Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

One of the first quests you should have done after ascending granted you a 15-second time extender for your flight, bringing you up to a total of 60 seconds. To avoid any unnecessary deaths, I'd also advise you to have a few in-flight time extending potions as well. There's nothing worse than concentrating on extracting the aether from a crystal a hundred feet above the ground and running out of flight time. In most cases, you can hit your space bar to spread your wings and glide a bit before hitting the ground, but sometimes you can't. The costs of healing your soul can get expensive very quickly, so it's best to avoid pointless deaths whenever possible.

Aether crystals can be found wherever there's a riftway. In the first town your get sent to after your ascension (Altgard Fortress for the Asmodians), you'll find void shards with a skill level of 1. Unlike other items you've been collecting, items containing aether allow you to extract more than a total of three items from each source. The most I've extracted from a single source in the sky is five, so don't spin around and leave after collecting just three.

The crystals available for a player with an aether gathering skill of less than 25 are few in number to be sure. This can make gathering them a little more than frustrating, especially if you’re competing over them with other gatherers in the area. The best I can do is to suggest some patience. It doesn't take too long to get your skill level to 25 (skill-ups appear to come faster for aether than any ground gathering items) so suck it up and remain nice. Hopefully, this particular aspect of things will change when the game goes live. In any case, be sure to gather all the aether you can because you're going to need to when it comes time to make yourself a new set of equipment.

Refining Your Gathering Skills

Just like aether, you need to collect and hang onto every refinement stone you can. Refinement stones drop off of mobs at random. You never know when one is going to drop, or what it's going to drop off of. Each crafting specialty requires different refinement stones. For example, those pursuing the Sewing profession need to scoop up every armor and accessory refining stone they can get their grubby little hands on, while Weaponsmiths need weapon and accessory refining stones.

Even if you come across a stone you don't require, I would advise selling them to players before dumping them off as trash to the merchants. A merchant will barely give you 100 kinah for any refinement stone, while they go for thousands in the auction house. I'm not normally a proponent of high priced auction house items, but you're quickly going to discover that everything in Aion quickly becomes expensive. As such, I strongly suggest getting what you can for items before selling them as vendor trash. You're going to need every kinah you can scrape together if you plan on being a high-end crafter some day.