Hi humans.
It’s been almost four months since I first signed up for and started playing Tera. In those four months, I’ve made a significant amount of progress in the game, and made my way to the tier of high-level players, both in terms of gear/equipment and player ability. Up to this point, I can say that I had a good amount of fun playing Tera.
Unfortunately, things have changed recently. Now that I have reached the end-most of the end-game content, it seems like I’m at a standstill until I overcome obstacles that are partially out of my control.
The biggest problem that I have now is that all of the upper-level instances require a group to complete. I can still do lower-level instances by myself and single-handedly carry, but in order to get the rewards/drops to scale with where I am at the game, I need to challenge the hardest content in the game. Unfortunately, this means that I need to have a good team with synergy, and cannot carry just by myself.
This brings two huge problems. First, finding a group in itself is a challenge. Because I am a DPS (which is short for damage per second, a nickname for an offensive class), it takes an extremely long time for me to find a group using instance matching, as there are a plentiful of offensive class players when there is a scarcity of tanks and healers. As a result, when I want to find a dungeon group, I have to wait for at least 10-20 minutes, and sometimes even over half an hour. That is usually significantly longer than the time it takes to even finish the dungeon.
A traumatizing relevant story: once I waited over 40 minutes in queue and still didn’t get anything. For literally two minutes, I walked away to take care of something else. When I came back, I noticed that I was no longer in instance matching queue. I looked at my chat logs and realized that, within the two minutes I was gone (which was 5% of the time I had waited overall), I had found a group, then my group kicked me for being AFK. Even though, at the core, that was my fault, I think I ragequit Tera for a few days after that happened.
Branching off the instance matching time problem, the next huge problem is the skill level of other people. For some reason, a ton of people who play Tera are led to believe that they are a lot better at the game than they really are. I see people queueing up for upper-level dungeons who barely meet the gear requirement, have no idea what they’re doing, are not mechanically solid with their character, and end up just dying over ten times at the first boss.
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