With the rollout of the Guardian of the Sky update (EME), I wasn’t really expecting much since the majority of recent patches for TERA have been rather lackluster when it came to content that I found enjoyable. These two particular flying missions turned out to be just the ticket of rediscovering the fun that I found missing in TERA. It also finally puts these flying mounts to use besides just jetting from point A to point B (if there weren’t a lot of invisible walls or maximum flight altitudes, exploration would be a much bigger thing with flying). A very small part of this is inspired from Bluehole’s work on Ascent: Infinite Realm (which will have more expanded PvE type of aerial missions but is mostly about PvEvP/surface to air and RvR).
Level 65 players (minimum item level of 412) receive an Aerial Guardian quest where the NPC (Launa) is standing on one of the pillars outside Valkyon Headquarters in Velika. She gives a short quest where you use your flying mount to collect 5 essences that are floating above Freedom Plaza. After completing that mini tutorial, the quest continues where you need to interact with 100 flying objects in the flying missions. It took me a short bit to get the objectives while doing each of the two new missions having not really watched prior K-TERA videos of these.
Search and Destroy starts off with taking out the alien scouts; collecting their dropped sparks extends the flight duration (collecting 10 grants a nice speed bonus). Hitting a spark generator also rapidly refills the flight duration. The alien mothership appears at around the 50% progress point (at first, I had no idea where it was since I was expecting a large model of the ship). Attacking it quickly drains flight duration (requiring collecting sparks or hitting a generator).
The other flying mission is The Rhapsody of Wind and Fire where the objective is to collect the same color power essences (which also help to extend flight duration); blue representing wind and red fire. After collecting 10 of them, desert wights of the opposite color can be slain (all while making sure to not hitting/collecting an essence of the opposite color since that will reset the amount of essences collected). At around 30%, the Desert Greatwight appears chasing the Skywhale which is trailing a lot of wind and fire essences (objective being the same with collecting 10 of the same one and attacking the opposite color portion of the Greatwight).
Boths mission go really well when there are a lot of players taking part. For the Skywhale portion when it is trailing a lot of essences, fewer players means there are way more of them mixed together making it a lot more difficult to collect 10 (as you’ll be dodging opposite color ones). For the alien mothership, it takes a lot longer to whittle it down since fewer people hitting it means a lot more time collecting sparks or heading off to a generator to extend your flight.
I did these on my gunner which I bought a mechanical flight suit; the response time feels much better compared to when I tried using a flying horse mount (and likely similar for dragon ones) since there are no animation (wings) to deal with plus zero footprint with the actual mount texture (since it is your character). Skycycles will also feel a bit more responsive as well. In reality, it’s the same axis points but the texture area of the larger mounts (plus the fact that it blocks your view) makes it feel less responsive. Regardless, I found both of these flying missions fun to do since they aren’t the usual gear based combat objectives (which most of my characters do poorly in since I’ve stopped bothering to gear them up).
On a slight tangent, one thing I never did write about regarding these Guardian Legion missions is the following. All of them take place in the open world but when the mission is active, the textures are replaced and extraneous mobs in the area are despawned (leading to an initial FPS drop when that change happens). Once the mission is over, the original textures are loaded back along with the mobs.
I bring this up since it’s a proof of concept of how the old Island of Dawn could eventually be spawned in place of the current one (as opposed to having an entirely different zone instance which takes up server side resources) since it would be client side like these guardian mission texture changes. Part of this relates to the “Sign of Hope” quest line (introduced in patch 68) which hinted about the possibility of the island being restored back to its original state (it is recovering from the crystallized essence of life that are now spawning).
