Aion Classic Professions

Alongside the character’s level, a Level 10 or higher character can choose to pursue separate leveling systems that involve gathering materials and crafting items. These systems work off a random success or failure chance, having a likelier success the higher your skill level compared to the target item. Morphing is also available to characters from Level 25.

Gathering Skills

Every character starts with the Collection skill they can use in Poeta for Elyos and Ishalgen for Asmodians. Once a character reaches Level 10, they learn Aethertapping and their Collection upgrades into Essencetapping.

Gathering Proficiency

A character’s proficiency level will cause nodes in the field to be named in different colors. Gray nodes can be gathered easily but will not grant experience points when over 40 levels below. Yellow nodes will grant your experience points. Red names can not be gathered. When a node is attempted to be gathered, two progress bars will race toward success or failure without further player input.

Aethertapping is the process of extracting aether vortex nodes, which can be found in flight zones. Each regular node can yield six attempts of aether, and the type of aether depends on the node’s level. Most aether node requirements follow a proficiency requirement by factors of 25.

Essencetapping is the process of harvesting bush, fish, gem, herb, log, metal, ore, and shell nodes, which can be found along the ground just about anywhere. Each gem node yields one attempt while the others yield one or three attempts. Some herbs may instead yield dye petals.

Each gathering attempt has a chance to proc a greater version of the item, which can be used for rarer crafting recipe designs. Some nodes may also yield double its amount at random.

Crafting Professions

Once reaching Level 10, a character can take up any of the six crafting professions in the Artisan’s Hall in Sanctum or the Temple of Artisans in Pandaemonium.

Alchemy

Alchemists can craft potion and scroll consumables, manastones, temporal stones, orbs, and spellbooks. Herbs and gems can be gathered through essencetapping and elemental stones can be looted from enemies.

Armorsmithing

Armorsmiths can craft chain and plate armor, helms, and shields. Ingots need to be crafted from ore gathered with essencetapping, shared with weaponsmiths.

Cooking

Cooks can craft food and drink consumables. Meats and other materials are mostly dropped by enemies.

Handicrafting

Handicrafters can craft bows, staves, and jeweled accessories. Many design recipes use logs and metals gathered with essencetapping.

Tailoring

Tailors can craft cloth and leather armor, and hats. For cloth, the fiber materials can mostly be gathered through essencetapping, while leather requires killing enemies for rawhide.

Weaponsmithing

Weaponsmiths can craft daggers, maces, swords, greatswords, and polearms. Ingots need to be crafted from ore gathered with essencetapping, shared with armorsmiths.

Leveling a Craft

Successfully completing a craft will provide skill points for the crafting level and experience for the character’s level. Profession trainers will also provide Work Orders, special craft quests that use materials bought from the appropriate vendor.

By choosing the desired item design recipe to craft, a window will show what materials are necessary for the craft, and up to the number of available attempts can be set to be crafted at a time. Two progress bars will appear to show success or failure. Once a character’s craft skill is high enough, the character can unlock more recipe designs but will no longer gain efficient skill points from any more than 40 levels below.

Higher Quality Crafts

Certain crafted items may have a random chance to proc into a better quality version. For weapons and armor, these Noble versions of the items would glean higher stats. There are also certain quests that require the better quality version of an item, such as the capstone Miragent and Fenris quest chains at character Level 50.

Ranks of Crafting

Each crafting profession can be upgraded to the rank of Journeyman, but crafters looking to further their rank can choose a limited number of crafting professions to reach Expert rank and beyond.

Balic Crafts

Balic crafts are special recipe designs that require several materials dropped from Balaur. The stats on these weapon and armor pieces can be on par with the highest Expert crafts depending on which stats a specific player may prefer, so it’s best to compare and plan which items to craft before endeavoring to farm.

Morphing

A character who reaches Level 25 gains the ability to morph. Morphing is the process of converting DP (slowly acquired after defeating enemies) into crafting resources, and morph recipes can be purchased from a character’s faction-owned fortress in the Abyss.