While the level 70 expansion for K-TERA sounded ok on “paper” in terms of the original developer note and then the December 20th patch notes, the actual reality for players was initially being faced with a huge level grind. There is essentially one new quest per level so players were left grinding open world BAM’s and dungeons. Some players were purported to have done a couple of hundred BAM’s over the course of 10 hours to go from level 65 to 66. Two days later, Bluehole issued a new patch to nerf the experience required to get to level 70 (it is still a grind though).
Dungeon XP was also increased (approximately triple the amount) based on each specific dungeons difficulty and clear times. Nonetheless, Bluehole also noted they are looking into other ways to increase the amount of experience earned.
I know there are some players who harken back to those days when leveling up (in many games) wasn’t as easy/fast as it is currently. Slower leveling would be fine if the journey itself was meaningful (which is of course subjective) whether it be interesting adventures/stories, actual new areas, or just non-recycled content in general. The reality is that most players do not have that sort of patience and will look for the path of least resistance.
Based on the actual implementation, the K-TERA team missed the mark because the level cap was raised without expanding the existing story or even adding a new zone (it’s really hard to call this a proper expansion). In the process, they came up with the original experience scale where there was not enough questing content to handle the leveling up process without just rewarding a huge amount of XP (like how it is when playing a Reaper through its starter zone where you begin at level 50, and end up at level 58 after completing that starter zone/Reaper story line).
Likewise, the TalYph system is its own grind based on this
spreadsheet of information that was put together (Tal costs tab at the bottom which shows the amount of scrolls and gold costs for each rank as well as the cumulative amounts to reach rank 60). The introduction tab explains the new system:
Each class has a total of 3 skills that gain Tal and 2 skills that gain Yph. Details of which skills can be seen on the Tal and Yph sheets. At levels 66/68/70, you can unlock a skill’s Tal. Each Tal has 60 levels which gradually increase a skill’s effects. You get all effects at once. At levels 67/69, you unlock a new skill’s Yph. Each skill has 3 Yph, each of which give a different effect.
That cumulative cost is for each Tal skill; that needs to be multiplied by 3 to hit the maximum Tal unlocks for one class representing both a huge time and gold sink. This seems to be the design philosophy of those making these decisions where the grind involved is meant to satiate the relatively small percentage of well geared end game players. This isn’t much different with the grind to upgrade a fishing rod once past Tier V (which I finally hit) where there is a huge cost involved with gems (Emeralds and then Diamonds) where Tier VI requires 60 Emeralds, Tier VII requires 25 Diamonds, and Tier VIII requires 100 Diamonds (the increased amount of Angler Token’s is inconsequential because each tier increase allows catching higher grade fish that also yield more tokens).To put this into context, the NPC vendor rate when selling an Emerald is 1000 gold while a Diamond is 10,000 gold (both Emerald and Diamonds aren’t common drops from dungeons or gem crates). These can of course be crafted (material costs tack a premium onto the amount of gold that is sunk when crafting but can be partially offset during crits during crafting where you get additional gems produced) and also traded (where there is normally a 20-30% markup to cover trade broker sales fee and some crafting costs). So at the top end, this is 1.25 million gold (in Diamonds alone) to max out one of the three different fishing rods.
From what I’ve heard, the acquisition of gold hasn’t really been increased in the game with this patch either (the average player doesn’t even currently hit a six-figure gold amount before they quit the end game grind in TERA). Thus, I still don’t see any proof that the current TERA development team has a good idea of how to make the post level 65 game a bit more of a fun and rewarding type of grind (as opposed to these huge time and gold sinks that the average player will not even bother to try to overcome – thus not doing anything to increase player retention numbers).
