Dungeons

AION 2 carries more than two hundred dungeons across the full progression curve, a figure NCsoft uses for the global launch build as well as the live one. Dungeons span solo challenges, five-player party content and ten-player group content, and the design supports a wide range of difficulty: lower-tier content includes an Easy Mode with boss tutorials, while higher-tier content uses staged difficulty that scales beyond the standard format. Party sizes were four and eight before the Chapter 1 update raised them.

Three of the tiers now have their own pages: Expedition Dungeons for the five-player tier, Sanctuary Raids for the ten-player tier, and Transcendence System for the staged tier. Odyle Energy covers what it costs to run them.

Dungeon Formats

Difficulty Tiers

• Easy Mode: Boss-fight tutorials and reduced mechanics for players new to a given dungeon. Lets you learn the room layout and the broad shape of a fight before stepping into normal difficulty.

• Normal: The standard tier; the assumed format for most progression.

• Hard / Higher: Increased mechanics density and tighter execution windows; gear and rotation matter more.

Expedition Dungeons

Expedition dungeons are timed party challenges with stronger mechanics and high-tier loot. The Season 2 update added Dying Dramata's Nest and Cradle of Nihility, which expanded the high-end PvE roster significantly. Season 3 added Phantom Corridor on April 8, 2026, a four-stage expedition with progressively stricter item-level gates and unique drops feeding the Daevanian Yustiel system.

Transcendence Dungeons

Transcendence dungeons are the highest difficulty content and feature staged progression that ties into the Transcendence System. The Submerged Life Temple is a key Transcendence dungeon, with stages that gate further bosses behind clearing earlier ones. Transcendence content rewards top-tier gear and is the practical ceiling for solo and small-group endgame.

Submerged Life Temple was retuned in Season 3 so that a previous healing-suppression effect no longer applies, letting the new HP Absorption math from Combat and Skill Chains run cleanly inside the encounter. Group healing is no longer flatly nerfed by the dungeon's environment, which made the existing fights feel different on the same gear.

Season 3 Dungeons

Season 3 added new dungeons in addition to the systemic reworks above. Both feed into the Daevanian Yustiel progression path described under Daeva System and Daevanion Board.

Island of Blue Breath has confirmed Exploration and Conquest variants on Normal and Hard difficulty, but its specific item-level gate has not yet been confirmed in the materials available at the time of writing. Treat any cited gate value as provisional until the live build confirms it. Players running the dungeon report shorter clear times on the Exploration variant and tighter mechanics on Conquest.

Ongoing Live-Build Additions

The KR and TW build continues to add dungeons through seasonal patches. These come in three broad shapes, and the specifics below are provisional live-build figures rather than confirmed global content:

• New Transcendence dungeons. A mid-May patch added a four-stage Transcendence dungeon whose stages have used entry item levels in the 3,200 to 4,000 range across the four stages on the live build. Its English name has appeared in coverage under more than one translation of the same Korean title, so defer to the in-game UI; it drops the next-tier Arcana sets and a new crafting material.

• Daily mini-dungeons. Short daily instances built for a quick login routine rather than a long progression loop, where the reward scales with the score reached during a brief timed run.

• Sanctuary instances. Larger instances that introduce fresh gear and occasionally a new equipment slot. The Chalice of Muspel Sanctuary launched on the live build and added the Brooch slot, detailed in the next section.

Specific entry item-levels, drop tables, reward caps, set names, and launch dates for upcoming instances are tuned on the live build and frequently shift between the dev-stream preview and the patch that ships. Treat any single figure circulating ahead of the live patch as provisional until it lands, and defer to the in-game UI once it does.

Specific instances previewed in the recent live-build stream illustrate the three shapes: a four-stage Transcendence dungeon with entry item levels around 3,200 to 4,000 across its stages, a Sanctuary instance that launched on the live build (covered in detail below) which drops Lava Heart gear and introduced the Brooch equipment slot, and a daily mini-dungeon built around a 40-second coin-and-bomb scoring routine that pays out a few hundred thousand Kina at the top score. These names and figures are live-build values from a pre-launch broadcast; defer to the in-game UI for the official global English names and any post-broadcast tuning.

Chalice of Muspel Sanctuary

The Chalice of Muspel is the current top-tier Sanctuary instance on the KR and TW live build, added in the late-May patch and billed as the most challenging group PvE content in the game. The setting is an ancient temple submerged beneath lava deep inside the Muspel volcano, resurfaced after intense seismic activity. English coverage has also rendered the name as Grail of Muspel; this page uses the official global wording. Entry requires a minimum item level of 4,500, and players may attempt it an unlimited number of times within the run's time limit. As with every late-game instance, the figures below are current live-build values and may be tuned for the global launch.

The Kaldrix Brooch ties into the new Brooch accessory slot. The Sanctuary patch also added the craft-only Genesis and Nemesis Dragon Lord weapons and guards, produced through Succession Crafting with six base Soul Inscription options, plus the Philosopher's Stone: Power material that enables Soul Binding on the new gear. The same patch raised the six core stat caps to 250 and lifted the maximum Attack Boost and Defense Boost to 130 percent.

A June 10 live-build patch split the Chalice of Muspel into two difficulties. The original version became the Hard tier, and a new Normal tier was added below it for groups that are not yet geared for the full fight. The Normal tier does not drop weapons or direct gear pieces, so the Hard tier remains the only source of the Lava Heart weapon and the Kaldrix Brooch. The same patch added a mid-run retry option so a wipe inside the instance no longer forces a full reset of the attempt. As with the other figures here, these are current live-build values and may be tuned again before the global launch.

Chapter 1 Dungeons

The Chapter 1. Lands of Sand and Snow update raised the level cap to 50 and added a new tier of level-50 endgame dungeons. Party size for Expedition and Transcendence content expanded to five players and Sanctuary content to ten. Consumable entry tickets were removed entirely; those instances now pay out through Odyle Energy instead. Players can also ride pets inside dungeons from this update onwards. The English names below are NCsoft's own, published on July 6, 2026, replacing the several provisional renderings that circulated in earlier coverage of the Korean build.

Citadel of the Fallen Daeva (Hard)

Community clear reports for the Hard version describe a three-boss layout. The first boss periodically summons swords into the arena that must be cleansed off the floor before they overwhelm the group. The second boss marks every party member with a circle that drops a high-damage poison pool after a short delay, then follows with a wide slice attack, so groups stack to drop the pools in one spot, dodge out, and spread for the slice. The final boss works off color auras: players carry a color, mechanics resolve by matching or avoiding zones of that color, and a golden-circle mechanic wipes groups that mishandle it. Reports also note the legendary drop chance here is markedly lower than in earlier dungeons. None of the three bosses has an official English name yet, and this mechanics summary is community-sourced, so treat both as provisional until official material covers the fight.

August 2026 Additions

The August 12, 2026 patch added a new level-50 Expedition to the Korean and Taiwanese build, named 잠식된 데우스 연구기지 in Korean. As of September 13, 2026 no single English rendering has settled across NCsoft press material and English coverage, so this wiki keeps the Korean name. Forms in circulation include Corroded, Consumed and Encroached Deus Research Base. The instance opens in an Exploration variant and a Conquest variant with Normal and Hard difficulties:

A companion four-stage Transcendence dungeon arrived in the same patch; its stage gates and new Arcana rewards are covered on the Transcendence System page. The patch also raised the contribution required to earn Odyle Energy cubes in Expeditions and Transcendence dungeons from 1% to 5%, and the note flags that the threshold may be adjusted again.

The August 26, 2026 patch converted the Kina paid out by six instances into a bound form that cannot be traded or moved between characters. It covers the Hard Conquest runs of 불의 신전 and 사나운 뿔 암굴, the Normal and Hard Conquest runs of Dying Dramata's Nest and Cradle of Nihility, the Transcendence dungeon 가라앉은 생명의 신전, and the Sanctuary raid 심연의 재련: 루드라. No settled English rendering exists for the four Korean-named instances, so this page keeps the Korean until an official rendering appears. The change is aimed at Kina farmed for resale rather than at the instances themselves, and clear rewards are otherwise untouched.

Player-Replacement System

In group dungeons, AION 2 includes a player-replacement system so a single dropout does not necessarily end a run. The system tries to fill the empty slot from a queue of available players, which keeps long pickup-group runs alive when one member leaves. The replacement does not lose existing progress on the active stage, and the new arrival inherits any completed checkpoint flags.

Tips

• Run Easy Mode the first time you encounter a new dungeon. The shorter rotations and lighter mechanics let you read the room before doing it for real.

• Build your role first. A dungeon is much harder when your tank does not have threat tools or your healer does not have a single-target emergency cooldown.

• Check the seasonal rotation. Top-tier rewards usually rotate with each season; chasing a piece that is leaving the rotation is a common time pressure for group play.

• Track Yustiel's Trace drops. The Daevanian Yustiel progression is the gating currency for current top-tier accessories; Phantom Corridor and Submerged Life Temple are the primary loops.

Trials

Trials are a content type added to the Korean and Taiwanese build on July 15, 2026, sitting alongside Expeditions, Transcendence, Sanctuaries and Nightmare content. They are entered through the Expedition interface but run on their own difficulty and reward rules, and they are aimed at players who have already cleared the existing endgame tiers.

The distinguishing feature is that you build the difficulty yourself. A Trial exposes four separate traits, each of which can be set from stage 1 to stage 4. The final difficulty is the sum of the four, which means the floor is stage 4 and the ceiling is stage 16, and two groups can run the same Trial at very different levels of pressure by weighting the traits differently.

Clearing a Trial awards a currency used only for this content, which is spent at a dedicated Trial vendor inside the Expedition area. Because rewards are gated per difficulty per week, running the same Trial repeatedly at one setting does not pay out again; the intended loop is to clear at several difficulty totals across the week. The first Trial opened at the item level 4,800 gate above, which places it beyond the Transcendence tiers on the current gear curve.

Solo Ladder Changes in Chapter 1

The solo instances were reworked alongside the group content. Nightmare gained a fourth layer with new bosses, and clearing a specific stage there now grants the combined rewards of every preceding stage rather than only that stage's payout. Ascension Trial gained a Doom difficulty that opens at item level 4,000, sitting above the previously top tier. Both changes landed with Chapter 1 on the Korean and Taiwanese build.

Related Pages

• Classes

• Combat and Skill Chains

• Daeva System and Daevanion Board

• Transcendence System

• Phantom Corridor

• Succession Crafting