Movement Bonuses and Penalties

One of the least talked about features in Aion is the way movement in combat works. It’s quite simple really, but also intuitive and keeps your fingers busy.

In addition to your armor and weapons, the way you move in combat also affects your offensive and defensive capabilities. For example, moving forward in combat will increase your damage, but also decrease your defense. Moving backwards will greatly increase your parry and block rating, but also significantly decrease the movement speed and physical damage inflicted. Lastly, strafing from side to side will increase your chance to evade attacks, but will in turn decrease both your damage and movement.

Forward	Backward	Left/Right Strafe
+10% Physical Damage +10% Magic Damage   -20% Physical Defense -20% Magic Damage	+500% to Parry +500% to Block   -70% Physical Damage -40% Movement Speed	+300% to Evasion   -70% Physical Damage -20% Movement Speed

Although you certainly don’t need to use movement in every single fight, it’s definitely a good trick to keep in mind. For example, if you’re low on health and expect a heal, it would be wise to start moving backwards (often frowned upon in other MMOs, but actually useful here) or strafing. Additionally, I recommend checking out the basic keybinds, and binding strafing to your A and D keys.  You can also check the short key binding guide here.

2 Responses to “Movement Bonuses and Penalties”

1. GamerAmelli says:

   August 18, 2009 at 2:47 pm

   Playing the beta I found using these to be quite hard and even harder to tell if any of the dancing around was actually helping any.

   Plus in PvP its alot harder to use these when everyone is spinning and darting around like mad bees and your wondering which move to make to stop from being ganked.

   Any tips in those instances?
2. Takameanie says:

   September 15, 2009 at 5:23 pm

   Strategy wise, I would think you would move backward from target until they use their skills so they are now on cooldown, and now you can move forward at them using your cooldowns to get the attack bonus (since their skills are now on cooldown you don’t have to worry about getting hit with one of their big skills while you are moving forward with the defense decrease), then continue moving backward until they use their cooldowns again to decrease the damage of their big skills.