Aion Begins!

Aion release is actually tomorrow... but for people who pre-ordered it, you were able to download the beta, provided that you were given a cd-key either from the store you pre-ordered from, or from steam. If you had it installed and all, you could start yesterday... which is the "head start" period before release. I like this idea, not only because it allowed me to start playing early... but it meant that the newbie areas won't be so congested... and a large pack of people would have been able to move on to the higher level areas.

The release was at 5am on Monday morning... I was not keen enough to wake up that early to start playing... although 1 of my friends did, and another friend took the entire week off =P but I had made a couple of characters to reserve names that I wanted to keep for later.

So I got home and began leveling my priest, which I plan to convert to a chanter later on. A chanter is pretty much a support class from what I heard, with combat buffs that you cast on your group members, and also provides off-healing (clerics are the main healers). This will be different to the classes I normally played in WoW... but I liked the sound of chanter because the role sounded more unique. In WoW, the buffs were all pre-combat kind of stuff.

I roamed around the newbie area, completing the stuff I already knew from beta... which helped a lot and saved me a fair bit of time. My friend who took a week off was already lvl 15 by the time I logged on.... and he started a legion (equivalent of a WoW guild) named "FML", which is a very emo name... but the reasoning was because 1 of our other friends would only come play wow if our legion name was FML, and if someone reserved FML for his character name (bit of an emo guy =P).

There was a quest that I found highly amusing... a questgiver wants you to find this pig that went missing... and when you find it, hes roasting on a spit, lol! My friend who was on vent with me at the time told me I was slack for laughing =(

Anyway I got to level 8 before I logged off for the night... my other friends got to lvl 16 and lvl 11 respectively by then... though they're probably even higher now. I took a couple of screenshots of my character that you can see below. I had deliberately made my character short, but it turned out to be much shorter than I had originally intended... but at least maybe it will make my character hard to see in pvp =P will post more screenshots when I get better looking armour and stuff... since I'm wearing mostly just the base gear atm.