Aion duo questions

[Sajiri]

Not sure if anyone around here plays Aion, but if they do I'm looking for some opinions. The husband and I were planning on playing it just for something to do together, I played it solo briefly a couple years ago but never got into endgame and I don't think he's ever played it. So first, keeping in mind it'll just be casual play and likely wont bother getting involved with any guilds, what kind of content can we expect to be able to complete with just the two of us? Dungeons while levelling? Old endgame content? (Obviously not current endgame whatever it is now).

Second is classes. He seems set on going chanter, I was deciding between spiritmaster and songweaver, but Im unsure if they make a good combination. Im open to other classes, but preferably not anything plate since I just dont like the aesthetics. Don't really care about the absolute best duo combos, just something that works decently well and can get stuff done. I did play songweaver when it first came out and enjoyed it, but all I really did was solo leveling.

[Alent]

It's been years since I last played Aion, so I'm not sure how much of this is still accurate. Back around it's US launch, Chanter was a great duo partner choice for anybody. I mean, the class was pretty much EQ Bard, I think I remember it having buff twisting and all. (I mained Templar back then, my Chanter was the alt I played when I couldn't get a good farm going on the main.)

General notes on Aion gameplay circa launch, subject to changes over the massive number of patches since then:

Aion mobs used to break down into the four basic classes, even in solo content. Keeping their behaviors in mind let a friend and I duo way more group content than we ever should have. (We were playing Templar and Cleric, but our alts made it clear that as long as someone played Cleric or Chanter, any survivable character works) If they still do, you can kind of see it in the character models. You've got your tanky plate guys, your backstabber sorts, mages, and healers.

The Tanky guys are obnoxious and will stun you then memwipe and usually beat on the healer for a little while. This is not the tank failing at tanking- throttle back when it happens unless you're the tank, it will take a little while to load enough threat on it. If you can time out the stun's cast animation so a stun of your own lands, it will cancel the memwipe.

The light armor rogue sorts are prone to do this nasty long cast animation attack that bursts for large amounts of damage, giving you enough time to toss out damage reduction effects and/or stuns, and for whoever's healing to get heal pre-casting. A stun will just cause them to cast this again as the stun clears, so you can at most buy time. They usually only do large amounts of damage in burst mode, their sustained damage output isn't really that high.

Mages are wimps and can be burst down fairly quickly, so not much to say on those, but on the other side, the medics are pretty predictable healer NPCs. Healers can be pretty nasty in Aion, and they can be pushovers, it just depends on how they're configured. NPC ones tend to be fairly middle of the road, so you end up needing to prioritize killing or CCing them.

For world content, you should be good for pretty much everything but the world dungeons, which are wholly optional. Do your "PVP quests" as they open up as you can out level them and lock yourself out of titles. (They didn't actually require PVP when I played, it was just doing PVE in the other faction's leveling zones which could suck during prime time.)

In terms of dungeons, there were two categories: Regular dungeons and Abyss Dungeons.

Regular dungeons were few and far between, and became available beginning at level 25 onward. There's a dungeon called Flame Temple that's level 35 or so, it's pretty tame and I used to duo it with a friend once we got to the upper end of the recommended level range for it. There are some really nice weapons that drop off the last boss, but attempting to farm them is a bad idea as they're 0.001% drop rate and better quest rewards pop up in another 5~10 levels or so. (I've watched that dungeon drive lots of people to quit the game because they didn't heed this advice, it's a fun dungeon if you relax and explore the whole thing, but it doesn't really hold up to weapon farm speed runs.) Higher up you get into things like Steel Rake, which is a blast of a dungeon- it's a giant steampunk sky pirate ship crewed by angry anthropomorphic Ferrets. There's three routes, each having a designated level range and ending. (given the higher level cap it seems within possibilities to duo it at max level.)

Abyss dungeons require world PVP. Find out who controls the Abyss on your chosen server and roll on that faction. The game will suck miserably if you don't control the Abyss, because the Abyss dungeons are the best dungeons- once a faction captures an abyss fortress, you gain access to the treasury vaults instances, which are timed runs where you get lots of really good loot from the floor, just lying around, and all of it vanishes when the timer runs out. Abyss fortresses all have set levels, fast dungeon lockout resets, and there's much more of them, so you can try duoing lots of low level abyss fortress dungeons back to back if your faction controls enough of the abyss.

Everything past that point I'm unfamiliar with, so anybody with more recent experience can probably give better advice than I can.