Aion 2 makes collecting mounts wonderfully accessible, but tying its pets and other collectibles to power makes it another exhausting endgame chore. Find out how Aion 2 turns its supposed side content into another pre-raid checklist.
Aion 2’s Pet Collection Is Fun Until It Becomes A Chore
Every Great Mount Comes With a Story
World of Warcraft has roughly 1,300 currently obtainable mounts (and hundreds more retired or otherwise unavailable). Acquiring them ranges from a simple vendor purchase to gambling on notoriously low drop rates, camping rare spawns for days, completing demanding achievements, or running the same raid week after week for years. Nonetheless, never underestimate the Herculean lengths a WoW player will go to once they’ve set their sights on a mount.
It's because these mounts carry stories, and those stories turn them into status symbols. When someone swoops past on a Time-Lost Proto-Drake, you know they may have spent days circling the Storm Peaks. When someone rides Mimiron’s Head or Big Love Rocket through a capital city, you know they have spent a concerning amount of time in the game. When someone flexes the Swift Spectral Tiger, you know they’re old enough to have played the WoW TCG, rolling in cash, or lying to their partner about how much it costs.
I’ve experienced the same phenomenon with my Guardian Druid’s Fel Werebear form. When people see it, they know I suffered through the Mage Tower challenge, and they may feel slightly more confident following me into a dungeon. They’re usually wrong, of course—but when I blame lag for not building up enough Ironfur stacks, at least more of them are inclined to believe me. Blizzard understands that this prestige matters only when it is earned, which is why it recently began removing Ashes of Belo'ren, the rare mount dropped by Mythic L’ura, from accounts whose rewards were reportedly linked to real-money boosting and other policy violations.
So when I started playing Aion 2 and spotted a funny little frog creature roaming the plains, and all I had to do to get it was hunt it five times, it felt like years of MMO-related mount-collecting trauma leaving my body at once. Initially, I loved it, and I still do, despite what I’ll sound like by the end of this article. The deeper I went into Aion 2’s pet system, the more I realized it hadn't eliminated the grind of collecting, and made it into a chore.
What starts as an entertaining, optional side activity eventually becomes another source of mandatory combat power, repetition, and a confusing maze of menus that makes even WoW’s most infamous mount grinds look refreshingly straightforward by comparison.
Aion 2 Makes Mount Collecting Feel Attainable
To start with the best part, almost all of Aion 2’s collectible pets, which also serve as mounts, roam the overworld. It’s hard to overstate how cool it is to spot something that looks fundamentally unsafe to sit on and know it could eventually be yours. The in-game collection menu even lets you preview how your character will look riding each one, while the Source option points you towards their habitat. Once something catches your eye, hunt the monster, collect five souls (with a little RNG), and it joins your collection, ready to mount up and explore Atreia.
Not every pet can be obtained by hunting its corresponding creature. Some come from Pet Soul or reward chests, rotating merchants, passes, shops, events, dungeons, and other specific activities. Even with those exceptions, the Pokédex-like structure gives players a reason to explore the world and hunt monsters they might otherwise ignore, particularly when they need a break from their tenth Sealed Dungeon or Stronghold run of the session. It is a major improvement over the original Aion, where pets were generally acquired as eggs and mounts existed as a separate system.
It’s satisfying to start filling out my collection in the same time I'd spend running one dungeon in WoW and getting nothing. With more than 200 pets to find, that accessibility also changes how I look at the creatures inhabiting Aion 2’s world. The standard MMO instruction to kill five wolves becomes considerably more exciting when the reward can be the wolf itself. Better still, the collection and its progress are shared across every character on the same server, letting my alts contribute to the same catalog instead of forcing each one to start from scratch.
Unlocking a Pet Is the Easy Part
The issue starts when you realize Aion 2’s pets aren't just fun collectibles, and it’s actually a system that you’ll eventually have to grind when you want to take on harder content. Each one grants an Owned Effect, a permanent passive bonus that stays active whether or not you equip that creature. Those bonuses improve with the pet’s Insight level, its upgrade level, which increases as you collect more souls per tier.
Five souls unlock a pet at Level 1, but that is only the beginning. Level 2 requires another 25 souls, while Level 3 requires another 75, bringing the total to 105 matching souls. The current global version stops there, but the Korean and Taiwanese versions have extended pet progression to Level 5. Soul-drop RNG is easy to shrug off when I need only five, but it becomes considerably less charming when I need another hundred. Some appear in large groups, while others occupy only a handful of contested spawn points where several players (and bots) may be waiting for the same monsters. Other souls come from dungeon enemies, which doesn’t mesh well with how Aion 2 already discourages repeat dungeon runs.
Although they don’t raise your Gear Score, these stats do raise your Combat Power, the broader measure most player-made groups use to judge whether you’re strong enough to join them. If you’re not a Templar or Cleric, you’ll need every ounce of Combat Power to get through the gatekeeping expected of the average MMO player.
Some pet souls are also tied to creatures found only in either the Elyos or Asmodian region. To farm a creature from the opposing faction’s territory directly, I have to wait for the timed Spacetime Rift, which opens every three hours and provides a ten-minute entry window, assuming it has not reached capacity during peak hours. Reward chests and the rotating Black Cloud Merchant can provide alternative sources for some of these souls, but they replace a direct hunt with another scheduled activity, a random reward, or a recurring shop check.
Even the convenience feature designed to make this farming less tedious comes with another recurring bill. Pet Auto-Loot isn't included just because I own a pet or have fully upgraded one. It requires a 30-day voucher costing 500,000 Kina, standard in-game currency, per character—not per server or account, per character—and it's only available once you have a membership, adding yet another expense to the long list of ways Aion 2 tries to pinch my wallet. After collecting enough creatures to populate a national zoo, I apparently still need to rent their willingness to pick things up for me.
Genus Insight Turns Collecting Into a Resource Sink
Individual pet upgrades would already provide enough to chase, but Aion 2 layers Genus Insight on top. Unlike Pet Insight, which only develops per creature, Genus Insight is yet another progression board shared by every pet within the same family. Collecting and upgrading pets from the four regular genera levels separate boards, where Analysis rerolls nine slots for additional combat bonuses. The cheapest rolls cost four matching Soul Crystals—materials needed to reroll, with separate varieties per genus because apparently one would have been too simple—and 1,000 Kina per unprotected slot, but preserving good results rapidly increases the price. With eight slots locked, rerolling the last one costs approximately 396 Soul Crystals and 99,000 Kina.
The special pets category also adds a time-gated problem you can solve with money. Unlike regular pets, they provide no individual Owned Effects or Genus experience, as obtaining one unlocks Special Insight, which progresses through Analysis using Kina and either Special or universal Soul Crystals. Several of these pets are cash shop exclusive, but some come from other sources like events. At this point, we’ve gone from collecting five souls to tracking which activities drop these crystal varieties.
This is one example of Aion 2’s wider problem: nearly every system has to be tied to its own currency and menu, while also serving as a source of Combat Power.
Aion 2’s Collectibles Become Mandatory for Progression
Combat Power Is Required To Have Fun
If players insist pet collecting isn't mandatory, then technically neither are most of Aion 2’s other systems for raising Combat Power. The game doesn't require a completed collection before letting me enter a dungeon, and its official Gear Score requirements must be met through gear, but that choice becomes harder to justify the longer players invest in the game. Every unfinished Owned Effect and neglected Genus board represents permanent stats and Combat Power left on the table, especially as that score becomes the metric for gatekeeping groups.
I love a good raid and challenging content, but I also play MMOs for the pursuits outside the combat treadmill: housing, fashion, social activities, and collections I complete because I like them and want to do them at my own pace. It wouldn’t be a proper MMO if people stayed in the capital and loaded into instances all day, even though that seems to be where the genre is headed.
I want to hunt a creature because watching my character get hauled around by the shoulders by a giant bee is inherently funny, not because its Owned Effect nudges my Combat Power upward. Instead, I check the collection for easy bonuses, farm animals I will never equip, and complete entries because my character is statistically weaker without them. In most MMOs, pet and mount collecting is something I can pursue in my spare time; Aion 2 ruins the fun for me and makes it another chore on a long list of tasks I have to do to prepare for endgame content.
Aion 2 sorely lacks meaningful content that stays separate from combat progression, and that pressure changes how I engage with the entire game. It is why I burn out on this MMO faster than almost any other and need to take frequent breaks, whereas I can lose entire evenings in games that let me alternate between endgame progression and simply existing in their worlds.
Without offshoot activities like FF14’s Triple Triad or WoW’s pet battles, I can't properly compartmentalize and relax in Aion 2 because almost everything I do eventually leads back to the same combat treadmill. Even Aion 2’s supposedly lighthearted Shugo Festival minigames are full of sweats because better placements make them a lucrative source of Abyss Points.
When Everything Grants Power, Nothing Feels Horizontal
Pets might be manageable if they existed in isolation. Instead, they sit alongside Aion 2’s many complex systems and currencies that passively and artificially increase a character’s numerical power: gear upgrades, skills, Daevanion, Arcana, titles, wings, appearance collections, and cosmetics (yes, really). Even Aion 2’s closest substitute for player housing, the Pantheon, turns collecting furniture into another source of Combat Power. At this rate, I wouldn’t be surprised if its eventual fishing system awards permanent stats for catching enough trout.
I don’t know why it became commonplace to call these parallel systems horizontal progression when they all feed into the gear treadmill. In MMOs, horizontal progression should broaden what a character can do without simply inflating their numbers or making their past gear irrelevant. Compare Aion 2 with Guild Wars 2—developed by NCSoft subsidiary ArenaNet—and it becomes clear that Aion 2 has turned much of its side content into parallel ways to inflate your power. A Guild Wars 2 player who assembled a set of Ascended gear a decade ago can return today and find it still endgame ready.
Aion 2's Pets Tell the Story of Arbitrary Grind
While I was mentally on vacation and my physical form mindlessly farmed pets in Aion 2, my thoughts drifted back to WoW, and the night I finally obtained Invincible after countless Icecrown Citadel runs. Sure, the Lich King’s undead horse no longer looks as impressive next to WoW’s flashier modern mounts, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t wake the whole house when it finally dropped in the middle of the night. After all, it was the steed of the legendary Arthas himself, one of gaming’s most iconic villains, and a mount I had spent years envying whenever other players brought it out, and now I get to be that stranger to others.
I still praise Aion 2 for making its mounts so accessible, but some of that magic and significance disappears when everyone who reaches a certain point has to work through the same collection for Combat Power. Again, collectibles and mounts in MMOs carry stories, signaling where players have been, what they accomplished, or at least how stubborn they were willing to be. So far, I have never felt envy for another player’s pet—the kind that sends me into a fever trying to get it for myself—it just makes me audibly groan because it means I haven’t checked that pet off my list yet.
Will I one day tell my daughter about the funny frog guy, one of more than 200 pets I checked off for incremental stats in Aion 2? Probably not. Will I tell her about every underhanded, disgusting, regrettable act of PvP I committed on WoW’s Timeless Isle to scrape together 500 Bloody Coins for the Ashhide Mushan Beast? Absolutely, but only on my deathbed, so I won’t have to live long enough to feel her judgment.
