Some of my AC experience if anyone cares to read: posted:

I had some friends in high school who were playing AC so I tried it out. It was the first MMO I played and it was a blast. It was a real gateway to becoming an even more hardcore gamer. I felled many-a-Tusker.

I still like the original fantasy stuff in AC more than the borrowed Tolkien in EQ and everything Warcraft.

I started with a gimpy default Bow build on a character named Charon but stalled in the 50's. With a little bit of experience, I created a new character named Archaicus and devised my own build with (the wildly underrated at the time) Spears. Was able to buff myself with full 6's and and then 7's just a little behind a full mage could and never had to visit Yew Wan Sum the buff bot in Mayoi again. The success of the build was extremely satisfying. I had an awesome set of matching amuli armor (with loot only colors) that I had a buddy do some extremely high risk tinkering on. Those were some serious clench moments. My set of spears were pretty nice too. I was pretty close to the level cap of 125ish before I stopped playing.

Some great memories like doing the Gaerlan quest the first day. It was a blast with its puzzles (some rear end in a top hat always spoke in the room requiring reverence) and then arriving at Gaerlan with him being wildly overtuned for the level 60-80 bracket. He was one or two shotting anyone not using a shield so we formed a shieldwall with our melee (who didn't attack to maintain the solid line of collision) while the mages and archers bombed away on him. He would periodically swipe at the melee but the mages healed us should our first aid not keep up.

When they first introduced respecialization there was a bug that allowed you to get infinite xp by untraining a skill with a weapon equipped. I abused the hell out of it for that day and ran around like a god with everything maxed. Weren't patch day rollbacks fun?

I enjoyed all the quests involving Virindi, they were just cool villains.