With the level 70 patch (patch 80) just a little over a month away for regions outside of Korea, I’m personally preparing for this update by doing absolutely nothing different. Wut?
I’ve made it no secret how much I’ve grown to dislike the current gear enchanting system that was released with the Arsenal update (when Bluehole first unveiled the initial details, I was in favor of it because it sounded good on paper, but it’s implementation for higher tier gear was designed to be heavily RNG influenced tilted towards failure than actual success).
As a result, gear enchanting dropped to the bottom of things I did in the game. At one point, it didn’t matter since gear could accumulate item XP indefinitely since it was not capped. Then the geniuses decided to implement caps which means that if you don’t enchant your gear, you are unable to continue earning item XP. Thus for the longest time, most of my characters were in Twistshard and my main character (ninja) was topped out in Frostmetal (the level 65 gear tiers as of this writing is Guardian -> Twistshard -> Frostmetal -> Stormcry -> Heroic Oath).
The thing is that for Guardian and Twistshard, the success rate for enchants are 100% when you’ve acquired a certain amount of item XP (and now, maxed out). That all changes from Frostmetal onwards where for Frostmetal, the success rate is around 54% when maxed out (failed enchants increase the percentage but you can still RNG fail many times in a row even when you start pushing 70% on the “increased chance for success” rate). And it gets worse for Stormcry (for Heroic Oath, you probably have to be masochistic).
With the current capped system, I only enchant once I hit that cap. Thus most of my alts are now all finally hitting Frostmetal (which is needed anyway in order to awaken them; a requirement for unlocking the level 70 quest when that drops). This current system is not alt-friendly for extremely casual players once you start enchanting through Frostmetal. For myself, they are more or less used to get gold and enchanting materials for my main. Because I also enjoy playing the ninja class, I created and awakened another for Vanguard Requests purposes.
For my main ninja, I finally hit Stormcry tier gear because the item XP cap forced me to enchant (I don’t do dungeons in TERA anymore so this gearing is somewhat irrelevant for me; it just makes open world content as well as the few solo instances easier to do). Fortunately, the upgrade RNG happened to be on my side except for my sleeves where I had 3 consecutive failures going from Frostmetal +9 to Stormcry). The good thing about not tryhard grinding (and pushing to gear up every alt) is being able to build up all the ridiculous enchanting materials that are now required. And that is only going to grow with the gear merging system that accompanies the level 70 patch.
But that doesn’t mean I haven’t found other ways to actually enjoy (and thus have fun) playing the game outside of the usual PvE endgame gearing grind. The operative words are “enjoy” and “fun”; I wouldn’t bother to stick around otherwise. One of the great things about fishing is that once you’ve built up an inventory of fillets, up to 200 deliverable fish (the daily cycle of deliverables revolves around fishing at the appropriate fishery to catch the correct fish) can be turned in for Metamorphic tokens (which can be used to buy enchanting materials).
I’ve hit artisan for each crafting profession and have two of my alts now mastered (my other awakened ninja is a master in processing while my awakened gunner is a master alchemist). I’m close to getting my reaper mastered in smelting while my main ninja will be mastering in cooking (though I could just nix that and master it in etching since I was previously part of the way there before the updated gathering/crafting system). Actually, scratch that, etching is ridiculously tedious compared to the other professions.
As I’ve noted before, I really like the updated crafting/gathering and the new fishing system because they’ve all made my character progress further (and given me activities to engage in since the gear portion hasn’t been the priority for me). The same goes with the Enhancement Point system; slowly but surely I’m making a dent (not as fast as the hardcore grinders) as I finally hit the 200’s. For myself, I enjoy playing TERA this way. Likewise, while there is a grind element to the pet companion system, that will definitely supplement my play for the grind to level 70. As can be discerned, these activities I do enjoy all provide a means to progress my character even if it is in smaller increments compared to directly grinding through holy trinity dungeons (and without a static group to run them, are at the mercy of potentially toxic public instance matching and/or LFG trap runs).
A good example of how to get me to actually quit and uninstall a game is with Bless Online. I tried (once it went F2P) to see if it could grow on me but that was a worse optimized mess than even B&S (which is levels below TERA in terms of pure client FPS drops) and had one of the most completely unintuitive starter skill tutorials which portends the designers thought process with how they actually approached the underlying game design (which provides a clue as to why the game has been this technical mess to begin with). There was no enjoyable or fun feeling; plus the combat didn’t even feel great as I leveled. I quit at around level 20ish since I couldn’t see torturing myself getting to level cap (this should say a lot because I normally power my way to max level and some end game in most titles I do try to at least get a feel for things there; like I tortured myself getting at least one character to max level in Warlords Awakening with that braindead mob grinding for the last two levels; I haven’t bothered returning to repeat this process for the current level 50 cap). With Bless Online, several patches later with no difference in at least the optimization resulted in freeing up that disk space.
Digressing, even though I’ve criticized the level 70 “expansion” for K-TERA (where the journey from 65 to 70 isn’t tied to actual new zones), I’m not going to change the way I’ve been playing. I know now that players have hit 70 in K-TERA (after some ridiculous combination of burnout inducing grind of hundreds/thousands of open world BAM’s and running dungeons until they ran out of adventure tokens aka dungeon stamina). That is something I’m not going to do where I go through this regimented/calculated routine (playing the game like an automaton). Instead, I will play my way (which from the perspective of the hardcore player, would be the “wrong” and “inefficient” way) where I find what is most enjoyable, and focus my energies there. I’m basically in no rush to get to nowhere fast.
tl;dr: find games that resonate with you and play them the way that you find them fun and enjoyable to play.
