Tera Online

[Darielle]

If you have a group, killing BAM's is extremely fast and worthwhile.

My comment was only that the rate of SOLOING Bam's (because that's what was being talked about) isn't worth it, since you're looking at a looong time to solo one BAM. WIth a group, a BAM will die in like 3-5 mins.

After all when you're killing a BAM in a group, you can go full bore. If you're solo, you wind up spending half your time either running around like a headless chicken or hiding behind Block and sneaking in autoattacks instead of being able to freely Thunder Strike and all that.

[Arcand]

I've got a 27 Aman Lancer on the RP server whose name escapes me - anyone else around?

So far the only instance I've done is Bastion of Lok - there's generally a slayer or
berserker who will rush in and start spamming AoE, turning trash pulls into chaos
in the finest traditions of WoW heroic runs. I've tried just picking up the 1-2 biggest
melee guys in each pull, making a half-assed effort at corraling the rest, and no
healers have cussed me out yet.

Tanking bosses and trying to take zero damage is a blast. I just got Death Grip (Leash)
and Shield Counter, which is a bit of an energy hog but still seems worth it.

I'm trying to keep Armorsmithing at at least 5 x level, and so far it's worthless;
everything I can make is nowhere near as good as my quest rewards. I got spoiled by
TOR where I was crafting small upgrades nearly every session. Maybe trying to maintain
7 x level would be more like it, if I can afford to. (I think I have 15 gold, which
feels like not very much.)

Threat definitely seems to decay. I soloed a BAM down to 25%, screwed up for several
seconds and ended up block-turtling while I waited for cooldowns, a Mystic who had been
watching jumped in to help and pulled the thing off me in a couple seconds. (Happy
ending; the cooldowns popped and the good guys won.)

Abilities:
I sometimes pull with Charging Lunge > Challenging Shout just to get a jump on the DPS.

Shield Barrage is a good way of rounding up minions, but the Spring Attack(?) proc
expires really fast. You have to be on that space bar, like right now, or instead
of the Spring you'll jump, then you'll get knocked down, and then you hope that
Retaliation is up.


Equipment:
I'm gemming for HP and MP regen; nice for soloing. For dungeon runs I could see having
a set that's damage reduction/MP regen instead. Might depend on how attentive the healer is.

I have glyphs for more MP regen from Combo Attack, more threat from Shield Counter, and +Power after a successful block. I'd like to have a shorter cooldown on Challenging Shout for when things go to shit, and then perhaps the reduced MP cost on Shield Counter. (If there's shorter cooldown on Leash, I might want that. I'll have to tank more to see how the base CD feels.)


In closing, my female Aman is currently full commando except for about four square inches of hip-joint protection.

[Darielle]

I like the threat decay, because it makes it fun when the boss turns around because you had a couple of 200k and 300k crits in a row, and now you have to block or evade through something as a dps - between that and the boss just doing his thing which involves things like stepping on you, jumping on you, turning around and trying to blast you, etc., things stay very active all the time.

As my Berserker is getting geared out, I've got my Warrior up to 41 now, and intend to tank with it. WArrior DPS is incredibly fun though, and soloing is a blast, especially soloing BAM's. Whereas on a Berserker, it was fairly easy to just turtle up and block all the things if you absolutely had to, as a Warrior you can stay active and do a lot of cool things, use your dodge to position yourself behind the boss and unload a Traverse/Vortex+Blade Draw combo, use Smoke Aggressor to do the same, etc.

[Fivelives]

Apparently it's impossible to cancel your subscription to Tera. Even going through the phone service people, I still got charged for the subscription renewal.

Oh well, I guess I can just cancel the card I used and get a new one. There are a lot of things I can forgive with a freshly launched IP (which Tera is most definitely NOT), but billing problems? Not one of those things. Tera's been out long enough, internationally (1.5 YEARS, ffs), that this shit should just plain WORK.

[aureon]

O_o, worked for me. EU or US?

[Fivelives]

US. I ended up waiting on hold to talk to someone on the phone for a little over an hour, then got it taken care of. Still, that's inexcusable. Make sure your billing works if you're going to release a subscription based game!

[Fridmarr]

Yeah, basic billing functions not working in almost any situation is inexcusable. It's kind of a mission critical thing on both the vendor and customer sides. Hopefully it's an isolated problem and/or they've sorted it out.

[Fivelives]

Nope. It's not an isolated problem, there are billing issues all over the damn place - enough to where they're giving out free days to anyone that asks for them.

Can't cancel automatic billing (haven't been able to do this since launch day)
Subscriptions aren't going through (Digital River is apparently bad at recurring charges)
Can't re-up a cancelled subscription (the button is just plain missing on the account management page)
Even after the subscription is charged, can't login because the game thinks you don't have an active subscription.

Etc, etc... there are a bunch of different problems with it right now, not just the one I had. Some (maybe most? Who knows - people rarely go onto the forums except to whine) people are getting lucky and having things go right, but there are enough problems that it even merited a status update on the general forum.

[aureon]

Oh, wow.
And i was bitching at Frogster. Guess en-masse is even worse.
Although Frogster is not giving server transfers, chronoscrolls and other useful stuff..

[Darielle]

EME's biggest problem is that Digital River isn't playing nice, especially with foreign customers. In that regards, EME's actually done a pretty fantastic job at making live support more accessible, and actually giving people the time without being bitchy at giving people free time when they ask for it, etc.

It's a relatively isolated problem though - the amount of people with subscription issues is fairly small, but because it's a big deal they've kept communicative on the issue while they work it out.

Hell, when we ran into a bug in the game where a world boss was bugged and wouldn't spawn, the GM tried to spawn it and it didn't work, and a couple of people had been camping it for a few hours, they gave all of us a free pre-order mount for our "inconvenience". Now I just need to find a couple more bugs and I'll have all the mounts ^.^

[Auroris]

/necro

TERA Online will is going "legit" free in February. Anyone else thinking of playing it?

[Darielle]

It'll be worth it to destress for free since the combat system is still awesome, but that's about it.

[Delphineas]

Have an itch for a fantasy hacknslash/rpg, but no money, so I will probably check it out.

Aman lancer looks kinda fun. only thing I checked out though.



Kinda like a character I'm trying to build for DND 3.5, a medium armor spearwielder. Alas, seems like everything in DND is feat intensive.

[Gracerath]

I'm giving it a whirl. I'm not happy with it. The game is pretty, the music is nice. The combat is okay. Everything else is from an era I don't wish to repeat. Mob tagging, quest hubs, no objectives marked on maps (save for quest NPC's). The moment I got to the first town and picked up 6 quests at once, I heaved a sigh and logged off.

[Gracerath]

I put some more time in with a friend and got off the starting island. I found out that you actually can see objectives on the map, you just have to open up your quest journal and click on the highlighted name of the enemy in the quest text. That was helpful but it would be nice if it did it automatically. This same friend tells me I have to go through at least one dungeon first before writing the game off so I'll plow through. Its not bad or anything, it is just a model I no longer enjoy. GW2 has spoiled me in that regard.

The game is certainly pretty. The fanservice borders on ridiculous but hey, I can enjoy some well purportioned tits in skimpy clothes.