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.