Sand and Jagged Rocks ep.3 - changes are needed

I have been thinking a lot lately about Dragon's Spine (because I have nothing else going in  my life, obviously :D) trying to nail what is really wrong with this content. Although I am not a big fan of deserts DS looks very fine. But with all this eye candy comes very little content and whatever we have now gets topped easily by ROGS expansions which is still "go-to" zone for lvl80 characters.

What I do like about DS is that it is a harsh, unforgiving land with tough mobs. I got the same vibe from Kara Korum (back in the days of wearing blue items :X) and I like to be challenged by the environment rather than walking over whatever inhabitants of the zone I can get my daggers into. The second thing is overall design of the zone which feels very much hand-crafted with a lot of attention to the details. Nothing seems randomly generated. Sadly, that is about it.

Dragon's Spine is simply thin on content. Yes there is "epic" chain of quests, but apart from well written, Kull based stor,y DS can be "beaten" in one sitting and pretty much there is no reason to return to the zone. EVER.

What can be done about this?

MOA rewards and bags - with recent changes on TL quests in DS got MOA rewards and caravan bags. That is a step in the right direction, but far from what is needed to make the DS a destination for veteran players. Right now DS is offering few repetable quests that are on par with Chosain and Paikang so that is pretty good, right? Wrong. Not only questing in Chosain and Paikang is easier (quests givers and quest objectives are close to each other), but also you can level up you factions at the same time. More so in Paikang you can also hunt nightmare bubbles while questing and get a rare token for it. Simply jacking up MOA value per quest in DS is not the way to go so it has to be that second factor that is making ROGS more interesting: factions.

Factions - Lack of factions in DS is simply staggering. Faction game play doesn't have to be as elaborate as in ROGS, but many players enjoy the progression that comes from leveling faction (access to new items, quests and story). What factions we could have in DS? Expedition Guards faction and Bandits. Expedition Guards quests are ready as we could have whatever is now in DS. Bandits are also present in DS zone, but the current story doesn't even mentions them. Expedition Guards would give "protect" type of missions and Bandits would give "raid" type of missions. Rewards? Take whatever social armors you have crammed into Wyrm (there are 3 or 4 dropping there I think) and make them faction rewards bought with few rares. Add a buy-able camel mount (there is no in-game one currently) and a guard/bandit combat pet that deals some damage (like wolf/tiger) and gives a minor buff (like Kappa). Funcom doesn't need to give players more power via armor sets, but at the same time people like me are sitting on hundreds of rare tokens with NOTHING to spend them on. Give us stuff to buy.

Rare spawns - I have always enjoyed the thrill of killing a rare spawn monster that can drop blue/epic loot. Adding a random spawns to DS would make questing in DS more exciting, just like hunting for nightmare bubbles in Paikang.

Dig sites - ROGS had hidden treasures that you could dig up with a shovel. The problem was that those treasures were bags that gave us crap items. Take the same concept in DS, but at the same time upgrade the rewards so the searching for lost treasures is worthwhile. C'mon, this is ancient dig site, there is bound to be some cool crap laying around.

This zone has a lot of potential, but it needs some work to bring it up to speed. For the love of Mitra DON'T LEAVE IT AS IT IS because it will be a huge waste. The current version of DS offers so little value to the players that you can't even justify it being a premium content.

You can support those suggestions in this thread on TL.

See what I´ve become - Assassin solo gameplay

One of the greatest things that you can find on teh internetz when trying to decide your class in MMO are videos. Youtube is full of them (duh). However what I think people are really interested in is seeing how their class of choice will be performing in day-to-day playing sessions and not necessarily in high end dungeons and raids.

This is why I have prepared video showcasing assassin gameplay along with, what I think are, somewhat helpful descriptions and commentaries so the viewer can at least have basic understanding of "what the fuck is going on (TM)"

As a bonus I have my two old old videos from 1.4 and 1.5 eras. See what I´ve become? I haven't become better at editing videos that is for sure :X Make sure to switch to 480p in video quality settings.

Assassin solo gameplay in 1.4 patch - Hybrid build

Assassin solo gameplay in 1.5 patch - Lotus build (at that time Hybrid was heavily nerfed)

Assassin solo gameplay in 4.0 patch - Hybrid build

Suggestion box: Lotus Overload, Lotus Tainted Blood, Arcane Backlash and Corrupted Body

Since the devs are back into saddle on TL it is time to crack out some suggestions about changes to the assassin class. First on the chopping block is the Lotus Overload which is a subject of a heated debate. Lotus Overload grants 95% immunity (might as well calll it 100%) to spells if assassin gets crited.

Spell immunity means also that assassin can't be affected by those CCs that are non-combo based. LO should only work on hostile spell crits but it is KNOWN to go off on friendly heals crits. Not working as intended. LO also seems to be not having a cooldown as it can proc super often in pvp. 

Cloth armor makes assassin extremely vulnerable to any non-magic based attack, so simply nerfing down anti-magic capabilities of assassin would make him just a gimped rogue. At the same time LO is available very early on so pretty much any Hybrid build can take advantage of LO. Pretty much it's a powerful ability that needs very little investment.

I think there are some changed needed in the Lotus tree itself. First of all Lotus Overload switches it's place with Arcane Backlash. Arcane Backlash is not nearly powerful enough to be soo deep in Lotus tree and it would make acquiring LO a more conscious decision for Lotus dedicated builds. 

Second thing is Lotus Tainted Blood which should be merged with Corrupted Body. On it's own those feats are not all that great for 3/3 investment, but combined they would provide good anti-magic support for Hybrid builds. 

Lotus Overload should become an active feat. It's a powerful ability so it should take skill to be able to use it at the right time. Pretty much the core mechanic should remain: when assassin get spell-crited he should get a buff called "energized blood" for 10s with visible particle to indicate that the buff is present. During this time frame assassin can use Lotus Overload to get 95%  spell immunity for 5s. Lotus Overload should have 30s cooldown and should go on cooldown if used without "energized blood" buff being present (this would prevent LO from being spammed all the time). 

I think this would be a significant change that would allow skilled players to use LO in more conscious way while not nerfing LO to the ground. Switching around the feats doesn't make Hybrid builds awkward all the sudden while encouraging playing around with Lotus focused builds.

If you like this suggestion then go to this thread on TL forum and give your feedback to the devs.

[Guide] crafting the Spine of Dagon dagger

With crafting revamp being right around the corner (sorta of, it's more like few more months to go) this might be your last chance to acquire the legendary Spine of Dagon, a Tier 3 raiding crafted dagger.

Post crafting revamp you won't be able to craft this dagger, but every crafted weapon will stay in game and become a legacy item with both sentimental value and great stats.

SOD has not only awesome, raw DPS alone, but also it can be gemmed with Bel's Mirth which can proc spell penetration, making detonation truly DA BOMB.

Getting this dagger is no easy task, but it's within a reach of any dedicated player provided that he has both the time and the patience to get it.

In this guide I will simply assume that you want to get the materials necessary to get this project going. Actual crafting (it happens in T3 raid) is a whole different topic.You need a T3 raiding guild for that.

To craft the dagger you will need:

Spine of Dagon = 1 Cromite Ingot, 1 Eventide Ingot, 1 Well-Honed Spire, 100 Superior Hilt Piece 

Well-honed Spire is actually a simple, blue crafted dagger. You can craft it yourself or get it off the trader for cheap.

Well Honed Spire (blue dagger)
6 Sourmetal Salts, 4 Tussah Silk, 6 Iron, 3 coal oil, 5 superior hilt piece, 4 plain hilt piece 

100 Superior Hilt Piece and 4 plain hilt pice  - you can buy this from crafting materials NPC. 

Now here comes the hard part: you will need materials for  Strange Malleable Alloy

Strange Malleable Alloy
10 Shards of the Exiled God 
10 Black Gold; - to craft you will need 50 Black Silver, 50 Gold 
10 Darksteel; - to craft you will need10 Tin, 40 Duskmetal 
10 Purlwire;- to craft you will need 10 Magnetite Powder , 10 Copper, 60 Silver, 20 Duskmetal 
10 Royal Gold;- to craft you will need 60 Illustrium, 20 Silver, 20 Gold 
10 Tumbaga; - to craft you will need10 Illustrium , 50 Copper, 40 Gold 
10 Zhemrian Bronze; - to craft you will need30 Black Silver, 10 Tin, 30 Copper, 30 Gold 
10 Aqua Regia; Humanoid drop 
20 Crystalline Flux; Bought at 15 Silver per CF 

You will need to craft 2 of Alloys.  Here is the list of all materials for two Alloys:

Black Silver - 50 + 30 = 80 x 2 = 160

Gold - 50 + 20 + 40 + 30 = 140 x 2 = 280

Tin - 10 + 10 = 20 x 2 = 40

Duskmetal - 40 + 20 = 60 x 2 = 120

Magnetite Powder - 10 = 10 x 2 = 20

Copper - 10 + 50 + 30 = 90 x 2 = 180

Silver - 60 + 20 = 80 x 2 = 160

Illustrium - 60 + 10 = 70 x 2 =140

Aqua Regia - 10 = 10 x 2 = 20

Crystaline Flux - 20 = 20 x 2 = 40

The most important part of crafting is getting the two Ingots. Ingots are items that are archetype specifics

Priest = Atlantium Ingot
Mage = Eventide Ingot
Rogue = Chromite Ingot
Soldier = Acheronian Steel Ingot

For Spine of Dagon you will need 1 Cromite Ingot and 1 Eventide Ingot.

So to sum it up here is the complete breakdown of every single base material that is needed to craft and gem up the Spine of Dagon:

Name	Need
Shards of the Exiled God	20
Superior Hilt Piece	105
Plain hilt piece	4
Sourmetal Salts	6
Tussah Silk	4
Iron	6
Coal oil	3
Black Silver	160
Gold	280
Tin	40
Magnetite Powder	20
Copper	180
Silver	160
Duskmetal	120
Illustrium	140
Aqua Regia	20
Crystaline Flux	40
Thrusting Marquise Peridot	1
Moonstone of Bel's Mirth	1
Brutal Brilliant Royal Onyx	1

Some tips:
- look for bargain offers on trader, anything under 20g per 1 shard of Exiled God is a good offer.
- farming the rare mats like Black Silver yourself would take forever. Look for cheap mats on trader or buy crafted materials like Royal Gold straight from trader.
- need Tussah silk? Cannibal cave mobs drop it.
- need Sourmetal Salts? lvl 70 caster can drop a cache with it. Purple Lotus Swamp is generally the best for it, but there are other places, like Khesh with lvl 70 casters.
- want to craft everything yourself? Here is the recipe list:

Recipe Name	Ingredients	Batch Yield	Last Known Drop Location
Black Gold	5 Black Silver 5 Gold	5	Brokk the Smith at Atzel's Fortress
Royal Gold	2 SIlver 6 Illustrium 2 Gold	8	Brokk the Smith at Atzel's Fortress
Darksteel	2 Tin 8 Duskmetal	2	Brokk the Smith at Atzel's Fortress
Zhemrian Bronze	3 Copper 1 Tin 3 Black Silver 3 Gold	4	Brokk the Smith at Atzel's Fortress
Tumbaga	5 Copper 4 Gold 1 Illustruim	2	Brokk the Smith at Atzel's Fortress
Purlwire	1 Copper 6 Silver 2 Duskmetal 1 Magnetite Powder	1	Brokk the Smith at Atzel's Fortress

I have researched this guide as best as I could, but if you found a mistake please let me know in the comments!

Five years of Age of Conan - anniversary event

Look, I don't want to oversell this event so I will be blunt: Joel Bylos is godlike and the event was best thing that happened to AOC. Oh, too soon? The event matched the player base expectations which were so low that we would be quiet about another vanity cloak. But no, Joel had to bring in the big guns and he delivered one hell of a event. This is the first thing that I want to give notice to: Mr. Bylos proved himself to be very competent which gives me A LOT hope for the future. Honestly, for a while after the restructuring I was fearful that AOC will be Funcom's bastard child and such is just not the case.

Let's get down to what the event was actually about:

It very much felt like someone read all my posts on previous events and decided to change everything I have complained about. This event had epic feeling, great rewards and replayability. Pretty much everything that, until now, sucked about the events.

Remember the first anniversary? You can check it out here. Or just watch the video below, it sums it up nicely.

Now the video from the recent event:
See the difference?

In a nutshell: everyday new boss spawned in different location of Hyboria. Furthermore the bosses from previous days would re-spawn stronger and stronger as the day went by. You had to be close to the boss to get a quest from killing it, so this way you could have brought your lvl20 alt and still get the goodies. After killing the monster you would go to the Old Tarantia where new NPC would accept your quest and reward you with a box with rewards. First major surprise was that NPC had a voice over!! Remember those? Game Director promised that those will be back (TSW voice artists are doing AOC stuff now) but no one expected for it to be so soon. Now the rewards themselves: the box could give either random crap like Halloween consumables (blood, brain juice etc.), epic mastery pots (like in HOC), unique vanity gear or..... T2 armor and weapons!!

Best thing is that you could do the bosses over and over and get a blast out of it. On the last days the bosses were spawning in different places so whole raids of people would jump from Old Tarantia to the Dragon's Spine only to be storming Khemi a couple minutes later. It did wonders for the server's population and morale because seeing so many active players in one place really gave hopes for the game's future.

If I really HAD to complain about anything it would be a lack of story. Sure there was SOME story, but pretty much it was: "thanks for killing teh dragonz0rz, here is ur epix0rz!". I think giving people small quest chain few days before the event would have been awesome. We didn't really get any explanation WHY there was a dragon and Tarantia and Kraken in Khemi and these quests would have builded up the anticipation. But it was all well designed and executed (Mitra knows we didn't have THOSE kind of updates in recent years..). 

Best thing that came out of this event? The bosses are here to stay and the GMs will spawn then randomly for the player's amusement.

Here is to another 5 years!! Cheers!

Unique vanity set

Bone Rattle

Worm

Basilisk

Kraken getting creamed!

The streets of Old Tarantia #1

I have came to the conclusion that I have been posting very little as of late. There is a good reason for that: lack of news. Duh! Still there is plenty going on in my Hyborian life so I have decided to start posting those random tidbits on the hideout.

The latest and greatest thing is me getting on the mats required to craft the Spine of Dagon - T3 dagger. It literally cost me my Hyborian life-time savings. I wasn't much up for shard gathering so I bought them. 400 gold. BAM!. Now it's only a matter of my guild getting it's shit together and we are on the easy street to T3 craft.

Or are we? After speedy advance in the T4 (we killed imp 3 times) we got demoted to T3 raiding and even struggling at that. I know, the summer is upon us and it's hard to get people to raid, but is to frustrating to have 4 or 5 weapons to craft all lined up and simply not enough people to do a mere T3 raid. Bah!

In other news I am enjoying pvp a lot more since I have started recording my 1v1 fights in the minigames. I have also fleshed out the little background story that will be in the pvp video (more of a cut scenes than story TBH). To my surprise the server move to US didn't really impact me all that much. Sure, when I look at the bar the latency is higher (around 176 max, usually at stable 126), but at the same the the server stability improved (no more red lag spikes) so it balances out. I have Fraps running in the background and still getting really good fights. I guess it's fine and, of course, it was necessary to insure future for Age of Conan. And it's not like old EU server was all that great either. I do understand that some got more affected by this than others, but what's done is done.

But let's get back to the pvp video for a second. I have several folders with videos named "special", "cut scenes", "2v1", "bad", "good" and "pro"."Special" is a place for a videos that have some part that I want to use like killing people with an xbow (truly, it's the king of frags). Cut scenes are self explanatory: it is the footage I will use to tell the background story. Folder with 2v1 fights....now I am not sure if I will be using it because those fights, even thou I have won them, are just sloppy. It's really hard to stay calm and precise when fighting 2 people at once and one mistake can mean the end of the fight. I do like the end result (winning against 2 people) but I don't like how I am performing (lot of combo steps and combos missed). Bad and good folders are for storing fights that are either really sloppy, boring or simply too short (usually it's vs casters). I will probably pick few movies from "good" folder and use some parts of from "bad" for intro or what have you. The "pro" folder contains really awesome fights like killing T4 barb or DT. Right now I have 4 fights that I am really pleased with and I think I need no less than 10 in total to make the video. I have decided to keep recording until end of July and start editing then.

And today AOC turns 5 years! How cool is that? Old love never rusts it seems. I will write a detailed report on anniversary event so I don't want to get into this topic a whole lot here.

PvP in a powder form - just add water!

So the new letter is in and we have learned about next pvp content: unchained minigames. The final design is not yet written in the stone but we got pretty good idea what we are getting: minigames (new mechanic but same maps) where people get equal gear and most likely further balancing options (like AA to spend for the game's duration - but that is just me talking).

I have thought about this and I think I have made up my mind that I very much like the core idea of it. Having all 3 pvp sets, maxed out AA and capped at pvp lvl 10 (done with minigames alone) I am pretty much in a same spot for several months now. For me "unchained" minigames are already happening. At the same time I can't really say I like pummeling undergeared players nor losing to T4 geared people. I think that for me getting pvp gear was never about having an advantage, but rather to avoid being at disadvantage. Since PVE T3.5 and T4 pretty much outclasses pvp gear in every way I get to only keep my advantage over "newbs" while not having a way to shorten the gear gap that is between, oh let's just say pvp T3 weapons and T4 weapons. A hint: it's absurd. In other words: current minigame system doesn't provide me with what I want.

There are several issues here and I want to quickly go over them:

The social aspect of pvp

I have spilled my guts about it here, so please go check it out. Current minigames are social nightmare and the fact that you can't do it with friends is mind blowing in the context of MMO. If the unchained minigames are to be successful Funcom need to put "group" back into "group pvp". Right now it is random strangers trying to make the best of it. I want to play with people I know. And this doesn't even require coding: just roll back whatever changes previous Game Director made (and truely this was one of his undoings).

Accessibility

AOC has one of most brutally unforgiving, gear based systems you can imagine. Pretty much pvp lvl 1 melee is a meat in pvp and will remain such for many many pvp lvls to come. Before you can even be competitive you need to do A LOT of gear grind and in a such manner that you won't really enough (like 20+ deaths per minigame). Having a way to simply jump in and be able to take a punch like others will surely encourage more people to pvp and perhaps will draw old timers back to the game (no need to play "gear catch up" anymore).

Population split

I doubt there will be any split happening. In a world of equal gear unchained minigames and regular minigames what is there to gain in regular minis? Why would anyone expose themselves to the T4 wearing people when they could be facing players on a equal footing? 

There are still many unanswered questions about this system and one of them is the question of rewards: will unchained minis give same rewards? No rewards? Why would someone do unchained minis and regular ones? I am very much afraid the unchained minis might share the fate with B&G server which seemed like a great concept, but was pretty much rehashed old content... minus the guards. New minis? Same thing, minus the gear.

Still we have to learn a lot about the design and also we need to keep in mind that incoming pvp crafting (which is months away) might totally change the pvp landscape and how people are playing this game.