Whistling While You Work (or Craft)
Crafting! Crafting! Crafting! That is how I spent my weekend. Rynala was out of town visiting her sister so I spent my time crafting in Aion. In the end, I still got over half of a level of experience from it.
Now raising your crafting is not hard. It just takes time and money. A LOT of time and a LOT of money. Now when I say that it takes a lot of money, that is relatively speaking. You can take any or all of your crafting skills to 399 without specialization. With specialization you can go to 450, but you can only specialize in two of the six professions. Getting your skill to 399 will let you craft items all the way to level 50. The items craft-able from 400-450 are your high end-game level items. It is incredibly expensive to gain a specialization so it is not something to be expected until your late 30s or early 40s.
This weekend, I took my Armorsmithing skill from 150 to 299 and my cooking skill from 20 to 230. This cost over a million kinah. I am estimating it will cost roughly another three million kinah to take each of those skills to 399.
In the grand scheme of things, four million kinah is not a lot of money. It is a lot of money for a level 28 character like myself, but 1000 gold is a lot of money for a level 30 character in WoW. The difference between raising your crafting in Aion and raising your crafting WoW is that you can raise your crafting in Aion without having to rely on the market or gathering skills.
In WoW, you have to either get a gathering profession to gather the materials or buy them off the auction house to get your skill-ups. In Aion, you can either craft items using gathered materials or you can do work orders. If at level 80 in WoW, you wanted to learn a new profession from 1 to 450 it would be obscenely expensive for even a level 80 character. It would cost thousands of gold. Millions of Kinah may sound like a lot, but it is really not in Aion.
Work orders are seemingly the most efficient way to level up your crafting. I have been over work orders before, but starting from your first skill point you can pick up the work orders, craft what they ask for and get rewarded. They provide the main materials for the crafted item, then you just need to buy the smaller reagents from the material goods vendor nearby. The amount of reagents and reagent prices get higher as you progress deeper into the skill, but still it is much more efficient than trying to craft hundreds and thousands of items. Each work order you turn in rewards you with a small amount of reagents or one of the unique recipes for the skill. Most of the times, the recipe rewards are high quality recipes that you cannot buy from the vendor, allowing you to craft really nice items. You also often start collecting multiple of the recipes from doing so many work orders most of the recipes can fetch a fine price on the auction house.
The only downside to crafting is that it takes time. Lots of time. I spent an obscene amount of time on crafting this weekend and I am nowhere near maxxed on those two professions. I was a bit behind on the podcasts I listened to and I was able to catch fully up. I listened to three episodes of the Bugle, four Gamers with Jobs Conference Calls, three episodes of Shut Up, We're Talking, as well as watch a handful of Netflix movies.
Raising crafting is a great thing for if you have two monitors, a TV for a book in the room. I know a lot of people cannot take the tedium, but for some reason I am very addicted to it. My favorite part is the experience gains. They are not as much as going out and farming monsters, but it is still a decent flow.