Early October Update
I have been quite busy as of lately and as such, my blog has unfortunately been collecting a little dust. Class and work have been busy, I have been playing some Aion, and as of last week I totaled my car and am in the process of buying a new one.
Rynala and I are currently level 26 in Aion. We have been playing quite a bit. I have really been enjoying the game, but at this point I think she is even more in love with the game than I am. We are leveling at what I consider a decent pace. It is nowhere near as fast as WoW but it is not mind numbingly slow (though I know some others would disagree). A lot of the people in the guild are in their 30s now, but I do not feel far behind as there are multitudes of people at every level. Nothing beats being around at the start of a new game. Sure, there may be server crashes within the start of a new game and occasionally some bugs, but the feeling of being on that frontier is awesome.
Crafting in this game is completely addicting and yet can be so utterly infuriating. I do not know why I love it so much when the crafting system is not really unique in any way. I am currently up to 205 armorsmithing and that is the only crafting skill I really have been working on. Even now, I am constantly broke from crafting so there is no way I could be working on maximizing two professions at this time.
One of the nice things about crafting (with armorsmithing at least) is 99% of the gear is actually useful and worth making. There are occasional random recipes that take materials from specific mobs, but the majority of the standard recipes are great for actual use. Every five levels, you can make two new sets of plate and chain. One set is the white set that can crit and make a green (high quality) set. The other set is a green quality set (with stats slightly higher than the crit-green set), that can crit and make a blue set (VERY high quality). It is unlikely you will be able to afford constantly making yourself a crit-blue set every five levels, but there is no reason you should not be able to make yourself a full crit-green set. The materials for the crit-blue set are really out of the question. But, there is an upside to this. Once you reach the level cap and have excess money, you should be able to afford making full blue sets for your alts every five levels. This will help to improve their leveling by a decent bit.
Rynala and I had our first foray into the Abyss this weekend. We only looks around and did a couple simple quests. Not much to do in there at level 25 as you cannot really contribute much to keep sieges. Either way, I remain excited to get higher in level. I hope to hit around level 30 by the end of this weekend. I am in no major rush to get to level cap, but I am anxious and excited for it.