Official Aion thread (Visions update)

[Mollerz]

Ok just logged on now. I'm getting some pretty bad lag considering I don't see many people in the Area. Ark is the name.

 

 

 

Did you roll on Perento?

[Lionheart_0]

Ok just logged on now. I'm getting some pretty bad lag considering I don't see many people in the Area. Ark is the name.

 

 

 

Did you roll on Perento?

 

 

 

 

 

No, I'm on the US servers (I'm Canadian).

[Nadril]

I really hope they get the NA lag issues fixed here soon. I was fine until late last night, and this morning I can hardly even get in the game.

 

 

 

Still made it to 15 though.

[Seraphi]

I hate my laptop now.

 

If I had a desktop I'd be there with you guys... :cry:

[Mollerz]

12 Sorcerer now, almost 13, love the playstyle as with my mage. Like the flying, too bad it's limited around Tolbas |:

 

 

 

Quests are generic but at least they lead somewhere. Earned 54k kinah too. Guild already has 3k contribution points and we have a couple of people prepared to farm contribution points for the next... uhh... 4 hours or so to try and get server best.

[Furah]

Getting my friend to dl the torrent version for me seeing as he is at his dad's. He is agreeing because I know his bro will love it, and he might too. Yeah, I won't get too much time with it, but if his bro likes it he will definately subscribe, so if I don't get a good enough play time during the Beta I'll watch him play, and hopefully get a play with it too. :D

 

 

 

what are your guy's names going to be? Mine will be Xehanort.

 

 

 

If you guess I will give you an ego boost.

 

Either AyRoxide or OxideRay.

[Nadril]

About half way to 22 now. Guild got a bit of contribution points rifting last night until we got zerged by like 16 players. (We only went rifting with 8)

 

 

 

Still killed a good number of players. :)

[Seraphi]

So how does the PVP compare to WoW?

[Nadril]

I can't think of a superlative strong enough to express the difference between both games PvP.

[Seraphi]

Well, which PvP system would you rather take?

 

(I think I already know the answer though)

[Lionheart_0]

So finally got to 10 (I'm very inefficient at leveling in mmo's). I forgot all about this feeling from WoW. I don't know where anything is, and there are so many things that were not explained so far (I only found out today that titles give bonuses). I still don't know what stigma's are.

 

 

 

I'm a spirit master by the way.

[Mollerz]

I levelled to 12 never touching the game before in a few hours. Was one of the first and my legion was surprised at how well I picked it up. I'm usually an efficient at what I do when I can be bothered.

 

 

 

Yesterday at ~9pm we had 17k contribution points, I don't know how we are doing now.

[Nadril]

So... here is a picture of my legion leader:

 

 

 

[hide=][/hide]

 

 

 

>_<

[ElkNight]

lol, stupid midget.

[Furah]

lol, stupid midget.

 

MIDGETS ARE AWESOME!!!!!!! :evil: :evil: :evil:

 

 

 

You have pissed me off man.

[Orpheus]

I lol'd so hard when I saw him ingame.

[RayOxide]

Either AyRoxide or OxideRay.

 

 

 

Maybe. ;)

 

 

 

I cbf pre-ordering it now. It comes out in 2 weeks. Is there still a need for the extra crap?

[Nadril]

And the OBT week is (pretty much) down.

 

 

 

Had a lot of fun this week, got to level 28, did a ton of PvP and did my first instance in Aion. Tomorrow I'll do a big write up on my opinions on how the open beta went and what I think we can expect for launch.

[RayOxide]

Meh, might be a little late on getting this now. Scribblenauts comes first for replay value, while I study up on Aion a little more.

[Sam]

So... here is a picture of my legion leader:

 

 

 

(image)

 

 

 

>_<

 

 

 

 

 

lol, stupid midget.

 

 

 

He's probably alot more dangerous than he looks. :P

[Sam]

So... here is a picture of my legion leader:

 

 

 

(image)

 

 

 

>_<

 

 

 

 

 

lol, stupid midget.

 

 

 

He's probably alot more dangerous than he looks. :P

[Lionheart_0]

It's sad knowing the game is finished but we have to wait till the 20th for it :( I hope with all the extra items that it will make those first 10 items go by pretty fast. I'm psyched for this though.

[Lionheart_0]

It's sad knowing the game is finished but we have to wait till the 20th for it :( I hope with all the extra items that it will make those first 10 items go by pretty fast. I'm psyched for this though.

[Nadril]

Alright, my impressions from the open beta.

 

 

 

 

 

The first things I want to get out of the way were the issues. I do want to make it clear up front that, yes, there were a few things that NCSoft dropped the ball on. Depending on how lucky you were depended on how much it would effect you. These are the main issues I experienced:

 

 

 

• 
   
  . Lag. The lag, for many players, was terrible for the first portion of the beta. My roomate reported having a latency of, I kid you not, 112 million. This stemmed down to an issue with several providers that the connection was going through to, and NCSoft scrambled quickly to try and fix it. Luckily I, personally, only had bad enough lag that the game was unplayable for about a day but I knew a few players who were quite unlucky. The biggest issue though had to be that all out of the rest of the beta I, for the most part, had a pretty bad ping. Not something that made the game unplayable, but something that made PvP iffy at times. I was running around 300-400ms for a large portion of the beta, although near the end I was getting around 150ms which was a good improvement.
   
   
   
  The good thing about this is NCSoft has been doing a good job at performing server maintenance and I have high hope that any issues will be stomped out for the few unlucky players.
   
   
   
  . Quest Shortage. This might not be as bad as it sounds, so hear me out. Around levels 22-25 there is a seemingly small amount of quests around, which lead to a good chunk of grinding for myself and other legion members in those levels. One of the things I noticed, however, was that there are a lot of gathering quests, and I do think that the grind would be kept to a minimum if you not only make sure to keep your gathering up to date, but kill anything you see on your way (and way back) to doing quests. Still levels 22-25 were certainly some "hell" levels, which is too bad because once you hit 25 you get a ton of quests. Granted at that point I was quite in the grinding mood (both options, quest and grind are pretty decent choices) and I just sat around and killed Balaur for a bit.
   
   
   
  . Low level balance. This is the last issue, which might not be too bad depending on how you look at it. The big thing is that scout classes, currently, really suck to level up to 16 or so. It may just be due to their archetype (rogues in WoW were a pain in the [wagon] to level at the lower end as well) but they really have issues sometimes. Assassins, for the most part, can fare fine. They have to heal after every mob usually, but they kill at a decent speed and fare well for themselves. Rangers, on the other hand, are pretty damn hard from 10-16. For the most part a lot of rangers will just go melee mode, due to not getting any real good DPS bow skills until 16.
   
   
   
  The tradeoff of this, of course, is that Rangers and Assassins are probably the two fastest leveling classes later on. My assassin, by the time I had hit 25, was a killing machine and the rangers in my legion were the same.
   
  

 

 

 

 

 

Onto the good stuff though, I'm sure you guys are wondering about the entire experience.

 

 

 

 

 

For the most part I started off just leveling solo. I had been through the starting area a few times now, and it was to my surprise that I still was just as interested in doing the quests as I was before. They have a good way of gripping you, and it felt like it was done well. Once I hit around level 13 or 14, however, I got into a group with a bunch of other legion members. We went off and just started to swarm quest areas, killing mobs at an incredible speed (we had a tank and 5 DPS in our group) and just getting through quests in no time flat. I was actually happy that grouping seemed to be viable XP if you did it right, as we had no downtime killing due to having a ranger in our group constantly pulling more to us. This also helped solve a lot of the issues with scout classes at lower levels, as we had a lot of backup. I should also say that it was a blast leveling in a group like that.

 

 

 

Fast forward to the next day, and a lot of us are around 17-18 or so, and we decide to go ahead and start doing black claw quests/grinding. This is an elite camp of mobs, probably around the size of an instance in WoW (perhaps something like Wailing caverns size, but open ended). In this place were numerous group quests, campaign quests and (most importantly) boss monsters to kill. The bosses here were just named elites, but the upside is they dropped nice green loot, and we were able to gear out a lot of our legion members. Finally near the end there is a level 19 boss who will drop a few pieces of blue loot (a ring and a belt) but also some of the best weapons you can get at level 20. We farmed him for a while, hopping channels and having a blast.

 

 

 

As I stated before the 20-25 experience was actually really difficult due to me not having gotten up gathering at all, so I had to skip a lot of quests and grind a bit. The good thing is that we usually had groups going on in the Legion, so you could almost always find someone to duo/trio with and get a good xp/hr rate.

 

 

 

Levels 25-28 for me were done purely in the abyss. The Abyss is just an awesome place, it looks amazing, it is packed with difficult foes and (of course) the PvP is always good. Sadly not a lot of players had made it to 25+ in the OBT, so it was a little emptier than it should have been. Still we were able to find some good fights, and I was able to get some incredible solo fights going on (more about that later).

 

 

 

 

 

So I'll split off of the general overview of went on and talk a bit about the PvP that I experienced. For the first time I managed to get some great experience in Aion PvP. The first type of PvP I encounted was what is called "rifting". The idea is that rifts will open up connecting enemy lands together, and players are able to use these rifts to get into enemy territory. Our first rift group was a bit of a failure, we had gone through the rift, set up our kisks (which are mobile spawn points with limited uses and a 2hr time limit) and went out. Sadly we had gotten overrun by a large amount of Elyos (around 15 to our group of like 8) and couldn't handle it.

 

 

 

Our later rift runs were much more successful though. The last one we had we managed to kill around 34 players within the timespan of half an hour, and we fought a few battles in which we were out numbered. It is a blast just roaming through their territory, watching out for guards and towns and just hunting unexpected Elyos. Of course in a fashion true to our last run we ended the rift by getting trained by what had to be a good 24 players (we brought along 7).

 

 

 

[hide=Outnumbered!][/hide]

 

 

 

The next form of PvP was the abyss. As a group we didn't get into too much combat in the abyss, mostly it was just fending off against gankers and the like. The big difference in Abyss PvP to rift PvP (and which makes it much more difficult) is the addition of flight. Adding in this entire other dimension is an incredible strategic change, and there is a lot to consider (especially with having limited flight time). This sort of thing I felt really added to the PvP, although it was also a source of frustration for me as an Assassin due to a couple of my core skills not working while in flight.

 

 

 

The biggest highlight for me, personally speaking, had to be my 1v4 fight I had. Let me lay out the story for you. It was me, a level 28 assassin, versus a ?? Assassin, a ?? Spiritmaster, a ?? Sorcerer and a ?? Templar that ran into the fight half way through. (The ?? are due to not knowing their levels, although all of them were at least 25+). What happened is that I actually got pretty lucky and managed to gank the assassin first and kill him before the sorc/SM noticed me. At that point both of them rushed at me, and I went after the sorc taking him out quickly. The spiritmaster tried to kite me but was too stupid to pull out his wings (he would have gotten me probably if it was for that) so I got him, and then during a lot of this time the templar was beating on me. I actually flew off with the templar on me (I was at low HP and had no potions on CD) but made it out alive, killing 3 of the 4 players.

 

 

 

To really show how big a difference it makes in skill, I later fought just the sorc one on one and lost. (it was close, but still). The key for him was to keep in the air, a key factor that he had not done in the first fight.

 

 

 

 

 

Abyss points are a big influence for PvPing, and by the end of the beta I had gotten up to "Soldier Rank 6", which was around 11,000 abyss points. The nice thing is that the game really pushes this PvPvE ideal, as you get AP by killing mobs in the abyss, by questing in the abyss and by killing players. Players, obviously, give some of the best rewards next to quests, and monsters give a little bit. It all balances out nicely and gives players a choice in how they want to get AP up, all while forcing them to stay in the Abyss where there is the danger of getting ganked at any time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The final bit of PvP we had was just dukeing it out in the city coliseum. This is a large area which is set to PvP free for all, giving players a chance to try their skills against others. We went there on the last day of the beta and it was packed, there was probably a good 25-30 players there all fighting at once. What was fun is that there were several guild groups out there (including our own 6 man team) and we had constant fights over supremacy in the coliseum. This was my first time really experiencing some hardcore group PvP tactics, and I have to say that there is a lot to think about and a lot of skill involved. On numerous occasions my legion, , managed to actually clear out the entire coliseum, until we would have another major guild all join forces and come in to stop us. Things got very interesting once another guild, full of level 30's, came in and started the fun. Most of the people in my group were in their mid 20's, myself being the highest level at 28. Still we managed to focus down a lot of their members and had some pretty even fights.

 

 

 

It really went to show how great this game is going to be for mass PvP. We had a huge blast in the coliseum and probably stayed there for a few hours PvPing. It really was some of the most fun I have had PvPing in a game in a long, long time - and it's group dynamics totally trounced that of any other MMO I have played to date. One awesome example of group dynamics at work was the kind of synergy between myself and my groups Gladiator. I have an ability that is an "ariel stun", which I can put the enemy up into the air and stun them for a period of time. The gladiator also has this same ability, but on a much longer CD. However he also has an ability which activates whenever his target is in an ariel stun, which does a ton of damage and crashes them to the ground. We got great at me setting up this stun, then him crashing her to the ground and myself backstabbing (surprise attack) the enemy for a large amount of damage. We got a lot of awesome KOs that way and managed to turn a few heads.

 

 

 

 

 

Finally, some pictures from the OBT :).

 

 

 

[hide=Legion /taunt][/hide]

 

[hide=Me drooling at the lvl 50 abyss gear][/hide]

 

[hide=Shot of our legion emblem (Third level 3 legion on Asmodian side!)][/hide]

 

[hide=Boss from level 25 abyss instance][/hide]

 

[hide=What me and my roomate plan to look like on launch (2x assassin)][/hide]

 

[hide=My (very badass looking) Assassin][/hide]

 

[hide=Legion chilling in Coliseum][/hide]

 

 

 

and, the best for last:

 

 

 

[hide=WTF?][/hide]

[Nadril]

Alright, my impressions from the open beta.

 

 

 

 

 

The first things I want to get out of the way were the issues. I do want to make it clear up front that, yes, there were a few things that NCSoft dropped the ball on. Depending on how lucky you were depended on how much it would effect you. These are the main issues I experienced:

 

 

 

• 
   
  . Lag. The lag, for many players, was terrible for the first portion of the beta. My roomate reported having a latency of, I kid you not, 112 million. This stemmed down to an issue with several providers that the connection was going through to, and NCSoft scrambled quickly to try and fix it. Luckily I, personally, only had bad enough lag that the game was unplayable for about a day but I knew a few players who were quite unlucky. The biggest issue though had to be that all out of the rest of the beta I, for the most part, had a pretty bad ping. Not something that made the game unplayable, but something that made PvP iffy at times. I was running around 300-400ms for a large portion of the beta, although near the end I was getting around 150ms which was a good improvement.
   
   
   
  The good thing about this is NCSoft has been doing a good job at performing server maintenance and I have high hope that any issues will be stomped out for the few unlucky players.
   
   
   
  . Quest Shortage. This might not be as bad as it sounds, so hear me out. Around levels 22-25 there is a seemingly small amount of quests around, which lead to a good chunk of grinding for myself and other legion members in those levels. One of the things I noticed, however, was that there are a lot of gathering quests, and I do think that the grind would be kept to a minimum if you not only make sure to keep your gathering up to date, but kill anything you see on your way (and way back) to doing quests. Still levels 22-25 were certainly some "hell" levels, which is too bad because once you hit 25 you get a ton of quests. Granted at that point I was quite in the grinding mood (both options, quest and grind are pretty decent choices) and I just sat around and killed Balaur for a bit.
   
   
   
  . Low level balance. This is the last issue, which might not be too bad depending on how you look at it. The big thing is that scout classes, currently, really suck to level up to 16 or so. It may just be due to their archetype (rogues in WoW were a pain in the [wagon] to level at the lower end as well) but they really have issues sometimes. Assassins, for the most part, can fare fine. They have to heal after every mob usually, but they kill at a decent speed and fare well for themselves. Rangers, on the other hand, are pretty damn hard from 10-16. For the most part a lot of rangers will just go melee mode, due to not getting any real good DPS bow skills until 16.
   
   
   
  The tradeoff of this, of course, is that Rangers and Assassins are probably the two fastest leveling classes later on. My assassin, by the time I had hit 25, was a killing machine and the rangers in my legion were the same.
   
  

 

 

 

 

 

Onto the good stuff though, I'm sure you guys are wondering about the entire experience.

 

 

 

 

 

For the most part I started off just leveling solo. I had been through the starting area a few times now, and it was to my surprise that I still was just as interested in doing the quests as I was before. They have a good way of gripping you, and it felt like it was done well. Once I hit around level 13 or 14, however, I got into a group with a bunch of other legion members. We went off and just started to swarm quest areas, killing mobs at an incredible speed (we had a tank and 5 DPS in our group) and just getting through quests in no time flat. I was actually happy that grouping seemed to be viable XP if you did it right, as we had no downtime killing due to having a ranger in our group constantly pulling more to us. This also helped solve a lot of the issues with scout classes at lower levels, as we had a lot of backup. I should also say that it was a blast leveling in a group like that.

 

 

 

Fast forward to the next day, and a lot of us are around 17-18 or so, and we decide to go ahead and start doing black claw quests/grinding. This is an elite camp of mobs, probably around the size of an instance in WoW (perhaps something like Wailing caverns size, but open ended). In this place were numerous group quests, campaign quests and (most importantly) boss monsters to kill. The bosses here were just named elites, but the upside is they dropped nice green loot, and we were able to gear out a lot of our legion members. Finally near the end there is a level 19 boss who will drop a few pieces of blue loot (a ring and a belt) but also some of the best weapons you can get at level 20. We farmed him for a while, hopping channels and having a blast.

 

 

 

As I stated before the 20-25 experience was actually really difficult due to me not having gotten up gathering at all, so I had to skip a lot of quests and grind a bit. The good thing is that we usually had groups going on in the Legion, so you could almost always find someone to duo/trio with and get a good xp/hr rate.

 

 

 

Levels 25-28 for me were done purely in the abyss. The Abyss is just an awesome place, it looks amazing, it is packed with difficult foes and (of course) the PvP is always good. Sadly not a lot of players had made it to 25+ in the OBT, so it was a little emptier than it should have been. Still we were able to find some good fights, and I was able to get some incredible solo fights going on (more about that later).

 

 

 

 

 

So I'll split off of the general overview of went on and talk a bit about the PvP that I experienced. For the first time I managed to get some great experience in Aion PvP. The first type of PvP I encounted was what is called "rifting". The idea is that rifts will open up connecting enemy lands together, and players are able to use these rifts to get into enemy territory. Our first rift group was a bit of a failure, we had gone through the rift, set up our kisks (which are mobile spawn points with limited uses and a 2hr time limit) and went out. Sadly we had gotten overrun by a large amount of Elyos (around 15 to our group of like 8) and couldn't handle it.

 

 

 

Our later rift runs were much more successful though. The last one we had we managed to kill around 34 players within the timespan of half an hour, and we fought a few battles in which we were out numbered. It is a blast just roaming through their territory, watching out for guards and towns and just hunting unexpected Elyos. Of course in a fashion true to our last run we ended the rift by getting trained by what had to be a good 24 players (we brought along 7).

 

 

 

[hide=Outnumbered!][/hide]

 

 

 

The next form of PvP was the abyss. As a group we didn't get into too much combat in the abyss, mostly it was just fending off against gankers and the like. The big difference in Abyss PvP to rift PvP (and which makes it much more difficult) is the addition of flight. Adding in this entire other dimension is an incredible strategic change, and there is a lot to consider (especially with having limited flight time). This sort of thing I felt really added to the PvP, although it was also a source of frustration for me as an Assassin due to a couple of my core skills not working while in flight.

 

 

 

The biggest highlight for me, personally speaking, had to be my 1v4 fight I had. Let me lay out the story for you. It was me, a level 28 assassin, versus a ?? Assassin, a ?? Spiritmaster, a ?? Sorcerer and a ?? Templar that ran into the fight half way through. (The ?? are due to not knowing their levels, although all of them were at least 25+). What happened is that I actually got pretty lucky and managed to gank the assassin first and kill him before the sorc/SM noticed me. At that point both of them rushed at me, and I went after the sorc taking him out quickly. The spiritmaster tried to kite me but was too stupid to pull out his wings (he would have gotten me probably if it was for that) so I got him, and then during a lot of this time the templar was beating on me. I actually flew off with the templar on me (I was at low HP and had no potions on CD) but made it out alive, killing 3 of the 4 players.

 

 

 

To really show how big a difference it makes in skill, I later fought just the sorc one on one and lost. (it was close, but still). The key for him was to keep in the air, a key factor that he had not done in the first fight.

 

 

 

 

 

Abyss points are a big influence for PvPing, and by the end of the beta I had gotten up to "Soldier Rank 6", which was around 11,000 abyss points. The nice thing is that the game really pushes this PvPvE ideal, as you get AP by killing mobs in the abyss, by questing in the abyss and by killing players. Players, obviously, give some of the best rewards next to quests, and monsters give a little bit. It all balances out nicely and gives players a choice in how they want to get AP up, all while forcing them to stay in the Abyss where there is the danger of getting ganked at any time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The final bit of PvP we had was just dukeing it out in the city coliseum. This is a large area which is set to PvP free for all, giving players a chance to try their skills against others. We went there on the last day of the beta and it was packed, there was probably a good 25-30 players there all fighting at once. What was fun is that there were several guild groups out there (including our own 6 man team) and we had constant fights over supremacy in the coliseum. This was my first time really experiencing some hardcore group PvP tactics, and I have to say that there is a lot to think about and a lot of skill involved. On numerous occasions my legion, , managed to actually clear out the entire coliseum, until we would have another major guild all join forces and come in to stop us. Things got very interesting once another guild, full of level 30's, came in and started the fun. Most of the people in my group were in their mid 20's, myself being the highest level at 28. Still we managed to focus down a lot of their members and had some pretty even fights.

 

 

 

It really went to show how great this game is going to be for mass PvP. We had a huge blast in the coliseum and probably stayed there for a few hours PvPing. It really was some of the most fun I have had PvPing in a game in a long, long time - and it's group dynamics totally trounced that of any other MMO I have played to date. One awesome example of group dynamics at work was the kind of synergy between myself and my groups Gladiator. I have an ability that is an "ariel stun", which I can put the enemy up into the air and stun them for a period of time. The gladiator also has this same ability, but on a much longer CD. However he also has an ability which activates whenever his target is in an ariel stun, which does a ton of damage and crashes them to the ground. We got great at me setting up this stun, then him crashing her to the ground and myself backstabbing (surprise attack) the enemy for a large amount of damage. We got a lot of awesome KOs that way and managed to turn a few heads.

 

 

 

 

 

Finally, some pictures from the OBT :).

 

 

 

[hide=Legion /taunt][/hide]

 

[hide=Me drooling at the lvl 50 abyss gear][/hide]

 

[hide=Shot of our legion emblem (Third level 3 legion on Asmodian side!)][/hide]

 

[hide=Boss from level 25 abyss instance][/hide]

 

[hide=What me and my roomate plan to look like on launch (2x assassin)][/hide]

 

[hide=My (very badass looking) Assassin][/hide]

 

[hide=Legion chilling in Coliseum][/hide]

 

 

 

and, the best for last:

 

 

 

[hide=WTF?][/hide]