Posts by Actaea

Currently, it is possible to drop items that are not usable by your faction. For example, stigmas that only exist for one faction can drop for the other faction: Stigmas for wrong faction can drop

This can lead to a frustrating game experience, as you can not only not use the item in question yourself, but are pretty much unable to benefit from obtaining it in any way (e.g. selling it to another player that can use it, which is impossible because cross-faction trading doesn't exist). Therefore, these drops are essentially useless and demotivating after putting in the effort to obtain them, e.g. by running instances, or getting "lucky" when random mobs drop them (but your rabbit's foot is actually a rabid bunny that kicks you in the face).

I suggest the loot tables to be adapted to account for factions, so that items obtained by players are actually usable by at least someone from their faction rather than having a chance for the main drop of an instance being degraded to vendor trash.

Grogget just dropped an Asmo stigma. I'm an Elyos.

Are the loot tables not adapted for factions?

Quote from Xeon

Do I need to do anything to auto-hunt?

The default bind to start it is Shift + A. Make sure you have tons of inventory space, set up your skill rotation in the auto hunt menu, put your character in the location you want to farm mobs in and go afk, then come back a few hours later to sell the low level manastones or the duplicate cubes that weren't sold by the auto-sale for 1 kinah... or realize that an enemy faction player killed you two minutes after you went AFK and your character wasn't farming anything meanwhile, or that your character got too close to an artifact and tried to farm the artifact mobs, with stress on "tried".

Quote from Xeon

What's quickest way to get the idians for my jewels?

The fastest way to get Normal Odians is to buy them from the broker for roughly 500k kinah each.

If you prefer to farm them, a lot of quests in Dumaha as well as the fortress quests in Inggison/Gelkmaros give you fragments of Odians (sometimes with a chance to get Noble Odian Fragments). Collect 100 of the same color to receive a Normal Odian for a random class with a random skill enchantment. You can also obtain new Odians for a random class with a random skill by fusing two existing Odians.

That takes care of Normal Odians. This will allow you to get one Odian skill at most, as you have to use a certain amount of Odians of the same color to get the Odian skill (5 Normal, 3 Noble or 1 Glowing). In order to have two Odian skills (without also requiring a Glowing Odian, but if you have that, you probably won't be using Normal Odian), which are currently still close to unobtainable for the average player, you'll have to slot Noble Odians (3 + 3 slots of the same color).

Noble Odians were distributed as a part of Elite Rewards a few months ago. You may still be able to find some on the broker for around 400m kinah each, with some costing more or less depending on the class and skill. You can also get a (random class random skill enchantment) Noble Odian from the crafting recipes (20x Normal Odian Fragment + 4x Legendary Enchantment Stones) that were added in the most recent patch as a greater output.

Finally, if you want to use all three Odian skills at the same time while wearing one of your sets, you will have to get either two Glowing Odians and three Noble Odians (1 + 1 + 3 slots), or three Glowing Odians (1 + 1 + 1 slots).

Glowing Odians drop from Legend tier world bosses on the server-wide maps (Rachmaga and friends). Glowing Odian Fragments can be obtained from some events and as the highest tier reward of the Stella Private Stadium legion instance (1 Glowing Odian Fragment, 2 entries per week). As usual, collect 100 of the same color to get a random class random skill enchantment Glowing Odian. They are rarely sold on the broker for a couple billion kinah as well.

Aside from getting the Odians themselves, you also need to pay attention to get matching Odian slots on your accessories, which can either be red, blue, green or LGBT-colored. The last one will accept Odians of any color. A slot may also randomly receive an Odian enchantment effect when you unlock it. This enchantment will be temporarily applied to the Odian you socket in this slot (e.g. +3 Odian in +2 slot = +5 Odian while it is socketed there). You can reroll the Odian slot by using a Restoration Stone, which are rarely given out in events. If you ran out of these or don't want to waste them on a non-endgame accessory, your only other option to get a fitting Odian slot is to get a new piece of equipment.

After you obtain your first set of Odians and slots to put them into, it's time to think about sets. If you're using the same accessories for all of your sets, you don't need to worry about this part (or should get another set of accessories, depending on your class). Just keep in mind that switching to a set that doesn't have an Odian skill and then switching back to one that does have it will put the skill at a minimum of 15 seconds of cooldown (or whatever its cooldown currently would be if it has more than 15 seconds left).

If you do have multiple accessory sets, ideally, you should make sure to get a second set of Odians to put on the second accessory set, so that no Odian skills will be put on cooldown when you switch sets in the middle of PvP.

With the easy part done, once you have the minimum of essential Odian skills for your class on all of your sets (whether that's 1, 2 or 3 Odian skills depends on the class), you'll now have to enchant them all to +5 to unlock the bonus skill effect (Red: undispellable received heal debuff, blue: undispellable defense debuff, green: Remove Shock CD reduction). This requires Ancient Polishing Stones, obtained from events or from combining 100 Polishing Powder, which is in turn obtained from extracting accessories and feathery with Extraction Tools, which are obtained from events or bought from merchants, mostly for Insignias of Experience, with a weekly limit.

Note that Odians (as well as Runes, which you also have to enchant) can be traded via account warehouse, so you can farm enchant materials on your alts and enchant them there.

During enchantment, Odians (and Runes) can become contaminated when enchantment fails. In this case, your item will become unusable unless you purify it using varying amounts of Ancient Purifiers, obtained by combining 100 Cleaning Powder, obtained by extracting Odians and Runes with Extraction Tools.

Battlefield Insignia merchant

I conducted some research about the apostle fragment boxes. I've published my findings here: [Aion 7.6] New apostle fragment boxes

My feedback about them can be summarized as "not worth the effort". Both the investment and the reward seem strange to me.

Cut the investment in half and make the reward an ultimate contract, so the "long term goal" ultimate forms were supposed to be would finally become something you can actually work towards by playing the game. Then it would be worth the effort.

The 2 ultimate enchantment stone bundles per week, on the other hand, are a nice addition to the Battlefield Insignia merchant. 7.5 removed a lot of options we had to get them, this patch gives us an option that's arguably better than any other we've ever had to get ultimate PvP stones - that is, by playing PvP instances. This is my favorite change of this patch, as I'm working on my second PvP set and 7.5 made it incredibly hard to collect ultimate PvP stones.

Crafting

The new crafting recipes that let you craft odians and runes seem like a nice addition. Let's put it like this: Having them doesn't hurt, if I want to use them and benefit from them more than from using enchantment stones on gear, I can use them. A way to put excessive resources I no longer need for their primary purpose to good use is something I'll gladly welcome.

Class changes

From what I could feel, a few classes' burst damage was balanced, which is a welcome change for me. I'm not too fond of the "100-to-0 me or I 100-to-0 you" oneshot combo fest PvP against some classes has become due to the changes and additions of recent patches. It feels like Aethertechs were not involved in these changes, though, as I'm still regularly getting around 50k damage from their Idium Bombardment and Idium Ray (AoE!).

Auto hunting

Auto hunting feels like a double-edged sword to me. I like it, but I also dislike it, for various reasons.

One of them is cubes. I didn't complete them before the original Cubinerk instance that dropped bronze/silver/gold cubes was removed and didn't realize they would become close to unobtainable. Farming them from overworld mobs quickly turned into a slog, as it literally only consists of fewshotting mobs that pose absolutely no threat and are neither interesting nor challenging to fight. For this reason, I like that auto hunting removes the need for me to manually sit through hours of mob grinding just to complete my cubes. It was already a long term goal when it was introduced, so two years later, I'd expect full cubes (not counting instance cubes) to be the norm. I'm glad I'll be able to make some progress here without boring myself to death.

In a similar vein of thought, I appreciate that auto hunting somewhat alleviates the grind for experience. Since experience has essentially become the new main currency by now, keeping up with the weekly cost of buying things like Daevanion Essences and Ultimate PvP Enchantment Stones has been a bit of a rollercoaster ride for me lately. While these are definitely not something I'd want to miss out on - now that they've finally become obtainable through regular ingame means, which is also much appreciated - I'd rather enjoy the time I spend in the game, which I certainly don't when all I do is kill mobs in a few hits.

This is letting me enjoy Aion a bit more again, as I'm no longer carrying out menial mass mob murder marathons manually.

One issue I have with the auto hunt system is that, normally, when the game window isn't focused, the frame rate is noticeably reduced. This isn't the case when auto hunting is active. Naturally, it therefore requires more performance, leading to my PC heating up more than it would if auto hunting wasn't active. This wouldn't really concern me if my average ambient room temperature wasn't 27°C due to the current weather conditions, but this (combined with me doing other things on my PC while auto hunt is running, which I wouldn't if I was playing actively) tends to make things a bit... steamy and uncomfortable. It's not like it's frying my PC or anything... so while it certainly bothers me and feels unnecessary, it's a minor issue that can be somewhat alleviated by an air conditioner.

... we'll talk about the electricity bill in a year from now.

The main issue I see with auto hunting is that it feels more like a wet bandaid than a solution to anything. Maybe it's not supposed to be a solution to anything, but it feels like there should be other sources for what is provided by the auto hunt system... which currently amounts to experience currency and cubes, as well as that sprinkle of polishing powder from the scraps of wings bought with Titan Coins that drop once in a blue moon after the drop rate changes. I'd much prefer such rewards to be added to active and fun content. I wouldn't stand around either AFK or auto hunting all day if the game gave me some sort of incentive to actually do something...

Content and progression

... which brings me to the next point, which is content. While the three current endgame instances - Prometun HM, Makarna HM and Ara Infernalia NM - certainly sound interesting and potentially enjoyable in theory, they feel way out of reach to me. There are multiple entry barriers for these, most of which feel insurmountable. Anything besides Yarkhan/Barkhan currently feels out of the question for me.

One part of this is class requirements, where pretty much all of these require one, if not two, dedicated tanks such as Templars or Aethertechs (maybe Gladiators to a lesser extent) to complete. This means that I can't play these instances with my usual group of friends, as unfortunately none of them are playing any of the aforementioned classes. I remember this wasn't as much of an issue in earlier patches, where other classes could, to a certain extent, fill the tank role with a bit of support and maybe some gear changes.

Essentially having to tell one or two of my friends "you're not a tank, we will fail if we go with you instead of one, so get lost" has made me mostly stay away from these, as my main reason for playing this game is playing with my established friends. It's definitely partially a "me" issue as I could easily resolve it if I was willing to ditch my friends, but also partially a way in which the game's current design differs from prior patches, therefore I'm including this as it used to not be an issue for me.

Another part is the gear requirements. I understand that endgame instances should be challenged with (close to) endgame gear, but it's a bit of a bummer when I tell friends who just started that they'll first have to grind for half a year until I can afford taking them along to harder instances, as they would otherwise just drag everyone down.

On top of gear requirements, so many of the recent instances have timer mechanics that turn battles into (mostly) DPS races. Prometun's Workshop (Prigga, to a lesser extent Yarkhan/Barkhan), Stella Research Laboratory (Draug), Beninerk's Manor (SVR-07)... all of these either have "kill it fast or you get oneshot", "kill it fast or it does so much damage that you can't outheal it anymore" or even "kill it fast or you get kicked out of the instance and lose the entry". I know that such mechanics have been a part of Aion instances since the beginning, but it's rather demotivating to spend time and effort and merely be rewarded with a slap in the face and a "come back later" when, if these (what I would call) cheap progress wall mechanics weren't there, a group of not fully geared players would in some cases be able to actually clear harder instances, albeit taking way longer than geared groups. If they know the mechanics and play well, why punish them even more for having too low stats? They're already at a disadvantage.

Siege

The changes to the siege system have escalated a problem that already existed for a while. Anyone who's been playing sieges lately is surely familiar with the following mental image: A cloud of Daevas, sitting in front of two portals, accidentally spamming /say chat like they're having a stroke while hammering their mice and keyboards like they're trying to cause an earthquake more groundbreaking than the research that went into the hardware that is now rendering this mess for their viewing pleasure.

Now imagine this cloud, except it's already there ten minutes before the siege started, and a split-second after it starts, the gates stop letting people in.

The limit needs to go. Ranking is no longer decided by siege contribution, but by who has the most ideal method of increasing their chances to be one of the first 192 people to confirm a popup. If you get left behind after the gates close, you can either choose to continue hammering for the remaining duration of the siege to have a mere chance to still get in (and get low rank rewards because you couldn't contribute anything for a long time), or just give up and accept that you will drop in the ranking without being able to do anything about it.

If I don't get siege rewards because I got myself killed by rushing ahead or staying behind, that's fine.

If I don't get siege rewards because I couldn't even enter the siege zone due to some artificial limit, which, unlike at Pangaea sieges, doesn't even prioritize me due to already having a high rank, but some random rank 6 soldier I've never heard of did some damage to a single mob and then went AFK to block others from entering and getting more contribution than them and push them off the reward list gets "free" legendary PvP stones to morph into odians or runes for their main account with the new recipes... now that's ridiculous.

Balance

Lastly, with more and more people obtaining purely statistical advantages such as ultimate transformations and stats from collections, the imbalance in PvP instances continues shifting towards the upper end. It's demotivating to wait in queue for these only to realize that my group is at a massive statistical disadvantage because half of the enemy group has ultimate forms, half of our group lacks improved stigmas/Daevanion skills/odians/runes/minions... a few of these are not exactly game breaking on their own, but when all of them are combined, the "gear" gap is no longer referring to just armor, weapons, feathers and accessories, but all of these other mechanics as well. Metaphorically speaking, a 5% damage buff doesn't make much of a difference, but 10 different 5% damage buffs that stack clearly do.

It's nearly impossible for any new player to catch up to endgame players at this rate because there are too many mechanics that are either entirely locked behind RNG or offered massive advantages to players who were playing actively during certain events. I can't recommend starting to play Aion to my friends with a clean conscience as I already know they'll be demotivated and quit once they see the massive grind they'd have to go through to be able to start - not even succeed - playing the game at endgame levels, so why bother? Saves their and my time in the long run.

Conclusion

I haven't been playing much lately as all the content I enjoy is slowly but surely being walled off by statistical requirements that either prevent me from completing PvE instances, mostly lead to PvP where my group either wipes the enemy group without issues or vice versa, or prevent me from playing with friends as they would drag everyone else down. It's rare to find PvP, whether it's in open world or in instances, where neither side has an obvious advantage over the other merely based on stats.

I performed some research about the apostle fragment boxes that you can purchase for Battlefield Coins.

There are four possible fragments (Yustiel/Triniel/Vaizel/Lumiel) you can get from the box. You can combine 100 fragments of the same type into one contract.

Unless we get any official word that there will be other sources, I will assume that this is their only source for the following calculations and feedback. I will also consider the only scenario in which you receive a "reward" to be when you receive a total of 100 of the same contract fragment, as the fragments by themselves are not useful to players until 100 have been accumulated.

I will analyze two cases in this post: The absolute worst case and the average case. We'll start with the former. I'll reserve my personal judgment until the end and merely present the statistics I've gathered for now.

Worst Case Scenario

"When am I guaranteed to receive a reward for the effort and resources I spent on this system?"

We will assume that the distribution of fragment drops is absolutely equal to simulate this case. This means that when you buy four boxes, we assume that you get one fragment of each contract - no exceptions. This depicts the absolute worst case scenario because it requires the highest amount of purchased boxes before getting the first reward from this system.

The simulation for this scenario is simple. As the distribution rate is absolutely even, you would need to buy 397 of these boxes to definitely get the first contract. At 396 boxes, you would have exactly 99 of each contract fragment in your inventory, still assuming that the rates are absolutely equal. The 397t, 398th, 399th and 400th boxes would provide you with one reward each, being the respective contract. If you have the worst imaginable luck possible, you would then get 99 times the type of fragment you just combined into a contract before obtaining the next contract. The latest possible point to receive the second contract therefore is at 497 boxes, and every 100 boxes thereafter.

Even if you have the worst luck imaginable, the 397th box is guaranteed to give you a reward, as no matter which fragment you get, you will end up with 100 of any one type.

If one box costs 20 Battlefield Insignias, you would need to spend 7940 Battlefield Insignias to get a guaranteed reward. That's 1588 Runatorium/Ashunatal wins before you are guaranteed to receive a reward in this scenario.

If you play these instances fully active (2 Runatorium and 3 Ashunatal Dredgion runs every day) and win 100% of the time, getting this amount will take roughly 317 days. This time span is irrelevant, though, as the real limitation is the weekly purchase limit. You are hard capped at buying 4 of these boxes per week. These are also fully untradeable, so there is no way to speed it up with alts.

Due to this, you're not hard pressed to win 100% of your runs to not lose out on any weekly sales limit, but roughly a 50% win rate is sufficient. I did not account for Battlefield Insignia gains from other PvP instances or losses in this simulation as the cap is the weekly sales limit, not the PvP instance wins, and the instances mentioned are merely for demonstration.

Given this limitation, it would take you 100 weeks, or 2 years, to get a guaranteed reward under the worst possible circumstances. Realistically, you may - and, likely, will - get more than this, but definitely not less.

Average Case Scenario

"When am I - on average - going to receive any reward for the effort and resources invested into this system?"

The case outlined above is the most pessimistic take on the situation, so let's try to check this from a slightly more realistic approach. To figure this out, we'll have to take a closer look at the underlying mechanics than just scratching the surface. I don't have access to the source code of Aion, so the implementation of these mechanics will once again be based on the assumption that every contract fragment has the same drop chance.

The most direct route to check this is simple trial and error. One "attempt" is considered successful once you get a single transformation contract, or 100 of the same fragment. For this purpose, I've written a program that simulates the process.

It works like this:

• Initialize four empty stacks.
• Initialize a counter at 0.
• Repeat until one of the stacks has a size of 100:
  • Add one element to any of the stacks. The stack is selected at random.
  • Increment the counter.

This simulates a single player's attempt to get a single transformation contract. This, however, is a very small sample. We need a larger sample size for the statistic to be accurate. Therefore, I ran this test 1 million times. This graph visually demonstrates how many boxes had to be opened to get one contract for each individual attempt. After receiving one contract, the test was considered successful and stopped.

Based on these results, I took the sum of the amount of opened boxes and added them together after each attempt. I then divided this sum by the amount of attempts made up to that point. This tells me the average amount of opened boxes over the course of all attempts. Dividing this by 4 tells me how many weeks it takes to get one contract.

The following graph illustrates how taking the average of the total sum of boxes opened becomes more and more accurate with each additional iteration, eventually evening out:

Conclusion

It would take - on average - 360 boxes, or 90 weeks, to get the first transformation contract from this feature. Given that this is a legendary contract - some may argue that it's "legendary tier 2" for some class/form combos - and not an ultimate contract, as well as this being the only source of these fragments, the amount of time, effort and resources needed to get a reward feels disproportional for players of all backgrounds.

For new players, these rewards are unlikely to be obtainable at all as they need to frequently run and win PvP instances to accumulate a sufficient amount of currency to buy the boxes. As a result, they are unlikely to get their first (or second, or third...) legendary form from this.

For existing players, the rewards are obtainable after playing actively for what feels like a disproportional amount of time for the reward on offer. That aside, the currency used to buy these boxes is shared with other much needed items such as Legendary Daevanion Skills (for those who don't have theirs fully enchanted yet) or Ultimate PvP Enchantment Stones (for those who don't have their set fully enchanted yet or are working on additional sets). Those who buy all of these resources will have to wait even longer to get one of these contracts.

For endgame players who already have an ultimate form, the rewards offer very low benefits as they amount to 30 Spell Fortitude, 30 Strike Fortitude, 323 Evasion and 323 Magic Resist from collections. Those are by no means insignificant benefits, but the effort required to obtain them is not up to scale.

With the amount of people that have obtained ultimate transformations through sheer luck by now (or using the cash shop... and then having sheer luck), legendary forms can pretty much be considered obsolete at this point. Having to wait an average of 90 weeks - and invest time, effort and resources into it in the meantime - to get an obsolete reward doesn't provide me with any incentive to even buy these fragments. It feels like it's more likely for the vendor for these to be removed 90 weeks into the future than it is for me to obtain the first reward from it.

Even if the reward was an ultimate contract instead of a legendary one, the payoff time would still feel far too long to me. An ultimate contract after 90 weeks of active participation sounds like a system that would have been welcome if it was implemented when the transformation system was introduced in patch 6.0 (although still a far too long payoff time - having to wait two years to be able to play to the fullest extent of my abilities does not sound right), but not if it is introduced two years later and then makes me wait an additional two years until I get anything out of it.