From Peter's comment on my last post re: the lack of soulbinding on items in Age of Conan:

Within a month it will be impossible to level any new characters due to twinks serial-ganking newbies. The economy as a whole will be completely fucked in three months.

I doubt it to be honest. The only tradeable mob drop items I've seen were green-quality items either equal to, or on a par with similar level quest items. I have yet to see the equivalent of superior or epic quality drops from standard mobs, and certainly not in the low level bracket.

Twinking as we understand it in WoW is by-and-large impossible. The closest thing the game has to Enchanting is jewelcrafting, and the only socketable items in the game are high-level crafted items. It's incredibly difficult to create a gigantic gear disparity at low levels.

AoC: the Bad, the Dumb, the Good.

Well ok, last night I just managed to get Aretus the second out of the Tortage starting area at level 21. There's a couple of quests left undone on the island, but I doubt I'll bother going back for them.

I'm going to list some of the things I'm not enjoying about it thusfar:

Age of Conan isn't a very alt-friendly game, since all level 1 characters regardless of race start in the same zone. You want to level a new toon, you've no choice but to run the same quests over again. Also, if you want to change toons, there's currently no way to do so except completely shutting down the game and restarting it. Add to that the hard limit of eight characters across all servers (compared to wow's ten per server) will have most diehard altoholics running back to Goldshire.

Healers really seem to get the shaft early on in AoC. In Wow at least they got relatively potent healing spells early on to make up for their crappier mitigation. In AoC, the first healing spell you get heals for a paltry 2 damage/tick and when combined with their weaker armor and lower health, they spend a lot of time running back from the respawn point.

The starting quests give a false impression of how the game's going to go. Almost all the Tortage quests have cut scenes with full voice acting and multiple dialogue options, which made a nice and impressive change from WoWs "read the quest log and click accept approach". Once you leave Tortage however, things change. You still get the cutscenes, and the dialogue trees, but the voice acting dries up to a trickle of core quests. For most of the quests you're faced with a mute NPC starting blankly at you as you read his request along the bottom of the screen.

Talking about questing brings us to Instances. Rather than a large, open plan world like WoW, the world Age of Conan is a series of instances. In theory this prevent overcrowding in quest areas, and being a veteran of Hellfire Penninsula on the opening week of The Burning Crusade I can kind of appreciate this. In practise however, when grouping you spend a minute or two getting everyone in the correct instance version, and moving to and from various questing zones requires load times.

Whilst it graphics are pretty realistic, (the water effects in particular are excellent) I find myself missing the variety and vibrancy of WoW's more cartoonish palette. Say what you will about WoW but Blizzard took their visual cues from Games Workshop and Anime and they ran with them. The end result is almost uniquely theirs.

Related to this, the default UI is very clunky and when I'm trying to play the game in 1024x768, things feel cramped in a way they don't even with WoW's default UI. Since Funcom haven't released the API, we can't expect the same level of modding that the WoW community enjoys, but some brave souls have started doing what they can to skin the UI to make it more manageable.

In spite of all this, there's some good stuff in there:

Guild creation's as simple as right-clicking a tab at level 20. No gold spent, no running around getting ten signatures.

Trading posts seem to combine banks, mailboxes and auction houses pretty smoothly, but I'm still experimenting with them.

Most items don't get soulbound, but there are some items (quest rewards and I assume boss drops) that are listed as non-tradeable. In practise, this means I can equip the green "mace of twatting" some pict scumbag dropped and when I get a better weapon I can put it up for trade or pass it to an alt.

Skills don't require hours of grinding to raise. And if you want to change your skills, you can do so by clicking on them and spending some money.

Travel between zones is pretty quick for the most part, so no long Griffin rides.

And I really like the Dark Templar. It's a wierd mix of Protection Paladin, Warlock and Shadow Priest. They have the lowest health of the three Soldier classes, but your melee attacks drain life from opponents to bolster your own. As you gain power and spend feats, you can do more damage and even start to damage enemies in the area around you. You also have an aura that heals people when they're struck and a spell that heals your entire group at the cost of your own health. It's an interesting class.

And of course, Barbarians are also great fun. One of those classes that seem to be built around offense with a complete disregard for survival.

More Gear Tinkering and AoC

I can't stop tinkering with Ulushnar's gear.

I've finally retired his Bonefist Gauntlets to use the Crystalforge Handguards fulltime, and replaced Pepe's Shroud of Pacification with my Slikk's Cloak of Placation. I've done this so I can comfortably hit the 490 Defense mark without resorting to using trinkets.

A nice side effect of doing this is that when I have my boss-tanking trinkets (Ancient Aqir Artifact and Commendation of Kael'thas) equipped, I can also afford to equip the Libram of Divine Purpose over the Libram of Repentance for better threat, along with the spelldamage and threat enchant on the gloves. The downside of this is the loss of about 500 unbuffed health, taking Ulu to the 16.5k mark.

All in all, I'll take it. 16.5k seems to be fine for the starting bosses in BT, but I am noticing a marked increase in our DPS with the 2.4 badge rewards, and keeping on top of that is a primary concern. If I do need to max out health for a fight, then it's easy enough to swap the AAA for the Darkmoon Card: Vengeance.

Over in Age of Conan, I created another version of Aretus on the Hyrkania PVE-RP server last night. I don't really have anything new to report since he's only level 16 and in Tortage. Still, knowing what to do this time around makes for faster levelling. Things feel rough in game, with server maintenance in the mornings and new patches every 2-3 days. That's to be expected. No matter how long the Development period or how strenuous the Beta, no MMO is completed on launch. The version of WoW that I started playing three years ago bears little resemblance to the game I play today, and I missed the first month of launch. I'm still having fun, so i'll give it time. Definately beats levelling another WoW toon in my non-raiding time.

AoC: F*** PVP!

Well I didn't get much time to play AoC this weekend, as I was visiting friends and then partaking in a moderately successful SSC raid with Ulu.

After the raid I went online and did a few quests in Cimmeria with Aretus. Was going ok, but when I was going to do the last quest of the night (kill an Alpha Wolf for some whining brat) when an Assassin destealths and begins to gib me.

I die, ress, rebuff and run back to the spot, figuring the Assassin's moved on, but no, the bitch is there waiting for me as I engage the mob.

As I was running back again (which was a wasted effort it seems, I was credited for the kill even though I died before the mob), I asked myself a simple question: "am I having fun here?" The answer was a simple "no".

The real reason I rolled here was because a mate of mine from CD was intending to roll here. He apparently has and is refusing to tell people who he is. I suspect he's just looking to gank folks, which is his freakshow.

Tonight I'm going to roll Aretus again on the PVE-RP server where I can hopefully focus on the things I enjoy: tanking and aoe-grinding without looking over my shoulders for opportunistic gankers.

My first experiences in PVP.

Last night's raid to Black Temple was cancelled due to lack of numbers, so I went back to levelling Aretus. I was hoping to get Tortage finished before it become inundated with new players from the full release today.

This is my first active experience on a PVP server. My few attempts to level characters on PVP servers in WoW never got me out of friendly territory so I was quite unprepared for the experience. I wouldn't even be on a PVP server, but my friends decided they were gonna roll there.

Firstly AoC PVP isn't faction-based like WoW. Basically in AoC everyone outside your party/raid is a viable target, and when you pull a bunch of mobs like I do, it can sometimes be hard to tell where the mobs stop and the players start.

This led to some awkward moments last night where I'd be killing a few mobs, then someone would pile in and I'd cleave into them or they'd cleave into me. There'd then be an awkward moment where we'd stare at each other, work out if the other person was going to actually attack, then shrug, apologise and go our separate ways.

Then there was the incident this morning where I was happily killing mobs and a Herald of Xotli called Soul came and started beating on me. By the time I realised what had happened, I was dead. So, I shrug, respawn, get my health up then walk through the door, and find that Soul is attacking me as I'm loading up. This happened 2-3 times in the Tortage Undercity until I managed to catch her with mid-fight for some revenge.

After that, I start killing some mobs in another part of the zone and I find her coming after me, along with a friend this time. She killed me about a half-dozen times before I sent her a tell telling her to grow up and lo the ganking stopped.

I know "it's a PVP server, you should expect it", but I dunno, I hoped the RP part would outweigh the PVP part. I still don't believe in attacking people who are spawning, or who are fighting mobs at the time.

Still I can imagine the dynamic brought about by free-for-all PVP will be an interesting one:

D00d1: Can u come and tank an instance for me?
Tank: Wait, didn't you spawn camp me for about an hour last week?
D00d1: hehe, yeah!
Tank: Erm, no thanks then.

What's in a name?

Here's Aretus, my Dark Templar, now at a Mighty-Thewed level 14! When I created him, I went for a thick black beard, short hair and sunken eyes. He now looks like Leonidas' junkie brother.

I'm gonna talk a little about my RP naming conventions. I usually tend towards RP servers on MMOs, usually since that's where my friends are. As a result, I have never had the joy of naming one of my toons "Bubblelol", "Retnub" or any of the other names I see doing the rounds whenever I step into a cross-realm battleground. I tend to go with one of two tricks when trying to come up with a new name in a Fantasy or Sci-Fi background:

1. The "George Lucas" approach. I pick two or three syllables I like the sound of and string them together. Examples would be an old Star Wars character of mine called Gann Tharr or indeed Ulushnar.

2. The "linguistic butchery" approach. I'm something of a linguaphile, I like languages and I like learning how other cultures say things. I can't actually speak many languages with any fluency, but I like to collect words and phrases. My Retribution twink experiment on Moonglade Rachskind is an example of this. His name is a very loose german translation of "Revenge Child", which serves as a dual placeholder for "Retribution Nub" and "Wrathchild".

With Aretus, I took the second approach. His name comes from "Arete", the greek word for "Excellence", although it can also mean "goodness" or "virtue". I thought it'd be a good name for someone who draws his power from whatever demon or god will answer his call.

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.