Last night a group of us pushed our way through Toirdealbach's Tomb. We had a lot of fun, which we tend to do, but I was disappointed as an example of Age of Conan's dungeons.

For starters, I hate fast respawns as a difficulty mechanic, and the respawn rate in there was insane. Twice, a guard literally reappeared immediately after killing it. All of the patrols would respawn behind us, there was no time to rest.

Next, when we got to the last boss, I was pretty sure we were going to wipe since I'd heard Toirdealbach is ramped up for ~ level 60 and our highest group member was level 56. We did wipe, Toirdealbach was nasty. The problem is, she ran all the way to the starting spawn point in the dungeon to kill us while we rezzed and of course, as you can expect, the whole thing ended in a respawn zerg.

It wasn't something we'd done intentionally, but afterwards it left a nasty sour taste in my mouth. Intentionally repeating that behaviour would be openly exploitive. Not the zerg itself per se, but the way it dragged the end boss all the way to the start. I'm sure some players might have a different take on this, being that it's Funcom's bug, but taking advantages of bugs for gain is one definition of exploiting. I'm pretty anal about this stuff, I like to enjoy a game as it's intended, so I did report the bug after we were done.

This morning's patch from Funcom brought in two fixes which would have made our experience better (I hope):

I'll probably go back after a few levels and see if it's more enjoyable.