My WAR account expired today! That's good news, by the way. I logged in a handful of times in the weekend, but each time, I only got as far as buffing myself and checking my friends list. I had no motivation whatsoever to do anything else. The last time I logged in, I saw that Order was pushing all 3 zones and seiging a Fortress. I winced and made a face as if I had drank rotten milk and logged off... and logged into Aion!

I got to level 10 after some nasty PVE. Aion's PVE isn't bad by usual standards. I just dislike PVE; always have, always will. I threw in the towel a couple of times when I had to do some stupid travel quests that made me run all over the place and back again for 30 minutes.  This would be equivalent to what WAR calls "epic quests" (or what I like to call "epic travel quests"). I don't know why game designers think it's "fun", or "epic" to have quests that make you run back and forth for more than a few minutes.

I recorded some videos from the weekend. I don't have many videos of the PVE action. Instead, I have more of duels and what seems to be an Arena. Flight does add another interesting dimension to the game, and I'd say that if you are not deft in managing your flight abilities, you will definitely be at a disadvantage.

Getting a feel for Spiritmaster mechanics on some NPCs:



Spiritmaster vs melee (Assassin, Warrior). There's a mismatch between caster CCs and melee counter-CCs at the this level. Things should sort themselves out at endgame:




Spiritmaster vs RDPS (Sorcerer, Spiritmaster). There aren't any anti-caster CCs at the moment. Only thing at this level are damage chance-to-interrupts and spell chain pushbacks (stuns). Because of this, it's pretty much like a wild west gunfight at this level --- whoever gets the interrupt first wins. The 2nd video is a little more interesting. In it, I fight a Spiritmaster and I try to do some kiting to disrupt the stun/damage sequences:




Spiritmaster vs Priest. It's a "max DPS and heal interrupt" game. Feels like DPS is greater than HPS at this level from the fights in the videos. Although, Klausen (from Phoenix Throne) destroyed me on his Cleric earlier by outhealing my damage and sneaking in some damage between heals. I didn't have fraps running at that time though:



Arena. We found out about the existence of the Arena minutes before we had to go to bed and rallied a group to go up against a team that had been kicking ass there. We held them off for a short while, but eventually got overwhelmed by their number of healers:



Bonus vid - Tooka (Lylia) kicking butt on her Chanter:



Combat is more involved and engaging than WAR even at this level. But that's the advantage of a combat system where classes are ultimately balanced with each other. Systems balanced for group combat have to dumb down each class so as not to give too many tools to each class. I think this is where WAR fails hard twice. First, by having classes balanced at a group level, paper classes will always be at a disadvantage to counter scissor classes, and have to rely on help from rock classes. This means that when group synergy is not just perfect, players die fast and are not able to do anything about it. Second, WAR has CCs that have no counter (stuns, long disables). Focused fire is enough to give serious problems in any combat system. But when you add the two characteristics of the WAR combat system mentioned above, combat becomes extremely cheesy with the one-two I-WIN combos. I believe it is possible to have a good combat system balanced for group PVP, but just not the way WAR does it.