The Aion Experience

Did you know you can teleport from one end of the city to the other in Pandaemonium?

I see so many comments from Aion players stating they want a mount lol. We’ve all been spoiled in WoW and not don’t want to use our legs for anything other the bare necessities. And in Aion, there’s a lot more running than there is flying, especially for a game supposedly all about flying…

Pandaemonium is a big city. And if you have to run to the far end to hand in a quest, come back and find out you have then go back again, it can be very tiresome. Well now, you don’t have to run all that way! At the entrance to the city (near the teleported) and the far end of the city (near the hoity toity ‘oh you’re a Daeva‘ snobs), there are teleport statues. These do, funny enough, just what their name states – teleport.

I’ve run past them countless times without even paying attention. Then one day, I moused over them to see that they glowed and had the name ‘teleport’. Naturally, if something says it can teleport you, even an innate object like a big stone statue, you’re going to have to test it out. It’s Human, I mean Daeva nature.

Sadly, it doesn’t take you anywhere really cool, just saves you a run.

The cost is only a few hundred Kinah – 237 to get from the back end of the city back to the bridge at the front. Not bad considering it can save you, like, at least 1 minute =p

Did you know you can purchase scrolls that will teleport you to major hubs in game?

Purchaseable from Nekai in Pandaemonium, you can use the scroll above to teleport back from anywhere in game. It costs 1,782 Kinah so can be a little more expensive than flying back, but if time is more important to you than holding onto a few extra Kinah, then this scroll could become your new best friend. I always carry one on me, and when used, I simply purchase another. They do stack of course, I just do it that way to create a habbit. Hopefully it will become second nature and then I won’t ever be without a scroll.

You will find Nekai in the Market Street, along the left hand side if you are running into the city. You can purchase scrolls for Altgard Fortress, Beluslan Fortress, Morheim Fortress and of course Pandaemonium.

Did you know there is an easier way to search the brokers than typing everything out in full?

Most of you would have figured out by now that you need to type in your search term with correct capital letters when making use of the Broker system in Aion: I Want To Search For This Item Please. Frustrating, but once you get used to it, easy enough. If you are a raising a profession of any sort and purchase materials off the brokers, this can become extremely annoying to have to type everything out in full any time you realise you’re a flux or piece of leather short.

Alternatively, if you are trying to search for a design, or even a manastone it gets even harder as sometimes a shorter term such as “Physical Crit” brings up everything with those words in it. Well guess what? No longer do you have to key in the full description!

Going with the manastone example, one of the current searches I am doing a lot at the moment is for Manastone: Physical Critical Hit +4 (I’m wanting to make my +6’s via Alchemy), but that’s a whole lot of words to type in multiple times a day. Well, check out the image below (click to enlarge) and take note of the new search term I am using:

M P C +4 returns results the same as typing out Manastone Physical Crit +4, but takes half the time to type! How cool is that?! And you can do this for any item, you just have to type in the FIRST LETTER of each word. Thin Rawhide would be T R for example.

Of course, sometimes you have multiple items with the same letters such as the Thin Rawhide (T R) example above – that search would also return Thick Rawhide among other items. All you need to do for this is expand on some of the words, such as the image below:

M A F returned multiple items such as Minor/Major Accessory/Amor Fluxe, so expanding to Minor Acc F narrows the list down to just the items I need.E

Enjoy future spending at the Brokers…. or E F S A T B! =p

While I think it’s totally fantastic that I can solo with my Assassin, especially coming off the frustration of the Ranger, I still have to watch the different mobs I try to take on alone as there are different levels of difficulty to a mob besides their obvious level.

There are several different ratings for creatures and NPCs. These ratings are displayed through the various target frames they have surrounding their health bar. It’s become very important for me to pay attention to these ratings to help determine if I’ll be able to take the mob with ease, if I’ll need to use a health pot or maybe two, or, the most important one for me to recognise, if I need to run my ass out of there!!

Target Frame Ratings

The first part to pay attention to is the target frame – the area surrounding the mobs health bar.

As you can see on the top one there is nothing really special, while the second one down – the elite – has the double bars at the end and a slightly enhanced circle on the left hand side. And of course Hero and Legendary look like they’ve been to some sort of academy and received their wings…

So long as you’re paying attention, you should be able to notice the differences immediately after targeting. But the mobs difficulty indicators don’t stop there… they also have spots!

Target Emblems

Ok, emblems as they are officially called. Spots, Dots, Emblems… they all refer to the little white markers inside the circle portion of the target frame on the left side of the health bar. The emblems indicates the relative difficulty of a target in relation to others of its kind.

So basically, you can have two mobs who look identical; however they can be different degrees of difficulty. This is what I pay particular attention too in these lower levels.

The first part, which most of you should be aware of by now, is the colour of the emblem background which will denote whether it is a hostile or non-hostile target. Red – for hostile targets – will aggressively attack you. On the other hand, yellow – non-hostile targets – will mostly ignore you.

Note: be wary when attacking non-hostile target when a similar creature or NPC is nearby as some of them will come to the aid of their comrades.

The second part is the actual marks on the mob…

Taking note of those dots is necessary for any soloing class out there – particularly one that can’t self heal well during combat. I know for me, I can take a mob with up to 3 dots fairly easily, however 4 dots can become quite tricky.

No idea if this info helps anyone else out there – I wasn’t aware of the dots (or, more to the point didn’t know what they meant) until my partner informed me. So maybe there’s someone else out there that shares my lack of knowledge about it hehe.

Did you know that you can transfer money between your characters via your warehouse?

Unless you’ve never been to your warehouse ( aka bank), you would be familiar with the ‘Account Warehouse’ section that allows you to quickly and easily move items around between your characters. I find this section of my warehouse invaluable as I have made my currently shelved Ranger the one who will level the professiosn (since she already started). Of course, collecting all the ingredients on my Assassin means I have to continually transfer the items over so Alexan can use them. The shared bank (as it was known in EQ) is a huge improvement over WoW’s simple “mail to your alt” route.

What a lot of people don’t know however, is that you can also transfer Kineh between your characters just as easily.

When you open your warehouse menu, at the bottom of the tab you will see a little gold coin icon – double clicking on this brings up a window allowing you to type in what ever amount of Kineh you would like to move to your bank.

Click the coin icon to begin...

Enter the amount

Once you’ve transfered it up to your warehouse, you simply log on any other character that needs it, double click on the coin icon at the top this time, and the same transfer window pops up allowing you to enter the amount you wish to pull down.

Bring it down to your character...

Voila – it’s THAT simple. Now, when your crafting character runs low on money, you can top her up with of your others quickly and easily.

Happy Hunting!

Coming from a Hunter background in World of Warcraft, it constantly felt like something was missing when I was fighting mobs in Aion. Oh I know what it was – the bouncy red arrow above the mobs head indicating “he belongs to me”. The good news is you can mark mobs in Aion as well – it won’t give you any benefit like the Hunter’s Mark of WoW, but it’s still a handy way to show your group members which mob you are attacking, especially if your group resembles a peep of chickens (yes, that’s what a group of chickens is called apparently)…

Ok, so marking in Aion is part of the Branding System. Frustratingly, the branding functionality is usable only by group leaders, Alliance captains, or Alliance vice captain. As a Hunter, you can be designated puller for a co-ordinated group and as such, can be made leader to utilise the function for this ability. I’d really like to see Aion open the ability up to all group members as the ability for a sorcerer to mark a mob they’ve put to sleep (there’s a Zzz mark) would be handy for all the “Gotta touch them all” group members. Sadly, at this point, we’ll have to resort to screaming “DON’T TOUCH” macros. I so do still love the “You touch it, you f**k it” slogan I witnessed in a WoW group years ago. “You spank it, you tank it” another all time favourite.

The biggest reason to use branding however, for now, is that it allows for one-key-press assisting. See, branding works two ways:

1. Branding the target
2. Targeting the brand

Confused? Ok, in simple terms, say you and me are in a group along with 4 other players. I pull 3 mobs, one of which is put to sleep by the sorcerer leaving two beating on me. I know that mob xxx has more hit points and hits harder than mob yyy so I brand that one with an arrow as the first to be killed. Instead of you having to target me then assist, or having to write up a macro to do it for you, you can simply press the /selectbrand 9 which is the arrow  hotkey (or assign any hotkey you like for the select arrow option) and blam, you’ve now targeted the correct mob and can start wailing away.

Of course in smaller groups while you are leveling up this won’t be as big a problem, but when you come to the higher end instances, raids or even PvP, it can come in very handy. Especially if you’re with a group you run with constantly.

How to set a Mark/Brand

There are two ways you can do it. I chose to do it via Options >> Key Mapping. Hit your escape button, choose options, then Key Mapping. Scroll about half way down until you see the marks and assign a key beside the one you want to use.

The other way, is by using the in-built functions by using the Show Brand functions and Select Brand functions in the [Actions] tab in the Skill Window.

Note: The Select Brand function is usable only when a group leader or an Alliance captain assigns the brand to a target.

Of course, using the built in buttons will clutter up your hotbar but can come in handy if you are needing to use multiple brands – such as a kill marker and a sleep marker. That only clutters up the group leaders hot bar of course, for the remaining group members that simply need to make sure they are targeting the correct mob, if several brands are in use, then Ctrl+Tab (default) tabs through only the targets with brands.

If you, as the group leader/marker don’t want to clutter up your hot bars, you can take a few extra seconds to right click the mobs target frame (the info bar that appears at the top) and select the branding icon from there. Of course you then have to do that for every mob which is annoying when there are quick pulls but may come in handy when moving through an area slowly. If you are doing it this way, note that the three most recently used brand are displayed at the bottom of the target’s drop down brands list.

When a branded target is dead, the brand will be removed automatically.

As an ex-WoW Hunter, I naturally use the blue arrow to mark all my pulls. It may not be a bouncy red one, and it may not improve my damage any, but it certainly makes me feel special. =p

I’m not 100% sure if this came in with the Patch 1.5.0.8 or was snuck in some other time, but it’s pretty cool. For those of your brave (or silly) enough to remain in the public chat channels, you can now block the annoying idiots without too much effort. Instead of having to type /block , you can now right-click directly on the players name and select to block them.

Small, but very handy feature. Especially for the people who create their names by sneezing and headbutting their keyboard.

Did you know you can split items stacks?

If you have multiples of any item, you can split them off into smaller stacks, or individually. And to do this is very easy – simply hold down your shift button, and then right click on the stack you want to split. A window will pop asking you how many you would like to move. Simply enter the numeric value of your choice and hit the ok button. Click in your inventory where you would like the newly created stack to be and voila – done!

Not only can you split stacks of your own items, you can split stacks found in personal stores. Say if someone is selling 50 of an item, all in one stack, yet you only need 10 of them. Well guess what? You can purchase only 10 off him! You don’t have to buy all 50!! And it’s just as easy as splitting your own stacks.

In the shop window, shift + right click the stack of what ever it is you want to buy, a window similar to the previous one will pop up, only this one asks you how many you want to buy.

Enter your desired amount and then click ok. And that’s it. Now you buy your 10, leaving the 40 or how ever many was originally there left over for someone else to buy!

Unfortunately it doesn’t appear to work when buying from the Brokers… or perhaps I just haven’t figured that step out yet.

Did you know you can link items in both chat and your private store message?

That’s right! Just like linking in WoW, you can link armor, weapons, manastones and more in both chat and your private store message. By linking an item, it allows other players to click on it to see the stats and information, which is very handy for armor and weapons as everyone can see the stats of the item without having to ask you.

Linking in chat is very easy – simply hold your CTRL key down and hit your right mouse button. Done!

Linking in your store message is a little tricker – unfortunately you can’t link directly into the message section. Insead, you need to link your items into your chat bar but don’t press enter just yet. Once you have linked all the items you want, select the text and then copy and paste it into your store message.

Obviously the above image doesn’t really show much use for it, however when you have green items, it’s a good way to get people’s attention as they run past all the shop message spam in the cities and major gathering areas.