Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures Class Interview #3

Ten Ton Hammer is offering up a third class interview for Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, this time highlighting the Conqueror class.
Q: Rather than being just a simple melee fighter, you've also bestowed some very powerful Auras to the Conqueror. How beneficial would it be for a group to always carry along a Conqueror? Are there any other Auras you can tell us about (healing, direct damage, increased movement rates etc.)?

A: But but Cody, you must surely be in love with the caster classes in MMOs. I mean, all this (simply) and (boring) remarks towards tanks and melee fighters. *smiles* (Editor's Note: I'm not in love with being a caster my AoC main is going to be a Conqueror. I like carrying a big stick.)

Remember that we have made a melee system which I think surpasses any MMO melee system I have seen before. I would of course say that anyway, working in Funcom and all, but I honestly believe that many will find our melee classes to be quite refreshing.

To your question then, and seeing that the Conqueror is a soldier, and a tank, I think having one along is quite essential to succeed in many cases. He doesn't have as much HP as the Guardian, for instance, but he deals more damage (the highest DPS output of the soldiers), and has a lot of unique strengths which makes him really strong in a group. As a part of this the auras of the Conquerors are very nice to have as a (weapon) in group combat. The core auras are split into two main groups (you can have one from each group running at once). One group is augmenting offensive power, and the other is augmenting recovery/defensive power. None of the core auras are about health restoration though, but there are stamina and mana regeneration auras on the defensive side. The offensive type auras are therefore based around adding DPS to the entire team in various ways.

A player can also further enhance with additional auras through the feat system. One example is the (Carnage) feat tree. With this the Conqueror can actually pick up two additional innate auras if wanted, one that provides mana and stamina (War Cry), and one which provides an out-of-combat runspeed increase (War March). So, in theory, a Conqueror could have four team buffing effects going at once with certain feat specs. Both War Cry and War March are passive long-duration auras (some Conquerors auras run up towards four hours), and are not actual spells that you cast like some of the other auras.