Ah mustve seen pet and jumped on.
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I completely disagree, @Xevyr .
We both know AI won’t be any better.
So, it was a very bad idea. High HP was what made them survive all the time the game decides to act up.
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Yet I haven’t seen ANY improvement so far. Have you?
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Dumb was nerfing it.
People have been losing thralls like crazy. Chest thumpers don’t complain, but it’s all over the internet and ingame, which didn’t surprise me at all.
I’m watching and listening to what people say.
I haven’t seen anyone praising your imaginary improved AI so far.
Btw, even on SP mode, at least on the ps5, the AI was still pretty shabby on AoS.
This is rich. Now you even speak by those who complain about losing thralls, not at the beginning, but now.
Dude, thralls are there to help people with poor fighting skills, not good fighters that don’t even need them
All the arguments about how good was nerfing thralls HP are a big load of you know what. But I won’t have this discussion again.
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That’s the reality we have. People don’t play in the future. They play now, with all the problems that also show in single player mode.
Why do you think a good player with much less hp than a weak thrall makes for a much better companion? Because thralls are dumb and the game acts up.
But that’s what we have.
It was the way that worked. Your hypothetical improvements are just wishful thinking. I’ll believe it when I see it.
Sure, it would be much better to have smart, fast thralls than damage sponges. But we won’t get them. So, it’s better having them with a high hp pool.
Or we can keep dreaming about improvements while losing thralls due to all sorts of crazy stuff.
Yeah, their ability to nerf stuff to oblivion is very much praised by the players. I see them applauding every single day. 
I don’t know what the other side of the discussion was, but I just wanna point out that this is an oversimplification. Followers have more uses than just “helping people with poor fighting skills”.
What I’m really sad about is that Funcom seems to be determined to turn CE into Pokemon again. I’m glad that they’re making the thrall conversion process shorter, but this seems excessive at the first glance.
But when you take this change together with making legendaries unrepairable – which means a lot of people will prefer to put their legendaries on their thralls – the design vision starts looking a bit clearer.
You used to put thralls on the wheel and go to sleep. Your thralls were unlikely to die, so you had to spend less time playing to have a good thrall team. Usually a good RHTS would last the whole game. Now, if you’re lucky it might, especially if you buff him with the elixir of rebirth until you get the perks you want. More time playing. I had to sacrifice Sepermeru several times to get the result I wanted.
It was rare losing a thrall. You didn’t have to baby sit them. You did your stuff, they did their job, mostly without supervision.
Now you have to replace thralls more frequently, something that will happen more often in the next age, since fast ttks will exacerbate all the problems that lead to their death. Adding to that, now they’ll lose your legendaries, because that’s where they’ll end. More time grinding, more time playing.
Good numbers to show.
If people haven’t understood the endgame of all of these changes by now, they are clueless. All these changes are aimed to make you spend more time playing. The reason is obvious. It’s not about fun. It’s about numbers. Fun is what they give you to get them, but numbers come first. Welcome to modern gaming.
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RHTSs are more or less obsolete as of AoW. Berserkers going back on top. They may have less health, but melee damage multipliers are going way up. Expect your Berserkers to be doing double current damage. The lower health won’t matter if they are killing enemies twice as fast.
Even the RHTSs’ damage is actually going up too, the only reason they are becoming obsolete is because every other thrall’s damage buff is outpacing them.
(Especially the coming glass nuclear cannons.)
That’s a big IF.
I laughed my pants out while my thrall was furiously attacking thin air while I had to kill the Commander in the UC just a few hours ago.
Glady I had lured the skeletons first and killed them.
Double the damage is the dmg they used to do, give or take. But their low hp is what kills them, not the dmg output, especially if they miss.
I don’t want to be pessimistic, but I don’t have high hopes about them doubling the dmg multiplier to about the same it used to be. It won’t do much if they get stuck, undecided, miss the target etc. Even with their old hp pool, on several fights they could be easily left on their last legs if something went wrong. As we know, that’s not a rare scenario. It’s not something that only happens on overloaded servers either. It happens on SP mode too. Often.
I like hard games, much harder than Conan, but it’s the type of difficulty that matters. When I get bummed about thralls being nerfed it’s because a type of difficulty that I don’t like is added.
These days, most of the times I don’t even take thralls with me any longer. They are a burden, not a help as I don’t like losing them. A manageable calculated risk is acceptable and makes for agreeable play. The risk of losing thralls currently is all but that. You never know when they will act stupid. That’s what kills them, not the difficulty of whatever they are facing that is as stupid as they are. It can go both ways. You never know which will be. Having a high hp used to protect them from such blunders. Was it ideal? Hell no. But at least it was a solution. The downside was people feeling like sidekicks, but that was always on them. You had the thrall you chosen.
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I’d love to call you cynical and say you’re wrong. I’d love to, but I can’t, because I’m just as cynical myself. Your explanation fits like a glove and it answers my question about why they did a U-turn and doubled down on the RNG aspects of the game even harder than before.
It brings to mind a discussion from a different thread:
Again, it all makes much more sense if you look at it as some kind of KPI-driven initiative designed to drive some numbers up.
Well, now that I have my answers, I find them thoroughly depressing 
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I think this change is great. With all the nice nerfs to thralls and the new purges we’re going to see more of our thralls die. It only makes sense to be able to rebuild your army faster after a purge/siege has put you in your place.
I personally love to orchestrate fights between my thralls and camps. I usually build as close as possible to an enemy capital and lure all those enemies into my thralls just to see limbs fly. Lower thrall converting time means more fun.
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Oh, and thralls dying is a good thing for you? Well, if that’s the case be prepared for a boatload of fun, @GodlyVoice !
I think it’s just repetitive, but I captured, broke, selected, leveled and geared up hundreds of them. It doesn’t get me all enthusiastic knowing I’ll have to do so much more of that. That’s pvp after a raid. Thralls are just tools. Pve, not so much. At least how I like to play pve.
For me the game has phases. Making a team is that. A phase. Replacing the poor sod that got killed on occasion is fun. Replacing too much of them is boring.
But each to his own. If you like it, you like it. At least you know what will likely happen and embrace it. Fine by me. 
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I did some testing with T4 darfari fighter named Thugra and got some interesting results. The point I’m going to making is that I think the fight between well-trained and war party is over for thralls.
Character set up: 20 points in authority with the out of combat regen and well-trained(+80% damage, +20 to all stats). Skelos Cultist Master armor (+50% follower damage and other stuff)
Thrall set up: Epic Slaver heavy armor (+25% strength), Momentum w/ master fitting (90 damage) and a few stacks of basic gruel.
Now individual thrall health may be lower but the perks make the difference. Now I got lucky and got 2 +15 vitality perks, but with the potion of rebirth and a lot of sacrificed someone could get all 3. So my thrall was sitting at 4.5k hp, does not seem that high. However, he was dropping UC skeleton bosses in 8 hits or less. The only reason it took him a minute to kill the red dragon is because she has a lot of knocks, but he lost about 10% hp through the fight.
I then ran this guy through warmakers and guess what I did? I put him on the arena champ, and he won. Now the arena champ still does massive damage and he was at about 20% health left, and I didnt interfere to block or anything. Next I put him on the 24.5k hp warmaker end boss and that boss could barely make it to the third transformation and thugra barely lost 15% health.
In conclusion: I think thralls are still fine 1 on 1 and well-trained seems like a must have for me now for the extra health and heavily multiplying damage. However, thralls are now weak to stunlock like all npcs and will just sit there getting hit if swarmed with 5+ enemies at once. So I can see the concern with low health if you plan on never helping and sending them into swarms of enemies. Also, there is a much larger curve for thrall effectiveness meaning if you dont gear them then they are guaranteed to die.
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Seems incredible, @forkyeah .
That thrall is medium tier. The AC should have eaten him alive.
I wonder if I’m beeing too pessimistic or you were incredibly lucky.
Btw, I detest authority builds. I only do them for war party to take two gorgeous ladies with me. Other than that, I don’t even consider using them.
Could you test a zerker on the wine cellar? Don’t baby sit him, but don’t just abandon the fellow. Buff him however you want, but don’t use authority. Make yourself a proper fighter. Could you?
And, as always, thank you.
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Well, I think I’m ok that if you don’t use authority, your thralls will be subpar. Same goes for strength, or agility or vitality and kind of grit now.
edit: I tested an authority build dalinsia last night ( hope thats close enough to a zerker) in the wine cellar and she was fine until she got swarmed and stunlocked during the Thag fight. The swarm only has 370 hp each now, I cleared them easily with a katana. The minibosses hit WAY harder than thag and she ended each fight at about 70% health.
edit2: there also were some points where she couldnt path right to a weak enemy so I chopped them so we could move on.
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Having to use authority to make thralls good is poor design… but if a medium tier thrall survived the arena champion, I wonder if a top tier thrall won’t make it without a authority build. If you could test it (fight along with the thrall if needed) in one or two dungeons, I would be very thankful, @forkyeah .