Thirteen1

Written By: DrunkenGamer

If there is one thing about MMO’s that makes them fun to play, it’s the hours of gameplay they provide you. However, from a reviewer standpoint, that is also a pain of a problem.

While I would love to have high level characters on all of the major MMO’s, there are just not enough hours in the day. So when I hear about new additions to titles, it can be a little frustrating not to be able to jump right in and give it some hands-on coverage.

One such example of this is Aion. As much as I loved playing this game during its Beta and after launch, time and other content slowly ate up my time. Too many damn good games! As a result I only ever made it to level 26ish on the live servers.
So when NCSoft released the Assault on Balaurea expansion in September, I was very interested in the new instances and high level content that was added, and put in a solid effort to get caught up.

Thankfully though, it seems the NCSoft Community Managers are well aware of this issue and invited me & several other members of the gaming press to a run of the expansion’s multi-group 12 man instance, the “Abyssal Splinter”, on a test server.

Biting their hands off at the offer, I soon found myself running around, nuking things from afar with a fully geared and levelled Sorcerer. After a short period of flying around and burning the local wildlife, the rest of the group arrived and we headed over to the Divine Fortress.
Being within the Divine Fortress means that only members of the faction in possession of the fortress are able to gain access to it, giving players a reason to try and claim the fortress.

When we get to the Abyssal Splinter entrance we meet up with Aion community managers Mo Fadl & Aidan Taylor, as well as PR managers Craig Stephens & Christian Vestol.  These guys have the unenviable task of guiding this ragtag bunch of (mostly) noobs through the one of the games hardest instances.

After a brief explanation of the instance and sorting out of the groups we head on in. Once in, I was instantly stunned with the style and scale of the instance – this place is a huge crystalline cavern!
As we round the corner, we find a Crystal Giant being attacked by a small group of Balaur – suffice to say that the Balaur do not come off so well.. they have their asses handed to them, and we move in for the kill afterwards…

As we are all running totally maxed out characters, the giant soon buckled under our force. That’s a trend that continues across all the trash mobs, as we quickly make our way to the instances first boss, Pazuzu the Life Current.

Pazuzu the Life Current is a very angry woman, and it turned out to be somewhat of a tank and spank fight.
That being said it still took us a while to kill her. She regularly spawns adds that heal and shield her, so as long as you take them out you will be fine.

Once she dies the path is cleared to the second boss, but also in the middle of the screen appears a large Aether Fragment. Mo quickly explains that this is an optional challenge for groups and, if you destroy the fragment, it will increase the difficulty on the final boss.

As we’re only here to look around, we decide its best to not break any of the fragments.

After another bit of trash clearing we arrive at our second boss, Kaluva the Fourth Fragment. This giant spiderlike beast is a bit more complex. As well as keeping up the damage on the boss itself, there are four ‘Spawners’ that he will activate from time to time.

Once these have been activated they have to be killed, and fast, as while active they give the boss a shield buff. Also, if they are not taken down in time, they will spawn adds that make things more difficult. Oh and as if that was not enough, the damn boss will randomly web up members of the group, and if you don’t free them quickly they die.