Russell's Tera Journal Day 6: Looking for group

by: Russell - posted: 6/6/2012 12:14:00 PM

Thankfully today's outing was mostly lag-free.  Just some occasional minor delays during a couple fights, but nothing too serious like last time.  Anywho, today I finished questing in the Lumbertown-related quests and the game presented me with two story quests: one north of Lumbertown and one south.  I went with the southward quests and after completing a few at a nearby encampment by defeating monsters two levels higher than me (yeah, it's starting to get rough), I went to another encampment where someone wanted me to kill this giant monster.  No big deal, right?  Um...no.

That's right, I have been introduced to "elites".  I'm not sure what they're technically called in Tera, but if you've played World of Warcraft, you've come across elites, monsters that are much stronger and harder to kill than normal monsters.  It's much easier to kill them in a group.  Same with Tera.  Thankfully though, I didn't really have to look for a group.  I was actually heading towards taking on the northward quests (north of Lumbertown that is) when someone posted in the Area Chat that they were looking for a few more people to take on a few quests...the ones I needed, so I offered to join them and got my first taste of group play.  Not much different than WoW, except I couldn't find any indication of when I had too much aggro other than the monster stomping towards me while I pounded the backstep button.  Still, it went pretty well.  It did take me a moment to learn how to leave the party, and with that comes a minor gripe that I think I mentioned before.

Players have stamina, like in a lot of games like this, that drains as you attack enemies (can't really find much else that drains it really).  To restore stamina for free, all you have to do is stand near a campfire, whether it be one you make yourself or one at a town, encampment, etc..  Well, here's the issue.  When you're restoring your stamina, the little heart at the top of your UI enlargens a bit to basically say "hey, you're restoring me just in case you forgot".  However, this will overlap the icons next to it, which meant I had to move away from the campfire to access my Party options to leave the party.  In general, that's an ongoing gripe I have with Tera.  You can change the size of the UI from the options, which is nice, but if you make it too small, you can't read it unless you have the ultimate pair of glasses that can auto-zoom in to whatever you're reading.  If you make it too big, parts of the UI overlap other parts to where you can't read or see everything anyway.  In other words, too much stuff on the UI.  Now you can turn off parts of it, which I may do, so while it is a gripe, it's one that's more due to my preferences really.