I found this post on the AoC boards. It has some good tips and things I hadn't thought of on my runs thru Tortage. This is meant for people who have already run atleast 1 character thru Tortage the normal way.

http://forums.ageofconan.com/showthr...53#post1376753

Preface: I write this guide only for the player who has already done tortage once and doesn't want to dilly around doing the same thing again. Completely new players, i suggest enjoying the experience, tortage is very cool and has a lot of fun quests/dialogue/etc.

Ok guys, since i've now done tortage 5.5 times (my guardian is lev 12 /shrug, i figure thats .5) I figured i would post on how to do it quickly. So far my record is a hair over 3 hours, but that included no soda/bio breaks and was quite painful really. Also, it was a pre patch necro so it was pretty uber /shrug.

Moving on.

Ok, basically, start out by going into your game options and either disabling the in game movies, or have it prompt you. I elected to have it prompt me. Once you're done with that, beat your way through the first area until you get to the slaver. Either continue pressing 1 on your keyboard until the dialogue dissapears, or click on the area where the first dialogue option appears. Get in the habit of doing this as this is how you will get through quest text efficiently and get quests efficiently.

Ok, once you're out of the initial area, and have your shackles removed, run around the entrance area and grab any quests you can. There are a couple you can do right now if you want since they're piss easy and are close, one of them is near the Madame of the *****house, basically you go around the corner and kill some redhands. You can or can't wait to do those.

As soon as you've picked up all the quests around, go to the inn and hit up nighttime. Finish off all the quests in night time. This should put you somewhere into level 9. Exit out of night time and once again run around and grab any available quests. Once that is done, finish only as many quests as you need to get level 10.

Go back into night mode and finish the line until she asks you to be level 15. At this point again, come out, grab all available quests, again, do only as many as you need to until you're 15.

Once again, go back at 15 and finish all available quests in the line.

Now, here is the important part. DO NOT exit back into day mode at this point. If you do you cant go back into night mode until you're level 20, this is bad. What you do at this point is you go into the underhalls. You should have around 9 or so quests. Many of these quests, including by far the most annoying one, which is to kill 50 red hand guards, are doable at night. The advantage of this is you won't have to fight for mobs, and, the zone scales to your level at night. That means all the mobs you kill actually give you decent XP. You can also do all the quests such as picking up the rings off the corpses, pelts, jewelry, etc. As well as getting the key to raboz' cell, and the male/female guard heads.

There are also a lot of white sands quests you can do at night, such as killing 30 picts, though i find these still to be easy to do, especially with the large camp of level ~18 picts in white sands.

Now, once you do these, it should get you close to if not level 18. Hop back out into day. At this point i like to take the extra time and go do the Acheronian ruins quest lines to ultimately get the blue pants. This may or may not be worth your time as there is now buyable loot in the 20's thats better than the tortage blues. This used to not be the case and the blues you got from Tortage you generally used until the early to mid 30's. Skip this if you'd like.

Now, you can also go the route of doing the quests in white sands instead of Ach Ruins. I personally hate white sands, something about it rubbed me the wrong way. You shouldn't have to do many of the quests to hit 20. Of course once you hit 20 you simply finish off the last line and you're done.

A few final tips.

Certain quests are not worth doing, period, end of conversation. A couple that pop up are the quests in Mithrelle's garden to get snake poison/venom, and the one in the garden to kill the plants.

There is a quest where you have to go to a cave near the lighthouse in NE tortage, that quest is a complete waste of time, as there are only about 16 spawn points of each and you WILL have to wait for repops, plus its just not worth the run.

Other tips. Keep moving, don't sit around and wait in an area for pops (i.e. when getting crocodile hides) Just kill what you can as your running to finish off other quests. You can always come back to finish those quests once you've done the "easy" ones.

Thats basically it. With this method you should be able to get out of tortage in a max of 5 hours. If you use some similar methods, i.e. clicking through quest text etc, you can level pretty quickly. I got my necro to level 29.5 in 11 hours, that including me getting up for bio, getting up to make dinner for myself, etc etc. So in all reality it was prob 9-9.5 hours of actual play time.

If you read some of the other posts on that thread it seems some archetypes can't access underhalls at night so keep that in mind.

I have never followed this guide but it recomends going to the Archeronian ruins quests for your mid destiny quest bits but I prefer just picking up most of the White Sands Isle quests and doing them in a burst mostly at once since a bunch are all together and the area is more open so players are spread out.

Hope this helps some of you and Bheep if he hasn't already run all his alts thru Tortage.