We all have ‘em and we all love ‘em.
One of the fun things about AION 2 is the pet collection. There are 200 pets to seek out, some are easy to pick up while levelling and completing duties, while others take a bit more effort to find. As well being playing the role of trusty steed, pets also add to your combat power by granting stats and titles for collecting and levelling them. Let’s do a deep dive into where and how to get pets and what they are good for.
Contents
Pet Basics
Before you can start collecting your pets, you will need to progress the main story quest. This happens fairly early in your character’s journey, around level 10. The quests to unlock pets are:
- Asmodian: Gathering Essentials
- Elyos: All Geared Up
You can choose between an Armadon, Fossa, and Tog. If you are from the Elyos faction, you may wish to select the Armadon or Tog as these are Altgard exclusive pets.
Levelling up
There are a few ways to level up your pets in AION 2. You’ll notice that when you fight some monsters, they will drop a soul. You can collect these souls to gain pet levels, which unlocks it as a mount, mount glide and transform, and also increases your pet related stats. Pet Growth chests are another way to add souls to your collection, and, finally, you can purchase them with Kina in the Black Cloud market.
- Level 1 – 5 souls adds the pet to your collection and you can use it as a mount
- Level 2 – an additional 25 souls allows you to stay on the mount while gliding
- Level 3 – collecting the final 75 souls brings the pet to max level and allows you to transform into it using a candy
Why level up your pets?
As well as having lots of pets to choose from, collecting and levelling up your pets adds bonuses to your character, increasing your Combat Power.
Perks
In AION 2 there are five genus types. These apply to all creatures of the world, including pets! Each genus of pet gives different bonuses, which increase as the pet level gets higher. Importantly, you don’t need to equip the pet to receive the bonus, so adding to your collection just builds up your power. Fully upgrading the pet to level 3 adds to your character stats and increases the sub stat bonuses from levels 1 and 2.
Special pets from the cash shop do not add any perks but they do have genus insights.
There are 41 Cogni, 65 Fera, 48 Natura, and 46 Varian, so you can increase your total stats as follows:
- Might +41
- Dexterity +65
- Precision +48
- Constitution +46
Locations and availability
Not all pets are available in your local lands, so you’ll have to make an effort to get the full collection. To farm the pets that don’t spawn in your home land, you’ll need to travel through the Rift to the other side. This opens every three hours and you can stay there for an hour, so it’s worth planning your strategy before you go. Be careful of enemy player Kisks, as hitting these will flag you and your whole group as PvP. Also watch out for Kibelisks – the guards will kill you if you get too close.
Verteron exclusive
We’ve put together a map showing the locations of the Verteron exclusive pets and rift locations. When you land on the other side, you can check which rift you came through and source out pets close by. You’ll notice Verteron has a plethora of Giant Sparkies, Tamed Zaif and Tamed Karnif. There are also 5 different Krall to collect. Some other fun pets include the Fungie and Fungen mushrooms, and the Guardite machines.
Altgard exclusive
These are the Altgard exclusive pets and rift locations. You’ll notice a lot of Withered Branch Spider locations, it seems you can’t go anywhere in Altgard without stepping on one! The blue Slime and Biruta Herbalist are slow to collect, with few spawn locations that are often camped.
Lower Reshanta in the Abyss
There are four pets you can only farm from the Abyss, which is the PvP zone, so if you don’t want to go there, you’ll have to get them from the Black Cloud Merchant or Growth Pet Chests as below. If you prefer playing in the Abyss for your Abyss commands and 2000 weekly seasonal reward PVE kills, there are more pets available for you to collect while you are there. Most of these are only available in one land plus the Abyss, so if you don’t want to wait for the Rift to open, you can head to Lower Reshanta at any time, as long as you haven’t used up your weekly hours.
Expedition exclusive
A couple of expedition bosses drop souls that you can collect by running the dungeon multiple times. We’re not entirely sure if the full list as we haven’t run some of the higher level expeditions yet, but have noted these so far:
- Harcon – Krao Cave
- Phantasmal Lakshmi – Draupnir
- Predator Saraswati – Draupnir
- Silver Blade Rotan – Fire Temple
- Black Smoke Murute – Fire Temple
- Red Spark Ignus – Fire Temple
Black Cloud Merchant
Did you know about the black cloud merchant? It’s one of our favourite features in the game, offering discounted theostones, pets, and skins for in-game currency – Kina. What’s relevant for this particular topic is, of course, the pets. Any kind of pet can turn up here, but most importantly, you can get the pets that don’t have souls dropping in any worlds. Sometimes, even at a discount!
Growth Pet Chests
Growth Pet Chests are offered as rewards throughout the game, including the Ascension Trial repeatable content and promotional rewards. There are general chests and also chests for each specific genus. These contain 5 souls for each pet you roll and are a good way to level up pets you can’t farm in the open world. There’s no way to control which pets you get, like so much in this game, you just have to get lucky.
Black Cloud Merchant and Pet Chests only
The following pets can only be obtained through the Black Cloud Merchant or in Growth Pet Chests. Be sure to check the market every hour, and do your Ascension Trials every week.
Titles
There are some titles related to pet collecting that will further increase your character’s power. These titles, like the pets tthemselves, are shared with your alts on the same server.
Genus Insights
On top of the base perks, you get bonus perks for genus insights. These are stats that are unlocked through a combination of unlocking more pets and (mostly) spending lots of kina and crystals re-rolling insight perks.
Collecting Crystals
You can collect genus-specific crystals by killing a pet creature that is levelled to the maximum level (3) or getting them as rewards, such as for Duty or Command quests. These crystals are one of the resources used in levelling up your genus insights and re-rolling perks. Once you roll a perk that you want, you can lock it so as to not lose it, but it greatly increases the re-roll cost, so choose wisely!
Insight Analysis
Once you have some crystals, you can use them to analyze insight for each genus. Each insight level adds another perk, which is randomly selected from a pool. Once you get to level 9, you will have all the perks unlocked for that genus, and level 10 increases the chance of higher grade perks rolling. When you get a perk you want, at the right grade and value, you can lock it and still roll for other perks, but each roll will cost you more resources.
Perk Priority
While the perks you seek should be subjective to what you want to play, there are some base rules to know. Firstly, each slot is rolled from a different perk pool, so some of them have specific things that you should be looking for that are not available through the other slots. As a generic baseline, try and aim for this board perk layout:
Slot 4 is the most important, and should be prioritised. This slot uses multiplicative damage percent increase perks rather than flat increases. This is the only slot that needs to/should be unique between insight boards.
Slots 1 & 5 are the offensive perk pool slots and include Max Attack, Attack Bonus, Boss Attack, and Front/Back Attack. Usually Max Attack or Attack Bonus are prioritised.
Slots 3, 6, & 9 are combat mechanics and crit perk pool. Including Critical Hit, Accuracy Bonus, PvE Accuracy, Front Attack Critical Hit, and Power Shard Damage Bonus. Usually it is recommended to focus on both Accuracy and Critical Hit.
Slot 7 is the mitigation perk pool, including Damage Tolerance, PvE Damage Tolerance, and Endurance. Often PvE Damage Tolerance is recommended as priority.
Finally, Slots 2 & 8 are the actual defence perk pool, and are usually lowest priority. This pool includes % HP Increase, Defense, and Evasion. Focus on % HP Increase.
Auto Analysis
You can use the Auto Analysis to lock the perks you want and let the computer roll until it hits your requirements. Just be careful, this will drain your money and soul crystals very quickly!
Our favs
So, we’ve collected all these pets but we can only ride one at a time – what do you choose?
Landi - Silver Blade Rotan
I like the minimal design and feeling of speed this little wheel gives. Plus I feel like ET riding the windstream!
Lish - Drakan Guard Dog
My character can see past this quadipedal beast’s neck, so it’s the least bad choice of the bunch.
Narok - Konutin Worker
I like this little guy carrying my little guy in his little basket. The low point of view makes it feel faster.
Timmby - Magic Gravi
I like the magic gravi because it bounces and makes a fun sound effect when you ride on it.
Suggestions for improvement
Although this system is incredible, there are two major ways that I think it could be improved; animation preview and visibility rework. When previewing potential pets, it’s already a great benefit to be able to toggle the player visibility and see where you will sit, but it would be even better if we got to see more than just the idle animation. Being able to preview how a mount runs and sprints without having to individually equip, close the menu, and run around would be a game changer. Additionally, when looking through the mounts and how they’re ridden, it’s really hard to ignore the fact that my character would not be able to see quite often! There aren’t really any quadrupedal mounts that fulfill the classic “horse” type because they’ve all got long necks that I wouldn’t be able to see past! Look at the Kernon/Keniere or any Coradon and tell me how my character is navigating on that thing!
Resources
This is a great site for tracking your pets and finding exact spawn locations. You can also bookmark up to 10 favs and use this as a filter for the map. Combining this specific data with the general knowledge of pet groupings from our human crafted maps, trips through the Rift are painless and productive!
This was the first site we found and has been helpful in working out which pets to buy from the Black Cloud Merchant. Just a bit of a warning about some predatory ads if you try to go to the home page.
