You have completely broken PVE

So now the bosses aggro you and not your high health, high effort to obtain and train, hours of harvesting to equip thrall (I mean why should all that effort be rewarded with more attainable victories right):

  1. Hit boss with a high level weapon and 40 strength to take 0.1% of their health
  2. Get hit for 25% of your health no matter how good your armour and vit are
  3. Roll away, run away, consume heal potion
  4. Repeat the same thing for 30 minutes
  5. If you accidentally cross an invisible line 20 minutes in, watch the boss reset all its health (that represents hours of resource gathering in healing materials, weapon and armour durability- all wasted)
  6. Run out of healing stuff, die/flee, and lose easily 50+ hours worth of progress in a dungeon you can’t return to, or in consumed materials

Is this more challenging? YES. Is it more FUN? NO! It is pretty much the antithesis of fun. You’ve turned the whole game into a chore.

This game has like 50 bosses. Why should every single one take an hour of dodging and rolling to beat?

Thrall tanking wasn’t cheap. It wasn’t cheesing. And it was fun!

Now maybe, it was a little unbalanced that the thrall took ALL the aggro. Sure. Maybe you could make the boss randomly change targets every 5-15 seconds? Then you still have to be careful, dodge, and heal. And the AI appears more real, as it’s trying to fight off both its attackers.

Just trying to make the game harder and harder makes it more and more of a chore. You do realise people play and put harvesting effort in for the REWARD, which is the feeling of being able to confidently defeat a boss at the top level, right? Spending the whole fight running away from it is NOT REWARDING.

There’s a fine challenge in PVP. Every good game in the world is masterable SP- because mastering it feels good for players. Except this one now, where the game cannot be mastered, it is merely survived by nothing but a long and easily losable slog of farming, and then dodging and running away from the bosses in a long, slow, and samey attrition.

If the top reward I can hope for is running, dodging, and healing my way through a boss fight, what’s there to play for?

23 Likes

And before someone says “the boss fights are still winnable”

Yes of course they’re still winnable. My point is this change has made them way less FUN.

I am no longer a crucified weakling turned mighty barbarian taking on the boss with my brave, heavily armoured sidekick distracting it. I’m still a weakling, rolling and fleeing my way to a long-distant win, followed by a useless minion.

The amount of dodging, running and healing required actually feels MORE cheesy and LESS realistic than before. Yay I defeated the boss by rolling around on the floor for half an hour and eating 100 pork joints
 feels great, so realistic and heroic
 not!

14 Likes

They have mentioned in previous posts there is an issue with the tethering on bosses. They are looking into fixing it. This is not how they wanted it just a side effect other the number of things changed for the patch.

Trust me I spent over an hour on the Red Mother then she clipped into the stairs and vanished. I was done after that. The insta heal is a really pain. You gotta keep aggro or the whole battle is a waste.

1 Like

Yes. But besides the insta heal bug, my main point is they’ve made winning against bosses require a strategy that’s slow, repetitive, more unrealistic than before, and just feels really cowardly and unrewarding.

You now feel like way less of a hero, running away constantly, than when your well-invested thrall was tanking for you and you could jump in, still risking getting a painful hit.

The complete opposite of what they apparently intended.

5 Likes

I haven’t noticed this on PvE.
I used to carry a big bow & lots of dragon bone arrows and shoot an arrow to tell my thrall which one they should attack. Now I just point to attack and carry specialty ammo for healing etc.
NPC’s seem to attack the closest enemy now, so run away a bit? Also if you just climb a little they run away from you because they’ve been told about “cheesing”? Apparently that’s a thing.

2 Likes

“
 so run away a bit?”

Exactly. That’s the game now. Win a heroic victory by running away.

6 Likes

That’s debatable. I personally dislike thrall tanking a lot, the game becomes an AFK farmer like that. Your thrall is the hero who does everything, you just sit back and do nothing.

But I have to agree, the boss fights in this game are not well designed, they are “bullet sponges”, no real mechanics behind them. Since I come from AoC where most bosses (there are a few exceptions where they are basic “Tank and Spank” stuff as well) have interesting mechanics that require you to do certain things, it would be nice to see a similar theme in Conan Exiles. Now, I know there are a few bosses that have mechanics, like the wine cellar boss or the Abyssal Remnant but even those pretty much require thrall tanking but at least they have hints of special techniques that could lead to more interesting boss fight mechanics.

I really wish, instead of adding more land mass or whatever they are planning to do, they would revamp the bosses a little bit, just to make them more interesting to fight since “tank and spank” or “bullet sponges” are not fun to fight, especially if you try to do it without “cheesing” it (like standing ontop of something to break the AI).

3 Likes

Disagree. Could the new system use some work where there is a threat level of some sort? Sure, I think that’d be cool. But “broken”? Nah. People have been leaving feedback by the hundreds for 6 months that they didn’t want to overshadowed by their Followers. This change, among others in the future, are well welcomed.

This also needs to be moved to Suggestions, rather than “bugs.” Please use the correct category when leaving feedback.

3 Likes

It’s more like that than ever before now. Because of the janky thrall AI, the thrall struggles to hit the boss while it’s chasing you.

You hit the boss just once, it chases you, you’re forced to keep running because of how strong the hits are / how weak armour is. Now the thrall is running after it, still doing most of the damage, but slower.

The meta / incentive is now literally to do nothing while your thrall kills the boss for you. That is now the fastest and safest way to win a boss fight. You hitting the boss at all makes the fight slower and way riskier.

6 Likes

Leave the thrall at home? And see my comment under yours that explains why the afk thrall-solo approach is now more incentivised than ever.

Also this section is titled ‘Updates and bugs’, not ‘bugs’. This post is referencing the recent update.

4 Likes

For the past months I rarely played with a thrall because I run a high strenght and vitality built with a two handed sword. I can tank a lot (only one or two bosses are impossible to tank alone) and whenever I get low I can run away a bit due to the cripple stacking on the boss and eat some food (Feast of Derketo) and a herbal tea which combined bring my health up to max in a few seconds.
The damage is kinda ok-ish as well due to not being interrupted a lot if I use heavy attacks.

But I guess without such build it will be a lot harder to kill the bosses. Still though, I would rather have more fight mechanics for the bosses instead of the old thrall tanking system back.

No. How about you don’t fight bosses solo? I suppose that’s not fair right? Neither is recommending people play the game without Followers, a core feature of the game. Hundreds of people have and continue to leave feedback about the Follower system, they are all allowed to voice their opinion and not be immediately dismissed.

It’s for reporting bugs related to the update. Not for update feedback.

4 Likes

Whether you like it or not, the pve portion of the game is currently balanced around thralls tanking and not the players. Otherwise players would have the same health and damage potential as the thralls do. That is the problem. If you are going to remove the ability of having a thrall tank the bosses then the players need to have the same potential health and damage. The pvp and pve are not balanced the same way. I don’t do pvp and though funcom is trying to balance for pvp, they are ruining many aspects of the game that pure pve players enjoy. Either balance both or separate them but the changes that have been made to address pvp have really hurt the rest of the game. There may be ways of completing some of the boss fights still but you have to build purely for health and damage and even then you risk being killed in 4 or 5 hits by many bosses and it will take forever to kill them. It’s just not fun anymore.

9 Likes

You know you can use shields, right?
tank until your thrall draws aggro and there you go, no healing items, no dodge, just you and pressing one button.

Thrall cheesing is not fun either and its really a problem, BUT, there is something where we agree and is that bosses have a ridiculous amount of health. They shouldn’t, they are beyond a tolerable experience, i don’t mind the damage, is easy to avoid and keeps the game as a challenge (some bosses deal way more damage than they should though) but thralls should only be a companion, a helper, not the one who does everything for you to take the glory.

1 Like

People have been complaining about 6 months for missing gods, yet we dont hear anything about them


And I doubt Funcom did that on purpose. All these bugs related to AI rework are simple just BUGS.

Why do NPCs target a damn horse, which doesnt even fight back? Because thats what player wanted?

Why does a boss target me,instead of the one hitting them to death? Currently when I fight a worldboss, I just run in a circle, while my thrall kills it! Its way faster than before, because my thrall can now make combos without being attacked - again, thats what player wanted? Didnt “they” (whoever “they” are to begin with) wanted to get “rid” of thralls/being stronger than them?

People complain about OP horses at PvP - so where is there anything happening? You can even kill people outside of PvP-time with a damn horse.

This patch is a massive bugfest. Lets see, what Funcoms intensions really were, when they (hopefully) fixed the AI rework.

2 Likes

Hey there,

This is not a bug report, so we’re moving to General Discussions.

1 Like

I play pve on the ps4 console.

I too thought that the agro I took was horrible, until
I was travelling through the Unnamed City with my lvl 7 greater bear, we came across a 3 skull Red Dragon.

I was trying to sneak by it as I was only lvl 43, equiped with Flawless Relic Hunter armor (light). I hear my bear fighting the dragon, and knew he would die. I found that I could do a light combo with a two hander and then do a dodge. You do have to switch to a shield now and again, but I was able to do about 75% of the damage to the boss, I only needed 1 exotic cooked meat. The battle lasted less than 10 min.

I was on the edge of my seat the whole time, but it was a fun kill.

1 Like

I ate dinner yesterday while farming Unnamed City.

Just appraoch a boss, sent your thrall to attack, while you yourself climb up onto a perch among the ruins, eat dinner while Thrall easily solo-kills the boss, rinse and repeat.

And I play on a modded server with nerfed thralls, doing that on vanilla probably wouldn’t have taken long enough to eat in the meantime.
(And no, I did not even use healing arrows, just a lvl 15 Dalinsia with Epic Flawless STR armor and a 2h legendary hammer, so far from optimal setup)

It is even easier now then before, with the new stances and direct commands.

1 Like

It kinda looks/feels like, that as soon as an NPC/creature has something to aggro, it will not shift to sth else, as fast as before AI rework.

@Gnadolin as I wrote in several other threads: I did this often in UC (also while eating) since JULY 2019. Because of the worse % drop-chance, you are kinda forced to use a thrall there. Dont want to spend >10minutes at each boss and often dont even get sth.

I think since thrall-leveling in December, I made 8-10 UC runs
 I have over 1000 Fragment of Powers in my chests (also every legendary from UC >2 times each).

I really want to know your gear and attribute points, so that you can really tank sth in this game.