AION 2 Global PVE - Every Dungeon, Raid, and Daily at Launch transcript

Hey everyone, Anders here with another video. Today we are going to go over all of the PvE content that will be available to us at launch in ION 2 Global. We'll take a look at what each activity is, what it rewards you with, how often you can run it, and what's different for our version compared to what we've had in Korea. Before we get into it, a quick reminder of where Global stands. We launch October 5th with season 1 content 5 days earlier.

If you buy a Founders pack, our dungeons are five player parties instead of four. Our raid is 10 players instead of eight. And as we confirmed in one of the NA live streams, there are no heroic rarity items at launch, not from dungeon drops and not from crafting. This changes how we look at a lot of this content, so keep that in mind as we go. But let's start with the core of PvE in ION 2. We have six expedition dungeons at launch, and every one of them can be run on two difficulties, exploration and conquest.

Exploration dungeons are basically the tutorial version of the conquest dungeons. You'll run into your first run, crow cave, around level 22 while you're leveling. A shoe walks you through the mechanics. The boss patterns are more forgiving, and it's a place to learn the fight before you do it for real. Conquest you can think of as normal dungeons, the real version. This is where the better gear drops come from, and it's where most of your odial energy is going to go early on.

Conquest dungeons are also divided by ranks. Kra Cave and Drabnir are one star. Urugule Canyon and Vakran Sky Island are two star. Fire Temple and Ferocious Horn Den are the three-star dungeons. Remember, item level requirements are going to be higher on global, so you can't skip the one-star dungeons like some of us did in Korea. You'll need Crow Cave and Dropar to build up your item level before you move on to the two stars.

There's also no hard mode conquest at launch. These should show up a few weeks in once the average player's combat power catches up. Every expedition also has three bosses, two main bosses, and a final boss. And this is where you decide between a one boss run and a three boss run. For Fire Temple, we even had a two boss run that was pretty common back in the day. Each boss you kill in Conquest has its own chance at a gear drop.

Killing all three gives you the best odds on your rewards, but it does take longer. A one boss run means you push past the mid bosses and only kill the final boss. You get worse odds per run, but it's much faster. Which one you do depends on whether you're farming for gear or just clearing for your kina and materials. Your rewards at the end come from this odel energy cube, and opening it costs odel energy. You regenerate 10 of this energy every 3 hours or 15 with the membership.

So, you don't want to waste it on dungeons you've already outgrown in item level. something we saw in the NA live stream in the global build. Exploration gives a bound kina and conquest gives unbound kina. So running conquest on your alts is a real way to send kina over to your main. Dungeons also have their own achievements like clearing it for the first time and also speedrunning it. These achievements generally give you enhanced stones, kina, and titles.

And titles in ION 2 carry stats for simply owning them. So, these are worth going for once your group is comfortable with the fight or if you want to join achievement specific lobbies at the start. As for the rewards themselves, since heroics aren't in at launch, unique is the best drop you'll get out of these dungeons. Anything you don't need, you can save for future upgrades that require sync stones or you can extract them for enhance stones and a chance at the skin.

I have a full guide on the closet system on the channel if you want to know more about that. But each dungeon also drops these items called feather downs and artwork scraps. 10 of these artworks will give you a 10% chance to craft a painting for that dungeon, which you can use or sell on the market. 50 of the feathers allow you to guarantee craft the wings for that dungeon, which you can then use to add to your collection, give it to an alt, or sell it on the market.

Next up, we have transcendence dungeons. Transcendence are timed runs. You fight through two named bosses, kill enough monsters to hit the required count, and that unlocks the final boss. The clock is always running, so your group needs to keep moving. At launch, we have two of them. Deis research base and shattered archonis. The global live streams confirmed we have four difficulty levels for the transcendence dungeons.

Just like in Korea, each level adds a new debuff to the run. So, poison pools on the ground, damage overtime ailments when enemies hit you, more boss mechanics, and the number of monsters you need to kill before the final boss unlocks goes up as well. The reason you run transcendence is for your arcana. Arcana are a big part of your character progression, and these dungeons are where you get them. They also drop materials to improve your existing arcana.

Global also got a nice improvement here on level one transcendence. You can get rare arcana. In Korea, level one only gives you the common rarity, which made opening the cube on level one pretty pointless on launch. That's not the case for us. That's a good change. Level one is still valuable because we have no heroic items at launch. Don't expect the heroic amplified stone fragments to drop from transcendence. Now, moving on to field bosses.

Field bosses are big named monsters out in the open world, and each faction has a lot of them. In Korea, there are 24 field bosses with each faction having 20 unique versions. They respawn and set timers. Most of the normal ones come back every hour and a half to 4 hours. And the bigger ones like High Commander Lata, they take a lot longer. In the current Korean version, the map also has a field boss tab that shows you boss locations and timers.

So, you don't need a third party timer to find out when they spawn. All the information is already available through the in-game map. Now, why exactly would you want to bother clearing these field bosses? Well, first, their drops are pretty good. They drop gear, paintings, and materials, and your chances go up the more damage you deal. And that's why most people run these in a force or in parties. If something good drops for one of you, you sell it on the market, split the kina.

But remember, you need the membership to use the market. So, keep that in mind if you are free to play. And also be aware that running with randoms does not automatically mean that you can trust them to split the winnings or respect the winning role if you are running acquisition parties. Just use your own judgment or form your own parties, making it clear what the loot drop rules are. The second reason why you want to run field bosses is the paintings that don't drop outright.

Some of the materials they do drop go into crafting them. And the reason you care about these paintings is because those give you stats in your Pantheon. Pantheon is essentially a trophy room that allows you to place paintings and statues for increasing your character stats. You get these from just playing the game. The third reason is the achievements. They have kill achievements that reward materials like kina and titles.

For example, if you take down high commander Lacta, you'll get the title executioner of high commander Lacta. And like I said before, owning titles carry stats, so these add up over time. Next, we have the sealed dungeons and strongholds. These are locations found across the map that require you to clear out monsters, defeat a boss, or even just complete a puzzle to clear them. They are crucial for your progression, as this is the main way you will obtain Devonian crystals and materials necessary to enhance your amulet and belt items.

Devian crystals are used for your passive stat tree called the DevOion. And we are limited in how many of these basic ones we get, so getting all of the ones available is important. In season 1, we will have the basic Ariel and Azafel Deanium boards available. The Ariel board gives you pure PvE stats, and you get these from PvE content, while Azafel is the PvP version of that, and you tend to get those from the abyss.

You will have to travel through the space-time rift to complete all of the sealed dungeons and strongholds on the enemy side as well. So, you're looking at over 100 of these to complete for global launch. These are also character specific, so you will need to clear them again on alts if you choose to level them properly. Next, we have the daily and weekly PvE quests. These are called duty missions and command scrolls.

Duty missions are your dailies. You can complete five per day. They're simple tasks out in the open world, kill a certain amount of monsters, or hunt down a named target. They reward things like kina, enhance stones, crystals, and keys for the hidden boxes in the overworld. Command scrolls are the weekly version. You get 12 per week and you buy them from the command shop NPC in your factions main town. They work the same way.

You pick up the scroll, complete the task, and you turn it in. Now, the important part here is r-rolling. Every duty and command scroll shows you a row of possible rewards. What a lot of people don't realize is that the chance to get each of these rewards drops from left to right. If you don't like what you see, you can reroll what's in those slots for Kina. So, long story short, you want to reroll until the reward you actually want is sitting in the first or second slot.

The easiest way to save time running your dailies and weeklies is to run missions in the same zone if you can. If your duties and command scrolls all point to the same map area, you knock them all out in one trip instead of warping across the map for each one. And while we're on repeatable content, daily dungeons is also technically PvE. These are solo instances with a limited number of entries per week. D.VA a bio research base gives you a large amount of enhanced stones and Odillium repository gives you rewards for your pets.

We might also have the Kbaki secret depository which is for the boundina farm, but we're not sure about that yet. Early on, you want to put your entries into the bio research base. That's the one that helps your gear progression the most at the start since you're going to be low on enhanced stones starting the game. You can run any mix of these up to a total of 14 per week. And this is a serverwide limit, so your alt will not be able to run this content if you've already completed them on your main.

Now, let's talk about overworld farming and pets. Grinding monsters out in the open world gives you loot. In Kina, there is a daily cap on how much kina you can get from killing these monsters, however, and in Korea, that cap is 1 million kina per day. So, it's not a replacement for dungeons, but early on, very useful. Every monster you kill is also working towards your pet insight level. Now, pets in Ion 2 level up through insight.

Each monster type is tied to a pet, and killing that monster drops a pet soul that raises your level with that pet. Each level requires more and more amounts of these souls as they level up, but they give you more and more stats. On global, the pet level cap is three at launch. In Korea, it's currently five, so there's going to be a lot less grind for us. And that means you will get a good chunk of the stats without needing hundreds of kills on every single monster type.

You also have the Odillium Repository, like I mentioned with the daily dungeons and the Black Cloud Merchant Shop to help with your pet collection. The Black Cloud Merchant Shop inventory refreshes every hour and they sell pet souls as well as skins. And just like the closet, pet related achievements are serverwide, so your alts can help you here, too. You also need to know a chunk of the monster types you need for your pet collection only live on the other faction side of the map.

So, if you want to fill out your collection, you'll be taking that space-time rift and farming monsters in enemy territory. You can go invade in PvE mode, but be aware that getting close to enemy guard NPCs aggros them and automatically flags you for PvP, meaning hostile players will be able to attack you. Next, we have Sanctuary. These are the raids of ION 2. At launch, we get the first raid, Abyssal Forge Ludra. On global, this is a 10-player raid made up of two five-player parties.

You start together, split into your two parties for the mid bosses, and then regroup for the final boss. There is a revival limit per player. In the current Korean version, each character can only be revived two times per boss fight, and that includes skill resurrection and resurrection spirit stone. So, your cleric can't just keep picking you up if you keep dying. This count resets when the fight starts with another boss or when the boss dies or if the whole raid wipes.

This is also where your best bracelets come from. Sanctuary is the only way to get higher rarity bracelets. And remember, heroic drops were removed from sanctuary for global, so don't expect those at launch. The highest rarity items we'll get from raids will be unique rarity. Bres and seals are the other two slots that come from raids. But in Korea, breaches come with a third raid, Chalice of Musbell. and seals just arrived with the newest raid in Korea.

Neither of those raids are in season one for us, so these are just future upgrades to look forward to. You're also limited in how many clears you can do per week. This clear system has changed multiple times since the Korean launch, but right now we can clear each raid once for rewards. The newest raid in Korea, Snowfield of Sorrow, just released with three difficulties: easy, normal, and hard, which is a departure from the way raids normally work.

The developers said they're moving away from mechanics where all 10 players need to be perfectly synchronized and one mistake wipes the entire raid. Instead, they want the difficulty to come from reading the boss and reacting to what you see. Less reliance on one-shot mechanics for artificial difficulty and more focus on actually playing well. I don't expect them to change our launch raid to this format, but it's a good sign for where Sanctuary is heading and something to look forward to down the line.

Now, moving on, we have Nightmare. Nightmare is solo content. You fight bosses one-on-one, and each boss has 10 levels of difficulty. The only exception to this is our season 1 final nightmare boss that only has one. NC described this as a sort of training ground. You learn your class, drill your rotation, master dodges, and I agree, it's the best place to practice your class without holding up a party, and some of the fights can be extremely challenging depending on your class.

Your first clear on each level gives you a bigger reward. And repeat clears give you less. You get two entries per day. In Korea, they stack up to 14, so if you don't have time to do them every day, you can afford to miss up to 7 days worth of nightmare runs. They reward you with fantasmal fragments. You spend these in the nightmare shop on statues, skins, wings, Deanian arerial crystals, or skill points for your character.

If you're trying to progress early on, you want to prioritize the Ariel crystals and skill points. We also have nightmare season rankings. The faster you clear the highest level of the final boss, the higher your rank for the season. If you want to compete for those, this is where your class knowledge and your gear really get tested. If global gets the same quality of life as Korea, we're also going to have these things called instant clear tickets.

This lets you claim your repeat clear rewards without actually fighting the boss. You don't get ranking points for it, but for bosses you've already mastered, it saves you a lot of time. This instant clear ticket voucher is also available for the daily dungeons in case you want to skip actually running them. Just saves you some time. Next up, we have Ascension Trials. Ascension Trial is more solo content. You can run these three times per week per character.

You clear out the monsters in each zone and then you take out the final boss all against a timer. There are side objectives along the way and if you complete them, you get buffed and it also weakens the boss. The main thing here is you want to choose your difficulty. Higher difficulty means more rewards, but it also means the monsters and bosses are higher level. On easy, the monsters are level 45, while in the hardest difficulty, they are level 75 in Korea.

Your score is your clear plus the time you have left multiplied by the difficulty. So, a fast clear on a higher difficulty is where the best rewards are, but the run counts the moment you enter. If you die too many times or you run out of time, you just wasted one of your three runs for the week. So, you want to make sure you pick a difficulty you can actually clear. The main reason you run ascension trials is for stigma shards.

These are what you use to level up your stigma skills, and the ascension trial and transcendence are the best way to get them. Lastly, we have the Shugo Festival mode. Now, every hour on the hour, the Shugo Festival starts, and you can pick which miniame you want to take part in. There is racing, hideand seek, defending Shugo merchants, a memory game, just a lot of options. You compete against other players and your rank decides your rewards.

You can get gear and materials as rewards with tokens that you can then use to exchange for things like skill points, Deanian crystals, skins, wings, pets, and pantheon decorations. Each miniame has its own achievements as well, so you want to try each one at least three times to unlock all of them. These are easy achievements to complete. Don't just stick to one game early on. Get all of those achievements done and then you can choose which one you want to do for fun.

There is however an easy mode miniame available. The one that most people run in Korea is called the not this tile miniame. It's a memory game and everyone basically cheeses it. One player eats all the orbs while the rest just go on the correct squares. Once you do this for five rounds, you stop and you let the game end and everyone gets max prizes since finishing first or second gives you the same amount of rewards.

Your entries to the Shugo Festival come from reward keys. As a free-to-play user, you get one key recharge per day. Membership holders get two per day and double rewards. At max rank, that's six bundles of rewards versus the three you get as freeto play. Like I mentioned in my membership video, the Shugo Festival bonus was not explicitly listed in the global membership announcement. So, we'll have to confirm if this is still a benefit at global launch.

If you don't have time to run Shugo Festival every day, your keys do stack up to 14 times. So again, you can miss up to 7 days worth of Shugo Festival miniames and still be okay. What I do suggest is as you unlock Shugo Festival as you're leveling, you don't want to burn them right away. Save them for when you hit max level because that's when the rewards are the most useful. And that's all the PvE content waiting for us at launch.

Expeditions and transcendence for your gear and arcana, field bosses and pet farming out in the open world, duty command scrolls and daily dungeons for your daily and weekly resources. [music] and Sanctuary, Nightmare, Ascension Trial, and the Shugo Festival rounding out the endgame. That's everything for now. If there's something you want to know about ION 2 before launch, feel free to ask in the comments or bring it to the Discord.

I'll answer what I can. Drop a like if this helped. I'll be covering the game heavily through launch. So, [music] subscribe if you want to keep up with it. Memberships start at just 99 cents if you want to support more of these videos. And as always, thanks for watching. [music] Thanks for listening. I'll see you all in the next one. Take care. >> [music] [music]