But it sure is cool that WoW might finally have some competition.

Aion’s winning acolades for the best MMO of the year. Well, since all the others were, in one way or another, severely broken that’s not necessarily saying much. Or maybe what it says is that it’s damn hard to create a viable, fun MMO that appeals to more than a select few.

Aion does a lot of things right. It’s graphically gorgeous and runs well on my meager machine. (I really need to get a better video card. )

So… my thoughts, in no particular order…

The lag? Aion’s laggy at times, but no more than Dalaran. My machine runs it well enough to be playable, but WoW is definitely smoother. More horsepower would be nice. Some people with nicer machines report 80 FPS.

The character generation system just pwns all others. Even the one in City of Heroes, though that one does a better job on costumes. Choose from a bunch of hair styles and basic faces (yawn) and then tweak the face to your heart’s content. The same with body design. You can make a small headed, thick thighed WoW Human or a delicate Elf Prinecess. No tails, though… so Draenei are out, but you can make some strange looking types. Pretty, ugly, tiny, huge, tall, short, fat, thin, whatever, it’s all there.

While there’s only the one set of clothes at the start you can see how your character will look in starter gear, undies, and high level gear.

You get to pick from either of two races with no real racial differences, Elyos and Asmodian. Light and dark side, or Pigeons and Furbacks. Four starting classes branch of into eight at level 10.

• Warrior becomes Templar (tank) or Gladiator (off tank and/or melee DPS)
• Mage becomes Sorcerer (ranged DPS bolt lobber) or Spiritmaster (much like a Hunter or Warlock.)
• Priest becomes Cleric (main healer) or Chanter (light heals, buffs, some DPS)
• Scout becomes Assassin (melee DPS) or Ranger (Ranged DPS, Hunter w/o pet)

More Customizing

WoW has more character customization with the talent trees, but Aion has some. Characters gain stigmas starting at level 20 and these add various abilities. Stigmas have to be installed at a Stigma Master, but they can also be removed and reused.

Eavery piece or armor and weaponry also has sockets for manastones. These stones work very much like gems in WoW and add a bit to various stats, such as crit rating, hit points, mana pool, etc.

Backstory

The backstory is more or less this – Once upon a time the world was nice and all races were one. The gods above created a protector race, the Balaur, to make sure things stayed that way. But the Balaur got smart, realized the other races were tasty and best used as snacks or slaves, and so decided to conquer everything.

Once thing led to another (major war) and there was a major cataclysm that literally split the world into two halves. One side is continually sunlight and that’s the Elyos side. The other is continually dark and that Asmodians have that area. The Balaur inhabit the Abyss, a void between the two areas.

After the Cataclysm both sides lost touch with each other, and with the Balaur, and developed their owns ways. Fairly recently each has discovered the other, but things didn’t go well and there is now perpetual war. Furback and Pigeons forever at each other’s throats, when they’re not taking fighting the Balaur.

Rifts exist on both Ely and Asmo sides which give limited access to the other side. This results, naturally, in a certain amount of gankage. A few of one side pop through the rift, kill a few opponent (or try to,) word gets out, and they’re hunted down.

The Abyss

The Anyss is an open PvP area, but there plenty of mobs to grind, quests to do, resources to gather and so on. It’s a good place to level, as well. A little like Stranglethorn Vale in WoW. You don’t have to spend much time there, but you might want to.

There are a series of fortresses and artifacts that each side can control, to the benefit of that side. There’s also a nifty series of training quests (and a training instance) which clearly explains how that works. I’d love to see that in WoW for the BGs and some of the raids.

All servers are PvP servers, though there’s no real PvP game until 25. After that the game is set up for group PvP and big fortress battles. Most of the PvP happens in the Abyss which is inaccessible until level 25.

Instances

At this time I’ve only been in the one instance, the Training Grounds, which is a training instance for a fortress battle. Go in, clear mobs around the fortress, grab an artifact, kill the force field generator, knock down the gate door (with siege engines,) and kill the boss. Sometimes the boss even drops a piece of decent loot.

Crafting and Gathering

Aion has six crafts: Alchemy (potions, scrolls, manastones, mage weapons,) Armorsmithing (chain and plate armor,) Tailoring (cloth and leather armor,) Weaponssmithing (take a guess,) Cooking (yum!) and Handicrafting (accessories and bows.)

Crafting isn’t done just anywhere. You actually have to go to the crafting area and make the items on the forge, loom, whatever. You can grab work orders from the trainer to work up your skill. At 99, 199, 299, and 399 you pay him a great chunk of money (Kinah) to advance to the next level.

Work orders give you several items to create. When done you hand them in to the trainer and receive some item, generally a crafting mat, but it might be a recipe. Also, you gain XP for each item that you craft, if it isn’t too low level for you.

At least in the mid 20s (where I am) the stuff you craft is every bit as nice as anything you’ll find off a mob or on the broker (Auction House.)

There are two gathering skills which allow characters to gather anything gatherable, generally herbs, ores, and Aether. Like WoW you need to work your skill up to gather stuff.

Prices, Broker, Kinah

There’s only one coin, the Kinah, and it’s both pretty easy to gain and pretty easy to spend. Vendor junk sells for enough to keep you in decent goodies, nice gear (found) sells for quite a bit, and nice crafted gear sell for a lot.

Not only can you buy gear, but you can buy consumables, accessories, clothes, and more. Youi’ll also spend an arm and a leg to get your crafting skill raised.

There is a broker, which everyone calls the “auction house,” but since there is no bidding it isn’t an auction house. Something is put up for sale at one price and you buy it or pass. Youre also limited to ten items posted at a time.

A neat feature is the private store. Going AFK for a few? Set up a store with the items you want to sell at the prices you choose. Set up the store anywhere. Even in a PvP zone in the middle of a war, not that that’s recommended…

Issues?

Very few. There’s some griping about too few quests and too much grinding, especially at later levels. If you like to grind, then you’re ok. Still, there are a lot of quests so it’s not nearly 100% grind. Plus, mobs drop enough loot to take away some of the pain.

Solo PvP is, well, about like it is in WoW. Mismatched. But then, the game is designed around group PvP, which actually seems to work well.

You do need halfway decent hardware to run the game, but if it runs WoW well then it should run Aion just fine. With a hot machine Aion will be gorgeous.

Lag. Well, that really is more of a routing issue than your individual machine. It’s much better than in beta, but it still happens and rubberbanding pops up at times. Jumping off hills can be entertaining as you bounce back up the hill a couple of times.

Summary

There are a lot of other cool bits, too. All in all it’s a solid game, very stable (as stable as any other MMO) and surprisingly bug free.

I’ll be blogging about it at my little Aion blog and this site will be going back to WoW (and I’ll be posting more than every other month.)

1 -  Know how to re-stealth

If you can’t re-stealth in combat, you are drastically reducing your survivability. The main techniques for acheiving this are to

1. blind and wait to leave combat
2. gouge/kidney shot your oppenent and run out
3. get your oppenent crippled and sprint away
4. vanish

Here’s the rest: Top 3 Rogue PvP Tips

A friend and I are putting together a new blog, Orc and Gnome, which we hope will have an interesting feel to it. Over there we’ve written up a couple of posts on the patch (see below.) I’m the Orc, he’s the Gnome.

The 3.2 patch is live (or will be in a couple of hours.)

Lots of little changes. While there’s a lot of stuff there it doesn’t look like you’re have to rebuild your talents, unless you’re a Death Knight. DKs received a small nerf (much needed and yes, I play one) and they’re had enough talents moved and tweaked that a respec is necessary.

• The Orc on the 3.2 patch
• And the Gnome on the 3.2 patch, specifically some of the mage changes.

There are always going to be times when, due to real life commitments, you can’t play your favourite MMO, whether it’s a month of exams or an important week at work…

The rest: The Daily Grind: How do you cope without your favourite MMO?

So the question is this: You’re not only cut off from WoW for a week (or month!) but you’re also cut off from the internet. No email, no twitter, no facebook, no illegal (or legal) torrent downloads, etc.

How would you cope?

• A few of the new glyphs are from the trainer, but most of  the new glyphs are found only through a Book of Glyph Mastery, not through any research procedure. edit: Also, you need to have 425 Inscription skill to use the book.
• The book is found as a world drop from any Northrend mob. Start the mass slaughter now.
• It’s a rare drop and is BoE, so can be traded or sold. Right now the going price for one is anywhere from 1-3k. Edit: Just checked Dark Iron. There the price is 4-5k each. Not worth it to me and I can easily afford it.
• Inscribers “read” the book and get a random glyph. So you may well pay 2,500 -4,500 for a book only to find a glyph that you can’t use and that won’t sell.
• These glyphs are going to be pretty rare for awhile and people who have them will be charging pretty high prices.

So there ya go. Happy hunting!

Here’s the comment:

Hi, Just looking for sum answers to questions i have been asking myself but as yet have not found any answers. I am level 80 comat rogue with a hit of 294(need 315 apparently)but have not worn my Gloves of fast reactions, titainium chocker and titainium impact band because the blue items have all hit on them and changing them moves me away from the hit cap? Any suggestions? I guess what am asking is is it worth upgrading to items with better Agility and AP but loosing a lot of Hit?

So based on recount numbers… If you’re combat or using the above build, or something like it, then you should have the precision talent. With a PvP version I’m working with about 130 hit and, according to recount numbers, I’m not missing on any strikes fighting in the BGs or against level 80 mobs. Fighting raid bosses, and the raid boss target dummy in Org, with a 200 hit rating, the miss rate was around 15%.

How much Hit you need depends on what you’re fighting. Generally mobs require less Hit rating than players/elites which require less than raid bosses.

How much hit is needed? Here’s my qick and dirty answer, since you already have precision from the combat tree:

• When fighitng mobs, you’re good. Upgrade your gear.
• Same answer for PvP, though high end arenas might be different. PvP hit caps are a bit lower than for Raid Bosses.
• Raiding is more complicated and I’m not a raider. Not yet, anyway. Part of it depends on the raid buffs you have and the debuffs on the boss.

There’s a concept called Agility Equivalence Points (AEP) which tries to measure the value of various stats. These numbers will change depending on exactly what you’re fighting. For example, a PvP calculation involves stamina and resilience, while raiding doesn’t.

So a general AEP table, for raiding, looks like this (taken from ElitistJerks info

• Expertise rating: 2.6
• Hit rating: 2.4
• Agility: 2.2
• Haste: 2.1
• Crit rating: 1.7
• Strength: 1.1
• Attack Power: 1

Multiply the stat for your gear by the numbers above. For example…

1. Gloves of Fast Reactions : 66Ag, 64 Stm, 38 Crit, 49 haste, 110 AP
2. Dropping Stam, we have: (66 x 2.2) + (38 x 1.7) + (49 x 2.1) +  (110 x 1) = 424.27
3. Now do the same for your blue gear. The highest number gives the best DPS for raiding.

The point is that your better gear will provide enough extra DPS to more than make up for the lack of hit, so go for the upgrade.

For PvP Stamina and the Resilience stat are important, though I’ll go out on a limb and say that the importanceof Res is situational. Rogues die very quickly in PvP and Res doesn’t slow that down much.

Comments?

By 1 am I had made almost 10,000 gold, all in glyphs. Sold about 350 of the things (math test: the average price per glyph is…?)  I’ll be hitting the gold cap in a day or two and will be dumping some on various alts. Maybe then I’ll power level something like Blacksmithing.

There’s a hint there, if you want it. Zuggy is a good one for market timing and the introduction of the dual spec in the 3.1 patch was a perfect example. Those of us who had large numbers of glyphs stocked up are cashing in. All of a sudden a lot of players need glyphs to fill out their second spec. And they have the money to buy your glyphs.

How do I know they have the money? Besides the obvious? Because it costs 1,000 gold to get the 2 spec capability (from your class trainer.) After that, what’s 30 gold for a glyph?

Prices are rather high on some pre-3.1 glyphs and I expect they’ll be really high for the new 3.1 glyphs.

By the way, for you Herbalists out there, what do you think the increased glyph demand is going to do to herb prices?Herbs being a necessary component for the Inscription inks.

If you need a quick and dirty guide to either profession, go to:

• The GotWarcraft Inscription Guide
• Herbalism Guide

It’s going to take some time for this demand to cool down, so if you’re a scribe and/or herbalist, get to work!

Naturally there will be a few bugs coming along with the patch, and no, they’re not the ones you’ll kill to earn XP. As an aside, it’s be kinda interesting to be able to code a hack that fixes a game bug and get Bliz to pay you for it.

Anyway, the full patch notes are in the usual place so check them out. Here are my remarks on miscellaneous points:

General Notes

Mounts can now swim.

Trainers, having decided that their trainees can’t read, have done away with the course requirements for books and will now teach those skills directly.

Dual Talents – Now you can have two builds to switch between. For example, one for raiding and one for PvP. The only downside is that it costs 1,000 gold to get the ability.

Glyphs – A bunch of new glyphs are being introduced and a bunch of old glyphs have been changed. You no longer need to be near a lexicon of power to install glyphs.

And the most important, game-changing, change of all: New music can be heard at the Argent Tournament grounds and in Ulduar.

Class Notes

All classes get a couple of pages of changes, except Warriors and Warlocks, who get a few lines each. Guess that means that Warriors and Rogues are nearly perfect. Looks like there are more than a few buffs in the list of changes. A few nerfs, too.  I’m looking forward to Rogues now being in demand for raids. Oh, Ok, I’m awake now… what was I saying?

Enough changes have been made to talents and spells that everyone (except Rogues and Warriors?) will get a free respec and should visit the trainer the get new spells.

Armor Penetration has been buffed. All classes now get 25% more effect from it. The main visible change of this will be to drop PvP survivability in the BGs (at level 80) from 1 second to 0.9 seconds.

The Fear mongers on the house have had a bit of a nerf. The fear (and related abilities) break sooner now.

DKs, Pallies, and Droods, the classes most in need of a buff, now receive 30% more haste from Haste Rating.

Profession Notes

Alchemy – Several Flask changes, introduction of Northrend Mixtures, and secret Alchemist loot caches (from the Bosses) in Uldar.

Blacksmithing – New recipes from Uldar and an upgrade to some recipes in the 1-300 range to make them useful.

Cooking – I’ll pass these on to my wife and she’ll update our cookbooks (Tauren Chef and Wrath of the Kitchen King) appropriately.

Enchanting and Engineering: have some updates and tweaks.

Fishing – You can now catch a mount! It’s pretty rare, though. Also, you can now fish anywhere.

Gathering skills – For some time low-level twinks have been able to get to 450 mining and skinning (for the crit and stam buffs.) No longer, there’s now a level requirement for those skills.

Inscription – More recipes and quite a number of Glyph changes.

Uldar bosses - will, rarely, be dropping recipes for several professions.

Misc Notes

There’s a bunch of interface tweaks

Lots of little item changes, but if you use Glyphs (you are, aren’t you?) you will want to check it out. There have been some significant changes.

Lots of little bug fixes.

So all in all there’s a lot there. Something for everyone and all that.

So I prodded a friend, who does raid a lot, into writing an article on Rogue Raid DPS which I found quite useful. Now it’s time to start playing around with some of this stuff and see what I can come up with and see if I can get to the point where my Rogue is useful.

My first raid was 25 Man OS (no drakes) and I beat most of the healers for DPS output. I was running a PvP mutilate build and had no clue so didn’t respec.

More browsing brought me to the ElitistJerks.com Roguecraft Spreadsheet which factors in a huge amount of stuff. It includes a Mutilate build and various defaults for maximum DPS.

I specced into that build and hit 2k DPS on the Orgrimmar practice dummies, so maybe there’s hope for cracking the top 20 of a 25 man raid?

Anyway, here’s what I’m working with for now:

Mutilate Build Details

Here’s the build on WoWhead

Note: this is a dagger build and assumes use of instant and/or deadly poisons. Lev 80 (non elite) mobs go down real fast with this build.

Assassination:

1. 5/5 Malice – more crit chance
2. 3/3 Ruthlessness – more combo points
3. 2/2 Blood Splatter – Adds to your DoTs
4. 3/3 Puncuring Wounds – +15% Mut crit, +30% Backstab crit
5. 5/5 Lethality
6. 3/3 Vile Poisons – Greater chance to actually apply poisons
7. 2/2 Fleet footed – Moved faster while stealthed and spend less time being rooted
8. 1 Cold Blood – add this into a macro with your favorite strike. I add mine to Eviscerate.
9. 5/5 Seal fate – Use less energy
10. 3/3 Focused attacks – gain energy from crits
11. 3/3 Find Weakness – All damage increased by 6%
12. 1 Mutilate – Your bread and butter attack
13. 3/3 Turn the tables – Adds 6% crit chance to bread and butter attacks. lots of arguing going on over whether to choose this or 3/3 Master Poisoner. Comments?
14. 5/5 Cut to the chance – lets you keep Slice and Dice up permanently.
15. 1 Hunger for Blood – More damage, Rarr! Edit: Will be changed (improved?) when the 3.1 patch hits.

Combat

1. 5/5 Dual Weild Specialization – More DPS
2. 5/5 Precision – Your Dual Weild gives a major “to hit” penalty. This compensates somewhat.
3. 3/5 Close Quarters cbt. – More crit chance

Subtlety

1. 5/5 Relentless Strikes – Restores energy
2. 2/2 Opportunity – +20% damage to your bread and butter strikes.

Weapons I’m using right now. Both drop off the Auction House.

1. Main – Titansteel Shanker
2. Off hand – Librarian’s Paper Cutter

Enchants:

• Exceptional Agility (+26 ag) on Main hand
• Titanium wpn chain on off hand (+28 hit rating)

I’ll be playing with some weapon choices, poison combos, gems, etc. to see what I can do to boost DPS.  Your comments? Thoughts? Changes? What do you have to say?

Edit 4/9: Joined a PUG into 10 man OS. Hit almost 2400 dps on the trash (#2 on the DPS list,) but the group disintigrated before the first drake. No one died, but people suddenly realized they had to wash their socks, so poof. All of a sudden I’m raid leader with two people in the raid.

The Recount addon said I had a miss rate of almost 15%, so I guess I need to look for more Hit ratng. Might try the Titanium Weapon Chain on the main hand as a start and swap an Ag gem for a Hit gem.

Changed off-hand to Namlak’s Supernumerary Sticker

Mongoose provides better DPS than Exceptional Agility and Berserking is better still, but Mongoose is over 400 gold (and Berserking is a lot more.) I’ll see if I can get better weapons before blowing that much cash on Berserking.

As of today…

• You have to be level 40+. Originally you had to be 80.
• You can switch talents anywhere, no Lexicon of Power is necessary.
• 1,000 gold to set it up, payable to your trainer. Need more gold to pay for that? Go here.
• It looks like the system is set up that you can use it during any period of downtime and never in the middle of a fight, battle, or raid. So you can duel someone, but cannot change spec mid-fight.
• Your actionbars also switch with the specs. Have one setup for your raid, another for PvP.

Switch your gear, too

There’s also a very cool change to the Equipment Manager. You can now save up sets of gear and switch them with a hot-key. Finish that raid, then switch specs and gear with a couple of clicks and you’re good for the arena.

For the near future there will only be the two specs, but GC says that Bliz is considering …

We will be launching the feature with just two specs, but depending on how we feel it works out, we might consider additional specs in the future.

Here’s the Interview with GhostCrawler that originally lays it all out.  There have been some changes since the interview, mentioned in the UI Page.

More UI Stuff

There’ve been some changes to the Looking for Group chat interface. Think anyone will use it now or will we all continue to spam the trade channel?

Like the BGs, but hate to have to travel to the big city? You will be able to queue for the Battlegrounds from anywhere, as long as you aren’t in a fight. Take a momentary break from farming crystallized whatevers and jump in line for your BG. When you’re done you’ll be popped back to where you were, to continue… your….. farming……zzzzzzz