Disclaimer:
This post is purely positive, and a guide on how to have fun playing a non-meta class based on thousands of hours of my own MMO experience, and a useful mindset to adopt when doing so.
If you’re genuinely struggling playing a less popular class, feel on the verge of quitting, or are unhappy with Pugging in Aion 2, this is for you. This post will give you the knowledge, mindset and TODOs to deal with your situation.
My goal is to help some of you out there who are struggling.
I did not use AI to write this, I wrote it myself because I am passionate about this.
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Intro and credentials
I am 2,477 ilvl, 117k and play Assassin. I’ve been playing since Early access.
My character:
https://aion2.plaync.com/en-us/characters/2304/kdPX-_ocYSqMloiCy7IXZx_mtBbpaeo6pU3xDY5gZc8%3D?region=eu
Plug of my character customisation if you like it:
https://aion2.plaync.com/en-us/styleshop/all?viewType=detail&view=6ac3e0f802862d665fca1a0a&viewRegion=eu
I’ve got to my level through playing completely on my own, and have pugged everything in the game so far.
Playing Assassin, I’ve seen it all in the group finder, and I’ve gone through hundreds of groups playing at all levels.
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Obligatory P2W note for comments. Skip to the next section if you don’t care about P2W.
Here’s the real life money I’ve spent on Aion 2 so far:
- I have bought the founders pack (playing since Early access, includes 1 month sub) (£20)
- Both the battle passes (3000 Kuna)
- About 15 levels on the 2nd battle pass (to max it out and get odyle energy repeatedly) (1000 Kuna cost).
- beginners pack (for the bubble gum skin + 50 res stones). (£15)
Total: £75. This is about €88 or $99 USD.
I would have paid around this amount to play a new MMO launch / AAA title. For context, new WoW expansions I’ve played cost about £45 pounds to play, with about £11 going for the sub.
A sub is all you need to eventually get to where I am at. There’s plenty of ways to set up your account to play free forever (except the sub), which takes a lot of effort, but it can be done.
This involves setting up alts, and doing crafting (look up this video from Grobs for the basics of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ry3n_wKO6PE)
If you’re happy sprinkling on a little extra to buy a battle pass, that will make the process faster, but you can literally buy the battle passes with gold you’ve acquired with your alt army and be totally fine as well.
All P2W in this game is sponsored by someone playing the actual game. E.g. someone has to grind the gold to sell whales, and someone has to drop the wings from dungeons to sell to whales (that they break down for enhance stones).
There is a symbiosis between whales <-> players playing mostly F2P with the sub. The P2W in this game isn’t even that good in terms of money to power gained. You get more than enough money in the game to sustain yourself without ever needing to swipe.
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(1) Why is my class not invited to groups
Let’s assume:
- All groups will at least include 1 tank (to hold aggro), and 1 healer (to heal chip damage).
- These classes are less common than dps classes (which is the case in Aion 2).
Then let’s say some classes perform better than others on average in a pug group.
This could be because, for an average dps player in Aion 2:
- Their class is ranged rather than being melee
- Their class is easier to play than another class
- Their class does a lot of dps vs. other classes balance wise
When we take both these facts into account
(1) with a general shortage of tanks and healers, and,
(2) that some dps classes perform better in pugs
This leads to the root of the issue: Your class is much less in demand.
(2) What’s the easiest way to increase my demand, so I can play the game?
The simplest way to do so is to make your own group. This is something you can do right now, today, without much work.
Making a group takes time, you need to select the right candidates, and also puts you in a position of leadership. These are generally things players don’t want to do.
They’d rather farm some materials while you put in the effort to form a group, or afk on their phones while waiting.
There’s also the fact that high demand players would much rather enter a pre-made group with 3 or 4 players already in there ready to go. For example as a dps, you’ve got a tank in your group, you’ve got some strong dps players (good combat scores), and this makes it very appealing for a cleric to enter your group.
You’ve just saved this cleric some time, and effort, and so they’ll play with you.
(3) More
Eventually when the game settles down a bit (everyone isn’t still very new, learning to play their classes, and learning mechanics), it will all just come down to one thing.
Combat Score.
You can hear this from many players in Korea, or those who played in the Taiwan servers. These players have been playing for upwards of 10 months now since launch.
When making groups, the only thing you really need is a good combat score. Whatever this may be set to.
The combat score you have, is a rough estimation of how much power your character has gained. This includes item level, but is definitely not limited to just that. There’s many, many other axes to improve a player's combat power.
Right now because we’re less in demand on classes like Assassin, you’re going to need to have an outstanding resume to get into the group. This means you need your combat score to be better.
Think of it this way.
Assassin’s = degree from mediocre University, so to get into a great job, e.g. Finance banking forex trading, we’re going to need to do a lot of extra-curriculars.
In the long run, players who work on their combat score will generally be better off than those who’re purely thinking about item level. This is because a lot, or most of the combat score is horizontal content, rather than being vertical, and this is something everyone will have to do, regardless of seasonal raids or dungeons.
These are horizontals you can work on today, which will increase your combat power, hence increase your overall strength. This list will point you to these systems, go research them in your own time:
- Genus insight board
- Abyss shop: Stigma points
- Nightmare shop: Stigma points, Daevanion Crystal, statues
- Collecting feathers for Skill points
- Killing world bosses for portraits (for Pantheon)
- Pet levels (from grinding pets, ascension trial, etc)
- Doing achievements (e.g. defeat Draupnir x10 times to receive a golden statue for your pantheon board).
- Collecting better titles
- Collecting wings
- Collecting skins
In my experience the single biggest increase in combat power will come from Stigma shards.
Additionally there are free ways of acquiring combat score:
- Using your Stigma points effectively (e.g. two level 10 skills gives much more than, one level 5 and level 12.
- Using your skill points correctly (to reach level 12, 16, 20 breakpoints). Excess points past these breakpoints sometimes have much higher value when put into passives for increasing your combat score than active skills.
- Using your daevanion board points effectively (follow a meta guide).
Then there are ways of increasing your actual dps in Aion 2 by playing better (these will not increase your combat score). This will increase the likelihood of players wanting to requeue the dungeon with you afterwards (this is because you’re performing at the same level, or much above other classes).
- Using the meta highest dps skills and stigma points
- Setup your macro correctly to use the above
- Animation cancelling macro with auto attacks.
There’s 3 levels to animation cancelling:
- Hold left click to animation cancel macro
- Spam left click to animation cancel macro faster (this is tedious and will result in RSI, better is below).
- Setup a mouse macro to spam auto attack, and macro on holding down right mouse button (on something like Logitech G-Hub, XifanGG has a great section on this in his guide on Assassin, timestamped at: https://youtu.be/OuL0b9RPJuY?si=XG74clNIwOi-F-bq&t=472, make sure you set up a profile for Aion 2 to avoid changing your right click throughout your system).
I’d suggest going to the training dummy in your major city (e.g. safe haven in Asmo), and try out the above suggestions for a ~1 minute target dummy parse to see if your dps increases, and by how much.
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Outro
The point of playing a MMO is that I have fun, and what class I find fun will be based on my personal preferences. It’s just a fact that if you’re wanting to play less meta classes, you will end up facing the issues described in this post.
The important thing to remember is that this game is fun because of the journey. If you were given a perfect character, it’s most likely you’d quit quite soon after as there’d be no sense of progression left in the game. One of Aion 2’s biggest strengths as a game is the progression system. It keeps you hooked and wanting to play more.
Nearly everything you do is towards the be-all and end-all goal of number go up. This is fun, and as a less meta-class, getting is a greater challenge, but also very rewarding.
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TL;DR: Get good.