Sharpening The Combat in Conan Exiles For The Age of War
The Age of Sorcery has ended, and now the Age of War has come to Conan Exiles. This new update will consist of three separate chapters, which each bring all new features, improvements, and content to the game.
Age of War Chapter One launches today, and together with brand-new systems for collecting treasures and making your own banners, we are also introducing significant changes to the balance of combat.
Changes To Stun and Stamina
Designers make games fun by placing challenges in your way. Challenges can be any type of gameplay that blocks your progress: a boss enemy with loot you want, or a long wall climb with few resting points along the way. The closer we can push you to a tipping point only for you to just barely overcome a challenge, the better the victory feels! You might also hear game designers call this concept “risk and reward” or “squeeze and release” – it’s in every game you play!
A few years ago, we gave NPCs brief immunities to stuns, because when enemies were attacked by multiple players, they would never get a chance to act, causing them to be stunlocked to death. This system was intended to give enemies a turn in combat.
We are taking away this “stun break” system because it made combat feel inconsistent. Instead, we want to introduce “squeeze and release” naturally, and predictably.
Enemies will no longer be allowed to defy the rules of being stunned. Most enemies you will fight in the update will be vulnerable to stunning, and only certain high difficulty enemies will be immune to them. To give enemies their turn in combat, you will be effectively stunned when you run out of stamina and cannot attack or dodge.
To achieve these natural turns in combat, we have rebalanced stamina. To make those short moments where you cannot act but an enemy can, we had to increase the stamina cost of attacks.
Don’t worry, it doesn’t mean you will never have stamina. You will now regenerate stamina extremely quickly.
Enemies, Weapons and Repairs
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 have to use some skill to dodge, block, or otherwise evade attacks and weave in your offensive. For difficult encounters, you should have to plan your approach.
To achieve this, we have made enemies deal heavier damage, so if they get an attack through, the danger is higher. At the same time, we have reduced the health of most enemies, something which should make fights quicker and more action packed.
In addition, we have made significant changes to weapons. Each time you upgrade your weapons, for example from stone to iron or iron to steel, there is a much more noticeable power gain. You can also find new items that are stronger than the ones you can craft! This introduces our new item type, which we call unique items. Unique items are similar to the ones you can already make but come with an additional power spike.
Legendary weapons now sit on top of the heap of power and are undisputedly more powerful than their epic and unique counterparts, but they have a new downside, because Legendary items can no longer be repaired.
Other items now lose maximum durability when being repaired and because items no longer last forever, there are new motivations for you to venture back into the world to acquire powerful items.
The changes in Age of War are aimed at making combat feel more consistent and more dynamic for everyone, and additional changes are coming in Chapter two and three. To name just a few – greatly improved loot, revamped purges and an all-new PvE siege where you attack an NPC stronghold.
Age of War Chapter One is available now.
Conan Exiles – Complete Edition
Funcom