The Spirit Realm

Has a class called the "Bear Shaman", has been described as a cross between Shaman and Paladin.

Not much activity on general site: http://forums.ageofconan.com/forumdisplay.php?f=1
Not much activity on existing class site: http://aocshaman.com/

AOCShaman site poofed, looks like.

some of the screenshots look pretty nice

Any one playing Open beta?

I will try it out any way..

Nanick

I'd love to... I was waaaaay into Conan and Doc Savage in high school, but I don't have time to play Vanguard, and really not enough time to play EverQuest as much as I'd like! Still, I might just, you know, try it out...

BTW, the new AOC newsletter is out:

http://funcom.cachefly.net/WebFiles/New ... nt=issue16

Pleasantly suprised my account is still in tact on The Spirit Realm... Haven't visited since I cancelled EQ accounts a couple of years ago

Thanks Sam for keeping the boards alive I can't tell you how much this board helped me to understand the Shaman of EQ.

Anyway, anxiously awaiting my retail version of AoC. Looking forward to trying out the Bear Shaman to re-kindle that fire. I dabbled in Vanguard for a bit (playing a Shaman of course), but it just wasn't as fun as EQ was.

Not sure what server I'll be playing on, but leaning towards Thog, so if anyone steps over Aikoiko's corpse, be sure to say hello

If aocshaman.com stays down, and we need Shaman forums... I'm good with that.

Funcom has revealed a record breaking number of pre-orders for its upcoming MMO Age of Conan, says GamesIndustry.biz.

Pre-orders of the MMO's collector's edition have been strong enough to cause the title to completely sell out, despite a second print run to keep up with demand, selling in total around 111,000 units.

The demand has been so high that 700,000 copies of the game will be shipped to retailers for day one sales, and Funcom has announced it will be unable to fulfill all pre-orders in some markets due to current server limitations.

"Everyone in Funcom is delighted and humbled with the historical pre-order numbers for Age of Conan," said Morten Larssen, Funcom's sales and marketing boss.

"If the information we have is correct, they represent the highest pre-order number for any global launch of an original PC game, ever, including the original World of Warcraft launch."

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=141099

I've got Barm the Cimmerian Bear Shaman up to level 36 and it really is a fun game. The UI is awful and there are bugs galore but I'm still having a blast. AoC shaman are definitely battle-priests. In fact, you need to be slugging it out to proc the heals to keep your group healthy.

Back in EQ, one of my favorite times was farming the cyclopses on that island in the Ocean of Tears. Pull with slow, dot, and slug it out with a Barbarian's Spiritist Hammer, proc'cing Winter's Roar like mad while enjoying crazy regen.

In AoC, you cast a heal over time, wail away with a big honking hammer, and furiously set up combos for mad damage and heal procs. The shaman is a tough character to bring down, even with multiple mobs on you. You can keep a group healed while dishing out impressive dps and, since heals are directional, you don't have to frantically target a dying teammate.

It feels good to hear the snow crunching under my boots again.

Cheers,
Barm

OK, I wanted to come back with an update at a post-honeymoon level 57.

I'm far less enthusiastic.

If you are considering this game, I strongly recommend waiting a good six months to a year. There's an appalling amount of content that just doesn't work. It started off well with the first 20 levels full of highly polished quest with superb voice acting, gorgeous graphics and an innovative combat system. After leaving the noob zone of Tortage quests are silent and WoW-like. Goals show as an X on your map so there's not much mystery involved. Run to the X, click the shimmering object. Done.

My biggest complaint is the sense of advancement doesn't keep pace with actual leveling. For instance, trade skills and city building are broken/non-existent. Feats (think WoW talents), spells, and attack combos are just rehashes of earlier abilities and many are pure placebo. Skills, stats, and armor appear to have no effect at all. Dump 700 points into running speed and you wont feel any quicker. Certainly nothing like the thrill of getting SoW at level 9 in EQ.

Like WoW, they have normal mobs and elites. A recent patch causes elites far below your level to kick your ass. This bothers me because if you remove the sense of progress from an RPG you're left with a paper-doll simulator. Speaking of which, damn I wish gear upgrades were more exciting. Oh these boots have .01 percent more defense than my old ones? Yay. They look just like my old ones.

The Good
Visually stunning word
Good character creation options.
Fast pace, innovative combat
All classes can solo
Lots of quests
Rich lore derived from Howard's stories.

The Bad
Graphics run poorly even on beefy machines
Combat grows stale and combos become annoying to execute as the number of keystrokes increase
Dungeons are tiny, few, and, for some level ranges, far between.
The UI sucks. EQ's did more in 1999.
The emote system sucks. It's easier to drive to your friend's house and pantomime.
Tradeskills are botched.
Crowd control is shallow/non-existent. Knocking a guy his ass for three seconds = CC.
Leveling is way too easy.
No death penalty. People use death as a form of travel.
Lots of zoning.
Everything is instanced, including towns. You often find groupmates in the wrong one.
Multiple patches per week have everything in a state of flux.
Spells lack variety. Complete absence of utility spells.
Many, many bugs.

Thanks for the update, Barm.

http://funcom.cachefly.net/WebFiles/New ... nt=issue17

News.

it sounds like one of those titles that pushes people to buy new pcs

thanks for the update, i was considering buying a box but now ill wait

Interesting follow-up, Barm.

I'm curious about whether other EQ people have tried AoC and what they've thought of it so far. To my mind, it's fairly WoW-like, but then, most things are these days. WoW got a lot of things right to appeal to the masses.

Been playing AoC a bit and so far it seems to be the only MMO released since EQ that I would consider leaving EQ for. Some things are buggy, but what newly releasaed MMO has ever been perfect on release. Some things are WoWish, but the game is far from being WoW. I couldn't play WoW for more than 3 days before getting tired of it.

As far as machines that can handle it, I currently have a Pentium D 3GHz / 2 GB RAM / GeForce 7600 GS and I get up to 42 FPS. It's not a strong machine by current standards at all, but tweak some of the video options and it runs very well.

so i decided to check this out last night, and let me first say two important things, be prepared for an hour long patch, and make sure you have TWENTY GIGS worth of space for the software lol. So after all that, i got on, made an assasin, a demonlogist, a bear shaman, and a guardian ( i play a tank, i was curious ;p ). first thing i notice about the game, well, it looks nice. then the next thing was, hey, this is a weird combat system. my up right and left arrow keys corresponded with attacks, left hand, right hand, frontal, and then ( with the assasin, and probably all melee ) there were combo abilities ( as you level ) which require an arrow key press after being hit. so you may hit a 1 and then a little icon would come up flashing indicating the left arrow was needed, then if you hit that youll fire off the combo. with casters i havent seen any such combos yet, seems to be straightforward.

the character creation process deserves to be mentioned, you have the option of pure randomized, or micromanaged adjustments of every part of the body, meaning chest, torso, arms, etc. there's the standard fare faces only this time they're tied to different characteristics, say, chivalric, greedy, etc, and the face kinda corresponds, you can kinda see the tie. tattoos and scars course, as well as choice of race, the egyptianish caster centric one, the barbarianish melee centric one, then the middle ground ( i think ) more benevolent and more everquest-humanish of the three.

some of the classes have cool names, like the whole bear shaman deal, and DEMONOLOGIST! ( i had to make one ;p ). was interestin to note only the barbarianish race could be made into a bear shaman. i suppose there were three priests, one for each religious persuasion, i guess each race has their own god. there's a bit of info on that sorta stuff in the little booklet that comes out the box, and im sure on the site as well the same infos printed.

so yeah, you start out washed ashore, your ships sunk and you lived. yer advised by a mystery powerful guy, who tells ya to go kill yer slaver in order to buy yer freedom. and so you set off on a series of quests that take place upon a pirate isle. there's a kinda neat storyline surrounding the local town.

i've only played just the one night, i'll probably log in again tonight and check it out. so far, entertaining. there are some complaints though. at times it'll freeze up, and there's popups galore asking for downloads of windows updates and driver updates. this thing wants your pc fully updated, and this's a computer that'll run eq better than most. there's also the matter of the 20 gigs, it takes ALOT of space, im sure eq takes about that much too, but still hah, be prepared. Then within the levels it seems to be that so far your path is limited, you'll have a straight and narrow surrounded by trees and full of dead ends. its real obvious which direction they want you to head and there certainly are alot of boundaries. of course this was primarily in the tutorial and the starting city ( i havent made it yet past level 10 ) but still, its real annoying, its definately not how things were for us back in freeport at level 5, total freedom to roam around and such. nah, this is more of a closed off and compact map set, which then draws comparisons in my mind to diablo. the clearly defined walls, the 3rd person view ( which im not quite sure you can slip out of ) and then the technical glitches that i seemed to experience.

the youtube interviews i checked out made the game sound ALOT better than it seems to be, and this game on the whole doesnt seem like its for me, but im curious enough to log in one more time and try to get past the starting city to see if there are any wide open areas in this game.

A solo full install of EQ takes up about 7.5 gig atm for reference.

The http://aocshaman.com domain registry has expired.