'Shady camps' and more in latest Age of Conan Testlive patch

Just as players' patience was starting to fray again, 'Patch 3' has arrived on the Age of Conan testlive server, and it is a chunky one - we counted at least 594 meg. Feel like browsing the patch notes? Make a nice cup of something, put your feet up, take your time... there are six pages to wade through.

Obviously we can't detail all of them here, but they range from the silly-but-desired 'Party people rejoice - proper drunkenness has been implemented!' to the necessary 'Fixed several causes of crashes and assert errors' to the trivial 'For decency's sake, Old Finn now has pants!'

But the most interesting new feature is the addition of Shady Camps as a complement to the new Age of Conan PvP notoriety system, as promised by Craig Morrison recently. There are several other new tweaks to the system that had us eager to see it go live. We've put them behind the cut.

As it's such a key feature, we've reproduced the salient section of the patch notes in full:

• Murderer Resurrection Points have been added, and are marked on the minimap. Murderers can only rez at these locations. Other players cannot see murderer rez points unless they are also murderers.

• PvP XP is now split between all attacking groups and individuals, based on their relative damage.

• Shady camps have been added in several locations, for use by Murderers: Look for them in Acheronian Ruins, Khemi, Old Tarantia, Conall's Valley.. camps have also been added to Field of the Dead, Eiglophian Mountains, Atzel's Approach, Tarantia Noble District, Thunder River, and Kheshatta.

• Shady Camp vendor, Cora, sells green and blue potions.

• Shield of the Risen will now remove the Criminal debuff on you.

• Con ratings for PvP have been updated, effecting murder point calculations.

• A player attacking another, who is innocent, will now be flagged as a criminal for a few minutes.

• Guards should now aggro the attacker even if the victim has a damage shield active.

• The cost for using shady teleporters correlates to the player's murderpoints.

• You will now see flying text overhead for murderpoints gained and lost.

• When you are in a playfield that is too high level for you, you will receive a debuff called Free Prey. While this debuff is on you, attackers are free to kill you without being penalized with criminal status or murder points.

Mechanics-wise, the change that has players talking is a change to crowd control and immunities: 'The way crowd control and immunities work has been changed. All player stuns, fears, roots, snares, and charms will now break if the victim's health is reduced by a certain percentage (depending on the effect type).' Soldiers will no longer be able to change their stance while stunned or feared, and 'pre-loading' combos is nerfed: 'For each attack in the combo chain that you do without a valid target, your end damage (on the combofinisher) is reduced 15% or miss.'

We're also seeing reports that the graphics for some Tier 2 and 3 epic items have been changed.

These changes are currently only on Testlive, and may perish in the long and arduous journey to the Live servers.