YMMV / Conan Exiles

• Best Known for the Fanservice: The game really made headlines when the option to increase the size of the male characters' penises was available in Early Access.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Giant snakes. As enemies they are quite nightmarish. Every attack inflicts poison and their attacking animator is quickly snapping their fangs at any threat in range. With only a high ranking trait, thus requiring a lot of points in a trait you might not prefer, to make yourself immune to poison and having an attack that is impossible to dodge while still being able to attack these things are best avoided. Unless you fight them in a purge, in which case you can expect quite a gruesome fight. You can use a shield against them to block their attacks, as normal snakes have a very visible tell that they're about to attack, but even that can have issues.
  • Human enemies wielding spears or one-handed maces. Spears have great reach and a surprisingly fast combo with serious Hitbox Dissonance and maces have combos that can't be interrupted while being very likely to interrupt whoever they're hitting. Combined with the substantial increase in damage that human enemies deal with the Age of War Act 1 update making tanking a few hits no longer practical for the majority of builds and these two types will slaughter an unprepared or inexperienced player with ease and as few as two of them with hardened steel or better weapons can potentially kill a veteran high-tier combat thrall in epic heavy armor.
• Fandom Rivalry: The game developed a very vitriolic rivalry with ARK: Survival Evolved and Rust players only a few days after release.
• Fan Nickname:
  • "Noob Cube" to describe buildings built with square foundations in a square layout (3x3, 4x4, 5x5, and so on) and modestly tall (between four and six walls high), giving them a very blocky, cubic appearance. They're easy for those not fully familiar with the intricacies of the build system to create, and fairly efficient for managing a limited land area, but not particularly creative.
  • Because it lacks any known name, the large river running along the south of the Exiled Lands gets called "Noob River" on account of its (comparative) Green Hill Zone status with the rest of the map. On dedicated servers the area will be littered with sandstone shelters built by new players to a server who may or may not have prioritised a quick box so players or the wildlife can't so easily kill them while they're offline.
• Game-Breaker: As in most games of this type, there are a few.
  • The first two heavy attacks in a spear's combo have a very high chance to stagger an enemy, a very long reach, and a very short reset period, meaning that any enemy who is vulnerable to staggering can be effectively stunlocked by repeating the first two attacks over and over until they die or you run out of stamina. The long reach makes this very hard to retaliate against. This makes spears an ideal weapon to use against NPCs, since even some bosses aren't immune to this treatment. Spears can also attack through solid walls.
    • An update to the spears moveset change the normal combo to also be a series of pokes. They kind of overdid it, however, as the pike's only real weakness is crowds now, and with its fast startup NPCs went from "annoying" to "you must take damage to even try and kill them".
  • With armor penetration reduced across the board to almost negligible amounts the protective strength of heavy armor outweighs the mobility of the other types by a huge margin.
  • Stacking bleed debuffs enables even relatively weak characters to punch high above their weight, particularly against targets that rely on mitigating direct damage with high armor. A full x20 stack of bleeding deals a respectable 33 damage per second, and the twenty-second timer can be reset indefinitely by simply performing further bleed attacks. Most overworld bosses and elite enemies crumple like paper due to their inability to counter it, with only undead enemies being immune.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Hyenas. While they're a credible threat to new players, it doesn't take long to obtain enough gear and levels to easily handle one or two hyenas in combat. The problem is that they spawn everywhere and they will notice players from a considerable distance away. Even worse, they can outrun a sprinting player and their bite temporarily slows movement speed, meaning a player traveling across the desert will have to stop and deal with at least a dozen of these irritating menaces. Due to their frequency and aggression range, it's not uncommon for players to start feeling as if hyenas are being purposefully spawned on them by a mischievous server admin.
  • Skeletons. They don't deal a lot of damage, especially in the late game, but make up for it by appearing in large numbers and taking a while to kill even with the best weaponry. Basic melee skeletons have a combo that deals very high stagger and finishes with a knockdown while skeleton archers do so little damage you might not even notice but they still trigger abilities like Glutton for Punishment and interrupt healing. They can also still inflict Cripple if they hit a player in the legs and thralls told to defend you will chase them to the ends of the earth.
• Good Bad Bugs: As expected for an Early Access title. Players are able to dismantle structure components to correct accidental misplacements of walls, doors, etc, which are placed by using a ghostly outline of the object that snaps in place. A current bug in the early access game (as of August 2017) allows you to dismantle the ghostly version of a construction item (which doesn't actually exist yet), thereby getting back a portion of its building materials. Using this bug, you can essentially generate endless resources.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The truncheon used to knock out thralls is pretty widely disliked for having several issues. First is its minuscule range, the shortest of any weapon. Any enemy in range of it will slowly back away from you because you're too close and this often causes the second and third hits of a combo to miss. The second is that it has a very low chance to stagger and very little momentum, meaning enemies can freely attack through and interrupt truncheon combos. Third is the fact its light and heavy combos are exactly the same, meaning there's no chance to diversify your combo. And fourth is that the initial truncheon is basically worthless, dealing virtually no knockout damage to any but the weakest of NPCs.
  • Blunt arrows and blunt javelins give you another option for knocking somebody out, the arrows being ranged obviously and the javelin having a melee combo you can also use, in addition to being craftable without leather at a blacksmith's bench. While they are much easier to use they're also only iron-tier and don't have any upgrades, meaning you either have to deal with their diminishing effectiveness as the game progresses or switch back to a truncheon.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: Picking Crom leaves you with no religion feat at the start of the game, denying you access to the various benefits of religions until you find a religion trainer within the game world.
• That One Boss: Rockslide is an upscaled Living Mountain, itself an oversized Rocknose, with a monumental amount of armor that renders it virtually immune to damage. Compounding this is the Spin Attack that it loves to spam, knocking down anyone it hits while doing a massive amount of damage, meaning thralls have an especially hard time against it. The constant spinning makes it very hard to hit with melee weapons since it's always moving its legs, the only part of it that melee players can reach. Rockslide is one of the least-popular world bosses as a result and is considered The Dreaded during a Purge, where it has the added complication of being so large it will sometimes clip through walls and defenses.