Introduction
This Albion Online 2023 Review is based upon starting this game as a complete beginner having never played Albion Online before.
One of the first things I noticed was there are some real Runescape vibes with this game graphically. It also makes me think of a more simplified World of Warcraft when it comes to the combat style.
Graphically things are quite simple but this comes entirely down to the fact this game is playable on mobile as well as PC so the game cannot have amazing graphics otherwise it just wouldn’t work well on mobile devices. The interface is basic, again this is likely to accommodate mobile.
Creating a character is quite a simple task, with some basic things to choose from but since the game has no races or classes, it’s purely aesthetical.
The beginners experience is your standard MMO introduction where you do quests and learn the basics of combat, gathering and crafting. There’s room for improvement to make this experience a bit more interesting and teach you a bit more about the game but it does a decent job of getting you started in Albion Online.
Can You Tank in Albion Online?
As a Tank main, one of my first thoughts was, how useful is a Tank going to be in Albion Online and can you Tank in Albion Online? As mentioned already this game resembled Runescape which is a game where you cannot really play as a Tank.
The simple answer with Albion Online is YES, you can Tank!
After completing the tutorial for the game I was sent to a new area and immediately I notice that the in-game chat was filled with people looking for PvE Tanks for a range of content. The good thing is that because it’s just one server with everyone on it, you will never have trouble finding a group as a Tank no matter what time of day you’re playing.
I set off on my journey to becoming a Tank.
One of the hardest parts about being a Tank in an MMO game is that it’s usually very slow and uninteresting during the levelling and beginner process if you start as a Tank. With Albion Online you don’t really have levels but rather you’re constantly gaining experience or “fame” as it’s known in this game, by killing enemies, gathering and crafting.
You need to equip the gear you intend to use pretty quickly so you can progress your Destiny Board and this will increase your combat power. Whilst doing so you can begin to improve your gear to gain strength in your character and this feels like a really effective and progressive system that doesn’t seem as pressuring as a level system.
After a while you will start to realise that you still need to grind out levelling your gear and weapons to boost your Item Power before people will accept you into joining their group for the harder content.
Combat
My first taste of proper combat was when I completed my daily solo dungeon with reasonable ease and this was a good introduction into the combat of Albion Online. What I like is that it somewhat resembles World of Warcraft but it’s just much simpler and easier. In WoW you have potentially 25+ abilities that you need to use and it can get quite complicated but here you only have 6 abilities and these are essentially tied into your gear choices.
Once you activate an ability this puts it on cooldown and so you need to time the use of abilities as some will have a longer cooldown than others. Based upon the gear you use you’ll gain access to different abilities which helps you to define the type of character you are playing. There were a range of different enemy types which had a range of different attack. There were AoEs, direct damage and more, you can overcome a lot of these attacks as a Tank with interrupts and crowd control skills and these even disrupt boss attacks.
The general concept of combat is movement, positioning and timing. You need to keep moving and avoiding damage, hit spacebar to restart auto-attacks, time abilities for the correct moment and manage resources and cooldowns to defeat enemies.
Progression
One of the good things about Albion Online is you are in control of your own success. You’re not relying on random drops and events to improve, you can just walk around and gather materials and craft your own gear and you can do this pretty much from the start. I decided to walk around the first village taking the east exit and I farmed ore along with completing any of the random solo dungeons that popped up.
After a while I took the northern exit to find hide, flax and tier 3 fishing. I used the majority of the materials I picked up to craft better gear and gathering tools for myself and then I used up all my materials to craft additional gear which I could easily sell to the trading post since everything is tradable so I was able to gain a lot of characters benefits from gathering, then crafting and then rewarded with silver for the hard work.
I noticed that Fishing was very rewarding when it came to selling items on the trading post at this early stage so I did that and built up about 50k silver, which I then reinvested into picking up some Tier 4 gear to get my Tank setup in the gear I wanted. I did some research on the Albion Online Wiki and looked through the trading post to see what gear might be good for a PvE Tank – you can find the build at the Albion Online Tank Build page.
One really nice thing about Albion Online is you’re able to buy your own island. On this island you can turn part of it into a farm and grow crops which you can then sell. I had to buy the initial seeds to grow the crops but upon harvesting those crops they yielded x2 the same amount of seeds back along with the grown product so I was then able to reseed the same area plus I had extra seeds to either sell or grow in another area of my island, and then the crop to also sell meaning I had a huge financial return for farming.
You can expand your island to add even more crops but you can also add animals for food products and you can build houses, buildings and hire workers to gather materials which is another income benefit. Overall the whole player housing not just an aesthetic thing but something that benefits your overall game progress and it’s well worth the investment of silver and time to gain the passive financial benefits, because it’s a nice passive income.
I personally like the fact that I can load up the game on my phone or tablet device to do my daily farming tasks but also do a bit of fishing on my island as well.
I setup my first Tank focussed build once I had collected enough silver, so I could begin learning and understanding how to be an effective Albion Online PvE Tank.
Tank Basics
Tanking in Albion Online is much simpler than a lot of other MMO games but still requires some understanding and effort. The Tank style of this game is a passive style where you can’t physically hold block or dodge attacks but you can use an ability to block or dodge depending on your gear selections.
You rely on damage mitigation to deal with incoming damage and ability timing in this case. You have to time your skill usage for the appropriate occasion as this puts a skill on cooldown so you would avoid using an ability that stuns for when enemies are casting an interruptible attack and you’d activate the block ability when you are receiving high damage or close to dying.
Enemies are aggroed based upon both a threat generation system mostly but you do have access to physical hard taunts if you choose them or need them for specific dungeons. The main job of a Tank in Albion Online is to aggro enemies, crowd control and stack them up, debuff them so your group can burn them down and interrupt big attacks that are cast by the enemy.
You can utilise food and gear to reduce your cooldowns which is really useful as a Tank allowing you to use your abilities more often.
The basics of Tanking are, you lead the way into combat, you attack each group of enemies first, ideally your group members do not attack anything meaning you have the most threat. You’ll typically try to pull 2-3 different groups of enemies all together by running past and hitting them, then circling around them to group them closer together so you can then use skills to stack, crowd control and debuff them. By stacking this way you also make better use of cooldowns. With boss fights it’s simply damage and debuff while keeping yourself buffed up and trying to mitigate incoming damage.
Gameplay & Content
I like the fact that Tanks have a function in the PvP side of the game. You can get involved in huge PvP battles or guild conflicts and Tanks can provide some really useful frontline support with their crowd control. This is something we don’t see very often in MMORPG games, a lot of the time Tanks have no real function or use in PvP with focus usually being on damage and evasion but Albion Online appears to have found a use for Tanks in group PvP.
One of my more long term concerns about the game is solo PvP. To begin with you are in zones that are safe where PvP is not possible. If you want to do the harder content or collect higher level materials you’ll need to venture into the Yellow, Red or Black zones which is where PvP is enabled.
I’ve participated briefly in some Yellow zone PvE content with my guild, if you are not flagged for PvP you can’t be killed here but people can still attack you and knock you down. In the Red and Black zones you are a target for full loot PvP meaning if you die, you’re going to lose your entire equipped gear. I’m yet to experience what it’s like but I already know that you’ll get into a lot of PvP battles with other players and you’ll even encounter groups of gankers if you venture too far into these zones.
PvP is a huge part of Albion Online and so seem to have some real influence on the game and it’s worth joining up with a guild as soon as you can, especially if you are a Tank and you’re venturing into PvP zones, which you’ll have to do to access some of the harder PvE content. The guild menus give you a lot of options so you can find exactly the type of guild to suit your needs.
With my guild I participated in some group dungeons in a yellow area and they were quite fun and very profitable but the maps can be expensive.
What content is there to do for a PvE Tank?
- Open World – in the open world you are able to kill enemies wandering around but you might also find open world solo dungeons and group dungeons which pop up now and again in the open world areas.
- Dungeons – As well has having the open world dungeons you also have instanced dungeons with fixed map locations these are often known as expeditions and they require a map. There are a number of other different dungeons such as solo dungeons which are for 1-2 people, group dungeons for groups of 3-5 people and raid dungeons which are for group of 6+ and randomized dungeons also.
- World Bosses – You are able to encounter a range of bosses with various difficulties, with roaming bosses but you also have open world raid bosses and resource bosses, some of these bosses are contested in PvP active zones however.
- Expeditions – These are instanced PvE missions which you can complete with a group. These are quite safe as you don’t lose any loot upon dying in these environments.
- Hardcore Expeditions – These are harder versions of the normal expeditions which have a tiered system where they get increasingly difficult the high level expedition you do, this is one of the main end game activities you would do as a PvE Tank.
- There are many other types of content to do such as Hellgates, Arena, Corrupted Dungeons, Guild vs Guild, Z vs Z and more but these are the most common PvE content types along with trading, gathering, crafting, farming and island building/housing.
Is it worth playing Albion Online in 2023
We’ll answer this considering a PvE Tank perspective especially.
In my opinion is it worth giving Albion Online a try. The game is currently thriving with a number of patches and updates arriving over the past few months that have made it a fun game to play. In game it is packed with players and its clear to see that the game is active and this is helped by the fact that everyone is sharing a single server so the player base is not watered down. As a Tank you’ll never have a problem finding groups to do content with.
If you have played classic MMORPG games like Runescape, Tibia and World of Warcraft then there is a good chance you would like what Albion Online has to offer, the game can be a bit of a grind because you need a constant supply of silver or materials but it feels worth it as everything you do has some overall benefit to your character. Even if you have to grind out fishing to gain silver, or gathering lots of ore to craft better gear you are still progressing your character no matter what you decide to do and the fact you can craft or buy and sell pretty much everything means you always have things you can do.
If you want to play Albion Online as a more serious game there is a strong end game vibe with hard PvE expeditions and you really have the opportunity to get involved in some exciting PvP if you join up with a good guild. For a more casual player you can enjoy some calmer features such as the crafting, gathering, farming and safe areas but you might run out of things to do if you are not into PvP and don’t get involved with a guild.
For anyone who has never played a Tank before you would have quite a good experience learning how to do so in Albion Online. With only having one weapon slotted at any particular time and 6 usable abilities and very few cooldowns, it’s not exactly complicated to be a Tank. A lot of the dungeons and expeditions are simply to move around and quick to learn how to do them, the main learning curve is knowing how many enemies to pull, how to stack them together and then how to avoid receiving too much damage. Once you mastered this and combine it with your threat generation you can progress that knowledge to each dungeon and expedition and even try the hardcore versions.
Even though Albion Online has almost no quests and is a very sandbox style game which is usually quite off-putting for many especially in an MMO game, they have found a good balance in keeping players engaged in the content and made it feel really rewarding.
