Age of Conan is a gritty well rendered world and everything else was rushed to market.
While the graphics continue to be great the quest npcs just become cut outs of each other with the occasional arm wave or draw the finger across the throat or head shake.
The heavy instancing in Tortage does lessen but your tolerance for instancing starts pushing your aggro buttons. Throw in all the running you have to do and you start to wonder why this just wasn't a cross country trainer for the Wii. With money in short supply very few will have a mount at level 40 when first offered. I have one character now pushing lvl48 he has his first gold piece hmm still 2 gold short. My second character is lvl40 has 28 silver. No mount and running the same terrain over and over again and instancing all in between and you quickly understand why some people just enter a zone and ask someone to kill them so they can choose a graveyard point somewhere on the other side of the map just so they don't have to run the map for the umpteenth time.
Many quest lines are broken and a few of those broken quests really tell the tail of how incomplete this game really is. For example the Stygian area has 2 large instanced areas that can be argued that are the culmination for the whole area. The Black Fortress and the Pyramid. The Black Fortress an excellant instance to explore but thats all you'll do there because I think I have only found 1 quest for it. The Pyramid's quest line is so broken you can do what you think is the right thing and break one of the major quest lines and not even know it. The other major quest line is simply non functioning. So you level in this area for approximately 15 levels go the final spot thats been on the horizon all this time and its completely lacking in quests/ functioning quests.
The quests are so few in number it doesn't matter what class you start with you'll be unable to keep any of it fresh for other classes because you have to go to all the areas over and over again just to level your current character.
At the later levels approximately mid 40s quests just dry right up and the grind is on. Unfortunately most of your quests in the Field of the Dead are all grinds anyways. 6 of my current quests are 2 x kill 20 vanir/2x kill werewolves/2 x kill 20 bandits. Yawn.
The pvp is simply old school Ultima Online. Yup they just took everything that was wrong with pvp in UO and threw it here. Ganking/griefing, res points /zone in points / required mobs and talking to npc's. Zero penalty so if they at first failed to gank, dont worry they'll be back in 1 minute because theres zero penalty to gank and fail. Furthermore if they do succeed and you want retributition good luck the gankers just move to a graveyard point and instance out to grief elsewhere. Sure they added a buff bubble at some of the points in and out of instances, so just move off 20-30 paces wait a second or two and grief there. Is there anything more time consuming than just dealing with gankers. Can you say forced grouping. And the worst of all forced grouping. Grouping for the sake of doing anything in the game. Sure you can run solo, it just takes forever to get anything done. Good luck if you expect to fit right in a share a set of npcs to grind or quest, you'll just get ganked when your taking on a mob unless you wait it out for everyone to move off. Of course some mobs always have crowds of gankers waiting and they never move off, go figure. Level 80's pawning people 20 levels or more lower than them. go figure. Its not pvp its just ganking over and over again, funcom said welcome to the brutal world of Conan. Its the only thing they got right for all the wrong reasons.
Give this game 6 months to a year for fixes. If you cant wait that long just hold off, your buddy will probably be cool with you covering a months sub because they have no plan to continue playing beyond the free 30 days.
Class imbalances, combat set up is dull. Push a button wait then push a direction key then wait push another direction key. Bah screw it just push 11111,2222,33333 on the direction keys it doesnt matter. Run naked your gear sucks, feats broken, skills broken, crafting broken, seiges broken.
Age of Conan is a gritty well rendered world and everything else was rushed to market. IMHO if you pay a sub for this game in this condition regardless of the potential your a paying to play an open beta.