Tera Priest (Impressions)

I decided to try the Priest as my main in Tera. This is not my normal choice—as this blog suggests, I prefer mage/wizards (the Sorcerer seems to be the Tera equivalent for the play style). I chose priest mostly because as a Priest I’d have an easier time getting into instances and seeing other content, which is especially important if I’m doing this just by myself. And I’ve gotten used to healing from my time in The Old Republic, so why not give it a shot?

At first you don’t really get a good feeling for the mechanics at first. This is very true of most MMOs, but it is especially true of a game like Tera which relies on skill chaining ability sets to distinguish the classes from one another. I didn’t really start getting a ‘feel’ for the class until around level 16 or so, and I suspect that this is true for all classes in Tera (and why the prologue provided starts at 20).

As a solo class, Priest is slow and steady with no downtime but taking some time to kill stuff. They are adequate solo, and effective but I’m sure other classes are better (or at least faster).

(And you’ll have to forgive me in advance. This is an impression post, and I do not remember the names of the abilities I’m describing here).

Priests have two main ranged nukes—a low-damage bolt with no cool down; and a higher damage bolt that you can fire in groups of 3 before hitting short  cool down. Both of these bolts chain into other abilities. Some of these are auto created for you, while others you get to set up and customize. This is one of the reasons why Tera’s combat is so interesting, and figuring out how to do this takes some real time and experimentation. 

For example, my main low-damage nuke chains into a short range cone-based AOE (useful for close mobs), which in turns chains into a staff-strike which does considerable damage to any enemy directly in front. The triple-strike bolt also chains directly into staff strike, so if you time it right you can hit them with that, and then immediately fire off a hit with the staff for high damage. Priests also get a short range ball of lightning that does considerable damage—and chains directly into the staff strike. That last example is a particularly heavy hitting damage, even though it’s short range.

As for moving and positioning the Priest has two key abilities:  a jump back, and a jump back-with-fire which does the same thing, but also does a little damage to everything close by. But you often have to do a lot of running, and these abilities are more useful for getting out of the way instead of kiting. This may change at higher levels, but I doubt it. Priests, from what I’ve read, are one of the least mobile classes in the game.

Priests have two abilities that give them a considerable amount of sustainability. They have a short-cast self-heal that heals for a considerable amount of damage (about 25% of the character’s health at this level), and a channeled mana regen that can be used in combat, and while moving, which can restore up to 800 mana in one channel. Both of these abilities mean that Priests can heal themselves, and keep doing so for an effectively indefinite amount of time. If a priest or someone in the group falls, it is normally due to the priest either being out of position, or simply overwhelmed by the amount of damage being thrown around.

As for healing the experience is a bit different than in other MMOs. Since you don’t really target people, healing is most definitely NOT whack-a-mole. Instead Priests heal primarily through lock-on abilities (which have to be targeted), and AOE abilities which affect an area of the ground (and this changes based on the ability in question).

Lock on heals are interesting in that when you use them you target them. You hit the ability, then have to lock on to them by aiming at them, and then you trigger the ability again to cast it. Priests have a lock-on heal that affects 2 targets (and up to 3 with a glyph). It’s a cool mechanic, actually, and it’s affected by line-of-sight which is frustrating, but again speaks to the fact that positioning is critical.

AOE heals vary a bit more (and I’ve not seen all of them by any means). Priests get a potent HOT with a relatively short targeting circle; and a much smaller HOT with a much larger radius. They also have a cleansing AOE, which cleanses friendlies within the range of the circle. This creates a different healing play style, since healing involves using the right heals, and then targeting them in the right location. It’s even more important since some of these abilities have fixed ranges/areas, so targeting them involves moving into the right position to cast.  

Other heals show up later, including a group shield and various hot-like effects. But the basics seem very straight forward, and they do a good job of showing just how Tera plays different than most MMOs. And while the classes damage options are relatively limited, they are effective enough and the class doesn’t lag far behind when it comes to soloing performance—if it lags at all. At this point, I’m not sure that it does.

At this point I’ve only scratched the surface of the class, and of Tera itself. Priest is fun with a variety of options on how to play. Its only downside is its lack of options when it comes to DPS—the abilities it has are fine, it just doesn’t have a LOT of them (at least through level 20 or so). If anything, I’ve heard people say that leveling Priest is easy-mode, which may or may not be true.

Either way I’m going to stick with the class until at least 30 before moving on to try some other things for a bit. As I go I may continue to post my impressions of the whole thing and if I do I’ll continue to post them here.  I’m definitely wanting to spend more time with Sorcerer, and Lancer, both of them look like fun, useful classes that will be worth checking out.

True Blood (Season 5)

So, am I the only person out there that thinks that True Blood Season 5 is much improved over last year’s disappointing season? I remember liking a lot of the individual episodes in Season 4, but taken as a whole, the season was a major disappointment.

And on the surface, Season 5 seems to have some of the same problems.

• Too many characters I don’t care about.
• Too many plot lines to keep track of taking up air time.
• Too many characters doing stupid things in service to the plot.
• Sookie
• Tara 

Yet, none of these things have bothered me so much this year. Even though so far Season 5 has spent way too much of its time with THE AUTHORITY, and vampire politics that have always bogged the show down. I’m not sure why this is, honestly…has my tolerance for the show simply gone up since last summer? Or is it that I find the character interactions much more interesting this year.

Whatever the reason, I’m finding that I’m much more interested in what’s happening on screen this year. I like the interactions between the characters more even if the plot is moving at a pretty glacial pace and Russell (presumably the main villain of the season) hasn’t even been fully seen yet.  I just have the vague impression that the whole thing is leading to some form of Vampire/Faery showdown, though at this point the season could veer off in virtually any direction at this point.

I just hope that the show does a better job including all of the main characters in the story as a whole, like it did in Season 1 and Season 2.  

Tera First Impressions

So I’m pretty much done with Star Wars: The Old Republic. And I’m pretty much committed to playing Guild Wars 2 in September. And while I’ll still be playing TOR for another month or so, mostly doing 4-mans with friends once a week, I really have no interest in trying to level another character to 50, or even doing more on the Imperial side. To make things worse, I don’t really have any new single-player games to play right now. So, I went ahead and downloaded the Tera trial and installed it.

Tera is a fairly straight forward fantasy-based MMO. I’m told it is a Korean MMO, though I haven’t done ANY research on the game. It came out earlier this year (May, I believe), and what little I know about it has been its combat system which has been mostly praised from everything I’ve read. The game definitely has a distinctive Asian theme to it, that’s both pretty and colorful, and the game itself is gorgeous.

The reviews I read indicated two things: first, the game’s combat system is very good. And second, the game’s leveling system is about as generic as you can get. And now that I’ve spent some time in the game (I have a Priest at level 26) I can say both of those statements are very accurate.

As First Impressions go, Tera is a little bit of a mixed bag. Like every MMO I’ve ever played, you pick a server, and create a character. You have a good variety of characters you can make, and you can customize the characters more than most MMO’s I’ve played. And you can make some very cool looking characters in the system—it’s better than SWTORS by far, while offering considerable flexibility. And it gives you a chance during creation to view the character under multiple different types of gear which in itself is useful to people who care a lot about the look of their characters.

Character classes seem fairly varied. You have tanks (Lancer, Warrior…though apparently there is some debate about the effectiveness of Warrior tanks); Slayer and Beserker for melee DD, Sorcerer and Archer for Ranged DD, and Priest and Mystic for Healing. This is actually one of the areas where the game really shines: because of the way in which the combat system works, there are a lot of new ways that a class can distinguish itself compared to a lot of other MMOs.

The game starts with some ‘epic’ cut scenes, and a rather bewildering ‘Prologue’ which also serves as a form of tutorial. I’m not sure if this was just for the 7 day free-trial, but the Prologue makes your character level 20, with a full set of abilities, and then shows you some of the basic mechanics. I did this as a priest, and I was a bit frustrated by it mostly because in the end you fight a boss as a healer, but actual healing didn’t seem to work. In hindsight, I think I understand why…you can’t heal NPCs not in your party…but it never TELLS you that.

The story itself is rather bland and doesn’t really explain things very well. Basically there are two sleeping titans, who formed the continents (or, I think ARE the continents), and now some new island has formed. And the combined nations see this as a threat of some form, though I have no idea why. An expedition was sent, yet everyone died. So, now you are part of a second expedition of level 1 characters who will have to succeed where all of the established veterans failed. And while you are there you are to find out what happened to the leader of the first expedition that was with you in the prologue.

This is where Tera certainly missteps. The graphics are pretty, and the art style is great. Yet the story and presentation is lacking in every way. Most of the quests in the prologue involve you being sent from person to person to person, not really doing anything but running back and forth and reading quest text. And this definitely follows with the ‘and the questing is as generic as it gets’ point above.

Tera is a quest-based leveling game that is definitely very WOW like in regards to leveling and execution. You go to an area. You receive a group of quests to kill/collect something with genetic quest text that you can fully ignore, and then you run in a circuit doing everything the quests ask you to do. Then you turn everything in and move on to the next area. There is actually LESS variation from what I’ve seen than WOW…WOW had the benefit with Cataclysm of revamping the questing system and using new scripting tech to increase the types of quests they could present. Tera shows little of that. It’s ‘kill 10 things, or ‘collect 5 things’, or ‘kill things till you get ‘x’ drops’.  It’s simple, and mindless, and deliberately designed to flow easily. But even at its best it’s as generic as it gets.

On the plus side questing help is very useful and things are easy to track. Hyperlinks in quest descriptions allow you to identify objectives, and follow things; and you can easily arrange the orders of quest in your screen however you want. And the quests are definitely designed to flow together—though they are generic and boring, they are designed to be inoffensive as possible. So when combined with the combat system the game actually flows pretty well.

And speaking of the combat system, Tera’s is good. I’ve seen several classes now and the game rewards being actively engaged with one’s target and situation far more than most MMOs. And skill very much reflects on how well you do rather than gear and mindless stats. Gear lets you do things faster, but not necessarily ‘better’. This is because positioning, avoidance, and maneuvering is more important in the game—you avoid damage by NOT BEING HIT. And a lot of the game’s mechanics involve maneuvering into positions to attack (say from a flanking position or from behind), all while avoiding being hit yourself. Combat therefore takes a bit more time in Tera, but it’s more engaging and more fun, and feels much more mindless.

Then there are the BAMS, or ‘Big Assed Monsters’—their name not mine. These are larger mobs designed to be taken by a party. They are basically like mini-bosses (though some of the lower level BAMS I’ve encountered actually have more mechanics that saw an old Molten Core boss in WOW. I’ve killed some of these solo—but this can take 10 to 15 minutes to kill and I’m not sure that the rewards are worth it. The risk involved is relatively high, but it’s also good practice and I suspect this is fairly indicative of the game as a whole.

At this point I’ve gotten at least one class to Level 26 (Priest) and I’ve played several other classes past the starter area (Lancer, and Sorcerer). Each of these classes plays different from the other, and in ways that I like. The start zone itself doesn’t change though. And I suspect that the level grind pretty much has the same problem SW:TOR had—it seems very likely that you will have to follow the same level path through the game, with only a little variation to keep things moving.

Despite these minor problems and nick picks the game has proven to be very fun and I’ve had a blast playing it. It may be generic question, but the combat and new scenery makes the experience as a whole anything but boring. And now seems to be a good time to be playing it. The server I’m on seems active and lively, and there is plenty of content to see that is new. I’m looking forward to checking out some instances as a healer (healing in this game as a Priest is definitely more involved), and I’m interested in seeing if some of the higher level content shakes things up a bit.

I don’t know how long I’ll be playing this. Certainly up to the time of Guild Wars 2. But, who knows, I may end up keeping up with the game past GW2 if the end game is interesting and accessible enough. It certainly seems like the game will keep my attention at least to the level cap at 60.

Star Wars: The Old Republic (Final Thoughts)

Star Wars: The Old Republic was the game I knew for a while was going to be the game I quit World of Warcraft over. Several of my WOW friends were invested in the game, and so burned out on WOW that there was no way they were going to stick around after TOR came out. Even I quit WOW before The Old Republic shipped—there was no point in playing any more when everyone I knew was pretty much gone and raiding in Cataclysm had become too much of a social drain.

I had high hopes for the Old Republic, and at first the game made a very good first impression. The idea of a story based MMO was very cool to me, and the presentation of the game was worlds above that of any other MMO I’d played. I had various fantasies about my days with FFXI, which had some very interesting stories wrapped around a completely unforgiving social system that left people spending more of their time waiting to get into a party than actually in a party. And I had a core group of friends that I had to experience the whole game with.

And now, some 6 months later, I see SW:TOR as something of a failed experiment for Bioware and EA. Yet, I also think the game shows a blue-print for how other companies might very well be able to succeed moving forward.

Yet I did call TOR a failed experiment. And I truly believe that. The problem is that TOR tried to take a traditional single-player WOW experience and wrap its quests around a central narrative. This, I think is actually a very good idea as it turns what is in every other MMO the least interesting part of the game into its central feature. But, in reality Bioware completely failed in the execution of this concept.

TOR may have had 8 separate storylines, and two completely different experiences, but simply put it ALL sucked. In fact it sucked hard. At first I really tried to get into it—but very quickly the reality of it set in and it was apparent that TOR’s storylines were bland, disinteresting, and in many ways completely infuriating. It took something that should have been truly grand and epic, and made it very much like watching C-SPAN.

TOR’s story presentation was about as bland as you can get. Almost every cut-scene was simply about people talking. Actual action was rare, and poorly presented. I mean when the War starts—the one hinted at for 40 levels, you don’t even get to see a newscast or a single ship. Instead someone just says, ‘The War Started. We’re already almost defeated and about to lose the war. Here have a quest that has nothing to do with that.’

It doesn’t help that the Republic storylines were horrible. And as a Republic player who hit 50 with 2 characters I can say with certainty that the Republic should fall. And just about every senator and military official should be shot as a traitor, or shot for complete incompetence. J

To put it in better terms, a Star Wars story should be epic. It should be epic-feeling. It should have serious consequences. It should be about the battle between good and evil, and the shades of grey in between. Yet, SWTOR’s story never at any point showed any evidence of being epic. Mostly the storyline was presented in the most boring and generic manner possible. You go up to a quest giver, you watch him spout off whatever BS he has to say, spout a few agreements/insults in return…knowing that none of it had any real consequence at all. Because consequences would screw up the quest line for the zone you were in, and the game couldn’t compensate for that.

Just how many times can you directly disobey General Garza, only for her to bitch you out one second, only to give you praise and a new mission in the same conversation before you realize that none of it matters? How many sith agents can you uncover before you realize that if the Republic was that heavily infiltrated that you might as well hand them the keys to the Kingdom (and of course, in some cases, like on Corellia, that’s exactly what happens).

Let’s face it. TOR’s leveling game was short—yet STILL extremely boring and unfulfilling.

There are other areas where the game failed. Its combat system wasn’t tight enough, for example, especially in instances or PVP where it really mattered. The game engine just couldn’t handle it without lag. Its end game (at least non-raiding end game) was a snooze-fest of dialing and instance grinding that got old fast. Its PVP was at best annoying (and I’m beginning to realize that faction-based PVP, especially 2 faction based PVP is a very bad thing), and each class just had too many abilities to feel comfortable at high levels.

It wasn’t all bad. The companion system was cool (and really helped keep solo combat interesting). Its legacy system was good. Its starter 2-man dungeons were kinda nice—and I would have liked to see a lot more of that honestly. And the gearing/mod system is something that is actually pretty cool. I won’t comment on TOR’s raiding game, because I’ve never experienced it. It could be awesome, I don’t know. I do know that there are several very active and successful raiding guilds on my server, so it’s certainly not horrible.

Despite its troubles, TOR remains one of the better MMOs out there. And while it’s not even a year old and already in decline, that I think is more of a general MMO trend, and one inevitable with TOR’s more story-based design. There is still a lot of promise in the game, and if Bioware can pull off regular story-based expansions that actually feel more like a epic single-player experience with an MMO attached to it, I think they can keep this game going for quite some time. (In some ways I think TOR would benefit from the Guild Wars model…no monthly description, but you buy regular expansions).  

But, for me, my time with the game is quickly coming to an end. I’ll be quitting soon, and really I’ve only been logging in for ‘game night’ for over 2 months now anyway. I’ll probably come back to check out its next major expansion (just like I plan to come back to WOW for Mists of Pandaria, even if it’s just to level to 90). But TOR wasn’t able to hold my interest in the long term. And I probably wouldn’t have stayed as long as I had if not for the group I was with taking so long to get to 50 in the first place.

Still, those first two months were the game were a blast, and that while the polish certainly wore off, I’ll probably still look back with my experiences with the game with fondness years from now.  I just wish the developer's had not stuck so close to the WOW formula, and really worked towards making a completely different story-focused experience. The concept feels right to me, and who knows, maybe there's still time for an expansion to fulfill that goal. Or for some other company to take the core concepts in TOR and execute them well.

My Life as a Retired Raider

(but not a retired MMO player)

It’s been over a year since I quit World of Warcraft, and quit raiding. The reality of it was that my personal life, despite not being married, is just no longer compatible with the raiding life-style, and hasn’t been for quite some time. I seriously stressed over it for a long time in WOW before I gave up, and I would have probably stuck with it even longer if my friends had remained playing. But, people moved on, and the reasons I had to stay evaporated just as my patience with trying to revolve my life around a 3 or 4 night a week raiding schedule ran out.

But even though I’ve quit raiding, I’ve not stopped playing MMOs. After WOW, a group of my RL friends began with The Old Republic, which we started when it came out. After the initial rush, we settled  into a 2-night a week schedule, where we leveled as a group and did instances. It took us a long time, four months, to hit level 50 (in a game where even semi-core people were hitting 50 in 2-3 weeks). And in that time I played several different characters, getting 3 others into the level 35 range, and another to level 50.

The SWTOR end game is very much like WOW. It revolves around raiding, and hard mode instances for gear in PVP; and badly unbalanced PVP grinding for PVP. Raiding is pretty much a no-go for me. Even if I was interested in it, none of my friends are, and those that do are in the same boat as I am. Raiding is fun, but it’s not worth the time commitment anymore.  

This has completely changed the end-game for me, for obvious reasons. It means that as a level-capped character, I am pretty much limited to daily grinding for tokens for better gear…and I’ll pretty much never be able to keep up even if I wanted to. And daily-instance grinding just isn’t that fun by itself.

Playing with a group of RL friends really helps with an MMO, but the specific way we went about playing the game also hurt us. For one thing, we formed our own guild. It was only the 4 (and later 6 of us), it was just a group for us to have a shared channel, etc, and in that regard it was perfect. But it also meant that when we were together, we never really made contacts with anyone else. The entire experience of the game became very sheltered—I’ve yet to do any instance with anyone outside of my friends (even though I’m a Sage healer, and shouldn’t have too much trouble getting a group).

And since I played SWTOR much more casually, I never even now understand all of the mechanics of the game. MMO mechanics—changes to game systems, item lists, crafting, new vendors, etc, are usually pretty cryptic. The developers pretty much expect you to look this stuff up yourself. And even now I find myself out of the loop. SWTOR is a game that needed a lot of polish and changes, and I’ve not really tried to keep up with them.

Of course part of the problem is that as a group, I’ve pretty much just played with my friends and have no outside contacts in the game. And as a non-raider, there is something of a glass ceiling—already I’m slowly reaching the point where better gear becomes a near impossibility without taking the next step. I’ve hit level 50. I’m in the instance-grind. But when I’m done, then what?

This is a core issue with most MMO’s I’ve played, but one that’s never been a real issue because I’ve always been on the other side of the ceiling. Most of the raiding guilds I ever played in were always in the top 5 of the server I was in—capable of doing the most intense raids, but not as quickly on the uptake as the best.  And most PVE end games cater to the raiding crowd, at least in the games I’ve played. And that leaves the rest to always sit in second place, at best.

I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon. But it also means that my commitment to any one game isn’t as great, unlike it was in WOW. My time with SWTOR is almost done. I’m ending my subscription in 2 months, when Guild Wars 2 comes out. My friends and I are pretty much committed to making that switch. And in a lot of ways the game sounds like it will fit my new play style very well.

In the meantime, I’ve tried Tera, which I’ve also had a lot of fun with even with the short amount of time I’ve spent with it. It shows me that even now, I like the MMO style. Tera may have an interesting combat mechanic, but in every other respect it’s a traditional Everquest/WOW like MMO. Yet, I’ve enjoyed the questing, even if it’s as generic as it gets. Everything is fun, and new, and interesting. And I’ll probably stick with it for the next 2 months, or until I hit 60 (which is the level cap in that game right now). I may even do some PVP and other activities. And then I’ll move on to Guild Wars 2 and start the cycle all over again. And then maybe I’ll try the Secret World, or another MMO that has already come out, but I never checked out the first time through.

This is my life now as an ex-raider. I’m still playing, still having fun, but as my commitment towards a specific game is much lower so is my loyalty to it. It’s not that I’m burned out. But, as the best rewards require more commitment than I’m willing to make—or more specifically the methods of obtaining them are simply not fun enough to go far—in most cases I’m not even bothering to try. I’m much more willing at that  point to switch to something new and different than stick with the grind. This is a perspective that I know most hard-core people strongly abject to, but the reality is that the non-raiding game just isn’t as interesting because of the lack of social context. And because of that I have no incentive to continue, and little loyalty to any one game.