Aion: Hands On Preview Part Four

11 Aug 2009 at 15:19:13 by Bill Vaughan

In the fourth part of our Aion preview, I discuss trade, professions and item enhancements available in the game. Oh yes, there's more to Aion than just a pretty face.

By the time you reach level five in Aion, chances are you've picked up various objects, some of which have purposes that aren't immediately obvious. Manastones and Powershards are two items that you can use right away.

Manastones fit into slots on your armour and weapons, enhancing stats such as accuracy or attack power. Most low level items have one or two slots for Manastones, but be careful; as with many things in Aion, if you fail in applying a Manastone to an item any stones that were on the item already will be destroyed. If you want to replace a Manastone with another one though, you must visit a specialist NPC in a city, and removing a stone will destroy it.

Power Shards are another common item that drops from early on. They increase the damage of your weapons by a set amount depending on the quality of the shard. Once equipped, you can activate the Power Shard ability, causing one shard to be consumed every time you attack with your weapon. If you dual-wield and have shards in each slot, two are used up for each attack you make. Power Shards can be bought from vendors as well as found on mobs. They're not cheap, especially early on, so it's best to save them for harder fights.

Later on, other items such as Enchantment Stones and Godstones are available. Enchantment Stones can be obtained by using Extraction Tools on unwanted armour and weapons. They improve specific attributes to gear, varying depending on the gear they are applied to. For example, they give a damage or magic boost increase to weapons, and a defence increase to armour. As with Manastones, there is a chance that you will fail when you apply it to an item, but the higher the level of Enchantment Stone used in comparison to the item it is being used on, the less chance there is of failing.

Finally, Godstones can be applied to weapons to give them a fairly powerful buff. You must visit an NPC in your faction's main city, Sanctum or Pandeamonium, to have the stone applied to the weapon. Once it's done, the weapon gets a cool glow effect, which varies depending on the Godstone.

Trade and professions are another big part of Aion. Once you've reached level 10 and have visited the main city, you have access to the Trade Brokers, which offer an auction facility, and warehouses (banks). You can pay to upgrade your cube (backpack), although the costs of doing so rise quite steeply with each step. Vendors in the city also offer additional services such as changing the appearance of your armour; In a game that puts so much focus on character customisation, it's not surprising that NCsoft thought to add this feature. Your can alter the look of your gear to anything that you have in your inventory provided it is the same sort of item, for example you can't make leather look like plate or vice versa. You can also buy dye to change the colour of your armour.

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