Completely personal opinion and suggestions.

In this post I will give my personal opinion and comment along the way about the possible changes and ideas.

So first I want to start with the current state and direction of Tera:

• Constant and never-ending grind,
• Skill level needed for literally any dungeon is close to low-average
• Population loss due to not listening to your player base.

Constant and never-ending grind:

Right now, and over the last year, Tera is becoming a bigger and bigger grind fest. Even tho, some are completely fine and will make a relative difference between a new player and a veteran player others are complete and absolute idiotism. Let me elaborate...

1. Enhancement Points - COMPLETELY FINE! This is a completely fine and in my opinion properly done grind in Tera. If we exclude the part where some classes' options are clearly giving them more benefit than others, the idea is nice and can stay like this with some possible additions/changes, EP Power <- Completely useless, like, 9.9/10 useless due to the way it is used in the damage calculation. Some classes don't have any really useful/core Enhancement options meanwhile other have some pretty strong ones.
2. Skill Advancement Points - COMPLETELY FINE! Especially with the new events/portals that give us many ways to get needed scrolls/points, this is very nicely done and imagined, even tho this as well would use some slight changes just to what skills are strengthened for which class, it's a really nice feature.
3. Glyphs - A very old system that everyone is used to, is amazing. But it needs a rework in the sense of, which skills have which glyphs... I mean, honestly, who the fck needs mana cost reduction on a skill that has a 5-6min cdw, hello?

------------- Overall, these grinds are pretty nice and/or acceptable, however...

1. Pets - Complete waste of time... Cash milking machine that it waaay too rng. Alright, I understand, we can simply go and have 1 pet, that we will only fuse tier 10 pets into and we will in the end have 1 pet with 30-40 power... But come on, getting 1 box, that MIGHT drop a pet is 30-50k, and we get 1 free fodder every 2 weeks assuming we are online for 10*ish* hours! ( Read PET -> Companion, Fodder -> Pet ). So, assuming we get 1 fodder out of 4 and 1 pet out of 10 boxes ( which is not the case ) we will get 2 pets/10 boxes, overall we need 100 pets to PROPERLY *kind of (not rly)* guarantee that we will get 30-40 power pet in the end. That is around 10milion gold just to get a proper pet. So you can see how absurd that is. Then, we get bad rng 2 times and we have to do it all again. And there is no reason for that, Just increase the rarity of legendary pets and make them give 3min 18 power, increase rarity of rare pets and make them give 2min 12 power and we get a free uncommon pet which could give 6 power for 1min. Everyone would be happy with that. Or something similar that isn't way too grindy.
2. Relics and Halidoms - Even tho it's a nice idea it's completely RNG with a low AF chance. My friend has already used like 30mil and only got to 4/3 R/H meanwhile there are people that got to 3/3 with 100k ( me, for some reason I was lucky and stopped there ) or 5/5 with a few million. Make it cap at 3 and increase the stats/cost so that on average a person will spend 1mil MAX or 1.5 if very unlucky to get it maxed out, which is a very understandable amount to spend on some acceptable grind.
3. Fodder for gear - Honestly, opinion on this is very depending on the person but, even tho it is acceptable it is pretty time consuming to go and farm the world bosses and most of the time leave empty handed. Increase of the number of rewards is FINE, but make it so everyone gets something or at least make fodder gear rerollable/fusable with each other so that we can craft a proper fodder gear eventually.
4. NEW GEAR - I personally don't care about it right now, but from everywhere I only hear one thing. " "GRIND GRIND GRIND" "RNG RNG RNG" " . You should really make it easier to get it. Downgrading is a real bummer! Especially for PvP where material gathering is closely tied to playing with many other people meanwhile the game's population is VERY low. So, remove downgrading or add the maximum amount of times gear can downgrade.

------------- Overall, all these options aren't COMPLETELY bad, they just need a complete rework.

So, many people, and me as well, as an example, completely stopped playing "supposedly hard content" and either slack or chat or do something that is not what a veteran, competitive and experienced person should be doing. Therefore we come to our next topic.

Skill level needed for literally any dungeon is close to low-average

So, basically, what current Tera direction is; is make everything brain-dead so that even the worst player out there can join any kind of content and still not be completely useless.

Got 65? Go do portals!

Got 68? Go buy blue gear!

Got blue gear? Let's go and do some of the hardest dungeons!

So... I am pretty tired of joining full lvl 70 and okay*ish*ly geared parties just to end up with 3-5min per boss in trash dungeons like AAN and similar. I am not saying I am not willing to play with rookies it's just, if I want a quick run, and join a party that looks like a good party, I expect it to be a good party. Not a healer that doesn't have maxed out stigma even tho his ToW is obviously buffed to max and doesn't even know how to give mana, or a tank that will dance fcking tango with the boss around the room.

Basically, make gearing relatively harder, but consistent and make tags proper. Like, don't let a person doing 1m/s in Bahaar as a dps get skilled with 10 clears. Take more things into a consideration with tag giving. 10 clears is okay for *acceptable* assuming all were done with completely/semi rookie parties. But for skilled it should be at least 20 clears with not full skilled party.

1. Make gearing harder but consistent. Aka, 5 tries per enchant and 10 per upgrade are fine imo. ( MAX ) So, it will still be possible to enchant/upgrade in 1 try, but there will be a limit. I reached 90/93/97% a few times... A friend of mine got to 100%!!!
   There was some guy who exceeded 20 tries on his main to get HO from SC when it just came out.
2. Re-work skilled/rookie tag, possibly add multiple options and make it possible for players to see if they have some higher rank on another char and what class it is.

Population loss due to not listening to your player base.

So, this is hopefully where this will end. All the time, developers themselves BARELY EVER listened to wishes of their players. The only people that tried their best to make up for that as much as they could are the PUBLISHERS ! Please, listen to what all the people, me including, will tell you in these posts. Tera is the game with the HIGHEST FCKING POTENTIAL out there. You just need to go in a proper direction. Best combat system out there, nice story, fine graphics ( best from it's time back in the time and still good nowadays )... You can easily revive the game, and I am sure many would be willing to stay even if the game went back to pay to play if that is necessary.

Now, after I have covered the stuff I deem important now I'mma share with you what I think about the dungeons/battleground/PvP/PvE/etc...

Dungeons + PvE

Game went from fully reactional, unpredictable, fun and challenging to fully learning the combos of bosses, predictable and repetitive.

It would be MUCH MORE enjoyable if game goes back to the time where you had to be ready, feel it, react and such rather than now where you just need to learn the mechs and combos and you are good to go.

RAIDS!!!!

Tera is a mainly both PvP and PvE game, except right now, PvE is MUCH more focused.

Tera lacks one of the funniest and nicest aspects of an MMORPG with holy trinity (T+H+D) and that is raids. I am not talking about stupid DFH, which IS a nice try, or KNX. I am talking about HARROWHOLD [20,30 man], BATU DESERT[30 man, iirc], and many other 20-30 man instances that WERE challenging and entertaining. BRING THOSE BACK A S A P! Every stream and such, I wait to hear news about HH coming back or something, but to no avail.

Current dungeons are more explained in the posts of other people and Assazinchen made a great post which I really like! So I will not go much into that but I almost completely agree with him, except the part where finding raids was hard/impossible, there were 30+ raids on MYSTEL going on EVERY WEEK during the latest HH 20 man, big raids aren't something you should do completely with LFG and quickly but rather a big group of people that trains to tackle the hardest raids and such!!!

Battleground + PvP

So, current system of PvP is pretty... meh...

Corsair's Stronghold is the only mass PvP we can do on daily basis... AND that is only assuming there isn't a good ongoing event at that moment, AND only for a few hours a day when jackpot is on.

Shore Hold is a relatively small scale battleground, 7v7 and it is pretty much who will capture better rather than who will kill more.

Skyring isn't worth the mention since it is the only bg where veteran's can go to enjoy the old feel of PvP and it gives COMPLETE TRASH for rewards.

Gridirion... it's pretty much just a clown fiesta for when you want to go and rage on some newbies that came there and smack with some other people, a really irrelevant battleground at the moment.

Fraywind Canyon was removed for... No real reason?! Except maybe to force the newest battleground which very much just killed the mood. Even tho it is still able to enter it if one would gather 30 players willing to do so, it is not allowed by the game developer and can result in severe punishments...

PvP gear is very much RNG and I suggest the same as with the current PvE gear:

1. Maximal number of downgrades! Like, one could go 6-7-6-7-6-7-7-7-6-7 and then never downgrade again, meanwhile another could 6-7-8-8-7-8-7-6-7-6-7-8-7 and again, never downgrade again
2. % increase on fail, in example, I got my weapon on Valk in 1 try, on priest I failed 7 and on Zerk I failed 4 times and got it on 5th, to +6, meanwhile, a friend of mine failed 20 times to get +6 or so.

With this, I want to summarize the important parts of this post:

1. LOWER THE AMOUNT OF GRIND AND MAKE SOME SAFETY MEASURES FOR REALLY UNLUCKY PEOPLE!
2. REWORK THE SKILLED/ROOKIE TAG AND INCREASE THE OVERALL DIFFICULTY IN DUNGEONS
3. ACTUALLY LISTEN TO THE WISHES OF YOUR PLAYERS AND TRY TO MAKE TERA GREAT AGAIN!!!

P.S: Tera developers should really get in touch with the Proxy Developing community. It would definitely be a HUGE benefit for Tera developers as majority of the proxy developers are all amazing and great people that are really trying to make the game better and improve the experience of the players!!!!!!!!!

Thank you for reading and I hope to see promising changes in the future!

P.P.S:

-Training IM, more options for IM, and such is a great idea! There were runs where I soloed the last boss for 50% cause everyone else died and no more resses... Making it have more options and options unlocking with your tag would be great! Also, if someone drops the party before it really starts doing the dungeon, he/she shouldn't get a dropout since he might just not like the party setup.

-Training rooms for bosses. It doesn't give any benefit to the player except being able to practice the dungeon solo. An example would be, player tps to a big room, there is an NPC in the center where we can choose WHICH BOSS we want to summon, that boss would do [0,1] damage and/or apply some CC, depending on the mech.

-Training room right now, it could have 2 options, 1 that would be SCORING, basically, players could compete with eachother how high their burst is. PRACTICE, make the crab have MAX_NUMBER hp, so people can actually practice properly and not kill it in 1 burst or have to switch to lower gear.

-Less relevant, but still important, 2.0 ISSUE! Check Trappiez for more info.

-Elleon Marks shop should be udpated, check Trappiez and Assazinchen posts.

*BIG IF, cross-region INSTANCE MATCHING. Impossible for battlegrounds due to the latency being prolly close to 100, but, for dungeons, it is very much possible if connection between regions is well optimized, at least like, EU+NA, RU+EU, RU+KR, etc... This would, of course, force disabling of certain stuff like, region specific consumables.

to be continued I guess