Taugrim's MMORPG Blog

In some games (e.g. World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online), your character automatically auto-attacks (AAs) in between uses of abilities. So even if you are spamming abilities, you still get AAs.

In Aion, your character AAs when you are not using an ability. It can be beneficial to “weave” AAs in between abilities, because doing so

• is efficient from an MP perspective. AAs don’t cost any MP
• can increase sustained DPS, esp when using a 2h weapon. See notes below

I’ve noticed that a lot of players across different classes have asked how to AA weave on the AionSource forums, so I created this video:

Some notes:

• if you allow an AA to complete its animation, you are more likely to have the 2nd and 3rd mini-strikes for the AA
• if you reduce or cut out the animation for an AA, you are less likely to have the AA mini-strikes. But you still get the main AA strike, which delivers the most damage
• there is a lot of debate as to whether AA weaving increases DPS; my impression is that AA weaving provides a DPS boost for melee classes using a quality 2h weapon, at least at lower levels when we have a limited number of abilities to work with.

For Chanters:

• the video was of my Chanter at level 18. I used the following sequence of abilities: Meteor Strike -> AA -> Hallowed Strike -> AA -> Heaven’s Judgment -> AA -> Meteor Strike -> AA -> Hallowed Strike -> AA -> Booming Strike -> AA
• I did have the damage-proc buff Promise of Wind turned on, but I checked the combat log when making the video, and it didn’t proc. So the white damage was only from either an AA or ability

Trivia:

• I forgot to use something as a Chanter. Can you guess what it was?

Here is my 1st Priest video for Aion:

Below is the macro that I referred to in the video. This macro applies both of our 60 min buffs on a target (and says so in chat):

/Skill Blessing of Health I
/delay 1
/Skill Blessing of Rock I
/say applied buffs for: [%Target]

I’ll  be publishing videos and useful macros as I level my Chanter up.

Feel free to post feedback, comments, and questions.

Today, players who pre-ordered Aion were able to create 2 characters across all servers, starting around 12:45 pm PST.

Just after 5pm PST, on the Aion web site, the status of those servers was posted:

It doesn’t take a statistical genius to infer from that screenshot that Asmodian is the more popular faction. The funny thing is that players often generalize and say that the “goodie-goodie” races (in this case Elyos) tend to attract more players. Looks like that is not the case so far in Aion.

Who are my 2 characters? They are:

• Taugrim the Chanter on Triniel / Elyos
• Taugrim the Assassin on Lumiel / Asmodian

I had been thinking about re-customizing my character on Triniel, but based on that screenshot, I’m not going to risk deleting a character and not being able to re-create him.

Which class, server, and faction did you roll?

P.S. switching to Chanter was a last-minute surprise change for me.

For those of you not keeping track, here are the classes I’ve thought about rolling as my main:

Chanter -> Gladiator -> Assassin -> Chanter

While I was waiting for Preselection, I thought hard about what class suited my personality and preferred playstyle the best. The answer was Chanter, not Assasin. I like doing multiple things, including bailing out an ally with a timely heal or bubble.

I also realized that I was putting too much weight on previous experience with a similar melee buffing/healing hybrid, the LOTRO Captain. When I played Captain pre-MoM (Mines of Moria), the class couldn’t meaningfully self-heal on-demand (aside from blowing the Man heal, which has a 1hr cooldown). Chanter doesn’t have that problem. Both classes are limited in terms of CC, but you can’t have everything. If I find later that Chanter isn’t viable for solo PVP, that will suck. I’m going with my gut.

I have some time before Head Start to decide if I want to stick with Chanter. Choosing a class is always the hardest part of an MMORPG for me

EDIT (2009/09/24): my main is now Taugrim the Chanter on Lumiel / Asmodian.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve chosen Assassin to play as my main character in Aion. I haven’t decided which server and faction to roll.

Here’s why this decision matters to me:

• I don’t have the time or desire to level multiple characters on multiple servers. The switching cost is too high
• I want to play on a server with a strong, mature community. For the last 2 MMOs I played, LOTRO and WAR,  I played on RP servers, Landroval and Phoenix Throne (PT) respectively, and the experience on those servers was much better compared to non-RP servers

Here are the options I am looking at:

1. roll Asmodian (Asmo) on Lumiel
2. roll Elyos on Zikel
3. roll Asmo on Zikel with the guild A New Level (my original plan)

Let me give some more context.

I’ve been unguilded since I de-subbed from WAR the first time back in April. When I came back to WAR in July, I wasn’t sure how long I’d be around, so I avoided joining a guild. I didn’t want to join a guild and then leave shortly after; that’s not healthy for the guild. It turns out I played WAR for the past 2.5 months. Had I known I was going to be around that long, I would have applied to an excellent guild, Irony, that I grouped with frequently. Irony has the trifecta I look for in players of a guild: skilled and friendly but not elitist.

I enjoyed the tight community on PT and wanted to guild with other PT players migrating to Aion, so a few weeks ago, I applied to a guild called A New Level (ANL), started by some of my former opponents. I never grouped with them in WAR, but they were cool on the forums and we had a lot of fun fights and duels.

There was a huge Vent meeting over the weekend between guilds from both factions of PT, and they decided to roll on the Aion server Zikel. This caused some friction between some PT players and ARP (Aion Role Playing), as both groups wanted their server (Zikel and Lumiel, respectively) to be designated as the Aion official RP server.

The upshot of all this:

• Zikel looks way imbalanced in favor of Asmo, as counted from the Zikel forum on AionSource (Numbers for the Legions Elyos/Asmo). A lot of people have said it won’t matter, but in the past 2 games I’ve played, I’ve seen the effect that even a hundred competent players switching factions on a server can have, even if the server has a population of thousands of players
• there has been a lot of flaming on the AionSource Zikel forums between PT / ARP and between PT / TheMercs. All this forum drama seems to have attracted a lot of elitist guilds to Zikel. I’m not intimidated by elitist guilds from a skill perspective, but they tend to be pricks in-game and on the forums, and this creates a environment I don’t want to be a part of

Both of those points have made Zikel look less attractive as a server.

I have til tomorrow to decide.

UPDATE (2009/09/18): I’ve rolled Elyos on Triniel.

UPDATE (2009/09/24): Yesterday, I re-rolled Asmodian on Lumiel for my main character. I checked out the server out of curiosity, and the player base is very friendly.

The launch of Aion for North America is only a week away!

I’m still debating the all-important decision of which class to play as my main character. As I said in a post a few weeks ago, I was thinking of rolling one of these 3 classes:

• Gladiator
• Templar
• Chanter

I decided to remove Templar and Chanter from the list, for the reasons I mentioned in the other post.

Once the Game Guard issues were resolved by NCSoft in Open Beta, I leveled a Gladiator to 11, so I could try out Gladiator with a 2h. I enjoyed the Gladiator a lot more with 2h; the burst damage is much better.

On a whim, in Open Beta, I also rolled a “Sin” (Assassin).

I was very curious about the Assassin class based on the positive comments from players on the AionSource.com forums. Here are some of the strengths of Sins at higher levels:

• high burst and sustained DPS. Sometimes you only get one or the other with a DPS class. With a Sin you get both
• lots of stuns to work with. This will be great for handling kiters and healers
• strong soloing capability
• highly desired for PVE groups, because of the high, sustained DPS

I’m now thinking of rolling a Sin as my main.

Which class are you thinking of rolling as your main and why?