Age of Conan’s Surprisingly Complex Combat, Pt. 1

I have a feeling most of the people coming to this blog (and “most” is probably only eight or nine people) probably aren’t extremely interested in Age of Conan, but unfortunately for those non-interested readers that have continued reading this extravagantly long sentence—I am interested. Much more interested than I ever expected to be.

Age of Conan’s had a pretty rough start, even if you only believe the most conservative posters on the official forums, and the population has dropped off considerably on the servers I have characters on (but seems to be rising again). I still haven’t completely figured out why I’m so addicted to it when other MMO’s (World of Warcraft, Anarchy Online, Tabula Rasa) became boring so quickly, but I have found something new today that ensures my continued interest for the near future.

Combat in Age of Conan was hyped as something new and original for an MMO, with its combo system that requires the player to complete a short series of timed button presses to pull off the moves. In World of Warcraft and the newly released Warhammer Online, you press one button for a combo and watch the animation unfold, but in Age of Conan you press more than one, and are sometimes rewarded with a gory fatality animation. The system is enjoyable, though seemingly simple, and I still find myself entertained as I repeat the same patterns over and over again, waiting for the arterial spray, but I realized (or thought I did) that it was sort of gimmicky. That it didn’t add an enormous amount of depth to MMO combat.

When I started my assassin character, Tiresias, I decided to actively hunt other players. After all, Funcom has finally gotten part of the PVP patch onto the Live servers that allows subscribers to gain PVP experience when they kill another player. Using my character’s hiding ability and attacking from behind, I was able to work up a Kill-Death ratio of about 15-2. Now, however, as my character enters her 30′s, I’ve begun to get my ass handed to me. Repeatedly. Last night a ranger six levels my junior hunted me across Khopshef Province and killed me three times in a row and I couldn’t even get close enough to hit them.

So I decided to do a little research into my class and figure out what I was doing wrong. I expected to pick up a few tips from the forums, maybe even specific strategies for destroying rangers, but I found so much more. The forums are chock full of videos demonstrating an array of techniques that I would never have imagined.

For starters, I typically stand relatively still unless my foe is running away (or I am). I already knew that circle-strafing was a technique in other MMO’s, but using it properly would mean giving up my current method of clicking everything with the mouse and just moving with the keyboard, which sounded like a lot of work. Key-binding all of my abilities and switching movement to the mouse is just the beginning though. Each of the systems unique to Age of Conan add a layer of complexity to its combat that elevates it beyond the standard MMO.

I’m going to split this into a two-part post since I’ve gotten fairly long-winded. That way everyone still reading can decide whether they’ve heard enough at this point, or would like to continue on and read a more detailed analysis of what makes Age of Conan’s combat an intimidatingly difficult, yet fascinating, system that rivals actual fighting games.