[TERA PC & Console] En Masse is closing, but TERA lives on! We will continue to support TERA PC (NA) and TERA Console until service is transferred. Stay tuned for more information.
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[TERA PC] The 64-bit update (v97) is now live. Check out all the changes delivered on August 11 here: https://bit.ly/tera64_patchnotes
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Balancing Patches
This post is going to discuss the lopsidedness of the content we receive in NA and why we as a region cannot let this continue to allow this to happen.
First let's discuss what patches are. According to definition, a patch -in the computing sense is- a small piece of code inserted into a program to improve its functioning or to correct an error. To further expand on this, a patch is new content or a balance to improve old content.
Now with that out of the way, we can look at TERA. We have KTera, JTera, EuTera, and NaTera. There are 4 different versions of TERA, all with their own unique differentiations. While, small, subtle differences can be made for the specific region in order to profit, the gameplay aspect is always the same and you could easily switch to another region and play rather seamlessly. However, one version of TERA seems to always short the rest of the versions. I'm talking about KTera, and since this is mainly to discuss the correlation that KTera's patches affect NaTera, I won't discuss JTera and EuTera from here on in this discussion.
We all know KTera has a Talent System AND we all know En Masse has expressly stated that NaTera will not be implementing the Talent System. Many people think of the KTera's Talent System as just extra buffs. In a way, they are right as it's pretty much just some extra glyphs. However, KTera looks at their Talent System as a means of balancing. A quick example of this would be that KTera grants Priests a crit resist debuff through the Talent System -- however, KTera is giving Mystics the crit resist debuff on their "Volley of Curses" skill. What does this mean for NaTera? Well, NaTera will further push and favor Mystics -who have the crit resist debuff- than Priests who do not have any crit resist debuffs because the lack of a Talent System.
We as a community cannot continue to accept these lopsided patches. To be honest, KTera should either lose the talents in KTera if they're not going to implement them outside of that region or give the other regions the Talent System and we'll work out the bugs. That would be the best way to balance the game across all regions. If this isn't possible, En Masse will need to step up and balance each patch Nexon gives them by hand, but that seems unlikely.
TL;DR: To be honest, this whole topic seems a little repetitive. We're asking two different publishers to work together to make a pretty obvious decision. These same publishers will not- or maybe rather, cannot- even optimize the game properly. These same publishers have refused to release any additional class that isn't gender/race-locked. These same two publishers have constant server outages and major latency issues. Yet, these same two publishers want to expand their game onto the PlayStation and XBOX platforms without fixing the issues that many people have left the game for from the start. Anyways, with rant aside...
In conclusion, we really need to fix the lopsidedness of the content we get from Nexon before it becomes a bigger issue than it already is.
First let's discuss what patches are. According to definition, a patch -in the computing sense is- a small piece of code inserted into a program to improve its functioning or to correct an error. To further expand on this, a patch is new content or a balance to improve old content.
Now with that out of the way, we can look at TERA. We have KTera, JTera, EuTera, and NaTera. There are 4 different versions of TERA, all with their own unique differentiations. While, small, subtle differences can be made for the specific region in order to profit, the gameplay aspect is always the same and you could easily switch to another region and play rather seamlessly. However, one version of TERA seems to always short the rest of the versions. I'm talking about KTera, and since this is mainly to discuss the correlation that KTera's patches affect NaTera, I won't discuss JTera and EuTera from here on in this discussion.
We all know KTera has a Talent System AND we all know En Masse has expressly stated that NaTera will not be implementing the Talent System. Many people think of the KTera's Talent System as just extra buffs. In a way, they are right as it's pretty much just some extra glyphs. However, KTera looks at their Talent System as a means of balancing. A quick example of this would be that KTera grants Priests a crit resist debuff through the Talent System -- however, KTera is giving Mystics the crit resist debuff on their "Volley of Curses" skill. What does this mean for NaTera? Well, NaTera will further push and favor Mystics -who have the crit resist debuff- than Priests who do not have any crit resist debuffs because the lack of a Talent System.
We as a community cannot continue to accept these lopsided patches. To be honest, KTera should either lose the talents in KTera if they're not going to implement them outside of that region or give the other regions the Talent System and we'll work out the bugs. That would be the best way to balance the game across all regions. If this isn't possible, En Masse will need to step up and balance each patch Nexon gives them by hand, but that seems unlikely.
TL;DR: To be honest, this whole topic seems a little repetitive. We're asking two different publishers to work together to make a pretty obvious decision. These same publishers will not- or maybe rather, cannot- even optimize the game properly. These same publishers have refused to release any additional class that isn't gender/race-locked. These same two publishers have constant server outages and major latency issues. Yet, these same two publishers want to expand their game onto the PlayStation and XBOX platforms without fixing the issues that many people have left the game for from the start. Anyways, with rant aside...
In conclusion, we really need to fix the lopsidedness of the content we get from Nexon before it becomes a bigger issue than it already is.
3
Comments
no russia tera ?
But seriously, the decisions they make are made to optimise profits. Optimising the client would require them to recode huge sections from scratch which would be incredibly expensive and probably would not generate enough income to justify the expense. Would be almost easier to just create a whole new game I think.
The gender locking is done to make more revenue from costumes... as has been explained repeatedly.
i knew i was forgetting one. so many teras
It's true that, because of the talent system, the class meta in K-TERA is slightly different than what we have here, but that doesn't make it more balanced. It seems to me that this argument only comes up because people feel slighted because there's some talent they have in K-TERA that would make their class more powerful, but without considering all the other things the talent system does to wreck balance the other way.
Not really. Assuming right now all classes in Ktera are balanced with unbalanced talents for each, if they rebalance talents for all classes (or remove talents all together) plus rebalance all classes after that based on the power scale, then all Tera version would be balanced.
Easy version:
In Ktera: warrior power scale = 5 + 1( from talents); slayer power scale = 2 + 4 (from talents)
~> In NA: warrior = 5; slayer = 2
If Ktera rebalance talents: warrior = 5 + 1; slayer = 2 + 1 (nerf slayer's talents)
and rebalance classes afterward: warrior = 5 + 1; slayer = 5 + 1 (buff slayer)
~> In NA: warrior = 5 = slayer, in Ktera warrior = 5 + 1 = slayer, both are balanced.
Done.
Of course they to do this would have to put the 2 balance patches together for ALL classes to avoid player aggro, thus it's a lots of work that needed to be done all at once. Moreover, rebalancing all classes will eliminate their current strategy of circling FoTM classes, and BHS will be quite hesitate about that.
The point I was making is that, if you look at the evidence, neither K-TERA nor NA TERA are balanced anyway as it is. So the fact that K-TERA has talents is itself the strawman that people are trying to blame for the game's lack of balance, even though BHS has said repeatedly that they do not balance with talents in mind. So the problem really has nothing to do with talents at all, it's just the fact that the game is not balanced. Now, I happen to think that "balance" is a moving target and we'll probably never arrive at a point that everyone will be happy with, but it's clear there's work to be done.
People are trying to be too "smart" and come up with this deep reason why the game isn't balanced given that they know talents exist, or why balance can never happen as long as talents exist, but this is really inconsequential. We already know clearly and unequivocally that talents are not coming here. So, the only message BHS needs to hear from us, just like they get from K-TERA, is "coffins." It's their job to fix it.
As Sylviette said, that is becuase some developers profit for the FotM and they make it that way so ppl give a chance to every option in the game if posible.
Sadly, in a game with few choices in classes, races or characters the unfairness from class balance could be more annoying than in other games where you have dozens or hundreds of options to play.
That doesn't logically follow at all, actually. The problem is that the talent system, the way it is now, cannot be balanced because it has no limits or caps. New players will forever be behind veterans no matter how they grind. So that is the main reason why it's impossible to balance a build with the current talent system. If not for that, it would be theoretically possible to balance both builds based on some sort of "ideal build" (a balance with no talents, and a balance with ideal talents), but it'd be a royal pain to do. Not impossible... just not likely.
I'm pretty sure the problem alluded to in the OP is that they feel the game is not balanced now, and that they feel it's because of the talent system. If they thought the game we have now were balanced, I don't think they would be arguing anything, since that'd be pure semantics about internal dev policies and irrelevant to us as players.
Class balance isn't actually about "equal power" in a trinity-based MMO, it's about the way classes play off each other to support each other in a party. But, incidentally, this will also be why "balance" will never happen. Some people define balance as the ability for any class to one-vs.-one any other class and have an even match. Some people define balance as that no class gets "rejected" when forming parties since they're all equally in demand. Some people define balance as everyone being able to output identical DPS when measuring during a raid. And so on...
Anyway, it's good that we're not getting the talent system here, so we don't have to worry about that. If there is class imbalance in our build, BHS has to address it.