Yes sir…thralls. One’s that you newly clobbered to take to the wheel of persuasion…lol.
It would also be nice to be able to have a follower mount with you. If the horses didn’t count as a follower and you could have a fighter or archer following, it would be more realistic to have them mount instead of keep up on foot. Having them able to do combat in the saddle would be a bonus. Or perhaps even be able to pair them with a horse of their own.
So you need 5th perk for what? I put that steel on my thrall.
Stone I only farm at volcano. Not big area and I mostly make 10k stones within 10mins (I use the oil on the blackblood pick).
I dont need wood. I kill bearers 
Same with many stones… I get them from bearer packs.
Me too.
BUT my first things I do when building sth new: Place down a chest and a fridge. Put most resources in there You can pick up the chest and fridge again anyway…
I often do that while over-enc… No need to run while building 
I only play official PvE… So harvest rate at x1 I made 8 outposts which are over 8 floors with a roof, etc. All in T3.
Currently I farm 10k stones while refreshing my volcano base, to have enough harden bricks for my joisting arena.
Already have >20k harden bricks… But I think I need more.
I mean, sure. I can put all that in a chest and then keep running back and forth every time I need to queue up another 100 walls and I ran out of raw mats for them. Or I could carry all of that in my inventory with the 5th enc perk. I’ll let you guess which one is much, much nicer. There’s no need to make me hate building just because people can’t think of how to solve legitimate problems with that perk
Speaking of which, the endless crowd of people hating on the 5th enc perk has only ever managed to give me one problem:
I have serious doubts about just how massive that impact is. I’ll go down the list of my doubts first and I would welcome feedback from anyone who is well-versed in PVP (paging @CromAndBiscuits, @WhatMightHaveBeen and @LostInTim). After I’m done with those doubts, I’ll also try to present some solutions that don’t involve getting rid of the whole damn perk.
So first of all, can anyone explain it to me why someone would run away from a raid overburdened like that? Doesn’t that mean that you’re abandoning your base (and your clanmates) so that you can take your stash somewhere. Is your stash really worth more than your base?
Okay, fine, let’s say it is. Where exactly are you going to run? Anyone who catches you out in the open is going to have an eartly Christmas. On the other hand, if you have another base, that means that your clan has to protect more than one base during raid hours, all the time. And with the follower cap, it’s going to be even harder.
But let’s say you have a place to run to. You’re still overencumbered. Are you going to run away on foot? You’re gonna run out of stamina real fast and you’re gonna get caught and killed. And people have horses now and there’s the new movement, so it’s not even the question of “you underestimate how easy it is to run away”. If it is, then you’re either doing something wrong, or Funcom really failed to do what they intended, in a truly spectacular fashion.
But what about teleporting? And now we come to the real crux of the problem, the one that actually needs a solution. And the solution – if the majority of PVP players believe it’s really needed – is actually fairly simple: make it impossible to teleport while overencumbered during raid hours. If you’re overencumbered during raid hours, interacting with the map room or drinking Midnight Potion will have no effect. Problem solved.
So can someone please explain why we need to remove the whole perk?
My guess is the answer is really “cuz its not realistic” ignoring that irl carrying as few as 10 gold bars would be VERY difficult
Edit: 10 gold bars as depicted would weigh 250 lbs…
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I dont hate the perk. Would I be angry if it stays? No. Would I be angry if it gets removed? Also no
Many PvP have several bases… Often hidden.
You need someone to draw attention away from you, to secure your loot normal or with obo.
Also its for both ways. You can steal other things faster
As I wrote… I couldnt care less about the perk. But Alex wasnt a fan of it… And well, he is the lead designer
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Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply you hated it with a passion. It’s just that during this relatively short time that I’ve become a daily forum poster, I’ve seen so many people ask for its removal and usually nobody bothers to give any reasons.
And that made it so much worse. So many people have jumped on the “remove 5th enc perk” bandwagon just because Alex said he doesn’t like it. Never mind that he didn’t say why or what he intends to do about it.
To be fair, I don’t blame Alex because other people turned his short statement into an “appeal to authority” fallacy. I just wish people would provide actual arguments more often 
Well as I wrote in another post, if it gets removed, FC hopefully gives sth good in return. And I dont want to encourage it, but I think FC or Alex already made decisions (or started to think about some), when he said that in stream.
The same with black-ice buildings… There will be changes. Regardless if I or you or we like them in general.
Like the dmg nerf of the Quivering arrows…
Dont confuse the goldbars from CE with real ones. Or do you need only 3 gold ore to make 1 goldbar in RL?
And only 5 coins out of a bar? 
I, too, love reasonable arguments and perspectives that go beyond: this is bad because of x, nerf it, which is the base argument for a large swathe of comments.
I also appreciate the fact that you do provide ideas/workarounds that make sense or is at least sensible in approach or as a starting point for more quality conversation. Thank you.
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I doubt it’s realism. I suspect that the objection to the Momentum perk is strictly in terms of PvP. Raiders setup a small base nearby with cauldrons, they go in a full offensive spec, blow the place apart and kill everyone. Then respec, or just designate a few members of their clan as “looters”, come in and grab everything that’s worth anything in a few minutes.
Eliminate that perk, and it would force raiders to either be more selective about what they loot, or it means they have to make multiple trips to haul out the goods, and that makes for more opportunities for defenders to get in their way.
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Everyone loves an Ark example, right?
In the beginning, metal runs became crazy big once someone figured out that adding a ramp to a Quetz (big flying bird) platform saddle would let you carry an Anky (metal gathering animal) with unlimited weight. This became such a staple of metal runs that when they went to nerf it they realized to reflect the entire weight of the Anky would be to incite revolution, so they made it like 10% of the weight. Did this stop the metal runs? No, since metal runs are like 90% of what you do in end game Ark (the other 10% is using that metal to make bullets), someone soon figured out that a person sitting on a chair had no weight, so even though they became a 3 man job you could still carry back untold amounts of metal. Once that was nerfed along came body bags, etc.
The point is that even if they nerf the 5th perk it won’t solve anything. Someone will figure out a way to carry everything, and it will most likely be a glitch so that honorable players would end up being the only ones hurt by the change (remember splitting stacks on thralls?).
Now while pretty much every raid does include someone in an encumbrance spec, any raider worth their salt knows that you don’t carry a bunch of pre-made explosive jars into a raid, but rather the dragonpowder, tar, and ceramic jars needed to craft them. It cuts down on weight, slot spaces, and allows you to craft them as needed so you don’t have to manually refill your hot wheel.
So, even if you got rid of the 5th perk it wouldn’t stop the problem, it’s like pushing down a bubble under plastic wrap, another one will take its place. As long as there are survival games that require you to carry a ton of stuff, someone will figure out how to do it.
Thank you! This is why I prefer to tag experienced PVP players, at the risk of annoying them, because I don’t know these things.
I have an idea that would solve this, so I would appreciate your opinion on it, but I’ll get to it at the end of my reply.
It’s true that you either need it or you don’t. As a PVE-C player, I don’t see a huge problem with that. I have a “farming spec” that includes things like 30 vit, 30 sur and effective 50 enc, and a “combat spec” that includes things like effective 40 str and effective 40 vit. When I need to do some resource farming or building, I chug the Potion of Bestial Memory and respec correspondingly. When I’m done with that, I chug another potion and respec into my combat spec.
This is where I disagree with you completely. One of my favorite quotes about game design is Sid Meyer’s definition video games: “A [good] game is a series of interesting choices.”
To me, the 5th perk is essentially about a tradeoff: do I spend my attribute points on this and have fewer to invest elsewhere? Sure, you can keep making that decision over and over, by quaffing a potion, but that’s severely constrained: the potion has to be brewed in a crafting station, it cannot be carried around and the process of changing your spec takes time.
Unfortunately, those aren’t practical enough. However, if there’s no good solution for PVP problems and if Funcom put some effort into making “pack mule followers” more practical, then I would have to shrug and adapt. I would probably still grumble and remember “the good old days” with nostalgia, but it wouldn’t make me hate my primary motivation to play the game
This is where we come to the solution I would like to propose. Both you and @Megaton238 have raised valid points about PVP impact of the 5th enc perk.
Let me say upfront that I see no way to completely solve those problems, even if the perk is removed. I can see no way to prevent a clan from carrying explosive jars to a spot near their target, setting up a staging area and executing their attack from there. Even if you remove the perk, you can still use “pack mule followers” to bring a significant amount of jars. As a matter of fact, I posit that any in-game mechanism that helps PVE players farm and carry materials will also help PVP players use this strategy.
That said, I do hope there is a solution that will mitigate these problems and get things to the middle ground people can (generally) agree on.
So let’s take it from the top: right now the perk allows the player to move at full speed while overencumbered. It also applies an undocumented stamina penalty. Does it help if, additionally, overencumbered players:
- cannot teleport during raid hours
- do not receive any benefits from their armor
- (optionally) have a multiplier to damage received from other players and followers
Would that be a good enough solution or is it still lacking?
I wasn’t trying to justify my farming as ‘the best’ or anything like that. This is just what I found works for me.
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I typically am enc spec when farming cities, not so much because of the weight, but the item limit. I go for steel, but pick up virtually everything. My thrall can’t carry it all. Slots are too limited and if I brought a bearer, I think farming would slow down as the bearer doesn’t do the same as a snowhunter ripping through the enemy thralls. Plus, as lame as this sounds, I do save on some time in that while I am going around picking up loot, snowhunter is killing stuff off to the side. (Once again, lame to be a side kick, however, its the fastest/most efficient means of ripping up a city for all the loot that I have found.)
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Stone I typically farm right outside my base (pillars by pirate bay) and do a round trip down the beach, over the top of the hill south, and back around (with around the main river). I can get around 30-40k in probably about 25-30 minutes or so. I don’t have to deal with travel/map rooms, usually I farm while I watch something on my other monitor or something. (for idea on the scale that I and my friend build, we typically have around 15k-20k harden bricks at hand/in process at any given time (we have gone through a supply like that countless times). We build big/a lot.
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Wood is farmed far less then stone and other things. Only really when needing to subsidize wood gotten from killing thralls.
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I have a chest and fridge down immediately on a new building also. Doesn’t change the fact that the walk back to it constantly for resources is a pain in the ■■■ and adds huge amounts of time just carting things around. Maybe this purpose is lost in not knowing the scale that we build at, but even in a small base, going back and forth is obnoxious, its far easier to just keep things on me until I am done building, then I off load my entire inventory out into a designated chest and I switch specs and grab all the gear for that spec out of its box and move on. I found this to be far more efficient then trying to do everything in just one build, or trying to keep a ‘consistent’ inventory at any given time.
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I disagree. Running while building is important. At least in the fact that I get things done faster. (and moving around over-encumbered is really annoying to me). But even more important then running us climbing. I still have the ability to climb with the 5th enc perk. I can’t speak for others, but I couldn’t build in this game without climbing. I build organic/flexible shape buildings that are tucked up under cliff walls, along cliff walls, jutting out from the top of cliffs, winding around pillars, etc, etc… I have to be able to climb.
Maybe I am just going about things inefficiently, however, I found this to be the fastest ways of tackling things in the game with how I play. For farming cities, I could probably do without. I am just used to the method. For farming stone, I would have to make smaller trips and many more. For building, it would just probably slow me down significantly. I kind of zone thinking about building shape and how I’ll connect things and if I was interrupted by supply box runs, I wouldn’t get anything done.
(I played PvE official for most my time in game also. Just recently swapped to a private server simply because I didn’t like the Thrall limit idea. We hardly do outposts. Typically a small building with a maproom and supplies at most. However, our main base consists of many themed buildings (gate house, outer wall, multiple bridges that span water/pillars, boats, lighthouses, area, castles, and more). Building all that would have never happened without the 5th enc perk.
Well if realism is the argument, we gotta go there. And lets overlook where those gold bars are stored on a nude body. The picture is of a 400 Troy ounce bar, and we have no idea how big a gold ore is, so you have to go with the depiction.
But thats the point. Realism is NOT an argument, because none of this even passes the sniff test. Lore, story and game implementation matter but realism is waaaay down the list.
Well thats an even weaker argument, cuz that just boils down to “I want less difficulty to do my thing, so nerf the other guy”. I intentionally didnt go there as its not a very classy reason.
That’s fair. It’s true that the encumbrance system and the perks system could be redesigned to offer choices that are more interesting than what we have right now. I believe that we do agree for the most part, except on whether the downside of choosing the max encumbrance build is or isn’t meaningful.
And I think that this disagreement comes from a different set of expectations. I realize what I’m about to say is harsh to the dev team and I do feel a bit bad about saying it, but this is my opinion on the quality of the end product and isn’t meant as a personal attack: I think that you’re holding Conan Exiles to an unrealistically high standard given the track record of the team’s game design decisions.
For whatever reason – and I personally believe it has less to do with the team’s competence and more to do with insufficient resources and tech limitations of the engine – the game design of Conan Exiles has been a continuous cycle of dumpster fires and firefighting operations.
Given that particular historical context, I have all but given up on hopes for a game with finely tuned balance and versatile mechanics that offer a depth of interesting choices and emergent gameplay. Instead, I’m looking at what can be adapted and tweaked to make things a little better than before without breaking new stuff, if possible.
I’m starting to think that the real problem here is not the encumbrance, but rather the foundation-wiping strategy. I’m not saying “hey, let’s make it impossible to do a foundation-wipe raid at all”, but is this how it should be done?
Take a look at trebuchets. Their existence in the game – and the way they have been tweaked recently – indicates that Funcom is thinking along the lines of siege warfare being a bit more than just “hey, let’s carry a bunch of jars and light them on fire”.
I wonder if Funcom could buff the foundation health so that it’s not feasible to foundation-wipe with carried explosives (while still making them perfectly usable for chests, vaults, doors, etc) and then introduce a new siege mechanism specifically for dealing with foundations? Something like explosive ballistae or some sorcery stuff, but the point is that it has to be built on the spot and it has to be defended and it’s vulnerable, etc.
Then again, people would probably end up building foundation walls instead of normal walls, and then we’re falling into another balancing rabbit hole… I’m too tired right now to think this through, but you get my drift. Maybe you could improve this idea or come up with a better one and we could then submit it to the suggestion forum where it would generate further discussion until nobody had anything more to say and it wound up being auto-closed and forgotten… wait, that wasn’t supposed to come out like that
All jokes aside, if you have the time and energy to indulge in some armchair game design, I would love to hear some ideas on this topic, even if they end up being another ignored suggestion
I believe you and I hope you also believe that I don’t want PVP to be unbalanced because I like to build
Although I do tend to see it less as legos and more like one of those cool animations from Civilization games when your civilization finished a World Wonder
There are few things that I dare to claim with absolute certainty, but this I’m prepared to assert with full confidence: no, they won’t. They’re not going to have one perk with different logic for different servers.
I think what they might end up doing is to get rid of the perk and make us use “pack mule followers”. I just wish they would also:
- Make followers immune to lava and fall damage.
- Give us a follower with at least 50, hopefully 100 slots. Or a way to give existing followers more slots.
That way people like me can keep one of those annoying lobotomized ambulatory chests on retainer while we farm and build, and people like you can slaughter them to prevent foundation wipe raids
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I think there’s more nuance there than you gave them credit for. There are many factors at play and they combine in complicated ways. At some point, the ease of executing a foundation-wipe raid crosses a certain threshold and produces an imbalance that’s detrimental to gameplay.
I think that it’s totally fine that the attackers can set up a staging area for their siege. But having a character that can carry all the necessary construction materials and a buttload of explosive jars and set the whole staging area in one fell swoop? That’s a bit too much, as is the fact that you can foundation-wipe an entire base just with explosive jars. Contrast that with the trebuchet, which has been adjusted to conform somewhat closer to what siege warfare ought to be.
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But does that happen? Is enc 5 the dominant build that cause all to quake? I dont think so.
You can say that but I’d say its a valid deduction based on whats been said. “Running away” is perfectly valid as a pvp strat. Ive read in multiple threads people talk as if its somehow not playing the game correctly. People should have an option to retreat. If that means loading up and taking off while someone gives cover, perhaps the attacker needs to be a bit more clever. All I see is “but he can run away!”
Honestly, it’s not a big deal in PVE. I don’t know anyone who would rather let their bearer tank a boss, as opposed to a fighter that hits hard. All followers have a crapton of health now, so what you want for bosses is to shorten the fight.
I get what you’re saying about PVP, though, so I wouldn’t have any problem with this idea, even if it’s not very realistic to have a caravan rhino or a caravan elephant that never fights back.
Only the devs know for sure, but my feeling is that it would actually be easier to turn them into mounts. Except for the bearer thrall, of course, but those have the advantage of wearing armor, wielding weapons and maybe they could even have more inventory slots than any other pack mule follower.
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Making them 2-seaters would be lovely. Either take a thrall with you or another player. Of course then you have the issue that everyone has both a horse and a thrall following them around.
When you dismount maybe make the hourse ■■■■ off out of the way so you’re not pulling two entities after you and you call them again with a whistle or something like that.
Anyway for me currently I’ll only use a horse if all my bearers are dead and I’m going farming. Otherwise ole “Galavant” is just for decoradtion god bless her.
I would like to say that I think they are not a complete waste of an addition to the game although I can fully understand this point of view. They are well designed I feel.