AION 2 — Domination, Mapped: All 30 Strongholds, the Rotation Behind Them, and What the Chests Hold

Where this comes from — the mode itself was announced in the September 2 patch notes. Everything below the announcement is read out of the shipped client (build of September 1, 2026), which carried five new tables the previous build did not have. The details have not been published by NCSOFT, and any of them can still change. Where a number is missing, it is because the client does not state it — we would rather say so than invent it.

The short version

• Thirty strongholds, fifteen in Verteron and fifteen in Altgard. Each side attacks the other’s continent.
• Three rotation groups per side, five strongholds each — and the groups are map sectors, not a shuffle. One window lights up one corner of the zone.
• Monday, Thursday, Saturday, at 20:00 and 23:00. A round lasts 25 minutes. Six reward keys a week, recharging Wednesday at 05:00.
• Level 50, 4 500 Combat Power, and a completed achievement — Stronghold Sweep Ⅵ, which asks for 15 strongholds cleared in Verteron and 15 in Altgard.
• One objective per stronghold: break the Monolith of Glory (Elyos) or the Monolith of Pride (Asmodian), through a timed invulnerability phase and two guards.
• You are ranked inside your own class, not against the server. Fifteen chest tiers, and the losing side is paid too.
• Only attackers may plant a Kisk — one hour, 240 resurrections, 80 people.
• Eighteen new achievements, and two old open-world ganking achievements removed to make room.

1. The timetable is the real constraint

Domination runs on a fixed schedule written into the client: Monday, Thursday and Saturday, with two windows each day, at 20:00 and 23:00. A round is 1 500 seconds — twenty-five minutes.

That is six rounds a week, a hundred and fifty minutes in total, and the client issues exactly six reward keys to spend on them. The keys recharge weekly on Wednesday at 05:00, which sits in the gap between Monday and Thursday. Spend a key, and that battle can pay you; run out, and you can still fight but not collect.

Getting in

• Level 50.
• 4 500 Combat Power.
• Stronghold Sweep Ⅵ — the sixth step of the achievement that asks you to clear 15 strongholds in Verteron, and its Altgard twin. Both factions have their own pair.
• A third threshold of 500 000 that the client stores beside the other two without naming it. On the numbers it looks like a gear score. We are not going to pretend we know.

2. All thirty strongholds, and where they are

These are not new places. They are the garrison forts that have been standing in Verteron and Altgard for months — the ones you have walked past on the way to something else. What the September patch added is the layer that turns them into objectives, and, for the first time, their names in a table.

Every point below is a stronghold gate, located by name: the client’s attack title for each battle reads "Miros Post Siege", and the client also owns a gate object called "Miros Post Door" that is physically placed in the world. Strip the word Siege, match the names, take the coordinates. All thirty were found that way — including the fifteen Asmodian ones, which in August we could only find by clustering scenery.

Verteron — Elyos territory

Altgard — Asmodian territory

How much to trust the pins. In Verteron the gate positions can be checked against a second, independent source — the props built inside each stronghold, which carry the stronghold’s own slot in their names. Fourteen of the fifteen agree to within 21–62 metres, which is roughly the width of a stronghold: the gate sits on the perimeter, the props sit inside it. The one outlier is Mantasch Patrol Base, whose props are spread across a drana field. Altgard has no second source, so its pins rest on the gate names alone.

3. The objective: one monolith, one barrier, two guards

Each stronghold holds a single objective, and the client’s own type for it is "kill NPC". On the Elyos side the target is the Monolith of Glory; on the Asmodian side, the Monolith of Pride. Both are level 50. Both speak in local chat — the Empyrean Lords’ benediction, on each side its own.

The fight is not a straight damage race. The monolith carries a Protection Barrier, and while it is up the monolith is invulnerable — the client says so twice, once as a status effect and once as a line of dialogue that warns you it has started. Two Monolith Guardians spawn alongside every monolith.

"The barrier has been activated. The Monolith is invulnerable."

"The Monolith has become invulnerable for a fixed duration."

Nothing is waiting there between windows. We dumped every placed object in both continents — 14 579 actors in Verteron, 17 963 in Altgard — and there is not one monolith among them. Thirty monoliths and sixty guards are placed by the server when a window opens, through a list of 180 start-and-stop spawn instructions written for exactly that purpose. Walk to a stronghold at any other hour and it is an ordinary building.

4. The reward ladder, and why it has a class column

You are not ranked against everyone in the battle. You are ranked against the other players of your own class in it — nine separate ladders running at once. This is the change that forced the patch to add a class column to a reward table that never had one, and it is the single most player-relevant thing in the data: your competition is eight other Gladiators, not the whole zone.

Both sides are paid. The winning ladder has seven tiers, the losing ladder eight — it starts one grade lower and stretches further down. Every chest is bound.

Nine classes multiplied by fifteen tiers is the 135 rows the patch added, and the ladders run to rank 200 — the client’s own estimate of how many people of one class it expects to show up.

5. The rules that will actually bite

• You cannot leave while in combat. The exit refuses outright.
• Leaving starts a lockout. Both late entry and teleport are gated by timers that count down in the interface: quit and re-entry is closed for a period; move and moving again is closed.
• Rankings only exist inside the zone. Ask for the board anywhere else and the client declines.
• Only the attacking side may plant a Kisk. The Domination Kisk lasts an hour, serves 240 resurrections and holds 80 people — an entire raid’s worth of respawn, handed to whoever is pushing.
• The Kisk stone costs 500 000 Kinah from the misc vendor, one version per faction, paid from the combined wallet.
• Domination has its own chat channel, prefixed RE, with two bindable commands of its own.
• There is a mail template for it — rewards that miss you in the field arrive in the post.

6. Eighteen achievements in, two out

Nine achievements per faction arrived with the mode: Territorial Expansion (win 3, 6, 10), Get Out of My Way (kill 50 up to 500 opposing players), A New Master Appears! (occupy 3 to 15), Line in the Sand (defend 3 to 15), plus Rift Within a Rift, The Final Bastion, To the Battlefield, Victory Dispatch and Rift Predator.

Two achievements went the other way. "Marching Beneath the Elyos Banner" and its Asmodian twin — twenty-six steps of killing enemy players out in Verteron, Eltnen, Altgard and Morheim — were deleted in the same patch. Open-world ganking rewards came out; scheduled sieges went in. Read that as a direction, not an accident.

How much should you believe?

• Certain — it is in the client and we can point at it: the schedule and round length; the three entry gates that are labelled; all thirty stronghold names and their rotation groups; the monolith, its barrier and its two guards; the fifteen chest tiers and the per-class ranking; the Kisk figures; the eighteen new achievements and the two deleted ones.
• Reasoned — the pieces fit, but nothing states it outright: that the unlabelled 500 000 threshold is a gear score; that the pins are accurate to stronghold width in Altgard as well as Verteron; that the six unnamed numbers stored per group (60, 200, 300, 300, 2 000, 1 000) are participant minimums, contribution floors and scoring weights.
• Unknown: what the losing side needs to do to place at all, whether contribution is measured in damage or in objectives, and how the two windows on a day relate to each other. The client stores the mode; the server runs it, and the server is not in the download.

We read the client after every patch and report what changed. If any of this goes live in a different shape — and some of it will — the correction will be here.