Age of Conan Game Director Craig Morrison has put out his March letter to the players. The letter focuses squarely on the faction armor rewards that will be available as part of the upcoming "Rise of the Godslayer" expansion, outlining the way players will earn the new armor, the type and quantity of armor that will be available, and the meaningful choices players will have to make to acquire it.

On variety:

Each faction offers four visual and power tier of armor sets, across two different armor types giving us a total of eighty different armor sets visually. That though is only the start of the faction armors. In order to distribute the various armor sets out over each class and create unique and interesting sets for each class you will find that every class has the ability to choose from five different possible sets.

So some classes may share a visual look from a faction tier on occasion, but they will have five sets available that are specifically designed to be useful to their class. So in effect there are actually far more armor sets (with unique names and statistics) than there are the eighty different visual sets.

At a top level each class has these five functional sets. Those sets are loosely categorized as follows:

• One set that offers general increase to your DPS
• One set that offers general increase to your health
• Three sets that offer different class specific utility

Faction armor will be available through three different ways. Buying it straight from a faction vendor, as drops from encounters and dungeon encounters and finally from a token vendor who will accept tokens as payments (these tokens are found throughout the expansion content from boss encounters)

 

Anyone who saw the coverage of our presentations at GDC recently knows that choice and consequence play a large role in how we built the expansion. It is also very relevant to this design. With the system described above we feel we are offering players a lot more flexibility and options in terms of their armor choices, and the functionality that it affords you.

It also means however that you will have some meaningful choices to make. It is by design that these choices exist. You won’t necessarily be able to get everything, at least not immediately, and you will have choices to make. Some of the faction rewards are in effect mutually exclusive and you will have to make choices about what suits your character best.

Read the full letter here for additional details.

[Thanks Christopher8 for the tip!]