What Was
Playing Don’t Starve Together, The Sims 4, World of Warcraft and Darkest Dungeon have all slowed down. I’m going to be having what should be minor surgery in a couple of weeks. This has turned my focus to spring cleaning, getting things ready for hand-off at work and organizing my house and bedroom beforehand. Minimally, I’ll be laid up for 4 weeks. 4 weeks convalescing takes planning!
I like TS4 more than I thought I would. It’s probably my second favorite of all the expansions, TS2 Open for Business being my favorite. After redesigning all of the new professions buildings where you accompany your Sim to work, it’s very cool. I’m very partial to the hospital I designed and downloaded a mod to extend the workday. Imagine wanting to make your workday longer! LOL I actually wish it was a location that was accessible to her outside of the normal workday. It’s a hoot seeing other Sims I’ve created as patients and co-workers. The only thing I’d want beyond what they’ve done, is a way to progress the professions to private practices / home offices. The same way you can open a bakery, photo studio or retail store on a personally owned piece of property, I want to open a doctor’s office.
In effort of not starving, I meandered back to the single player version because of a RPG mod someone created. The mod provides predefined classes with their own set of skills and weapons. It also adds monster villages / towns to spice things up. Instead of the single NPC boss encounters and dangerous critters in certain areas, this puts more combat and excitement into the game. I wish there was a DTS version.
I’ve lost interest in WOW and Darkest Dungeon for a while. WOW I probably would have played longer if the instances queues weren’t so long for DPS people. I’m really no longer fond of the quest model and not much new with the Warlock class itself. For now, I hop on occasionally to do garrison stuff until the subscription runs out. I’m sure part of the issue is playing in utter silence. No guild or anything. One of my favorite WOW steamers has started a guild for people subscribed to his stream. And since I’m subscribed, I recently moved two characters over there for the next time I get the WOW itch.
Memorial Day Weekend in Tera
On the same stream, people were talking about trying out Tera. I guess now that it’s on Steam it’s getting more attention. I liked Tera well enough. The combat was good and it had some interesting zones. It’s still the old school questing model but they’ve amped it up a bit since I last played. There are more daily quests. They’ve also added a new “Initiative Requests” interface that’s like GW2 dailies. The quests are delivered to you via the interface, you go off and do them and the rewards are received via the interface. The interface will also port you to the appropriate zone. Tera is large compared to many MMOs and traversing all the zones isn’t exactly speedy. Battlegrounds have also been added.
Other than the common lockbox RNG that’s favored in many Asian MMOs, Tera’s F2P model is good. It’s certainly not P2W. It’s pay for convenience such as a map with portals on it. Pay to look good – lots of costumes and skins. Pay to lighten the load – faster mounts, pets with storage space, pets that auto loot. They have a “Roll Call” promotion going where you earn small treats every day that you log in – minor conveniences.
Over the long weekend I popped in for an hour, liked what I saw and started leveling my priest again. Always a sucker for cute cash shop items, I bought a mount that’s a huge hulking creature I ride on top of Cleopatra style and the pet that auto loots. OMG the amount of trash loot in Tera is staggering. I wish spending a certain amount in the CS granted a month subscription, I spent more than that over the weekend. Cuz you know, steampunk rules all and given the chance to dress up in cogs, gears and whatnot is a no brainer! Unique mount, useful pet and gears – ‘nuff said.
Leveling has been fairly fast with the double XP promotion going. Playing on and off, I gained 4 levels over the weekend. I changed out of my healing spec on the priest to pure DPS. Her filler skills are shit but she can hold her own. I was even able to do 2 quests designed for 5 mans – BAMS (Big Ass Monsters). It takes some doing alone but I got her done. And at least one of the 5 man instances I needed to complete a storyline quest had a single player option. The bosses were difficult but I survived with more than full health.
To my chagrin, Tera has taken a page from the Blizzard handbook of designing boss encounters – hopscotching out of circles and obstacles left-right-center has become a thing. They've even added phases where things get worse the longer the encounter stretches on, which wasn’t going in my favor doing it alone but I managed it. All in all, it was a fun diversion. I don’t expect to play it “full time”. Not sure I’ll be playing anything “full time” for a while to come but it was definitely worth the download.
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