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Leveling and Character Development

Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures features 80 levels of character advancement, and every level is reached by gaining experience points through completing quests and killing enemies.

Questing is the primary way of gaining experience, allowing you to see the world and experience the stories of Hyboria while advancing your characters. Killing enemies also provides experience points, and this is based on how difficult the enemy is.

Every time you gain a level, you will have to make a range of decisions that impact your character’s future:

  • Attributes: Your attributes will gain automatically when you gain new levels.
  • Skills: You will gain a certain number of skill points that you can invest in your various skills.
  • Feats: You will gain a certain number of feat points that you can use to buy new feats or strengthen the feats you’ve taken before.
  • Combos: Depending on your character’s class, new combos may become available when leveling up.

Skills

Depending on your character's class you have a set of skills that are either working in the background while you play, or you will have to activate them yourself by using various abilities. When you gain a level you may also gain a set of points you can invest in these skills to make them more potent. You invest skill points through the character window.

Here are some of the most important skills:

  • Perception: Determines how well you observe the environment around you. May allow you to spot hidden enemies or even dangerous traps.
  • Concentration: Determines how prone you are to having your spell canceled if distracted.
  • Hiding: This skill allows you to hide and become invisible to others. A higher skill allows you to hide better and become more difficult to spot.
  • Climbing: Determines the difficulty of objects (such as ladders) and slopes that you can climb. You may climb by using climbing spots in certain areas.
  • Taunt: The higher your skill in taunting, the greater chance of making enemies aggressive towards you. The maximum number of points you can invest in a skill increases as you gain new levels.

Feats

At the core of the character development system in Age of Conan are the feats. This allows you to use points gained when leveling up to give your character new capabilities and more existing ones more potent. It can be compared to the talents system found in other games, usually being a tree-shaped system to display the various talents.

Every character has three feat trees and they can be viewed at any time by clicking the appropriate icon in your interface. There is one general tree specific to your archetype (Soldier, Mage, Priest or Rogue) and two trees specific to your class.

(Above: Dark Templar Depravity feat tree)

Abilities

Last, but certainly not least you will find the combos, the spells and the stances that you will acquire through leveling. As you gain new levels you will be able to find shopkeepers who sell spell scrolls, and some might even be found through adventuring. The stances and combos, however, will be automatically granted to you as you level up.

  • Combos: These are melee combat techniques that you receive as you level up. You perform combos during fights by executing a series of different swings with your weapon, resulting in a fascinating animation and a bigger damage output. It can also lead to other effects, such as stunning your opponent.
  • Spells: It wouldn’t quite be a fantasy role-playing game without it (though Age of Conan is very much a low-fantasy game where magic is terrible and dangerous), and by purchasing spell scrolls or finding them in your adventures you will be able to acquire new spells that you can cast. They are not automatically trained.
  • Stances: To make combat even more interesting we added the stance system which allows you to go into a certain position when fighting. Attacking stances might allow you to do more damage but will also lead to you taking more damage. Then again, a defense stance might work the other way around.

 

(Above: a Barbarian's combo bar.)

Combos and spells can increase in effectiveness, for instance by investing in certain feats. For instance, the Glowing Embers feat for the Demonologist will make the Flamestrike spell do more damage, while the Boiling Blood feat for the Barbarian will make all his Berserk combos do even more devastating damage than usual.

 

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