Aion's Assault on Balaurea releases today with new trailer

I went back during the welcome back weekend they had... I felt the grind right away as if I had just been playing the game the day before.. i have not played since release.

Such a good looking game and i like the systems in place, but it just can't hold my attention.

So i played during release and then i played 3 weeks ago.. felt no difference.

Robert,

If you want to totally avoid as much PvP as possible you can level using a combination of quests, grinding monsters, crafting and instances. Locations listed as Asmodian / Elyos below. This also assumes you do lots of gathering, both ground items and the boring aerial aether gathering, all of which provides XP and things you can sell.

You can easily hit level 25 by just playing through the starter area and then the Altgard / Verteron areas (all non-PvP), including the new solo instance Haramel which opens up for levels 18 to 22. At level 25 you can go to the Abyss (staying in the main fortress, so no PvP), do the quests there to get access to Nochsana Training Camp (group instance for levels 25 to 28, no PvP). Doing NTC and the low level PvE only areas of Brusthonin / Theobomos should get you to level 30 or 31 with little problem, maybe 32 with the new higher XP rates they have apparently added with 2.0.

The gap between 31/32 to 37 (and another solo instance at 37) is a bit tricky. If you don't mind getting ganked occasionally you can carefully grind mobs and do quests around the fortresses in Beluslan / Heiron. I actually have some fun with PvP there as they are often fairly busy and sometimes there will be small group vs group fights. If you learn where the guard patrols are you can even venture a short distance away from the forts, by staying right near them and killing the mobs around them. You can hit 34 doing that.

You can also craft all 6 professions up to level 399 using work orders. This provides large amounts of XP, costs a bunch and is pretty darn boring. But very safe and you can do something else at the same time, like reading Massively.com or watching TV. Hopefully you've saved as much kinah (gold) as possible while you leveled to help pay for this. You'll also get extra designs and recipes you can sell from doing the work orders.

This should get you to level 37 and then you can do the solo instance Kromede's Trial (level 37 to 44). It is easy to safely get to on the Elyos side, the Asmodian (as usual) is a bit harder to reach and you will have to cross a smallish section of the map where enemy players can get you. That gets you to 45 and you can go back to the high level areas of the PvE only Brusthonin / Theobomos to reach 50. After that, I have no idea. :)

Doing that you will miss out on quite a bit of the quests and explorable areas, but you can always backtrack a good part of that once you are higher level, but then you'll only get quest XP and nothing for killing mobs or in the way of drops. With the new rifting limits and home ground bonuses, PvP in the leveling up areas hopefully won't be subject to as much ganking, and if you have players around you, PvP isn't such a big deal. You can join in or run away most of time as long as you aren't ambushed by hiding rangers or assassins.

Hope that helps answer your question.

Even if I don't end up playing Aion again, I just want to give props to Wade for a really helpful and informative posts. Cheers

And yet, "holy crap it's beautiful" doesn't even begin to explain how gorgeous the environments are. The monsters, the music, the landscapes, towns, heck if you're into it even the quest text is very well done.

I was part of the mass exodus before 1.9 came, mostly because of how terribly nerfed the assassin class was going to be. I came back to check out the expansion, and I'm thoroughly impressed. My class got buffs where needed and... well damn. BRB, logging in to spend some more time in Inggison.