There is now more couter-measures in place to stop gold spammers, but this won’t completely eliminate them.

1.5.0.11 Client Update

• All chat channels now have a level 10 restriction, both to join and participate
• Whispering now has a level 10 restriction,
  • Players can receive whispers but cannot respond below level 10
• Players cannot send in game mail until level 10
  • Players under 10 can still receive in game mail
• Players cannot search for ’who’ in game until level 10
• Players are now limited at the amount of in game mail you can send per hour
  • If players exceed this limit, they will not be able to send mail. There is currently no message saying players have exceeded your limit
  • Legion Abyss ranks have been fixed and will now display properly

Upon searching through AionOnline’s PowerWiki for some general information on the the game, we came along some interesting facts that affect crafting and thus Kinah income. That is, having high Divine Points (DP) will affect things like your chance to critically hit or heal as well as your chance of receiving procs from critting (Noble prefix). Here is the exact excerpt from the Wiki.

• Divine Points begin to accumulate after a player has reached level 10 and become a Daeva. Players earn divine points for each creature killed and can fill the DP bar three times.
• Once you have earned 2000 DP, you can use a Divine Skill. The skill is different for each class.
• The higher your DP, the better your chance of either critically healing or critically hitting your intended target. Divine Points can also help improve your chance of creating a “Noble” variant of an item while crafting. While there is always an element of chance in the creation of Noble items, think of your DP as helping you stack the deck subtly in your favor.
• All accumulated DP is lost upon the player’s death.

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.

For our crafting skill, we took up Tailoring and leveled up to about 215. We crafted the level 28 Worth Durable Twisp (Worthy Durable Fess for Elyos) gear set minus the chest piece since you receive a piece of Daevination gear at 30. The set is great for Spiritmasters since they have +HP and 2 sockets per piece which you could manastone for more HP. The general consensus we came across was to stack HP especially since Magic Boost does not scale with our pet and energy balls. So our SM is sitting at a comfortable ~3300 HP at level 30. Being able to craft your own gear is nice, but be prepared to spend lots of Kinah and time on it. It seems that as you level your character higher and higher, the more Kinah you will obtain. So in our experience it is better to do a lot of leveling just for the Kinah and collecting the different crafting materials before taking on a profession. While crafting our level 28 set at skill level 160-199, we noticed that the materials used also require Aether/Gathering at similar levels. Unless you want to spend the cash at the trade broker buying materials, it may be wise to level gathering to a similar level as your crafting skill. All this is assuming that you want to craft items for profit rather than skill ups, which are usually done with Work Orders. The advantages for work orders are that they reward crafting materials and recipes after each turn in. Some of these green recipes can proc/crit blue quality items. This is how you make all that Kinah spent on leveling a crafting skill back. Procced blues can sell for a good amount especially while the majority of the population are still leveling.

One thing to mention is that you should consider crafting gear that you simply have the materials for. Even though we were focused on crafting cloth gear, Tailoring also has the ability to make leather gear. Since not all the materials overlap between the two, you can burn through all those leather materials sitting in your bank for gear. Over the course of crafting recipes that can proc blues, we only made it happen about 4-5 times. Attempts probably totalled about 40-50 times. We chose to buy some of the rare materials like Worthy Greater Armor Flux, High-Grade Gold Ore, and High-Grade Aether Crystal on the trade broker for the purpose of trying to proc the blues. This was in addition with all the materials we picked up while leveling and gathering. The good news is that we recouped all crafting expenses this way when the blue items sold. Just remember that trying to proc a blue takes a lot of attempts, so you have to do it on a large scale if you want results. We believe that the failure rates are under 2% once you are 10 skill points above your current recipe level. Just make sure to minimize your failure rates in general by crafting recipes that are about 20-30 skill levels lower than what you are at, also known as a light yellow colored recipe in your crafting interface.

Many people are wondering where they can expand their cube a 6th time, which is also known as the level 5 expansion. They don’t count the free one you receive as a level. The cube expander NPC at Pandaemonium/Sanctum will only go as high as level 4. So to make things simple, we will show you with pictures. Just make sure you have some flight potions on you and having the level 30 wings will help you make it out here. This is for Asmodians, please feel free to comment if you know where to go as Elyos. You will need to port to the Upper Abyss first.

• Fly to the island closest to the green X.

• Then fly straight out to the green X and start flying upwards as you get close.

• Talk to the Shugo inside the hut to buy your level 5 cube expansion.

You should now have a total of 81 cubes for your personal inventory.

Related Article: Expanding your Cube/Warehouse Space

There is a highly informative guide on the cost of leveling crafting we came across on the AionSource Forums. It estimates the cost of leveling a crafting skill from 1-399 using work orders, which is supposed to be the most inexpensive way. Here are some highlights of the guide:

• Each Crafing profession costs an estimated 2,000,000 (2 Million) Kinah to level up to 399
• Leveling all 6 Crafts to 399 will cost an estimated 13-14 Million Kinah
• 1-99 Lesser Skill Cost: ~3500 Kinah
• 100=199 Regular Skill Cost: ~18,000
• 200-299 Greater Skill Cost: ~120,000
• 300-399 Expert Skill Cost: ~480,000

AionSource.com brings us some exciting changes and additions, especially for Spiritmasters! There are also some additions to the Trade Broker as well.

Gathering

• During aether extraction there will be a low chance to be inflicted with ‘Aether Venom’. Unless removed, this effect will not allow the character to extract any materials for a certain period of time.
• Aether Venom can only be neutralized with the ‘Word of Purification’
• “‘Word of Purication’ can be received once completing a captcha phrase
• You have up to 3 attempts to complete the captcha phrase. If the captcha is incorrect 3 times, then the character will not be able to extract Aether or regular materials for a certain period of time.
• The ‘/ExtractStatus’ command can be used to check whether your character is able or unable to extract materials.
• Characters can still move or do other actions with the Aether Venom debuff. Players are advised to move to a safe location before completing the captcha.

Kinah

• Numbered buttons now appear on the side when using the Qina/item quantity window. Clickable buttons for those too lazy to type
• Text color changes depending on the amount

Trade Broker

• Use of the auction window has been made more convenient in the item list tab, 2 drop down options added. ‘Include in search’ and ‘Exact match’.
• The ‘Include in search’ option will search for all items that include the text provided in the input box. The ‘Exact match’ option only looks for items with exactly the same name as the item being searched for.
• Right clicking or alt+left clicking an item in your bag while the auction window is open will automatically fill the search input box with the item’s name.
• Right clicking an item(in your bag) in the registration tab will register it in the auction house.

Inventory

• Cubes can now be individually auto-arranged when you have multiple cubes.
• Right click the Cube name to use the ‘change tab name’ and ‘cube auto arrange’ options.

Reagents

• Amount of stigma shards required for equipping stigmas reduced

For a full list of changes go to AionSource.com

In Aion, the trade broker is severely limiting compared to a MMO like WoW in the sense that you can only have 10 auctions posted at a time. The only mass selling you will ever do is just increasing the item quantity per auction, but not everyone likes to buy in bulk. So having a bank alt in this game can be very beneficial. The 10 auctions cap is per character so each bank alt you level to 10 will have the ability to list 10 items. In addition, you will receive 32 warehouse and 27 personal cube slots to store your items. Add in the inexpensive level 1 cube upgrade for 1000 Kinah and the warehouse upgrade for 1200, you now have a total of 72 slots. This is a huge benefit especially those that are leveling gathering, crafting, and saving up materials for multiple crafting skills later on. This frees up a lot of inventory space on your main character which allows you to pick up more vendor trash and items for profit as well as start carrying multiple gear sets. Those spaces will fill up fast when you start grinding non stop and gathering every node you come across.

For a few hours spent on leveling an alt to 10, you will gain the ability to list 10 extra auctions and have 72 more spaces to store materials and items. So having 5 bank alts means an extra 50 auctions for you. Don’t forget to transfer items between characters with the account warehouse. Sending items through regular mail can be hassle.

So to recap:

• Level 1-10 ASAP
• Buy level 1 cube upgrade (1000 Kinah)
• The Ascension quest line will port you to your major city.
• Run to the Warehouse and Trade Broker area.
• Buy level 1 warehouse upgrade (1200 Kinah)

Since level 1-10 may take a few hours, what do our readers think is the fastest class is for doing this? Warrior, Scout, Mage, or Priest?