An Introduction to Aion
Mid-Level Gameplay on Aion

After playing for a bit more than 2 months, I am now level 37. Everything about the game is a challenge at the moment, the levelling, the gearing up, the cashflow, progression in crafting, PvP…all are really difficult to make solid progress in. This suits some people but will definately put-off others. Where I use the word challenge, other people will use the word grind. Your mileage may vary….

Levelling Past 30

Levelling 1-30 was somewhat of a breeze. There were plenty of quests yielding good xp and towards 25 an instance opened up (Noctua Training Grounds) which took me from 25 to 29 in a few easy sessions.

From level 30 onwards things have changed dramatically. There are two types of quests in the game: regular quests and Campaign quests. The Campaign quests are much harder and usually require groups to deal with Elite mobs but they also yield huge XP. In the early to mid 30′s I quickly ran out of regular quests and relied on the Campaign quests as my main source of quest XP.

Last night at level 36 I completed two level 40 Campaign quests with a friend using some good flying skills and team work to dodge Asmodian enemies (hiding, using NPC guards, taking turn in rezzing each other while quickly killing mobs in open ground). Those two quests gave us around 5 million xp out of the 19 million required to ding to 37. It was quite a thrill to be able to complete quests using some clever tactics without having to resort to full-group bulldozer strategies.

Abyss and PvP

Part of the reason why levelling becomes difficult is that the game pushes you towards the Abyss PvP area for questing but I, and a lot of people, am in a level range where you get killed too easily in PvP by higher level players. If you get killed you typically have a long run back to the place you were fighting at just before you got killed. It’s a pain in the arse and results in very slow XP gain, so unless you have a regular full group of like-level friends, you tend to avoid the Abyss. Abyss mobs are substantially more XP-rich than PVE area mobs.

At the moment, it seems the Asmodians are dominating the PvP stage (I am on the Elysian side). This unfortunatly results in a vicious cycle where the higher level Asmodian players basically own the Abyss and have access to the higher xp rate than the regular Elysian player who sticks to PVE areas. So the high levels get higher faster, the lower levels struggle more, i.e end up having to grind more.

Further compounding the problem, Abyss kills also give Abyss points which accumulated allow you to buy Abyss gear, again tangibly better gear than other non-abyss gear. The divide grows further. Realistically, PvP is looking more like a end-game activity than one I will be active in regularly for the next 10 levels. I did go and check out a Fortress take; quite impressive but at level 35/36 I was basically useless against the Boss AE. On another occasion a group of us tried a rearward manoeuver on an Asmo force taking a Fortress and that was a lot of fun for a short while. We got a lot of kills sneaking on the rear ranks of that raid but after a while the raid turned onto us and neatly wiped us. Still: great fun.

Back on track with the discussion: there is a clear need for smaller scale, scenario-like PvP (for those familiar with WAR) so that small groups of level matched players can go up against each other for Abyss points. That would bridge the current gap and take this game to a higher stratosphere.

Economy

Development in other areas like gear, crafting are also challenging due to the cash side of things. Everything is hugely expensive in the game. Your options are as follows:

1. You basically have to get lucky to have a somewhat reasonable ride. By lucky, I mean come across a huge rare drop which you can sell for masses of Kinah, which allows you to invest in your craft, level your harvesting skills, get your full spell book (yes even buying your spells is a huge cash drain)
2. You grind your way up the cash ladder through endless hours of fighting for cash drops or harvesting and selling
3. You buy Kinah from gold sellers (1 million Kinah was reported at 3 Euro a couple of days ago) – this exacerbates the problem as I am sure some people are buying Kinah and causing price inflation (not to be confused with Mudflation where prices drop due to neverending supply)
4. You risk it all through crafting gambles i.e. hope for lucky crits that sell very well, double up on even more all or nothing combines and hope for a streak…you can end up totally skint quickly or quite rich

Fortunately I got lucky with a drop on a trash mob which sold for 1.7 million. As I am an armoursmith, I quickly set about trying some tough combines (i.e. very expensive combine which if it doesn’t crit will lose you a ton of money but which if it does will make 5 times its crafting cost). I got lucky again, my 1.7 million turned into 3.4 million.

To put things in context. My level 37 spells cost me about 400,000, my level 30 wings (+30 seconds flight) cost me 940,000. The level 40 wings are 12 million and level 45 gold armour pieces (very rare tradeable drops) routinely go for 14 million+. The best earrings at my level are 1.5 million plus per ear lobe….So I am far from made but I have some cushion. A lot of people are struggling with less than 500,000 to their name. Did I mention the game is hard already?!

The Future

NCSoft have created a vision trailer to show the broad direction that the game is going in artistically, with gameplay additions around housing, tameable mounts, underwater action and a few other things. It makes for interesting viewing:

The next 10 levels are likely to take me a lot longer to get through and I frankly cannot see how I will do it without a substantial amount of grinding mobs. Is the reward in the journey or in where you get to? Don’t know. It’s a fine line at the moment, lots of changes are planned for the game but not so much around PvP as I hear. It has felt like getting close to hitting a brick wall at times in terms of making progress, but every time something happens that takes me through it; a stroke of luck, a nice trade, a good group nailing an area…Time will tell.

Wiz

Posted by Wizlor on http://www.mmorpg-info.org.

The initial issues with queuing and server-side lag have completely disappeared. The game is playing smoothly for me at all times.

Since the first update, I have experienced the game in three new dimensions: PvP, Instance Play and Crafting.

Impressions follow:

PvP

I have only participated in impromptu, open-field PvP, not in any Fortress or Artifact organised pushes yet. This is for the moment dominated by level difference and implicitly the level and quality of the gear you wear.

One feature of the game is that you cannot determine the exact level of your opponent when you target them. You can see their Abyss Rank which shows how many points they have acquired in PvP areas but I believe this balance of points can go down when you spend Abyss points (for PvP vendor gear). In general though the higher Abyss rank, the more likely the player is to be of higher native level.

As a tank, the few encounters I have been in have gone one of two ways.

1. I get ganked by a group of Asmodians while I am questing which usually means a quick death unless I see them coming and manage a sharp run for my life
2. A one-on-one encounter which is then more interesting.

One-on-one fights at similar levels require you to understand how the opponent’s class is played in order to have a better chance of defeating them. The game only has 8 distinct classes which are effectively identical (8 evil classes mirrored by 8 good classes) in skills/spells. All classes have a small set of “special” abilities to avoid or deal massive damage and you need to anticipate what the opponent will do and react accordingly with your play, keeping your own special skills in store for the right time in the fight.

It’s a very deep challenge to try to understand your enemy, read what he is doing during the fight and react appropriately. Fights can be over in seconds or can last up to a minute. I had one such fight where I ended up running but only after 30 seconds toe-to-toe with an opponent who was also a tank and 5 levels above me. I found out his level by looking him up on the Aion website after the fight.

I have been spending a lot of time with a friend who plays a Spiritmaster (pet class, debuff expert with DD). He has had a few frustrating fights where the level difference resulted in endless resists to his spells (we think – it could have been avoidance skills being used).

As people reach the top-end of levelling (50), PvP should become increasingly even. I am told that a top level Templar (my tank) when well played is a devastating force, is able to pull enemies to him from range (like a Marauder in WAR) and unleash a series of stuns which, if they hit a couple of crits, can down soft, unprepared targets in one cycle. That would not be the usual outcome, more the occasional one. The majority role will be a disruptor of the enemy, crippling key targets at the right time to allow more DPS-centric group members to put in the killing blows. I can’t wait!

Instance Play

I have a lot of experience with the first instance in the game, which opens at level 25 and becomes unavailable at level 29. I have been making the most of it: the experience you get in that instance is substantially greater than the experience obtained in regular quest / grind play.

The instance teaches people the basics of group play very well. It’s not too difficult but requires people to perform multiple roles at all times. Tanks have to select targets correctly and manage aggro on multiple mobs. Healers have to…well they have to heal and rez. DPS have to DD but in Aion they also act as the Crowd Control with sleep spells. At most you have to manage 3 mobs of Elite level which is not too hard but if not controlled can lead to a wipe. Loot is not great but the XP makes up for that. I found I was making 60% of a level per 2 hour run and tonight will likely be my last run in this instance as I will ding 29. I will have done the instance 4 times on 4 consecutive nights :-)

An interesting point is that rezzing occurs on the spot you died (as opposed to the spot where the rezzer is standing) so dying close to mobs makes recovery harder. For example, I died in a tough fight (mini-boss) last night but the cleric managed to run for safety. In order to rez me we had to initiate combat, with a Sorcerer sleeping the named boss and the adds it spawned, while the Cleric rezzed me. It was touch and go but fun. Deaths to NPCs are expensive to erase so people really are cautious about dying. Deaths to PvP are free to remove death penalty though.

Crafting

The top-end gear that can be crafted is substantially better in quality than the gear you can get in regular quests or drops. The act of crafting itself is simply a process of collecting the ingredients / components and clicking “Craft”. There is no interactive element to influence failure or success. The higher level you are in your craft, the more likely your combine will succeed. It is rumoured that within 10 levels of the level of the item you’re crafting is the sweetspot for crits but I have not seen empirical evidence to confirm this.

An interesting dynamic at the moment is that because a lot of people are in the 20-30 level range, the components used for crafting recipes in that range are very expensive. Currently, they are more expensive than components for higher level gear.

It makes getting the best gear a challenge at the moment, as you need rare Crits to occur and the rate of success is somewhere around 20%. You can literally spend fortunes trying to create a set of gear which will be superseded in 5 levels by the next set. You can minimise the cost by harvesting all the components yourself, though some are item drops off mobs so you will need to buy those or spend endless time fighting.

In saying that, it makes trading very important on the Auction house. You can really play the market, stocking up on higher level components waiting for the players to get into that level range at which point demand outstrips supply and you can sell your stocks to fund buying the more expensive materials you need at your lower levels. There are lots of base materials in high demand and a gatherer person can make a lot of money simply selling those.

There are also drops you can farm (grind) which sell for tons, and you can also scan for good deals all the time: both uneducated players who don’t know the right price for valuable items and impatient players who under-cut everybody to sell first.

Conclusion

All in all, for someone who enjoys the trading and making side of things, Aion is very rewarding. If you play the market, at the right time with the right products, you can become very very wealthy in a short space of time, even to the point that you simply do not need to craft anything as you can afford all the best gear directly.

The various paths you can take to get to the objective of being well geared at a given level is something I find very enjoyable.

More later :-)

Wiz

P.S. You can purchase Aion for the PC from amazon.com or amazon.co.uk and still receive it in time for Christmas! -Taymar

Posted by Wizlor on http://www.mmorpg-info.org.

The problem of queuing was exacerbated by a game feature called “private stores”. Private Stores allow you to basically enter your own vendor mode anywhere while AFK, indefinitely. The point of private stores is that you can place yourself in strategic spots and sell items from your inventory that may be required in that particular location (e.g. potions outside a dungeon). Travel to the main city where the Auction House is situated is expensive (e.g. return trip at my level is 10-20% of my wealth currently, having upgraded armor at level 13, I cannot spare the cash right now to do trips at will). People have started using this Private Store functionality to avoid queues by remaining logged in from play session to play session. Aside from this issue, I enjoyed the game from the start.

The queues to get into the game have disappeared and the game is playing smoothly.

So far, I have found the gameplay to be increasingly deep in PvE (PvP only really starts at 20-25).

Once you start to play, it is immediately clear that the combat mechanic is quite varied. For instance:

• You have your regular skills which operate in chains (i.e. skill type 1 opens up a choice of multiple skills from type 2) but if you use a non-chain skill in the middle of the chain you break the chain. As a result, you have to make a decision as to whether to do so or not in a short space of time, as your chain also expires if you don’t use it.
• You receive Divine Point skills which require you to accumulate a Divine Point pool before using them. They tend to be very powerful skills so you need to consider when to use them or save them.
• You can also loot Power Shards of varying levels of strength (minor, lesser, etc). Those act like boosters to your DPS. You slot them into your weapon and press the B key when you want to activate them. They get consumed at the rate of 1 per hit. Once again you have to consider the appropriate time to use them.
• Your gear has also got multiple slots to insert Manastones that boost particular stats, some of which influence reactive skills e.g. some of your skills activate only when you Block or Parry so you need to use Manastones specific to your play style.
• Weapons and armour also have an “Enchantment level” which you can raise through applying Enchantment stones. Stones are generated through salvaging enchanted gear, which is expensive, and prone to failure (which I think resets the enchantment level of the item you’re attempting to enchant – same mechanic for applying manastones: they all vanish if you fail)
• Healing can come from potions, food, skills that consume other reagents (like power shards) so again you need to juggle these supplies.

Overall, you need to be pay close attention to what you are doing to get the most out of your combat capability.

Crafting is huge in this game: you need lots of harvesting, rares are rare, crafting takes time and the results are highly sought after. I sold a dozen items in a couple of hours easily, the market is very active.

Gameplay performance (graphics and sound) continue to impress me with their fluidity even with massive amounts of people on screen. Reports of PVP performance are good from the higher level guys; no slide show effects as seem on the large scale battles in WAR

Customisation is also very rich, both for your character (there is a plastic surgeon type vendor – expensive but you know you want J-Lo’s buttocks) and your gear: you can re-skin armour and weapons if you want a particular look to an item.

I am having a great time and am really enjoying the game. I’ll post another update once I start to explore the PvP aspects.

P.S. You can purchase Aion for the PC from amazon.com or amazon.co.uk and still receive it in time for Christmas! -Taymar

Posted by Wizlor on http://www.mmorpg-info.org.