Posted by Spooner | 8 Comments

Aion Professions & Crafting Primer

So I haven’t done a video showing you all the specific professions in Aion until now. As I stated in the video there is no limitation per say on the professions, you can learn all of them, however. You can only become a master in two of them so the highest/best crafts are pretty much exclusively created by that person.

Sure there isn’t much to stop players from picking up every profession and gearing themselves out int he process but the amount of money needed as well as time spent crafting is INSANE. So only a complete psycho or a kinah buyer would do this. You’re going to end up spending something close to 80+ hours straight crafting to get to the crafting skill cap  and somewhere around 5 million kinah.

The element of luck and surprise with HQ procs are fun. There’s just an inherent addiction/sense of gambling when crafting certain items, sometimes you’ll get (completely luck based) a High-Quality craft of the item. It won’t cost anything extra and the way it works is such: You’re crafting an item, it reaches the end of the meter then suddenly you hear a ding and the meter reset now showing the crafted item as a green or higher quality piece of gear with a different name. It’s the same item but with MUCH better stats and this extra proc doesn’t cost a thing mats wise.

Crafting as well is just a lot of fun in Aion. You don’t have to spend hours just crafting tons of useless crap in bulk and lose mats in the process. Work order quests let you burn through the skill-ups like crazy, and you get exp for crafting as well so it’s a win/win situation. I remember when I had gathered up something like 200 iron ore, bought the appropriate amount of charcoal briskets and went AFK crafting Steel Ingots as I ate dinner. I came back with all my bars done and about 5,000 exp away from leveling up from a zero point as well as my armor smithing skill leveled. Another little bit to note is that most items stack incredibly high, I’m talking easily into the 100+ to save inventory space, it’s wonderful.

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Posted by Spooner | 3 Comments

Aion: Gathering Primer v2.0

I know I did a gathering video already but like most of my first uploads, it was lacking. In this video you’ll see the basics of gathering which isn’t very complex at all truth be told. Also you’ll hear my single major complaint with Aion, gathering in flight.

Now the gathering quests really aren’t as big of a deal as I make it out to be in the video, I was a little caught off guard by them and so knee-jerked into being pissed. Imagine you are questing in a zone fighting wild animals, revolutionaries, quelling a beastial uprising, unearthing and rebuilding ancient ruins, shutting down a malevolent Abyss Gate where invading evil Balaur will pass through – and then you have to collect 8 Zucchini for a mermaid chick outside of the water because she’s tired of eating fish. WTF?

Now there ARE items and gear and such that let you fly longer for more time gathering, but until the mid-range levels it’s not realistic. People suggest finding a node closer to the ground, that’s all fine and good if it wasn’t for the long downtime waiting for your flight meter to refill and the slowness with which you gather Aether from the sky. You may not fall to your death, but its still a time sink compared to normal gathering. Also the best quality aether comes from very high up.

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Posted by Spooner | 4 Comments

Aion: Flight Primer v2.0!

I did a flight video but it felt lacking. I went ahead and hit the vid again this time with footage from CB5 showing you a little bit of the eye candy during flight and explaining the concept more. Flight in Aion isn’t just for faster travel, it’s pretty much a solid way to PvP and a strategic choice as some attacks close or open up as a result of taking flight.

I mention different wings in the vid as well that affect your flight time. Here’s a chart!

As I said in the video, you’re going to want to break up your PvP group into who’s on the ground and who’s in the air. Casters and healers are more vulnerable in flight as they’re spotted easier, but they have much more mobility and typically ranged DPS is at a major advantage over melee in the air since there aren’t knockdowns. It also pays off to have say an Assassin with high flight speed and average flight time, zip past the enemy front and then stealth up to distract and divert enemy players.

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Posted by Spooner | 2 Comments

Ganking in the Aion Arena: There’s always a bigger fish!

I promise I’ll get some real PvP footage online for you guys soon. I took this short clip while screwing around in the first 20 minutes of the servers going online last weekend for CB5. I was trying to spend more time leveling so I can show you guys the Abyss but I didn’t get that far yet.

I’ll have rifting videos as well as tons of Abyss stuff coming very soon, in the meantime you can watch me downright spank a lowbie Assassin in the arena. Rule of thumb for Aion: Don’t enter the free-for-all arena unless you want to fight.

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Posted by Spooner | 5 Comments

Aion Closed Beta 5 brings English Voice Acting and much more!

This is downright badass, I’ll have more in the way of videos for you guys very soon on my YouTube page as well as here on the Spooncraft Video Page. Here’s the recently announced changes coming to the next closed beta for Aion happening this weekend.

We had a blast showing off Aion to the enormous crowds of people and potential robots at Comic-Con in San Diego last week. It was a crazy event that spanned five days – but we are now back in the office, getting ready to launch a brand new beta event that is sure to tickle your curiosity. Read on.

Closed Beta event #5 (CB5) is incoming, ladies and gentlemen, and it’s coming with a respectable shipment of fixes, improvements and fine additions which we have worked hard to complete since the previous event. To give you an overview, please find below a pure list of things to expect for this coming weekend:

• New Sound files have been added
  • NPCs should now have a greet and farewell voice
  • Cutscenes will now have voice
  • Race Prologues are now available when you create a new character for Elyos and Asmodian
  • Tutorial videos are now available in game via the help menu
  • Player voices are now available at character creation
  • System voices are now available
• New NPC Dialogue/Quest text for Theobomos and Brusthonin
• Various Localization fixes
  • Broken HTMLs have been fixed
  • Various grammatical errors have been fixed
  • Various Glossary term fixed
• 2 New servers added for each territory

Especially exciting for us is to introduce a first round of English audio, allowing you all to have a small taste of a more completely localized version of Aion. As we have announced before we are committed to releasing Aion with all its content adjusted and culturalized into top-notch English, including character voices and voice-overs. Keep in mind that these are currently implemented as a beta feature and that they will contain minor irregularities and bugs. Bear with us as we work to polish this and extend the volume of content even more in the foreseeable future. You will be able to log in to the game no later than on Friday noon PDT (8 PM BST, 9 PM CEST), marking the exciting dawn for two entirely new game servers for each territory. In order to promote newcomers to join these new servers, character creation will be disabled on all other servers during the beginning of the event.

Meanwhile, the much asked for beta forums will open for responsible posting again on Thursday 30th noon PDT (8 PM BST, 9 PM CEST). Don’t miss it, as constructive feedback means a lot to us and allows us to make even more accurate improvements to the game before launch.

Let us thereupon extend a hopefully helpful recommendation as conclusion to this announcement. The audio-rich patch for CB5 is definitely a big one, and it’s advisable for you to boot up your patcher as soon as possible in order to get the game ready for the weekend. Waiting until the last minute to download all the new content we’re pushing out for this event could mean that you miss out on a good amount of enjoyable playtime!

That’s all for now, see you in Atreia!

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