NeoNeTiC
LOCKDOWN.
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Posted - 2009.10.14 20:53:00 -
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I tried Aion and the subscription is still running until the 25th but I won't renew it.
The game has a few major flaws/issues that overshadow the potential within.
Just consider these facts:
Spell-timings and cooldowns do not affect the character animation and results in you being 'stuck' until the char stops flailing his arms around - applies to rogue-classes and casters alike and is a sad, sad joke. There you are, getting lots of spell-haste but what good does it since you'll have 0.5 to 1 second delay after the cast due to char-movement? You can actually get melee-haste to speed the animation up but there are very few items with it and it's more of a late game thing. Most actions have animations - even entering flying mode (you know, spreading your wings and stuff). That's fluent gameplay right here.
Healing does not scale with equipment. Right. Everything damage/damage reduction related stat can be increased, no matter if melee, range or caster class but healers just have their basic heals. You end up spamming them repeatedly just to heal 1-2 seconds of damage a DD class deals. Later you'll mostly end up spamming potion-macros while gearing for HP. Buffer-tank all the way. :\
The grind. And there's lot of it. You do nice quests from Levels 1 to 25 (maybe 30) but then it's just grind. And it's not even enjoyable grind - you have repeatable quests (up to 100 times) which require you to slay NPCs X, Y and Z - now grind your way up to 50 (later levels take 18 hours of grinding). NCSoft did introduce a few more quests but the amount of mindless grind is massive, compared to the handfull of unique quests you get. You can enter an instance each 18 hours and if you fail because the group sucked you had your chance for today. That's classy PvE right here. :/
You want to know about crafting? Well, glad you asked, since it's a grindy joke. You need nothing but ingame currency to level your profession from 1 to 400 and most recipes but the system is just silly:
You get a repeatable quest for each 10 levels of the profession and buy the materials required from another NPC nearby. You then spend two to five minutes waiting until your char crafted all the crap required since the system is luck-based and you have two bars (one for success and one for failure) raising from time to time without you doing anything but watch TV/play EVE on the second screen. That's just tedious. You then hand in the quest and pick up the same again, doing the same **** once more. Early on it's one profession-level within one quest (sometimes more), later on you have to do several and this just means more costs. It's like saying "pay X currency to get the level" but then spend hours in front of the screen doing nothing but click every 4 minutes. Since the mining-reference is now given, please consider: You're doing it in your capital city, which is safe from any kind of attack. You don't even gain **** but a profession level here and there. :|
Then there's the luck-factor. You want a fancy item? Great, buy the mats for the common one, hope for a lucky procc to get a green one, then use this and hope for a procc to blue and then the same **** again for orange. Given that the chance is less likely for each step you end up grinding the mats/cash for hours, spend hours crafing and then do not have luck and the newb next to you crafts it in one try. Yay. All gear is BoE on the other hand and you can sell it (which you won't, since selling the mats is as profiable without the risk of devaluation due to lack of procc-luck).
I'm not going to whine about the bugs, memory leaks and bot-plague right now - it's a new MMO and I have yet to see one performing much better. ;3
The best aspect so far is that you can make all kinds of sexy girl chars and cyber with people for ingame currency (and then blackmail them with the chatlogs). 
Regards,
NeoNeTiC
Grindybear
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