You Want Me To Go Where?!

Now I remember what I didn't enjoy about Age of Conan: the focus on questing. You barely get any XP from doing anything EXCEPT for finishing quests. What keeps drawing me back to EverQuest II is that its viable to advance your character in MANY ways: I can quest and earn regular XP, I can camp mobs for regular XP, and I can earn AA XP by mentoring low level players, hunting nameds, and exploring. Whereas in Age of Conan, I feel like I'm on rails because the only truly viable way to advance is by questing.

Unfortunately, this feeling is exacerbated by the fact that Age of Conan's quests tend to send you half way across the world and back. It's like the worst of EverQuest II quest design (a typical EQ2 quest: run around five different zones and collect four different things from the four corners of each zone) and the worst of World of Warcraft quest design (quest chain after quest chain after quest chain after boring, stupid christmas tree laden NPC hub after hub) mixed together. Except the NPCs in AOC all wear skirts.

On the other hand, Dungeons and Dragons Online has a focus on quests/missions, but I always enjoyed that there. I guess the dungeon crawl just works better for me than hailing a random skirt, running to a different zone, and then to the opposite side of that zone, then killing some random sort of dangerous wildlife that terrorize the land of MMOs.

Still, I am having fun. And, so far, I've only been soloing, which is hardly the full experience AOC has to offer. So maybe I'll have to find some time to be less anti-social, and see how the community is, and maybe try a dungeon or two in AOC. At least for the couple of weeks before DDO goes F2P and I get distracted by that.

Unfortunately, since my main is still young, having unsubscribed after launch at level 27 (now 28), I'm not even sure what there is that I can do at my level range?