Aion Professions Guide to Crafting and Gathering

Leveling a crafting profession in Aion offers a great deal of fun, plus an opportunity to use up those gathered items and carefully hoarded drops. Crafting also gains you experience points. The professions available in the closed beta version include Alchemy, Cooking, Sewing, Weaponcrafting, Armorcrafting, and Handicrafting.

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You should be able to get 2-4 levels from each repeatable work order quest, and while the end results are turned in with the quest, you won't have to gather a number of expensive materials on your own. For those who have spare materials to burn, many of the craftable items sell very well to other players both in personal stores and on the auction house.

The crafting mechanism in Aion is not without fault. Instead of having recipes of a certain difficulty level that are guaranteed to give you a skill point, each successful non-gray crafting attempt adds a bit of skill. When this invisible skill meter fills up, you are awarded a point for that particular skill. This can be unsatisfying and could have used a visual indicator of progress.

In contrast, crafting, gathering, and extracting success seems to depend on a series of 2-step rolls. Roll #1 is for pass / fail, roll #2 decides how much. If the 'pass' meter fills up before the 'fail' meter, you successfully craft. Players spend far too much time breathlessly cheering on the 'pass' meter until the fate of the attempt has been decided. While the transparency of the system was initially fun to watch, it quickly becomes tiresome and you may find yourself tabbing out during crafting sessions to check your Twitter feed. Developers should be very wary any system that does not completely suck the player in and provide a sense of immersion. Boredom is death to MMOs.

There is also a small chance of not succeeding with your crafting attempt. This can lead to waste of materials and player frustration, especially when the mats you just spent a great deal of kinah on disappear in a flash of bubbling failure. Additionally, the process moves rather slowly, and when crafting items in bulk your character may be spending a great deal of time at the Artisan section in your faction's city. There has been no sign of crafting areas outside of the major city for each faction, at least up to level 20. And while the bank is very close to the crafting area in Pandemonium, the Elyos are forced to drag their items quite a way from the warehouse in Sanctum. Your inventory, or cube space, is at a premium, and while you can purchase additional cube and warehouse slots, it gets expensive rather quickly. Making upgraded inventory space a priority is probably your best strategy if you intend to take one or more crafting professions.