They may not be the same people doing the coding, but they should be connected. If a thrall is ineffective at fighting, making them worse at it objectively doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I’ve given up even taking my thrall most places. I still get them and level them but purely because its something to do in game and having them in mass for defense against purges and whatnot is still useful. The reason they are still useful though is independent of nerf because a 30% damage reduction to one just means I should get more to make up for it (private server, so thrall caps will never impact me).
Weapons get nerfed, thralls get nerfed; I can only shrug at it anymore. I guess the one positive is when Dune gets released, there will be some normalized lethality to everything in parallel and hopefully Dune won’t go thru the same fits of nerfs… but I will not be surprised if it turns out not to be the case.
Personally, I don’t about the statisic nerfs from the upcoming patch - far from it even, I think they are a very welcome change; however, what I do care about is the fact that thralls just don’t work properly currently (you know, the annoying crap where they equip and unequip, just stand there, try hugging you, etc).
So having the nerfs on top of that issue is going to be rotten. I’ve been suffering so badly from it as of late (I think the latest PS4 update made the bug even more prevalent…).
Even if you “git gud” you will always have moments where the enemy just bugs out. This can be due to lag (server issue or user issue), glitchy behaviour, bugs, and whatever else.
Like, I was fighting the croc earlier and the things was just attacking me through my shield with the regular bite that usually just bounces off. And then later I was fighting a rhino that just - when facing my thrall - did a full 180 mid-charge and ended up running over me, to which I just stared at the screen and proceeded to get killed after it repeated this a few more times (a lot of BS comes from animation skips and glitches…).
Yeah, that’s what the game designers should be doing, making decisions about how to balance everything out. They have a track record of making decisions that seem… questionable. Especially when you look at the history of this whole follower rigmarole: back when they announced the follower cap and we all screamed about it, they promised new thralls would be much stronger than the legacy ones, and now they’re nerfing them because they’re too strong…
Thing is, the things described in this thread – thrall constantly equipping and unequipping weapons, not aggroing properly, not displaying their health bars – are nasty bugs. They’re not really a case of thrall not being a good fighter, they completely bork up the fight. Whether you nerf or boost the thrall’s damage (or health or any other attribute) is completely immaterial if your thrall is too bugged up to fight at all.
And vice versa, it’s not like nerfing thralls is going to make it harder or easier to fix the AI bugs.
No it wont make it easier, but if its too hard to fix the thrall ai, that should factor into what their stats should be to compensate. Certainly it would make more sense to hold the neef for when the thrall borkedness is actually fixed. If they dont hit things, they do need more damage to he useful at those moments where they do. So whatever the limitations of the ai might be is important input for what the stats should be.
Thralls seem to be working just fine on Single-Player, the only issue I’ve seen is the thrall pocketing his weapon when knocked down by an opponent, then posing threateningly with his fists for a couple of seconds before he remembers that it’s a sword in his pocket and he’s not just glad to see me.
I think time since server reset factors into it somehow also. I don’t have loads of experience on servers, but from what I’ve noticed the closer it gets to server reset, the thralls get dumber and buggier. It could also explain why it’s minimized in singleplayer mode. Every game launch is a server reset.
Official resets once per day, I think. The regular servers announce the reset, or at least the one time I played on it, there was a warning the server was about to reset. The testlive servers just drop you and you can sign back in after a couple minutes.
I dont know the reason, But as a ps4 player I dont have server options; I have to rent from gportal. Thats also part of the official concern here as well since we all have to play by this change. Individual server settings would make all this moot.
It doesnt seem to care that I do a reset but thralls on guard dont have the same issues as a thrall on follow. On follow, they have good times and bad, but even during the good times they dont chain attacks much. They go in stilted and slow and sometimes stand there while I’m getting pummeled. They are also always a mile behind the action and usually only show up either when not needed or after its over.
All that I can handle though and fundamentally I can accept it as a hard problem that takes time to fix. But I dont understand why when its still wonky, we need a nerf to them. Its just one more reason for me to leave them at home.
It’s consistent with what I’ve seen on officials. When the server FPS goes into orange, followers get extra-crappy. And when it goes into red, they’re completely useless.
I don’t know if they’re borked only during server load spikes, though. I’ve haven’t used my followers (except for my horse) for a couple of months now.
I noticed this exact same thing! And here I thought I was crazy or that it was just coincidence… Not that it matters, as the issue pops up often enough during the day anyway that the majority of my time is spent swapping the thrall for another one over and over to “refresh” this “debuff” they have.
I play offline on the PS4 platform, like darthphysicist stated, thralls on guard behave as they should. Thralls following have various issues (fall way behind; attack/don’t attack is random; get stuck on environment objects; falling through the environment where you have to ghost to retrieve; crowding you while harvesting or fighting which prevents player actions; commands work sporadically; etc…the list goes on). Unless I’m leveling a follower, I travel on foot solo. Love the game too much to quit!
The thralls aren’t actually controlled by an AI. They’re controlled by people Funcom staff have knocked unconscious, broken on a wheel of pain and chained to their desks. So they suffer from lag just like other players, and may disconnect if the server lag gets too bad.
Their irrational behavior is easy to explain: repeated whacks on the head can cause serious brain injury in real life.
I hope Funcom doesn’t feed them with porridge made of roadside bushes and random plant seeds.
