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Revert PvP Boxes to give more Talents
EME, you have talked many times about how you see the issues with talent availability and how you are looking into different ways to alleviate this burden, yet, once again, you have removed the best way to get talents: Battleground Boxes. Previously one could get up to 150 talents from these battleground boxes, and now you're lucky to get just 35. So now bgs unviable for farming talents.
So what else is there for us to farm our talents? IoD? Ah, right, you nerfed that too. No more double vanguard boxes. It came with the promise of not being a nerf and exerting the extra freedom to keep IoD fun and rewarding and netting us triple boxes sometimes, but after being teased a couple times with the triple talent drops we had to wave goodbye, never to see that again. Now we get single boxes, and once a month we get a week of the old rewards (and there was still a talent issue when enchanting was cheaper and we had double boxes every day).
Solo dungeons like Akasha's offer nothing of value so we can throw those out as well, only GG provides anything worthwhile and that doesn't come in the form of talents. That seems to exhaust all solo content available. That's ok though, I guess we will make some new friends and jump into dungeons to farm our talents. Oh, wait, dungeons don't give any appreciable amount of talents either.
One of these three areas needs to provide a substantial amount of talents, and honestly more than one should but one is the absolute bare minimum to keep the game functionally playable moving forward. BGs, Solo Content, PvE.
Currently PvE is the premier way to farm item xp, the most efficient way to farm endgame enchanting matts, as well as the best gold rewards and rubies to craft up into enchanting gems. So from farming PvE dungeons you can earn everything you need except for talents, which you get virtually none of. 8/10 for gearing
PvP offers inferior xp to pve, inferior gold rewards, inferior enchanting matt farmability, and arguably just as bad of a talent farm compared to farming lower tier dungeons like Lilith's Keep. PvP offers 1 singlular advantage over other types of content: BG coins provide crafter's cures. This was actually much needed and greatly appreciated, however the massive gold differential between pve and pvp vanguards means it's more efficient to just buy cures anyways. 3/10 for gearing.
Solo Content, Guardians, and GG: I think it's clear by now that all solo content barring IoD, Guardians, and GG are entirely worthless to run for farming purposes and to even discuss them further would almost imply people consider farming them. Guardians are now worse than pve for aquiring gems efficiently but they consume no vanguard which gives them a nice niche as well as a way for new players to farm efficiently and something to do while in queue for other content. GG gives innerwear tokens and is basically the sole reason to run it, with a Diamond drop being a nice and fun surprise every now and again. IoD gives new players and new characters their glyphs and etchings, as well as provides a decent way to grind Reward Points. Talent return is laughable on normal weeks, but on those rare double drops it almost feels like it's worth doing. Almost. Only low gear players in guardian or twistshard really feel a gain from this level of talent dropping, which is fine because IoD is designed to be a new/undergeared player's paradise. What is not fine is how this is still the premier location to gain talents when spending all 16 of your vanguards and and hour afk crafting nets you just enough talents for 1/3-1/2 of an enchant as well as feeling very unrewarding and not at all interactive once you've reached higher gear levels.
10/10 for what it is and what it offers fresh 65 characters, 5/10 for helping mid and high gear players progress with their gearing.
Through this analysis I hope you can see that both PvE and Solo Content both provide niche and substantial bonuses to farming specific things, while PvP feels like the ugly duckling of the bunch, providing inferior or nonexistent levels of everything and is 100% outclassed by PvE. Returning talent rewards to where they were previously will help keep PvP alive and give players a reason to engage in it, as well as assisting in solving the biggest problem with Tera gearing today in my eyes. Furthermore Events that can provide talents as a reward, or an additional way to *efficiently* trade vg credits or bg credits for talents would be a godsend for the game and balance as a whole. Start by increasing bg talents again, and continue by adding additional ways to farm talents, darics, or even plates for geared players.
So what else is there for us to farm our talents? IoD? Ah, right, you nerfed that too. No more double vanguard boxes. It came with the promise of not being a nerf and exerting the extra freedom to keep IoD fun and rewarding and netting us triple boxes sometimes, but after being teased a couple times with the triple talent drops we had to wave goodbye, never to see that again. Now we get single boxes, and once a month we get a week of the old rewards (and there was still a talent issue when enchanting was cheaper and we had double boxes every day).
Solo dungeons like Akasha's offer nothing of value so we can throw those out as well, only GG provides anything worthwhile and that doesn't come in the form of talents. That seems to exhaust all solo content available. That's ok though, I guess we will make some new friends and jump into dungeons to farm our talents. Oh, wait, dungeons don't give any appreciable amount of talents either.
One of these three areas needs to provide a substantial amount of talents, and honestly more than one should but one is the absolute bare minimum to keep the game functionally playable moving forward. BGs, Solo Content, PvE.
Currently PvE is the premier way to farm item xp, the most efficient way to farm endgame enchanting matts, as well as the best gold rewards and rubies to craft up into enchanting gems. So from farming PvE dungeons you can earn everything you need except for talents, which you get virtually none of. 8/10 for gearing
PvP offers inferior xp to pve, inferior gold rewards, inferior enchanting matt farmability, and arguably just as bad of a talent farm compared to farming lower tier dungeons like Lilith's Keep. PvP offers 1 singlular advantage over other types of content: BG coins provide crafter's cures. This was actually much needed and greatly appreciated, however the massive gold differential between pve and pvp vanguards means it's more efficient to just buy cures anyways. 3/10 for gearing.
Solo Content, Guardians, and GG: I think it's clear by now that all solo content barring IoD, Guardians, and GG are entirely worthless to run for farming purposes and to even discuss them further would almost imply people consider farming them. Guardians are now worse than pve for aquiring gems efficiently but they consume no vanguard which gives them a nice niche as well as a way for new players to farm efficiently and something to do while in queue for other content. GG gives innerwear tokens and is basically the sole reason to run it, with a Diamond drop being a nice and fun surprise every now and again. IoD gives new players and new characters their glyphs and etchings, as well as provides a decent way to grind Reward Points. Talent return is laughable on normal weeks, but on those rare double drops it almost feels like it's worth doing. Almost. Only low gear players in guardian or twistshard really feel a gain from this level of talent dropping, which is fine because IoD is designed to be a new/undergeared player's paradise. What is not fine is how this is still the premier location to gain talents when spending all 16 of your vanguards and and hour afk crafting nets you just enough talents for 1/3-1/2 of an enchant as well as feeling very unrewarding and not at all interactive once you've reached higher gear levels.
10/10 for what it is and what it offers fresh 65 characters, 5/10 for helping mid and high gear players progress with their gearing.
Through this analysis I hope you can see that both PvE and Solo Content both provide niche and substantial bonuses to farming specific things, while PvP feels like the ugly duckling of the bunch, providing inferior or nonexistent levels of everything and is 100% outclassed by PvE. Returning talent rewards to where they were previously will help keep PvP alive and give players a reason to engage in it, as well as assisting in solving the biggest problem with Tera gearing today in my eyes. Furthermore Events that can provide talents as a reward, or an additional way to *efficiently* trade vg credits or bg credits for talents would be a godsend for the game and balance as a whole. Start by increasing bg talents again, and continue by adding additional ways to farm talents, darics, or even plates for geared players.
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6 months is plenty of time to get a staff member up to speed with game mechanics. Spacecats was already playing Tera casually by the same timestamp in his career as CM, which showed.
Last week, EME staff finally learned what WB means in mmorpgs on stream.