Bonii!

One of the neat things about Aion is the extent to which you can customise your gear. There are a lot of items out there and every one of them can be mashed into what you want it to be, both in terms of stat bonii and appearance.

Manastones

In other games, sockets come late in the game. In Aion, you start with them and chances are the first mob you'll ever kill will drop a manastone. If you're reading this you probably know what a manastone is, but for the uninformed, a manastone is an item that can be magically placed into your gear to give it a stat bonus. The stats and bonus depend on the type and quality of manastone.


As far as I can tell, the definitive list of manastone types are:

• Accuracy - for overcoming block, parry and evade
• Attack - for enhancing physical damage
• Evasion - for evading physical attacks entirely
• HP - for being able to take more damage
• MP - for stretching your mana out a little longer from full
  
• Magic Boost - for enhancing your magical damage
  
• Magical Accuracy - for overcoming Magical Resistance
• Maximum Flight Time - for flying longer (only awarded by completing certain quests)
• Parry - for mitigating incoming damage
• Physical Critical Hit - for boosting your chance to land a physical critical hit
• Resist Magic - for evading magical attacks entirely
• Shield Defense - for mitigating incoming damage when using a shield

Some of these are more useful than others, depending on your class and the role you are gemming for. For example, if you are gemming some PvP gear as a cleric, practically the only stones you would want are HP stones. Magic Boost does not effect healing, you will not be in melee or casting damaging spells unless alone or not much healing is required and you'll be facing both physical and magic damage dealers trying to take you down. In PvP your priority is to survive so you can continue healing people. On the other hand if you're gemming for PvE, MP stones would take a larger priority as the monsters will be hitting the tanks, not you, whereas for the other role MP stones are vastly inferior to HP stones.

If you're unsure what to go with, consider this rough general guide:

• PvE Tanking Templar? Go with Evasion, Shield Defense and HP.
• Solo Templar? Go with Attack and Physical Critical Hit instead.
  
• PvE Physical Damage Dealer? Go with Attack, Physical Critical Hit and Accuracy.
• PvE Magic Damage Dealer? Go with Magic Boost and Magical Accuracy.
• PvE Healer? Go with MP.
• PvP and not a Templar? Go with the above, but instead prioritise HP, especially if a healer or leather/cloth class (which is... everyone except for Gladiators xD).
• PvP Templar? Go with Attack, Physical Critical Hit and HP.

The quality of your gear determines how many manastone sockets it has. White is one socket, green two, etc. though I should note that I have found green items with three sockets, so there might be bonus slots on a per-item basis or some kind of randomisation happening.

Random Gear Stats

You may notice while you play that a green item will drop with the same name as something that has previously dropped, and yet the second row of stats on it are different... say, MP and Concentration instead of HP and Accuracy. That's because that second row is random. So pay attention to the stats of what drops, even if you've seen it drop before... it could have a better stat allocation than what you have. :)


Godstones

Eventually you'll get access to GODSTONES, which are generally as awesome as they sound. They are essentially socketable items that can only be applied to your weapon and only once. Whenever you hit with that weapon (or cast a spell) there is a random chance for the power of the godstone to be unleashed. That chance and that power are both described on the godstone.

Oh, and it makes your weapon glow.

Some examples:

• Aegir's Eye Beam
• Boreas's Fury
• Vaizel's Will

There are a lot of options. Debuffs, DOTs, Less damage often, More damage rarely, etc. You can just imagine the awesomeness of fighting a losig battle and then having Nezekan's Valiance trigger on your opponent.

Enchantment Stones

What do you do with all that white and green quality gear you don't want? Well, you sell it, duh. But if you don't feel like making money you can instead use them to boost your gear. Extracting the Enchantment from an item creates an Enchantment Stone which can then be used on one of the following types of items:

• Chest
• Leggings
• Shoulder
• Gloves
• Shoes
• Weapons
• Shields
  

Enchanting a weapon increases its Attack. Additionally, if it's a caster weapon such as a Mace or Orb, its Magic Power is increased as well. Enchanting an armour piece increases its Physical Defense... the better the type of armour (cloth->leather->chain->plate), the more Physical Defense is granted from the stone. Enchanting a shield raises its Damage Reduction.

1. From a General Goods Merchant, purchase Extraction Tools.
2. Use the tools on the item you want to disenchant. An enchantment stone will be created.
   
3. Use the enchantment stone on the item you want to enhance.

It should be noted that you can only extract enchantment stones from items that can be enchanted... so no extracting belts.

Enchantment stones stack up to ten times per item. They can also fail, in which case, the enchantment level of the item will decrease by one instead of increase. The lower level the stone vs. the item, the higher its chance of failing. To minimise this risk, only extract items that are about the same level as the item you're enchanting. A good rule of thumb is use an enchantment stone that is five levels higher than your item. Of course, you could always just spam cheap lower level enchantment stones and hope for luck.


Item Dyes

If you're anything like me, you can't enter a rift without looking good. Unlike WoW where every high end warrior looks exactly the same as every other high end warrior, Aion makes sure there are options for the discerning daeva.

Four basic dyes can be purchased from your capital city from a dye vendor -- look around until you find them. Make sure you know what dyes are sold before you buy any from other players as people will often park somewhere with overpriced vendor-bought dyes to trap the unaware. These dyes can be used on your visible armour, shield and possibly your weapon (I didn't try), tinting certain parts of them in the colour of your choice. Not all of the item's colours will be change - which in my opinion was a good choice, power rangers are not cool - some colours specific to the item will remain, but 99% of the time it works. If you don't like the way your dye turned out, you can use Dye Remover on the item.

Bored with the four vendor dyes? Certain plants in Elysea and Asmodae drop petals rarely when gathered, which can be used as a dye.

Elysea:

• Wiki - Green
• Meon - Yellow
• Ormea - Orange
• Tange - Purple (darker than the ones from the vendors)
  
• Ervio - Cyan
• Lunime - Gold
• Omblic - "Red" (pink mo like it)

Asmodae:

• Vinna - Dark Blue
• Kirka - Purple (again, darker than vendor)
• Brommel - Gold
  
• Pressa - Orange
• Merone - Green
• Kukar - Yellow
• Leopis - Cyan
  

As you can see there is some overlap, though I'm not certain whether or not the dyes are the same or whether they've got a slightly different tint. Random fact: Omblic used to be called Umblia in the Open Beta, which was super confusing because there was a completely different plant called Umblia that was around the same kind of area. Omblic is basically a pineapple on a stick :P.

At the end of Closed Beta, we were treated to some reward dyes. The "true red" dye that I used on my gear was actually red, while the red petal dye I found in Open Beta was more of a pink, so I suspect there are more dyes available out there somewhere. Apparently the Koreans get access to extra dyes through something on their website.


Item Appearance

Pick up a sweet new piece of armour but think it makes you look fat? At level 30+ you have the option to change the very model of your items. Simply go to the Item Appearance NPC and give them two items:

1. The item you want changed
2. An item that has the appearance you want

The second item will be destroyed and your first item will then look like the second item, but retain all the stats etc. of the original. It should be worth noting it needs to be the same item type, so no changing Polearms to look like Greatswords or Plate to look like Cloth.

I actually didn't touch this gear but it still looks
awesome enough to post as subject matter.