Thursday, April 16, 2009

Age of Conan - Amphiteater of Karutonia

An excellent instance for Age of Conan in Ymirs Pass, it is considered also the final zone for the area with a complete story within.
Amatheon joined a group to adventure within this noted prison.
Like Guild Wars and LOTRO, there are specific goals, and cutscene drama within, when you complete quests.

Upon entering, we are greeted by a familiar woman

From the trailer that starts the game, we meet the woman known as Keaira. Noted as a "close ally" of Conan, she is here to start us upon the quests regarding a specific creature that is holding the Frost Giant at bay.

As we travel further into the zone, we are met with portals being opened by Black Ring Witches. They are usings demons to guard the entryway to the main location of the Frost Giant. If we do not destroy the portals, demons continue to spew forth


This is not all we must deal with. As further in, we meet up with demons set to guard the witches..

Known as Guardian Fiends, their attacks are powerful, and if hit with even a couple of strokes, you could die. We must keep this one on its toes, and off guard to defeat...

Then we find the ringleader. The Dimensionalist.

As you can probably assume, he is the one who continues to call the Guardian Fiends. This battle was tough due to the fact that we had to split the team to take out the Dimensionalits while keeping the Guardians at bay.

After a long hard fight, the barrier blocking us breaks down and we move further in.

We can finally catch a small glimpse of the Giant, but we do have a quest further within this "prison".
It seems a boss known as the "Hunter" has entrapped some type of lion like creature known as a Vortex Stalker. The Hunter carries a special prize for Rangers, thus we ensure to take this prize from him, as well as defeating his main pet, a VERY large stalker.


Upon its death, we move to our final objective...to free the Frost Father.



Chains in flames entrap the Frost Father, and lurking around the prison of the Father is a creature known as the Devourer. We must engage this creature and force it to dissolve from our realm to free the Frost Father.


We lure the Devourer near the frost giant, as this helps weaken the Devourer. But, he is also not whithout his wiles. He will drain your stamina and mana if you get too close, so you are quite limited in what you can do.


Various members of the group would stand a distance away and keep him occupied or even try to run him off as various warriors came to the front to engage him, then pull back.
Eventually his connection with our realm would fade, then we had time to attack the chains holding the father, and break him free.

Once the Frost Father is free, we are able to engage the Devourer for the final battle, as his hold on the realm is weakened. We must keep the Devourer close to the frost giant to keep him at bay.




Upon the Devourers defeat we have freed the Frost Father.





He is noted to not be pleased that it was "mortals" who freed him, but he stays his hand, and lets us return to our lands once more.

We find out though to Keaira, that this was a test for Conan and herself.
And the reward is a gorgeous cloak (with some great attributes to boot).



There is no doubt that any player should not pass up this final zone. Groups are running this aplenty, so there is no excuse not to go in.
This zone has indeed reminded me of my old days in Guild Wars and how fun the missions were.

Ethalos still has a few levels to go, but he will run it as well.

Hope you enjoyed my Ymir pass phtoto diary...

Cheers

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice pictures. I remember this part from a presentation Funcom did last year in Leipzig...let's just say that Keaira's dialogue at the time was just a placeholder, with references to the Playboy-spread they used her in. We were, sadly, asked to not take photographs of it. :D

Unknown said...

I agree, this is a great instance and the cloak is arguably better than the Black Dragon Cloak you receive from Conan on defeating Vistrix...

I have run it on four different toons and it is a great experience each time :)