So today we got our hands on the snowball battlefield and for anyone who hasn't tried it yet there is some interesting starter tips that you will enjoy as well as a few noticeable bugs that can also be found with the snowfield battleground. So I figured I would cover them in this post this way all the readers will be well informed and provide some interesting stuff as well.
So the first thing you might ask about it whats the point of doing it? Well the answer is you get tokens which can be used to buy items from the merchant which you can find in all the main cities or at least in velika that I've noticed. I haven't checked all of the cities but it's near the banker in velika. The items which you can buy are:
Riding Skill: Snowdrift
Santa Cap
Red Rudolph Hairband
Brown Rudolph Hairband
Yellow Wintera Scarf
Red Wintera Scarf
Blue Wintera Scarf
Green Wintera Scarf
Shape Changer: Height Changer (permanent)
Shape Changer: Chest (permanent)
Shape Changer: Thighs (permanent)
Gilded Leaf Necklace
Santa Candle
Rudolph Nose
Hot Cocoa
The tokens obtained can be put in your bank so you can collect them with more then one character to save them up faster. Keep in mind you can only do the snowball fight battleground 10 times per character. So if you want to do it more then 10 times you will need to pull out alternative characters to make this possible.
When you enter this battleground it will be a 10 verses 10 match and it works like last man standing or the team with the most players still alive if time runs out. You obtain some skills while your in this battleground.
So if you take a look you obtain the following skills which you can see from the screenshot:
Flameball: This throws a fireball in front of you and slows all the targets who get stuck in it.
IceTrap: Puts a stun trap on the ground enemies get stunned if they walk into it and slowed.
Hot Cider: Heals you for 50k HP
Thermal Layer: 100,000 damage shield and immune to knockdown or slows.
Snowball: Throws a snowball for 20k damage single hit target
Snow Barrage: Charging skill that can hit multiple targets and can do up to 40k damage 10k when not charged but uses more snow then a snowball.
The blue chests called Warm Up Box will either have thermal layer or hot cider at random.
The patches of snow will give you snowballs these can be gathered in groups.
The chests will have flameball or icetrap's at random.
When you die you have to just wait till the rest of your team finishes killing the remaining people.
At this point you might be thinking wait a minute I learned nothing new that I didn't already know from the main website what a useless post right? Well if you're still here and reading I'll let you in on a few interesting tips you most likely don't know.
Visionmaker weapon will randomly stun people hit by any of the effects that you throw including the large snowballs great for stunning groups of people. This also works for mayhem weapons. This may work for fire weapons or necklaces as well but I have nothing to test with to find out.
Vigorous crystals also work you can restore health just by rolling with 4 of these and hiding behind the wall and avoiding enemies. It heals quite a lot this can really save you during long fights.
Make sure your inventory isn't full or you can't pick up items and it will tell you that your on cool-down when you are not.
You can avoid getting hit by jumping but be careful when doing this cause if you get knocked down you become the victim and will get raped.
Otherwise this battleground is a whole lot of fun and if you haven't given it a try yet you should consider doing so. There are some achievements and boxes which you can get for having a certain amount of wins which should be fairly easy unless your team is bad. But you can go with five of you're friends to make it easier as well.
Besides all of the modifications which can be done to increase the games FPS you can also change other features of the game which will speed up login and also increase the field of view for a character. These are more of the optional tweaks which you can choose to do to your game. Keep in mind modification of the client still falls into gray area's when it comes to submiting screenshots to the GM team remember that when you go to submit for contests.
Note: Make sure any configurations does in the .ini files are set to READ ONLY to stop the client from rewriting them
Modification of Field of Vision (FOV)
You will need to locate:
64Bit: C:\Program Files (x86)\TERA\Client\S1Game\Config\S1Input.ini
32Bit: C:\Program Files\TERA\Client\S1Game\Config\S1Input.ini
Look for the line bEnableMouseSmoothing then under it add the following: Bindings=(Name="end",Command="fov 90") Bindings=(Name="home",Command="fov 71")
When you press the end key you will have a field of vision of 90. When you press the home key it will go back to the default field of vision.
Disable Opening Movies/Logos
Doing this will speed up the entry into the game but keep in mind doing this will most likely remove the loading screens making them black in game so you will not have the pretty art that Tera Online uses when you do this.
Locate the following folder:
64Bit: C:\Program Files (x86)\TERA\Client\S1Game\CookedPC\Art_Data\Packages\Video\
32Bit: C:\Program Files\TERA\Client\S1Game\CookedPC\Art_Data\Packages\Video\
Then rename the following files in this folder:
intro_atari.bik <-This one control's atari's logo
intro_bhs.bik <- This one control's the begining movie for bluehole studio's
intro_eme.bik <- This one control's En Masse's introduction
intro_fog.bik (Europe Version) <-gameforge logo specific to Europe
intro_ubi.bik (Europe Version) <-Ubisoft logo specific to Europe
Prologue_kor.bik <- The main introduction movie before the game takes you to the login screen.
I was able to view them using the a BIK player since it is a known video format for gaming. Disable Mouse Smoothing
This effect's how your mouse works in game. Mouse smoothing is an option which slows down your mouses movement this can be bad if your trying to do something quickly cause the game will actually cause your mouse to move slower based on this setting.
You will need to locate:
64Bit: C:\Program Files (x86)\TERA\Client\S1Game\Config\S1Input.ini
32Bit: C:\Program Files\TERA\Client\S1Game\Config\S1Input.ini
Find: bEnableMouseSmoothing=True
Change to: bEnableMouseSmoothing=False
This will increase the response time of your mouse.
NetWorkThrottling
This only applies to newer windows and does not apply for people using windows xp but most people have this modification that they can do. But this will work from windows vista to most current systems. What this option in windows does is limits the network receive speed to 10% of its maximum – 100Mbps on gigabit ethernet, and 10Mbps on fast ethernet. But if the service itself is removed it will disable all of the sound for the computer and that's not a good thing. So all we need to do is turn off the throttling without killing the sound services.
Go to start then Run and type regedit Then go to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows
NT\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\SystemProfile There will be an entry for
network performance throttling, default value is 10; set it to FFFFFFFF hex
* Reboot
This effects quite afew games when it comes to lag issues.
If you didn't already know Tera Online has the ability to flag up in opened world allowing a player to kill other players without their consent. Tera Online PvP when you have killed many players your an outlaw to everyone and can die and break a crystal. But there's issues with a system like this and honestly when you look at the big picture you realize that PvP is infact dead in mmorpg's.
What I mean by PvP is dead in mmorpg's is that ever since World of Warcraft everyone assumes PvP means you flag up when you feel like PvPing and when you don't you just stay unflagged and do your normal questing and no ones gonna bother you. Other people assume the word PvP is associated with closed PvP arena's that are a separate instance from the rest of the world. When it comes to open world PvP it hasn't existed in the mmorpg market for at least 4 or 5 years maybe longer depending on how brutal we are talking.
The issue with Tera Online's open world PvP system is:
No incentive for PvP
No punishment for people that Pk too much
Safe zones in every small town
Now I'm sure every care bear who's gonna read this is gonna be like why are safe zones a bad thing. Think about it like this they put in safe zones to make it so lower levels have a place to hide but a safe zone becomes the same place for the Pker to hide as well after they've farmed you over and over and you go get your fully geared main they go to the save zone and call you a scrub and all sorts of stuff and you don't get any closure to killing them cause your not able to. So in the end all safe zones seem to do is make it easier for your Pkers in the end.
The reason I say theirs no incentives for PvP is related to the fact that the only thing that you get for killing anyone is your Epeen level grows it's more of a haha I killed you reward but in the end you get nothing for it so unless your into griefing people and trying to prevent them from doing a quest or something that's the only reason you would turn on PvP.
No punishment is bad because people can just get 100 or more points and keep killing and the only thing they can lose is a crystal which most likely is like 5g and many people go Pking with complete crystal bind anyways so they won't break anything.
So in the end unless the PvP system gets revamped in a way that benefits Pkers as well as making it more fun and also helps people who are getting picked on by a Pker the system will keep being pretty lame. So what I'm going to do is explain some way's the system could be improved to work like it should. I have 10 years development within the private server community and I worked on ways of making a open world PvP system for the game called Ragnarok Online.
Tera Online PvP system needs:
Removal of safe zones
Incentives for PvP
Punishment system that doesn't outweigh rewards but makes it fun or interesting
Placement of guards in towns
World raid bosses PvE
GvG incentive as well as removal of safe zones outside of main cities
So first lets talk about removal of the safe zones rather then have complete safe zones when it comes to our small towns the only main safe zone should be our main cities these being Velika, Kaiator, and Allemantheia. Main cities are the main hubs for players to hangout, chat etc in most of your older mmorpg's you had only one or two maps that where safe zones while the rest of the world was protected by guard's in towns. So what Tera Online would turn into is outside of dungeons and in smaller towns certain vendors, portals, and NPC's would be protected by guards these would only attacked the flagged players Pking. The towns would be an open Pking zone for the non flagged players to still kill them as well so now the outlaw has to worry about the guards in the town as well as all of the players in it. If a Pker wants a place to hide they would have to get to a main city.
For PvPers there should be some kind of incentives other then Epeen growing cause no one would want to PvP if there was no point to it. This could be done in a few different ways. The first way is by providing some sort of point system that would give rewards when players of the same level are killed then the points could be used to buy items with a special vendor. But a system like this would have drawbacks because from a developer point of view it could be exploitable.
Although a system which worked for many older mmorpg's would be the one that when your killed you drop items which you have been farming as well as a percentage of the overall money you have. We have a bank system which lets you put your money away but as your farming you constantly pick up gold and if someone forgets to put it away they could lose some of it when Pked. Item wise you make it so that items bound with the name of the player like for example your PvP set in your inventory says only "skoll" can wear it won't drop from inventory making it so you won't lose the items that are soul bound. And just make it so that the bind on equip items in a players inventory would drop and not quest items or soul bound ones. They could even make it give experience for people under max level which would give another way people could level up by Pking people and of course just make sure that it can't be exploited like you lose more experience then gained when say a level 50 kills a level 58 the level 58 loses 10% experience while only 1% goes to the level 50 as experience making it so someone wouldn't want to feed low levels that way.
Another interesting feature to incentive based PvP was one which I used in my last server related to the loss of money. How it worked was when a player lost 10% of the money they had 5% would go to the Pker and the other 5% would go to a bounty system under the Pker's name the more players someone killed the higher the bounty would be. Then players could choose from a bounty list of who they wanted to hunt down and kill them for the bounty reward. This would work well with the system in edition to the current system and provide more fun for care bears or white knight's what ever you would like to call them.
Pker punishment cause we know that it's not always enough just to make it so they are outlawed from normal towns because of the guards and players wanting to kill them. So they can face a higher loss when it comes to money dropped like a 25% loss of money a higher loss in experience if they aren't level 60. When a Pker is killed money wouldn't go into the bounty system it would drop to the floor for the person who killed them to pick up. The dropping of equipped gear wouldn't really be feasible in Tera Online so I won't really suggest it but they could drop some of what they've collected from other players of none soulbound items. But they could be made to drop crystals instead of just breaking them so the person that killed them would get money and free crystals and what ever items dropped from a Pker.
For the people who don't wanna read all of it lets break down what was suggested:
Main Cities are the safe zones small towns guarded by guards kill flagged players
Incentive based PvP Pkers get 10% gold, experience, non bound item drops.
Pkers lose 25% gold being carried on person, experience, non bound items drop of crystals.
Pkers only safe in main cities from getting pked.
Add of bounty system portion of gold lost from normal players feeds a bounty system.
So now we have a structured PvP system which is pretty functional but we are left with an issue in the end cause once players get to max level and have everything they stop doing dailies so much and don't go out into the world anymore. That means the higher level zones end up being dead so that's where world bosses come in. Rather then just normal bam's maps should have random rare spawns of world bosses which drop valuable items which would make them worth killing for even long standing players but because Pking in open world would be possible it would become a battle for these bosses. The vanarch bams have become kind of pointless at this point would be better if they had some raid quality bosses instead which would take place in any random map it could even be lower level maps. They could even be made with no spawn restrictions so a person could in effect drag it around the map trying to kill it. The issue with static spawns is you have to worry about the boss resetting but if they are given really large health pools and no reset restrictions would be a little more chaotic and provide something interesting for people.
Now the issue is the GvG system too I'm sorry but Guild vs Guild in Tera Online is another battle for the epeen. There's no point to GvG currently but what makes it worse is you can hide in safe zones when your winning. With the removal of the safe zones for normal towns GvG would only have main cities as a safe zone. This would provide more fun for guilds cause it wouldn't be so much the game of who ever hides in town wins cause people have to do quests and unless you plan on telling your whole guild to go hide all night long in a main city someones gonna get killed at some point. Currently thats the issue when people wanna win they sit in towns tell members not to go out some even go as far as to kick members out of the guild until the GvG is over.
GvG should also be changed to have some kind of incentive towards GvGing as well its kind of boring only having a leader board of who's got the biggest Epeen and the fact you get to call other guilds scrubs cause they lost to you when you got 10 kills then kicked half your guild who decided to do dailies. GvG should either provide some point system for every 50 or 100 kills your guild gets you get point's which can either go into purchasing stuff for the guild. Or it could be done on a level up bases. Don't get me wrong I know you can currently level up for some junky potions and such but what I'm talking about is more like when your guild wins a GvG they can use policy points within the guild to give them bonus effects, increase experience, or unlock guild skills. A perfect example was Ragnarok Online you had to level guilds to get various guild skills even the Exarch system has guild skills within the system. They could incorporate housing and other benefits to the system which people would find fun.
It would be nice to see some sort of guild vs guild organized event that happens weekly or daily. If you ever played Ragnarok Online they had what was called War of Emperium which was a guild vs guild event that happened two times during the week each main city had a different set of castles like Prontera had 5 castles which could be captured by any guild who made there way up to the crystal room and broke it then that guild would be forced to defend the crystal from enemy guilds. If a guild was successful in doing that they would receive nightly treasure chest rewards and access to a special dungeon. Each city had a different dungeon with different monsters in it. Out of all my mmorpg gaming I haven't seen another game come up with something that really made use of the GvG system the same way. I played an worked on Ragnarok Online for 10 years and that was one of the most fun parts of it which if it was added to Tera Online it would be a huge hit especially since it could be added in a PvP or PvE server without to much effort.
With that being said some more types of battlegrounds would be nice. As of right now the two most popular are corsairs stronghold and 3v3 arena. Fraywind is sort of popular now that they added slightly more rewarding rewards for it. But it would be nice to see a 1v1 arena and a 5v5. More battlegrounds as well like a capture the flag would be nice since that would be popular.
Something else I wanted to bring up there's a system in Tera Online known as the death match system which you can set team verses team against each other for player vs player and you can also choose to bet money in this system but it's not really used or known about. What would be nice is if they made a system which could be queued into arena based fighting using the death match system. Players participating would be charged entry fee which would then turn into the reward for the winner. Other players could even be allowed to bet on a winning team against other players and be allowed to watch in a spectator mode.
One of the other more useless things is the crafting system. Aside from a few unique recipes which can be crafted that have some really nice armor templates there hasn't been anything new that's been added to the game since its release. With each update they should add more unique templates which add new gear set looks for players aside from the costume looks they have. They could even provide designs holiday theme'ed for special events this way you would have even more ways of making yourself unique. And since crafting becomes slightly useless unless your making nightforge or strikeforce this would be a reason to level it up.
They could also look into providing more casual gamer's things added similar to what some of the other mmorpg's have done. Some examples of casual activities are:
Fishing
Card Game
Farming
Cooking
Fishing is one of the biggest that's quite popular this being because it usually goes hand in hand with cooking very well. In Ktera one of the newer limited time events was related to cooking different types of buff food but it's only a limited time event. I'm talking about these being active events various recipes could be drop able in game which then opens another reason to go quest and grind monsters in hopes of finding rare recipes which can craft various foods. And with Tera Onlines action combat system if fishing was added with a more interactive system which simulates more how fishing is I can see where this would become a very fun aspect of the game. Not to mention the large amounts of different pond's oceans in various maps don't have a purpose but this would add another interesting angle onto game play in Tera Online.
Cooking of course goes well with fishing and like said above Ktera experimented with something during an event with it but it can be Incorporated to use many of the junk items which drops from various monsters rather then anything garbage just being all vendor food.
When I say card game inside of a mmorpg many games have added systems like this within the game as a side thing to add more things for people to do. There is many different way's a system like this could work but I would think one of the more interesting way's was a system one of my friends made for a game where cards could be obtained though various monsters within the game. You would have a album of these cards and then there was a battle area that you could play either one verses one or in a team against another team and when you used a card it would allow you control of a monster and you would obtain skills for that monster to use in the fight. In the end he never ended up finishing the game he was working on but the idea was very interesting cause it played out similar to Hero's from LOL only it was only a side feature from the main mmorpg game. Tera Online could add something to this effect which would allow players to collect cards then battle each other in some kind of card game.
Farming is not something that you see in most mmorpg's but it would also go along with cooking and it's another one of our casual features in a mmorpg being able to buy a part of a land then grow things over time and continue to check them and water them like normal then being able to gather from them in order to use what's gathered in cooking.
One of the other main things when it comes to PvP area's its not so much that the maps and types of games we have are bad so to speak its also grinding the same looking things over and over. The idea behind adding more casual things to do in a game is giving players who get bored of grinding your normal activities of the same PvP map over and over and allow them to play something else.
The achievement system they added with exploring and pets is nice and I hope they continue to keep adding onto it. I like that you can gain bonus effects to your damage for certain effects just by doing some of the achievements. They should continue adding more things to the achievement system cause this will bring more casual activities to players and give them more reason to play.
Now I know this topic started off strictly as a PvP one but everyone likes a certain amount of PvE as well so I figured would be worth mentioning as well. Tera Online hasn't done a bad job so far with its PvE aspect of course part of the issue that most people have with it is they instantly assume Tera Online is going to have as much content as the 7 years world of warcraft does. But in the end it took world of warcraft years to get the amount of dungeons and content is has.
What would be nice though is to see them follow much of the same model providing a few different types of dungeons which now we've seen Tera Online provide:
1 Man Dungeons 3 Man Dungeons 5 Man Dungeons 7 Man Dungeons 10 Man Dungeons 20 Man Dungeons
So Tera has a good amount of unique dungeons forming and I feel like the current update they did more puzzle type things in dungeons which test your memory like in Wonderholme harmode and such. I hope they continue to do much of the same type of things.
I feel like they could do some raids which take more time to clear and more time to figure out as well as make people need to bring different classes in order to complete certain mechanics of the raid. I'm going to go back for a moment and bring up Ragnarok Online again. One of the most amazing raids so to speak in that game was that of endless tower.
The object of this was it was 100 floors that you had to clear and it had a 6 day cool down if you died somewhere before reaching some of the higher up levels and not obtaining certain items to warp back in there was no way to get back inside. As you got closer and closer to the top the monsters got more tough some floors had more then one boss monster to fight. In Ragnarok they used MVP monsters which where found though out the world of Ragnarok Online and the last few floors contained monsters that where made for the dungeon itself. The main thing was group build you couldn't just go in the dungeon with all of the same class each class was used for different buffing and powerful for certain fights. The portal for the next room would only open once the room was completely cleared and the mobs from each floor would also drop items as well but the last boss providing what everyone really wanted.
So far I have not seen any games not even wow do a system like this and I think this takes PvE to a whole new level. I can see this type of system working with Tera Online the best since your healers in Tera can resurrect just like you could in Ragnarok Online as well as the use of scrolls to resurrect just like the Yggdrasil Leaf's you had in Ragnarok Online. They could use a board ranking for how far people have cleared as well for it in Tera Online.
The very last thing I wanted to bring out is in Ktera recently they had a monster arena that monsters fight against each other and you can bet which monster will win. This is something else which came from Ragnarok Online only they also had monster racing and other aspects like this. We found these to be interesting and fun. These are known by as mini games it can be anything from playing music to racing of some sort or like the summer and autumn events that they released. Having more of this for off season times would keep people busy. No one likes to have to wait months to see new content updates. But if they worked on providing more in the future that we could enjoy that makes the game more enjoyable even though people have to wait this will keep the player base alive, attract newer players and keep older players playing as well.
In the end because En Masse has the rights to code things into Tera Online and chooses not to we might not never see these types of features. But It would be nice if we could see any one or all of these brought into Ktera or into some game out on the market. Tera Online has it right with the action combat system they just need to do more with it to make it one of the best titles on the market.
You might be wondering why priests are on the top rating score for most servers while most mystics are not. Whether you have noticed or not some priests are avoiding getting knocked down during any type of pvp they get into because of a bug that's in the skill animations. And pretty much this is supposed to be a hush hush in game just like all bug cause the elitist players want to be able to exploit it as long as they can meanwhile people who don't know about it continue to get curb stomped in pvp.
But like all bugs the best way to get it fixed for everyone to make it fair game play is to post about it. The trick behind this bug that people are using is the skill called arise which picks people up off the floor when they are knocked down but of course this skill has a 30 second delay so you might wonder how would a priest get around this? Some of your buff animations as a priest share the same animation as the arise animation which currently will prevent you from being knocked down.
What makes this not fair for other healers like mystics is they don't have the arise skill so they cannot avoid all knockdowns and for a priest not ever having to worry about getting knocked down is making them nearly impossible to kill. As a mystic fighting a priest you have to wait for them to go to do it and then fear and sleep them to get around it. But in the end your going to have to just focus on killing one of the dps and avoid the priest if he knows how to do this bug. And the priest having the ability to 120 stamina res in pvp makes fights really stupid if the priest can avoid every knockdown you try to hit them with.
Then we all know there's people who decide to use dysncing as well as what ever bugs. If someones using a lag switch on top of the bug above they will be nearly un-killable in any situation. As someone who enjoys PvP the most out of mmorpg's this kinda stuff just makes me angry. The good news is the GM team for En Masse has seen streamers abusing this bug and they do know that people are doing something to avoid knockdowns. But until Ktera manages to get a fix for this which most people might not know about since if you search for it you cannot find anything related to it on the net it might not be fixed for a while. So let me be the first to say something about it so they know about it and it gets fixed.
So people have been speculating a lot whether there will be a visionmaker 3 as well as another upgrade onto the conjunct set using strikeforce as a base to make another set of gear. And there seems to be some controversy whether or not Tera Online is gonna keep going with the same set's as a continuation or whether they will just junk visionmaker 2 in the future and start over in some way.
But from what we have seen so far they seem to be working towards an overall trend. This trend relates to rewarding the older player base which puts in the effort to obtain the best gear by allowing them to upgrade it to a future expansion. I'm sure many of you remember world of warcraft days but if you don't every time a new expansion was set for a release the old tier of gear was then replaced by greens from the new expansion. This was a very upsetting way of moving on to the new gear cause if you did your 25 or 40 man raids and spent all the time farming it out you would be giving it away to the NPC monster in the end and vendoring it for gold.
While not everything that Tera Online has done has been the favorite of every player in its community I believe that when it comes to gear and how they plan on structuring it they want the older player base to be happy and not feel like they wasted months farming gear only to vendor it in the future so I believe that all of your PvE, and PvP crafted sets will continue to be upgraded while the sets which drop from monsters and require nothing but participation's in daily raids with RNG based drops will continue to be the NPC fodder each expansion.
I also think they will continue with the trend of catch up gear after every new large content update with a set that's easy to masterwork for the newer players to have the ability to catch up with the old and that is most likely why the base set of conjunct now requires 0 crafting to make it as well as in the future KTera has made it even easier for players removing the need to grind battlegrounds and nexus in order to craft the set instead you would only need the two armor pieces and the recipe.
Visionmaker is a similar trend quills now drop at a 100% rate and I'm sure in the future they will take steps to reduce the cost of the items or eliminate them completely so newer players can obtain visionmaker faster so they can move on to visionmaker 2. The other notable thing is while visionmaker 2 right now for NA Tera Online is a grind. In KTera they have updated the servers with other ways to obtain materials such as the new revamped alliance systems credits allowing you to buy Sturdy forge Pitch which is a much needed item that costs 4,000 Killing Spree credits and can only be bought from the Killing Spree vendor. If they had intentions of just stopping the line of gear with visionmaker 2 I seriously doubt they would be making an effort to provide more ways for people to catch up in making this set. Instead they would just leave it as is and not say anything then one day we would be vendoring it.
The GM's in Tera Online as well as some of the development team when talking usually mention gear sets as being from Conjunct Series or Visionmaker Series and if they seem to think its a series it means that most likely they will continue the series onward rather then just removing it. In the current post about the Canyon Clash they talk about using the "Conjunct Series" for the gear for the event meaning they will most likely be using Strikeforce gear during the event.
In the end all we can really do is speculate whether Visionmaker 3 will be released in the future but I would think that there's more fact floating around to support that we will be seeing a visionmaker 3 in the future or at least some sort of upgrade for turning visionmaker 2 into something else. But in the end we are forced to wait and twiddle our thumbs and hope that myth's become a reality.
So currently the server is having a 300 masterwork scroll event. This event works like so you have a chance to get 300 masterwork scrolls from one of the RNG strong lockboxes. The keys can be obtained either by purchasing keys or by doing cosairs daily. Whether your a new Tera player or whether you have been playing for awhile you need to know that chances are these events are a big trap for people.
The keys on Mount Tyrannus are selling for about 660 gold each. I spent all my time farming and saving keys from cosairs as well as my elite status so I had a nice big total of 62 strongbox keys. In the past 62 keys would have been more then enough to make some kind of decent return but that is no more. They added so many garbage items in the strong lockbox that it makes it not even worth taking the chance.
If I had to take a guess about what the drop rate is on the masterwork scrolls would be the items and drops would be something like so:
I'm sure I'm missing some more items within this list which they throw into the mix as well and this is more a guess of what the percentages feel about but after skimming though the forums and looking at some of the more recent posts about what people got after opening lockboxes off event times these feel like pretty close percentages for most of the item drops.
So you might be like okay what's the issue if this is what drops from the lockboxes? The issue is more the way RNG tables usually work. The more items that are higher up on the percentage's the less chance to score the very valuable items making it a pure game of gambling. When it comes to loot systems with no guarantee of getting the 300 scrolls it could be anything from 1 to a million if your really that unlucky. These systems are not time based like masterworking they are a complete computer generated random system. An example of how these work is more like so:
set $LW3,rand (0,1);
if ($num3 == $LW3) goto Loss;
if ($num3 != $LW3) goto prizeclaim;
Of course we have no true way of knowing exactly how the formula is interprated for the script and unless someone could look at the source code of how it works we wouldn't know for sure but it's pretty safe to say it's a RNG gamble which will not net you a rich reward. You will most likely spend 90,000 gold to have a chance to get 300 masterwork scrolls which is worth about 90,000 and with the other items which you are more likely to obtain you can consider that you will most likely end up with between 98,000 to 120,000 at most. Those figures coming out if masterwork scrolls are about 300 gold each and most of the junk you obtain is pretty much junk like it was for myself.
Of course some people have gotten lucky I would imagine the best thing you could ever do is don't be greedy if you get 300 masterwork scrolls out of 10 to 30 strongbox keys don't keep using them and quit while your ahead cause the more you use the more money you will be wasting. I would also not suggest buying strongbox keys instead farm them from cosairs daily quest's.
The RNG system has changed from what it used to be for events I know some of you are most likely thinking but the first few events I was lucky as all hell and got 1,000 extensive alkahest or 1,000 masterwork alkahest. But remember when it first came out the amount of items in the table was so much smaller. The table used to look more like so:
The difference is that you had much less crap possible during the events people had more reason to spam keys because in the event that some rare item was added in even at a low chance of 1% or under you would have a pretty high chance of scoring at least something worth selling even if you didn't score the main item. Back then you could buy them and shoot for getting emeralds and masterwork alkahest as well as spellbind and make a fortune on it. Now if you actually get any spellbind it's gonna take you 40 to 50 keys to see some. When it first came out every 5 keys used almost always had some spellbind, masterwork alkahest, or refined alkahest.
One of the other things to note is you have different types of the reputation boosts, experience boosts and the gold boosts these can come in 1 hour, 1 day, 5 days and percentage wise 50%, 100% like so which also add's some more hidden ways you get screwed pretty much and also add's more to the RNG table of hell. The same for the NPC summons because there are 4 different types of merchants each has its own chance as well as adds more to the table to make it impossible to get what you want.
But they don't want you to think about it by breaking it down to fine detail because if you knew all of what drops from the strong lockboxes and thought about it in the terms of each type of possible item being another thing to stop you from getting what you wanted you would realize it's not a win situation for the player. It's a win situation for Enmasse why do you think they allow you to get keys by doing daily pvp this is because they know out of any events even if every single person in game farmed keys on all of the characters the chance that they actually win during an event is so low they can afford to give something out to the player base. They know someone will always buy strongbox keys.
So until they either remove the items which are pretty much junk like the NPC summon scrolls or the charms which are worth 8 gold to 50 gold at most you will continue to see really poor winnings. And for even more information I'll go and post some of the average prices:
Masterwork scroll (1-3): 300 gold to 550 gold each
Ruby: 100 gold to a merchant
Charm of some type: 8 gold to buy from a merchant
Emerald: 1000 gold to a merchant
Battle Panacea: Cannot be sold or traded worthless outside of use
Summon NPC various types: 10 gold to 50 gold each
Divine Infusion: 3 gold to 20 gold each
Valkyron Potion: Cannot be sold or traded worthless outside of use
Valiant Potion: 9 gold to 20 gold
Sapphire: 200 gold to a merchant
Masterwork Alkhest (random amount): 119 gold to 170 gold each
Extensive Alkahest (random amount): 120 gold to 190 gold each
Spellbind 17 - 21: 40 gold to 90 gold each
Refined Alkhest (random amount): 14 gold to 21 gold each
Crystalbind: 20 gold to 50 gold each
Canephora Potion: Cannot be sold or traded worthless outside of use
Village Atlas (1time use): 50 gold to 100 gold each
Reputation Boost: 400 gold to 800 gold each
Experience Boost: 200 gold to 500 gold each
Gold Hunting Boost: 50 gold to 200 gold each
Complete Crystalbind: 500 gold to 1,300 gold each
Semi Enigmatic scrolls: 400 gold to 2,000 gold each
Instance Reset Scroll: 300 gold to 600 gold each
Of course market prices change so these might not apply to every server at every time but out of the items some of them cannot be traded these are slightly useless unless your going to use them yourself pretty much. Most of the items which have the highest drop chance are your items worth 3 gold to 100 gold quite a lot of these items exist now making it harder to actually get what you really want. So keep this in mind when you plan on opening lockboxes. It's up to you whether your a gambling person but after this last event unless they totally plan on giving a super awesome reason to open them I give up on ever trying my luck again. Not with the odds of getting so much garbage that is either not sellable, sells for nothing, or isn't frequent enough to make it worth spending the gold.
Your welcome to comment and post if I've missed any possible items which drop from strong lockboxes or if you have anything constructive that you feel I might have missed.
Update: I figured I would also mention some of my guildies bought over 200 keys and had no luck what so ever so that means that chances are this event will have you spending more in the neighborhood of 300 on an average if your luck is bad.
During the alliance patch which was added to Tera Online more recently Tera added some new unique BAM's which can be found inside of the alliance zones. These new type of BAM's are dracolith monsters which look exactly like dragons. These drop the materials needed to craft the nocturium gear which is the faction based gear as well as materials which are used in the ruthless visionmaker also known as nightforce pvp set.
These new type of BAM's can be an interesting hunt because while they are walking on the path's that they spawn on they are completely invisible unless aggro'ed by mistake or unless detected using one of the detection items that comes from the alliance daily quests. These BAM's are a tough fight they have a lot of health as well as come with a raid icon but don't be fooled currently these are ment to be killed with only 5 people or loot will not drop. In a future Ktera patch they have fixed this error allowing a full raid group to kill the bam and still get the loot for them. But currently farming them must be done with 5 people or else the superior membrane will not drop. You will most likely will want to bring a tank and healer to kill these they take quite awhile since dragons move around so often.
The mechanics for these dracolith's is also randomized and can fight like the ones found at the level 50's which fly around a lot and have charging type skills to run you over and knock you down. A more easier type which doesn't move all that much but spin's its tail around similar to the boss in labyrinth of terror. Or the most frustrating one which is just like the one from Crucible of Flame which does ground digging and coming up and knocking people over a lot. Depending on which boss you get you might want to change the type of DPS you end up bringing so that it makes the fight very easy.
Finding the Invisible BAM:
The spawn for these BAM's work exactly like the bosses in Ragnarok Online in that they will respawn an hour after they are killed. One BAM spawns within each of the alliance maps this means that you will find at least 3 total BAM's as long as no one has killed them.
There's a little trick for finding the BAM in the location without using tons of sticks or zig zaging around trying to run into him. If you hover your mouse over the area the pointer will turn into a hand pointer when your hovering over a location the invisible bam is in. This makes it much easier to find it without having to use detection sticks. The speed in which he walks is pretty fast and he always walks in a counter clockwise rotation so you can always go clockwise to run into him faster.
If your having problems with people trying to steal BAM's from you theres some tips that can help you deal with them. For someone to kill steal a BAM from you they need to accomplish two things:
1. They must do 50% of the BAM's damage
2. They must get the last hit.
If either of these are not met the bam will not drop loot. If you manage to meet both of these you will get the superior membrane and all of the items from the drop. This is a standard for any BAM's in game not only to the ones inside the alliance zones. Most people do not know about these tips which makes them pretty useful.
Azure Butterfly Wings
This blue butterfly wings costume can be bought from the EMP store in permanent or temporary versions.
Can I Haz Backpack
This is a rare cat backpack which can only be obtained by RNG luck with the Lost-and-Found loot box.
Monarch Wings
This yellow butterfly wings costume can be bought from the EMP store in permanent or temporary versions.
Popo Backpack
This cute popo backpack costume can be bought from the EMP store in permanent or temporary versions.
Popo Piper Backpack
This cute popo piper backpack costume has a flute which the normal popo backpack does not this backpack can only be obtained by RNG luck with the Lost-and-Found loot box.
Shellback
This koopa shell costume can be bought from the EMP store in permanent or temporary versions.
Spun Sugar Wings
This pink wings costume can be bought from the EMP store in permanent or temporary versions.
Waverider Surfboard
This surf board with castanic and elin decals can only be obtained from the Fun in the summer Beach box with RNG chance.
White Butterfly Wings
This white butterfly wings costume can be bought from the EMP store in permanent or temporary versions.
Scuba Tank
This Scuba Tank can only be obtained from the Fun in the summer Beach box with RNG chance.
Wind-Up Key
This clock looking key costume can be bought from the EMP store in permanent or temporary versions.
Deluxe Aqualung
This gold colored scuba tank can only be obtained from the Fun in the summer Beach box with RNG chance.
So my guild is on Mount Tyrannas server the guild's name is Dragonfury. We are a pretty unique guild in that we have a large amount of girls in the guild and usually as a warning of the crazy randomness that people are subjected to the officers of the guild have started to share the video from one of our streamers which is deemed as the Dolphin girl video. The leading star Bumble decided to help our guildie Honey.Bean get her new mayhem axe to +12 so they where sacrificing animal noises to the RNG gods trying to give her luck.
The guild is a really lively one and this video itself has had over 200 views already on twitch tv since it is pretty funny. I know the first time I saw it I was laughing so hard I couldn't breath. But I figured it would be interesting for the blogs followers to have a moment of funny.
So the names of the sets of gear for the new ruthless visionmaker gear as well as just the names of the dungeons has changed from what Ktera is calling them. This makes it really confusing for people who are unsure which dungeon is which and what is dropped from the dungeons.
So to avoid confusion I thought I would explain how the new names work to make it real easy so people aren't lost.
The Maps: Ancient Underground Waterway = Channelworks Red Mist Pirate Ship = Shattered Fleet Giant's Forest = Kezzel's Gorge Magician's Fortress = Wonderholme
With the Nightforge gear there is three different recipes which you can buy to craft this gear. Of course you have the recipe which uses Bloodrave as a material. The recipe which requires Visionmaker and the recipe which makes the Luminous the sets themselve will tell you on the tool tips whether they are PvP or PvE. The colors for the PvP set is Red and Black while the colors for PvE are Green and Blue.
The Wonderholme sets of gear come in three different variations as well. You have the quick which has attack speed in the gear. You have keen which comes with crit and you have powerful which comes with more damage.
Ktera names:
Agile Aphrodite Enraged Aphrodite Swift Aphrodite
So the alliance patch has been out for awhile and it brought us some PvP some dailies and such and the introduction to the federation gear which everyone kinda does not see much point in getting the armor for because its lesser compared to the previous conjunct gear only newer people would want to get this gear as catch up gear.
But today while I was helping one of my guildies named Tick.Me.Elin do the uncommon summoning sticks so he could get his uncommon membranes a tier 14 dropped. At first we thought it was just a peice of fodder but it turns out besides this item being a tier 14 ilvl 151 item it also comes with a very nice unique skin but unfortantly these don't seem to be usable as a template which is slightly disappointing.
At the same time though it might be worth holding on to them for if they end up changing this in the future but I figured I would post a screenshot of this new weapon. I think it's possible that there might be armor templates which go with it as well and while I farm these bams I will keep an eye out for anymore unique drops and figure out whether they are useable for templates.
The name of the lance which dropped is: Lasting Impression
I checked my auction house and also found a bow for sale for a quite large amount but the template isn't something ive seen before either.
The bow is called: Learning Curve
The interesting thing was I checked some of the online codex's and none of the NA databases seem to have any information about these items. I would imagine that if these end up being usable as templates in the future they will be quite expensive I told my guildies not to just give them away especially since none of us have tried to use them as a template yet. Cause not sure if maybe it's just not marked as a template out of a mistake or not. I'm thinking about also asking to see if the GM's plan on allowing us to use these as templates. I would love to be able to skin my Visionmaker using these cause they are pretty unique.
This section is dedicated to Berzerker weapon skins in Tera Online. As more Berzerker skins are added to Tera Online I will be updating this topic as
needed.
Goldrift
This is the golden weapon skin which came when you pre-ordered Tera
Online and paid for your first month of subscription from Tera Online.
The only way that you could still get this is if you pre-ordered the
game and paid for your first month during pay to play times but never
received your weapons in the item claim. Or if you buy an account from
someone which has it. The black dragon skins look the same only black
colored.
Gargantalon
This was apart of the dark side items which where released this can be bought though the EMP shop as either permanent or temporary items.
Banhammer
This came out shortly after the release of the black dragon weapon skins this can be bought from the EMP store in permanent or temporary versions.
Icetouch Axe
This was apart of the ice weapons items that got released this can be bought though the EMP shop as either permanent or temporary items.
Icegrip Axe
This can be bought from the EMP shop or you can get them from the Ice Box by RNG chance these can also drop the Ice Grip version by chance as well. This version is similar only the lance glows for these weapons regardless of whether your weapon is master worked or not.
Bento Axe
This is apart of the food items that got released to Tera Online this can be bought from the EMP store as a permanent or temporary item.
I figured that I would share a LOL moment of Dragonfury. I was not a participant of this but Lora decides to troll bouncy into dieing to the jelly fish in MCHM and of course Lora was trying so hard not to laugh you hear Neb in the background like LOL.
Watch live video from shizen579 on TwitchTV
All of us PvPers only really care about the updates which allow us to the abilities to do more damage within PvP arena's and battlegrounds as well as in open world PvP and with the addition of the Alliance patch if we can build new gear to give us more survivablity we would be crazy not to take it. What makes it even more valuable to us is the fact that we can start working on this before it even comes out since we get information about Ktera before patches come out.
The upcoming sets which have been released for Ktera is the:
Ruthless Conjunct Series
Ruthless Visionmaker Series
From what I understand the difference from the ruthless conjunct and the ruthless visionmaker is not that much different to allow people who have not put as much time and dedication into the game some advantages to compete but the stats from the old conjunct and fraywind gear is much different.
But keep in mind if you are working on making the Ruthless Visionmaker series this will not be a walk in the park to start with you must have either Bloodrave or Visionmaker to use as the base to make the Visionmaker 2 gear.
The materials to make the new Ruthless Visionmaker 2 gear is:
Ruthless Visionmaker 2 with Visionmaker as a base:
Weapon:
Visionmaker (1)
Victor's Trophy (11)
Sturdy Forge Pitch (16)
Noctenium Forge Slag (8 )
Armor:
Visionmaker (1)
Victor's Trophy (8)
Sturdy Forge Pitch (12)
Noctenium Forge Slag (6)
Glove:
Visionmaker (1)
Victor's Trophy (4)
Sturdy Forge Pitch (6)
Noctenium Forge Slag (3)
Flexible Forge Pitch (1)
Boots:
Visionmaker (1)
Victor's Trophy (4)
Sturdy Forge Pitch (6)
Noctenium Forge Slag (3)
Ruthless Visionmaker 2 with Bloodrave as a base:
Weapon:
Bloodrave Weapon (1)
Victor's Trophy (11)
Sturdy Forge Pitch (16)
Noctenium Forge Slag (8 )
Armor:
Bloodrave Armor (1)
Victor's Trophy (8)
Sturdy Forge Pitch (12)
Noctenium Forge Slag (6)
Glove:
Bloodrave Glove (1)
Victor's Trophy (4)
Sturdy Forge Pitch (6)
Noctenium Forge Slag (3)
Flexible Forge Pitch (1)
Boots:
Bloodrave Boot (1)
Victor's Trophy (4)
Sturdy Forge Pitch (6)
Noctenium Forge Slag (3)
Ruthless Conjunct Set Materials:
Weapon:
Conjunct Weapon (1)
Victor's Orthoclase (9)
Noble Stone (3)
Armor:
Conjunct Armor (1)
Victor's Orthoclase (7)
Noble Stone (2)
Glove:
Conjunct Glove (1)
Victor's Orthoclase (3)
Noble Stone (1)
Boot:
Conjunct Boot (1)
Victor's Orthoclase (3)
Noble Stone (1)
Above is the cost of Luminous Stone's these come from Killing Spree points in otherwords you get these by completing 3v3's The point cap of 1,000 points per week will be removed and the rewards for winning a game will also be increased. But this is not the only item which will be required in order to make the Ruthless set from the 3's. Some of he items from 3's will require the rating of 1800 to actually be able to buy them this will make it very difficult to obtain these items.
Victor's Orthoclase
KTERA 1200 Bellicarium credits
Current NA price 2200 credits
Victor's Trophy
3000 Bellicarium credits
Sturdy Forge Pitch
KTERA 4,000 Killing Spree credits
Flexible Forge Pitch
KTERA 1,000 Killing Spree credits Must be 1800 battle rating to buy them
Noble Stone
KTERA 1,800 Killing Spree credits
Noctenium Forge Slag
Requires 5 Superior Noctenium Membrane to craft. The reagent to craft it costs 1070g at the Alliance Quartermaster.
Total Required Materials for Nightforge:
3 Common Membranes = 1 Uncommon Membrane
3 Uncommon Membranes = 1 Rare Membrane
3 Rare Membranes = 1 Superior Membrane
27 Common Membranes = 1 Superior Membrane
100 Superior Membranes: 5 superiors = 1 Noctenium Forge Slag
Of course I figured it would be a good idea to also provide the information about the PvE set as well which is called Luminous Visionmaker. The pve set cannot be prefarmed before the patch comes out since all of these drops come from the dungeon. This set is also much easier to make aside from the low drop rates which people will be stuck with and fighting over who gets what loot.
Luminous Visionmaker Set Materials:
Weapon:
Visionmaker Weapon (1)
Ancient Weapon (15)
King Lazard's Cube (5)
Magician's Insignia (5)
Armor:
Visionmaker Armor (1)
Ancient Weapon (9)
King Lazard's Cube (3)
Magician's Insignia (3)
Glove:
Visionmaker Glove (1)
Ancient Weapon (6)
King Lazard's Cube (2)
Magician's Insignia (2)
Boot:
Visionmaker Boot (1)
Ancient Weapon (6)
King Lazard's Cube (2)
Magician's Insignia (2)
Ancient Weapon
Only be obtained from a repeatable zone quest called "shattered ancient weapon"
King Lazard's Cube
Magician's Fortress normal and hard mode drop from final boss. Untradeable.
Magician's Insignia
Drops from Magician's Fortress. Low drop rate from Ancient Underground Waterway and Red Mist Pirates' Trap as well. Can obtain from boxes obtained after clearing the new dungeons. This item is tradable.
The difference between the Ruthless Visionmaker and Ruthless Conjunct sets are mostly different base stats with the exception of the blacksmith's hammerstrike on the weapons. And after looking at the lumonious sets I wonder how these new stats will effect players in pvp since things have been changed from boss monsters to damage dealt and specific monster reductions to all incoming damage. Some people have decided to all together skip creation of the Ruthless VM set and just decided to build the Luminous set instead of wasting time and money to craft the Ruthless VM set.
Weapons Stats:
Armors:
Gloves:
Boots:
Rerollable stats options:
Some of the changes to PvP vendors and system changes include:
Bellicarium Shop List
Battleground Equipment: Fraywind
Supplies: Battle Charger, Victor's Set, Victor's Spoils Item, Black Label Templates, Coat of Arms Box
