Hi , I’ve noticed this a few times in the past and it’s one of the reasons I’ve used virtually only bersekers for years.
I will safely say that 7 out of 10 Cimmerian berskers ( which is more or less the standard of a warrior in CE) will have a very decent percentage chance of increasing strength and vitality when leveling up ( usually 60-70% but can be 95 for one of the attributes) after “hiring” (bar/wheel).
This makes them relatively ( combined with their easy availability ) easy to level up ( although after the last nerf to their XP it got pretty boring )
I’ve noticed though that other thralls are often pretty bad at it, and often the relatively rare ones from the purges where for example I recently got a couple of Chieftain Varulf from tier 5 purges and each time he was just “untrainable”
So I tried singleplayer and spawned 100 of them through the admin panel - results ?
3 of them had 80% on vitality and 60% on strength , about 5 had 60% on both but more than half had decent percentages on strength but around 40% on vitality.
Northeimer berserkers had similar results.
From what I’ve noticed otherwise t4 exiles just love grit , dogs in turn agility which isn’t bad though , they make decent archers.
I understand that vitality isn’t everything and for PVE in 99% of situations 3,5k-4k HP is enough but even that is often a problem for many thralls when they have only a minimal chance of HP increase and elixir of rebirth should help and not be a necessity
Overall, this percentage system is rather bad and even food often doesn’t help when the chance is too low but I don’t understand why at least everyone doesn’t have the same chance - at the moment a lot of thralls are ¨below average¨ and it’s especially frustrating for the rarer ones from the purges where you just don’t get another one and hope for better
I believe that the mistake lies in the weapons existed for strength and agilty.
For a player right now, the best option is to build agility light armor, you’re simply invincible.
For a thrall what determines the dmg outcome is the weapons above all.
An agility thrall do not have momentum or hanumans gada. Even if you use these weapons to them they will not be as effective as strength thralls. And no even if they have btalls razor, or whatever is called, still they do not do the same dmg.
Yet i am surprised you see a nordeim Berserker as a bad thrall. I had one guy with hanumans gada on a lvl 10 purge, he was just lvl 10 and he was squishing npcs like bugs.
Then again a Turas went almost 6k hp.
I don’t believe that there are bad thralls anymore, all of them can find a spot in a pve battle.
If you really wish to have a safe and easy replacement army i would suggest you Lians, not Berserkers anymore. They lvl up faster and they are as effective as Berserkers, no matter what the hidden stats say. I report what i see and i can guarantee for Lians. They seem to be the new Teimos of exile lands. No they don’t go high in hp, but they don’t need it, all they need is a momentum or a hanumans gada and decent armor. Unleash these beasts and make the stygians cry.
Ps. The agility purge thralls that many believe are rare, they are not. They almost always existed to camps that we didn’t care to search. Northern jungle has 3 camps that spawns mainly named agility fighters and archers. The most Northern spawn is not exactly in the camp but the named fighter is fighting the locusts a bit to the left .
I’m not saying that a Northeimer berserker can’t be a good thrall
I’m just saying that with a lot of thralls, there is a much smaller chance - thanks to the way the percentage chances are set for an increased attribute - to get a thrall that “makes sense to train”, like are Varulf or Northheimer Zerker for me with a 40% chance of increasing vitality - and those I got almost 60 out of 100 in the test … really good ones (wirh chances on par with zerkers) i find only few .
If I want another uninteresting fighter, I’ll just get a berserker (good chance, guaranteed spawn)
If I want an archer, I’ll take Dunedan (good chance, guaranteed spawn)
But I wanted something else and Varulf looked interesting, but when I tested him, only 3 out of 100 thanks to how the FC set them have good chances, 10-15 more mediocre and he is only in the purges - so the chance of a good one is about the same as winning the lottery
so the question is why? why don’t all thralls have roughly the same chances for attributes? their mutual balancing is solved in other ways
There’s nothing worse than finding a super rare thrall in a purge with a slim chance and then finding out that it’s simply untrainable
Make it 99, 99% and you’re still in the equation, but i don’t speak for their bugged performance, but their stats.
If you remove the exiles, all the others are pretty decent… on stats . And yes, you can accept a lvl 10 purge with 20 cannibal brutes and Tugras, that’s not a lie, but you will certainly have casualties. The better the thralls you train the less casualties. Yet don’t forget how easy is to train Darfari thralls.
Go on single player @MarcosC and train fast 20 Sully (god mode kill 10 times the All Mera yah boss, log out, log in for faster respawn) and put them in a lvl 10 purge. Do the same with Darfari. You will witness that Darfari may have less casualties and that’s because of the wespons. Agility thralls need a weapon to equalize strength weapons.
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We agree!!!
Remove negative stats perks and rng from thralls, is something that i wish too after the sorcery update, it’s pointless to have them, it makes thrall leveling frustrating not fun. If devs wish for us to be frustrated as we play their game, then they succeed!
Come on @stelagel !
I was expecting something more complex, like you put these on cauldrons, those with bows, that others you set their range to x while those will take the heat on the frontline, after building in such and such way! And you use this food, that potion, etc! The kind of stuff you do!
Not just “use many”!
I was baiting you for a long technical answer born out of experience.
Didn’t work. Use 20 Sullys, that’s what I got!
The biggest issue with thralls’ attributes is what its always been. Outside of Vitality. Their attributes almost useless.
Since we’re talking about the Cimmerian Berserker here. They have a 2.26x melee damage modifier (hidden from in game view unless you use dev commands or refer to the wiki). That means a 100 damage weapon in their hands will do 226 damage. At zero Strength or Agility.
Is strength or agility useless? Well… no. Not utterly. For each point they get a 0.4% damage increase. At default the Berserker has 15 STR to start and will do an extra 6% damage. The problem is their damage increases are almost negligible.
The damage bonus that you don’t see is equal to about 315 STR. Getting an extra 30-50 strength from good growth and the best perks doesn’t sound so great does it? Especially when those growth chances and perks can skew the vitality enough to make for a 500-1000 health difference.
Now there’s a caveat here. Thralls only need as much health to survive. That sounds like a painfully obvious statement. But it isn’t. If you can fight the hardest encounter in the game and your thrall has a 1000 health leftover. Well you have around 500-800 health more than you need. Which is about 7-8pts of damage (depending on armor pen and other factors) per hit they could have done to the encounter. Which can add up over time.
The tricky part is knowing how much health your thrall needs. For many its best to err on the side of more, and more does let you take on more things in succession. And with buggy AI’s or whatnot, this number is also incredibly hard to predict.
Things also get muddier when you decent to ‘tank’ for your thrall and turn off their Irritate ability. Allowing them to have more focus on damage than a thrall who is ‘taunting’ the NPC for you.
Xevyr has a whole thread on this topic, with far more numbers and formulas:
At the end of the day you need to gage what you need and don’t fret over a few points going this way or that way. You want the best thrall, not the best attributes on the thrall. Getting both is great, but doesn’t affect outcomes that much.
I also do not recommend giving agility weapons to thralls for melee purposes. The mace and two-handed sword are still the most consistent weapons and that consistency will ensure they do enough damage to survive over a potential hit that might do a few extra points of damage due to agility being higher for whatever reason. Unless of course you’re using one of the agility two-handed swords, then by all means.
What Funcom needs to do. And its a bit of work (not hard, just tedious) is remove all the NPC templates when a thrall is tamed. These templates are what give the NPC their stats when they fight you. Its why the Cimmerians in the Mounds of the Dead hit so hard. They have star metal weapons, but since NPCs have 0 attributes in the wild, they use templates (tribe, tier, and sometimes more) to increase their abilities.
Unfortunately these templates remain on tamed thalls, and end up as hidden modifiers. When they introduced the thrall attribute and level system, they expanded (erroneously) on the templates to give them different stats based on the attributes.
Not every thrall gets the same health per vitality, same damage per strength/agility, or the same armor per grit. Its also not listed in the stat info page about that. You can somewhat get the information by using some math (such as bonus health divided by total vitality or max damage bonus divided by attribute with no buffs on) but its not as simple as looking.
If they removed these NPC templates, and instead replaced them with a sort of tamed template, that gave the same bonuses per attribute point across the board, then we could at a glance see if a thrall is ‘good’ or not without using admin commands or wiki articles.
Then what could make a thrall better than another is another table that determines their growth. So weaker thralls would have lower stat growths than stronger ones.
A Thrall with 50 Strength should do more damage than one with 15. But that isn’t always the case now. But it could be. And it SHOULD be. But this requires a developer to make the new template, make sure it applies on a tamed thrall, and then make the changes in the stat growth side of things for each thrall.
Since they are not removing the old templates and only not using them on tamed thralls, it should not cause issues for the difficulty of thralls in the wild. Which the main reason this system even still exists.
They should normalize the whole thing. It’s absurd that we have to check tables outside of the game and do math on top if it to figure out how a thrall might perform. And I say might because now they are kind of Alzheimic…
Adding to that, they should make most factions viable. I don’t want them equal, but I like having a diverse base.
As noted above, the Hidden Modifiers are as, if not more, impactful than the actual stats on the Thrall. Followed quickly by Health/Vigor as opposed to the raw Vigor score itself.
Also, some purge thralls haven’t been updated in a long time and it shows.
Named Fighters with less than a 1.0 melee modifier?
Please, that’s absurd.
Why are thralls doomed to suck?
Spotty update work on one end.
If one wants to look for conspiracy, then to drive “engagement” up by incentivizing grind grind and regrind.
If every thrall comes out at least ok, then where is the lure of doing the same slave raid dozens of times?
Funcom never Will make Thralls AI work like the npcs from assassina Creed or GTA or Ark or dragons dogma the Thralls in Conan Will be always BRAINLESS and the level system IS a trash WITH random status and sometimes negative perks they shall rework It and make Thrall system like Any others games wheres It really work.
well in my gaming beginnings it was a common thing , written notes , chest combinations in Gothic II etc …
it’s true that I don’t have to do it much anymore, but for example with Medival Dynasty I sometimes use a calculator
I agree, but at least some can be found
the problem is that some thralls just don’t have updated stats for years
and as I mentioned in my opening post , the important problem is the percentage chance setting which is pure chaos and makes a lot of thralls have little to no chance of being useful at the moment
it was mentioned here that everyone needs to set a safe HP threshold for thrall from which it’s worth taking it somewhere ( purges , dugeons , bosses )
For me it’s 4k and I know it can go almost anywhere.
I have one at 7.5 but the trade off is I can’t take him anywhere. I’m not built for thralls at the moment, but he almost died to a Dalinsia when I was busy with the mob.
Honestly my purge base is Cormags, Sonjas, Anyas, and Berserkers and they’re fine.
Growth Points = Total number of attribute “Growth Points” to be distributed
Growth Ratio = Percent value of attribute growth awarded per Growth Point (0.05 = +5%)
Weight = Weighted probability of growth points being awarded to specific attribute
Base Growth Rate = Percent value of minimum growth per attribute (0.4 = 40%)
I do not know what Base Growth Rate 2 is used for, and neither does Xevyr, who created the spreadsheet for me. It may not be used at all.
For what is worth, not all the Berserkers are the same, not all of them are equally good on fights and yes i speak for their battle AI and luck so far is our only hope. In the past i had Berserkers who where OMG and Berserkers that were pure lazy dogs.
Now in this chapter they are all lazy dogs , but it’s not their fault this time. All the thralls are good for emotes and cauldrons in this chapter. (humoring a bit)
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I’m not built for thralls at the moment, but he almost died to a Dalinsia when I was busy with the mob.