The Basics



Manastones are nifty little socketed items that you can add to your gear to boost your stats. Which stats to boost are completely up to you but you’ll find a guideline for each class at the end of this tutorial.

Using manastones is fairly simple. Starting out you’ll likely only be socketing one or two and you may not realize that failure is an option until you are trying to add your prized manastone to a piece of gear and you get the awful message that it failed and your stone has been destroyed. If you are socketing more than a couple of manastones, save the best ones for last so you aren’t just wasting good stones to failures.

Manastones are not permanent and they can be removed. There is generally a manastone removal NPC in every major town. Removing a manastone will destroy it, but it leaves the gear intact and allows you to place a new manastone in that slot.

When will I get to start flying?


There is no flight through your first 9 levels. The ability is granted once you have completed your ascension quests and you join the ranks of the Daevas. Your first real introduction to flight will be the cities after you have left the newbie area. It is here that you will learn about maneuvering, fighting, and gathering while in the air. It can get a little tricky though, so I strongly suggest flying around as much as possible at first to get the hang of it.




Where can I fly?

Pieces of Aion need to be present in order for players to have the ability to fly. The Abyss highlights aerial combat so you may plan on using flight as part of your strategy here. Around the rest of the world, the best way to tell if flight is possible is to glance at your UI. There is a button on the lower right hand corner that shows a wing graphic when you’re in an area where you can fly and turns black when you cannot fly. This flight indictor will be your best friend whenever you fly.




How do I fly?

You can take off by hitting your “Page Up” key and land by hitting the “Page Down” key on your keyboard. I personally did not like the location of those keys but luckily the game also provides a hotkey icon that you can find in your skills window under the actions tab. Drag and drop the icon from this tab to your hotbar where you can use it to take off or to land. If you prefer mouse control over keyboard, you can also click the flight button on the lower right hand corner of your UI.


Flight movement is controlled by your mouse and arrow keys. Use your forward key (either the up arrow if you use the arrow keys, the W key if you use WASD for movement, or the Num Lock for auto-forward) to propel yourself through the air. To maneuver, hold down your right mouse button and mouse look in the direction you wish to travel! Pushing the mouse away from you makes you fly up and pulling it down towards you brings you back down to the ground. You can fly in either first person or third person camera view and Aion’s key mapping allows for customization of the keys you use in game so if the default doesn’t work for you, you have plenty of options to work with.




Is there any way to augment flight?

Because flight is a key feature in Aion, there are ways to boost your flight capabilities. Skills and consumables have the ability to raise both your flight time and your flight speed. If you are questing, early on you will likely receive flight time extension potions that will come in handy as you are learning this new aspect of gameplay.

Gear Grades


There are four levels of gear rarity in Aion, each tier more powerful than the next. Some gear you acquire will have sockets for placing manastones or godstones. Chest, legs, shoulder, gloves, and boots will offer socket slots. The more rare the gear, the more sockets the item has.




* Normal (Gray): Normal items are the common drops and often found on vendors. Normal items have between 1-2 socket slots.
* Rare (Green): Rare items are a bit harder to find but they offer better statistics then normal items. These items drop off of creatures across Atreia and on contribution vendors for those looking rare items for a PvP boost. Rare items generally come with 2-3 socket slots.
* Legendary (Blue): Legendary items are difficult to find, but they provide some of the best statistic gear in the game. Contribution vendors also carry these items at a high cost. Legendary items come with 3-4 sockets.
* Unique (Orange): Unique items are the hardest to come by, but they also provide the best statistics gear-wise. You can find these on contribution vendors, but expect to pay greatly for them. Unique items come with 4-5 socket slots.




Enchantments


Enchantments improve specific attributes on weapons and armor and are a bit tricky, but the way this works is you will need to buy a set of extraction tools from the general goods vendor. You can then use these tools on an item to try and extract an enchantment stone from it. It is important to note that this will destroy the item. However, the higher the level of the item, the better the enchantment. Once you have your enchantment stone, you can try to use it on one of your items to boost its stats. There is also a chance that you will fail here and lose the stone. Lastly, if you try to enchant an already enchanted item and fail, your item will lose one level of enchantment. So there is always a chance you could do more harm than good through enchantments, but if you can succeed, your power will be enhanced, making it risky, but worth it. One way to reduce your chance of failure is to try and use a higher level stone than your items level.





Manastones


Manastones are used to socket your gear and provide it with a number of possible enchantments. You can usually find these stones on various creatures throughout Atreia and very commonly on the trade broker. Manastones provide a number of possible enhancements such as boosting evasion, parry, hitpoints, attack, mana points, and much more. Read the full list of manastones here.

To socket a manastone, you first need an empty socket in a piece of gear. If you have already placed something in the socket, you can pay a visit to the specific vendors in town that can remove your current manastones. Before you remove a manastone, make sure it’s the one you want to be rid of as removing it will destroy the stone.

If you're jumping into Aion for the first time this weekend, you'll find it's different than other MMORPGs you might have played in more ways than one. Ten Ton Hammer has compiled a quick list of 13 hints and tips to get you off to a great start in your first 10 levels.
Collect early, and look forward to aether harvesting when you get flight at or about level 10.







1. Start collecting early. Aion has two gathering skill progressions: collecting and aether harvesting. Collecting can be done at level on, e but aether gathering doesn't start until you start flying at level 10 (look for the floating green nodes at that point). You can avoid backtracking to earlier areas if you start early. Crafting and even some quests hinge on your ability to collect and gather aether..


2. Titles not only look cool, they add stats as well. Look for titles as you complete longer quest lines under your character profile and equip them early.


3. Manastones are a cheap and easy way to add a little extra umph to your equipment, but keep in mind that while you can remove a manastone to free up a slot, you won't get that manastone back. +4s are fairly plentiful early, but save your +12s for green and blue items you'll be hanging onto for a while. You'll start seeing two-socket items around level 10.


4. Unlike other MMORPGs, you won't find yourself fully kitted out early in the game as the result of completing class quests. Spend some of that hard earned cash on clothing upgrades as you can and enjoy dying less often.


5. Thankfully, Aion offers a nice amount of inventory space (i.e. your "cube") but should you find yourself running out of space, a cube vendor in the starting village will be glad to expand your cube. The first upgrade is now pretty cheap.


6. Resting (keystroke [comma] by default) helps you regain health and mana much more quickly. Try it and save bandages / potions for when you really need to reduce downtime.


7. Both starting areas have an end dungeon where players tend to converge. You're all after the same thing, so why not try a group on for size? It's as simple as a right click on another player and then clicking "invite," and you'll get through the dungeon content with far less risk.


8. Power shards are sort of like ammo for all weapon types (mage spellbooks included) and proc occasionally for increased stats. Like manastones, they're fairly common drops and cheap to buy, so keep a fresh stack attached to your weapon.


9. Using the /pathfinding [name] feature can save you some time and cut down on the wandering aimlessly portion of quest or NPC hunting. /pathfinding can be used to locate areas and NPCs, so have fun with it.


10. For those of you dual-booting the Windows 7 RC1 preview, Aion's anti-hack program has some pretty nasty qualms with the new OS. Install in Vista or XP if you're dual-booting to save some potential installation headaches (Disabling UAC doesn't work, in my experience).


11. If the default UI isn't to your taste, experiment with more standard layouts via the settings menu.


12. Have green items that you don't want or can't use? If you're long on cash and short on manastones, buy "extraction tools" from a General Goods vendor for 1,000 kinah (thanks for the clarification, Deluxion - also note that this is not a skill-based crafting item) to break down green weapons into special "enhancement" stones.


13. Despite the ominous warning you get when you seek to complete your ascension quest at level 9 or 10, you can speak to a teleporter to return to the starting area if you have quests to complete there. It's worth completing the ascension quest asap because of the new abilities you'll get.