Fortresses and Artifacts Guide

Lets start with the artifacts, the tide turners of a battle, and this is true without a doubt that having these make numbers meaningless, make the powerful powerless, and have the capability to turn the weak into the strong.

A list of what artifacts do what can be found in the link below.
http://www.aiondatabase.com/artifactcastle/list

In the above link, names of artifacts, the area of effect that artifact affects, the effect itself, and the cooldown time. Along with that, the abilities that are bestowed upon a faction after a fortress has been taken over are listed as well. Note the table doesn’t include the cooldown time of the artifact after it is taken, which from what I’ve seen on most artifacts are 5-10 minutes.

There are 9 fortresses in total, three on the bottom layer of Reshanta (The abyss), five on the top layer, and one in the core.

Names and Descriptions:

Siel’s Eastern Fortress

The Siel’s fortresses are on a set of islands adjacent to each other known as Siel’s Wings, often making for a very intense battle if both factions control one each. Siel’s Eastern Fortress is the more difficult fortress to take of the two, as the boss is deep in the bottom of the fortress as opposed to it’s sibling fortress. The front door of Siel’s Eastern is a “T” like structure with a corridor that has pros and cons to attacking through it. The con is how restrictive the corridor is, if there are ranged attackers attacking a force moving through the corridor, they can have a field day with AoEs. The pro here is that there is a form of a hood over the actual door, so melee attackers beating on the door are protected by obstructed line of sight from enemy ranged attackers. There is also an alternate door on the north side with no corridor, but also no hood to cover melee attackers, attacking from this door means you have the choice of flight. There is yet a third door, known as the backdoor, or bottom, or asscrack of the fortress, this door has no actual fortress gate that needs to be broken down, but there are Hero rank mobs, roughly 6-8 between the entrence to the backdoor and the ramp leading to the bottom. The backdoor itself is located along the side of the continent itself, and can be found by flying between the two fortresses, landing on the small floating rock, and looking directly towards the fortress, and you will see it. The boss is located in the bottom room, the only way to reach him is by going down the ramp, which can be reached from any of the three doors.

Siel’s Western Fortress

This is the little brother to Siel’s Eastern, an easier fortress to take, but is more open to be attacked by the enemy faction. If you go through either the south or north door, which are similar in design, no obstruction or corridor, you will walk right through the doorway and run right into the boss, as he spawns on the top floor of this fortress, as opposed to the lower room. There is also a backdoor/bottom/asscrack to this fortress, and can be found the same way as shown above, but from my experience, the easiest way to get in is from one of the doors, because going through the backdoor in this forterss puts you at the bottom floor and you have to fight your entire way up to the top floor. Siel’s Western has a special vantage point located along the wall in a corner.

Sulfer Fortress

Sulfer is a pretty beastly fortress to take in comparison to either of the Siel’s, as this fortress is guarded with at least twice the amount of NPC power, as well as five artifacts that include it in their area of effect. On the top level of Sulfer there are regular guard mobs and guard towers all around the outside of the fortress wall. The front door, identifiable with the two trees that sit ontop of it, has a Hero rank golem-like beast as well as two level 40 guard towers guarding it. The alternate door is much easier to get through as it has less NPC power guarding it. There is a backdoor/bottom/asscrack that is similar to Siel’s, it is located underneath Sulfer on its directly north side, you will have to find the small hole that you have to fly up into. I discourage entering through the backdoor because of two floating platforms that have a number of snipers on it, next to the hole are sentry eyes, air mines, and inside the backdoor are Hero ranked mobs. On the top floor, after you pass through the gate, there is what looks to be a massive hole in the floor that leads straight to the boss room which allows you to skip the ramp completely. As an extra little note, you can cut off enemy reenforcements by killing the teleporter located on the top floor before moving into the boss room.

More to come…

Templar Cooking Items

The following are recommended Food and Drink items for Templars with cooking level and description next to each. I have placed a star (*) next to my personal favorite within each category.

Foods

• Starturtle Aether Steak (420) – Physical Attack increases by 10 and Maximum HP increase by 200 points, and Flight Time also increases by 10 seconds for 30 min.
• Starturtle Steak (395) – Physical Attack increases by 10 and Maximum HP increase by 200 points for 30 min.
• Calydon Meat Dumpling * (385) – Physical Crit increases by 50 and Accuracy increase by 50 points for 30 min.

Drinks

• Lunime Cocktail (385) – Natural Healing increases by 10 and Natural Mana Treatment increase by 15 points for 30 min.
• Cellatu Porridge * (365) – Natural Healing and Natural Mana Treatment increase by 12 and 18 points respectively for 30 min. There is a low chance of getting a stomach ache due to the poison of Cellatu. (If you’re going to run this be sure to have healing potions to remove the possible debuff.)

The benefits of cooking may not be well known to you now but these foods can give buffs valuable in both PvE and PvP scenarios.

Aion Officer Applications

We’re looking to add 3 officers.

What we’re looking for?

1) PvP coordinator to work w/ Siris
2) PvE coordinator to work w/ Hypnosis
3) Craft Master/Banker

What the roles entail?

Craft Master/Banker

• Oversee all Legion Craft Masters (LCM).
• Oversee Legion wide crafting projects (siege weapons, etc.)
• Handle legion warehouse requests coming from members.

PvE Coordinator

• Organize PvE events which can consist of questing, instances, etc.

PvP Coordinator

• Organize general PvP, Abyss PvP, and Rifting events.
• Coordinate with other legions for fortress raids, etc.

How to apply?

Send a PM to Kousei here on the forums outlining which position you’d like/why you feel you would make a good officer/why you feel you are qualified/etc. DO NOT add an application to the forums.

When to apply by?

We will be accepting applications until Friday Dec 4, 2009

Templar: Severe Blow Skills

There has been a lot of discussion about which one of the Severe Blow skills is “the best” for Templars to be using. I’m kind of disappointed in our Templar community with their responses so I decided to write this post. What was their response you ask? Blunting Severe Blow is the default response of the community. The problem I have with this is that they simply leave it at that. Blunting is a good skill but the other two are much better in certain situations. To get the most out of your Templar, you have to choose 1 of the 3 skills based on the current situation your Templar is facing.

The Three Skills

Let’s start by taking a look at each skill individually.

Blunting Severe Blow is an an Accuracy and Evasion debuff which can only be done by Templars. The skill reads “Deals 73~77 physical damage to the target and decreases its Accuracy by 200 and Evasion by 200 for 12 sec”.

Weakening Severe Blow is a Physical Defense debuff which doesn’t stack with Chanter debuff and can also be used by Gladiators. The skill reads “Inflicts 71~75 physical damage on the target, and decreases its Physical Def by 500 for 6 sec”.

Dazing Severe Blow is an Attack Speed debuff which doesn’t stack with Spirit Master or Chanter debuff. It has two versions and the speed debuff is said to be 20% for version I and 40% for version II. The skill reads “Deals 62~66 physical damage to the target. The target’s attack speed decreases for 12 sec.”. This skill also has the fastest animation of the three.

Situational Use

Without knowing what you’re fighting, you can see just from the above information that there are things to be taken into account before you choose which one of these skills to use. Do I have a Chanter, Spiritmaster, or Gladiator in party? If I have a Gladiator in party, does he/she actually use Weakening?

PvE Tanking

While tanking, I tend to lean towards Dazing to slow down the damage coming in which in turn gives my healer a break. Blunting can also mitigate some damage but there is a huge BUT that goes along with Blunting while tanking. Blunting increases your chances of Dodge or Parry. People quickly jump in here and say this is great! Not completely. Dodge and Parry come in play Block in terms of game mechanics. That means the more you Dodge or Parry the less you Block and the less your shield skills can be used. This includes Provoking Shield Counter which is one of the best Templar enmity building skills. After getting Dazing II, the competition between the two lessens even more in favor of Dazing.

Also, I tend to use Weakening once a mob is down to about 1/8-1/4 of their health if we only have 1 or 2 mobs aggro’d and the party has at least 2 other physical damagers (glad, sorc, sin).

PvE Greatsword

When using a greatsword, I lean towards Blunting. All the negatives of Blunting as a damage mitigation tool go away the second you swap to greatsword. Unless a mob is 2-3+ levels higher, I usually stick with Blunting. On higher mobs, I tend to use Dazing since Blunting is harder to get applied and there the chance Evade/Parry diminishes on higher mobs.

PvP

Here I tend to lean towards Blunting on melee and Weakening on casters. Every now and then I’ll throw Dazing on a melee class picking on our healers to lower the pressure.

Conclusion

I’m sure I could write for hours about all the different situations I would pull each one of these skills out but I think you get the picture. I’m not arguing that the way I’m using the 3 skills is the best. These were just some examples and I know that in time I will find more uses for each one of these skills. The point of this post is to get my fellow Templars to realize that all 3 of these skills can shine if you switch depending on the situation you’re playing within.

Aion Performance Tweaks

Here are some tips, tricks, and tweaks found by Marked Souls members on other forums, through experimentation, etc. Enjoy!

Cut Your Ping In Half

I tried this fix and I went from an average 130ms to never above 30ms all night.

Think this only applies to vista/7 users. http://jasdemi.com/aion/waysto-reduce-your-aion-ping/

Fixed FPS Option

ok, so for the past 7months in Caion and now NaAion i have been running with lowest possible graphics and still lag like a nyerk. I also had the fixed fps option turned off. Then, by some cahnce I decided to see how game would look with full graphics and said why not turn this little option on and see what happens. little did I know that it would make the difference between lag and no lag/rubberbanding. I can also play with full graphics now. WTF…Everybody turn on fixed FPS it will make your day.

it keeps u at a certain fps by minimizing graphix output for certain images. so, unless can handle loading all frames data extremely fast, you should have it on. I have a ****** graphix card so i have to have on.

Tips and Tricks To Prevent Crashing

I along with many others have problems with crashing in game during siege.

There are a couple problems that usually cause this:

x64 Operating Systems
.dll crash (cry engine problem, it will tell you this explicitly in the error if this is your problem)

For the x64 type crashes, the game usually just freezes entirely. You will have to use task manager more than likely to kill Aion when this happens. Often times, it will leave aion.bin open in your active processes as well, which you have to kill manually. The best way to keep this from happening is to turn all graphics settings to low, bloom effect and glow effect off, and anti-aliasing off (x0). Then shut down Aion and do a fresh restart on your computer. This minimizes any memory leaks from using up excess RAM (the primary reason x64 makes Aion crash is overuse of memory). After the siege you can turn your setting back up and restart Aion. Doing this has made me go from crashing about every 5 minutes to maybe once a night max.

The cry engine crash has only been fixed one way that I have found. Depending on your version of windows and sound car etc, you need to turn your sound accelerations down and/or off. Typically in most windows OS’s you can hit Start->Run and type dxdiag. Go to the sound tab and turn the slider for acceleration all the way off. If you use an integrated sound card (it’s part of your motherboard), you may have to do this in the Sound category in your Control Panel in Windows. More on this later.

Regardless of both of these fixes, push Shift-F12 when you start PVP. This makes all characters disappear off your screen except those in your party. If you disconnect or crash, you will have to push it again, as it is not default.