Hi all,

For once I do not have as massive as an entry in terms of screen shot fodder, so let's see just how big it gets from text, shall we?

It's been a helluva time since my last update. I have been, like, dying I think up until recently.

It could of been from anything really. Perhaps stress from school, stress from home, my ridiculous schedule and lack of eating/sleeping in amongst so many other things, but I got sick.

Really sick.

H1N1-esque sick.

It was really bad there for a while. As a result things got rougher than they already were and I had to back away from the game for a bit to rest of up and get caught up lest my situation ended up unrepairable.

So yeah, this update is not that big. It's also not completely FFXI-based either, but I will get to that after I get through some of the pre-bedridden stuff first.

I did get some progress done on PLD a while back. Got a few EXP parties and some more RNGs who made me want to pull out my hair in rage, but in the end the EXP wasn't too bad.



Did get to 64 and a little over halfway through that level as well before the party disbanded. During it I got a chain of tells that ended up in a rather funny albeit coincidental situation.



I did a bit of a double take at first before I realized her tell was completely unrelated to what Any said.

Did some Campaign to finish up the rest of my level and that was pretty fun. Also got a shot of Flic dead which is a rare sight to see...



Hit 65 and got my Chainsaw sword and reached Shield Torque level which was nice. 10 more to go! Now with more Starcade.



Things in Radiance have been pretty fun. The tedious king camps have actually allowed me to get some work done which is an epic bonus considering just how freaking much of it I have to do now. It's no wonder I am always stressed out...

Couple of older claims pre-break.





We also had a rather extensive ZNM zerg recently in order to finish Refrain's Yagrush which was a lot of fun. During a Verdelet spam I managed to score this:



Which meant I had to get my hands on a Templar Mace and feel like a real WHM!



We popped a shitton of Tier IVs for said Mythic triggers. I had only previously done Tinnin and those Tinnin were fairly messy so it was a different experience definitely.

Not to mention...



Pretty good drops overall.



Fashion shot!



I was so excited to get this body as it means I now have a WS body, and it's not a bad one to boot! Was a great feeling to see that drop to me after seeing my roll of 20.

First time fighting Nosferatu for me, didn't really know what to expect. First pop went uneventful.



Second pop... not so much.







I can't complain too much however because it was hilarious.

Sarameya was different. Radiance just melts this thing into the floor with DD rather than the strategies I was aware of so the fights were over incredibly fast (less than 30 seconds each). The first one did however, put out the last trigger needed for Refrain so I think we were all on a bit of a high for him.



Soon I will be the yellow ranger. Only missing boots!



After that I kind of died for a while. Was really hard for me to keep up with everything but it was nice to finally log back in last night and get back into the swing of events. We ran Sea for a bit which ended up rewarding me with this little trinket:



I have to say I was not expecting to be called on it, so I was kind of blindsided. Was not expecting to get this soon if ever, so it was pretty epic. So close to capped Enfeebling!

Salvage-wise, we finally completed our first boss run, although it was kind of down and dirty and that makes me a little uncomfortable.



Rawr!



We did get wanted drops though, so it wasn't a complete wash. Just need the 15s for Morrigan Hands >: O

Random stuff! After... years... of laziness and fail, I give you:



Yay~

Any (finally) shelling out money for a Noble's Tunic!



Tanking Koukennin's Cheesehoarder after multiple failed attempts with me on SMN!



Triple Mantle Proc! I know I didn't believe it either.



With being sick (and intensely dizzy all the time) and not being able to do much else besides lie in a bed/on a couch/on the floor, there was not a whole lot to do. I was hesitant to move around alot as it made me extremely nauseaous in a short period of time. I was hesitant to log on and run events as I am usually delegated to a healer job and I did not want to endanger anything with my sudden need to ofuckigottastoplookingatthischatlogitsrapingmyeyes, so it did not leave me much else to do.

I couldn't get away from Peter's incessant nagging anymore, either.

He brought his laptop over and I had nothing else to do so I ended up watching him and some of my other RL friends play a bit of Aion.

Yeah, I know. I KNOW.

Ever since talk about this game started I was always vehemently against even thinking about playing it. Talk of it in my presence usually ended in "Hey guys, stfu, I don't care."

Boy did that go out the window when you're insanely bored and unable to do anything else. He ended up letting (read: forcing) me to make a character under his account for me to dick around with one Sunday afternoon, so I thought wtf let's see what all the hoopla is about.

This is going to be a little journal of my journey so far in this strange little game. Coming from FFXI, I have some preset thinking and things like that so bare with me as we go. I am by no means an expert on this game, nor do I know a lot about anything in later levels. This is merely going to be a record of my observations and adventures in a new MMO with the mindset of an oldschool FFXI player.

First thing that struck me were the visuals. They are insane on some computers. With my laptop, not so much... but I can work with basic level graphics. I have an imagination!

My group of friends picked the dark-based race, so that's what I was given to work with. The light-based race doesn't really interest me much anyways so I wasn't too upset about all that. I decided I'd make a Warrior, with intent to choose Templar (the PLD class) should I get that far for shits and giggles.

So I played for a few hours on and off, stopping when my head would spin. A few hours of mindless killing and running around like a headless chicken completing quests, I noticed how in that time frame I had managed to make it to level 9.

It wasn't so bad really. The controls are clunky as fuck for me coming from a game like FFXI. I have no prior knowledge or hands on experience in any other MMOs barring FFXI nor have I ever played any other PC-based game before so let's just say good god it was a bitch and a half for me to just move around.

The camera moves with mouse commands only. Took forever to get used to that. Shit snuck up on me constantly. Whoops, linked 8 mobs. Whoops, just walked off a cliff. Whoops, autorunning into a wall.

The grind from 8-9 was pretty boring, either that or my eyestrain started to kick in overtime because at this point I decided ugh, don't want to play anymore and called it quits.

Coming from only playing a game like FFXI, it took a little bit longer for me to adjust than I think someone coming from WAR or WoW would. There was a lot of new stuff to get my head around fast, like there not being a claim lock system, wonky ass aggro and enmity tables, resets, a plethora of new game terms and abbreviations used by the community, the mouse command aspect, and of course, the ever-lovely PVP aspect.

That's not to say it was horrible though. One thing that I was instantly in love with was the NPC Locate tool, that is the greatest shit ever. Another really cool thing to see was the amount of EXP gained from quests. For example, you can do all of level 9 in one quest that's fairly easy to do.

The Warrior class is your basic straight-forward class. Target mob, pull out weapon, walk up to mob, whack mob until either of you dies, use bandage, repeat as necessary. There are skills you learn and stuff but that is the gist of what I did for about 4 or 5 hours. Not a hard job to play. Now I knew at level 10 you "ascend" into an advanced job and stuff gets shinier but for the most part I was just doing mindless killing and wasting an afternoon and not thinking too much of it.

It wasn't really until Peter left and I went back to slumping around being useless that I realized I kinda enjoyed playing it.

So I caved and made an account. We deleted Whren off Peter's account and I remade her.

I decided this time to roll another class. Originally I was gonna be a Temp but since one of our friends rolled that I decided to dick around with another job that caught my eye; the Summoner equivalent.

That meant I had to start as a Mage, which I was worried about considering my total inefficiency at moving in this silly little game. Turns out instead of the rotation listed above on Warrior it was more of a target mob, cast nuke, pick up drops, target mob, rinse repeat as necessary. The job is disgusting. Maybe it was just that at this point I was getting familiar with things, but I zerged through the low levels in a retardedly less amount of time and was actually finding it quite hilarious as I went in that;

- magic in this game does a fuckton of damage even if you're wearing a potato sack for equipment
- the second nuke I learned causes a movement speed down effect (harhar mob trying to reach me)
- it also combos into a second spell that casts instantly (and waaaaaaaay overkills anything at this level, I only ever used it "for the lulz" or to hear my character Xena scream)
- the Aion equivalent of Bind is instant-cast and you can cast it while running~

So I was level 9 before I knew it, which meant time to ascend and get my goddamn wings so I can throw myself off cliffs and die repeatedly due to rubberbanding at bad times (oh, we will get to this...)

So I ascended after kicking some Pixie General's ass and got to have my shiny Spiritmaster icon, as well as receiving my first summon pet. I went back out to mess around with the job and my new toys and I had this amazing revelation.

It sounded something like "Oh my god, this is awesome,"

The best way I can describe Spiritmaster to FFXI people is that it's a weird mash of SMN/BST/PUP etc, and RDM/SCH. But having said that it's very very different still.

Before we get to that though, let's talk about flying for a quick moment. Flying is awesome, I just wish I did not suck as bad as I do at it. The flight duration time is a little scary at times though when you watch your bar slow tick to empty when you are nowhere near land and then get to watch yourself splatter on a bridge 100m down after failing to land (or rubberbanding over a landing!) Flight is also restricted to certain areas which is kind of lame.

Gliding however, works everywhere! Yeah shortcuts! What's that? Don't want to walk down this huge mountain? Jump off the side and glide to the bottom! For that matter, being able to jump in this game is also really cool. I found myself in sea last night on Ro trying to jump up a ramp while camping Ix'DRK and feeling very stupid realizing such.

Anyways, back to grinding! Armed with my new fiery minion blob of death, I proceeded to wreak havoc on the countryside's friendly ladybugs and sheep. I carved a fiery swathe through the land with my tools of destruction and rage!!!111!one! This little blob sped things up by so much, especially since he has a fair bit of HP and survivability and his version of my first Command skill (think BP but all on individual timers) is burst damage rather than DoT of some of the other, later spirits. He was essentially my new tank. I could send him in and let him whail and just stand back and attack from afar.

As I leveled up, more and more toys became available. Even pre-20 I found that I had a metric fuckton of movement impeding spells, either in the form of a Gravity effect or a Bind effect. Not to mention that many of these spells also did damage, and soooo many of them are instant-cast, and can be performed while moving. I also noticed that I had a plethora of DoT spells, in the form of Helix-esque spells, as well as these nifty elementals that I could summon (on top of having a spirit pet out) which would spin around a mob and auto-attack them for magical-based damage over time. It was kind of funny really. I would do a rotation on a mob and at first it would look like I had done nothing and then all of a sudden the mob's health would just plummet.

At 13 I got a second new Command skill called Threat which I learned really fast is Aion's word for Hate. Basically, Pet Provoke. I also got a new spirit, a wind pet, to play around with but after one mob learned very fast that the spirits in this game function very differently from the Avatars in FFXI. As in, the fire pet feels like a pretty overall Mario-type. He has decent HP, decent attack, and decent survivability. His Threat Command is also fairly potent. This new wind spirit, on the other hand, felt like a piece of paper. Lower HP and barely any defense, what this thing did have was overall higher damage output and a pretty good critical hit rate. He's also fast. Really fast. And he looks cool. But I had to give in and go back to the trusty fire blob and continued to grind out those levels.

At 16 I got Dispel, and felt a bit more like a RDM. I also got the earth spirit, or the tank pet. I also got an instant-cast Stoneskin and a Spirit Link-like ability to siphon HP into my pet. Nice.

At this point, when I realized just how hard to kill the earth pet was, I started taking on mobs quite a few levels higher than me with ease. It was during this time that I happened to finally test out my class' DP skill (think 2hr only not necessarily that long of a recast--SM one is 10min recast assuming your DP meter is high enough) which buffs the spirit's stats and movement speed to holy high hell and gives them a Regen effect.

Suddenly I was playing on Easy Mode and suddenly I was really enjoying the game. Was freaking awesome. Continued leveling and achieved the last spirit pet--the water spirit--at 19 to round out my elemental arsenal of pets in this game. The water pet feels like it has the lowest staying power, it dies in like 2 hits but it's basic engaged attack is not only magical, it's ranged, which is something I think that could be useful somewhere. Maybe.

I hit 22 within a few days of playing and figured I would stop and admit to myself that I was actually enjoying the game and would like to continue playing it alongside FFXI.

Here's a pic of me at 22 with the little wind pet. Actually this is the first pic I even thought of to take before I realized there is a SS button ala FFXI. So, noob moment for me. Anyways, notice the extreme amount of skills available even at 22...



Isn't he cute? Kind of like Fenrir meets Pokemon meets... something else. It is kind of annoying though as his presence is accompanied by this obnoxious as fuck sound effects of wind which gets to be incredibly aggravating and from what I've been told only gets worse as I level up.

Anyways, after 26 levels now, it's been a fun little ride. I've learned a lot about the game, and I've also learned a lot about MMOs in general and how much of a box FFXI seems to be in in terms of that. That's not to say that FFXI is a terrible game. I love FFXI to death and was very happy to go back to playing it last night after being away from it for so long, but it is interesting to see the differences.

It has been especially interesting to me to see how I just so happened to pick a class that seems to function as a cross between SMN and RDM. There's some hilarity in that somewhere. Coming from the somewhat slow reaction time and clunkiness of FFXI's SMN job to this is kind of neat.

Granted, it's not all better. There are still some gimmicks that I killed myself on many times. For one, the pets can't fly. Sure, the water spirit's attacks are ranged by that only goes so far, especially in later zones where flight and even aerial combat comes into play. Second, moving enough out of range of them will cause them to despawn. This is especially bad if you just used your DP to buff them, essentially wasting the skill. If they are in Guard mode, they act similar to FFXI and will attack anything that goes to attack you. If this target then jets off in another direction, your pet will idiotically give chase and then despawn when they get out of range. The wind spirit is really bad at this, as his movement speed is really high and as such he tears off with you not having any hope in hell of keeping up. In fact, I have learned that this is a PVP tactic used by many to purposefully depop the pet.

Unlike in FFXI, where upon an avatar being killed or released you can immediately summon another, there is a small window where you are unable to summon anything, which can be kind of dangerous in a bad situation, so it's a good thing we have all our movement impeding spells. Another thing I found out early on is that the pets sometimes have retarded as fuck pathing. Like, I jumped down a fairly small hill and my fire pet just stood at the top of the hill and stared at me for 10 seconds before I got too far and he despawned. He could have just walked around a very, VERY small hill and pathed to me but instead his AI couldn't figure that out. Another time, when I was in a Group area trying to sneak into a stronghold, we all jumped over this little fence in the back to get in. The fence is about 2 feet high and almost non-existent and my pet pathed AROUND the perimeter of the fence and through the main gate instead, which brings me to my next point...

Spirits can body aggro mobs. Hello new concept for me. No such thing as Carby-pulling in this game either, oh no. Shit attacks your pet? Multiple shit? All that shit's coming to say hi when your pet dies/unsummons. So you can imagine how the above scenario ended when my pet pathed through the front entrance of the stronghold and right to us with 5-6 Group mobs on his ass. This isn't completely horrible though as it also means that buffs and heals can be cast on your pet by other players. That's pretty cool in my book.

Things that I like about the game in general though that I learned while running for my fucking skin after a bad pathing incident, is that mobs will not chase you to infinity and beyond around a zone like they sometimes do in FFXI. In fact it's quite easy to lose aggro and quite easy to just kite mobs, movement reducing abilities or not. In fact, I learned that it is possible for my class, and some others, to solo Group mobs in a way similar to how a mage would DoT kite in FFXI. This immediately drew my attention and I went to test it out on some designed for a few levels over me.

A Group mob, known in Aion as an Elite, is basically a stronger monster that is designed to be fought in a group setting. Kind of like a VT or an IT. They hit my paper ass like a truck but the idea is to not get hit period. Because they are group mobs, they have a lot of EXP as EXP is split among group members. As such, soloing them for the lump sum of EXP is a pretty lucrative endeavor. I messed around with it.



You can see here that the basic strategy I had learned off of, being engage pet and let the pet tank while I DoT and nuke from afar had switched. These mobs hit too hard for my spirits to handle and then plow through my HP so you basically resort to keeping hate while kiting, while your pet follows behind the mob and whacks it. It's actually quite fun since you can kill this shit fairly fast for pretty nice EXP and do not have to rely on being in a group. The playerbase feels pretty subpar at the present time so I was all for solo grinding at a respectable rate. You'll also notice in that screen another neat thing I like about this class; the pets visually change as you level up. My fire blob is no longer a blob and is more of a lava humanoid with a fiery sword-thing.

So that sped up my leveling pretty well, although I did not get to mess around with it for long as homework and Radiance events came back into play. At this point in time I've hit 26, and received some updates in armor as well as the next wind pet which still happens to be my favourite at the moment!





Next few levels I get the second tier earth spirit and I am curious to see how he scales against the first tier but I will not be able to mess around with this for a bit as I have commitments elsewhere for the time being.

All in all, I take back all the bad shit I've said about this game. Yeah there's still lame parts. Trying to farm Abyss points and minding your own business only to get owned by this random guy who is obviously in his 40's based on the tiers of moves he uses definitely sucks, but on the other hand, there's still fun to be had. So many Abyss deaths from our own stupidity... the skype conferences are pretty epic.

Our group's still small, and mostly RL friends/old members of BK, but hey, it's more fun that way. We tend to keep to ourselves and on the rare occasions of otherwise we've met some pretty colourful characters. Some pretty awesome, and some horrendously bad. This is definitely a game that you need a circle of friends to keep playing in as eventually that grinding mindlessly is going to just kill you. It's the exact same mentality that exists in FFXI-- I know a lot of us are still playing primarily because of the people we've met over the course of our time here.

Anyways, that's the extent of my little escapade. It was fun overall. But FFXI's still definitely my game. I haven't hit class-defining skills yet so I look forward to that when I have free time.

Until then, here's one last pic for you Levi people-- Drae 2.0, now with upgraded wings~



Haha!

Toodles all~ I have an essay to write before tomorrow morning that I have to finish and then maybe I can attend events tonight =X