Category Archives: TERA

3X: Month 1 Update

That’s just about as uncreative a title as I’ve come up with in awhile. /whap self. Also, my Google-fu has failed me for several months now – I am unable to write a blog post in Chrome. I can set all the options, etc. but I cannot type in the text window. I’ve tried deleting the cache and everything else, and every WordPress forum post I’ve read so far comes up empty and gets closed with no resolution. I’ve installed a few plugins but I can’t use them from Live Writer obviously.

Ok, so here we go with a status update on my attempt at juggling multiple MMOs and still hoping to feel like I’m getting somewhere and investing myself in the experience.

Star Trek Online

No new content since the Season 6 release last month, so I’m still mostly doing dailies for the 8,000 Dilithium per day. I was doing STFs a couple months ago and I have two of the three MACO ground pieces, but I’ve petered out a bit so getting the final piece to unlock the MACO Armor costume will take awhile. Otherwise, I try to get some Fleet Marks to help out our little starbase, especially during the Fleet Mark Events. During the day I’m often the only one on but sometimes in the evenings there might be enough fleet-mates online to queue ourselves up as a team, which is a lot of fun.

Allods Online

I know right? Petter mentioned something about Allods on Twitter, and I still had it installed from last year so what the heck, I patched it up and played a few hours earlier in the month. I actually had some fun but decided that I wasn’t in quite the same place as last year so I made a new character. Exact same role – Healer – but instead of the Xadaganian (Human for the Empire faction) Inquisitor, I now have an Arisen (Undead Cyborg?) Heretic that I’ve been playing on and off during down times and he is now level 13 or so as of last week.

I got into a group and completed the XAES instance. I think there were three, maybe four players, plus we all used our freebie Mercenary Contract to summon an AI to help us out. Very straightforward instance, no real surprises but that’s what I’d expect from a low level instance. Allods will be something I just do on the side every now and again, mostly out of curiosity plus it gives me a chance to see how a built-for-F2P game ends up and where the item shop starts coming into play. My impression has always been that item shops are always end-game requirements, though I’ve read about some that ramp up the XP curve so much around the mid-game that buying XP boosts becomes almost required. We’ll see. I didn’t play during the controversial launch that plagues Allods to this day even though all the prices were permanently reduced and the item shop death penalty has been removed. I will say for a straight up F2P game, Allods has the most impressive engine I’ve seen.

TERA

Earlier in the month, TERA had their Suit Up for Summer event, which involved finding glowing chests in coastal regions of the game, then being the first player to whack that chest to open it and receive a random reward. So, yes, just like the game content itself, this was a grind dealing with the random loot generation until I finally got the swim suit for my Baraka Lancer. In the meantime I did find some of the more in-demand suits such as the Castanic Female which sold for a hefty sum on the Auction House, so I now have plenty of gold to buy more Glyphs to experiment with my build a bit.

Last week, the Argon Queen update went live which added PvP Battlegrounds for level-capped players, and the game’s first raid. Also introduced is a new mechanic for Lancers and Warriors called Resolve. It adds a third bar to our vitals for us to manage, and for Lancers will force many of us, myself included, to alter our play style to fit the new mechanic because now our Resolve will diminish while using Stand Fast, our block ability. Up to now, many Lancers would “turtle” where they’d run up and use Challenging Shout (taunt) then Stand Fast taking the hits. Each hit you took while blocking slowly depleted your Mana, and if you turtled too long, you wouldn’t have enough Mana to activate one of your abilities, most importantly another Challenging Shout when you inevitably lost aggro since you’d been standing still blocking the whole time. I’ll admit, I often turtled in instances mostly because while leveling I don’t need to repeat instances to learn the enemy attack patterns, but I only held Stand Fast when I knew I was going to be taking hits. Once the boss wasn’t doing an obvious tell, I was busy smacking him to build more aggro and regenerate Mana. Resolve, on the other hand, begins depleting the moment we go into Stand Fast so it’s going to force Lancers to become much more active. To help with that, the patch also removed the one-second cooldown for Stand Fast, which burned me in almost every instance or group BAM fight so far because if you press the right mouse button to block before it finished, there’s no warning that it’s not ready, you simply stand there wide open for attack, which comes a few milliseconds later and you’re knocked down for a few seconds, taking quite a bit of damage in the process and that’s valuable time you could be losing aggro to your dps classes and possibly the healer now that you need to be topped off again (healing generates a ton of aggro in TERA). Finally, the patch also added two new skills for the Lancer: Backstep, which several (all?) of the other classes have, is just what it sounds like, an ability to jump backwards out of harm’s way. This can be useful in a couple ways for a Lancer. First, the obvious if you’re perhaps low on Resolve and you have aggro but can’t afford to block right that second, you can jump back to give you a few more seconds of Resolve regeneration while the boss comes to you. Second, you can use it to get behind the boss by exploiting the mechanics behind it. If you very quickly swivel your camera so the boss is behind you then do Backstep, you jump backwards through the boss where you have a few seconds to pound on him from the rear for bonus backstab damage! The new Wallop skill has your Lancer jump forward and slam his shield into the ground for a chance of knocking the enemies to the ground. Used on its own, it has a semi-lengthy (for TERA anyway) cast time, but if used as a combo with other opening skills it becomes nearly instant-cast.

The Secret World

I’ve had one hell of a time having fun in TSW, mostly due to a poor choice of weapons when I first created my Templar, then having to repeat the content over and over again while I experimented with other weapons. A few days ago, I switched out of Blades into Pistols and kept Blood Magic. I’m honestly not sure what synergy those two have, but I did find someone’s build they called a Battle Cleric. I went with it because it used all Inner Ring (beginner) abilities from both weapons except for one advanced Outer Ring ability which didn’t take too long to acquire since it was the only one I had to set a goal for. Now that I have this build, I can concentrate on working on some of the pre-made Decks and building my character up. I still feel he’s fairly inadequate but that seems to be mostly a gear thing. Very little gear drops in Kingsmouth, it’s most quest rewards to prevent farming. So I’m QL3 gear with a few still QL2 because I haven’t found replacements. I can deal with most of the Kingsmouth mobs one on one, but if a second one enters the fray I’m in trouble, and three I’m dead if I can’t get away. Since I end up doing a lot of circle-strafing, it can be easy to accidentally pick up new mobs that were nearby so it’s a bit touchy still.

Yesterday, I did finally manage to get enough of the quests done to open up the Dead in the Water quests which took me to the first instance, the Wreck of the Polaris. Like the game world, the instance exudes atmosphere and mood and I found it refreshing for a first instance to actually require some situational awareness and used some basic mechanics rather than the typical tank and spank that most MMOs go for with their very first group instance. My favorite part was the cut scene towards the end where I thought we were done then a very Cthulhu-looking monster flies up and swats our helicopter to the ground, forcing us to fight him. That was fun, and I had to switch to mainly healing a lot of the time (learning experience, I actually had no idea the couple Blood Magic spells would work on other players) so apparently Pistols/Blood is a DPS/Support build. I can get behind that!

Guild Wars 2

I’ve always enjoyed Guild Wars so picking up GW2 was no surprise. However, I was not planning on getting it right away. I figured I already had enough game-wise, work-wise and life-wise on my plate. But at the last minute I caved and bought the Digital Deluxe edition and spent a fair amount of time playing over the weekend in the head start launch. I hadn’t spent any time getting into the GW2 hype or educating myself about the various classes, but several months ago one of the players I follow on Google+ did her own rundown and convinced me to go for the Guardian class. I’m enjoying it so far and have no desire to start rolling alts anytime soon.

My main character in Guild Wars was always my Monk, Benjeth Lorhall so in deciding on the Guardian class, I also decided to continue Benjeth’s legacy. So here is Jheryvin Lorhall. The Guardian class in general seems inspired by the Paragon from the first game, while adding mostly melee weapons to the mix rather than throwing spears. That’s fine, the Paragon ended up being my favorite secondary character. Despite my loathing for RPG PvP, I do hope to become involved with World vs. World in GW2. I’m beyond terrible with melee PvP in particular so I was thrilled to learn the Guardian has some great support skills using a staff! He also gets some scepter skills which is another ranged weapon but aside from unlocking all the skills, I didn’t spend any time really learning which situations the scepter would be preferred.

I may do a proper writeup of my GW2 experiences, but I do have a couple of negative points:

First, the weapon skill unlocks. I am given to understand that during beta unlocking weapon skills was a lengthy and time-consuming process and that very late in beta it was adjusted to its current fast process. It hasn’t taken me more than five minutes to unlock every skill on any particular weapon, which begs the question: why bother with the unlocks at all? Second, since (apparently?) all weapon skills are hard-locked and I’ll never get more skills for a weapon, I am already feeling a bit limited. I get a staff, five minutes tops I have all five skills and that’s all I ever get. And I’m only level 2 or 3 at the time with 77 more levels to go. Yes, I can unlock character skills and switch those up but even then, the mystery and exploration of skills from Guild Wars is gone. I press H to open up the Hero UI and right there every skill I can ever unlock is before me. I can just sit there at level 1 and plan things out and once I have that plan, I can spend the additional skill points I get unlocking the rest for completion. That just doesn’t feel Guild Warsy to me.

Second, the dynamic events. Mind you, I am enjoying them where I didn’t care for the Public Quests in Warhammer. There are plenty of them and they’re quite varied in style so far. However, even with the backwards-only level scaling, GW2 is still a vertical progression theme park world and I do have concerns that once the initial rush is over, the lower level zones will start having population issues. With my job, I can only play a couple times per week. I experienced drastic low population issues within the first three weeks of both WAR and SWTOR which was a major factor in my cancelation of both those games. One does not cancel GW2 at least, but my concern is that I may have trouble getting XP to level in a week or few. I hope that’s not the case, but I feel it is a valid concern nonetheless at this point in time.

Tri-Gaming

Back in June, Syp over at Bio Break decided he was going to continue playing his favorite three MMOs and came up with a three-quest plan, which he later revised to a time block plan per game.

I’ve been playing three MMOs lately myself — yes, me playing MMOs again! — and for now I’ve decided to stick with these three with occasional dips into a few others, plus my Xbox 360 gaming of course.

The MMOs I’m putting on the pedestal?

Star Trek Online, naturally, since it’s the one I write about most and probably my favorite game on PC at the moment. I don’t play STO “like an MMO” per se, meaning I don’t go into it necessarily with the same attitude that I would most other MMOs I decide to stick with. I can just jump into STO and do my dailies, or do some STFs or Fleet Events, chat or role-play and I’m good, no worrying about “MMO Stuff.”

TERA! I’m on the three-month subscription plan but – as predicted – all the blogger / Twitter / G+ people I played with that first month jumped ship when Guild Wars 2 started running their Beta Weekends, plus The Secret World was finishing up beta and they were all doing that as well. Last week I fired up TERA again, and ya know, despite being the linear Diku treadmill, I just really enjoy the game and I enjoy the hell out of the Lancer class. So I’m planning on sticking with it for now and reaching end-game.

The Secret World. This was an impulse purchase, namely because I’d been ignoring all the information about the game but in the end some of my online friends whose opinions I value most got the Lifetime so I broke down and got one too on launch day without so much as having watched a single video of gameplay. Totally sight-unseen. And… it’s… different. In a good way – no, in a great way! But… There’s always a “but…” isn’t there? I’m really not digging the combat or the faux “weapon combo = class” setup. I’d read on someone’s TSW beta blog (I could have swore it was Syp but he said it absolutely wasn’t) that Assault Rifle and Blade was a good combo so as soon as the game installed, that’s what I did. Afterwards, some Cabal-mates told me that might indeed be a good combo for one of the other factions (do skills differ between factions?) but not so much for Templars. I love shooters, so when I’m using an Assault Rifle the last thing I want to see is some slow action that fires a single shot. That’s what sniper rifles are for. My finishers were automatic, and they were fun if they worked and critted, but otherwise I totally was not enjoying the AR/Blade mix, it felt ineffective with very little survivability. So… a bunch of wasted Skill Points right there. Now I’m starting over with Blood magic but keeping Blades for now. So I’m still in Kingsmouth Town repeating every mission I can find to build up points in Blood, plus apparently I need to put points into my Talismans so I can equip better gear. TSW is already a very slow game, and aside from combat (at least the low / noob combat) not being very interesting or even fun, I feel like I’m spinning my wheels that I am not in any way, shape or form ready or able to progress to anything new yet so I have to repeat the same quests I did the first time. There are some other things I could complain about but really haven’t put them into coherent thoughts and words yet. But – another but! – when my Cabal is active and at least chatting TSW doesn’t seem as lonely and it’s definitely something I’m willing to continue for the story and seeing how Funcom and Ragnar Tornquist’s team put all the paranormal conspiracy theories and all sorts of horror literature into a single lore-filled world. I have to imagine that once I finally earn enough Skill Points and Ability Points, I’ll be able to put together some decks that start getting fun and useful. So in the end, I think I’ll be happy with the Lifetime purchase and do plan on sticking with TSW.

TERA: First Impressions

Just to get this out of the way, I knew TERA (which stands for The Exiled Realm of Arborea) was in development, mostly due to the “upskirts” posts on Massively and other comments. I honestly had no plans to waste even a moment’s thought on the game since I am still mostly burned-out on traditional MMOs. But after everyone on Google+ was suddenly having so much fun, I figured what the heck and tried it out. And am I glad I did!

What TERA is:
Let’s make no bones about it, TERA is a full-on traditional vertical progression themepark, complete with the Trinity (Tank, Healer, DPS). You move in a linear fashion from one level-bracketed zone to the next, from one quest hub to the next. You pick up quests that are mostly the Kill N Monster variety. It could be considered “grindy” (and who knows, maybe it is at high levels?) since you’re doing so much combat, but the combat is the #1 attraction to the game! It’s why you are there in the first place.

What TERA is not:
Anything remotely resembling a “real” virtual world with meaningful crafting, economy, PvP or whatever else someone might be tempted to apply the “sandbox” label to. If you’re looking for that, and only that, then this is yet another of thousands of MMOs to skip over. These are not the droids you are looking for. Move along.

So why play?
Bluehole and En Masse claim TERA is the “first Action MMO” which is a highly debatable statement (hello over there, Vindictus and Dragon Nest) although to be fair it could be debatable just how “MMO” the two I just mentioned are, so… six of one, half-dozen of the other.

Linear theme park it may be, but make no mistake: TERA is absolutely gorgeous! The graphical quality, the art design, the colors, the effects… everything comes together and really pulls me in and I enjoy seeing everything. Unlike your typical Western game these days all about semi-realism with constantly killing wolves, spiders, and boars (oh my!) (with a healthy glance toward LOTRO in particular) the monsters in TERA are all bizarre creations that make you wonder what the modeler was smoking, but in a good way.

I’m sure you’ve all seen the character models already, especially the female ones. I normally have at least one female character in an MMO, but I’ve already deleted the female Castanic Archer I made. No idea where my personal line in the sand is, but that character crossed it with the whole “upskirts slut” thing. To be totally forthright, just before writing this I created (but not yet played) another female Castanic character, this time a Mystic. Not sure if it will take or if I end up re-rolling as a male Mystic.

TERA has seven races, and eight classes. Every race can be every class; there are no forced racial choices, unless you’re trying to min/max your build with racial abilities.

So far I have a Lancer and a Priest up to level 13 or so, fully completing the story on the Island of Dawn (ie. “noob island”) and moving onto the mainland. I have a Berzerker (two-handed axe melee DPS with block ability) and as mentioned above I have the not-yet-played Mystic (support and backup healer) and also a Warrior (dual-wield melee DPS or evasion tank; both very challenging but fun and rewarding).

Your two primary vitals are Health Points (HP) and Mana Points (MP). The way combat and class abilities work (so far) is balancing the two. Obviously you want your HP up or you’ll die, but I’ve seen certain skills on certain classes spend HP to pull off a devasting move, for example, much like the Necromancer in Guild Wars 1 (and presumably 2?).

For example, my Lancer comes with a full MP bar. Using hotbar skills spends MP but using his main attack gains MP to spend. Blocking spends a little MP as well. So it becomes a balancing act to gain and spend MP.

The Berzerker, on the other hand, starts off with an empty MP bar and I have to use my main attack to build it up so I can use hotbar abilities. Blocking also spends MP, and I think it costs more than blocking on the Lancer does?

The Priest starts with a full MP bar, but none of his attacks regain MP like the melee classes do. Instead he gets one ability early on that lets him regain a chunk of MP out of combat, then another around level 12 that lets him move full speed while recharging more MP.

TERA does play like a normal third-person MMO except the normal mode is similar to a third-person shooter (actually, think Tabula Rasa if you played that) where you have a fairly wide targeting reticule you have to aim. Mostly this is pretty easy and fun. I did have concerns about the Priest, however, trying to aim a heal at a player who is probably dodging or jumping all over, but this morning I took the Priest on the final quest on noob island which is an instance to fight a big demon monster and it was actually fairly easy. I activate the directed heal spell, then aim at my target, then click the heal again to cast it.

All the classes have some very unique play styles to them, even the more traditional ones, and they are all very fun to play so far. I haven’t had a game promote altaholism in a long time, but TERA is doing it.

Crafting
Unlike some MMOs you’re not restricted — at least mechanic-wise — to a tradeskill. Everyone can gather every type of material, and everyone can craft in every profession. The catch is that currently crafting is extremely expensive. I’ve been gathering everything that isn’t nailed to the floor though so I can craft later, and also because gathering gives not only a tiny bit of XP (I’ve actually leveled twice just from gathering) but also a very slight 10-minute combat buff! People in chat say quest rewards are generally better at low levels, and crafting doesn’t start to make sense until you’re in your 30s where you’re making enough money to afford it.

Campfires and Public Buffs
This part of the game reminds me of Star Wars Galaxies. Towns and outposts will have campfires, but players can buy them too and set them up in the wilderness. Standing around the campfire will overcharge your Stamina (Stamina seems to mean HP and MP together) — I’ve been to 130% so far —
plus you can get “charms” from mob drops or from vendors and burn them in the fire. Everyone standing around the fire gets the charm buff, up to three (one of each type)! Very nice touch!

TERA-Moambasa TERA-Fozhran

Summary:
I’m enjoying the hell out of TERA so far, mostly because the classes and the combat is so well-done and it’s just pure entertainment. You know, FUN! The reason we play games to begin with. I’m almost tempted to liken it to a traditional MMO version of Diablo (or perhaps Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckonging would be a better example) in the sense that you’re not there for the story, like you were with SWTOR, you’re there to be a badass beating the crap out of crazy monsters and get loot! You’re there simply because it’s fun, which I can’t say of SWTOR… /cough