Alright. Thralls.
Some hate them, some love them. What I wanted to discuss were some of the things I noticed while testing thralls out in Testlive. Both single-player and a PVP server.
I’m going to talk about base thralls without any points being invested into authority for the most part.
It’s really hard to get a thrall’s base hp over 4k now. From the force levelling I did, most will end up with 3-4k hp. This includes all of the go-to thralls that everyone loves to farm. Lian, Teimos, Relic Hunter, and Berserkers.
Except for purge thralls. They actually get around 5-6k hp which is nice since they should be stronger than thralls that can be easily mass farmed.
Here’s the real question, why should I spend the time levelling one of the slow levellers when they’ll just turn out more or less the same as the fast or medium levellers? Cimmerians and volcano thralls require so much more time to get to level 20 compared to Lian or Teimos’s and when they aren’t going to be any better… what’s the point?
Right now, I don’t see a reason to even bother with the slow levellers because they take too much time to invest in and offer hardly anything in return.
I think that thralls need (maybe not with this update) a rework and a better payoff for the time it takes to get them to 20.
The longer it takes to level a thrall, the better it should be compared to other fast and medium levellers. The simplest thing I can think of is more hp. A Snowhunter or Ravager should feel stronger than a Lian or a Relic Hunter and have more hp than them so you know that the time invested in farming and levelling them is worth it.
Now, back to 3.0.
Teimos got nerfed into the ground. I’m not necessarily against that, since all thralls now get around the same hp. But poison from world bosses absolutely chews through thralls now that they only have 3-4k hp at base. Yes, I know that you can get a thrall up to 8k with authority, but when you’re lvl 30 with a lvl 15 Lian in normal heavy armor with a hammer of the wale or other black hand legendary since they’re the best you can get, trying to get better weapons. The spider bosses used to be the easiest world bosses to farm early game, thralls could tank them and you could stand off to the side and help poke them with a spear or sunder them with a hammer. Now the spiders, sandreaper queen, and scorpians eat through thralls because of their poison making them bosses I don’t want to have to deal with UNLESS I have 2 thralls at level 20 with alchemical armor and star metal weapons.
Now, a lvl 20 Lian with good gear and a good weapon can still fight the Jhil bosses and Rotbranch without any points in Authority. But they still get wrecked by the White Tiger and while I haven’t tested the Black Rhino and Thunderfoot, I suspect because of their high armor value vs the hp of the thrall, the boss would win in the end.
So… where am I going with this?
The point is to make the player the hero of their story right? But that doesn’t really happen until after you get to level 60 and can start really using your attribute points to build a character that has the hp and damage output to capitalize on that. So once I’m able to run warmakers solo, no thrall and kill everything by myself… why should I even bother with thralls? Again, for me, fighters are most valuable early game when I need them to tank things I can’t and they can’t do that anymore.
Alright, so, let’s say I spec into the authority tree to make my Lian better or get a second Lian, aren’t they pretty strong?
Yes… and no. He’s only stronger while following you and if you have him unfollow at low hp to grab a different thrall he can just die making you an essential lifeline. Now, if you have two of them, they can easily beat down most of the world bosses, (again, if the sandreaper queen gets that venom cloud attack off it melts thralls) but it’s now taking 2 thralls early to mid-game to do what 1 used to be able to do which I don’t think is a good thing.
The harder, longer, and more frustrating it is to progress the less likely people are to continue playing. And when you mostly play pvp as I do, the early to mid-game grind is really important to getting stuff done and having thralls die early on when you still NEED them sets you back even further.
I’ve mostly talked about pve stuff so far, but that’s a core part of the game that affects everyone regardless of whatever you play, so, let’s talk about pvp now.
Thralls from my experience, are typically base defenders and something you take with you when running around as a bodyguard or extra body. I mean before the follower cap people would just farm thralls and cover their bases in them because they were the best defense against offline raids. (Raiding in general could use from reworking/expanding but that’s a different discussion for a different time.) Now, without being invested in authority to boost your thralls I don’t see people roaming with them as much anymore because they’ll just die compared to the disposable zombies that don’t require any time to level or tame, have 2x more hp than they would as thralls, and you can have 3 of them following you at a time compared to a single thrall.
So… I can continue complaining and saying about how bad thralls are in 3.0 now compared to 2.8, but I’d like to offer some suggestions instead.
Don’t let Authority determine how much hp thralls have. Makes them too reliant on the player and less useful early mid-game and redundant late-game.
Replace the hp Authority gives thralls with other perks that make thralls stronger when following you. Immunity to poison and/or bleed would be amazing. It would really make having a single thrall with good hp, immunity to poison, and healing when you deal damage useful not just in the early and mid-game but during pvp as well. Because let’s face it, even a 14k hp Teimos in 2.8 is going to die if left on his own because you died during a fight.
These are the two simplest and most effective suggestions I’ve come up with that deal with not only my complaints but the complaints about the changes I’ve seen here that should benefit both the PVP and PVE aspects of the game.