Tera - Anyone playing it?

[Jadeskies]

I see that Tera is out and I heard at least 2 guys during a vanilla wow raid run talking about playing the game so is anyone here trying this game out? I am not hearing any buzz about this game and that may not be a good sign.
Does anyone have any reviews on this game? It reminded me a lot of the imagery of Final Fantasy XI with updated graphics and the over all plot seemed a little ungraspable, living islands that dream up constantly respawning monsters which you defeat. Then again FFXI had a plot that was not very followable by a western playerbase.

Personally speaking the little girls with animal features (bunny or kitty ears) are a little creepy in a molesty kind of way. I do applaud thier approach of action over rotation, you get back flips and stuff so if the enemy launches a ranged attack and your not there then you don't get hit much like DCUO. If you are a lancer then you can strike every enemy in front of you so its a good thing to back up and make your enemy get in a line formation.

I may be wrong but this is a subsciption game. Anyone trying this game out? How is the character creation? Is it like FFXI where you have 6 different human appearances and all you can change is its hair color?

[Jadeskies]

Well I am giving this game a try and though I have only played it a day I am enjoying this game. I did have to upgrade my graphics card to get it to run smoothly but man was it worth it. I have been sitting on a new 550 ti Geforce for about 4 weeks because I was too lazy to sort out my wifes internet so I could steal her wireless thumb drive and remove the wireless card in my computer to make room for the graphics card.

There is nothing quite as fun as fighting an enemy with a huge buster sword (or two one handed swords) and wailing away until the mob looks like its going to strike and then leaping over the beast, whirling your camera around and laying into its back and even though it attacked you 12 times never laid a hand on you. :) You will need a good graphic card to run this game though since its an action game and if you are skipping all over the place you are not going to fight well.

I am only level 5 so far so I should have a better grasp of the game in a week or two.

The races are are gorgeous and there is something for everyone, from the masculine human males, demonic Aman and rocky Barrakan (I think thats the name) to the cute and cuddly Popporin animal people. I'm not playing the little animal girls because that all just feels kind of pervy to me but I know its huge in Asia.

The combat is very smooth and it does have a dumbed down version of wow quests, go kill x of these and come back, I did have a mission where I threw grenades at dummies though. Hopefully there are a few unique ones sprinkled in with the usual. However what keeps you coming back is the combat against all those guys you have to kill. This game takes skill as much as anything else.

[Jadeskies]

There is a prologue that you have to complete once but then I suggest skipping it and going directly to the island starting zone. Its a little confusing because in the prologue you are level 20 and then you go back to level 1. I still don't know why. Was that the future? The past? I dont know, just know the island is much better than the prologue.

[Alex]

I'm tired of playing mmos that fail.

[Jadeskies]

You should keep that in your copy paste file :) Wait a few months and see if it fails coming right out the gate. I'm enjoying it though. :)

The Archer is getting some bad rap right now, so like the dragon knight in FFXI you might want to avoid it until the dps gets better.

[Jadeskies]

Most of the quests on Noob Island were pretty standard faire but its the action in the game that keeps you clicking away. Then I ran into a quest where I was teleported to an instance where I had to defend Sorcha for 5 mins from 7 waves of enemies coming across a bridge. It starts off easy but quickly ramps up with swarms of little guys being pushed forward by task masters, then when you hit the 3 min mark more waves start attacking Sorcha from the path leading away from the bridge. If you were putting all your attention on the bridge then Sorcha would get cut down and you would fail to survive. This mission had me on my toes the whole time and I had been saving up unused bombs right up to this point and I had to use them to keep the little guys under control, and it took some bandages just to keep me in prime fighting shape.

The boss, called BAMs in game of the noob island was quite interesting. I had a random healer player enter with me so I was able to play the fight loosely but if I had gone in solo it may of taken me a few tries to beat the boss because you have to figure out its tells to avoid its attacks and after it fails to hit you get a window of time where it sits still for a second and you can unleash a charge up attack. It is far better than standing at its feet and just swinging swords while it swings at me.

If it was not for the fighting action this game would suck. But its got it, and it works.

[Jadeskies]

Two things that I like in this MMO that I hope other MMO's adopt...

1) Channels - Bunch of people stealing your mobs and generally annoying you? Even though you share a server you don't have to share your mining nodes and quest creature pools, you can switch to an emptier channel and not have to deal with all the rush.
2) Armor dyes - You can buy dyes to change your armor to what ever color you prefer. :)

[Jadeskies]

I just read Tera Faq that says you can pay for your subscription with in game gold by buying 'Chronoscrolls' off the auction house. This is thier way of combating gold sellers by removing gold from the economy and giving you game time in exchange. One person buys a scroll directly from Tera and then can sell it on AH, the buyer uses it and gets game time to play with for in game money.

I don't know how this actually works or even how much a chronoscroll goes for in game, I'm level 16 and all I have made is about 3 gold which I had pretty much spent upgrading inventory slots. I havent tooled with the auction house yet though, I am spending my time hack n' slashing.

[Brian Gravity]

Tera looks good but right now I am knee deep into the Guild Wars 2 and Secret World betas. Keep filling us in on your Tera experience, it sounds interesting so far.

[Jadeskies]

Will do ;)

This games action combat is rediculously addictive, if it were not for the combat mechanisms the quests would be awful, but the combat keeps it refreshing. Sometimes I am leaping, hacking and spinning the camera so fast that I accidently go shooting off in the wrong direction with my specialty attack.

[Jadeskies]

I hit level 23 last night on my warrior and at level 20 they open up a dungeon that you can cue up for, so it has dungeon finder (shame on you Swtor!) and I cued up for it. Currently warriors can't cue up as tanks, the only ones who can are lancers. So my cue time was 15 minutes and at 3 am it was 30 minutes, same as wow really.

The dungeon was pretty straight forward, stationary mobs, some patroling mobs with intersperced BAMS (Big Ass Monsters as named by Tera production), on regular mobs its usually a tank and spank but the BAMs tend to get trickier since they hit like frieght trains and jump around the battle field. Fortunately every mob has a tell and you just have to learn how to read them.

I did get to see other classes in action, especially the healing classes which I have no interest in playing. I just dont like healing jobs. You have your straight up priest who uses the cross hairs to do direct healing and some rather robut AOE healing. 1 ability lets them cross hair a player and mark them, then mark up to 4 more and then heal them all at once for the same mana cost or less than a regular heal. Its not easy though because you are using the camera target to hit moving players and some of them are trying to get behind a moving mob and flipping through the air spinning with thier swords out to the sides like I am. :)

The Mystic however has a very interesting way of healing players, monsters sometimes drop healing or mana healing orbs after you defeat them and you can pick them up to get a burst heal followed by a consistent smaller heal, the Mystic can create orbs himself and litter the battlefield with them. I know what your saying, "Oh thats annoying like trying to deal with light wells in WoW." Not really, to pick one up you have to be close to one and click the 'F' key, which is right beside your 'wasd' keys. In fact picking up stuff is such a natural breeze in this game that it makes wow corpse picking look silly. You dont click on corpses, they just toss the loot on the ground and you pick it up, if you dont in time someone else can. The Mystic also has a few direct heals if you are unable to pick up an orb and they give you lots of stat boosts. If you are fighting and you see your HP are not maxed out grab up an orb and heal right back up. Good Mystics tend to drop them all over the battlefield and a few right close to the action. They do drop it at thier feet though so to get it close to the fight they have to be careful.