Who will Actually Play Tera? Lv. 58 Lancer Review

BigBadWolfe

I finally hit 58 and wanted to do a full review of the game. However I will have to save endgame content for the third review. This is going to focus more on completing the first review with the additions covered by the first October content update.



I'll be making reference to my last review which can be found in an older thread on this forum.



Story- 7/10: My feelings for the story is largely unchanged from my first impression except that they definitely saved the best campaign battles for last. I also need to mention how much I looked forward to playing in each new leveling zone. Easily the most impressive looking zones, capital cities, and dungeon designs in an MMO.



Classes- 6/10: The whole purpose of the trinity based system is that people get to choose a role and the classes should be designed to fill its role well. Before I can claim Tera the best trinity based game again, they need to seriously fix their tanking classes. Warrior is a very popular class but they are too difficult to tank with, every healer I know loathes Warrior tanks. Lancer is the opposite in that they are a great tanking class but they are unpopular because they are too difficult to level. In my entire guild of 100+ players there are maybe 2 or 3 level 58 Lancers at the moment, including myself. I don't know how to fix these classes, and to be honest these issues might probably resolve themselves via cross-server LFG and an English retail version. However I can't give a review on what Might happen.



Progression- 8/10: I'm very impressed with how they streamlined the leveling process in the new patch. Outside of the soul-stealing void that is lv. 45-50 range, leveling overall is less grindy and thus more fun. With the new event rewards, leveling alts is now a reasonable option.



A huge and very expensive aspect of progression is the gear enhancement system. I can't go into details but it's basically a huge money dump that is a nightmare for the individual but great for the economy. I actually witnessed of prices of the AH drop during my play time. Personally, I don't like the RNG but the results speak for themselves.



Combat-9/10: My impression of the combat in this game is largely unchanged from my previous review, which was pretty good. I’m going to add a new community review in its place.



Community-8/10: This is definitely subject to change after the NA/EU versions launch, but I’m very happy with the K-Tera community so far. It seems the overwhelming majority of players in this game come from Aion and Lineage 2. This game is odd in that unlike most MMOs, Tera seems to have absolutely no appeal at all to WoW players, so you can take that as you will. This game does seem to hit a sweet spot between casual and hardcore players, but it’s still lacking enough content to keep hardcores interested. Since the endgame is mostly 5-man content I don’t see as much collaboration between guilds as I would like, but I expect this to change when the Political system is finalized, and I’m hearing talks of adding 20man raid content in a future patch, so we’ll see.



Bottom Line: This game has a weird style in that it’s not casual enough for players of western mmos, and it’s not hardcore enough for hardcore asian players. A person like me who does like the graphical style of asian mmos, but turned off by grind fest, yet also tired of ultra-casual WoW styled games; Tera works for me. Because of its quirky design, I don’t see this game breaking a million subs like Rift did when it launched in NA/EU, but if En Masse/Frogster/Blue Hole does release the game with a full year of polish and all the content updates they are promising, I can see it having stronger sub retention rates compared to other MMOs.



Polish it and Release this bloody game!

k11keeper

Though I am not sitting on the edge of my seat anticipating this game I do always keep my eye on it now and then to see how it's turning out. Honestly everything about it has seemed tailor made for me except for one thing and that being the combat. I've always liked my RPGs non twitch related but if everything else seems so perfect I think I will give it a try. Who knows I may actually end up liking the combat system after getting a feel for it. Well anyway, thanks for the review. If I was going to play I'd probably role a lancer because I love tanking and even if it's difficult to level in the end being a sought after class can be very beneficial. Plus any game that is full of L2 players is probably something I'll enjoy with that being my second favorite MMO ever.

Lille7

I wonder, how is the class distribution among the players? You said not very many plays lancer, but what about the other classes?

mrcalhou

Hopefully one day we'll get a game that has this kind of combat with Eve's kind of depth and economics.

Lille7

Originally posted by mrcalhou

Hopefully one day we'll get a game that has this kind of combat with Eve's kind of depth and economics.

Yes please. That, for me, would be the Ultimate MMO.

Benthon

If they'd start releasing more info about the game and less flashy screenshots I'd be more inclined to stay involved in TERA. This doesn't seem to be the case.

stayontarget

I've played all the classes except mystic because I don't like pet/summon classes.   In ever mmo I have played I always roll melee classes,  and in tera I like every melee class in the game.   Lancer is probably my least fav of the melee's due to the slow leveling,  but I would expect they would have no problem getting into groups for instances & BAM fights. 

I don't much care for range classes but i did try them out.  I did not care for the archer (kiting much) but i think they would be very good in pvp.  Sorcerer on the other hand was a blow to my "melee prefrence" this class was a pure joy to play,  it was so much fun in fact that now I am debating if i should make a sorcerer for my main and roll a melee class for my alt.

 

Nice overview OP,  I would say spot on.

Mehve

Originally posted by BigBadWolfe

A huge and very expensive aspect of progression is the gear enhancement system. I can't go into details but it's basically a huge money dump that is a nightmare for the individual but great for the economy. I actually witnessed of prices of the AH drop during my play time. Personally, I don't like the RNG but the results speak for themselves.

Any chance on a little elaboration? RNG-based progression is one of my biggest peeves with MMO's these days (even outside of the F2P propensity for selling things based on it). Nothing more frustrating than putting in a good long bout of time and effort, only to watch it get flushed away with a button click, with nothing to show for it because some RNG decided so.

BigBadWolfe

Well for those people that were interested in a class break down, I pulled up an old guild roster breakdown by class.  Keep in mind this is an English guild and probably not reflective of the Korean community.  Also I want to keep in mind that these are total numbers and not numbers at Lv. 58 which are much lower.  If you’re interested in more detailed guild roster breakdown I will add a link to our guild recruitment page.  Here’s the original roster:

 

Warrior 17

Berserker 14    Priest 14   Mystic 14

Slayer 11   Archer 11

Lancer 9

Sorcerer 6

 

I did mention that I didn’t like the RNG in the game but it’s not a deal breaker for me.  When you hear talk about true action twitched based combat, you’d think it would mean completely skill based, but that’s not Tera.  RNG is very prevalent in this game, crit modifiers are like 400+% in this game so most of your dps will come from random crits, which means that it will come from your gear.

 

 The stats on gear itself is random which is fine, it allows an individual to tailor their gear bonuses to their liking.  But to get the random bonuses you want, you have to constantly seal and unseal your gear which costs money.  Then finally you have to enhance your gear through upgrading it, which is where the majority of the money sink comes from. Most gear upgrades go from +1 - +9, but some go as high as +12. If you have a lot of money you can brute force the RNG to +6 pretty easily but past that it’s pure luck, and the +9 bonuses of course are always the best.  However it’s not like Lineage 2 where you can break a piece of gear and lose everything if things go wrong.  A critical failure will reduce your armor back -1 level, all the way down to +0.

 

For endgame dungeons itself, there doesn’t seem to be any badge gear available for Lv. 58, so players have to rely heavily on the random gear drops, and I haven’t seen more than one piece of gear drop per run.  I’ll have to go more in-depth with how RNG effects our endgame progression in the next (final?) review of the game.

 

About the players that are requesting more info, I do feel that En Masse isn’t doing their part in advertising Tera online, which is going to hurt the game’s chances in the long run.

On the other hand, it’s not like this game is in closed beta, it’s already out, and it’s playable, you just have to dig around for it.  Our guild is trying to do it’s part to provide info on the game, but we can use more help from the K-Tera community as a whole.  I know around last March the K-Tera community was huge because there was a hacked English patch made for the game. Unfortunately  Blue Hole has since killed that patch forcing everybody to play the game in Korean. There are still people still willing to try this game out though, so we will keep doing what we can to help.