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 
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 
– 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” 
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
So. Much. Yes.