The level 80 soloist's second look at AoC: Unchained

My job requires me to be an MMO whore. Play a game 12 hours a day, explore every single aspect of it, possibly including classes, features and content you personally don't care about, so you can write a fair review, create a helpful guide, or at the very least, come up with an article that somehow covers up the fact you're just stealing it all from Wikipedia. And before you know it, you're already supposed to check on the next big title. Ooookay, since 95% of the stuff I do is F2P, it's not that strict for me, but you get the idea. Play a lot of stuff all the time. Download and install game after game after game.

This behaviour will inevitably cause you to neglect and eventually forget about certain games you enjoy. Games you'd play for fun and not just because it's a job. From this blog's headline, you've already derived I'm talking about Age of Conan here.
Like most people who, at some point in their life, came out of a vagina, Claire happens to have a mother. And said mother was playing AoC the last time we visited the family, while I was sitting right next to her. And I was watching her for a while and asked myself, "Why the hell did I ever stop playing that?"

This is solo content.

Hyboria has always been one of my favourite virtual hangouts. Sure, four years after the launch of AoC, the game world isn't as stunning and breathtaking as it used to be, but it's still gorgeous enough to draw me in. There is this omnipresent contrast of sheer amazing beauty and rancid filth. You can watch the sunset at the docks in a fantastic, very realistic and life-like city, seagulls circling around, dockworkers unloading crates from the ships and what have you, only to be interrupted by a drunk pirate, who decides to take a massive piss right next to you. You get blazing deserts, snowy mountains and lush, green fields and forests as much as bloated corpses dangling from the trees, with crows pecking at their eyeballs. I like it, because it's plausible. It makes sense. Most games usually go for one extreme or the other: They try to impress players with massive, majestic cities and landscapes or they're over the top gory and dirty and depressing. But you can't have a nice, big metropolis without poverty, without dark, creepy corners, where the shit piles up in the streets, where people riot, where disease and decay spread. There is a constant sense of dread. There's probably something lurking around the next corner, waiting to jump you, wanting to kill you for a million reasons or just out of desperation and hunger.

The other day, one of my friends told me he has some level 80 toons on AoC, wanting to know whether or not there is any point in coming back. So I had a look around.
I suppose that for anyone enthusiastic about being part of a major guild and taking part in the raid content, the answer is pretty simple: The final Khitai raid encounters have only been implemented today and if you want to grind your way up the raid tiers for sexy and powerful gear, then that's the way to go. But maybe you're more like me, you're not the most social kinda guy and you just can't get yourself to ask around for endgame dungeon groups, let alone raids. AoC has no dungeon finder at the moment, people spam the global chat channels to find people and the abreviations alone are enough to drive away most fresh max level players. LFM HoX Khitai HMs AA EXP req pst!

Even if you can figure out what all of that means, people require you to be kitted out in gear ten times more powerful than what is actually needed to beat most dungeons, they expect you to know all the boss tactics and if you're a newcomer, you'll be in for a hard time. The game has been around for a while, the veterans have played most of the pre-raid and lower tier raid content to death and unless you're part of some big, helpful guild, which is willing to teach you the basics, trying to get into the whole thing might just be a bit too intimidating and overwhelming.

Feeling lonely? Steal a wolf pup and raise it to be your pet!

Seeing as AoC also features so-called pvp 'minigames', which work just like WoW's battlegrounds, you might get the idea to just get stronger by taking part in those. And in theory, that's entirely possible. Winning in pvp raises your pvp level and nets you tokens, tokens and pvp levels are required to purchase epic pvp gear, epic pvp gear makes you more powerful. So far, so good.

Unfortunately, the truth is a lot less fun than any of this. A vast amount of players taking part in the minigames have spent a massive amount of time getting all the epic pvp gear you're drooling over. They do more damage than you could ever dare dream about, their shiny armors prevent you from even putting a dent in their health bars and most of them are capped out on the dreaded AA-system. You see, once you reach the level cap on AoC, you get the possibility to make your character even more powerful by gaining so-called AA points. 'Alternative Advancement'. For the most part, it's a pretty cool feature. Instead of standing still and not getting any stronger and better, you may use AA points to raise your resistances, your overall DPS and unlock whole new special attacks and skills. And if somebody has been an active subscriber for the past 2 years and has gathered 700 AA points and you just dinged 80, well... you're fucked.

Basically, it's like this: Every other player has better gear than you do. Gaining ranks and tokens to obtain some of the weaker, first-tier pvp stuff requires hundreds of utterly frustrating, humiliating pvp matches, where you're little more than a walking free kill. Everyone will hate you. The enemy team will always attack you first, because every kill looks good on the scoreboard and you're the softest target. Your own team mates will tell you to fuck off and die, because your very presence most likely ruins their chances at winning the match. And even if you spend 20 Euros on the most basic cash shop pvp stuff to stand at least a small chance, the vast majority of players around you will still have better gear and a headstart of a couple years on farming AA points.
My pvp level is 4 right now, with the maximum being level 10. If I'm lucky, I can get about 5% of pvp experience per day. That's 20 days of getting my ass kicked and being insulted by everyone on the server to be allowed to buy some epic gloves and bracers. Then I gotta get to pvp level 6 to get my epic leg armor, which will require a little more experience and take a little more time. I will probably start self-harming somewhere halfway to pvp level 7.

If you're good, you can finish even the toughest solo dungeon without raid gear.

There are surveys and forum threads about this, people are trying to find a solution to make pvp more fun and less frustrating to newcomers, without alienating the veterans too much. Nobody is entirely sure how to fix this mess and until they come up with a working solution, I really wouldn't recommend pvp to anyone, unless you actually love getting hurt. And I'm talking one-shots, tea-bagging, people openly threatening to flay you, your dog and your entire family if you ever dare set foot into any pvp-related area again. You can grit your teeth, ignore it, hope for the next level up and gloat over the occasional kill you might get against some other unsuspecting noob, but for the most part, it's just cyber-mobbing.

So, would I recommend coming back if you're level 80, you're not into raids and you're not stupid enough to consider going for pvp gear? YES!
That is, of course, if you've actually stopped at the level cap and you haven't been around for Turan, the F2P transition and possibly even Khitai. And if you don't mind spending a bit of money, because in order to get anywhere at level 80, you won't get around a subscription and buying access to the areas of the expansion and the adventure pack.

One of AoC's biggest highlights are the level-scaling solo instances. Khitai comes with the Forgotten City and the Breach, the former of which had just been added an extra hard 'Unchained'-mode, where baddies are level 83 and drop tons of nice loot, if you can defeat them. In Turan you get to explore Dead Man's Hand and the Isle of the Iron Statues, the latter being an incredibly tough solo instance full of level 84 critters. If you want to see how good your gear and spec really are, this is the place to go. It's harder than any other solo content I have ever seen in this game, but if you try hard enough, it can be done without any raid gear.

If you haven't been to Khitai before, just getting there can be an adventure in itself. If you don't want to pay the fare to get there safe and sound, you will have to earn your spot in a caravan by fighting a giant kraken, diving for lost treasure or cleansing an undead-infested oasis. And even without the dungeons, Khitai is a wild and exciting place to explore. The four adventure-zones are chock-full of solo quests, most of which are repeatable, so you may raise your standing with certain factions and unlock sexy new armor or even a brand new battle pet or a mount. Stealing a tiger cub and teaching it how to hunt can be a lot more exciting than just clicking a tame hotkey on any random monster.

Of course none of this comes without a certain MMO-esque grind-factor and a certain amount of repetition. At some point you will know all of the solo dungeons, you will know all the quests around Khitai and you'll end up repeating them only for tokens to obtain better gear, that cool wolf pet or a big tiger to ride around on. But that will happen to you, no matter whether you're a pvp-nut, a raid fanatic or the proverbial lone wolf. At some point, you will end up repeating content in order to unlock some sexy new reward. The carrot on a stick.

The nice thing about AoC is that even as a solo player, you still get that carrot if you want it. If you don't want to do heroic dungeons, raids and pvp on WoW, the game ends at the level cap. On AoC, you become stronger and stronger by earning AA points, you get the fun, repeatable solo-dungeons, which also serve as a cool benchmark for testing new gear and specs and you get Khitai's epic adventure zones. And with a dungeon finder and a pvp revamp on the horizon, using all this content to warm up and relight the old flame a bit isn't such a bad idea. And if none of that works for you, there's always gratuitous violence and tits.

"Wish you were here!"

-Cat