Aion stun defense: case study of a bad C&C patch

Somehow I still get Aion newsletters, even though I have unsubscribed. I am always curious about game design changes, so I read it anyway. The newsletter talked about the introduction of a new 'stun defense' ability that will be introduced for 'balance'. I will first paste what they have to say about it, and then I will talk about how this is an example of an overzealous designer (Chris "Kinslon" Hager) trying to fix a problem by not completely understanding the crux of the problem, doing too much, missing the mark, ultimately not really fixing anything at all and creating more problems elsewhere. This happened time and time again in WAR and I wish I had documented every counter-productive patch and hotfix. But I guess better late than never:

Aquilanius: How exactly will the stun defense skills work?
Kinslon: You can purchase the Remove Shock skill from your character's appropriate skill trainer (preceptor). Once your character has learned the skill you've purchased, if your character becomes stunned in combat, Remove Shock becomes available as a chain skill that you can use to remove the stun and increase your character's resistance to stun, knockback, and similar conditions for 7 seconds. At later levels, class-specific skills that you can also learn will act as chain skills that let you go on the offensive in addition to the basic abilities of Remove Shock.

Aquilanius: What purpose does this stun defense have in overall class balance?
Kinslon: With each update in an MMO, the game designers need to rebalance the game's classes as players progress in skill and learn tactics that allow them to optimize (and sometimes overly optimize) specific class abilities. In the Aion 1.9 update, every class can now counteract and counterattack stun blocks to a degree. This strengthens the balance of all of Aion's classes. Future updates will continue to balance and shape each class, allowing players to shift tactics as new and different skills are introduced, and 1.9 is no exception.

First of all, it's good that the designers are aware that there is a problem with some classes (e.g., a well-geared Assassin can burst someone down from stealth while his target is stunned/disabled the entire time). But the problem with the stun defense is that they plan to give it to everyone. Here's a example to illustrate why this is a bad idea using Spiritmaster vs Chanters, since I am familiar with them. The only ranged stun a Chanter has is Soul Strike. It's a 4 sec stun with a 12 sec cooldown. If Spiritmasters are given this "blanket" stun defense ability, Chanters are pretty much f*cked. They just took away the only ranged stun a Chanter has, and the only way for a Chanter to get into melee range or kite a Spiritmaster. To make matters worse, Soul Strike doesn't even stun 100% of the time, AND pretty much all the CC a Chanter has is in the form of stuns! Might as well rename the 'Remove Shock' ability to 'F*ck you Chanters, LOL'.

Besides, I'm not even sure if this will fix the original problem of classes like the Assassin. Okay, so you can hit the button and be stun-free for 7 seconds. But within that 7 seconds, Assassins also can cast a buff to resist 2 magical attacks (this includes CCs). If you do wipe that buff off, there's no way you can CC him either. Snare/root him and the game already allows people to remove that with a potion. And now, he's buffed to be unstunnable as well because the new stun defense grants everyone the 7-second stun immunity. This change only marginally improves the problem scenarios, and hurts everyone else that didn't have a problem with stuns to begin with.

What they should have done instead, was specifically fix the problem classes, instead of taking this lazy one-size-fits-all fix.

Aion: analysis of the last grind that broke my back

Some of you may have noticed that I no longer post Aion videos. I have retired my Spiritmaster a few months ago and moved on to Global Agenda. Aion has some unique characteristics that I believe will prevent it from ever being successful in the western market. Sure it's grindy, but many people are okay with grindy. More than that, there is something unique about its grindiness that I have been wanting to talk about but haven't gotten a chance to (until now). I will attempt to paint a picture of Aion below, with key issues bolded.

Those who haven't played Aion may not appreciate what I'm talking about without some more background information about Aion's "endgame", "PvPvE" and "the grind". In summary, it takes a while to get to max level (50). In the time it took me to get to Level 50 in Aion, I could have gotten 3-4 characters to max level in Warhammer, and maybe 1-2 characters to max level in WoW (or 6 characters via the Recruit-a-Friend bonuses) .

The grinding in Aion is split in to what I think of as "grind buckets". Every couple of levels, you receive quests or get access to certain zones that place your character in a particular "grind bucket". The first grind bucket rewards you with Boots that give you +20% run speed. This is a tremendous advantage and necessary for PVP. You can either get your 20% speed boots via PVE by killing a thousand elite NPCs, or by doing Abyss/PvPvE stuff to get enough Abyss points to spend on the PVP version. The next couple of grind buckets involve grinding to obtain player abilities or grinding a few thousand more PVE kills to claim a nice gear reward. But almost invariably, every grind bucket requires you to spend money. Killing NPCs alone isn't enough --- the game often requires that you spend money crafting or buying some expensive item to turn in along with whatever crap you've been picking up from the NPCs.

Everyone in the same "grind bucket" may group up and keep each other company through the grind, to get whatever reward is associated with the bucket. The first few buckets may take days to weeks of playing time, while the last few buckets take months. When people graduate from one grind bucket to move on to the next, they usually never want to revisit the previous grind bucket. If you miss the train, or don't grind as fast as everyone else, you will be left behind and on your own. Throughout the game, people are constantly left behind in grind buckets, alienated and ultimately demotivated to unsubscribe. This may not be as apparent in games like Warhammer or WoW, because the grind buckets aren't as severe.

It was the "end game" grind bucket that killed me. You had to do things like kill thousands of silly NPCs. You had to wait for spawns all around the world at different times of day (there was a chance that they did not appear). You had to level a profession to Expert, costing insane amounts of money if you started the wrong profession (once you've started the expert quest on one profession, the game didn't let you change) and it involved standing in the crafting area for hours, just clicking on the 'craft' button. Then, you had to pass the Expert crafting exam by crafting a rare item that costs a lot of money or rare materials with a chance to fail. Many people's banks were bled dry by this point. But it's not over yet. The pinnacle of this chain's grind was collecting rare materials that came mostly from PVP zones. The drop rate was something like < 5% per NPC at a contested PVP zone, and you needed more than a 100 of them. For reference, I was getting one of them every couple of hours of playing. If you tried to cooperate with friends to farm them, you wouldn't necessarily be faster since you would have to split the drops with everyone. Needless to say they were expensive, so it was either grind them or grind something else to get enough money to buy them. But there's more. After you've collected all your rare items, you don't simply turn them in for your reward. You need to craft something with all of the materials, and THEN turn in the crafted item. What crushed my soul was the fact that you had a chance to fail at crafting the final item. I believe it was a 20% chance to succeed, 80% chance to fail.

Now that is ridiculous. Most people can tolerate a grind if there is a certain end in sight. If the end is certain, you know that any time you put in will bring you one step closer to your reward, and that you will eventually get the reward. It was only a matter of time. But once you place a random number generator at the end, it's demoralizing. If you are lucky, you could get it on your first try. But since it's random and each try is independent, you could be unlucky and fail 100 times. There is also a probability (even if it's slim) that you fail 1000 times. I wanted to PVP, not battle a random number generator.

Needless to say, I only focused on one character in Aion, which is a shame because one of the fun things of an MMORPG is trying out different classes/careers.

All this wouldn't make as much of a difference if Skill > Gear. If Skill > Gear, there will be less pressure to grind, and less reason for activities like botting and RMT to flourish. Unfortunately, Aion rewards grinders and encourages Gear > Skill. In fact, Gear in Aion is allowed to negate Skill so much that it's not even worth trying to fight sometimes because the chance of winning is almost zero. For example, the set bonus from completing the final epic gear quest bumps up magic resist so much, that someone else who has not completed the quest and has not received the full set bonuses has a slim chance of landing any magical abilities. Another example: if you are an Assassin with good gear, you can pretty much sneak up on someone, open up with some Combos that lead into stuns or a disable, and kill even tank classes --- all within the brief period of time that the player is disabled. You literally cannot do a single thing. Well... except go back to grinding.

But this points to another problem. Once you fall behind the gear race in Aion, it's almost impossible to catch up. The reason for this is that the final gear grind buckets requires "grinding" in a PVP zone. But since Gear > Skill, once you are outgeared, you will most probably be roflstomped in the PVP zones, and any PVP-zone-related quests will be inhibited. You will be unable to advance, while your opponents are free to extend their lead, causing the gear gap to widen exponentially. Not surprisingly, my guildie tells me that this is exactly what has happened on Zikel --- the entire "Core" (the highest-level PVP zone in the Abyss) is dominated by Elyos and Asmodians cannot do anything about it.

Ultimately, it wasn't just the grind. As much as I loved my Spiritmaster and PVP, the PVP environment in Aion wasn't that great. There are only a few ways you could PVP in Aion:

a) Rift into enemy territory
This required you to teleport to the enemy zone via a "rift" that would spawn at a random location in the friendly zone. At max level, you probably only had one rift that you could enter through every hour or so. The nice thing about rifting is that the zones are no-fly zones; and you don't have to suffer Aion's broken flight combat. The cons about this is that the rifts are not always available, and you need to pay for a resurrection kisk to resurrect in the enemy zone. Without a kisk deployed, deaths send you back to your friendly zone and you'll have to try to find a working rift again.

b) Go to the Abyss
This is an open PVP zone where everyone is flying most of the time. I typically stay away from this zone since flight combat sucks in Aion. This is also where all the artifacts and fortresses are, but I stay away from them too since they encourage zergy PVP.

c) Dredgion
Every now and then, action in the Abyss unlocks the Dredgion 'scenario'. This is an instance where you have human players on opposing factions fighting for similar PVE objectives. I like to play this whenever I can. The downside is you can only play one Dredgion game each time it becomes available.

I think the only reason I kept playing for as long as I did was because I enjoyed the Spiritmaster class. I still feel that they did a good job with core PVP combat (all else being equal). It was the world they wrapped around it, flight, their flavor of grinding, and how they let gear rule the world that sucked.

Duoing Spiritmaster & Gladiator

A guildie went rifting to Heiron and I went to join him. I haven't really duelled Gladiators so I didn't know much about how they worked. I imagine it was the same for the Gladiator with Spiritmasters as well, so it was a good learning experience for us. A video with snippets of the trip is below. I edited out the fights where we only ran into 1 opponent, so each encounter should show at least 2 people on the screen. Looking back at it, our synergy was raw. There were many missed opportunities and a couple of deaths that could have been wins. I need to tighten down my CCs on multiple targets and interleave more damage assists with the CCs. We also need to get comfortable with maneuvering an enemy mob around as a duo. There were a couple of stutters and miscommunications that got us rubberbanding between each other, resulting in one of us getting CC'd and killed. But as time goes by, I expect that we'd understand the strengths and limitations of each other's class better, and get a good feel for our individual playstyles. As for duo potential, Gladiator-Spiritmaster seems pretty solid and something I would run again. The Gladiator brings the damage the SM lacks, and the SM fills in all the CC holes in the Gladiator arsenal.

Comments: at the end of the video, the Gladiator received the debuff that reveals his location to every Elyos in the zone. We were eventually chased by a mob of Elyos, which we tried to evade by slipping into an elite area. The idea is that the elite NPCs would weed out or discourage lower-level players from following us. This worked, and the Elyos mob thinned out to 2 people. We killed the Chanter, but I was a little lax on the CCs and the Templar managed to escape back to his camp, which my Gladiator guildie bloodlusted into :)

Spiritmaster vs Ranger tactics callibration (videos)

Consumables were not used in the following videos (one of the Rangers requested this and I wanted to see what effect it had). Also, for some reason the Rangers did not start most of the duels stealthed (must be some honor thing!). However, I included a video that shows the advantage they get from stealth.

Bread and butter: dispel buffs, regain control:



Spirit Substitution: I started a few fights without the Stone Skin shield, to play around with Spirit Substitution:



The following video shows how much a Spiritmaster's damage drops when the pet is taken out of combat. I could not kill one Ranger even with a chain of 2 Fears. The video also demonstrates how a Ranger can use Sleep Arrow during Stun → Fear to neutralize the Fear chain, therby creating an opportunity to recover:



Next, Stealth. In the first fight, I tried a trick of casting an AOE DOT on my spirit. The second fight shows the ridiculous burst damage potential of a Ranger from a string of crits. I tried to recover using my instant fear, but I missed the 2nd Fear and was killed before Spirit Substitution took effect.



Bonus vid: a Chanter mis-timing his abilities, allowing for easy counters: Dispel, Dispel, DOT, DOT, Dispel Recovery Spell, wait for Soul Strike, Stun → Fear:

Spiritmaster vs Ranger tactics callibration

     

The potential of the Ranger class at end-game has been a mystery to me for a while now. I finally got around to getting a guildie Ranger to help me understand the class better. I caught him late at night, so his reaction times were not the best in the videos. But I just wanted to figure out what Rangers could or could not do, to be able to tell what they're thinking when they engage an enemy target. While we were duelling, another Ranger spectator got interested in duelling too so I had the chance to callibrate my tactics against two different Rangers.

Rangers rely heavily on crits to do damage. When rangers don't crit, they struggle to even break through a Spiritmaster's Stoneskin shield. On the other hand, a string of crits can drop my HP down to 20% in seconds. Since they have to stack extreme amounts of crit for their damage, they often have to sacrifice HP. It will usually not be until they soft cap their crit % that they stack more HP. This makes them the lowest HP class in the game, and extremely gear dependent to be able to get their nasty crit damage, while still having a decent amount of HP.

Because of these factors, fights with Rangers are very quick. Chain fears are neither necessary, nor natural to set up. Rangers have a tremendous amount of burst damage but low HP. So, from the SM point of view, the fight is won or lost depending on whether or not the SM has his instant fear up, or if the SM can regain control after being jumped and chain-CCed by the Ranger. If the SM can regain control, the SM does not have to go through many rotations to empty the Ranger's HP bar.

From the point of view of the Ranger, the fight requires a lot of effort. The Ranger can always quickly drop the SM's life into the danger zone from the initial burst and CCs from stealth. However, the Ranger's success hinges on countering all the SM's attempts to regain control after the intial burst. Unfortunately, the SM has many tricks. If the Ranger thinks that he can't kill the SM after the initial burst, it's probably best to make an exit, med up (dispel, shield, heal), restealth, and try again.

Key Spiritmaster factors:

• Enough HP to survive the initial burst
• Save healing potion for Silence. It's okay to be rooted or snared. While it's advantageous for a Ranger to snare the SM in range, it is imperative that the SM pots out of Silence. Otherwise, the Ranger can easily lock down and kill the SM with stuns/sleep/silence.
• Stone Shock → Fear is bread and butter for regaining control
• The Ranger's self-buffs boost Ranger damage tremendously and must be dispelled. Also, watch out for Nature's Resolve and Run Speed buffs.
• Wind pet's stun is useful, although it's easier to disable a melee pet
• Shackle of Vulnerability, Body Root (melee disarm) and Silence
• If instant fear is up, it will be sad times for the Ranger. Erosion DOT (to eat the resist buff) → instant fear → root → 2 fears.
• Spirit Substitution (transfer damage to pet)
• Stack DOTs and maintain pet pressure

Key Ranger factors:

• Pop Nature's Resolve (resist 1 magical attack) while dealing the stun/silence chain.
  Th SM will probably pot out of Silence. Regardless, SMs will desperately try to regain control with CCs after the initial burst and chain CCs. Having Nature's Resolve waiting for the SM after he comes out of CCs will absorb a trigger happy noob's instant fear.
• Stay out of range of Fear Shriek (15m). Don't give the SM a free Fear Shriek. Force him to Stone Shock → Fear.
• Save Sleep Arrow to hit the SM between Stone Shock → Fear (just like Chanters and Soul Strike). This prevents the SM from being able to chain Fears. If the Ranger survives the DOTs while Feared, he can break away, recollect himself and hit the SM again later.
• Interrupt the 2.5s Fear
• Always take advantage of the initial burst from Stealth
• Keep consumables handy (shield, HP pot, dispel DOTs pot).
  BUT, do not use them all in the beginning --- they can be easily dispelled. Instead, use them to recover from Fear, or during tactical retreats.
• If the SM pops Spirit Substitution, separate the SM and the pet by 10m or wait it out.
• Take the pet out of the picture if possible (with the 1 min root, or kill it)

Gotchas:

• Rangers cannot counter Stone Shock → Fear with Nature's Resolve. The Fear will register as completed and hit the Ranger, and the buff will only resist the next attack.
• The SM cannot break the root on the pet by using Spirit Absorption.

Decoding Aion videos

I just realized that the people who do not play Aion may not be familiar with what's going on in an Aion video. I know I definitely felt that way when I was looking at Korean Aion videos a few months ago. In this post, I'm going to try to provide some info to help non-Aion players decode Aion videos.

The pic on the left shows the class symbols/icons that appear beside a target's HP bar.

A1 - Spiritmaster, B1 - Sorcerer
A2 - Assassin, B2 - Ranger
A3 - Gladiator, B3 - Templar
A4 - Chanter, B4 - Cleric

Below is a labelled screenshot of my UI. In general, what I do in my videos is: strip my target's buffs, apply debuffs, CC (silence, disarm, root, fear, etc), and use pet commands. The only chain skill that I use is a "snare → short stun". Everytime I hit the "snare" ability, my "short stun" indicator pops up to the right of my character.

Bonus vid: another rift adventure in Heiron before dinner yesterday. This time, I popped out at location E on the map in my previous post. The action in the video happened as I was moving from E to F along the north edge of the map. Hopefully the videos make more sense now :)

Exploring Heiron, enemy territory

Yesterday, I hopped on some rifts to explore the enemy zone, Heiron. I decided I needed more PVP in my life, now that I was at max level. However, I was Rank 4 in terms of "PVP rank". At this rank, I would start to lose Abyss Points every time I was killed. Going into unfamiliar territory and not having PVP'ed in a while, I anticipated many deaths. So instead of potentially wasting my Abyss Points, I spent them purchasing the advanced stigma Infernal Pain. That deranked me to Rank 6. Sweet. The next thing I packed with me for my trip was a resurrection kisk. This allows me to set up a resurrection point anywhere in the zone. However, it is visible to the enemy and can be destroyed.

Then, it was time to find an open rift that allowed Lvl 50s to enter. Rifts appear every ~20 minutes at random locations, and have level restrictions for entry. There are only 2 "usable" rifts for me to enter into Heiron from Beluslan. My first rift was short-lived. I had trouble orienting myself and finding a safe spot to drop my Kisk. Consequently, I got zerged and my Kisk was destroyed. I spent some time after that restocking my "rifting picnic bag" and running around Beluslan to try to find the next open rift, since the first rift had closed. It was annoying that there was no way to "run" to Heiron, and the only way to enter enemy territory was via a rift.

Eventually, a rift opens. The rift spits me out at location F in the map above. Just like before, my first order of business was to orient myself, and find a safe spot to set down my Kisk. Since this was an unfamiliar enemy zone, initially everything seemed dangerous. For great success, I knew I had to sort the zone out. I needed to figure out where my safe zones are, where the danger zones are, what the enemy traffic patterns are, what level NPCs each area has, etc --- just like when I decided to roam around solo on my Zealot in WAR. I needed to figure out what was actually dangerous, and what was not. I would also benefit from figuring if anything in the zone was advantageous to me.

My plan of action was to first spiral out from F, and to lower-level areas to get my feet wet. Get some easy kills, work up some confidence, and maybe get some 1 vs many fights. I started out circling around locations F and C. Eventually I had a good idea where the low-level areas are and I'd try to up the challenge and move to locations B, D and E; to run myself into higher-level players. With this approach, I have a better feeling of where the "safer" areas are, I have more control over my surroundings and I could consciously put myself in less or more danger. Videos below.

Out-levelled players who bravely put up a fight:



Some noteworthy encounters, including me being a jerk and playing with the prey. I didn't notice that there was a level 50 sorceror in the mix, or I would have been a little more careful.



If you have been following my Spiritmaster-Chanter posts, you may notice the key moment in the fight where the 1st Chanter in the following video gave the fight away. He almost had me killed for goofing around too much. But, he gave me too much space to med up and when he finally closed the distance, he was too trigger happy with his ranged stun, Soul Strike. That allowed me to hit "stun → fear" unchallenged and take control of the fight.



And finally, moments of fail below. The first one was me trying to mess with a few groups that were getting ready for an instance. I bit off a little more than I could chew and got gangbanged. The second was me stumbling onto a bunch of Lvl 50s waiting outside a rift from Heiron to Beluslan! I saw a whole bunch of red dots pop up on my radar, and got curious so I took a closer look. Then I noticed a rift, and my first thought was that they were waiting for my friends to jump through it and ambush them. But then I hovered over the rift and discovered that I could click it --- they were getting ready to infiltrate Beluslan! While I was being distracted, they noticed me and I was hunted down.



My kisk had expired and I was sent back to Beluslan. Shortly after, there were reports that Elyos groups were rifting into Beluslan.

Aion's aerial gameplay issues

At first glance, flight in Aion seems like a good idea. But the more I experience it, the more I start to see areas that don't seem to be as well thought out or nailed down. In general, they've designed combat and classes to work a certain way. However, these combat mechanics and classes have to work both on the ground and while flying. While they work for the most part on the ground, they do not completely translate to a similar visceral experience in the air. I thought about it for a little yesterday, and the following are what I believe some of the reasons are:

Flight speed is faster than running speed
While not instantly obvious, this has very significant implications for combat and mechanics. All abilities in the game are tuned for run speed and do not readily work in the air without mechanic adjustments. E.g., how a 3s ability works on the ground is not the same as 3s in the air. Even quick melee abilities suffer, since quick on the ground often translates to "target is out of range" in the air. To have combat feel as good in the air as it does on the ground, they should have done something like shorten cast times by the % difference of run speed vs flight speed. Then, reducing defense stats while flying should keep it balanced.

Animation root
Many abilities have an ending animation root. While it is annoying enough on the ground, it is exacerbated in the air because more distance can be covered over the time that someone spends being rooted by animations. E.g., get caught in an animation snare in the air and your opponent can be long gone. They should shorten or remove animation root when flying.

The factors above are reasons for aerial class disparities, and why some classes appear to have a significant advantage over other classes when in the air. The classes that benefit from fighting in the air are the classes that have low/instant cast times and short/no animation snares. 

Area effects are 2-dimensional
Many AE abilities (e.g., buffs, mantras, fear, heals) only work in 2-D. If a target is on a different z- coordinate, they will not be affected.

Flight as transportation
I believe that this is a bad idea. It implies that long flight times are necessary and goes against original intent that flight should not be overused. When players roam around in a typical 'grounded' or 'no-fly' zone, they can run around indefinitely. They can run up hills, down hills, glide across vallies, into caves, around rocks, sit, hide, etc. However, this is not the case in the Abyss. Once you're in the air, your flight timer starts to tick down.

The Abyss is mostly empty space
In fact, too much empty space. Each layer of the Abyss is a large zone, sparsely populated by islands that only have 1 or 2 levels of flat land (but typically only 1). While this is fine if flight combat was not clunky or if Aion was a space/flight simulator where you could actually have fun fights in open space, this is not the case in Aion and battles in open space are clunky. It's also easier to run away from a fight in the air than it is in the ground, and lame strategies such as running someone's 5-10 minute flight timer down are common. As vast as the Abyss is, there's a lot of wasted or practically unusable space. They should have scattered more platforms or large asteroids all over the place to make things more interesting. They could also have added more features to the Abyss islands' terrain. E.g., caves, tunnels (think Star Wars), and more levels.

Flight time
Everyone can easily consume flight time potions to stay in the air for a long time. Why not just allow everyone to fly for 5 minutes if that's the kind of combat they are trying to encourage? Right now, the zone layout and flight mechanics require that people chain-chug flight time potions like water in the Abyss.

No special flight abilities
This is especially disappointing for me. Flying in Aion is pretty much like running in 3-D. You don't get any acceleration from diving toward the ground or any variation in speed at any time. You are just an object that moves at a constant speed in 3-dimensional space and there are no special aerial attacks or maneuvers. There's also a lame limitation that prevents you from falling too far. If you tried to fold your wings and dive, the game won't let you go very far before crashing you into some invisible plane. Basically, being in flight dumbs down each class and renders many abilities virtually ineffective.

Despite these gripes I have, flight can still a good idea, provided that the developers make an effort to tune and clean up the mechanics, and rework the flying zones. Being able to fly is still great, along with being able to fight in 3-D. But the developers really need to get off their thumbs and put more thought into their flight system (combat, mechanics, zones) if they want a winning product. Just allowing people to move (like they were running) in 3-D and passing that as 'flying' does not cut it.

Currently, aerial combat is a dumbed-down, more restrictive, and more broken version of ground combat; with the exception that you can move in the vertical direction as well.

Spiritmaster-Chanter update (video)

The video starts with me having a Wind Spirit. The Wind Spirit does pretty decent melee-range damage, and can cast a short stun with a low cooldown. I was trying to win the fight without chaining Fears, but using control and dispel abilities instead. The next couple of fights are with a Water Spirit, which has very low HP and does ranged attacks but does not have a stun. We moved to a less laggy location for the last couple of fights, but the location that the Chanter picked was disadvantageous for him because it was surrounded by walls. Toward the end, I settled into the sequence of: dispelling buffs and HOTs, waiting for Soul Strike, and then leading Fears with stuns. I revealed what I was doing to him after our duels --- his gears started turning and he exclaimed that he had discovered the "Achilles heel" of Spiritmasters. I expect more interesting counters from him in the future!

Level 47 Spiritmaster experiences vs Chanters

  
I had a couple of interesting duels last weekend. This was long overdue, as I have not been learning as much about each class as I should. Unfortunately, this post will not contain any videos. The duels were often frantic since I am still learning, and FRAPS stutters had cost me a couple of fights. What I have instead are a bunch of notes or tips that may help other Spiritmasters against Chanters, or vice versa (by understanding what SMs can or cannot do).

Key Chanter factors:

1. HOTs (especially Recovery Spell) and shields (especially Word of Spellstopping and Divine Curtain)
   These help to keep HP up through fears. The SM cannot out-DPS even the HOTs enough and must dispel them.
2. Soul Strike ranged stun (also, Parrying Strike and Binding Word)
   These are for kiting the SM. Stun to enter into melee/stunlock range, or stun to get out of fear range. The spell's damage also eats away at the SM's HP. However, drawing out the fight too much will lead to a draw as it allows the SM to refresh stoneskin and pot. One interesting thing to note is that when a SM does Stone Shock (stun) into Fear Shriek, there will be a small window between the stun and Fear Shriek where the Chanter regains control of his character. I.e., the stun duration is shorter than 1.5s. This is a good opportunity for the Chanter to reply with a stun of his own. If the stun lands, the SM will be disabled while the Chanter is feared away scott-free. A smarter SM may try a Body Root (to disable the stuns) into Earth Shock into Fear Shriek. But, remember that Body Root can be potted out of. Save stuns for stopping a Fear.
3. Celerity Mantra
   Mantras cannot be removed by the SM. With Celerity on, a snared Chanter will run at the same speed as the SM. This means that if the Chanter is feared, stopping to cast anything will put the SM farther behind the Chanter. If the SM lets himself fall too far behind, he will not be in range to chain other fears. The SM only has 1 or 2 "DOTs" that can be cast on the run (in addition to having pet damage). Having the Celerity Mantra greatly reduces the SM's damage, in addition to making it harder for the SM to chain fear. If the Chanter has a run speed scroll, the SM must slap on his speed scroll too. Note that speed scroll buffs can be dispelled by the SM.
4. High HP / magic resist
   This is the greatest counter against the SM at end game. The SM can only chain 3-4 fears (the fears are on a 30s, 1 min and 5 min cooldown). If a Chanter stacks enough HP to live through 3-4 fears, there is nothing the SM can do to kill the Chanter. Once the fear chain is up, the Chanter is free to kite and heal and the SM will be a sitting duck with his fears on cooldown.
5. Greater Healing Potion (to remove Silence/Root)
   When the Chanter is rooted, the SM has time to set up debuffs, DOTs and CC. Since Chanters cannot dispel roots, having Greater Healing Pots is a must. Some SMs rely on Silence or Body Root to stretch the fear chain. Pot out of Silence/Bind and the chain is broken.
6. Stay away from confined areas (see SM below)

Key SM factors :

1. Dispel (especially Ignite Aether and Magic Implosion)
   A Chanter has various self-buffs, and some buffs mentioned above that give him the edge. These must be removed to level the playing field. The core Dispel ability has a cast time, a cooldown and only removes 1 buff at a time. There is no time to remove all the buffs of the Chanter one at a time, especially when trying to CC or follow him after a fear. Having instacast dispels that take off 3 buffs each is helpful. Note that Ignite Aether and Magic Implosion do not share cooldowns.
2. Curse of Water instant fear
   For high-HP Chanters, Curse of Water is a must, unfortunately. Against a high-HP Chanter, the only way to win is to try to get the Chanter's HP low enough to be able to finish with chained fears. If the Chanter is smart/conservative and keeps himself topped up... disadvantage SM.
3. Shackle of Vulnerability
   This is nice for the casting speed debuff and the elemental resist debuff (damage increase). However, it does not last very long and has a cast time, so choosing when to cast it is important.
4. Silence, Body Root
   Silence stops heals and Body Root stops the ranged stun. Body Root also reduces melee damage.
5. Running speed scroll
   The only way to get a speed advantage over a Chanter is to dispell the Chanter's speed scroll buff and for the SM to use one.
6. Having a pet already out
   Time is a scarce resource against a Chanter. Taking the time to pop the instant summon buff, followed by a brief stop and jump-cast to summon the pet means you either lose CC or damage time. The wind pet can be helpful sometimes for the additional stun. Note that all pet auto-attacks and Orb damage are physical damage (they can enable the Chanter's parry-based abilities).
7. Keep track of the Soul Strike (ranged stun) cooldown
   Soul Strike's stun lasts 4s, and its cooldown is 12s. If the Chanter is unable to chain stun for the ~6s after the Soul Strike stun wears off, the Chanter is vulnerable to the Stone Shock into Fear combo. However, stay out of melee range after Stone Shock to avoid the melee stuns.
8. Save Chain of Earth and Stone Shock
   They are useful for leading Fears. I think it is a waste to cast Chain of Earth on a Feared target, or when snared with the Chanter's Binding Word. Pot out of Binding Word instead.
9. Being in a confined area
   It is a massive advantage for the SM to be able to pin the Chanter against a wall. If the Chanter is pinned, the SM can plant his feet and go "PVE raid boss" on the Chanter while chain fearing: Spirit Wrath Position, Spirit Erosion, Shackle of Vulnerability, 2 Spirit Claws, Spirit Disturbance, Summon Orbs/Energies, Erosion, Sandblaster.

I'm very impressed with how balanced the classes are, and how the combat system allows for complex encounters. I cannot enter each fight with a fixed strategy, and I have to constantly act/react to my opponents actions. The fight could go either way at any point in the fight. I've been having alot of fun playing 'mental chess' --- going over scenarios in my head and having duels/discussions with guildies.

Update: I found more 1v1 matchup info here.

Infiltrating Eltnen through Rifts

Finally! I've found the rifts. Rifts appear at regular times in the PVE zone, but at random locations. To find a rift, you could check one of their possible spawn locations yourself, or check general chat in case someone has already reported one. One of the incentives for rifting is to complete "rift quests" that give you good rewards, proportional to the challenge of completing quests in enemy territory. The first video is of me entering the rift solo and as a small group. We popped up deep inside enemy territory --- sometimes inside a questing area right next to enemies. We then had to navigate our way out of danger and stay mobile so as not to have enemies converge on us, as our locations get broadcasted in their general chat.



After going on a killing spree, we get a debuff that makes our location visible to all enemies in the area, in addition to being banned from rifting for a while. This was probably from all the low-PVP-ranked farming bots we plowed through. The debuff is called Ariel's Curse: "You are under Ariel's Curse for killing too many lower level targets in Elysea. The curse prevents you from using the Rifts. Return to Asmodae and wait until the curse is lifted." Shortly after receiving the debuff, we were zerged down.



The next video is of us practicing rifting as a guild for the first time. This was a little more difficult than small-man rifting for a couple of reasons. Communication and coordination were difficult, since we had to maneuver a big blob while the fringes of the blog would keep getting focus-fired and CC'd. Everytime we engaged, we had trouble disengaging and extending because part of our blob would get stuck behind. The other difficulty is that a blob attracts more attention. Attracting lots of attention and lacking mobility meant that we would eventually get zerged by increasing numbers. We even have a "300"-style standoff at one point :)



Bonus vid: Water Spirit: Spirit disturbance - "Crash". This is a situational spell that drops flying players out of the sky. The spell requires the Water Spirit pet to be out and the target to be close enough to the ground to be in the Water Spirit's range.



And here's some silly back and forth fighting in the Abyss, by the "layer teleporters". The teleporters of both factions that transport players to the different levels of the Abyss are placed right next to each other.

Level 28-31: key skills and the consequence of reaching terminal velocity

Level 28 is when the Spiritmaster begins to feel more like a Spiritmaster. The CC ability I have been looking forward to is Fear (level 28). Fear is a CC that puts the target in a feared state and doesn't break on damage. The downsides to Fear are its long cast time, high mana consumption and long cooldown. Another neat ability, Summoning Alacrity, came at Level 31. Summoning Alacrity makes summons instacast for 10s. Apart from the pet summons, this ability also affects the DOT servant summons.

Now to the videos. For reasons outside my present sphere of knowledge, zergs happen in the Abyss occasionally. I was exploring around the lower Abyss when I find myself caught in the middle of a clash between an Elyos force and an Asmodian force:



Here's a video of something unexpected happening in an aerial fight. A high-level priest was trying to get away from a few of us lowbies by flying really high. He just bolted and shot up vertically for minutes as we followed him. As he kept ascending, I saw that my flight timer was depleting and I popped a flight time potion. This bought me some extra time but the priest kept ascending. But we weren't making any progress on his HP bar, so I started to wonder how I was going to get down, now that my flight timer was nearly empty, my flight time potion was on cooldown and I was so far up that the ground was clipped by my draw distance. Then I thought, "okay, I'll save a few seconds of flight time, cut my wings, allow myself to freefall til just a few seconds from the ground, then reopen my wings." This didn't work quite as expected and I mysteriously died in mid-air. Apparently in Aion, you die if you reach terminal velocity:



And finally here are 2 fights from me stumbling into some Elyos. The first one was against a warrior, who retreated back to his guard tower. I underestimated the range/power of the guard tower and died a foolish death from being zapped by it:



What's sucky about the Spiritmasters right now is that the pets have trouble following, especially when flying. That's why my pet is rarely with me in the videos, except when duelling. It's not that bad of a problem at these lower levels, since the pet is mainly a DOT with a HP bar. It makes more of a difference at higher levels, when pets enable more interesting abilities. Flying pets are already on the Korean test servers, so hopefully pets will be able to fly by the time it matters to me :)

Level 26 thoughts on the Abyss and Rifts

One thing great about the Abyss is that it merges PVE and PVP into a single zone. However, that's not all. It also puts everyone on the server (of all levels) in the same place. Here's an encounter I had with a lvl 37 Templar (10 levels above me) and his friends while I was trying to complete a quest in the Abyss. I was on my way to meet an NPC as part of a quest, and apparently the farther I travel from the starting Fortress, the more likely I am to run into enemies (and PVP). The video shows how much effect level differences have. A few of us lowbies tried our best to scratch at their HP bars, but they bullied us with their level gap and I was forced to retreat.



The next video captures some Rift action. We were completing some quests in Morheim when random rifts opened near us, spilling Elyos into our PVE zone. Similar to the Abyss, the rifts open at the higher level areas in the Zone. I.e., you will be less likely to encounter PVP when you start PVEing in the zone initially, but as you start progressing to higher level quests in the zone, you could find rifts opening next to you and be forced to PVP. The last part of the video shows a swirly vortex thing in the sky and a column of light that some say indicate where rifts open. But nothing happened and I failed to find a rift yet again.

Aion update: Level 26 Spiritmaster duels

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.

Aion CBT 5 & 6 rift action (lvl 22 SM P.O.V.)

Update: CBT 6





Looking forward to the Aion release, and finally being able to develop my real char!

Aion closed beta #4

RL stuff kept me occupied this weekend, so I only managed to get from level 19 to 21. Unexpectedly, there was some PVP action outside the Abyss. Something about rifts opening and Asmodians and Elyos ending up in the same place at the same time. I was caught by surprise while I was PVE-ing and had no clue how it all worked or where the baddies were coming from.



It was a confusing weekend for me. It felt awkward playing the Spiritmaster at this level. It's as if I'm growing out of my old "generic Mage" skin but I'm not quite a Spiritmaster yet. E.g., the only CCs I have are root/snares, which means it's still a pissing contest against casters.

Aion 2nd N.A. Beta weekend

My WAR account expired today! That's good news, by the way. I logged in a handful of times in the weekend, but each time, I only got as far as buffing myself and checking my friends list. I had no motivation whatsoever to do anything else. The last time I logged in, I saw that Order was pushing all 3 zones and seiging a Fortress. I winced and made a face as if I had drank rotten milk and logged off... and logged into Aion!

I got to level 10 after some nasty PVE. Aion's PVE isn't bad by usual standards. I just dislike PVE; always have, always will. I threw in the towel a couple of times when I had to do some stupid travel quests that made me run all over the place and back again for 30 minutes.  This would be equivalent to what WAR calls "epic quests" (or what I like to call "epic travel quests"). I don't know why game designers think it's "fun", or "epic" to have quests that make you run back and forth for more than a few minutes.

I recorded some videos from the weekend. I don't have many videos of the PVE action. Instead, I have more of duels and what seems to be an Arena. Flight does add another interesting dimension to the game, and I'd say that if you are not deft in managing your flight abilities, you will definitely be at a disadvantage.

Getting a feel for Spiritmaster mechanics on some NPCs:



Spiritmaster vs melee (Assassin, Warrior). There's a mismatch between caster CCs and melee counter-CCs at the this level. Things should sort themselves out at endgame:




Spiritmaster vs RDPS (Sorcerer, Spiritmaster). There aren't any anti-caster CCs at the moment. Only thing at this level are damage chance-to-interrupts and spell chain pushbacks (stuns). Because of this, it's pretty much like a wild west gunfight at this level --- whoever gets the interrupt first wins. The 2nd video is a little more interesting. In it, I fight a Spiritmaster and I try to do some kiting to disrupt the stun/damage sequences:




Spiritmaster vs Priest. It's a "max DPS and heal interrupt" game. Feels like DPS is greater than HPS at this level from the fights in the videos. Although, Klausen (from Phoenix Throne) destroyed me on his Cleric earlier by outhealing my damage and sneaking in some damage between heals. I didn't have fraps running at that time though:



Arena. We found out about the existence of the Arena minutes before we had to go to bed and rallied a group to go up against a team that had been kicking ass there. We held them off for a short while, but eventually got overwhelmed by their number of healers:



Bonus vid - Tooka (Lylia) kicking butt on her Chanter:



Combat is more involved and engaging than WAR even at this level. But that's the advantage of a combat system where classes are ultimately balanced with each other. Systems balanced for group combat have to dumb down each class so as not to give too many tools to each class. I think this is where WAR fails hard twice. First, by having classes balanced at a group level, paper classes will always be at a disadvantage to counter scissor classes, and have to rely on help from rock classes. This means that when group synergy is not just perfect, players die fast and are not able to do anything about it. Second, WAR has CCs that have no counter (stuns, long disables). Focused fire is enough to give serious problems in any combat system. But when you add the two characteristics of the WAR combat system mentioned above, combat becomes extremely cheesy with the one-two I-WIN combos. I believe it is possible to have a good combat system balanced for group PVP, but just not the way WAR does it.

Aion 1v1 combat

I pre-ordered Aion last week, and I have since been researching for the right class for me to play.

I was severely disappointed with the Zealot in WAR, since pre-game info and interviews (and even the class details on the *#&$ official website!) had conned me into thinking that there were no healbots in the game, and that the Zealot could be a cross between the WoW Warlock and Shadowpriest --- being complicated but rewarding to play, and a bitch to fight against. Man was I wrong. I was pigeonholed to be a boring healbot because that is the best way a Zealot could contribute to a fight and to his team. I played along for a few months, but after getting the right gear combo, I finally had enough. No more. No more button mashing in boring zergs. No more cheesy skirmishes. No more RVE. No more healbotting. It was time for me to try to find some fun in this broken game.

And here I am now, a month or so after running around soloing/duoing, etc. I'm spent. That was my "hail mary" play to give WAR one last shot. But I see nothing meaningful on the horizon for the Zealot, combat and career cheese dominating, same ol boring zerg RVE, and Mythic shoving Land of the Dead in my face despite the fundamental problems with the game that I have issues with.

Damn, got sidetracked into a rant again. I'm sorry. Anyway, I've been trawling the interwebs for Aion class info, but I found that the web is overflowing with tons of speculation from lowbies who don't know much about their class or the game, and an abundance of anecdotal evidence instead of sound arguments. Most of the gameplay videos (just like WAR gameplay videos) are of people PVEing, or PVPing in lowbie encounters. I absolutely didn't care about PVE, nor about how classes are balanced at lower levels. I wanted to know what the potential and playstyle of each class was at endgame. Most importantly, I didn't want to make the mistake I did in WAR again, by "learning about a class" only by getting to max level.

Fortunately, Aion has already been released in Asia for a while now. That means that people have had more than enough time to work on their characters. Then it occurred to me... I should be looking for KOREAN videos!



I found what appears to be a 3v3 tournament. Except that it's a series of 1v1 fights, until one team has no players left standing. The video was uploaded by "s2dayz". He has uploaded other videos that have given me some valuable info about how each class plays: http://www.youtube.com/user/s2dayz. I initially thought of being a Ranger, but I am leaning more toward the Spiritmaster now.

Aion looks amazing

I've been looking over Lylia's shoulder as she tests Aion with her beta access and I have to say... it looks AMAZING. Now that's what a game looks like! Not like a game like WAR, that looks like it was hacked together by some high school kids as a computer graphics project.

The "polish" that everyone praises is well deserved. With graphics at max quality, the game is smoother than WAR with fastest framerate, and it looks gorgeous. Gorgeous enough that I actually feel like walking around to explore the virtual world, instead of closing my eyes, holding my breath and rushing through the PVE content. We didn't realize how scarred we were by WAR until we exclaimed in surprise for being able to walk over a fence without getting impaled on it.

Graphics-wise: from what I can tell, the polygon count is actually lower in Aion than in WAR. They are just smarter with their implementation. E.g., better use of textures, various illusions and clever tricks to make the game look good. There are people who know what they are doing at work on this game. It might have also helped that they used the CryEngine for Aion. The visual depth of the environment is far better. Pretty clouds span the sky, buildings in the background, butterflies, fish in the river... it even started raining at one point without any noticable performance degradation. There's also Bloom for some of you junkies.

The game doesn't try to blow you away with sophisticated, resource-hungry graphics. It looks like there might have been some conscious thought put into deciding that some visuals are just too slow, so it's better to use faster alternatives. But they still managed to pull off a very cohesive environment that looks great. And that's what an interactive game should be. It should look great and run fast. There's no need to dick around with crazy particle effects as if you have something to prove, and consequently slaughter performance because the devs don't know what they are doing. Aion's environment is immersive, unlike how WAR reminds you how broken a game can be and how much software can suck every minute you play the game.

The music is fantastic (if you like the genre). Seamless transitions. Enter combat, and the background music gets more energetic. Exit combat, and the music transitions to a soothing, ambient piece from a wind instrument, piano or vocals. It's not music they whipped together by the developers calling a friend of a friend who happens to play an instrument. It's well produced music with an orchestra behind most of the pieces. The sound effects are great as well. Birds chirping, snappy spell animations and sound effects.

(Since I started writing this, Lylia must have mentioned at least 20 times how much she loves the music and how pretty the game is)

Interface is slick and looks well implemented and efficient. Windows and menus are fast and snappy. No noticable server-client lag. You can show the enemy cast bar, so I would assume that the latency is low enough to have them in the game. There is some weird occasional camera glitching that I can't put my finger on though.

Can't say much about how the combat is, since Lylia didn't get high enough for any meaningful combat. Can't tell if PVE is grindy either. 

What I can say for sure is, Aion looks like a game I want to try. I want to play it now! F***k you WAR, you uninspired jimmy-rigged piece of garbage. Can't believe I let you string me along since Beta. I'll be pre-ordering Aion and the second the N.A. servers go live I'm there!