I'm back! It took me 2 weeks to level up my Spiritmaster above the level I was when I made my last Aion post. I'm now level 26. Level 20 granted me access to Stigma stones. These stones allow players to customize their class' "spec". But this only gave me a new ability or two to play with. Levelling 20-25 were the worst levels for me. PVE was starting to get tiresome. Levelling up professions was (is) lame and a boring time sink. It's the usual minigame of spending tons of money, pushing the button a quadrillion times and watching the progress bar wrestle its way full. But, most annoying to me was that I was starting to see some PVP, but the key abilities that define my class weren't available to me until Levels 25 and 28.
Then it suddenly got interesting again at level 25. The game funnels you into quests that prep you for access into the Abyss (the ORVR zone). From what I can tell about the Abyss, it's more like DAOC than WAR is, was or hopes to be. A whole bunch of new Abyss quests popped up and so began my char's journey into the world of PvPvE. The Abyss is like WAR if there were no separate PVP/PVE zones, but instead one massive zone with PVE, fortresses, relics and the possibility of PVP encounters at any time. The difference with fortresses too is that they are hubs for PVE and PVP activity. People would go there to get their stuff done. If a fortress gets attacked, it's like the alarm sounding in a fire station. The PVP in the Abyss totally sidetracked me from my questing. I didn't even get to figure out what to do for my first Abyss quest before I saw combat log spam and a cluster of red names in the distance!
Eventually I was back at Morheim, and I tried to catch a rift to complete some quests. The sucky thing about rifts is that they open at any one of seven locations at random. I followed a report in General Chat hoping to catch a rift and some PVP, but when I got there, there were only a group of friendlies chilling while waiting for the next rift to appear. I can't figure out why WAR wouldn't allow duels for the life of me. We were bored, so a fun way to kill time was to duel to tweak our skills and strategies.
There weren't many around my level, so I only managed to duel with a Ranger, Sorc and Assassin. I hadn't duelled since beta and PVE has been rotting my skills, so this was a nice chance to practice:
The assassin I duelled with didn't have Aethertwisting slotted --- that would have changed everything. I need to figure out a game plan for Aethertwisting. That reminds me... I watched a fight between a Cleric and Spiritmaster a while back and the Cleric summoned a Holy Servant. I'm going to see if the in-game Spiritmaster channel can give me more info about that too.
