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[Editorial] TERA: Rising: Our Fate of Arun Review
BillMurphy
Former Managing EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 4,565
On December 16th, En Masse released the first full TERA expansion, new level cap and all, into the wild. It may not make new fans of people who have already dismissed the F2P themepark, but for those who’ve always enjoyed Arborea’s mix of action, questing, and dungeoneering there’s a lot to love in the free expansion Fate of Arun.
Try to be excellent to everyone you meet. You never know what someone else has seen or endured.
Comments
I'm in the same boat. Though, I may have to give it another swing.
Played-Everything
Playing-LoL
Ya, questing and the community really destroyed the game for me. I was one of those who purchased it on release and quit just a few days after. What got me to play in the beginning is that it is such a beautiful world and it has the action combat.
The OP gave good info and I see no need to try it again. Good luck to those who enjoy this game!
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, Death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
Weaboo's, that's what. They can be pretty hilarious at times : )
In the land of Predators,the lion does not fear the jackals...
I've really enjoyed TERA's combat system (I have five 65's (lancer,slayer, zerker,warrior, and reaper) at this point). But I'm pretty much at a dead end. Trying to get into a dungeon is like pulling teeth. Way too many people are kicking anyone lacking high level gear.
Not to mention tanks kicking anyone who might compete with them for drops.
I originally came in at launch (founder account), but over time, the community has become even worse than WoW's. Its too bad, but I doubt anything is going to be done about it. Blue Hole seems to enjoy keeping everyone at each others throats, and EM doesn't seem to have much say in the matter.
Too bad rest of the game is at best, average.
However, while there is a lot of new content that has been introduced, a lot of older, former endgame content was outright removed from the game in the process; presumably to be re-introduced at some point in the future. So, naturally, there's a lot less to do now at level cap than there was just a couple of months ago. If you're looking for a bright side, a gradual introduction of the expansion makes the race to endgame a little more casual-friendly since the carrot is advancing forward at that much slower of a pace.
As for TERA's community, it occasionally glimmers with what I like to think of as trollish charm but most of the time it tries its darnedest to turn you into an immature adolescent. If you find that a scary proposition, you'll probably want to keep Global chat turned off. But it can be rather candid at times in ways other games that take themselves seriously often aren't, and that's something I like to look at as a positive.
Many of the previous posters said it correctly when it comes to the TERA community on the N.A. servers, especially with the fact that it serves as essentially a global server. Granted, many of the previous "Wounded World" content was removed to make room for the expansion content, and the last 2 dungeons that concluded the original story quests were dumbed down to allow for quicker passage into Fate of Arun. This is made up with a more difficult endgame dungeon content, where understanding the battle mechanics and having the gear comes at a big premium; a clear explanation of why some players only want highly-geared party or raid members.
Had it not been for its great combat system, I would still be on a hiatus from this game after playing it for a few months after its "global release", which was when I tried TSW, then moved to GW2. If only other MMO games like GW2 had adopted this kind of battle mechanics...
How do you quest without using the combat system? Would next to impossible.
If you like the combat system.. then you're using it to quest.
Community terribad, it's F2P. Bluehole and Enmasse are collecting millions a month and do nothing with or for the community that is "free"
Overall, questing and "quests" are a means to an end. They're an afterthought after you're done leveling to 65.
You absolutely cannot and will not get a group for end game content. You will be kicked, ignored and laughed at.
Period.
You need the gear in the end game content to run the end game content and no one cares. Everyone is better than you , everyone has more experience than you and you're not good enough.
That's the current Tera Community mentality. It's good thing, a very good thing I'm not in charge as I would render 90% of all accounts banned inside of one hour. Banned permenantly.
What you just said has no relevance to how bad the questing system is, your just making an excuse for it.
The questing is awful. When you can't even keep my attention to lvl 20 because I get so freaking bored due to the horrible quest hubs, than there is something wrong.
Smile
OK, I decided to make a post here to offer my point of view, as I have been playing Tera since pre-launch and to this day and it is hands down my favourite MMORPG.
I am sorry to say, but in one word the new expansion has been disappointing. And I will elaborate a bit. While any new content is certainly welcome, the Fate of Arun comes at the expense of actually removing large chunks of older content and virtually wiped out most of the instances we used to know. Granted, it could be argued that they would serve little purpose now, but this isn't exactly accurate.
I would agree that no one would have much interest in running WH or CW any more, not even LP, AB and RE (in its original form). Not when you are supposed to be getting "new gear". On the other hand, along with these instances, many more were completely removed. Couple this with the fact that most of the already "classic" instances offer almost nothing now in terms of useful drops, and the game is feeling kinda empty.
One of the greatest issues, and if the situation remains as is now, will become even more profound, is the absolute shortage of Master Enigmatic Scrolls. First, they removed them from the Agnitor NPCs, then they removed them from instances like KN, and now we do not even have that boring GG, which at least guaranteed a modest supply every day.
To me it all looks like a bold move towards the dreaded Cash Shop and RNG boxes as a source of much needed supplies, the MES being the first example here.
As far as the new instances go, I don't find them spectacular either. SA and the Catacombs are just a triviality that you do a few times until you get your glyphs... seriously, 2 whole instances and there is virtually no other drops of interest? As for Ravenous Gorge and Bathysmal Rise, they look pretty, they do have some decent mechanics.
However, considering they are more or less Normal Mode or "average" dungeons (or so I view them), their difficulty and especially drop rates are just pathetic. Are we really going back to the era when people used to run MCHM 50 times hoping to get ONE quill? I was hoping those times were over, because simply put it is a horrible waste of time. And the new Normal Mode instances are by no means "elite end game content", are they?
So, why really, we have to spend all this time, run a RG, which not every player finds a faceroll, and in the end there is like no drop at all? Something is rotten here, just saying.
As far as the leveling process is concerned, it is another triviality and very easy to reach 65, within a few hours. Questing is easy, straight forward, to the point of being boring, exp can be gained from several sources and it comes in large chunks. Nothing really novel here.
The re-designing of the enchanting system is welcome, it simplified things and it is probably much easier now to upgrade gear, at least until masterworking and mwa are required.
Tera still remains a lovely and beautifully made game and this is the reason I still play and enjoy it every day. However, as I said, the latest expansion has been a bit disappointing, at least the first installment of it.
I am hoping that the patches that will follow (I play on the EU servers) will fine tune and correct certain issues, and above all I really do hope Tera is not going the pay-2-win way, with important materials made very scarce in-game pushing us to the Cash Shop for them.
TERA used to be a promising game but the cash shop utterly ruined it. Contrary to other games, TERA is not a Pay to Win F2P but instead they have introduced some incredibly ridicilous fluff items which destroys any sort of immersion. I am talking about police car mounts, candy stick weapons sticks and "sexy" santa claus outfits for women (and men).
Imagine you are in a PvP or PvE situation and a police car comes up to you, then santa claus walks out of it and starts wacking you with a huge candy stick. I am not kidding, that is sort of the thing that happens in this game. It has basically become a farce.
They only way to avoid such nonsense is to solo, which is the only thing I do in this game these days but that gets boring pretty fast. And oh yeah, in the Korea version of the game has released something called an arcane, engineer, which sounds cool, but is basically a bikini clad elf (yep, gender locked female only) with a huge bazooka, I kid you not. This game has been taken over by a juvenile gang of morons.
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It blows my mind how incompetent the people running this game have become.
They introduced a new "battleground" where all you do is sit in a circle and kill monsters.
The new content can be cleared in 4 weeks....on like 5 different characters.
They thought it was a good idea to delay the next part of this patch 3 months. When you get to the end game, you have 2 new dungeons which are dead easy to clear. TWO! THEY EXPECT YOU TO DO THE SAME 2 DUNGEONS FOR THE NEXT 3 MONTHS.
More importantly, the North American publishers tried to trap its users into a subscription which they would have no use. A $10 auto renewal option. Oh yeah...except that they couldn't even pull off a scam properly. Some people's subscription did not even auto renew.