Cristiano

After playing both, I have to agree with the article:

Combat: Guild Wars 2 vs TERA

The combat in GW2 is fun and the weapon specific skills are fun, but it is not a huge departure from the standard MMO tab target button mash. TERA by comparison requires you to maintain target on creatures, and dodging, attacking from behind and knocking over things is strategically important. Both games have great combat, but I find TERA's more fun and a nice change of pace.

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Ariane

Having not played TERA I cannot compare, but TERA combat sounds very FPS like, true?

GW2, TERA, and The Secret World are all being hyped as "changing MMORPGs forever". I'm glad to hear that these games actually are living up to their hype.

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Hana

i dislike FPS, but really enjoyed Tera's combat a lot..

i don't know enough about gaming combat to explain the difference... but i don't feel like its the same...

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Cristiano

I wouldn't exactly say it is FPS like, but it does have some similarities. As Hana said, I'm not sure how to explain the difference. I just really like how it plays, and I am not a fan of FPS games. It still does involve using various skills, but the combat is just more engaging to me. I also like how they have a system where you can link attacks using the spacebar. It makes it very intuitive to do a combo series of attacks without even having to think about the individual hot keys and is very customizable.

Vaelissa Cortes

For starters, first person shooters are in first person.

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Cristiano

Agreed, but TERA does use a targeting reticule, the same way an FPS does.

Edav Nomad

Reading about the combat some of it sounds similar to combat in a MMO called "The Chronicles of Spellborn." It was cancelled not very long after it launched.

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Seyla Warden

I'd probably label it as 'active combat'. Instead of the typical MMO combat where you face the mob, turn on auto-attack, stand still and use abilities as needed, you have to manually duck, dodge and maneuver; combat is typically with multiple enemies at once and you have 'floaty' targeting that 'locks on' to the enemy closest to the center of the screen, which allows you to switch targets seamlessly, and instead of combat being tuned against a stream of automatic damage plus abilities even your 'normal' attacks are manually input and can be a large portion of outgoing damage.

No experience with TERA but that's how I would describe DCUO's difference from your typical WoW-like. No idea if the rock-paper-scissors mechanic with lunges, block breakers, and interrupts applies there, though.

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Mad Mouse

Guild Wars 2 vs TERA a General Article at MMORPG.com

Really good article as well.

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Cindy Claveau

God, I am coming SOOOOOO close this morning to buying Tera! I can't - I already have Diablo 3, GW2 and Secret World sitting on my desktop ready to go at launch. Cost of another game aside, do I really have time to play one more MMO??

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Rebel Television

I think it would be easy enough to make GW2 control like TERA. Already, the abilities work in such a fashion that they will hit the closest target you're looking at, if you're not currently targeting anything.

The problem I've seen with most critics is, they don't attempt to make it any more interesting. By rebinding 1 to mouse button 4, I was able to play in a very "action" style, constantly circlestrafing enemies as I blew them up.

Worse yet, you have comments from people such as Gabe from Penny Arcade, who referred to the gameplay as "click action bar combat". The only reason your mouse cursor should ever be over your action bar is to read ability tooltips, or to rearrange them. This is what's known as being a "clicker" in many MMORPG communities and its one of the first behaviors you should correct if you want to seriously deconstruct and analyze the quality of design in this genre.

Lianne Marten

I didn't like either of their combat mechanics. Tera was boring and grindy, Guild Wars 2 was hard as shit.

The difference is Guild Wars 2 was in beta and will be tweaked before release, and it doesn't have a subscription fee, so that's where i'm going.

And since PA was mentioned:

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Rebel Television

I have a feeling "great story" means the game telling you you're an "Epic Hero", when GW2, gasp, is about being one person in a densely populated virtual world where your power fantasies may not be entertained.

Lianne Marten

Actually in the human and norn starting areas (the only two I tried) after the prologue that's exactly what the npcs call you. Either for helping kill a giant skeleton or helping kill a giant worm.

Then you go out and do dynamic quests that involve picking up bird eggs to put back in a nest and stopping goblins from burning down haystacks.

Vaelissa Cortes

I always find it amusing that everyone else in the MMO world is almost always a low level weakling except for the character. No wonder these kingdoms/villages/civilizations are always having such a hard time.

This made me think dirty things . As for the rest of the post, if you plan to play on the Frost Reach server then the answer is yes!

Cindy Claveau

I started on Freehold before I saw your message, Vaelissa. Right now I'm just plinking away wasting time until D3 drops.

My first char was a sorceress, but being squishy matters a lot more in Tera than it has in other games - as much as I can tell at level 6, anyway. If there are protection spells and better armor available later it'll help but I didn't see any during my level 20 prologue.

So my second character is a Castanic Archer, and suddenly it all started to get fun. She learned a few new skills and mastered the art of backing up to avoid attacks. Plus, she's tiny and cute

The biggest change I was able to master this morning was resizing the UI. At its default resolution I couldn't read the quests or skill descriptions. They were in like 2-point font or something. Enlarging the UI helped immeasurably!

Still not sure how long I'll hang onto this since there are 3 other games already on order, but for now it's fun enough to keep me happy when I'm not working.

Cristiano

Cindy,

A couple of things I learned early on that will help:

1) When you get to the base camp in the middle with all the different vendors and trainers, look for the specialty vendor. They sell armor and weapon crystals. Your armor and weapon should both have two crystal slots available. For the armor, get the fleetness crystal - it improves your running speed. There is also one that will give you a health boost. When you get new armor, you can take out the crystals from the old and put it into the new by right clicking on the crystals in your character window to send them back to inventory. Don't forget to do that before selling or extracting from armor/weapons.

2) In the upper left corner of the radar, there is a channel button. If you are in an area where there are a bunch of people and you are trying to kill stuff, you can change channels to one with less people on it.

3) If you are into crafting at all, buy the different types of extraction skills from a general merchant (there is one at the base camp). For the starter area, you will only need level 1 of each. You can do all crafting professions ultimately, but you will probably just want to focus on one or two. If a piece of armor or weapon can be extracted, it will say Extractable on the tooltip. You can extract any type from anything that is extractable. For example, I craft bows, which actually uses material extracted with the Alchemy extraction, and the leather extraction for leather. I use that type of extraction to get materials from things. If you were going to make weapons or heavy armor, you would use the metal extraction. You won't be able to craft until you get to the starting city, but you can extract stuff and gather.

Cindy Claveau

I kinda knew about the crystals but totally forgot during play! I'll do that when I log back in.

I did the individual instance quest where you protect Sorcha, and I have to say it was more fun than eatin' bugs (as my Dad used to say). Wave after wave of baddies, coming faster than I can recharge my Arrow Volleys

Even though the play field was pretty busy, I didn't have many issues with cross-targeting other players' mobs (not that they paid any attention anyway). Mob respawn seemed to be so fast that there was already a respawn before I could move off.

I did fall out of the big tree though, for 915 points damage. I'd made the mistake of climbing up before I'd clicked the quest stone a second time so I had no way of TPing back down and tried to climb down. Bah, half health is still alive. I just built a campfire

Cindy Claveau

Tonight I saw the best game character name ever.

This guy's high elf was named...

"Elvish Pressley".

Vaelissa Cortes

I haven't figured out how to actually climb back down those vines, but I don't think anyone else has either from what I've seem .

There's actually a bunch of large rocks to the side that you can safely jump down on and get to the bottom without taking any damage, but I didn't figure that out until my second character.

Cindy Claveau

You'd have to know that I have this proud legacy to uphold. In every MMO I've ever played that has fall damage, I've figured out a way to fall to my death, going clear back to EQ.

So in a way it was a minor disappointment that falling so far only banged up a knee.

Cindy Claveau

Getting pretty frustrated with the disconnects This reminds me of the flukey early days of EQ. Not even WoW was this bad, as I recall.

My connection is fine. I was in SL this morning and i've been posting on SLU without a hitch. The Tera servers apparently hiccup a lot.

Vaelissa Cortes

That's no fun, at least I haven't had any connection problems on Frost Reach yet. My only annoyance so far is the strange chat issues where it randomly resets to something several minutes in the past.

Also, I helped kill my first BAM a while ago, Arakia was the name I believe. It was quite fun, though the archer in the party somehow managed to die more times than should be possible.

Cristiano

Weird, I have only had one disconnect issue the entire time I've been playing, which has been since last Saturday. I'm on Dragon something.

Hana

SL is /very/ forgiving about disconnects though. i've tested it. SL will let your connection be 'gone' for several minutes... before it disconnects you.

Tera, not so much. If your connection even flickers you're dropped pretty fast. But... i've noticed this with other MMOs too, they disconnect you much faster than SL does.

So maybe you did have connection issues. Hard to tell for sure unless you were actively "refreshing the forum madly over and over" ... to see if you ever had an issue loading it.. or were maybe watching something streaming..

i mention this because /i/ had lots of disconnects from Tera last night too. But my yahoo (which is forgiving like sl) didn't disconnect. So i would have thought it was just Tera, except.. i happened to be watching Netflix through my xbox at the same time and it kept halting.. then restarting like 5 or 10 seconds later...

which was short enough that Yahoo didn't disconnect me, and SL wouldn't have either.. and unless you were refreshing the forum a lot... you might not have happened to click "new posts"or a thread during the 5 or 10 seconds your internet connection was out.

i have comcast! and am in Connecticut, maybe if you are in that area with Comcast your issue might have been the same?

Cause! other than today(err, last night) i've never had connection issues with Tera.