Raiding in Age of Conan

[Fraktal]

"
Raiding

Raiding in Age of Conan will be fairly familiar to players of previous MMOs, as the player cap is 24 members per raid, and the raid content will be designed to have players progress through multiple tiers of difficulty. Initially there will be 8 raid dungeons in total, with 21 raid encounters, as well as other events that may play out during the progress of clearing a dungeon. Gaute Godager mentioned that these are "encounters" that can be made up of multiple bosses per-encounter.

These dungeons will be split up into three tiers of difficulty; three for Tier one, three for Tier Two, and two for Tier Three. There's also a bit of linear progression through the difficulty tiers; unlocking one of the dungeons in Tier Two will require you to defeat a Tier One dungeon, and unlocking one of the Tier Three dungeons will require the defeat of a boss in a Tier Two dungeon. Of course, there's also item progression that will require sticking with a tier of difficulty longer than one clear as well; Funcom expects there to be well over 200 hours worth of raid content in the game at launch, with a dungeon typically taking 2 1/2-3 hours for an experienced raid group who has done the dungeon before.

Finally, these dungeons will all be instanced, with lockout timers which are currently set to one week, meaning once you've been locked into a dungeon, that's what you'll zone into each time for a week -- giving you ample learning time to conquer each dungeon and tier before they reset. The good news is that Funcom is also going to be saving the state of the dungeon, and most of the monsters will not respawn for that week once they've been killed -- meaning that for the most part, you'll only have to kill each particular trash monster or boss encounter once a week and then you're done with it.

During our tour around the Funcom office we had the opportunity to meet and chat with many of the members of the Funcom team -- everyone from the folks who do all of the motion capture for animations, the sound director, members of "strike teams" who are teamed up to work on specific areas of the game like 1-40, end-game raiding, PvP, mounted combat, etc., and the folks who are working on the Cheetah 2 improvements and additions for the Dreamworld graphics engine.
"

My source (http://aoc.curse.com/articles/details/5570/)

[Fraktal]

"
Siegeing

There are two kinds of player-run city in the game. The crafted villages that we talked about above, and the kind that will keep major guilds fighting each other for land. The PvP village.

For those who can remember back to the Games Convention in Leipzig last year, the guys at Funcom unveiled a new feature: Siege PvP. You can check out the video of that presentation here.

In a nutshell, I find that the best way to think of the Siege PvP is to think about playing an RTS. In an RTS, you almost invariably end up staging at least one major attack on the stronghold of your enemy. He defends it, while you use your armies to attack. Now, imagine if each of those units on your RTS map were controlled by an individual player, filling a number of roles from working a siege engine to defending the engines of destruction from attacking defenders to using your Mammoth to knock down the walls.

The objective of Siege PvP combat for the attacking force is to take the opposing team’s Keep, which is located at the heart of the PvP city. There are two layers of walls between the attackers and their objective, not to mention any number of players on the side of the defending guild (including mercenaries) who might stand in the way.

The objective for the defending force is pretty self-explanatory. Keep the attacking force from defeating your keep. Obviously though, this task isn’t as open-ended as a real siege, and a time limit of 90 minutes is placed on the battle. If the defenders can hold off the attackers for at least that long, they win the battle.

Reading the details of this set-up does bring a few questions to mind. Most notably in how a guild could possibly have their PvP city defended 24 hours a day. In real life, places like that would have 24/7 defenders, but in the world of MMOs, where many people work a 9-5, how will your town be defended when your level 80 Barbarian leader is reading inter-office memos? Simple, battles over PvP cities will be arranged in advance, and will only be attackable during specific hours of the day.

Other Rules

* An attacking force which fails to take the keep may not attack again for at least two days
* Each Guild will be limited to one PvP village and one town.
* While guilds are limited in the number of PvP cities they may own, there is no limit to the number they can destroy.
* There will be a limited number of PvP cities available on each server.
* Each team may use between eight and nine siege weapons.

"

My source (http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/gameId/191/setView/features/loadFeature/1720)

[Raspbuten]

My only critique is that the more "rules" they drop (how many days between fighting, how many siege engines you can bring) causes more items to balance.

Other than that, this sounds like the AoC I wanted to play back last summer. If they hold up to delivering this, I'll definitely be there.

[Faelor]

All interesting, but I still want to see it. I just don't want to see another Helm Graphics situation.

[Tearofsoul]

I am READY!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Fraktal]

I am READY!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My interest for AoC just went up drastically again.

I am ready for May 20th!

[Abigor]

Helm Graphics?