Thralls make the entire PvE Content a cakewalk & even quite useless tbh

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Hello CodeMage,

I agree with you for the most part and maybe i was not clear enough.
Indeed, in no way would be weakening thralls the one and only solution.

As you have said, there are other issues as well, AI in general, Bosses AI, no real mechanics, just tank&spank.
The lack of challenge in PvE has problems on various ends, i already said that in one of my posts here, but reading the entire thread is not something one wants to do now.

Just to make it clear, i also do not want to turn this game into an “hardcore” game, this wouldn’t work and only would frustrate a lot of other players.

Lag in various shapes and forms + latency issues are obvious and as soon you even get packet loss almost everything is unplayable anyway. But theese factors count for nearly all online/coop/multiplayer/mmo games and shouldn’t be used for reference when it comes to “balancing” game content.
If your servercode and/or networkcode causes Lag/Latency or sends wrong data between server-client then it needs to be fixed.
If one clan can pop 400+ entities in one small area to kill the fun for all other players, then yes this needs to get fixed.

As for the AI being crappy in Unreal Engine 4.15, well, Funcoms UE 4.15 Engine is already heavily modified and you always can write your own AI Systems or add upon it. Ofc. just simply writing a new AI System is something that you won’t pull off in just 1 week and is actually extremly complicated too, so that’s maybe not an option.

Also making bosses one-shot players is not really a hard mode, and as you have said already, it makes it only frustrating to play, this is not what we want. I have never said that anyway.

The Arena Champion already hits like a truck, but doesn’t one shot you.
But take one Relic Hunter Thrall with you and he is just a normal mob, zero challenge.
You don’t even have to equip the Thrall with the best Armor or Weapon, it is a cakewalk.

I am also no fan of dying because of lag or latency, this is obviously another problem that needs to get fixed, expecially if one clan can pop 400+ entities around 1 small area to completly eliminate the fun of other players.

Yes, thralls are here to balance the difficulty problems, but as it stands now, the better ones are not balanced. If i play around with serversettings and sliders and mods, the only thing i am archiving here is maybe balancing the lategame Thralls for me and other endgame players… yes, but the huge drawback here is it also totally imbalances all other tiered thralls for lower leveled players or new players on the entire server!

Look, i posted this thread, it is my opinion and ofc. not everyone has to agree with my opinion.
That is perfectly fine.

But this was my experience so far:

  • People right on started with “just don’t use them”, everything is fine.

  • Then some told me to play around with the server settings and i clearly said over and over again some server settings are not even working, not supported, leftovers from early access. And even if they would work it would only totally unbalance a lot of other things for lower or newer players on the entire server.

  • Then people all of a suddon think i want a hardcore game or Bosses that one shot you, i never said that. I don’t want that, it would be only extremly frustrating for everyone!

  • Then people thought i want to nerf everything with just T1 stats and what not, that is not balancing either, instead it would totally imbalance the entire game for everyone on the server.

  • Then one even calls out i am trolling, that’s just not helpful at all

I know this “topic” here is not new in the community, but you gotta ask yourself honestly why this topic always comes up again and again…
Before i was posting this i found several threads about the same topic from past years and the replies there were no different, “just don’t use them”.

Just don’t use them, everything is fine, let’s move on, all is ok.
That’s what i got out of this thread.

Only CodeMage actually understands that PvE Challenge in general needs work on various ends.

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That’s easy to answer. If a bit lengthy.

Thralls are a symptom to a greater issue. There was a point in time when the best thrall in the game was Dalanisa Snowhunter. When tamed she had 750hp. She had no STR score. No VIT score. Or any attribute. She simply had 750hp, and did the damage of whatever weapon you gave her. They also did not gain experience. They were what they were and never improved.

During this time. We had bosses like the Kinscourge, King Below, and others. You didn’t typically take thralls around with you as they just didn’t have the HP to survive a pack of wolves and the like. And coupled with the fact that falling damage did a number back then.

But there was a problem. The game was easy even back then. There was no option to ‘not use thralls’. No one used thralls.

Now here is where things got dumb. They buffed thralls, the aforementioned Snowhunter has between 11,000-14,000hp (~12k) and did 3.9x the damage of the weapon you gave her times their STR modifier. To compensate many world bosses were also adjusted (I think the world bosses were adjusted and then the thralls. I don’t quite remember the order).

Suffice to say, that was a bit much. She was toned down to have around 4-6k hp and ‘only’ a 2.21 modifier. I am only mentioning the one thrall because it was the one I knew the stats of quite well. Teimos is a relatively new thing and comparing him to past iterations is not something I can do. But with that said, all thralls got similar buffs, changes, and nerfs by nearly the same margins.

So now we have bosses with upwards of 18,000hp or more. Depending on their armor or what not, it can take about 30-50 combos to down them. That’s a lot of clicking. Combine this with the fact you need to dodge attacks here and there. It can take a minute.

Of course if you have a thrall that just tanks their attacks, you can just go ham. But even with a thrall the bosses are spongy. Not difficult, just lengthy. Couple this with other issues such as RNG on drops. And it makes for a boring time.

One thing I like about Siptah is the vault bosses are around 6,000hp. They’re not so spongy and some of them even have a variety of interesting moves that make them a bit more engaging. It could be better. There could be phases, there could be effects (think the Wine Cellar boss with the floor blowing up), and maybe even environmental hazards (like the Witch Queen).

Is nerfing thralls the way to fix the issues? As they stand, no. If they nerf thralls and fix no other issues, then things would just suck. People would simply avoid many of the bosses because what’s the point? People want fun. The bosses aren’t fun. But unfun things will be done by players to get things.

That’s horrible design philosophy. Unfun things in video games don’t need to be there, period. Here’s the proper design philosphy:

Ask yourself this question: Will the player play through content or a feature without a reward?

If the answer is no, redesign the content so the answer is yes.

The best example of this is Worlds 2-7 in Super Mario Bros. 3. You can warp whistle past them to World 8. Everyone growing up around the time of the release saw the Wizard demonstration and knew how to get those items to skip levels. But many of us didn’t during some play throughs because the worlds themselves were fun on their own.

Why can’t this apply to bosses in Conan Exiles? Why do they need rewards to get us to do them? Lets be honest, without the rewards, the loot, the journey steps, or the achievements… they are a waste of time.

Up to this point I have not even said to make content harder. I have said I want more complexity, more engagement, and more fun. Challenge will naturally evolve from those things. And as I’ve said before, nerfing thralls won’t give us a challenge. I’ve been clearing Siptah content without them.

But even though Thralls are a symptom. They do need some changes.

I’m quoting this because it brings up a very great point. The differences in tiers of thralls is far too great. Lets be honest. Tier 1 and 2 thralls are useless. No one uses them. Not even for fodder. Right now people get T3 thralls for fodder and T4 for use out in the world.

Maybe… just MAYBE a few new arrivals on a server starting out may use them just to get started. But those thralls are quickly replaced. But lets be honest. How many level 10s are using a T1 Exile Fighter as a follower? Well if they do, its not for long. Its gonna die to a croc or hyena.

While T4s need to be toned down. T1s and T2s need to be brought up a bit. How I would go about it, is standardize the thralls based on tier. None of this some T4 thralls are weaker than some T3 depending on location. Just make the harder locations have more chances of higher tiers than lower ones. So while you ‘could’ get a T4 in the noob river, its not likely and if you did, good luck cause its gonna be a T4 you gotta fight (in this case it hits as hard as any other T4 and takes as many hits to take down).

But I would have a rough cap of about 3,500-4,000hp for a T4 tops. That’s assuming good rolls on VIT, VIT armor, and so forth. T1s would cap out in the same manner at 2,000-2,500. With the other tiers being in the middle. Now the benefit of higher tiers isn’t just base HP, but also base stats.

And most importantly, remove that damned hidden multiplier. Make the stats entirely transparent so you know how much damage the thrall is going to do, and how much it can take. And finally, perks are restricted to fighter and archer respectfully. That should have been done from the start.

We also need a way to heal thralls. This was removed for a good reason, but in a bad way. The reason healing on thralls was nerfed was because it made them invulnerable. With 10,000 health, a 5% heal a second meant you needed a boss that could deal over 500dmg/s, such a boss would gib a player in an instant.

So now they heal at the same rate of players, but have multitudes more health (cause they don’t dodge). So healing takes a long time. As a stop gap, I would suggest a way of healing them through some means in a base. Though it would have to mean a thrall can’t heal in seiges otherwise the invulnerability problem comes back.

But eventually some system where you could pull agro from a boss and have the thrall stop attacking and heal themselves while not engaged. Working sort of like if it was two players and one kept the NPC’s attention while his buddy pulled back to bandage or potion or whatever.

But with all that, we still need to address the monotony of the PVE content. The last time I played on Exiled Lands, I had crafted some dungeons using admin privileges. They were a pretty big hit. They employed much of the stuff I mentioned earlier. The bosses were not spongy, and used mechanics (as best as I could do using Pippi tools), and the players on the server found them very fun to experience. So I do know it is possible. You can do it with mods. Some mods actually add content. Age of Calamitous, Extended Endgame Weapon Arsenal, and Thralls Wars all add bosses of their own.

So this idea there is limitations for Unreal 4.15 or whatever is ridiculous. Besides there’s like a hundred games with AI’s using previous versions of Unreal. I don’t think that needs to be brought up again.

And anything that aids with PVE also helps with PVP. PVPers need to PVE too. Just ganking each other off the cross with stone weapons doesn’t just magically make legendaries fall out of the sky afterall.

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Like I said in a reply above, playing with a T3 when Siptah launched felt really good. You got involved more in the combat and a T3 is more like a support. It gave me the feeling I was in charge of any combat situation.
With a T4 i’m living in the shadow of my thrall and game is too easy from my point of view.
At this point they could add T5 thralls with 30k hp and T6 thralls with 100k hp. The game would feel same as now on PvE servers. It would make no difference difficulty wise.
I can also bet that if FUncom raises level cap from 60 to 300 and allow for full stats, players who enjoy the cakewalk would be even more happy, because that’s the mentality they share.
Players who enjoy only building and spam 100s of thralls around their bases don’t know how thralls work and what’s their purpose, let alone have a say in how they should be balanced.

Honestly I feel like the hp pool is mostly there to make up for the lack of AI and control we have. I was a little shocked when I first started and got my first decent T4 thrall and saw they had 10 times my health or more. I was even more shocked when I saw what they looked like at 20. And then I watch them get stuck in the ground or stand there not attacking or stuck behind a wall of mobs trying to attack an archer that they can’t get to while getting their faces kicked in. If they reduced thrall health they’d have to drastically improve thrall AI and the control we have over them and I certainly don’t want to endure the former for any period of time until the latter is done. And they took months to fix thralls not attacking or doing combos with weapons and there are still some quirks with the system.

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With the AI thralls have I have only lost 1 T3 in 7 months, inside a vault. My thralls are never dying, they are immortal and I’m a casual player.
If Funcom made an official statement saying “Thralls are not supposed to die in-game” I wouldn’t bother with this topic.

Thank you, it’s much clearer now! What you explained here is very different from what I thought you were saying. There are some ideas I liked a lot and wish Funcom could somehow implement without ■■■■■■■■ up other players’ playstyles. For example, I liked the “commander build”, even though I have no idea how they could fit it with existing stats.

But the idea that I absolutely adored is this:

Imagine this: when your thrall dies, they drop a special item representing their soul, which you can take to your T3 shrine for your T3 priest to resurrect – at a steep price (e.g. the sacrifice of the archpriest)! This would kill two birds with one stone: allow players to resurrect their favorite followers and give the religion more importance in PVE.

Anyway, back on topic.

I’m glad to see that most people here are not really just calling for a senseless nerf of thralls. I wish more forum discussions could be like this :slight_smile:

Yeah, it’s a rather delicate balance and I don’t envy Funcom on having to deal with it. It’s not like they can’t make any changes, but every change will make a bunch of people unhappy and they have to be careful not to go too far.

I’m afraid I have to disagree here. I believe that a good game designer always has to take in account the limitations of the underlying tech. Sure, those limitations might be, in some cases, self-imposed or solvable, but that doesn’t really change things. If you have a design that depends on your tech performing better than it normally does in the average case, then you need to solve your tech problems before you can use that design.

That’s what the follower cap was supposed to solve. They still haven’t activated it, but I hope they will in the near future.

By the way, that 400+ figure is not an exaggeration. JJDancer and I used to play on the same server, then I left on my hiatus. Before I left, I saw a clan come to the server and erect massive builds everywhere. I have no problem with building big, as long as you avoid doing things that bog down the server performance. They took no such precautions and didn’t care at all. JJDancer later told me that, when their stuff finally decayed, their “pyramid theme park” had “at least 500+ thralls/pets”.

One of the modders here on the forums – don’t remember which and don’t want to tag the wrong one – said that AI support in UE4.15 is crappy. I haven’t personally worked with that version of UE.

And yeah, feasibility is a big problem in these discussions. Most things we talk about here are doable, but that doesn’t mean they’re always feasible.

Because a lot of us are not satisfied with the PVE combat. We feel like we’re not heroes, but sidekicks to our own thralls. Or, at least, that’s how I used to feel during a time when this was much, much worse.

As @Taemien explained in great detail – and I can’t tell you how happy I am that there’s finally someone with an even bigger wall of text to point at :stuck_out_tongue: – there was a time when nobody even used fighter thralls for day-to-day PVE.

Back then, on PVE(-C) servers, thralls were mostly used for decoration (so that the cities and theme parks don’t feel empty) and for a bit of support when defending against the purge. Then Funcom announced that they were going to institute a follower cap and all hell broke loose. As part of that big update, they also introduced the thrall leveling system, so your thralls could get more badass, but that just made people more upset. And for good reasons, too: before the thrall leveling system, death of one thrall wasn’t a big deal. After all, you didn’t have to spend hours and hours leveling it. Now each thrall was going to be more valuable. And when you take into account that you could have a limited number of them, well, you can draw your own conclusions about how we felt.

And so Funcom made sure that our new thralls were going to be superior to the old ones and buffed the crap out of them. Which, of course, made the rest of the PVE content laughably easy, so they eventually rebalanced that too. And that’s how we ended up in what I call The Dark Age of Überthralls, where you pretty much had to have a thrall with you. Not because you were in great danger, but because things were way too tedious without thralls.

They kept tweaking things until they eventually settled on this balance we have now. Which is why my original reaction to your thread was “for the love of Mitra, not another thrall nerf, just leave them the **** alone” :smiley:

That’s a bit unfair. There are several other people in this thread that have had a nuanced approach. It’s just that the thread got off to a rocky start. Once Andy stepped in and did some cleanup, the discussion got much better. Don’t give up now, just when it’s starting to get really good :smiley:

So. Much. Yes.

hi jupp
Perhaps you have been previously playing mostly linear games where options appear sequentially to be used to overcome specific problems set to lead you along a prescribed story and timeline and you are thinking of the conan game in that sense.
let me explain what i mean
I personally play mostly on official pvp servers. I do not however raid or pvp. i do like the jeapordy that that brings to the game and the diplomacy and challenges that throws up for me as a solo player (yup i ignore clanning too).I still get raided and that’s fine, that’s my alternate strategies failing, as all strategies do sometimes. I don’t feel as though i am “ignoring game mechanics” by not pvping or raiding on a pvp server I feel like i am making a choice as to the style of game I am playing. I also don’t use horse and don’t feel that means I am ignoring a mechanic. It’s a choice.

I am pretty sure all players level to 60 well before the content is exhausted and at that stage conan is an illustrated slate on which you can impose whatever gamep[lay style you want. 4500 hours into the game I still don’t have all my journey steps 'cos I just start playing my own game once i hit 60.

It does feel that you are trying to impose your skill level and settings to everybody bearing in mind it isn’t possible to have easy, medium or hard settings in a game like conan exiles (although I would argue that the equivalence of these settings is represented in conan exiles as pvp, pve-c and pve respectively and so you are effectively playing on easy and then complaining it’s easy.) You seem to be stubbornly refusing to excercise your own agency to create an equivalent to settings in pve and playing in a way which challenges you. Your argueement of ignoring mechanics not really holding water when you consider that there are more mechanics choices than you can use simultaneously anyway so your going to have to make some similar choices anyway.

Taking your perspective, could it not be argued that by not playing on a private server modded more to your tastes you are “ignoring a game mechanic” after all funcom officially support mods to personalise your experience. I don’t know if a suitable server exists but the game has the opportunity for you to create your own which you are ignoring. there is a strong modding community with many mods
Think outside of what seem to be a set of very small parameters of what constitutes a game or gameplay and you may have a more fun time

Anyway my advise to you is get on a populated pvp server, chat in global, socialise have fun, don’t take things to heart or personally (like raids on your base or people pvping you) and you’ll soon be running around and seeing your thralls die to other players and raids and you can go out and replace them and train 'em up. which was one of the things you mentioned. It certainly won’t be the “cakewalk” you complain about so maybe it’s the mode of exiles your playing that you are tired of?

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Maybe PVE players enjoy making this content, but for PVP players who entered a new server dont want to do the same for 100th time, when you leveled up and cleaned dungeons 100 times its no more and “adventure” its just a formality to 1º reach max lvl quickly 2º farm necessary resources to go to the real fun: kill other players.

Si if anyone thinks that thralls make content too easy, don’t use them. Because there is an important part of the community for which pve content is just a way to have better weapons / armor to kill other players and they don’t enjoy doing it “slow and leisurely” .

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Which is why any change to make PVE more engaging and challenging would also have to come with related server settings to adjust things between PVE and PVP servers. Just like a myriad of other settings they’ve added for similar reasons.

Come on, people, I’m trying really hard not to be resentful here, but the treatment of PVE issues by PVP players on these forums is really starting to grate. In every single PVP-oriented discussion in which a PVE player dared to give their opinion, there was at least one PVP player reacting along the lines of “tough luck, suck it up” and more than one along the lines of “if you don’t PVP, you don’t belong in this discussion”.

Yet it’s perfectly fine for PVP players to come to a PVE-oriented discussion and dictate how the PVE players should play, without giving any thought to the possibility of balancing things differently between PVP and PVE.

Not to mention failing to read the whole thread, but that’s something both PVE and PVP players are guilty of :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Totally agree: PVP and PVE servers must have different configuration, so that PVE mechanics do not weigh down on the PVP.

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thralls are too op, let’s nerf them alright… and then, we will have to spend 15 minutes or more to kill any boss like a pro player ? Losing thralls daily so we enjoy the fun to fill our wheels with the new ■■■■■■ nerfed t4 thralls ?

All of that for what… oh an amaaaazing frag of power, a useless legendary weapon not even worth my star metal axe ?
Thx for the suggestion :wink:

Now for a more serious side, most of you seems to forget a crucial point : you all have here hundreds or thousands of hours in game, you know it perfectly or at least pretty well.
Be a bit more on the side of a new comer, how many know where to find teimos, relic hunters, volcano’s fighters ?
And even by knowing that, i helped a ton of people to grow on my server and most of them had the exact same answer about thralls locations => i’ll go at my own rythm, i don’t need to rush.

Once they have explored, got their own challenge and reward, they ALL enjoy having a powerful thrall to grind fragments, weapons and such.

To finish, even with more “balances” on thrall… before having them as followers, experienced people had archer towers as boss grinder all across the map, even before that… it was V shape spike traps… people always find a way to make their grind faster and unbalance the game.

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So continue to have a game where thralls never die. I don’t understand your idea of fun.

You answered your own question: most online players learn a lot about the game from other players :slight_smile:

Don’t get me wrong, your point is perfectly valid: everyone likes playing the game at their own pace, and there are also offline players to consider.

But I think you’re missing something important, probably because the thread is too long to read thoroughly before posting: although it looks at first glance that this thread is calling for a thrall nerf (I also thought so initially), it’s really about something else – namely, the lack of challenge in (certain parts of) PVE.

Simply nerfing thralls would not solve this and I believe everyone here agrees on that. Some of us would like to keep discussing how the situation could be improved. The progression of the game for the newbies is an important concern to keep in mind, but it’s not an unsolvable problem.

The hardest boss in the game is the great void under your base, that swallow all your thralls one by one.

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i just wanted to avoid a “wall” message that’s why i tried to remain as brief as possible :wink:

Imo, this post should have ended when you mentionned the 4 types of players.
After that, all i saw was frustrated and nostalic people about the good old time of conan when they were new, unskilled, without knowledges and where even survive was a challenge.

Having their “horse eye cup” about their frustration of the supposed lack of challenge just make them forget that there is many way to play a game and that they don’t have to impose their way to play as a default game style for everyone when they are able to do it by their own without penalize anybody…

i saw the argue about server perfs… really… if they played conan enough, they should know since long that thrall as follower are faaaaar to be the most gluttonous for server perfs… but maybe these people want also after removing followers : limit static thrall to 4 / clan, structure range to max 664, workstation to 10 and chests to 3 so server perfs will be perfect for them :þ

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I second that! Hit that solution button on CodeMage’s 1st comment and close this thread :roll_eyes:

Yikes. As a big part the community solo’s I can’t image how annoying be without the thralls. Already people have to take our cheap methods to kill certain mobs and bosses and such. We don’t need to have to find even more exploits because we have no backup lol.

Thralls gives the game the more PvE RTS feels in some ways. Honestly if they were to screw with that, then people just have to move them slowly one by one and bring a bunch of thralls near a destination just to fight it.

All I can say is nerfing them will only make people annoyed and have to do other methods of achieving the same goal that would only piss the playerbase.

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So you speak for the community? You keep using ‘our’ as if you represent everyone’s opinion on the matter.
Balancing the thralls won’t make them disappear. They would still be viable to support you. If you can’t process that bit of information that was discussed above, then you’re in a world of your own.
I missed the part where thralls turn conan into an RTS, and even if it was, thralls with 12k hp and 90% damage reduction feels like cheating and in no way a balanced game design.

PS. Now i get it. RTS / clans with 500 thralls. Makes total sense, but not in this game.

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I just have enough of this forum. Its filled with bunch of veterans pve players that thinks they are majority - all they do is complain about people feedback that actually makes sense - giving back no valid arguments. Like i said before, with that people this game will never change.

It’s just insane they think that it’s fine to grab one thrall and be able to do all pve content without any effort.
Saying that you should not use them if you want to have challenge is just childish - game is meant to have progressive difficulty and player should use all available tools to beat it / advance further.
It’s getting even more insane when you think about official servers with such ‘balance’ - pve is not fun / challenging - it’s just boring chore, grind - how fun is it order thrall to attack and watch? I thought its not pokemon game but maybe that’s the reason they like it that way?

I personally think that nerfing thralls is just first NECESSARY step to change it, make game challenging - right now pve is just pointless clikcer, chore and grind.

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