One week has now passed since patch 80 went live in the NA region (En Masse Entertainment is the publisher), roll back and all.
From my point of view, progression is going exactly the way I thought it would be. The hardcore grinders reached level 70 during the weekend (a couple of days after the update) spending 12-16 hours a day (mindlessly) doing BAM’s in the higher level zones. Most everyone else playing “normally” are around level 66-68.
Myself, I hit level 66 on my main ninja after approximately 12 hours of play over the past week (this is a combination of running the main story quest, subsequent zone dailies, and AFK fishing which totaled around 4 hours). I often times forgot to pop the 100% rapid XP potion that Elite offers for an hour. I didn’t go out and grind the BAM’s in any of the upgraded open world zones because that isn’t my idea of fun.
I also only did the Guardian Legion flight mission. In short, if you play normally but also run more dungeons, do all the Guardian Legion missions, and get all of their daily Vanguard Request rewards, progression will be much faster (probably 4 hour reduction). The real grind is going from level 66 to 70 though.
Getting to 66 first is pretty much important since that is when the Halidom and Relic gear slots unlock (both provide a small amount of power boost which translates to handling the higher level mobs a little bit better) as well as advanced skills; the latter being the real grind not just for skill experience but also the scrolls and gold (which goes up exponentially as that skill level reaches 60).
Your first skill point is essentially free and completion of one of the quests gives you a bunch of scrolls. The initial skill level costs 3,000 gold and goes up from there. Halidoms and Relics can be combined in order to upgrade them to the next tier (the initial cost is 1,100 gold for the lowest “green” quality ones and goes up from there). Like higher gear tier enchanting, material and gold costs tend to eventually scare off newer and/or more casual players (most of those players rarely reach 100k gold for example after getting into the initial end game prior to this level cap increase).
With this patch and how the leveling and skill advancements are structured, the very casual player will pretty much find hitting level 65 as actual end game (as in stop playing) for them since the road from there is pretty much Korean level grind (and even Korean natives weren’t/aren’t happy with this entire level 65-70 progression).
But as I’ve written before, I’m taking this in stride much like I did with the Arsenal update (which introduced the current gear enhancement system) when it became apparent the level of RNG associated with enchanting from Frostmetal tier on up (where successful enchants were actually skewed towards failures).
Over the course of time, Bluehole made minor adjustments to gold and/or material costs while publishers have occasionally run events to help with enchanting (much like EME running a gear enchanting event from today until April 30th; which incidentally means they’ll likely be doing another run of Lustrous Federation Crates like they did the first time they ran an enchanting event like this) which works in my favor having not tryhard gear enchanting most of my level 65 alts. Only 4 of my level 65’s are in Frostmetal (well, my main is Stormcry) and awakened (Apex) so after this event, the remaining that are still Twistshard will be in Frostmetal. And for the previous ones with some item XP on them, I’ll be able to progress their enchanting a bit further since with the base success rate increased to 60%, that will translate into a 100% success rate.
This will one day eventually help for leveling those characters up. I say eventually because the way the current leveling is structured, it is NOT alt friendly (and part of the games design centers around the notion of having alts). Unlike EP (Enhancement Points aka Talents), skill advancement experience is character bound which translates to having to grind on every character in order to obtain enough skill points to advance them. That play time for the time being, is better spent on your main character.
Myself, I’m taking a two-phased approach in terms of focusing on my main ninja and secondarily on my alt ninja (since this is my preferred class) while I’m using my other alt classes to simply do things like Celestial Arena (now gives gold/silver talents, darics, siglo, or plates), Ghillieglade, Guardian Legion flight mission, and running the ones already Apex’d through the new story as time permits (so basically, far slower progression).
I again do get the new development teams objective to make unused/underutilized open world content relevant/viable again and at a basic level, they’ve achieved that. For folks like myself that advocated for more open world activities, this is also a good thing. The implementation however leaves much to be desired but it is what it is given the low priority placed on production value. The more I delve into this patch though, the more I believe this current system is a stop gap before they (potentially) drop the bombshell of actual level 70 gear (not that it will mean that current high end tier gear will be obsoleted since there was bridging in the past to accomplish that like Deathwrack +15 from the prior gear system being able to be upgraded to Stormcry).
Krafton is basically just trying to maintain TERA on PC (and by extension, console) while they milk the franchise on mobile. They don’t really expect any mindshare gained on mobile to translate back to the other platforms since in most markets, revenues from mobile has surpassed PC. The KRAFTON Game Union is looking for the next big success (doubt Ascent: Infinite Realm will be it nor do I believe it will come even close to TERA) while they milk both TERA and PUBG (which is still popular in some Asian countries).
After having to merge K-TERA down to just one server, their internal metrics likely does show issues with retention (and that is probably going to accelerate with this patch not only in Korea, but in other regions). Their data probably also shows the revenues coming from those same folks who hardcore grind (and stuck with these ridiculous systems in terms of actually playing into it similar to those folks who grinded to hit level 70 in less than a week) which is why we’re getting what we get (as I noted before, Krafton isn’t purposely trying to kill the game as they are just using metrics while missing the bigger picture in the process).
