Back into Age of Conan, frustrated w/ SWG

So I'm getting back into Age of Conan, a little at a time. Slith's Assassin's Hideout, Hyboria Revisited, relistening to the Hyborian Herald, the guild forum for "Company of Shadows", etc. I've been through (most of the way) as a Tempest of Set and Barbarian, and a little way as a Dark Templar, all on the Wiccanna server. I've got to say that, while I've heard good things re:ToS's, the Barb is still my class. I just could not reliably run w/o dying as a ToS. As a barbarian, it's bring it on.

First things first, pre-order/whatever pack claims FTW. Each toon I create will get the same items available to it, unlike SWG wear you can usually claim a reward once / account. In this case, I'm grabbing (to start w/) some jewelry w/ minor xp buffs and nice weapons, along w/ a double xp potion that lasts for 12 hours. Yeah, 12 hours.....of game time, not clock time. So even though I've popped one on both my ToS and my Barb, I've got 8 hours left on the ToS, and 10 on the Barb, b/c I've only been in game for that long. W/ double xp potions, Tortage should take one about 2-3 hours, supposedly. For me it looks like, 3-5 hours is more likely, depending upon class.

One other thing to note, so far I've been running AoC in DX10 all the time. It's ridiculous how good it looks and how good the performance is, especially compared w/ 7 year old SWG which gets 1/4 of the performance on max settings, 1/2 on low, and still lags like crap in 10 person pvp in Bestine.

Along that SWG front, I've finally completed my Dire Fate jewelry set, thanks J'ack and RSE/folks on Shadowfire, for my last EK run. Probably the best EK run I've ever been a part of. Or up there (top 3). On Radiant, I'm tired of running star map every day just to get filler, tired of reading folks on the forums cry because they believe they've been handicapped at a pvp event (despite the fact that they won easily), and tired of not knowing wtf happened to my house which had enough maintenance, but has disappeared from Naboo.

Well, that's enough for now. Still to come for me: figuring out if I can help Slith get his podcast in a place that I can download it to my Zune, figuring out if I can get a AoC Blackberry Messenger group going, and getting my Barbarian out of Tortage and into Khitai. Feel free to check my twitter for a BBMessenger image for the AoC group if that's your thing (http://twitter.com/redheadedtim)