I started off tonight in Old Tarantia (massive Aquilonian city) and made my way to the sewers to take care of some bad people and rescue a princess. Lemme just say, in Aquilonia, there really are alligators in the sewers o_o

So after rescuing the "princess" from the hands of the surely evil, Xanarus Darkhand, I brought her to Fabio and he thanked me profusely for bringing him back his beloved dog. Jerk. Oh, then he decided to tell me the cursed scroll I gave him is too evil for him to hold on to, and he had no idea that a parchment made of flesh inked in blood could possibly bring him bad luck! What the hell am I supposed to do with this now? I sure don't want it... Zelata will know what to do.

"You must take it back from whence it came!" Oh... where was that? The Sanctum of DOOOOOOM? Right, I'll just go ahead and not do that right now; you wanna hang on to this scroll in the meantime? No? Damnit.

The Sanctum is some big, evil instance for lv 39-42 that seems to require a full group to get through and lemme just say that I now have 5 group quests in my log that require me to go into this place and the number of solo quests in the area is dwindling.


So dogs, sewers and evil scroll aside, I spent most of the night in the Wild Lands once again, completing quests for random townies. On two ocassions I had to group with random strangers and both times resulted in a great experience. I think the farther I get from low level areas the more civilized people are getting. I had this one quest to go into an enemy camp and place plague-ridden blankets in all the tents, and upon going there and finding a ton of level 38s, I ran away. Walking just a few meters away I heard the sounds of combat nearby; I approached the noise to find a lv 30 priest and a herald hacking away at lower level mobs and working their way up the mountain towards the big camp I had to take down, so I asked them if they wanted to help. They graciously agreed (probably happy I didn't just behead both of them) and off we went!

Afterwards they left but I was close to levelling so I hung around for a while picking off the 38s one at a time until I saw a lv40 ranger run in and start doing the same. We teamed up and kicked some ass, it was nice to be able to stand next to a ranger 5 levels above me and pwn just as much face as him after hearing all the complaints that rangers are OP (which I've always agreed with to a point, after 20 their overpoweredness takes a nosedive as everyone else starts getting more uber). Don't get me wrong, I still hate rangers in PvP because they can permastun and drop traps and generally be a nuisance, but they are by no means the 2-shot wonder you see in Tortage.

After hitting 36 and turning in all my quests, I checked out my Feat tree again, noticing that I now have a brand new stun as well as a new knockdown. And now that I can actually stand up for myself in PvP I have no problems with it ^_^

I spent the next 30-or-so minutes just exploring the Wild Lands, marking out resource points on my map and generally taking in the lay of the land. Along the way I met someone who I had a nice chat with about the absurdity of this one quest's respawn timer. We parted ways and nobody got ganked.


Once I got back to town, on the other hand, I encountered more griefers like I did last night and being the upstanding citizen I am, I saved some lowbies and then made use of the new dance ability. I'm like some sort of superhero.

Kamakazie is clearly an underappreciated character from the Conan universe. I am here to tell his story!

So tonight I logged on to Age of Conan and my buddy Away was there to confirm my suspicions... there was really nothing else to do in Cimmeria until 40 :( So off we went to Aquilonia and the Wild Lands of Zelata where it looks like we'll be good til about 38!

The two of us banged out a few quests and after a few hours I became level 34 and he is now 35. After he logged off I ran around the town doing some fetch quests and at one point I noticed (aka: was killed by) some lv 54 guy hiding near one of the quest givers ganking people. Unacceptable! After getting killed by this guy twice, I hid nearby to be assured that he was indeed killing everyone who came up to this NPC. So after seeing him take down some others, I group invited a few who had just gotten killed, expressed my need for vengeance, and off we went to take this guy down. We hid then sent in a lv 22 as bait and waited for him to expose himself... when he did I charged in and knocked him down as the 3 others in our group followed and started unloading on this guy. He didn't know who to attack at first, but then we got him to about 30% health and he began to run - we followed and took him down before he reached the city guard. Huzzah! We hung around to see if he would return and he did. He took us off guard and murdered a few of us before we were able to regroup and kill him again. At this point he brought in help as 2 of his guildies appeared and thankfully they didn't know what the hell they were doing because we took them both down as the original ganker ran for his life... it was at this point that while we were all huddled around celebrating, a giant stone altar began rising in the middle of the ground. I did a search and found out what was causing that. A GM. Massive and level 100, this guy was doing something that looked both awesome and terrifying and it brought on a fair crowd. He then proceeded to kill some people and generally just mess around before leaving. All in all it was a great time.

"To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women!"

I picked up Age of Conan two weeks ago and in this time I have played much of it. Originally I only had a passing interest in the game but thanks to my friend Erik talking it up to great extent I decided to give it a shot. I'm glad I did, as the game is extremely fun.

This is probably the only MMO I've played where I feel like the NPCs are actual characters in the world, not just faceless quest givers. I know a few of my friends have chosen to completely ignore the conversations and storyline, but my god man... how can you? I mean, first off there's this whole overarching storyline with your character as the focal point (all of these "destiny quests" are single player), then there are side stories like the battle between the Cimmerians and the Vanir that I've been taking part of the entire time I've been off the noob island of Tortage. Here we have a town being ravaged by red-haired marauders coming down from the mountains; the town chieftan is a coward who refuses to send any men to fight, insisting that if he spares anyone to send out to fight back, that they will leave the settlement undefended and the Vanir can juts come and take everyone out. Everyone in the town believes this man is wrong but they don't dare speak out against him out of fear of death. However, this hasn't stopped a few people from fighting back, as there are a few renegades led by a man named Kern Wolfeye that have left the village altogether to take the fight to the Vanir and try to drive them back. So my character, a Cimmerian himself, has taken it upon himself to assist Kern and his men in sending the Vanir away once and for all!

Okay, obviously we're not talking about some greatly original story here, but the characters are solid and memorable... so far. I have heard horror stories about this game past level 50. And apparently there is literally zero endgame content up right now, so the crazies out there with no life that have already hit level 80 are doing nothing but complaining on the official forums. Honestly, this isn't surprising; its a brand freaking new MMO, even everyone's favorite WoW had some serious issues for the first few months after it was released. Hell, they didn't get the UI right until some time within the past year.

So Age of Conan is fun in PvE, absolutely. Grouping is damn fun as well, and I just found out last night that my Conquerer class has some passive ability to heal and rez teammates as long as I'm not tanking. Combine that with my shouts, auras and AoE attacks and I'm pretty happy with the Conquerer. I am getting scared at the fact that I am running out of quests in my current area, however, as the next closest one is a 40-60 zone and I'm only at 32. I don't want to have to travel to a different continent just yet, but its looking like I might have to.

PvP is another story. It took me a while to realize this, but the PvP in this game right now is garbage. The super cool 3-point guard stuff that you need to deal with vs the NPCs doesn't really come into effect in PvP because there is no incentive to shift your guard at all. Combine this with some seriously unbalanced classes and realize the only effective skills in PvP are stuns and knockdowns and you have a recipe for a piece of shit. It just seems like all of the class balance went towards PvE, I seriously don't think anyone ever tested PvP. Of course, its still early in the game's lifecycle so I'm sure this stuff will be fixed eventually, but my god its annoying to be on a PvP server right now, especially one where the SA goons are running rampant.