Conan Exiles – 15 Jun 23
Developer Letter - Combat changes during the Age of War - Conan Exiles
Hello everyone! My name is Dennis Douthett, and I’m the Lead Designer for Conan Exiles. I’ve spent a lot of my time as Lead Designer collaborating with the community on Discord, showing off new content on Twitch and YouTube, but this is the first...
It is true that nobody outright asked us to increase the stamina cost of attacks,
Never known no one asking for something to stop funcom from putting it in game. Or to take it back out when we hate it.
To address this, our first order of business for the Age of War was to remove the system that made combat feel inconsistent and buggy.
For whom? How?
Our goal was clear: to create brief moments in time where you were starved of stamina. In order to take your stamina away, we also he to give a lot more back. So, the two major changes you will see in Chapter 1 are that attacks are much more expensive, but stamina comes back extremely quickly.
And as such the change cancels it’s self out.
After you’ve mopped the floor with your enemies, you get a kick of satisfaction from the relief that the challenge has been overcome!
Challenge 
Most of the time it feels like I’m swatting flies with a shot gun. I’m sure people in chat may he read my rants about how super soft the game is, how easy it was do things at a low level with tin weapons and cardboard armor, that I never aught to he been able to do.
People know my opinion of what a super soft warm and fuzzy game this has become. It’s starConan valley now. I expect to see purple unicorns running by and song birds to land on my shoulders at any time.
I’m just really really hoping this super soft PG version of Conan isn’t what goes live.
When exploring the world, it felt like there was little reason to clear a point of interest after you had explored it once. The rewards for the effort you put into clearing the camp were not worth the time and cost to do so. Once we obtained legendary items, our desire to explore and repeat content went down dramatically. When adventuring, some enemies posed little threat and had very high health pools, which led to boring encounters with no contrast in the action.
Sounds like a YOU thing to me.
We want you to feel like a warrior capable of chopping off heads and limbs as enemies attack you. When fighting a few enemies, you should he to use some skill to dodge, block, or otherwise evade attacks and wee in your offensive. For difficult encounters you should he to plan your approach. Ideally you should never walk up to a monster and stand, unmoving, swinging your weapon into it for five minutes to defeat it. We needed to reduce the slog and ramp up the action!
Felt that way before, or at least that is how I played. But then that just begs the question why did you make this update just that?
I’m sorry but maybe it’s just the test server settings. But ths build is super soft, boringly easy.
So, we made the following changes: A new weapon balance scheme that allows us to increase interest and value when looting.
Do tell?
All this said, we are aware that the breadth of these changes has some people worried
So far I he no issues except the warm and fuzzy feel of a PG extra soft version of Conan exiles. My biggest fear is the massive player let down of this age’s sad lacking in content. The age of sorcery dropped enough content on us we about drown in it. And with that you set up expectations. Not only is the age of war going to be a big disappointment in that, it also removes a lot of the content added in the age of sorcery.
This may mean additional changes to the cost of certain actions, the balance of certain perks, or items, but it will not mean another major rework!
Which should be done on test before it goes live. But if this version goes live, I expect a forum explosion like we hen’t seen since the server mergers.