The grind from 20-30 definitely took a bit longer, but it wasn’t too bad. You just had to be smart about where to grind/level. If you are being ganked in the Abyss while trying to PvE grind out levels and points, it doesn’t make sense to keep going back. Although the Abyss does reward higher experience, higher DP gain, and Abyss Points which becomes an incentive for players to travel out there. Coin and Campaign quests are usually worth doing since they reward items and/or good experience.

So now with a level 30 character, you will automatically receive a quest for your Daevination gear. You will have to buy a “Holy Item” from a vendor for about 98,000 Kinah and turn it in for a nice blue quality item. Once you receive the item, you will notice that it is part of a 5 piece set and has bonuses depending on how many pieces are equipped. The catch is, each character can only do this quest once, so you must have 5 alts at level 30 if you want your main toon to have all 5 pieces. This is usually not worth it but it does reward those that choose to re-roll. You can do a quest to have the item transferred to another one of your characters and it will even change the armor class. Now if somewhere in the future you were ever to obtain all 5 pieces, you can continue the questline and turn the 5 pieces in for a Daevination Weapon for your class.

Level 30 also allows you to remodel items to look like other ones. Be warned though, the item you are taking the skin from will be destroyed. Since we were disappointed in what our crafted Twisp/Fess set looked like, we remodeled them. While exploring our major city, we came across a vendor that sells vanity items such as X-mas outfits. So we picked out a 5 piece set that we like the skin of and remodeled all our gear while destroying the vanity items in the process. Now if you want to reverse the effect of the remodeling, you will have to buy an item from a vendor for around 30,000 Kinah to do it.

At this level you also can equip the level 30 Collector’s Edition wings or the green quality ones from the vendor for around 950,000 Kinah. This will add 30-40 seconds to your flight time which is a huge deal when you are collecting Aether and generally reducing the number of stops to your destinations. If you are holding off on collecting Aether, we recommend waiting till you get these wings to make the process of leveling it less painful.

While leveling up gather skill, you definitely have to spend some time on it. Even if you pick up everything you see, you will still have to go back and actively level it. It isn’t so bad if you keep leveling your character and gathering separate. You can just go back and collect from nodes that are bunched up together while doing something else like watching TV or something. It became important for us to do this separately because taking advantage of the 10 minute DP pet buff speeds up leveling considerably. For other classes you could also try a combination of the two and gather when you are running low on mana/health and just want to regen passively.

As far as currency, we have 1.2 million Kinah and have expanded our cube 6 times and warehouse 5 times. The 5th cube expansion is done through a level 29 quest in your major city and is free. The 6th upgrade is located in the Abyss on and island in the middle of nowhere.

So I decided to play a Spiritmaster when Aion went live. They are considered one of the best farming/grinding classes in the game. I had even tried one out on the beta and it felt like leveling was so much easier than the other classes. So for the purpose of an Econ blog, what better class to play than the farmbot machine that is the Spiritmaster! At this time, my SM is level 20.

Hopefully by now you have leveled at least to level 10 since it is pretty straight forward on what to do there. One tip though, once you hit level 9, you will be given the Ascension quest in your campaign log. Start doing this right away since the final part gives you a full bar of XP almost right till level 10. The next step takes you into your respective major city’s and you will hit level 10 when you turn it in. This is also when you receive your wings and also don’t forget to pick up your new spells! Now port back to the starting areas to finish up the left over quests for some easy XP. You may be tempted to get started in the new questing hub but in Aion you may have to do a bit of grinding in between quests and levels. So every bit of XP counts if you want to reduce the amount of farming and focus on quests more.

At level 20, all classes will receive a quest to unlock the ability to use Stigmas. The quest was easy to do and involved mostly going back to the starting areas and talking to a few people. You will get a one of your Stigmas through this quest and your other level 20 ones are either purchased from a vendor for a very high price or another player. Luckily they are pretty common so you may find some on the Trade Broker. So now with my 2 new Stigmas, we headed off to the next major questing hub. In beta we remembered we had to be level 20 just to pick up the quests over there, so we made sure we hit this level before heading over. An easy quest to grind out is the repeatable coin quests that requires you to kill some mobs and turn them in for these coins. The quest can be repeated 100 times and you can trade the coins in for green quality items. We chose to save up 4 coins before trading them in. The item that it gave was a level 16 green quality Orb.

For those that play a SM, there are two skill book drops you may want to pick up. One is the summon for the Wind Spirit and the other is for the summon Water Spirit. They are dirt cheap on the Trade Broker if you can’t get one to drop for you. The Wind Spirit summon requires level 16 and is more suited for PvP and the Water Spirit summon requires level 19 and is geared towards ranged DPS for PvE in groups.

At this time we have over 100,000 Kinah. This was from selling white/green quality gear on the Trade Broker as well as picking up everything we came across. We did however saved all crafting materials we came across. Our cube was expanded 3 times and warehouse 2 times. Since leveling goes by fairly quick at the lower levels, we decided not to purchase any gear, manastones, or enchantments to save money. Tune in next time as we provide you with a update at level 25.