My orginal goal was to hit level 25 within the first week but as they say the best laid plans. Not really sure what the rest of the saying is but whatever. Last night after grueling repeatable quests I finally hit level 25. A few of my friends and I had run out of quests around level 24. I’ve found that soloing by far nets you the best xp but let’s face it this is an MMO and soloing gets boring after awhile. In theory if you are gathering, crafting, and questing it should be ok but one doesn’t always have the option to do first too which was what happened to me. Due to ques I had to make the best of my time as possible.
After hitting level 25 I ran over to Sanctum and did my “quiz” where you run back and forth from person to person in the library answering questions. Thankfully I did all of this in open beta plus I’m a bit of a lore nut so I knew all the answers. After that is the quest to prove yourself, by far the fight in the dugeon under the arena is the easiest of the three but honestly I’ve only done the other one that sends you to Veteron to hunt for that little short midget general. Speaking of why the hell is he so little. I feel like I should put him on my knee and bounce him up and down. Well after you do the fighting portion the next part of the test is to take the flying quest. Which in and of itself is easy but they hide that last damn ring and I totally forgot about it and failed the test…twice. >.< Well after that was all said and done and midget general gave me the a-o-k off to the abyss I went. The place still amazes me. The idea of free flight, although limited at times, is so much fun. Being the explorer that I am I just want to fly all around but that’s not possible because the abyss is open PvP.
And this is where our joyous omg I’m 25 and I can go to the abyss with the big kids comes to an end. I might have a different mindset than others. I am of course by no means an expert when it comes to PvP and all that. One thing I do know is that you come after me regardless of the numbers I’m going to go down fighting. I’m not going to run away and be all “oh noes you haz PvPs and my PvEs.” That’s not why I’m playing Aion. If I wanted purely PvE there are plenty of games out there for that. Last night when my friends and I picked up some quests we flew out to this one area to see a huge hunting party of Asmodians. They were gunning right for us. I died. I came back. I noticed that the other Elyos in the area were running away. I died again, mainly my fault as I got seperated from our main healer and my own personal heals aren’t strong enough to outstand getting jumped on by 5 people. I came back again and finally we worked together with a group of other people and pushed the Asmodians back. I’m just hoping that running away is just an isolated incident. I’d hate to be part of the carebear camp in a PvPcentric game.
I think one of my biggest pet peeves is when I see another chanter running around and I stop to inspect them I notice something very very scary…..they are in cloth! Chanters and clerics for that matter can wear chain mail. Please for the love of Aion put some on. Chanters and Clerics are the only class whose highest available armor designation is chain mail. And while we chanters are a buff and debuff class we are also melee. You are going to get your ass smacked from Poeta to Themobomos wearing cloth. We apply our debuffs via melee fighting. You can’t melee fight in cloth. Period. You also get no bonus from wearing cloth. Chanters have one magic skill (smite) that gets no upgrade as we learn it at level 1 and it becomes a cleric only skill at level 10. (I personally only use it for pulling if I’m soloing.) Our mantras get absolutely no benefit from magic boost and you should have no problem with mana until your early to mid twenties and by the time it gets to be a real problem you will have mantras to counteract that. You need the stats from chain mail, such as physical defense and parry (especially parry because higher up you have skills that proc off parry). So get your chain mail set together early as you will be needed it.
Once you hit 10 and head to Sanctum/Pandaemonium for your acession you will gain the passive skill to wear chain. It’s important to have a few pieces before you even get there because you will need to buy all your skill manuals as well. With that said, you should take the chain mail rewards from the last few quests you have in the starting zones. The ones you get around level 8 and 9 are good enough to get you started in the level 10 areas. If you are Elyos they are Mercenary”s Mail from the Barring the Gate quest and Mercenary’s Chain Greaves from the Neutralizing Odium quest. I usually have enough kinah after buying my skill manuals to also pick up any filler chain mail pieces I need. So be smart about saving your money. Pick up everything and vendor it this way you will have enough saved up to get you started on the path of a Daeva.
Personally I am quite happy that we get to wear chain mail. After playing Wrath of the Lich King were Blizzard decided to homogenize armor it made for a real mess as priest and caster dps all started vying for the same gear. Each class in Aion is unique and comes with their own set of gear so there is little reason to argue when it comes to that…manastones on the other hand are a different issue. Which I’ll get into next time. Until then happy hunting.
It’s no secret that since the pre-selection and head start of Aion the que times have been a bit of a problem. It’s even become a bit of a joke with survival guides posted to help ease your time in the que. Generally I am not one to complain much when it comes to my MMOs. I can put up with most anything. I come from, despite my cries otherwise, hard core gaming stock. I’ve put up with random PK in Lineage 2, frustrating PvP in WoW, often repeative game play in City of Heroes, and the list goes on and on. And while I didn’t not start playing WoW until a few months before Burning Crusade was released I do remember the ques when it was. They lasted for the most part a day or two on my server at the time. However this is the 5th day for me inside the que and I’m sorry but I’m getting a bit annoyed.
I understand the reasons why there is a need for a que. I appreciate NCSoft’s logic in wanting to maintain servers where play time is enjoyable by all. I get that. But it seems that they’ve failed to understand the basic human logic, if there is a will there is a way. Right now the will of the people is to play and the only way to beat the que at the moment is to set up an afk shop. I mean let’s be honest in pretty much every MMO its basic human nature to devolve into a complete and total prick. I’m sure there are other underlying reasons for the que outside of afk shops but its the one that people are the most upset about. When you see things like the picture above how could you not be.
They’ve offered a solutions by uping the amount of people that can be on the servers at any one time, sending out messages of what servers don’t have ques and opening 2 new servers over the weekend it ultimately doesn’t seem like much to me. Because while technically there are 12 North American servers at the moment there are only 6 servers designated for the East Coast, 5 for the West and 1 for Oceanic. Meaning that prime events such at fortress sieges will take place around a times that some what fit that time zone thus making the decision for which server to create a character on even smaller. So that means for me I’d -have- to pick one of the 6 East Coast servers which always have a que. Being able to participate in fortress sieges and the endgame pvp content is and was a huge selling point to me when I started getting into this game. The end game is what is really important here and if you can’t participate in that then it kinda negates everything you’ve done to get there.
At this point I’m not really sure what I’m going to do. I want to continue to play with the friends I’ve gamed with for over 4 years but I can’t continue to see me waiting around 3 hours every night after work just to play. They say this won’t continue and I’m going to give them that chance to prove it. I have to say though that if I was actually paying for this I’d cancel my account tonight.
In about 3 hours the servers should be live for Aion’s head start. This is it folks. There will probably be a mad dash to the login screen, the servers are more than likely explode, and as I type this it seems as if the Aion site is down due to high amounts of traffic. Personally I think they took it down to put up all those new goodies they spoke about last week. I can’t wait to play and the excitement is building within the Aion community. My tweetdeck is going crazy right now as I have #Aion saved as a search. It’s been fun watching all the different people talk about Aion and the community of players have been very helpful towards one another. I’m still surprised by the amount of Asmodians, where the heck is the Elyos love. Either way if you are a gamer this is one to watch to be sure. With 400k in pre-orders and it being extremely popular over in Korea since the release back in November I’m sure this game will be around for awhile.
*Update* And I was right the did update the website with all the goodies. Make sure you check it out. Loads of stuff to see while we wait.
Okay, yes I am a crackhead. Yes I woke up at something like 8 this morning so that I could check on the server pre-selection status. And yes the minute I saw my server was unlocked I rushed and created my character. So here she is, my soon to be Elyos chanter Jadzia. 5 bonus points if you can pick up the name reference. ^_-
My goals for head start:
1. Get Jadzia to 20-22. Most of my legion mates have Monday off and I want to make sure I don’t fall to far behind.
2. Finish the Krall quests in Verteron. For the love of Aion I must finish those.
3. Gather every stinking thing in sight. Gathering in Aion is a sort of secondary profession. There are a bunch of quests that require you to go out and pick up stuff for people. If your gathering skill isn’t high enough to complete the quest you are missing out on xp. Plus it will help my legion.
4. Not as important but still on the list get handicrafting, my profession of choice, to a level that will somewhat match what I’m able to gather. I doubt it will happen but one can dream. I plan to have a ranger alt eventually so I figured handcrafting would be a good profession to pick. I will be able to craft staves for my chanter and bows for my ranger. Plus they make accessories and that’s just good to have in general.
So that’s about it. Let’s see how well I do.
Well the day started with excitement. I pre-ordered Aion months ago so I knew all about the pre-selection that would happen today. My friends and I planned during open beta which server we would be on. It was a well planned and thought out process. Okay not really we just pinned a tail on a donkey and called it a day. LOL. Kidding. Either way the server was picked and today when I got home I was ready. However that was what awaited me when I tried to make my character. While I understand the reasoning behind trying to balance the servers its still really frustrating. Liv, associate producer for Aion, has assured us that the servers that are locked will be open again once head start begins. So at least I have that to hold me over. Balancing will still take place during that time, I’m sure, so its just a question of will I be able to make an Elyos on Triniel.
And speaking of balancing I’m surprised at the amount of Asmodians. In my experience I’ve noticed people like to play the race they believe to be the “pretty” and/or “good” race. I’m only rolling an Elyos because I lost the vote when we decided what race we wanted to be. The majority of my friends didn’t want back hair and claws. I wanted Asmodian because I’m a semi lore nut and just admired their side of the story when it came to the destruction of the Tower of Eternity. Plus they seemed like the underdogs to me so I liked that aspect as well. I had gotten that impression that most people felt Asmodians are evil from looking around at various forums. As pre-selection drew near I noticed a change towards people declaring they would be Asmodian. I just never knew how big the Asmodian population would be.
Despite the frustration overall I’m happy with the decision of NCSoft to maintain balance with the races. It will help to create servers that aren’t totally dominated with one faction. Which is a good thing cause we know how people love to complain if they are given an unfair advantage in an MMO. Cause gaming is serious business.
Make sure you check the link to keep up to date on pre-selection server status.
Well I have about a week until Aion comes out and thankfully I’ll be playing in the head start cause I need my gaming fix. I’ve been searching you tube looking at videos to hold me over until Ayase yells that the servers are up and I can play.
I’ll be playing a Chanter once Aion goes live and this is the video that initially got me interested in the class. When I saw the animations I fell in love. Normally I play a pure DPS class. I was a warlock in WoW and a Spellhowler in Lineage 2 just to give you an idea. Yes I go for the caster types but I have done melee too cause let’s face it stabbing someone with a pointy knife is fun. The idea of playing a hybrid class was a bit off putting at first but when I finally started playing the chanter I knew it was right for me. I will even admit I made a totally of 5 of them during all the Aion betas. >.< So be prepared for a lot of chanter talk in the weeks to come as I test things out cause I never like to go with what people say is good until I’ve actually tried it myself.
So this is actually a few days old but I didn’t get a chance to watch it until tonight. Skip to around 1:59 mark. Go on dooooo it! Don’t worry I’ll wait……….
Talk about flipping awesome. I doubt my chanter will ever be ranked high enough to get that but its still pretty neat. What this video also shows tells me is that thankfully they are planing ahead with Aion and the world we see at launch might not be the world we see a year from now. Hopefully they will be able to find that balance so that older areas don’t get neglected for the new and shiny which tends to happen a lot with MMOs. New content comes out and old content fades away. Overall I have high hopes for Aion.
With only a few hours left to the Aion Open Beta its time for me to say good bye to my little chanter. She made it all the way to level 25 and got to see some of the abyss before I had to call it a night. ’sniff I will miss her so. That is until pre-selection next Friday when I can make her all over again.
First please forgive me for the lack of updates this week I’ve been fighting a sinus infection. I haven’t really felt like doing much of anything but passing out on my sofa. I did manage to get in a few hours play time in the Aion OB here and there between moments of being doped up on meds and I’ve started noticing a horrible trend with region chat. So much so that last night while glancing down at region chat I noticed this little nugget of goodness which about sums up the experience quite nicely. I’m not sure how it is on the other servers but on the Elyos side of the Nezekan server region chat is about 500 times worse than Barrens chat and that’s saying a lot. So much so that I too feel like this poor helpless soul.
Another thing I’ve noticed its that people are really stupid. I know that sometimes the initial quest text has a lot of words but they do give you a summary if you know reading big walls of text is hard for you. It’s like they said in school reading is fundamental. I’m starting to realize that perhaps WoW really has dumbed down the whole MMO experience. Nothing glows for you telling you “hey I’m a quest item pick me up” because heaven forbid you actually have to search for something on your own. I know that it might seem a little harsh but after hearing the same questions asked over and over again
1. Where is Tutty?
2. Where can I find this fossil?
3. Where is Poppy?
I think my head is going to explode. What’s funny is I managed to find all these on my own the first time out without asking anyone for help and trust me when I say for the most part in games I’m directionally challenged. I’m not going to lie in WoW I even used quest helper but that was after playing for a year and some change getting around on my own. Even with that I still don’t see what the hell is so hard. I think the next time someone asks either of these questions my response will just be “over near Mankrik’s Wife”.
Aion’s Open Beta started on Sunday to some not to wonderful cheers. If you follow #Aion on Twitter as I do then you know that the beta launch started late and there were serious lag, connection, and game guard issues. Having played the closed betas I was a bit disappointed only because I expected so much more from the Aion West team. Even though the game was unplayable for me until last night these issues haven’t changed my views on Aion and I’m still totally in love with the game. For others, who didn’t get a chance to play in the closed betas, this might have been a make it or break it kinda of deal. I hope they give the game a real chance as we have a whole week instead of just a weekend.
Well what I originally had for the second paragraph is no longer true. The open beta is now fully open and Fileplanet has keys if you want to grab one and try the game for yourself. I hear there are also more keys to be given away as the week goes on so stay on the look out.