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Tera Online - Classes and Group Play
Group Play and Warrior gameplay mechanics
Played some more TERA last night but this time we tried grouping up from lvl 1-20 Group was Nalfen on a Warrior, Finris on a Mystic and Plaster on a Priest. Write-up for each class will be done by that player.
Note: Some quests require groups, not sure as of now if there will be many since we have yet to get any class over lvl 20 (too many rerolls!)
Nalfen PoV - Class Warrior
Warrior is a group class, dmg and solo ability is ok but compared to my Slayer, Archer and Sorcerer it takes longer and more rest time to accomplish the same things. You also have a lot of skills that deal with agro and some other that consume your hit points that you wouldn't use if you were soloing. Luckily i was grouped with both healers in the game so i could just go wild with the HP skills and grab agro on whatever i could find.
Agro was good; damage was ok and tanking ability... well, not so much. You see, Warriors are light armor wearing agile tanks; meaning that you grab agro, and then dance around trying to avoid getting hit. Hit points were just above the Mystic, damage done was around equal to said Mystic and getting knocked down means death when dealing with large groups.
Skills on the Warrior are very AoE based, so far i get two whirlwinds (3 if you count the instant recovery from knockdown) an aoe taunt/stun, two wide arc combos and a frontal Slash. The frontal slash consumes a lot of HP but cost no mana so i guess it’s useful from time to time. Best ability so far was a lvl 18 skill that summons a shadow of the Warrior, the shadow is immortal, hold agro very well and lasts around a minute, only drawback it costs half your HP to summon.
Group Play started a little bit slower than soloing because you do not share kill credit for most things. Credit is given in a sequential order, so if you have a 3 man party and you got to kill 10 critters you end up having to kill 30. Bosses and special monsters have shared credit at least so no waiting for the boss to respawn to get credit on everyone.
Eventually we figured out how to party properly, Mass pulls! It seems Mystics and Warriors were designed for such a thing, grab everything in sight, have the Mystic pop some healing orbs/turrets, bunch the mobs up and aoe taunt then run around trying to stay alive while killing them.
Leveling pace in a 3 man party was around 7 hours for lvl 1 to 20, not too bad considering we cannot read the language.
Oh and btw we are not roleplaying or anything like that; standing around the fire serves an actual in game purpose: It raises your max HP/Mana, enables you to use party buffs, lets you craft and modify gear as well as provide increased stat regen.
Finris PoV - Class Mystic
I have to say, this is a very interesting class so far. Nalfen called me a swiss army knife, and that's a pretty good description.
To give you some idea of the look/feel, this is the most accurate skill list I've found on the internets so far: http://www.terafans.com/topic/5702-translation-new-mystic-skills-from-gamechosuncom/
I'm level 19 so far, so I'm not sure what else is in the pipeline, but I currently have:
Teleport(Blink) (Nalfen is very jealous of this)
Basic ranged attack (mid distance)
Frontal cone
Frontal aoe
Channeled pbaoe/drain
Single target heal/hot
Egg laying (hefty hot potions I spawn, basically)
Rez
Cleanse
Lock-on dot
Lock-on mez (apparently this is aoe up to 4, I'm a little unclear)
Tank pet
Turret summon (~20sec, dps)
Fairy summon (~20sec, heals)
Mana restore
So far, my damage is quite good. The frontals are my big hitters, and can crit on single targets for, I feel, obscenely good numbers. Note that in Tera, the aoe damage is split, not copied per target. So there's plenty of incentive to use my small frontals for single target, as well. It's not like casting rain of fire on a single mob in WoW.
Right now, my potion egg heals for 2100, and at full Nalfen has 5.5k. My single target heals for 1500 + ~300 in hot. I don't have the aoe capacity of a priest, but I'm not shabby.
Mystic is definitely an amazing class so far, and I think they will be very, very good to have around in PVP. I also think it'll be one of those classes that has a higher learning curve, though. It's not easy to target heals or CC in a mass of mobs. Ask Nalfen, he's died more than once because I can't find him.
At least I can rez him after I'm done soloing the pack~
:: posted at 2011-01-14 @ 11:01 by Nalfen.
Tera Online Beta
Tera Online - Future good game or generic boring MMO?
Having acquired a Hangame Korean account a while back i couldn’t wait to test out the new MMO coming out called Tera Online.
Unlike most Korean MMORPG's we actually heard of this one, the reason? En Masse entertainment, a newly formed company has already announced that their debut title will be the English version of Tera. Dates for this release are still 2011 Q? TBD.
So while we might still be a little off for an English release i decided to give the Korean version a try. Right off the bat this has the feeling of an AAA title, the amount of polish is visible, the graphics are out of this world and the interface is intuitive enough that someone with no knowledge of Korean can actually figure it out.
Character creation is everything we have come to expect of modern MMO's with enough features to please anyone. Class selection is once again very simple, every class being available to every race (take that WoW!)
I won’t go into the races and classes too deeply here as this info is already available on the English tera webpage. (http://www.tera-online.com/)
Server and code quality shows; i am playing a game on the other side of the planet and i hardly feel the 300-400 latency that i have with Korea.
This is especially important as Tera is an action mmo. Action MMO's are games that get rid of targeting, auto aiming and avoidance for a manual approach: What you aim into is what you hit and getting out of the way or blocking actual attacks is how you stay alive, no RNG there.
The game follows the Aion inspired story driven quest arks, you have the main quest that is story driven and highly scripted and some side quests that you pick up along the way. the whole thing is spread out over 60 levels. The quests are varied enough to stay interesting, they include all the modern Blizzard inspired twists on questing, including bombing runs, timed escorts, phasing (see WoW's WoTLK for more info), gathering, killing and the unavoidable fed-ex quest.
The environments are breathtaking, everything feels handcrafted and the art direction is top notch, creatures are interesting but a little repetitive, something that will probably change over the course of the game. The character models, gear and weapons, true to any Asian MMO are a bit generic, though beautiful looking they lack diversity that we often see in most Western games.
Character SFX, actions animations and general feel are good as well. The animations and sounds look and feel like they belong, there is an almost organic feel to a lot of the animations. The commands themselves can feel a little unresponsive at times but i will chalk that up to my high latency.
The game controls are easy and feel modern, the expertise Hangame got from C9 can be felt in the controls of the game, and everything is controlled by the timing and very few keys. This UI mode has been the norm of most console and recent games but MMO's are starting to incorporate them. (For an example think of the Prince of Persia games; depending where and what you are doing the same button will perform different functions).
PvP is in the game but i have yet to test it out, same goes for raiding and many of the higher level items. I also cannot speak for end game content as i am still far from that point. Expect more on those subjects in the following days.
In the meantime, check out the screenshots section for more shots of the beautiful world of Arborea.
:: posted at 2011-01-12 @ 10:01 by Nalfen.
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