Uh... yeah, so Aion! Ever since a friend introduced me to Aion, I have been clinging to it in some form or another. Normally I wouldn't bother with an MMO: the vast majority are absolute arse. The success rate of MMORPGs is somewhere in the low tens. But feedback has been good... all of my friend's friends who were playing it were reporting back in the positive. That's not how MMOs work! They gather hype! They string people along and only a few months after release do people realise that WoW really deserves its massive subscriber base! Yes, I'm an ex-WoWer and I don't mean that in a recovering-addict kind of way. I loved the game, but as all games eventually do, it got stale. One of the things I wished I did in WoW was preorder the collector's edition and take part in the closed betas, experience the early versions that you could recall to your grandguildren years on. And, ya know... own a cute baby panda pet that's rarer than a legitimate Stone of Jordan in Diablo II.
Lewin fails at fishing. IT'S TO YOUR RIGHTSo when a collector's edition of Aion appeared on Steam for $50 less than retail, containing special wings and items and a founder's title, I preordered it. My first beta was Closed Beta 5. Since then, every other game I play has a dull edge. It just... isn't Aion. After it ended I found myself pining for CB6... and now that CB6 is over, I pine for the early access awarded to us preordering folk.
I should probably talk about the game :P. I'm Zot/duckInferno, "that friend from World of Warcraft" who is having a love affair with the Sorcerer class. The term usually applied to the magic dps role is 'glass cannon' and the this class is no different. We have powerful bursty offensive spells as well as spells which serve to increase the distance between you and your target, all cast from the squishy cloth-covered cardboard cutout that is the Sorcerer. Woe betide you if a monster gets up to you and you do nothing about it!
We found armour dyes, Lewin makes a funnyFortunately, there's plenty of abilities to prevent this. A good opening spell is Ice Chain, a damage spell with a modest cooldown that slows your target. It chains into another spell called Frozen Shock which physically pushes the mob back and staggers it (a form of stun). We have an instant root that breaks on damage, a sleep on a 15 second cooldown which puts a mob out of action for 20 seconds, an area of effect cold spell (kind of like WoW's frost nova) which freezes everything in its range in place... and my personal favourite, Blind Leap.
Blind Leap is a spell that instantly teleports you a distance backwards (and it's free! thirty second cooldown, though). WoW has a similar Mage ability called Blink, which teleports you forward instead of backwards. I find that Aion's approach is much more fluid: when you use it, you're instantly teleported backwards, still facing your target without losing your point of reference. In PvP, Blind Leap also clears your enemy's target so it really does work as a nice spell for gaining a few seconds of time. Combined with Aion's smaller 'global cooldown' between abilities, this all makes for Blind Leap being one hell of a sexy ability and probably my favourite Sorcerer spell.
All offensive spells have a small cooldown with no easily discernable 'rotation', requiring you to instead prioritise... or just go nuts casting whatever is available. Spells can also chain, activating other more powerful spells, making for truly action-oriented gameplay. I actually feel like a powerful spellcaster slinging spells left right and center... hefty charged spells, instant chained spells, damage-over-time spells with instant damage components, pushbacks... all while teleporting around with awesome rippling robes. It certainly contrasts with WoW, where mages have around twenty different offensive damage spells but only a few that are worth casting for the spec and one 'main nuke' that clearly takes precedence over all others.
Note the abilities on my main bar. Five of them are my main damagingabilities; two more are chain spells and are hidden. I use all of them constantly.
I did some soloing but most of my time was spent grouped with Lewin the Templar. The combination of a squishy damage dealer and a corporeal form of CC is quite powerful. There were several times where we messed up and ended up fighting a ridiculous amount of mobs at once (remember, this is a game where you often can't take on two monsters at once without using consumables), with him insulting the monsters' parentage so they'd attack him, my sleeping one mob, rooting another in place away from us and blasting the living shit out of everything else.
We were so busy talking about how tasty this pig we were escortinglooked, that we lost him and had to go back :(
I think that's enough for an introductory post :P. I will leave with this: I am completely and utterly enthralled in this intoxicating game, and I'm yet to break past level twenty.
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