Saturday was a fun, but very expensive day. We ran Ice Claw Village, Sky Temple and Fire Temple. For hours! Due to various wipes (Ice Claw seems to be famous for other groups kiting mobs through people, trying to make them wipe, and as for the rest? To be honest, sometimes I just fuck up) I had an xp restoration bill of over 120k. At one point, I had a grand total of 2 kinah (!!!) to my name. Since then I’ve managed to make some cash back, and I even managed to pay for the next level of my gathering skill, which made me very happy. Now I’m trying to save for my level 34 training.
As much as I hate and loathe goldsellers, the lure of buying kinah occasionally sings a siren song of better gear and profession levelling. I have a warehouse full of armorsmithing mats, and no way to level the profession. Templars are very gear-dependent, and I am still carrying the Big Ladle of Whoopass quest-reward mace, amongst other substandard gear. I resist temptation, not wanting to get banned (hey, I totally admit to having somewhat flexible morals and am entirely ok with hating goldsellers and still wishing I could buy kinah safely). Because I know I would…I just have that kind of luck. Other people play Indy 500 on the freeways, but if I don’t come to a full stop at a stop sign, a cop will immediately jump out from behind a bush to give me a ticket. I just have that kind of luck. So no easy kinah for me, even though there are shops advertising it in front of the bank, and bots outnumber players in Beluslan.
I’m really enjoying tanking. I’m not saying that I’m especially good at it, mind you – but I try, and I have fun. One of the problems that I have is having absolutely NO sense of direction, either in real life or in game. It’s almost a disability; it’s something that I was born without. Spin me around twice, and I’ll be lost, I won’t remember which way I was travelling. So that makes it a bit difficult to lead groups through the maze of an instance, when you haven’t the faintest idea where you are or where you should go next. I’m trying to get runs done faster, but it conflicts with my natural caution. I can’t express how miserable I feel for bad pulls, especially in a game where a death has real adverse consequences and a substantial cost. As I level, I’m hoping that taunts get more effective – once a healer has grabbed a solid amount of aggro, it’s quite difficult to peel mobs off them. And sometimes when you’ve used everything you have, someone gets aggro on a boss, and for too many seconds there’s nothing to use to grab that aggro back – you just watch that skill count down until it can be used again, hoping whoever it is can survive until you do.
Encounters in Aion (so far) haven’t been technical fights at all in the Warcraft sense. Perhaps the higher level instances are, but so far they’ve been extremely simple fights. I rather like the challenge of technical fights (the famous Heigan Dance, for instance), but I do like how casual “raiding” in Aion has been so far. I do think that it would ruin the game for me if there was proper endgame raiding. As it is, we can run Fire Temple a few nights, do some questing, do some pvp, and look forward to the time when we’re a bit higher level, and have more legion members, so we can start fortress raiding. It’s the perfect combination, at least for me.