More on Age of Conan

Played a bit more last night, and Aretus my Dark Templar has hit level 11. I quite like the game, although I'm still not convinced it's a Wow-killer. It's graphics are a lot more realistic, and there's a nice tactical element to combat that acts as a nice counterpart to WoW's "hit auto attack and then watch your cooldowns" system.

I rolled Dark Templar since it's a hybrid Tank/Melee caster and I thought it would be the best analogue to the style of gameplay I was used to with Ulushnar. The magic flavor is closer to Warlocks though, with life-draining abilities and calling on pacts with dark powers.

As it turns out despite having the best armor I can afford, his neophyte abilities aren't quite up with my expectations. I can't plunge in and multi-tank my foes yet, and I tend to struggle with more than two mobs of the same level. Since the DT doesn't really have any ranged abilities, it makes some pulls tricky, although I've recently grabbed a Throwing Axe for him which will hopefully help.

It's making the current quest he does tricky, but after doing some research on the forums, I think I see a way around it. I'll give it a go tonight.

This morning I rolled my second character, Donarth, a mighty-thewed Cimmerian Conqueror. The Conqueror's another example of the Soldier archetype, which are tanks. Unlike the Dark Templar however, the Conqueror can't use a shield. They instead do damage either by Dual-weilding or with large 2-handed weapons. They also appear to have some interesting group auras, which will make partying kinda interesting. He seems pretty powerful at level five, but of course there's a long way to go and we'll see how he shapes up.

AoC's a lot of fun, more fun that doing dailies, levelling alts or any of those other tasks that exist to fill the time I'm not raiding in Wow. I'm not about to stop Raiding with Ulu, but this at least gives me something interesting to do with my downtime.