Sorry for the late notice, but I’ll be on the Team Waffle podcast tonight at 10 pm Central with Sunfyre from Sunfyre’s Nest to talk about…something. If I still know anything about druids. (Man, go away for a few weeks and you’re like, umm, I push 1 for the attack that makes the red swirlies, yeah!)
I spent a few hours playing the TERA open beta over the weekend, and here’s some quick thoughts. (I’ll start doing these every so often, especially when there’s no druid news to talk about.)
Gameplay
The gameplay is quite good. Initially, things are confusing as heck (you start at lvl 20, play a short tutorial, then go to lvl 1…none of which is really explained at all) but the whole action-combat style works well. Very similar to a multiplayer version of Kingdom of Amalur, though like KoA, it really works better for melee classes than ranged classes. Having to move + dodge frequently because you’re right up on enemies = fun; stand and nuke = not as fun.
Questing isn’t any better or worse than any normal MMO…nothing to see here, really, and the storyline is also quite forgettable. Leveling is quite fast, and you do want to level quickly, as the AI of the early mobs is simply terrible (thankfully, they get smarter.) I didn’t try any of the crafting or PvP, so I can’t speak to that, but all the buttons were there.
Remember how I said leveling was fast? Several people were already at level cap, and complaining about how there was nothing to do. (If you preorder the game, one character per server will not be deleted when the open beta closes. Interesting incentive.)
Interface
The UI is good for a MMO game. All the elements can be moved around the screen by default, though I couldn’t immediately see a way to minimize/close them. This annoyed me, as one of the UI elements was showing how my spells were mapped to my controller, even though I was playing with mouse/keyboard. There’s a rudimentary combat log, but no mod support, so good luck with doing any kind of comprehensive analysis. (Yes, WoW has spoiled me on this. The question about whether that’s a good or bad thing is a whole nother’ debate.)
Look and Feel
The big controversial point: it’s pure anime styling. The men all look like Marcus Fenix or Ezio Auditore, while the women are all in stripper gear. There’s even a “race” that looks like pre-pubescent females, complete with available bunny ears and panty shots. Combine this with the marketing campaign (which features a MMA fighter beating up people who play other MMO’s until they switch to Tera) and you can see EXACTLY which demographic this is targeted at. That all said, the world design (monsters, weather, backgrounds) is the best I’ve seen in any game to date, so that’s something.
Overall
Two thoughts. 1) If I was 18 again, I’d probably be all over this game. Now that I’m 28 with a wife and son, this kind of thing just feels tawdry. 2) I don’t know what their goals are, but the target demo + the lack of endgame (which appears to be all PvP) tells me this thing is going to be big for a month or two, then flame out as everyone moves on to the next big thing. Again, a lot like KoA where about 15-20 hours in, you were like “Welp, I’ve seen everything this game has to offer.”
I’ve been frustrated with the lack of updates for druids recently, so I decided to roll up some Monks on beta, see if they were worth assuming ‘main alt’ status come Mists release date. Well, I’ve enjoyed them enough that I’ve decided to rip off my own blog layout and start up a new Monk blog called…World of Monkcraft! (I know, I know, great name, right?) I’ve been writing up some Monk spec guides: Windwalker is up, and I’m currently working on Mistweaver. Feel free to pop over and comment/troll/berate as you see fit; the design is terrible, as is my usual standard.
Also, not to worry, I’m still committed to Feral: the thread on the beta forums I started is going on five pages of mostly drama-free constructive criticism, so input’s still flowing in. Just no new builds means no new stuff to talk about. :(
FAQ:
EDIT: Since this is apparently a popular search result page, I’ve gone back and updated this table with the correct numbers for Level 90; in early beta, all the combat ratings were higher, but were reduced by about 15% across the board.
Remember, these stats are before diminishing returns: See Theck if you want more DR math than your head can handle. The general TLDR idea fir tanks is stack avoidance stats for best overall survivability but more RNG; stack offensive stats for more control over your active mitigation but slightly more total damage taken.
| 85 (1% Gain) | 90 (1% Gain) | Stat |
| 265.08 | 885 | Dodge |
| 265.08 | 885 | Parry |
| 88.36 | 295 | Block |
| 102.45 | 340 | Hit/Spell Hit |
| 102.45 | 340 | Expertise |
| 128.06 | 425 | Haste |
| 179.28 | 600 | Crit |
| 179.28 | 600 | Mastery (but varies for some specs) |
| 322.58 | 1259.52 | Agility needed for 1% crit |
| 648.91 | 2533.66 | Intellect needed for 1% crit |
| 243.58 | 951.15 | Agility needed for 1% dodge (druids/monks), Strength needed for 1% parry (paladin/warrior/DK) |
| 95.22 | 310 | PvP Resilience |
| N/A | 265 | PvP Power (note: PvPP is half as effective for heals, so 530 for +1% healing done) |
If I’m incorrect/missing something, let me know.
Briefly, here’s what I’m predicting we’ll see come out of the press event. (Note: Yeah, I contribute for WoW Insider, who had two people there, but they haven’t told me anything. Despite attempted bribery via baked goods.)
We’ll see; remember, all the goodies will go live at 12AM PDT. If you want the straight data dump, I’m pretty sure Wowhead will cover you; WoWI will probably have more bite-size pieces along with analysis. I’m not really paying attention; still messing around with the SWTOR free weekend. I’ll throw up my thoughts on that after all the press news settles.
Thanks to Arielle’s kind invitation, I’ll be appearing on the Team Waffle podcast later this evening (8pm PST). Live link here.
While this isn’t specifically Druid-related, I’d like to highlight the two Cataclysm postmortems that just came out from senior Blizzard developers that are incredibly illustrative.
The first, Daelo’s, is absolutely TERRIBLE. It was very short and read like Cataclysm promo material. “My greatest weakness? I care about work just a bit too much. *snif*” It reads like he just blew off the email from the CM’s asking him to fill this out, and some junior intern got stuck with it. “Mr. Mercer, how does this look? Fine. Go away.”
In contrast, Ghostcrawler’s is absolutely excellent, and reminds me of why I keep coming back to this now seven-year-old game. It’s chock-full of honest discussion about what worked and didn’t work. So go read it. I agree with 90% of what’s there; the only thing I disagree on is legendaries, and even that remains TBD. Personally, I think legendaries should go away entirely, but if they must be kept, I’d like to see the legendary crafting materials/progress be guild-bound and the proc be one that buffs raid DPS/DTPS/HPS, not personal. That way, when the next content tier comes out, you take a small personal hit if you keep using it but it still buffs your raid more than the amount you lose.
(Back to ME3. /poof)
Last one of these for a while, I promise. Here’s a quick list of what I’m planning for TFD in 2012:
Short-Term (pre-MoP):
Long-Term (for MoP)
Feel free to jump in and tell me what else I should cover (or tell me I’m crazy for trying to do videos, either works). This is still just an idea at the moment, so there’s lots of flexibility.
So, things have settled down for me again, and I’d like to take a little time now to look back at the site for 2011. (I’ll do some looking ahead to 2012 in a future post.)
Website Stats
People were excited to finally dig into Cataclysm content, and it showed. The site had a huge spike in popularity, going from ~50k monthly views in Nov/Dec to ~150k in January, then slowly fell back to the 50-60k level. (Of course, we also had a lot less to talk about in the later half of the year.) Subscribers to the RSS feed (as measured by FeedBurner) jumped from 500ish to about 800 in January, and are now hovering around 1k. I don’t have good stats for the forums, but we’re up over 6k total posts, so obviously something’s going right there. :)
Popular Posts:
Personal
WoW Insider offered me a columnist slot back in January, which I accepted (first column for WOWI). Admittedly, the timing wasn’t the greatest: I completed my training in Georgia in February (CISSP passed! Yay!) and moved to Texas in March to deploy to Iraq in April. Whew. Sylvaneart, Qbear, Tinderhoof, and Leafkiller did an excellent job filling in with guest posts while I was occupied, and they of course continue to contribute in forum discussion, which I am slowly dipping my toe back into. Due to a highly unlikely set of coincidences, I was actually able to keep raiding in Iraq, even though I had to wake up at 0330 to make the 8PM CST start time. Due to a lack of healers and low FPS, I ended up raiding as Resto.
September saw me leaving Iraq for Kuwait; no more incoming fire (good) but, ironically, worse Internet and housing arrangements meant no more raiding. Yay. I wrote a story for the Blizzard writing contest, which didn’t win anything. I’ll post it, in case anyone is interested in reading my first attempt to write fiction since high school. (TLDR: Not very good.)
Now that I’m home, I’m playing through all the great games I missed (got Portal 2 on my 360, with Arkham City waiting as soon as I finish Arkham Asylum on the PC). Raid Finder is cool, but ultimately boring in the lack of difficulty. I feel like I’m cheating somehow; I’ve still got a lot of 359 gear, but I’m hitting top 5 on the DPS meters for every fight. (UPDATE: Wow, Happy Winterveil: I’ve done RF twice now, both parts, and come away with 3 pieces of T13, Kiril’s, and the Wrath trinket. I actually topped the DPS meters on Ultraxion.) I may come back to normal raiding, but I’m not ready to commit time to a schedule yet. We’ll see on that one.
Anyway, enough navel-gazing. (At least till my next post, where I discuss where I want to take TFD for 2012.) What’s your favorite moment of 2011?
Awesome, as always. Don’t forget to check out my latest column on WoW Insider for (slightly) more serious discussion.
