Massively^™

Now that the Testlive forums are up and running, Age of Conan players have a chance to scope out coming patches before they go live. Right now, there's a new patch on the Testlive servers that's a possible candidate for release on the 16th of July.

As well as a pile of fixes and alterations, a stray patch note sneaked in that would affect how combos work. More than anything else, this has caught the attention of AoC forum commentators. The change is clearly meant to prevent melee classes from 'pre-loading' combos by executing all the initial moves and then walloping a target for the last one.

However, it's transpired that the relevant change wasn't even on the Testlive server yet, and will only be included along with other changes, as Vinterstum explains: 'This change won't actually be in for a little while, and when it does come in, it'll be in a little package with a few other things that should make being a melee class in PvP a little bit easier.' Patch notes are available for those who have forum accounts. We'd just like to emphasise that none of this will necessarily make it to Live.

Curse.com has posted a list of patch notes from Age of Conan's test server, which will likely go live in one of this coming week's scheduled downtime slots. You will notice that stat gains from equipment will finally be functioning correctly, and it's going to be interesting to see just how much of a difference this will make to the strength of each class.

The patch notes also feature another round of class tweaks, notably some buffs for Dark Templars and damage changes for Priests of Mitra. Confusingly, Bear Shamans will be getting improved Wreck Armor combo visuals and sounds -- however, this is a Barbarian combo, so is this change actually for Barbs or did they mean the BS combo Crush Armor? Other really good things: lower level mobs will knock you off your mount a lot less (although higher mobs will do it more) and attackers at your sides will have half the chance of knocking you off -- attackers from the front will never knock you off. Finally, player cities will be able to get their Trader NPC at last. Take a look through the full patch notes for some other changes, including quest and item fixes, and perhaps start speculating on what changes will be left off the list this time.