Good evening, fellow Conanians and Funcomians!
I’d like to write a small review to Age of War, Chapter I, so here it is. I write from a single player, PvE perspective. Feedback and discussion welcome!
Legendary Weapons
The update to Legendaries is very welcome. Farming legendaries makes sense again - a small change that makes old content relevant again. Hunting the various overworld bosses is a relaxing after-work activity and rewarding again.
I’m not sure if I all changes are well-balanced, but haven’t found anything out of bounds so far.
Special effects like permanent undead bane coating or a two-handed sword with agility scaling are nice - more would be even nicer!
Some weapons seem to give extra strength or agility. Don’t know if they work - no effect is displayed afaik.
Environment
I’ve noticed some small changes in the environment. For example, in the Warmaker’s Sanctuary, the Servant of the Priest King apparently got a Set altar to actually fit his role instead of the bed he had before. Sweet! Shows a little love for making the world a consistent place.
Thralls
The changes to thralls seem to increase balancing. Dear Funcom, you complety f’ed up my collection of Relic Hunter thralls, buuuuut I like the change anyhow. Some thralls might need some further adjustments, but overall, factions seem more balanced now. Although I like the Relic Hunter faction a lot, it was a bit weird that the strongest thralls in the game were one of the most easily available.
Purge thralls should be buffed a little in my view. Maybe that’ll be irrelevant with the purge changes, but I liked it when collecting purge thralls was a relevant activity as they all gave a little advantage when compared to normal T4 thralls.
Bosses
The lowered HP on bosses is okayish in my view, but we could have lived without it, I think.
From the perspective of a completely overpowered single-player PvE charater, many overworld bosses aren’t very powerful now. Two strong thralls and a shortsword burn through a croc boss like Conan through changes, uhm, his relationships. That is okay, as my character is totally outlevelled for that content, but well, less would have been okay, too.
Thag, however, seems too strong. He still has 25k HP, and though he seems to summon fewer skeletons, he’s a problem now. With two very well equipped, level 20 Cimmerian Berskers with >4k health each, I was barely able to survice him. One berserker hat < 100 HP when the boss fell. Was a bit of a surprise after having all outdoor bosses nerfed like that.
XP
XP from many enemies has been adjusted, e. g. hyenas. Seems much more balanced to me now.
NPC aggro range and placement
The reduction in NPC aggro range and numbers (e. g. black galleon camp) seems unnecessary to me. The nerf in their HP was enough to make fights viable in my view.
In some cases, it’s even pretty annoying. The spider phase in Kurak’s dungeon, for example, gets pretty long and thereby dangerous if you have to personally invite each spider to pretty please come attack you.
Treasure
The idea to collect treasure seems nice. It’s similar to collecting pool statuettes on the Isle of Siptah - that concept was fun, good idea to port it to the Exiled Lands.
Buuuuuut I’m not sure if the treasure values are well thought-through. A heavy treasure item, which needs maybe an hour to find an carry back, gives 450 treasure points. Gold coins, in comparison, are very easy to farm and carry.
Finding treasure is too random for me to properly test that, but so far, it feels it’s easier to farm gold in the volcano or even just pick up coins from chests than finding large treasure items and carry them home.
Stamina
The stamina changes… hu. I like the faster regeneration, but I’m a bit puzzled by the huge increase in stamina costs. I understand the idea behind it, but a bit less of an increase would have been enough for that, I think. With my uncorrupted, no-grit character, two-handed weapons feel unusable now. Maybe that’s intended, but it’s a bit weird.
The weapon balancing kit needs an adjustment. It seems to reduce stamina costs by a flat amount, which is completely irrelevant with the new costs. It reduced stamina costs from 40 to 39 on one weapon I tested. That’s completely useless.
Some weapons may have grandfathered stamina costs. If so, that seems like a dangerous idea for PvP scenarios. I have two weapons from before the patch with suspiciously low stamina costs; at least one seems too powerful compared to other weapons. Haven’t properly tested that against new weapons, however, so maybe they’re “only” unbalanced or grandfather-damage-unbalanced, not grandfather-stamina-unbalanced. Or maybe it is. Who knows. I’ll keep it. It is now my precious.
Battle Pass
Very happy to see the Stygian soldier outfit from the Age of Conan intro return. Haven’t seen it ingame yet, but excited for that. Except for that, the battlepass/store doesn’t hold much appeal to me so far. I bought Crom coins for X amount of money to support the company - now give me something to spend it on! Building sets, armor sets and emotes for thralls would be most welcome, thanks. 
Repair Changes
As weapon/armor degredation is switched off in my game, I cannot comment on that. Yes, that’s how much I liked repairs even before the change. Might be a showstopper for me if I was playing on official servers, though.
Sorcerer NPCs
It’s nice to see that some sorcerer NPCs have learned to use weapons other than daggers.
If I may make a suggestion to further spice them up: Give them some limited sorcery abilities. Maybe 1 in 10 manages to summon a demon or some zombies when combat begins? Or they change into an animal/monster fitting their faction, e. g. a corrupted hyena for Darfaris, a bear for Heirs of the North, a wight for Forgotten Tribe, a serpentman for the Votaries of Skelos and so on. Some simple effects should be possible with unbalancing the game.
Events
Please bring back the event system! Make it optional. Only enable it in single-player. Make us write a poem and send it to Oslo. I don’t care - just bring them back.
If I understand correctly, they created problems on official servers. Okay, understood, may be difficult to fix. But allow us to enable them in the server options for single player and private servers, pretty please!
I probably forgot something, might add that later.
P. S.: Telith’s ghost is still missing.