some” is not a good word here, because it was possible to pass more than 100% of the stats from the companion that is currently following you.
It’s such a simple solution and made you really want to collect companions, look for the most suitable for: a specific map; dungeon; or even crafting. While it’s really irrational - the game doesn’t have to be realistic all the time.
The dragons humps you up so close that you get stuck mid air, unable to dodge or use your weapon
I kite with bow now on horse back, so all the above issues doesn’t matter.
If one more “Bitter Bite Recipe” drop I’m going to end it all…
Every decent recipe on the Isle of Siptah seems hard to get due to RNG, the things I get most is the venom infused weapons recipes or these useless totems…
I wonder if midnight alchemist and grandmaster recipes drop at all… I gave up grinding the vaults and pools for this. I just transfer to Exiled Lands learn the recipes how it should be learned and then transfer back to Siptah.
I don’t mind a little grind, but this is whack. I’ve said this many times but things still didn’t change.
Yeah I haven’t a clue why you all continue that…I got wiped, took the opportunity to server transfer to EL, spent the cool down time learning learning the recipes and came back and now have no knowledge reason to do the pools anymore. I only do pools for power frags and ghoulish weapons which are easy enough…but there is that oak shield…but dang that’s a hard one to do solo and voidforge shield is close… eventually I’ll loose that battle of wills and farm botanical Cthulhu.
I never get any of that? Are you on a private server where the admin doesn’t restart it or maybe your ping is really high? The Grey Pools are pretty cool! Nice addition to the game! Nice challenge for a solo player or solo w/thrall. Lots of fun for two or three non-alpha players too! Although, they can get a little grindy after you’ve done each one a few times.
This is exactly what I addressed in my original post. The summoning pools not only don’t fix this situation, they make it worse. Having enemies that only aggro the player is not some clever fix for the Thrall Commander Deluxe combat system of the game, it just makes it worse because now I avoid combat almost entirely by sitting on a ledge. With every other fight in the game I can have my thrall tank and I at least engage in the fight as a secondary combatant. At the pools I just put the statue, hide on a ledge, wait for the fight to be over. The summoning pools have made the problem worse.
Absolutely nothing in the pools is inherently impossible to solo, the idea is to actually give yourself a challenge instead of leaning on ol reliable thrall crutch.
Instead of calling it poor game design, why don’t we reframe it as poor combat planning? You went in to the pools with the intent to fight powerful enemies, and you complain when they try to hit you?
Even from a lore standpoint, you’re invoking these beings and tearing them into our world from the outer void, of course they’re gonna target you with blind fury
Hey most of those things are trying to break into the world every time Yog sneezes up a maelstrom so I think I should be given the legendary gear for doing it for them.
You can do whatever you want in the game. You can fight naked with stone daggers if you want. Everyone has different goals and playstyles, but we all abide by the same rewards and the same rules. I want to be rewarded by the drops from enemies and I like to kill fast. The game rules give a huge advantage to using a thrall effectively. The summoning pools completely hamstring effective use of a thrall unless you remove yourself from the fight entirely.
I’m not here for lore (although I have some appreciation for it). I’m here to play a game. The game has rules and while I don’t aggressively min-max for effectiveness, I do strive to get the best gear and engage in combat with overwhelming force. I have no interest in significantly handicapping myself by ignoring the tools provided to me.
In the context of the rules established in the game over a period of years and all the other PvE encounters throughout the Exiled Lands and Siptah the summoning pools are a bizarre oddity of poor game design.
I’m not complaining that the summoning pools are too hard. I bring two thralls and they are a breeze. I kill quickly and effectively, but to do so I have to remove myself from the fight. Every other fight in the game has some non-zero degree of aggro management. Summoning Pool aggro management consists of “hide on a ledge”. Lame.
And you do. Plenty of gear drops alongside the fragments you get.
Wholly untrue. I’m not sure where you got that idea from, it’s not like only one of you is allowed to hit something at a time. If you really cared about ttk you’d bust out the gladius and help out. Two combatants is still more effective than one, especially if you don’t need to waste time scrambling to safety on a ledge.
Lore is part of the game whether you want it to be or not. If you don’t like that, there’s plenty of oily elf mods that’ll rebalance it for you.
Hard disagree. Just because it’s unique doesn’t mean it’s bad. If anything, it’s a refreshing change to push you to be more hands on with your fight. You should try building for combat, it’s more rewarding and a faster ttk
You still haven’t explained why though? Did you not bring a weapon? I don’t wanna be that guy who says git gud but yikes dude at least give it a few swings before dipping out
If that’s the goal it fails. It pushes me to sit on the ledge so my survival is ensured and fast kills are ensured.
The summoning pools are an entirely different level of “git gud” than the rest of the game. I have my spec (offhand it’s roughly something like 25 str, 10 agi, 35 vit, 10 grit, 25 enc). It’s a bit of a pain to change spec so I do it infrequently, and I’m not inclined to do it for the summoning pools when I can just sit on a ledge instead. I’m not in the habit of carrying healing potions because they have been nerfed in effectiveness, are prohibitively heavy and unnecessary in the vast majority of cases (the only time I grab a few is when I’m going to fight Thag).
Many of the bosses in the game will kill a player in 1-3 hits. Considering the severe penalty for death (possible loss of all items in inventory) I strive to avoid death as much as possible. I die very infrequently and often it’s because of bugs.
As has already been mentioned thrall AI is rather poor. The best case for thralls is the enemy standing in place and attacking the thrall. They attack each other, no one moves around, no one gets glitched. The more movement that happens the more likely the thrall and/or the enemy AI will glitch out. If I engage my player character in fights at the pools I need to move around to not die. If I move, the boss moves. If the boss moves, my thrall swings at the air. If I hop over onto the ledge the boss stands there like an absolute moron for a while breathing angrily at me while my thralls rip it a new one. If it survives long enough it may actually switch aggro to my thralls and then I’ll hop back over the wall and join the fight.
Bottom line is if the game wants to provide better combat then survivability needs to be significantly improved and penalties for death need to be significantly decreased. Just flipping a switch that says “enemy aggro player 100%” is a no-effort poor solution.
With all due respect: no, you didn’t. Thankfully, @prologue1337 did, and then @anon83039162 followed up, so it’s all much clearer now.
I doubt they tried to “fix” it, because there’s really nothing to fix. People who complain about thralls doing all the work are people who are unwilling to accept that Conan Exiles is a sandbox game that targets many different playstyles, and not just their own obsessively optimized variant. Thralls are like a dynamic difficulty slider for combat, and that’s fine.
What isn’t fine at all is the laundry list of bugs that @prologue1337 and @anon83039162 mentioned. Unfortunately, it seems like many of those are not easily reproducible and vary wildly from server to server. Although it does sound like they’re more likely to manifest on consoles, but I might be wrong about that.
Nah. I’d love to have an “enemy aggro player 100%” in Exiled Lands, but not if it hits as hard as the Arena Champion, or if it insta-rotates like the Red Mother.
So yeah, I kinda agree with you that “always aggro the player” is a bad idea when combined with the flaky AI. Also, Funcom’s two favorite ideas of balancing bosses are “make 'em hit unreasonably hard so you won’t risk even looking at 'em if your ping is over 60ms” and “make their hit pool so high that the fight is mind-numbingly boring”.
I’m glad that they’re experimenting, but their experiments deserve honest feedback. In this case, it seems like good feedback would be “fix the bugs and tune the bosses”, rather than “don’t aggro the player”.
I liked the first few times, I don’t blame the idea I quite like it
They only way you can defeat most of these mobs is by tanking all the damage with a tanky build
Playing with light or medium is not viable you can’t dodge the stuff especially when 5 mobs have aggro on you. it can become very annoying when they stagger stunlock you to death without being able to fight back.
The drops are just not worth my time, getting the same recipes too often, done around 50+ of them so far and still not even 1 recipe I need.
Nobody’s pushing you to do that other than yourself. I can’t even grasp why you won’t even consider joining into the fight.
That’s not even that bad. Are you using level 10 armor or something? The pools aren’t that hard.
There’s your first mistake. Always, always bring a minimum one stack. You’re going into a fight totally unprepared and wondering why it’s difficult. With 25 encumbrance you can carry enough to survive, unless you travel around with your pockets full of stone.
If they’re not wearing armor. Even level 60 tier medium with a shieldwright gives ~70% damage reduction. Don’t sleep on armor, it’s essential.
Sorry pal but I just need to reiterate, if you’re having issues with survivability but carry no means of healing, and no means of reducing damage, that’s not the game at fault; that’s you.
I think you should re-read my original post and your first comment. I try to honestly reflect on what I say because I totally understand that communication is tricky and context can be lost, but I do not understand how you could read my original post and then reply with your comment. I did exactly the opposite of “complaining about how there’s this place where we can’t sit on the sidelines and let thrall do all our work”. I complained that it’s worse now. The rest of the PvE in the game you can engage in the fight with your thrall. At the summoning pools the best approach is to not engage in the fight at all.
He’s not saying you shouldn’t bring a thrall. He’s saying you should have a base level skill enough to do them without a thrall. To be honest your original post is confusing because the Summoning Pools are not regarded as really challenging content. In addition, many don’t even see not bringing a thrall as a handicap because their AI can sometimes just get in the way. So many of us don’t even use them (I usually just use a non-attacking heavily armored Bearer to carry my loot).
I definitely recommend trying to play the game without a thrall for a while. If summoning pools are giving you trouble, then you’ve been using them as a crutch and its been hampering your ability to learn to melee effectively.
Just an FYI, all PVE content in the game can be done without a thrall. And by players who are not even great at the game.
I guess i’m just the odd ball that looks at risk vs reward. I tried them all and then did the research on the drops…70% of the pool summons just isn’t worth it, IMHO outside of bragging rights. Before i just used them to get schematics and within a week I was staring at 300 fragments of power going WTF am I going to do with these…now I’m just sitting here thinking if I’m bored enough with the game I’ll go down there and do some of them. I don’t know…it’s cool. I like it but in a Siptah game…the rewards just isn’t there for the level of challenge that it offered. What makes it more fun that anything else is if you are in PVP knowing that someone could be just watching and waiting to kack your @$$ after you defeat the summons and take everything from you. That is always in the back of my mind and I’m always looking at the cliffsides for characters while constantly dodging and weaving.
I’ve joined the fight numerous times. Assessment: things go better when I sit on the ledge and let the thralls handle it.
Playing the game for over a year has conditioned me to not bother with healing potions for the reasons I mentioned:
not very effective
prohibitively heavy
99.9% unnecessary
I’ve got all the armor recipes and a shieldwright, I definitely appreciate the value of armor. I generally wear heavy pictish warchief.
It kind of is the game’s fault. I’ve been playing for over a year and killed everything in the Exiled Lands and Siptah. And there’s just no need for healing potions or even significant armor for the vast majority of encounters (I engage in most fights, even the miserably buggy Red Mother, but ok, maybe not the absurd ones like Rockslide). And there are penalties (encumbrance) for carrying healing items and heavy armor. So I’m just following the rules of the game and optimizing for my goals - survive, kill, loot. The more healing potions I carry the less loot I can carry.
I definitely understand that I can bust my ass and improve my survivability and engage in these fights. But why? It’s totally out of line with the rest of the game’s content. Alternatively I can just make two trips to the pools so I have two thralls with me, sit on a ledge and watch bosses melt. I get the rewards quick and easy, but the aggro mechanic that is unique to this area of the game makes it a less interesting experience.
.
a very simple way made the player the most important during the fight and at the same time catching the best companion, leveling him up and collecting best equipment for him was the most important thing in the game. Aside from what game it was…
from the companion that is currently following you.
companions, look for the most suitable for: a specific map; dungeon; or even crafting. While it’s really irrational - the game doesn’t have to be realistic all the time. 
