I hate to be too hard on Age of Conan, since it's not a terrible game and I want to let the developers at Funcom get on with the business of finishing the game. However, I can't resist this tidbit: it seems that girls if Age of Conan hit like, well, girls. All other things being equal, female characters do less damage than male characters. Funcom developer Svein Erik Jenset posts the following explanation on the official forums:

The main reason for the discrepancy in damage output that you’re seeing is that the length of an animation isn’t equal for both Male and Female characters in many cases. This is what we’re currently fixing, but there’s roughly 800 to 1000 animations in total that are involved here… Of course, once the length of the animations have been fully corrected/tweaked either by an animator or...designer then every rank (of every combo for every class) has to be re-balanced by the System Designers because, as I mentioned above, one of the factors that come into play when determining the combo damage is animation length.

Although it's a frustrating bug for those of us with female characters, Funcom deserves credit for being so open about exactly what's happening and why it's happening. This sort of openness with the player base is commendable. But until it's fixed, my female character will be in the kitchen leveling up her cooking skill.