I’m still having fun playing Age of Conan. However, one glaring issue stares me in the face every few minutes. AoC has the worst itemization I’ve ever seen in a game. I mean it is so bad, it’s like a room of monkeys randomly put stats on the items, and I don’t mean just the gear. The consumables don’t make much more sense either.
What am I supposed to think when a randomly dropped level 1 item is superior to a Quest Reward that was red to me at level 13???? Sometimes I laugh at the drops from the higher level mobs and quest rewards. Other times it’s rather insulting and it minimizes the achievement. When I’ve walked through brimstones at my level to complete a quest and I’m not a quest oriented person, it irks me to look at the reward say, “WTF is this useless piece of crap,” and walk away still wearing the same lower level stuff. It’s disheartening for someone that is trying to stick with the quests to get a bit of the lore.
Are there better drops in the instances? I heard that only the boss drops loot and that only happens if it’s on Epic? Can anyone verify that claim? I did read a post that they are going to be pushing out new/updated items in roughly two weeks. I hope that means fixing not only the sets in the instances but also doing something to increase and improve the quality of the world drops as well.
I’m not looking for a gear dependant game like World of Warcraft. I just need reasonable distinctions across the levels and where/how the item was acquired – random mob drops passable items, named boss drops decent items, quest rewards give quality items, instanced drops give quality items, instanced bosses drop best gear, Destiny quests give best gear for level. Something along those lines, then decide where crafted items belong in the scheme. I’m sure someone did think about the itemization. It just doesn’t feel like they thought about it enough or ever mapped it out statistically, to see if what they devised made any sense.
So much of this game reminds me of Asheron’s Call 2, where I loved the subtle variations on the gear. I enjoyed how they add multiple versions of the same item at the same level. However they varied the stats so that classes could choose the item that best fit their skill set and play-style. I remember farming for very specific versions of staffs, bows and robes, and trading among guild-mates. I fondly recall dropping the versions you didn’t want in the Guild Hall for others to use. Can someone else PLEASE implement that level of persistence besides EVEOnline!
Last night I was so sick of looking at my level two 2H Blunt weapon, that I bought one off the vendor. It wasn’t great and cost me my very little tin. But I was sick of getting crap weapon rewards that were worse than the level two plank of junk on my back. I’m on the third iteration of my Bear Shaman having re-rolled on Wiccana (first was PVP which I hated the FFA, then went PVE server with my son) to join up with the TTH folks. My second BS has a sweet weapon but I don’t remember where the hell it came from. I’ve done so many toons at this point it’s all melding together in my head.
