Tips & tricks

Levelling to 45

• Stick to the main quest. It unlocks almost every feature. With Alt + 1 your character walks to the next quest objective on its own.
• Save Odyle Energy for later. The energy doesn’t pay for entry, it pays for the reward chest. So go ahead and finish Exploration dungeons, but leave the chest. Worthwhile exceptions: one Fire Temple run for the weapon, and Draupnir Exploration until the pity chest is due.
• Get alts to level 22 early. From then on every character collects energy, even when you don’t play it. An alt needs roughly 70 to 90 minutes to get there.
• Keep until 45: Shugo Festa keys, yellow Unique items and manastones. At 45 they are worth a lot more.
• Never get rid of your belt and amulet. You keep both until the endgame. Up to +10 enhancing can’t fail, and after that Substance Morph raises them to the next rarity.
• Barely enhance levelling gear. It gets replaced quickly. The weapon at about +5 is enough, the armour not at all.
• Keep an eye on the red ascension bar. At certain points the main quest only continues once it is full. You fill it with main and side quests, sealed dungeons and fortresses; feathers don’t count.
• Leave the Shugo event, dimensional invasions and the Abyss until 45; before that, less loot drops there.

Settings worth changing

• Bind the macro key. On Global it is unbound by default. Under Settings → Key Settings → General → “Skill Macro”, enter a key, for example the right mouse button, and confirm the warning. This only works in AION 2 mode without a visible mouse cursor, not in Classic Mode “AION 1”.
• Show the boss orientation. For classes that have to attack from behind or the front: Settings → Info Display → Combat → Display Boss Orientation Indicator.
• Measure your own damage. Ctrl + X opens the DPS meter. If you compare settings, such as the skill queue on or off, it’s better to count hits than to read the DPS value early in the game, because random critical hits distort the number.
• Recognise weaving. If you hold left click and the macro key at the same time, your character keeps leaving a shadow behind. That’s not a clone; it shows that animations are being cancelled cleanly.

Friends on other servers

• Add across servers. Your friend list isn’t limited to your own server. In the friend search, enter the character name followed by the tag of their server in square brackets, i.e. Name [Tag]. You can also leave out the space before the bracket: Name[Tag] works just as well.
• The tag is the first three letters of the server name, for example Sie for Siel or Isr for Israphel. All European servers with their tags are in the server list.
• Whispers and party invites work the same way: with Name [Tag] you can reach players on other servers in whisper chat and invite them to your party.

From level 45

• From now on your item level, not your level, decides which content you may enter.
• Never leave Odyle Energy sitting at the cap, or the recharge is wasted. Spend it in the newest dungeon you can enter.
• Craft weapons and jewellery, farm armour and guards. Crafted pieces have five soul binding lines instead of four.
• Don’t enhance anything past +10 that you’ll replace soon anyway.
• Abyss time is limited: 7 hours per week, 14 with a membership according to the tooltip disputed. Standing around AFK costs real time.

The complete road to the raid is in the guide From 45 to Ludra.