Age of Conan Patch Finally Arrived – With murderers and criminals

The long expected Patch 3 for Age of Conan is finally out. It introduced some important changes and fixes to trade skills, combat mechanics, massive PVP and GUI functionality, but the most important change is certainly PvP Consequence System.

So, let start with this major update first.

PVP Consequence System

Major new gameplay feature within this update is a new consequence system for PVP or the notoriety system, which aims to bring deeper meaning to PVP and introduce real consequences for your actions. This means that the players will now run the risk of becoming a criminal or even a murderer depending on their actions in PVP.

For example, if you take part in anti-social actions in PVP, which means  picking on weaker players, you will get ‘murder points’. Acquiring those points will eventually change the attitudes of NPCs in the world towards you. Murderers will be outcast from society in new outlaw camps at remote locations in various different playfields. Players with ‘murderer’ etiquette will still have access to vendors and will be able to travel through these camps, but they will be labeled as dangerous individuals.

This label, however, isn’t permanent. It will be possible for those who are labeled to redeem themselves, through solving specific quests to lower their murder points until they receive amnesty and loose the status of a murderer. But, until then, other players can hunt down and kill murderers to punish them for their crimes.
Sounds exciting and refreshing, right? This system will introduce a great new dynamic to PVP gameplay for sure. It depends only on how members are ready to become infamous.


Trade Skills Changes

Another important set of changes is connected with trade skills. Brand new types of armor and weapons are introduced with this update. There are so called ‘Base’, ‘Culture’ and ‘City’ armors and weapons recipes, which give weapon and armor-smiths many new pieces to craft. The recipes for these new items also include new resources that Alchemists, Skinners, Weavers and Woodcutters will have to provide, where working together with other crafters and gatherers is encouraged and even necessary.

Alchemist profession also got an update where the number of alchemy resources and existing recipes has been reduced by about two thirds. This change should make crafting for alchemists much more enjoyable and allow this profession to focus on crafting of specific items and potions.


Combat Updates

There are few significant adjustments to the combat system for this update. Most important are changes in crowd control and combos.

First, crowd control and immunities work have been adjusted. This change will cause players to break stuns, fears, roots, snares and charms when they have lost a certain amount of health. This is introduced in order to give players a fair chance to withstand these spells and fight back.

Newest AoC Patch introduced some changes to combos as well. These changes will affect melee and ranged classes. This means that the damage they deal should merely be distributed more evenly throughout battle than before.
The second change regarding combos is introducing a penalty when player miss with directional combo strikes. This penalty will increase with the number of missed strikes.

Some combos now have reduced number of steps, especially the longer combos, which will give more efficiency to PvP gameplay.

In addition Ranger, Demonologist and Herald of Xotli have all received healing debuff abilities, to make the healing of others less efficient.


GUI Adjustments and Additions

Many changes and improvements to the GUI are added, but the most important are additional possibilities for raid leaders to add and move members from different raid teams, as well as debuffs  and ability to display more detailed information about the team members to show different bars.


Revamp of ‘The Cistern’ Dungeon

Together with various other adjustments to the world design, the major change in the Patch has been done to the dungeon ‘The Cistern’. Listening to the members’ feedback, developers changed this dungeon from a social dungeon into an instance which will give groups the chance to venture there without interruption from other players or groups.
In addition, the dungeon gameplay, including AI, loot and interactive environments, has been improved and new alchemy recipes can be found here as well.


Additional Changes

In addition to the content mentioned above this update also gives many more changes on other topics like massive PVP sieges, mounts, quests, tradeposts, raid encounters, items, etc.


In one of the previous articles we discussed the problems that Age of Conan has, stating that the lack of patch, or to be precise, its constant delaying caused many problems to new and promising game. Hopefully, the Patch came just in time to save the game from disaster.