Age of Conan - Patch notes and expectations

Wednesday is the first major content patch, along with some major overhauls of the systems in place in AoC. I wanted to review some of these here...(complete notes at this link)

NEW DUNGEONS

• Cradle of Decay is a level 43 group instance which can be accessed through the Field of the Dead.
• The Slaughterhouse Cellar is a level 80 single player instance located in Thunder River just south of the palisades area.
• Xibaluku is a level 80 group instance located in Thunder River on the prison island. There is a quest pre-requisite to enter this area. You can begin this quest by speaking to General Lupercus in Thunder River. (This quest will send you into the The Slaughterhouse Cellar to obtain items).
• Black Ring Citadel, Wing 3 is a level 80 raid instance that can now be accessed from Kheshatta between the entrances to Wing 1 and Wing 2.

A sore subject for some has been endgame content. The bosses that were present had several bugs in the encounters as well, so to do anything endgame became difficult (but not impossible, as several major raids were being done on a regular basis..). Along with the major content added above (I love that all areas were covered...solo, small group, large group), but the bugged encounters have now been fixed. This means twice as much endgame material.

But, this is not all for endgame..

PVP/ MASSIVE PVP

• This update introduces a new type of crafting resources. These new resources can be found in Border Kingdoms, Cimmerian End. The resources are used to build and repair battlekeeps and player shave a chance to drop them when they die in PvP. The recipes required can be found in the NPC camps located in this playfield.

Basically PvP endgame become a loot drop instance (but only resources). This makes for a competitive zone with players working to gather these resources through conflict. This makes the PvP system an admirable play style.
Now, there were complaints about issues with the PvP system due to some exploits in the overall scheme. These issues have been fixed...including splash damage exploits and guard exploits for low/high level encounters.
Many more fixes as well in PvP. Enhancements to PvP minigames has also been done with an overhaul of the interface and join system for those who wish to PvP on a PvE server.

Quite a few class balance changes have been done, UI changes, and..one of my personal favorites for this patch...

ITEMS

• Treasure Chests throughout Hyboria have been improved and filled with more loot!

This is also noted as being a rather large patch, which should make repairs to clients if they have crashed and a new checking tool for finding client corruption issues to prevent re-downloading patches which would happen on rare occasions.

This is the first MAJOR patch for Funcom, and I will be watching to see how this progresses. Previous patches had caused issues when Gaute was on board as no QA seemed to be going on. Craig is a whole different player here, and is more concerned about AoC's health. This should be great stuff.

I have Craig's twitter in my Blog list on the right (Silirrion), and hopefully we should see updates from him on a regular basis.

Excitement is an understatement today...so I will be playing later today and hopefully get some more info to you.

Cheers