How long does it take to play Tera from character creation to level 65? It turns out that the game keeps track, so it’s really easy to tell. Here’s one of the early toons I created, an Elin Mystic. I like Mystics. They solo very well and are in high demand in dungeons so if you want to run a dungeon, you have a short wait. Some times only a second or two, so you better be ready when you queue. But back to looking at play times. 6 Days 6 Hours.
That is total time playing the character, from, for this character, creating it on the Island of Dawn way back when, until I cleaned up some quests back in Habere to get rid of some stale quest items from my inventory, which probably took an hour or so.
Now let’s look at some other characters, since I’m a real Altaholic.
So, the current level cap for Tera is 65. It used to be 60. What happened and what’s likely to happen next time and does that mean anything for how you might want to play this MMO or any other?
Let’s look at what happened:
When the “Fate of Arun” update happened, Blue Hole took a page from the Wow playbook. Briefly, this is what happened in the Pandaria expansion of Wow a few years ago: “A new threat has appeared on the horizon and we need to take a ship voyage to get there. The ship crashes and you begin a new journey on a distant land.” Sound familiar? In case you are new to Tera, this is exactly what you will see in Tera when you reach level 60 and then embark on the Sky Cruiser Endeavor.
I’m back playing Tera and loving it. I played Wildstar for a few weeks, but it didn’t hold my interest. When the Tera Brawler came out, I jumped back and don’t feel like going back to Wildstar.
I recently became aware of a method of fighting in dungeons that seemed quite surprising. Apparently some folks equip Slayer crystals in dungeons in an effort to up their Crit stat. These crystals only increase crit however, when your HP is below 50%. This causes some very strange behavior :
Healers are discouraged from healing players since they over heal – above 50%.
HP Pots are using during combat to manage HP to the correct level so that the Slayer crystals have their effect.
This causes an Economy in Pots apparently, where some folks make Gold based on the creation and sale of Pots.
I decided to do a test to see if Slayer Crystals had more benefit than the obvious other choice of Pounding Crystals which have recently been added to the game. I’ve done this test and recorded the video. The video and a PDF file of the data analysis spreadsheet are available for your review.
Bottom Line: Slayer Crystals, under the conditions of this test, appear to be about 20% better than Pounding Crystals. But the difficulty of keeping your health below 50%, and the issue of not being able to use healers, would seem to outweigh this advantage.
No, not Class Halls, but Class Overhauls. One of the things that impresses me about World of Warcraft is that they are willing to periodically change major aspects of their classes and supporting mechanisms as changing game requirements demand. Not only have they changed Talent trees multiple times, but Glyphs, and even Class Skill Trees have changed dramatically over past releases.
I think that it’s time for Tera to consider some major overhauls to the class skill trees and this document tries to lay out some ideas for those changes and rationale for them.
Let me say first of all that I’ve been playing Tera for over two years and that I’m a severe Altoholic. I’m not even going to say how many toons I have at this point, but suffice it to say that I’ve played all the classes in PvE and also done Corsairs with all the classes. I was around before the Avatar Weapon change and the changes that made enchantment easy with the introduction of Feedstock. Also I’ve done the PvE Story content for Fate of Arun and done a dungeon there. I’m not a dungeon raider expert, but I’ve done plenty of dungeons at all levels. So I think I have the experience to know what I’m talking about to suggest these changes.
WildStar has been out for some time, but in September, they changed to Free to Play. While they talk about being able to experience all the content, they have a long list of caveats on their Free to Play page. This is an interesting contrast with Tera, which is Free to Play with a Premium option which basically gives you an XP and Gold boost and a fancy mount. Tera’s list of caveats are the feature list for Premium which costs $15 / mo rather than a list of Don’t-Gets for the WildStar free-2-play choice. Anyway, with all that aside, I gave it a try and bottom line – I’m impressed. This is not a complete review, I’m sure you can find a ton of those out there, and since it’s F2P, you can try it yourself and see. I’ll do quick comparison with some observations compared with Wow, Tera and some other games I’ve played recently.
So what does WildStar have going for it? Yes, it’s a Wow Clone. No bones about it. Two factions vying for dominance on the ancient planet of Nexus and the technology of the Eldans who have disappeared. Well, its a start. But recall that Wow has had since 2004 to build their brand.
Not that Big Really
The first thing one notices about WildStar is the small size of the download – 12 GB. What! Only 12 GB?? Wow is 40GB and Tera is more than 30 GB. And you’d be right. WildStar is just starting out as a franchise and the size of the download shows it. The environments feel a little cramped and a little same ole same ole as you move around. But not claustrophobic, just not wide open like Wow or Tera. But the character models are detailed. So they are not going to have to backfill with new character models later like Wow has had to do. Update: Actually, the environments from level 6 or so on feel very spacious. There are long vistas and while the mountains and foliage is stylized, nothing feels cramped in those areas.
The BlizzConn 2015 Legion Game System Panel gave a lot more detail about the content of the Legion Expansion and the other game system changes that are occurring with the expansion.
See below for a link to the video as well as a summary of the information:
So, Blizzcon 2015 is underway and I tripped across the Youtube videos yesterday. See below. They had lots of coverage of the coming Wow Expansion Legions.
There are some other things that you may not have caught up on if, like me, you have been away from Wow for some time. Here’s a catch-up guide in case you’ve been away:
I enjoy playing Alts in MMOs. I find that leveling the Alts through the same old content provides new challenges if the Alts are of different classes, but also that I can hone the use and efficiency of traversing content the next time through even if the same classes are used. However, recently, over the last several months, some things have happened in Tera that have now reminded me how useful playing the same content over and over can be. One learns to do it better and better. Here is a short chronicle of my experiences in Tera since the Gunner and Fate of Arun expansion were released:
Fate of Arun
Tera at Enmasse released the Fate of Arun expansion in December 2014. This expansion provided a foothold on the as yet unoccupied content of Northern Arun and provided a path to level from 60 to 65. I did not rush into playing this expansion. I had some toons at nearly level 60, but didn’t have any that were ready to take on the new content.
I was struggling in Elenea with toons at level 58 or so that seemed to be under-powered and were not advancing beyond what looked like a strength valley in their ability to level up.
Windy Weather 