I will just cut to the chase; this new update with Mahtnan gear is pretty bad. The base incomplete rare (blue) version you are given freely is nearly double the power creep of the previous highend Kaia Soul gear. And since they’ve rebalanced a lot of the content, it pretty much forces you to swap out and begin farming the better items (3 tiers: rare, legendary, and mythic).
Power creep is a given in games like this; but it’s pretty bad when you log in the next day, and your previous gear is completely trivialized by the low end freebie with absolutely no overlap. I myself didn’t bother trying to get perfect rolls like some other players, but this is probably the worst gear update (I don’t think even Guille gear was this bad even though it did something similar to the prior high end Visionmaker gear).
The game has lost a lot of players over the past year (you can see it in the AFK’s in Highwatch). This updated gear isn’t going to help with player retention. Gameforge is busy with their new buy-to-play money maker Sword of Legends Online (SOLO). Bluehole isn’t helping any with the sort of “content” updates they are releasing for TERA. After grabbing the new incomplete Mahtnan gear boxes and slogging through a rebalanced Ghillieglade (which has been neglected through the prior Arsenal and Exodor gear except for the removal of the easy mode parts since hard mode was already trivialized), I promptly logged out. It went from one extreme (less than 30 seconds) to 3+minutes of just chipping away at the Dominolith crystal before I could finally engage Banyakas. This isn’t my idea of fun. And there is literally no in-game info on how to enchant or upgrade this starter gear set.
There is literally no imagination with this new gear. It’s a major power creep that pushes the last remaining whales to do what they did in the past; buy the cash shop boxes that give larger quantities of enchanting mats (compared to grinding the small amounts in-game). That is what Gameforge does on their end unfortunately. And with their focus now on what has brought them an influx of customers; SOLO, they are content to let what exists in TERA to operate on autopilot. Furthermore, the current TERA dev team at Bluehole has shown little creativity with Exodor (and the Exodor gear) and now this new Mahtnan gear. I kind of now expect a half-assed effort to utilize Baldera when that becomes available.
To put it simply, this has been the first time in years that I’ve flat out lost the desire of putting any time into TERA. I’ve always been casual in it and played it the way I wanted to (the parts I enjoyed). But this focus of ever changing gear with an ungodly spawn of different enchanting materials that has been coupled with a massive increase in the numbers, has now pushed even someone like myself over the edge.
I know that Bluehole’s primary focus has been to get Elyon out the door. Kakao Gaming publishing it was already a disincentive (given how they oversaw the cash shop mechanics in Black Desert Online when they were publishing it) of it being something I would want to put time into. But watching the poor direction they’ve (Bluehole) been heading for with TERA especially with this latest update, I’m now less inclined to bother with Elyon (which I’ve been on the fence, and was planning to wait to see how CBT2 played). It almost feels like the end of an era for what was once the glory years of these MMORPG’s that were released left and right by South Korean development studios.
I guess it makes sense why many in Korea were stating years ago, that Lost Ark was the last hope for a decent Korean designed MMORPG to come out for their domestic market. It seemed a bit hyperbolic at the time because NCsoft was putting a big push behind UE4 for many of their games (ended up falling flat with how they utilized it for B&S) and had rebooted Lineage Eternal into Project TL (which years later, is still caught up in development hell).
In many regards, TERA now falling to low priority in my game play rotation, opens up that time for Lost Ark. Most of my time in recent months has been playing Genshin Impact. And that’s mainly because it has a fully explorable world and fun (most of the time except for the constant reliance on timed challenges) combat combined with story quests and an incredible OST. If it weren’t for the gacha based character acquisition, I’d be in complete bliss.
With Krafton going public soon, it will be harder for them to hide the numbers (due to public financial disclosure) though I am sure they will obfuscate the details. Should the bottom begin to fall out from both MMO’s, they’ll end up being reliant on PUBG to carry them (and that is tough when the market will be looking for growth, not a shrinking portfolio including neglecting the TERA IP that they were heavily reliant on early on).
