Age of Conan Official Strategy Guide Review

The official Age of Conan strategy guide fails to deliver and is full of insufficient and out dated information from the Age of Conan Beta.

Age of Conan has a lot of minute details from crafting to quests to building your city to a variety of common and not-so-common ideas in MMOs. I had pre-ordered this book before the game came out and after spending time in beta. Basically, my intent in the purchase was to have a one-stop-shop for things like the crafting system, how to go about building a guild city, where to get quests, maps of areas and, at the end, information concerning the raids.

This book has basically none of that.

Classes

Let's start with the classes. This book spends a good deal of time presenting feat trees, class skills, etc. but it never does a good job of dissecting the information. After reading this book, you will know nothing that you didn't know prior to reading your skilllist and feat trees. The skills are simply taken word for word. So if you're wondering what exactly that particular feat does or if it's worth it, this book will not help you.

It also uses image placeholders instead of the actual spells at times. For instance, all of the beta placeholders for summoning minions are intact...meaning there's no picture. Just a little dash. With a lot of the pictures and content looking like it's from beta, I wonder if the spells themselves aren't different since I've noticed changes moving from closed beta to release.

Zones

There's a lot of details here concerning Tortage and the beginning levels. After that, you're given a few pages per zone...but not every zone is here! It breaks it down to Cimmeria (Conall's Valley and Fields of the Dead), Aquilonia (Old Tarantia, Noble District and Tesso...along with a couple of the instanced zones) and Stygia (Khemi and Khopshef). Obviously there's more zones than those above for questing. There's a ton of content that's not even here! Where's the higher level areas like Eiglophian Mountains? Or the resource areas, for Crom's sake?

Quests

The zones that are actually included in the book have a quest breakdown, but the information isn't really very user-friendly. They list the name of the quest and if there's a quest prerequisite. They don't list the level you can get the quest, what the rewards are, or anything, you know, useful. Complete waste of time, you're better off exploring the world and discovering them on your own than you are reading the name of the quest.

Crafting

Here's the area I had most hope for. And it's the only area where it does above a crappy job...it even verges on mediocre! The Strategy Guide breaks down the five crafting professions and tells you what you can create during each of the crafting levels. Good so far. It even tells you the names of the crafting levels. Then it gives the "helpful" advice that you move between the crafting levels based on your level, not on spamming the recipes like in most MMOs...but it doesn't tell you when those levels are. It doesn't say, for instance, that you can start crafting at level 40. Or that you can start harvesting the first two tiers at 20, but you don't rank up until level 50.

Additionally, while it does tell you what you can make at each crafting level, the book doesn't always explain what it takes to make things. For instance, as an architect you can draw up plans to create your guild city. You'd know this, though, by playing the game. Once you've drawn your plans, I would think you'd like to know how many joists, for example, it takes to build a keep. Won't find that information here. No sir. It'll tell you how much Ash goes into making one joist (10, in case you're wondering), but it won't tell you how many joists (among other parts) make a keep. Useless.

End Game Content

Finally, those looking forward to participating in end game raids, the Border Kingdom's fierce PvP, sieging or other PvP minigames will discover this book doesn't even mention them. There's no talk about the raids. No mention of the Border Kingdoms, nor sieging. There's a "PvP Primer" of sorts based around PvP minigames but that is absolutely not helpful.

The end.

This books is absolutely useless, a complete waste of $17 or $25 or however much you end up spending on it. It doesn't have one piece of information that's helpful. It's incomplete and feels completely rushed (with is ironic, since it was supposed to come out three weeks ago), lacks crucial information, doesn't address any content after level 40 or so and completely ignores end game content. I have never seen a strategy guide this incompetent.

Do not waste your money on this product.
Read full Story

Source / Author / Credit: Anonymous