Yep that’s my current load out, combine with some encumberance-boosting armor for farming/building/‘normal’ adventuring, and switch to specialist armor for ‘serious’ fighting (the latter is rarely necessary).
All in all the new system is way better than the old one, even - or perhaps especially - for an army-of-one, jack-of-all-trades solo like me.
Yup, I’m really liking it 
I went with the farmer / fighter combo, kinda fell in love with it as it wasn’t possible in the past to this degree. Got a decent thrall with no authority support, but we manage 
Maces are top tier thrall weapons for the same reason mace NPCs are so dangerous, they can’t be staggered during the attack as easily as they can be with other weapons.
So I agree, if you haven’t tossed a mace on your thrall, give it a go.
This is bizarre.
Have you tried the infinite stamina Void Forged Gladius combo? It’s pretty strong, and as the thralls is too addled to use most agility weapons, a Player Character exclusive.
Alternatively, the Sword of ne-Crom-ancer build is good for thralls as support (zombie shamble only).
There are other combos of specific feats, gear, and sometimes sorcery that put the spotlight firmly on the PC. However, this cheese does take a little work to culture.
This one personally likes the current balance. Thralls are useful, but simplistic and their capabilities are eclipsed by a well bit PC in the hands of a skilled player.
In a straight up zerg rush button mash, the thrall is generally best.
Thralls are incredibly weak…
Zombies and even pets are much better than thralls by now. Really can’t see how much weaker they should be. They are a big feature of the game.
Especially if you compare them to zombies the issues are clear, they are simply not worth the time or resources you would invest Into a thrall.
If anything then they need serious “buffs“ but in terms of ai fixes
The only good thing they have now is the 10 corrupted perk that half’s the dmg you as a player take
Depends on what you’re fighting. Against most NPCs I can dodge, kite, avoid contact and use healing items to keep myself in good shape. But I can’t heal my follower during combat. So it’s usually better if the thrall doesn’t take any more hits from my screw-ups.
PvP may be different because players take more hits, and those hits are often deadlier too.
Expendable zombies are fine as extra damage sponges, but a thrall who needs training and equipment is hard to replace.
I was not talking about pve, the whole pve content is designed to be easy. I mean just considering that you can kill worldbosses as lvl 1 with stone daggers makes it pretty clear to me.
Generally pve content needs to become much harder to do.
Thralls can easily tank every pve content aside from the arenachampion, but even there if you stand between them and block the combos from the champ it’s also easy
Honestly with the pve content Beeing so incredibly easy, the only real measurement we could use is pvp to determine how balanced something is. And there thralls are a joke.
People saying a thrall outperforms them in pve need to really fix their build…because i do more dmg/dps than my berserker with 84strebght
And a good number of us players do not care about PvP at all. So your sentiment of PvP being the only measure of balance is utter nonsense.
It also does not matter how hard or easy the PvE content is for you. There will be skill differences and experience differences that change that from player to player.
And private servers and single-players can modify the difficulty according to their own preferences. If you don’t want thralls to dominate, reduce thrall damage on the server. If you want to challenge yourself, crank monster damage to 10x and see if you can beat Thag.
Just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean it’s not true… the issue is clear, pve content is way to easy and nerfing thralls to the point that they fail there would make them even more useless in pvp, while they are allrdy a joke to begin with and would need serious buffs to be somewhat useful there.
And no killing pve bosses with stone daggers is nothing that needs some kind of real skill. Everyone can do it
You balance things from top to down and not the other way arround. You need to see the limit of what something is capable off, and thralls are not even close to their limit in pve, and their limit is simply way to low allrdy in pvp. Wich means you if you want thralls to not clear 95% of those childbosses then you have to buff the bosses extremely.
Example: if every boss does the dmg of the arena champ, you won’t be able to let the thrall solo everything.
Currently bosses simply don’t have the dps to actually kill a thrall, thralls are nothing else but statsticks and bosses don’t have mechanics to overcome that and that’s why it’s free for a thrall to shred the content… in pvp on the other hand people use mechanics to get through big armorvalues and hp pools
Problem solved, thralls can’t do the pve content alone anymore, they will need your help/you just do it on your own because you can dodge the still easy to evade attacks of the bosses
And yes pve content is way to easy wich is actually really unfortunate and a missed opportunity
There has been movement in regard to making pve harder in some respects. The changes to the concussive bar on npcs is what comes to mind. I think for world bosses, funcom may feel by giving us the damage sliders in server settings is quite enough done. There may have been a judgement that enough people find it challenging as is that those who don’t will play on privates to customize their experience. Just guesses.
And you just ignored everything I said.
A lot of people do not and have no desire to play PvP. That is not the top for them. And you simply saying “Anyone can do blah blah blah” doesn’t make it so or change the fact that people have different skill levels.
If you want controller throwing NPC challenges, there are plenty of dark souls type games out there for you. Conan at its very root is a sandbox game, and not every PvE game needs to be some crazy test of twitch reflexes.
I think what both of you are potentially overlooking (@Tuffman and @Lole) is that you’re thinking about this in a linear fashion and the context of raw stats… more hp… more damage… less hp… less damage… for both followers and bosses. What if your follower could dodge? Just an example… wouldn’t that completely redefine these difficulty curves and potentially make it so that all of a sudden the same hp and damage would make them adequate for both modes?
The point I’m trying to make is that it would be nice to see some progress on the intelligence of both followers and PvE bosses rather than just making them hit hard and healthy… and that type of progress might equally benefit both PvE and PvP without significant stat nerfs / buffs being required
don’t quite feel the same, its a balancing act, problem is NPCs need a large health pool to make up for the AI not being challenging enough, to be useful and not die too easily, thralls need a decent healthpool too.
I feel lowering HP of thralls would be counter intuitive, part of the issue I think now is with authority someone can have up to 3 thralls/zombies think of a 10 man clan that is 30 zombies running around.
the issue here is army play is cool, but not balanced, and really cant be balanced the way the game is structured, so I think funcom is just aiming for what is cool and a play as you please model which imo is fine outside of PVP balancing.
You still didn’t get it.
I explained exactly the issue of why thralls can handle all the pve content so easy, they are statsticks and that’s what they need to be because their ai is horrible.
And bosses can’t overcome theese hp and armorvalues because they lack the necessary tools to do so. But till they have the tools the best solution would be to buff the dps of bosses to ensure thralls can’t do it anymore
Point still stands nerfing thralls to the point that they can’t tank the bosses anymore would be the worst way to solve the issue…
Thank you
Yes and in my post I suggested requesting them to be smarter instead of having more health, which you clearly didn’t read… Else you wouldn’t have said “their ai is horrible” when I’m literally suggesting improving that instead of their hp…
I think we have reached peak AI that is the issue, like if you understand how AI works in unreal engine, with behaviour trees and network updates,and how conan has been optimised in the past, why follower limits are necessary and why AI goes unresponsive you would kind of accept it for what it is.
it is bad compared to a singleplayer game, but a massively networked game with multiple attacks, path finding, following, agro decision making, the AI is likely as good as it is going to ever get.
“Improving” the AI would mean more behaviour trees assuming it is fully optimised, which, why wouldn’t it be? given its gone through subsequent upgrades in the past.
more networking checks, so more pressure on the AI on server performance, all of a sudden that first 10 seconds the AI doesn’t react becomes 30 seconds, it attacking where you were 2 seconds ago becomes 5 seconds, and it defeats the purpose entirely of it “attacking more intelligently” as it simply doesn’t play out in reality.
Sorry but they won’t improve their ai to a point that it can properly dodge etc.
But you can give bosses the necessary tools to deal with thralls