Friday, July 10, 2009

Age of Conan - The family that plays together...

Lops off heads and limbs...hehe

This week saw a new convert to MMO's in general...my son. He got the itch after having a blast in Aion this past beta.
He has been mainly a Halo player, and Call of Duty. But, I also see the wheels grind as he seems more intelligent than someone who just sits and mindlessly shoots...
I saw this excitement and intelligence and tried to build on it by having him try Guild Wars and then Age of Conan.

Conan won out after some initial issues.

He got his account for only 10 bucks, with a free 30 days through an online service. A Good deal in my opinion. He immediately went to work on a Demonologist after an initial hiccup in the arena of melee (melee scary is the thought I felt from him)..

The spellcaster was a win.

But, we needed that final party member...the wife, who just when we were ready to order time cards, Funcom opens up the "Return for 14 days" trials for original subscribers. To top this off, they offered a deal for 20% if you bought a scrip right away. So basically, the wife got her account started for 12 bucks for 44 days.

I still have 25 left on mine.

The team now consists of Xerthes, my heal PoM, Shanrethe, the Conqueror and Colthair, the Demo!

We each started separately. We leveled our characters to the main city, and then started doing evening quests up to level 10. We finally took off to quest together at that level and hit our snag...

Each of our classes are TOO effective early on. The Demo can annihilate multiple enemies with a wave of his hand, the wife, who created a conqueror dual wields death, and I am the healer...who, uh, heals pitifully thanks to the last heal nerf (when you see + 2HP regen for a Heal over Time for people with 500 to 600 HP...there is a problem).

We walked all over quests, and the wife even gave up trying to kill anything as it was dead before she got to it.

Then we got crazy.

All 3 of us entered EPIC mode on the same zone we were in. The Acheronian Ruins.

This proved to be a major challenge now, and we were downed several times...but, we started to work strats. My son really got the hang of kiting, and the wife tanked her heart out.
My heals...uh, were ineffective. Luckily, I was able to do damage though and stayed on the main tanks mob, and helped down it quicker.

We felt like a 3 person raid, and we saw some potential here. With effective armor, food, and lots of pots, we may just have created a killer team for our future fun.

Our issue is the main questing seems too...easy. I am rethinking this now of how we can quest AND do it together and have fun.

Three zones exist where we can enter them as EPIC, so I am thinking we will regroup, and attack White Sands until we level. By entering as EPIC, we also have a good chance at some killer drops. The Acheronian run netted each of us gear and weapons we could use. Money was much higher from drops as well.
White sands is lower level than Acheronian Ruins, so this may be a more effective zone to level in.

So, our first day of about an hour and a half of adventure has us discussing and strategizing our hearts out.

The fun factor was quite high, and we are ready for some more

I will try to share the adventures of the trio as we proceed...

For now...Cheers!

2 comments:

Sharon said...

This is great! I recently did the "Return for 14 days" thing also, and I've been debating having my daughter jump in with me, so I enjoyed reading about your experiences playing as a family! Please keep sharing how it goes. :) You're making me want to go sign her up right now...hehe.

Verrence said...

My wife and I have levelled two pairs of toons to 80 and have 3 or 4 others in the pipeline. Questing is a lot of fun when you are sitting in the same room and can yell at each other to pick up a mob or to stop hitting the stunned target etc :)

Highly recommended

V.