SnowShael wrote:Hey guys, I'm thinking of playing Aion (North American Version), is it worth playing? Can someone give me a no bs low down on what this game is about, how hard it is to level, whats the amount of capped players, the PvP, etc? Also, I heard bots are a big thing. I thought the GM's could easily take care of such problems..?
Don't play it. I'd rather get pissed on by a wild bull in the eye or something, it's terrible endgame. If you want something that will just take up your time with no real meaning, then go for it.
The early levels are the best, I think the game was the most exciting at lvl 40-45. Rifting, where you go into opposing factions territories and randomly kill anyone you see, was the best at that level because you got rewarded Abyss Points (used to cash in for godly gear). At 50, which is cap, you get such little points from the lower level 40s it's not even worth it because when you die by them (after they swarm you), you lose a lot more than you gain.
Think of it this way.
1,000,000 Abyss Points will get you a Seal of Sun sword.
a lv40 player will give you 50 Abyss Points if you kill them, but if you die you will lose 600. And the closer to that 1,000,000 mark you get, the more you lose per death. So you'll end up losing 5,000 every death, while gaining less than piss. anyway..
If you played SRO, the grind will seem like a breeze. You can get to 50 in like 3 months, that's cap - But there is NO POINT in rushing cause seriously at 50 you will be bored out of your mind unless you can instigate pvp. Oh, and you can't 1-shot mobs, itll take you like 5 skills to kill one, even for the highest damage dealing class.
There are 2 instances you can do at 50 that are PVE. One is completely useless unless you want the staff drop at the end (like a .00001% chance ; takes ~3 hrs to complete each run) and the other you have to run at least 5 times to get your final lvl50 skill (~20 hrs total). If you've ever played WoW, the dungeons in this game will seem like garbage, cause it's literally pull this monster..kill..next pull...kill. All the elites are like party mobs in SRO, but SRO had an awesome party system where you could destroy like 5 mobs at once because every class had AoEs and Warriors had awesome fences and stuff. In AION what you basically do is if you pull more than 1 monster, you sleep the rest and you pick them off one by one. (zZzZzZz)
There is ONE fence skill , the tanks bodyguard, and it lasts for like 30 seconds and you have to basically be up on his ass just for it to be in effect, needless to say the PVE in Aion is crap, but that's cause its supposed to be a PVP game.
Onto the pvp....or shall we say lack there of. There are about 35,000 subscribers to AION, and 15 servers. So about 2k per server give or take a few. I would guess that about 10% of the people are capped lv50s- and believe me it feels like less. Unless you have a guild, you wont get anything done in this game. The abyss, the main pvp ground, is a complete wasteland. It was thriving 3 months ago when the game first came out, but the problem is the highest level monster in the area is 40..FORTY...in a capped lv50 game..WTF!. **** me in the a$$. I'm serious *&^$#& what in gods name would make level 50s go into the abyss for pvp if all they can find are ten lv40s grinding on monsters every hour? ...wait here's the developers solution. They added lv50 monsters in a 'core' which is the size of my eyeball, and basically you kill or get killed there because all you are trying to do there is kill MONSTERS ..yes that's right you are trying to PVE at lv50..when you are capped..because those monsters give more Abyss Points than people. Each monster gives 50 AP. ..nvm I'm not even going to start with that because that is just another completely flawed system in the game and it angers me to no end. By the way to the Aion fanboys okay you may be right some people will give you 1,000 AP if you kill them but you have to look for them, you have to manage to kill them and they give 1,000 AP because they are decked out in ungodly gear and if they give that much AP, they are absurdly high ranked (Army officer ++ ) and would be f*cking Stupid to run around in the abyss without a full party anyway, and you arent touching that (unless you are an OP SM with M. Acc gear and can fear them into elites)
oh and on the subject of 'touching that'. Magic resistance in Aion is completely broken. Take this scenario as an example. This is Bob and Bill =
Bob has a blue and green normal set attained easily as monster drops.
Bill has a gold set, attained by running the same instance 50 times and wasting a month of his life inside a dungeon.
They decide to pvp >>>
Bob will never hit Bill, ever. Because Bill is in a gold set and has high magic resistance. In fact, if Bill want's to be a bigger a$$hole, he can add Magic Resistance stones to his gear, and be even more invincible to casters. In fact, Bill can probably go take a dump and come back and still be alive.....
Okay now to the other part of pvp. We've already touched on the Abyss, now onto rifting. Every 2 hrs or w/e a portal opens on your side of the map to go to their side of the map. Think SRO as in Chinese vs Euro. Chinese can only stand on chinese land, and euro's can only stand on european land. Now every two hours a portal will open near samarkand or wherever and the little 2handed warrior can go teleport to hotan and annhilate any chinese character they see. And I mean anything, you can even kill the NPC's if you have the balls (they hurt like hell). It's fun as hell and I know tons of people that have kept their characters lv30 just to rift. But that's the problem, they are keeping themselves low level because rifting suck's major d!ck at lv50. You know why? because f*cktards NCSoft (the game company) made the same mistake they did in the abyss. The highest level area you can rift to is a lv44 area....at lv50. That gives no Abyss Points, there are a shitload of bots, and it's a terrible waste of time unless you are one of the f*cking dicks in SRO that put on a cape just to rape little 50s when you are lv100. So, if you like to rape little kiddies that can't fight back because A) they are bots ..or B) they are LEVEL F*CKING FORTY and cant hit you because you evade/resist everything, then go for it. I for one, enjoyed that for a week, and the game died on me.
I guess the last form of entertainment is Dredgion, an instanced PvPvE scenario that pins you against the opposing faction at 12pm, 8pm, and 12am. Yeah..thats right..you can't even CHOOSE when to have your fun, they are predetermined to 3 specific times in the day. Basically you sign up for it and wait 5minutes for you party to form, unless you have a premade party then you basically just hop on in and wait for the opponents to come. You get ported in and you have 60minutes to kill elites and kill the captain at the end. Problem is the other faction is trying to do the same so it's like a battleground and sh!t goes down. 90% of the team, one team will be better than the other, and will cause them to quit. You can check the previous page and look at Da_Realest SM OP video, that's what Dredgion looks like when one team is getting slaughtered against the other, and they end up quitting and afk at the spawn point. Needless to say, having fun in dredgion is rare, and by the end you are either on the losing end and bitching to your teammates or you are on the winning end and it's been an easy ride because you facerolled over the other team. I've only had a handful of competetive matches, very few but they were fun as hell.
the graphics are marvelous but the content makes me wanna skin myself alive. Maybe it will get better, but I doubt it, because it's already been out in Korea and they havent done anything to please their endgame crowd. Oh by the way, they farked up the fortress wars so they only last 30 minutes. The fortress war is like 200 people from the entire server crammed into the size of Donhwang, you get like 15fps on the most amazing computers (trust me I have one) and the fight consists of pressing tab to select an enemy target and spamming numbers, you can barely tell whats going on because it's a complete orgy of bodies, and everyone dies in a heartbeat as soon as they are tabbed by 20 people and nuked to the end of the world.
This is from a lv50 point of view though, i've thoroughly outplayed the game, if you wouldve asked me at lv 30 if you should play it, I would've probably bought you a subscription because it was that good back then. It's a joke now, and people are quitting left and right. The best thing I can probably tell you is play it but it just gets gradually worse the higher level you get. It seems like they had enough money to come up with stuff, then it just started dying down as you got closer to lv50.
Most of my friends who I'm trying to get to quit so we can move onto another MMO, keep saying "I wish Aion had this...I wish it had that...If only they could.." blah blah. I dont think this game will last, it's being compared to the barren desert that is Warhammer, and I dno...just disappointing for an MMO that was deemed the WoW killer. I've never played WoW but It could not be any worse than AION. I resubbed 2 weeks ago to check how my friends were doin ingame, their guild had 6 active people in vent so it's not like I could even join them in anything because 6 is max party size. I joined another guild which is currently the 2nd biggest on the server and took 2 forts last night, but all they ever do is cry about how the game sucks. Half of them don't even play anymore, it's just people playing on characters that are on their last subscription, some aren't even the actual owners themselves.
just my two cents
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