If you're already faltering - you'll be doing more as soon as you hit the top. From what I'm hearing - Aion is exactly what I said it was. So - who here has hit the top already ... if anyone.
http://wowriot.gameriot.com/blogs/d-in-my-a/My-final-Aion-review-a-must-see-as-im-a-big-deal
Hi. I'm 50, I've been 50 for weeks now. Still playing, still going strong. The game is amazing, if you're a fan of RvR this is THE game for you. I'm by far the best geared sorc on the server.
It's grindy, there's no doubt about that. If you've paid any attention to recent patches, that's going to be addressed in the next patch. They're greatly increasing quest exp for almost all zones. I'm going to read that review in full today and I'll post counter arguments to most of it. Some of the stuff I read when I glanced through it is just flat out wrong.
You know what, I'm just going to do this now. This is going to be half me refuting statements made in that review as well as some of my own statements about the game.
Just so you see where I'm coming from with these responses I'm a pretty hardcore MMO player. In WoW, I was in a top 25 US guild through BC, and a top 50 (maybe it was 75-100) US guild in vanilla WoW. In Wrath, I was a server first 80 human, and server second 80 priest. I was beaten by 3 hours, I spent a good 12 hours without power during Wrath launch. I was one of the first groups to clear 10 man Naxx, etc etc. I quit shortly before Ulduar came out in WoW.
In Aion, I'm on one of the larger servers. My legion is in the top 10 on legion rankings, and our members are currently dominating the top of the abyss point rankings. Most of us come from DaoC (a game very similar to Aion in PvP), and we have very similar WoW backgrounds. We're much smaller than other legions though, close to half the size of most of the top 20 legions.
PvESurprisingly, all of the instances in the game are pretty enjoyable, with only a few problems, mostly related to loot drops. For example, bosses have about a 50% chance to just plain drop nothing, a 30% chance to drop a green, a 15% chance to drop a blue, and a 5% chance to drop an epic. It's pretty funny fighting a boss for the first time, killing it, and getting 10k gold for your troubles with the corpse despawning before you even notice it was there.
QQ I deserve free epics. No. You don't. WoW has made you believe that every boss in the game should be a loot pinata and just rain free gear on your head. Sorry, I like to avoid WoW comparisons when talking about Aion, but sometimes you have to. I don't think getting loot everytime you kill a boss is right, it makes loot and gold (epic) gear that much more valuable.
In Theobomos Labs, there's seriously about 15 keymasters and 15 doors you have to open before you're at the last boss.
Try 8..
I'd like to note that he posted this "review" before he even hit level 50. This means he has not run the hardest PvE instance in the game, Dark Poeta. (or the Asmodian equivalent) Dark Poeta is a whole new bag of tricks. It's a pretty straight forward instance, and generally the bosses are quite simple. The interesting part of it is that there's a 4 hour time limit. You get a certain amount of points for each mob, boss, and item you gather in there. Depending on how fast you clear the instance and how many points you have you earn a certain rank. The better your rank the harder the final final boss is. The S grade boss has only been killed a handful of times on even the KR servers. You want challenging? You got challenging. I've only managed to hit B rank with groups I've run with. That being said, I really haven't felt the need to get to A or S rank because I'm quite happy with grinding out my Miragent set (which I posted about earlier and PvPing) I didn't pick up this game for PvE, but there's some content there for those who like to mix it up a bit. I would also like to note that they're increasing the drop rate of items off of bosses in patch 1.6. So you will be able to gear up pretty quickly in PvE instances after this.
I am not going to sugarcoat this though.
If you are playing this game for PvE instances, you will be sorely disappointed. Do not think for even a second that this is a PvE game, it's not. It's a RvR game.
PvE Raiding (World Bosses)
Yup, there are no raid instances. Yes, there's about 4-5 raid bosses with level 50 loot. Yes, they are on long spawn times. They do drop loot though, I don't think I've even seen any of the really high level raid bosses ever drop no loot. I've done quite a few of them too.
There is a multitude of people who want to kill these bosses but obviously only 1 raid is going to be doing them every 1-2 days. Pretty much there's 1-2 guilds per server with a monolopy on the very few world spawn bosses in the game, leaving any other guilds with the playerbase and interest in pve raiding with nothing to do. Oh, also, these bosses drop nothing 50% of the time.
Wrong wrong wrong. I've never seen any of the level 50 raid bosses flat out drop 0 loot. They've at least dropped 2 blues, sometimes even 2 blues + a gold. I know a few drop 2 golds every time.
This is NOT a PvE game! 1-2 legions do not have a monopoly on my server. Everyone, I mean everyone wants loot off of some of these bosses. In addition to everyone wanting the loot, they also don't want others to get the loot. So what does this mean? A lot of mob training. I've seen full raid groups from multiple legions fight over a raid boss by training mobs onto other legions. It's perhaps the MOST fun I've had doing PvE in a MMO in a long time. It adds an entirely new dimension to PvE. Occasionally we've even had Asmodian groups rifting join the mix as well.
QuestsQuest exp does suck, I'll admit that. They've admitted that and they're nearly quadrupling quest exp in patch 1.6.
PvPThe review gives a surprisingly positive review on PvP, and like I've been saying this is a PvP game. There's a few fixing coming up to make it even better, the z-axis range calculation is a bit messed up. It's like someone didn't take trig back in high school. This can makes things a bit frustrating in the abyss, but otherwise PvP is quite good.
Personally I couldn't care less about balance in an open PvP game, good players can still do OK on any class, whatever, and you can pick your fights pretty easily when you can go up and down in addition to forwards, right, left and backwards. You won't die if you're smart. Mute was wrong when he implied that avoiding fights you can't win isn't balance, because it's exactly that. Balance isn't relevant if you never fight the class that's the scissors to your paper, and hell, pretty much every class gets an ability on a 30min-1hour cooldown at level 50 that is a guaranteed 1 shot, so who cares? If you can't beat them fair, just ******* 1 shot them. Problem solved.
Amazing. I like this. I bolded the key part. Another thing that I believe players miss in an world PvP game is that it's not suppose to be fair. This is what should happen.
1. You get ganked by someone.
2. You call about 5 of your friends to get revenge, 6v1 someone and laugh at them and call them terrible in irc or the forums.
3. They call even more of their friends and you end up with a massive chain of events that ends up in a ton of people killing each other.
Of course there's always the times you could 1v2/3 some people, or some good 1v1 fights, but it's always more fun the above way.
Open PvP isn't fair, it never is. That's the point.
He mentions that the "zerg" or fortress PvP isn't that great. Some aspects of it aren't, those are being addressed in 1.6. The crash issue with too many people on your screen has forced many people, including myself, to tone down their graphics during a fortress siege. For a game with such beautiful graphics, it's highly disappointing. The actual fortress combat itself hasn't been bad at all. Generally the attacker will win, but successful defenses have happened. I think as more people finish leveling, that will happen more and more.
Even when you're done grinding, gearing is still a grind as bosses don't even drop good items except maybe 1 out of every 20 runs.
Gearing in PvE instances is a pretty silly idea, this is a PvP game. PvP, get abyss points, buy gear. Abyss gear is the best gear in the game by far. Even if you're not the more hardcore PvPer, it doesn't take a ton of abyss points to get some decent gear.
I guess this is sort of a half review of the time, but seeing that review linked earlier made me facepalm. It's not an accurate review of the game. You could say my view could be a bit too positive, but if you have any specific questions about the game I'll try to answer them as honestly and as neutral as possible.
I think this game will be much better for leveling 1-50 after patch 1.6. I've seen some of the experience changes for quests. Some of the exp increases are insane. If anyone complains about the leveling grind after this change, then they're someone who hasn't even hit 80 or even 70 in WoW.
