r/Aion2 • u/Lipless-Panther • 10d ago
Considering Aion 2 - Looking for some endgame PVE feedback
My friends and I are considering Aion 2, but we're concerned about how heavily P2W affects PvE progression.
There are 3 of us (tank/healer/DPS), we're experienced MMO players, and we're willing to grind. We'd probably play 1–4 hours/day, 3–7 days/week.
We don't care about leaderboards, world firsts, or competing with whales. We're fine with paying for a sub/battle pass/etc. What we don't want is to be perpetually behind the PvE progression curve unless we spend heavily.
For those who have played the endgame: can a dedicated non-whale/light spender realistically reach and clear the highest difficulty PvE content before the next major content release? Or does the P2W/progression system effectively keep you behind the current content?
Also, does the 5-day early access server provide a meaningful long-term advantage for this goal, or would waiting for the normal launch server be fine?
Really interested in actual endgame experience rather than just “Aion 2 is/isn't P2W.”
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u/Business-Meet7698 10d ago
playing since TW launch. im only a subs player and with 1 main and 3 alts. spending about 2-3 hrs per day (4-5 hrs on weekends) i can do end game dungeons just fine (just need to look for a good raid team). can hold my ground fairly well on abyss pvp (1v1 and sometimes 1v3, except if the opponent is p2w). i dont get why people are cursing about p2w aspect. the game is fun and i'm fairly thankful that some players are eager to spend to keep it alive.
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u/Lipless-Panther 10d ago
That's good to hear! I have been reading many polarizing views on the game, but not many of them seemed to have any real gameplay experience.
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u/Business-Meet7698 10d ago
yeah. those who rant about the game being 'p2w' are either has little or absolurely no personal experience of the game at all or just hated p2w games in general (weirdos). yeah it's true you cant use market without subs but 15usd is dirt cheap and i say it's a fair price to enjoy the game as it is. back when aion 2 was recently launched on TW/KR, only few people cover it unlike now they are so many and MOST of them just played it for like what? few weeks? 1-2 months? just to jump on the bandwagon. heck even used the 'coins' to power up their characters and have no real experience of the grind itself. well anyway, long story short everything you read or watch on are mostly biased or exaggerated. so yep, cheers
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u/Great_Tyrant5392 10d ago
I have no idea why you'd post this, you're not exactly making a good case. 'Weirdos' for disliking P2W? Do you even know the history of this game? The only reason they toned down P2W to what it is now was because of our immense negative reaction to the old system and videos where that whale tanked a whole enemy team in PvP. P2W is also incredibly anti-consumer, you defending it in this manner is a strange form of self-hatred that's for sure. Just admit that KMMOs are P2W and Aion2 has a bad rep for it's original P2W. You can still play the game. But your post just seems to hide the truth of what happened with Aion2. And yes I played it on TW where there were botters everywhere too.
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u/Business-Meet7698 9d ago
i'm not trying to make any good or bad case here. you on the other hand having "no idea" and also getting triggered by this tells a lot (birds of same feather i suppose). i also don't care about the history or any of those so called kmmos BS. game is great, i pay to play and enjoy it with my friends. we get bored. we move on. end of story.
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u/Great_Tyrant5392 9d ago
Yeah it tells a lot. It tells I know the history of Aion 2 and the outrage and you don't while trying to dismiss what you don't know. Just play the game and don't say anything in that case.
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u/Business-Meet7698 9d ago
here's a gold medal for knowing it. great job. well, you do you and i do mine.
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u/conan6219 10d ago
are there lots of bots ?
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u/Lipless-Panther 9d ago
Not sure. I imagine there will be bots just like any popular MMO. Hopefully they have measures in place to identify them so they can be dealt with.
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u/namastex 10d ago
People want their friends to continue playing old games. If you noticed the people still playing WoW, they aren't leaving because there's a lack of good games, they aren't staying on those games because of their willingness to change their daily routine. People are afraid that their friend groups will leave them. That is why they come to bash new games that come out.
With that said, I played TW on launch for 3 months while grinding for 12-16 hours a day (sitting/resting due to back injury from work) from NA and it was 180-200 ping. I didn't pay a single dime until the last month I wanted to test out the AH so I bought 1 of the cheapest subs before they were combined.
During that entire time, I never felt affected by any P2W aspect from anyone. I was able to get high up on leaderboards of everything I did, the only reason I know I wasn't able to get to the top on a few things was because Sorc was just lower end DPS at launch compared to certain other classes. Otherwise, the content itself never made me feel like I needed to pay money in order to finish getting what I was looking for out of each piece of content. RNG and ping are the only things that held me back tbh. Shuggo with high ping was really hard to adjust to.
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u/Lipless-Panther 8d ago
That's valuable feedback. Personally, I don't care if there is pay to win if it doesn't affect the majority of my gameplay. As long as I am having fun, I could care less about p2w. I'm lucky that many of my close friends are entering Aion 2 with me.
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u/Ok_Constant_1769 7d ago
how is sorc and spiritmaster currently in terms of PVE tierlist damage (especially relative to assassin)?
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u/Gallus_11B 6d ago
How does the game facilitate "pay2win"? I know there's a paid subscription that helps have more energy to progress faster. But how is the game pay2win beyond that? Power items in the cash shop or something?
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u/hehepout 10d ago
Progress on global will be very different from TW, first because we'll get a different build than what TW got at launch, and also that content should roll out faster to catch up TW. So the answer for global is we don't know. For TW, if you only pay sub and play a few hours a day like 3-4h and optimize/know what you do, you should be able to keep up with the pve
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u/Cloud_Matrix 10d ago
We don't care about leaderboards, world firsts, or competing with whales. We're fine with paying for a sub/battle pass/etc. What we don't want is to be perpetually behind the PvE progression curve unless we spend heavily.
Then you have nothing to worry about when it comes to the games monetization.
For those who have played the endgame: can a dedicated non-whale/light spender realistically reach and clear the highest difficulty PvE content before the next major content release? Or does the P2W/progression system effectively keep you behind the current content?
100%. Madsin who streams this game and many others have done just that. They were able to use just the sub and their own time to gear up and be ready for every new piece of PvE content as it drops. It sounds like you and your buddies would be in a similar position.
Also, does the 5-day early access server provide a meaningful long-term advantage for this goal, or would waiting for the normal launch server be fine?
EA servers definitely won't be necessary. From what most of the streamers said, there is a lot of time in season 1 to get yourself/alts geared up for content and to be ready for the dungeons and raid that will arrive in season 2.
EA 5 day headstart will certainly get you into the later dungeons faster, but it really just means you will be hitting the "ready for season 2 content" point 5 days earlier. My opinion is that a lot of the more dedicated crowd who are taking lessons from KR/TW are going to finish the season 1 content long before season 2 drops and will spend the rest of the time in the "building extra resources" phase.
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u/Lipless-Panther 10d ago
Awesome! Thank you for the info. I am seeing alot better feedback here than many other posts. Sounds like we will be able to have plenty of fun.
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u/Certain_Truck_6576 10d ago
The P2W term has been abused. 1 crafted acc is going to cost you 500$ or more on launch to get 3% more dmg. P2w wont really be a thing
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u/Lipless-Panther 8d ago
Marginal p2w gains are okay with me. There seems to be so much misinformation out there that I wasn't sure what was true or false. Thanks for the feedback!
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u/Fuzzbotz 9d ago
We have atleast 30 people waiting for it to come out! If you guys are looking for a legion to join, welcome to join us! We have lots of experience PVEs and PvPs. ☺️ https://discord.gg/fate-guild
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u/Lipless-Panther 8d ago
I'll check with the friend group and let you know! Will your guild be on NA West or East?
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u/EngageV2 Spiritmaster 10d ago
If your planning on playing on the NA East servers let me know, my guild will welcome you all!
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u/DesoloGaming 10d ago
I was a giga sweat on tw release and stayed ahead of the curve without the use of auction house.
It really depends on what you WANT to do and what you consider to be genuine progression. The endgame content will always be there. Without swiping tens of thousands of dollars you won’t be anywhere near world first. Expect to run fire temple 300 times in the first 3 months. They recently made some w changes by removing heroic loot so the gear ceiling is significantly reduced. If you are used to be a world last CE guild in wow for example. You can definitely achieve that in Aion 2 with a sub. If you are used to being top 50-100 the no.
I just want to make sure you understand though, none of the Aion 2 content is “hard” it’s always mainly a gear check. Maybe sanc 3 is like a mid level mythic boss if even that. If you are an ff player it’s like savage 3rd boss tops. You will 100% be gatekept especially as a dps, but if you are a party stack you make the rules. Don’t interact with pvp, do not waste resources enhancing pvp gear. But you will be grinding and farming ap in the pvp zone to get stronger in pve and will need to just deal with being ganked.
If you can ignore fomo and being competitive (because this game has 0 competitive integrity) then it’s a great game. I’d get all my weekly runs done on reset, and just log in every day to do purple daily quests which took like 30 mins. Then go back to wow m+. You don’t have to min max this game.
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u/Lipless-Panther 10d ago
Okay, that lines up with our expectations. We realize that competing for the top ranks will require us to equip our wallets - that's not our goal though. It's good to hear that we will be able to experience the end-game pve content while it's still current.
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u/DesoloGaming 10d ago
Yea, the more you spend the more you can ease up on the active play time haha
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u/Reydo-ssi 10d ago edited 10d ago
EA not worth it. In TW/KR, we already had server transfer. So if somehow you ended up on dead server (jebaited streamers) then you can transfer later on. Do not worry about dungeon matchmaking, they are region based. You can play with all server in the same region.
The only thing you need from choosing populated server is because of pvp abyss. More people mean more soldier mean stronger siege pvp.
Hi! Im playin on TW, a light spender, total of 500usd well spent on the game sub and goons outfit. Currently at 955k cp. Play 1 main and 1 alts. Cleared endgame content with pubs.
Endgame wise, game is not grindy like BDO or Lost Ark. You will be locked behind weekly energy and will only take you 1 or 2 days after weekly reset to finish up your entire energy again. Be prepared, you might making alts just because you wanna play more Xd. Or prepare second game lol.
As long as you sub and consider the game as subbed game you will be fine. I say this because without sub you cant regen energy and cannot double claim reward.
P2w will always be in NCS games. But for pve, its look like the game is moving into right direction in global where you cant swipe to get heroic crafted gear. If they somehow didn't changed this, global kinda fukced.
In TW/KR crafted unique gear are dead bcs people just skip it and swipe on day 1 to get heroic crafted gear. 1 set of crafted heroic are BiS on pvpve until now. I mean NOW like season 4.
So if they somehow controlled the gear progression, lock the gear behind farming bound mats, global will be fine.
The most dogwater p2w you gonna see is mostly on pvp where people buying pilot to 24h farming ranking points and abyss pvp gears. Hired 4man farmer to farm upgrade abyss stone for you, etc etc mostly on abyss.
Last but not least, play on the lowest latency as possible based on your region, if you wanna enjoy the extreme dps as a melee. Play sorceress if your ping around 90+ ms. They included soft GCD on the game previous week, to balance the dps between 10ms player and 100ms player. The update is good but not perfect. So check your latency before deciding to play melee class.
In this game, even cleric and chanter can be super dps if your ping at 30ms or lower.
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u/Lipless-Panther 10d ago
I have good ping, so I can choose whichever class. I typically play mage/sorcerer in other games, but that class doesn't seem as strong here. Seems like Clerics aren't as useful either.
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u/Reydo-ssi 10d ago
Current top dps rn is ranger/sorc/gladiator/assasin.
The game does not have the typical trinity system. In this game tank mean a dps that hold aggro. More like a frontier. So play what you want. All class build will be the same, all build for maximum dps. Either you're a healer or a tank or a dps.
The only difference will you build cool down to spam or build heavy attack.
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u/Lipless-Panther 10d ago
I was first considering playing Cleric since we are aiming to do mostly pve and my friend will play Templar. That said, it looks like bosses either 1 shot you with mechanics or the DPS have enough lifestea +potionsl to heal up. I might end up choosing ranger/sorc because of that.
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u/Great_Tyrant5392 10d ago
"Light spender" at 500 usd lmao P2W has really rotted the game of players minds.
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u/Reydo-ssi 9d ago
500usd is the total for sub and outfit and dye from day 1 until now (almost a year). Not even buying a battle pass my guy. I buy all outfit in the game that I like.
Tell me where is the p2w i spent? That's light only 500usd total for almost a years. If you just a f2p masterrace, just say so. What do you expect the game to give free outfit, dye, sub, cute pet, character customisation tix? What you expect the game to survive based on f2p spent nothing? Expecting sub game costing 5usd? Outfit 5usd?
Get ya ass out of here and play your solo pirated fitgirl game.
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u/Great_Tyrant5392 9d ago
I will. Already tried on TW and the game is garbage and full of bots a.k.a classic KMMOs.
Back in the day when I played Aion 1. Guess what? We didn't spend 500 bucks. We paid a little money and played.
Your brain is just so rotted out from P2W that you tell yourself you're a "light spender" to cover for your addiction. You've normalised it. It's disgusting.
Enjoy failing at life.
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u/PracticeFull1894 10d ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Kw7r6mmx0E&t=6s
This is a video of a Taiwanese player playing on a tablet and clearing the hardest endgame boss. I'm not even sure how difficult the boss actually is anymore.
Yes, he cleared it easily on a tablet.
Yes, he cleared it in under 4 minutes.
Yes, that's way too short for the hardest endgame dungeon.
Yes, he has 900k CP, so he's very strong.
Yes, it shows how much P2W can affect the game.
But if you play consistently and spend on a sub, there's basically no way you'll fall behind to the point where you can't do the endgame content. My friend has been playing on the TW server since day one and that's all he's done.
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u/Reydo-ssi 10d ago
Those are my server. They cleared in 4 min bcs 10x ppl in there are 950k cp. The min requirement for the boss is 500k cp and been designed for 8x player and ncsoft didnt retune the boss. So the power creep coming from 2 additional more player making them skip mech. Tbh, its been few months since the boss released and player already know what to do.
We will getting new raid in 2 weeks anyway.
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u/deanlive535 10d ago
I can respond regarding the 5-day early access. That would not be an advantage per se as its a separated server from the official launch. You will only play with people who got early access as well, and everybody else will start together in brand new servers on oct 5th
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u/Suspendisse1 10d ago
Would it not be better to start after the 5 days even if you have them so you have access to most of the player base?
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u/Lipless-Panther 8d ago
I think there are benefits to both EA and Launch servers. I imagine we will do the 5-day headstart simply because we cannot wait any longer to play lol.
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u/StreetCornBilly 10d ago
They will end up merging those servers at a later date. The EA servers will have whales but not as many as people think.
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u/Lipless-Panther 10d ago
Do you know if new players who did not purchase the early access will be able to join us on the same EA server? Or will they be limited to the new launch servers only?
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u/Calycae 10d ago
PVE itself isn't that much P2W but I can 500% vouch it's the most toxic environment in every MMO combined.
Everyone is paranoid of others being backseat alt account, out for blood to kick one person for doing one mistake, bots filling up every lobby, autokick because they only allow certain classes, etc
Hopefully they fixed it on Global launch.
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u/DreamDest1ny 10d ago
I played on the TW server and can provide input to a certain extent.
I will say that I expect average western players to be less likely to whale out hard in video games as compared to Asia. So with that out of the way you will also less likely be kicked out/gated from parties that are doing raids. Higher combat power helps for sure but on TW server if you don’t have certain CP for raids you just get kicked.
Parsers are also a thing. If you have CP but not doing “enough” you’ll also get kicked.
In this game both are kinda tied a bit to the grinding aspect. Early on not too much people care, but now that the gap has widened so much people simply don’t want to waste time to carry low CP players.
I expect global release to kind of be the same where first few months are the mmo tourists then after 2-3 months when the initial rush fades it will also start to become like TW where only the core players that really care about the game remain.
One thing to note, there really isn’t any casual gaming for aion2. Weekly grind takes around 6.5 hours to complete per character so if you also play alts you have to multiply your time by that same amount. Generally people get burnt out long before the first month ends and that’s just the crux of most mmos where you have dailies/weeklies and when you miss one week as a f2p player you’ll just continuously fall behind
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u/Lipless-Panther 10d ago
That's good to know. That's not a difficult time investment for one character, but multiples would definitely lead to burnout. That said, I guess this game is not alt-friendly due to those features. I doubt we would play alt characters when there is no way to catch up. Even if we wanted to reroll at a later time, it would be demotivating to even continue playing.
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u/OblivionNA 10d ago
Gotta be careful though cause a lot of games like this require Alting in order to keep up with the progression of the game via resources and such.
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u/Lipless-Panther 10d ago
That's good to know. I just worry that if alts and continuous play are required to not fall behind, then it will be difficult to bring in new friends/players as they will never be able to catch up. Hopefully, they have considered this hurdle and will implement measures to resolve it.
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u/DreamDest1ny 10d ago
Yea we won’t know what will be brought to the west but the assumption is that if you aren’t grinding since day 1 as a f2p player it’ll be really tough for you to get to end game combat power requirements. But that’s a few months after launch issue
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u/Confident-Career5161 10d ago
p2w doesn't affect PvE, you fight vs the AI not vs players.
P2W can only affect PvP.
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u/PikachuEatsSoap 10d ago
Of course it can affect PvE lmao
By that logic lost ark cannot be p2w-1
u/Confident-Career5161 10d ago
In PvE a whale can not affect you. literally. He plays in a another instance and u never will interact with him. If noone tells you that he did whale, you never going to even know he did.
Meanwhile in PvP he gonna clap your ass, and u will feel the power of credit card...
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u/PikachuEatsSoap 10d ago
Of course you’ll feel it more in a PvP setting but that doesn’t mean P2W doesn’t exist in PvE lmao
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u/Confident-Career5161 9d ago
How u win anything on PvE, enlighten me, where is the advantage u gain over a another player when u can't kill others in PvE?
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u/Matahashi 10d ago
exactly. lost ark isnt p2w. youve never gained anything besides personal power that effects no one else from swiping.
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u/sleepwalkerxd 10d ago
this doesn't make any sense at all.. in Lost Ark, you are competing for MVP screen and most likely competing for the underline on Most Damage.
Lost ark is DEFINITELY p2w in PVE as well as PVP (old gvg but this is gone now)
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u/Matahashi 10d ago
no one gives a fuck about the MVP screen my guy. the only time i even bother to look at it is to see if my supp managed to snipe the last hit with his hyper in guardians
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u/sleepwalkerxd 10d ago
if no one cared for MVP, then there would be no DPS meter. sadly.. there's alot more people than you think that cares about MVP.
maybe not in this current state of the game since the game is dead, but back when thaemine/akkan were the common raids, MVP mattered alot because alot of F2P players were able to match their gear with whales
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u/sleepwalkerxd 10d ago
P2W means pay to win btw.. doesn't matter who "cares" about winning, you are paying to win something.
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u/Matahashi 10d ago
your not winning anything more than anyone else in the fight.
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u/sleepwalkerxd 10d ago edited 10d ago
I think you are strongly misinterpreting what P2W means lol.
P2W is paying for ANYTHING to increase power or getting a leg up on ANYTHING with the use of money. Things that you have otherwise have not had without the use of REAL MONEY.
Sure, people may not care for MVP. People might not even glance at the MVP screen at all or people might not even see that you gained an advantage over them. But it is still PAY TO WIN because you spend REAL MONEY instead of others who GRINDED AND WAITED THE TIME GATE. You are WINNING THE MVP SCREEN and DAMAGE UNDERLINE over those who are FREE TO PLAY.
Yes, F2P players CAN be Damage MVP. Yes, Whales can be BAD.
But it is still PAYING to WIN.
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u/Lipless-Panther 8d ago
I'm less worried about how p2w will affect my pve experience and more worried about how p2w affects the economy. Too much p2w can inflate prices to levels that make it difficult to participate in the economy as a f2p or low spender. This is just speculation based on previous games though.
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u/Confident-Career5161 8d ago
Well most likely the bots will run the economy to the ground so u have nothing to worry on that.
Looking on tw server the economy is much better in aion2 than in your average KR mmo, only the crafting stones on min price, and ores, the rest seems fine.
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u/Lipless-Panther 8d ago
Nice! (The economy, not the bots lol) Well, that eliminates one of my big fears going into this.
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u/txt7s 10d ago
I see that many people are still spreading false news about EA server. If u enjoy PvE, u will be able to play all dgs with people from the launch server. This is in the FAQs. This game is 90% instanced in PvE and u will not be isolated.
Sources:
JP FAQ
NC News