“Be the hero of your story, not your thralls”, that was the idea pitched by the developers during the original 3.0 dev stream. But all that’s happened is replace thralls, with zombies.
The authority tree does what it’s built to do – Make your followers stronger. And even gives you the nifty option to have two followers follow you, at the cost of all the bonuses they receive from authority; seems pretty fair doesn’t it? If you want to have 2x the meat shields, you end up having to choose to ‘nerf’ them a little bit to the base stats you levelled them with. Which isn’t a huge deal considering you can run around in Skelos Cult Master, and pop Hearty Feasts and Tears of Gullah to give them a WHOPPING 74% damage increase. (50% from armor + 12% from food + 12% from potion). All seems fine here, with the obvious exception of sabretooths that are being given a slight nerf in Age of Sorcery part 2.
The issue comes when you have all of the benefits of the final Authority perk (+20 to all stats) for your followers, and can run around with multiples of them, without the hinderance of the War Party perk – AND all of the bonuses from points in authority. Instead of 12-16k health Beastmaster Teimos’, we now have the fun new conundrum of not one, not two, but THREE fully buffed meat shields that have +20 to all stats, a 74% damage increase from buffs, and a whopping 22-26k health points – all while still having enough perk points to make sure you don’t fall over like a leaf in the wind, and can still hit for a decent amount of damage.
Zombies are obtained through sorcery, which from the way the developers spoke during the initial 3.0 livestream was supposed to have the give-and-take of making you stronger, while making you more fragile because you lose health and stamina from corruption while you’re utilizing the corrupted perks system. But there is no give-and-take with zombies, it’s all give and no glory. Let’s ignore the glaring issue that’s being resolved in AoS Part II with them currently being able to equip weapons and armor and focus on a phrase I heard during the AoS Part II livestream regarding the new sorcerer encounters they’re adding to the game: “The sorcerers themselves are fairly weak, as with sorcery their minions are supposed to be their big source of protection.” (Paraphrased)
Sorcerers minions are supposed to be the big danger when encountering them, that’s what I heard out of that statement; a give-and-take as it were. But player sorcerers don’t need to be corrupted to cosplay as the hit TV series ‘The Walking Dead’, and can utilize the beefiest followers we’ve ever seen to play the field and exacerbate the previous issue of a 1v2 against a powerful thrall and their owner, into a 1v4.
Even with adding a requirement to corrupt yourself in order to utilize zombies, there isn’t a huge downside to sorcery; not nearly as hefty as the developers insinuated. – Just take Steel Thewed, the 20 Grit perk, and corrupt yourself to split damage with your followers (The Flesh Bond perk in corrupted Authority). You can always survive seven hits from another player, and the reduced health pool makes healing even easier as you can use a singular Concentrated Aloe Potion to heal yourself to full health, and tick back up that four-hit threshold. The give-and-take there is the risk of your followers dying from taking too much of your damage; but that doesn’t really happen when your followers have more health than the Red Mother in the Unnamed City. And even if they DO die, there’s no waiting for some chance respawn, and waiting another 8-25 hours for another thrall to break and spending several hours levelling the thrall, crafting it a new set of armor, and giving it a weapon that can do decent damage – they’re instantly replaceable by knocking out a Relic Hunter Treasure Seeker, and waiting a short craft timer to instantly pop out another 24k hp zombie.
While the fixing of zombies of their ability to wear weapons and armor is a step in the right direction, I still think that zombies need significant reworks to their health values. It’s not such a drastic issue at the moment with the katana dash combo (Light > Light > Light > Ctrl Dash Attack) being able to circumvent the Steel Thewed perk (it hits multiple times in the dash, which still guarantees a 1-shot in most situations to the player, and takes out anywhere from 1-1.3k hp from a zombie), BUT that is being addressed in the same fashion the lance multi-hit was addressed in 3.0 and the supposed shambling dead remain meat pillars that’ll stand the test of time.
Don’t get me wrong, I think that the perk system contributes heavily to the usage of zombies, and know full-well that the zombies themselves aren’t the issue; but when there’s no consequence to running around with more undead followers than you’re allowed with any other type of follower, with absolutely zero draw back from the perk system like there is with thralls and pets; what’s the point to even using thralls or pets?
I think zombies should get the same treatment as any other follower, where you get 1 to follow you, 2 with the war party perk, and maybe change up the 20-point corrupted Authority perk to allow you to add another zombie to your roaming warband; because Age of Sorcery isn’t the age of you becoming the hero as it was advertised; it’s the Age of Zombies and like so many other issues in the game, I’m really hoping we don’t need to wait 1-2 years before seeing this issue addressed.
Survive, Build, and Dominate.
- Valaris Steps-on-Toes
