Well, you're right.  It certainly is very short.

The Pact system is designed so that power leveling is not really possible.  I've read on their main site that you can only establish the Pact between two new characters, and furthermore you are not generating extra xp, its simply that half of what each character earns goes to the other character.  The total xp needed to gain levels has not changed.  If one character was not being played, the other would need to earn double to reach 50.

The game is great, I've always liked it.  But I won't be returning with this new expansion for the same reason I left:  lack of groups.  I hate to solo and could never seem to find a regular group to play with in Everquest 2.  I played it starting at launch, solid for the first couple of years and then on and off til a few months ago, and only once during that time did I manage to join a decent, active guild.  Everyone I know IRL plays WoW, which I don't care for.  But everytime I join a new guild, it seems to be dying and on its way out, and too many people play only with the family or group of friends they already know, which leaves me always LFG.  I once spent an entire week LFG with my wizard that left me totally demorarlized about the game.  I would suspect that I'm just really, really bad about meeting people, but I can logon to City of Heroes and be in a full group in mere moments despite that game having far fewer players, so I think its something about EQ2 itself that creates this problem for me.  I have nothing but praise for the game itself, its really grown over time, but if my only choice is soloing then I'll just stick with a game that doesn't have a monthly fee.

Oh, and don't forget to back the pet off before casting mez.  Put the pet control Back Off in your hotbar.

I've had great luck running my wizard with an illusionist.  If you include the illusionist personae (a kind of pet) then you have access to 3 roots and 3 stuns.  And  as long as you avoid using dot attacks, the illusionist is always free to mez should roots break (the illusionist has 3 mezzes, and the two single target ones can even be cast while moving!)  Have the illusionist get the Time Compression skill early on so that he can put it on the wizard to have the big nukes back up quicker.  The wizard brings heavy damage and the illusionist brings medium damage with excellent control; he covers the wizard's one weakness, which is the break-prone root.  Illusionist root is so powerful, in fact, that will often use dot attacks on non-Heroic mobs.  For heroic targets, avoid dot attacks, just double root, have wizard cast Ice Shape and Frostgift buffs and the illusionist cast his skill and Int buffs, and nuke fast; when root breaks mez and wait for heavy nukes to come back up.  Easy once you get the hang of it!

I've been playing steadily but let my sub run dry for a month so I could switch back to play City of Heroes a bit.  Getting tired of CoH already, and I come here and see this.  My EQ2 account ran out on June 6, so of course the game tells me I have no account.  I look on SOE's account info page and it shows 54 days like for everyone else, but the account is Pending.  It seems you had to be unsubscribed exactly on April 30th to get the free time.  Long time players are indeed screwed over.  I was going to re-up until I saw all this and realized I might get some free time, and now that I see I'm omitted due to bueacracy I'm thinking I won't re-up at all.

I agree with the OP that this is strange and annoying, and I say this as a now-paying customer for AoC.  I can't access the forums, it won't let me log in.  It doesn't recognize my password, and when I tried password recovery it says it doesn't recognize my e-mail address.  If it didn't keep people out I would at least be able to read the forums, so wth?  I had similar weirdness when I put in my key to activate the game, it kept telling me it didn't recognize, though it apparently did as I can log onto the game.  They need to work on their website or something, its very user-unfriendly and its starting to annoy me greatly.

This is very distressing, I had not realized how bad it was for mages.  I was going around noon to get a copy of the game, and now I find myself rethinking the whole thing.  I always play mages, the 'blaster' or 'caster' archtypes- I like the flash, and I could be a priest, soldier or theif in real life haha, and so mage represents the most fun for me, generally.  I'm coming from EQ2, though I haven't bothered logging in hardly in the last 2 months.  I have one of every caster there and though I've grown bored if Age of Conan makes mages even less soloable the other games tend to do, I don't see myself playing very long, or at all really

Never in 10 years?  I promise I'm not making it up, or anything:

www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php

www.wowwiki.com/Multiboxing

forums.station.sony.com/eq2/search/search.m

www.g4tv.com/techtvvault/features/44758/Free_File_Ghost_Mouse.html

www.autohotkey.com/

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostromo_SpeedPad_n52

I've known players who play 6 and 8 at a time, psychotic I know, but to each his own.  I appreciate the real responses to my thread, I was genuinely curious as I have not gotten into AoC beta, and have little foreknowledge regarding playability.

I'm not sure what 'need' has to do with anything, you don't 'need' to play a single copy of the game.  I don't 'need' to play online at all, for that matter, its just fun and as I said in the original post, I happened to find it fun.  I've played many, many games and this so-called 'join a guild' response has always left me feeling cold.  Smaller guilds vanish so quickly that its become obvious to me that joining them in the first place is a waste of time.  Larger guilds have vast lists of rules, usually involving raiding requirements, and as I also mentioned I cannot play in the evenings and so have always been left out of 'raid' type content.  I am the very opposite of a rabid gamer, I just happen to have two computers.  If I didn't start two-boxing in Everquest 2 I would have quit playing it much, much earlier than I did.  I ask mostly because leveling up two at the same time is easier than playing one for a while, then trying to catch up the other character.  Its nice that most of you have so much time that joining groups is possible for you, but please try to remember that is not always the case for other players, and so we try to work around this limitation; two-boxing being one solution.

Howdy, pard'ners

I'm wondering if there's any reason for me to pick up two copies of the game next week.  I greatly extended my interest in Everquest 2 by trying various fun combinations of characters, in large part due to the fact I can't play at times when most other players are online (late evenings).  I got quite good at it, using various in-game macros and my Nostromo speedpad.

Is a similar thing possible in Age of Conan?  Can you divide your atttention enough to make it a worth-while pursuit?  Does the game seem to support this (macros) or is it geared against it?  Are there any combinations of character types that would work best for this?  Or should I just abandon the whole idea and stick with a single copy?

Thanks in advance for responding!

This link shows the game's solo timelines, indicating where the content overlaps in levels:

eq2.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Solo_Timelines

Upper 50s is also where the Fallen Dynasty content starts.  To access, goto the Isle of Mara bell on the Nektulos dock. 

Its like saying the Porche isn't worth driving because the Model T was so revolutionary.  "Worst in history"? When people exaggerate they do so to compensate for the poor strength of their argument.

Release dates for new games, dvds, and similar electronic media is nearly always Tuesday of each week.  To give you one before the Tuesday of release is technically illegal, as it would give stores a jump on their competition if they happened to get their shipment before another chain did.   Shipments varying as they do, a common date of sale is set.  When I worked at Blockbuster it was not uncommon for us to get discs a full week or two before we were allowed to actually put it on the shelf.

Because its easy and requires no real effort.  People compare any game's every feature to WoW's.

A team with four controllers does really well? I never would have guessed :P

It was directed to the OP.  Though it certainly applies to you, now.

quoted from the article:

"One thing to note, as it will cause endless debate among overly knowledgable fanboys forever and ever -- the classes on the side of Order, and of Chaos, are not merely parallels of each other. Will this cause imbalance? Of course it will; no game is every perfectly balanced. Most MMOs, however, attempt to resolve this issue by making one side's "rogues" almost identical to the other side's "assassins", if you follow my meaning. WAR does not appear to even be considering this approach. Acolytes and shaman are not now, nor will they ever be, merely parallels of one another. The spells aren't basically the same, just with different names. They are different. We felt this added a lot to the game, and for this bold stand on class differences, we applaud the EA Mythic developers. "

If this stays true through live, then I will applaud them, too.  That constitutes a real step forward.  It'll be interesting to see how they'll handle the inevitable imbalances, though.  If they follow standard Dev reactions, it'll be with nerf stick.  Let's hope their solutions will be as innovative as their implementation.

That second paragraph sounds like marketing spin.  If you don't see it, don't believe it, and shame on the reviewers for giving them the benefit of the doubt.  If the company wants something listed as a feature, it needs to be, you know, actually identifiable.  The rest of it sounds quite promising.