Aion 3.0 Chronicles: Muada's Trencher

Last night Void decided to take on the other 12-man instance, Muada's Trencher. We didn't know what to expect going in and thought it was an actual instance, however, it turned out to be a single legendary-grade boss. We gave it a few tries to see how the boss worked and if we could handle doing it "legit" or not, we ran into some...issues.

Strategy: The first thing you need to do if you're going to follow this guide is drop a kisk outside of the entrance to the instance. Kisk res'ing during this fight is essential since the healers will already be bombarded with adds and will likely be too busy to res you. This boss also likes to enrage if you don't kill it fast enough, but fear not, there is a way to recover from the enrage.

IMPORTANT NOTE!: Enrage was a problem we ran into frequently, possibly due to our low numbers, and we have a solution for getting enrage off of Muada. We did something similar to the ol' Lannok trick where we had someone sit the first part of the fight out until Muada went nuts and killed everyone. Once everyone dies the buff runs off. Before Muada resets we had the person sitting out grab her to make sure she didn't reset before the rest of the group kisk reses and runs back in. This may not be a problem for full groups of 60's with good gear but we didn't even have a Sorceror with us so this was a necessary part in the fight for us.

Phase One: 100-75%
This is the easiest phase, Muada does a 360 degree AoE (Ray Thorn) that hits everything outside of 20 meters or so of her. To avoid being hit by this ALL party members must be standing close to Muada and the tank will be positioning the boss away from the rest of the group. Muada does some other minor attacks during this phase like projectile vomit but it's nothing terribly dangerous outside of Ray Thorn but be ready to run when phase two begins.

Phase Two: 75-50%
At this point Muada will use a skill called Rage and stun your party briefly, following this stun Muada will spawn a couple elite adds and add spawners. Now, we tried this several different ways and, possibly due to our less-than-average sized group, we were unsuccessful when we tried to burn the adds faster than they were spawning. One or two from each set would be left over and eventually overwhelm us.

To remedy this we decided to have all DPS stick to the boss as the Templar kited it around the circular room. When you do this it causes all of the adds to zerg around after various members of your group so it's important to kite when you've got a large number of adds on you. Moving in a circle prevents both the boss and adds from ever catching you since they are all pretty sluggish (<--Ohohoho so clever). After slowly but surely kiting and DPSing Muada out of this phase you enter phase three.

Side Note: If you feel you can DPS the adds down before more spawn then make sure to prioritize the spawners and be sure to utilize CC's (Unconfirmed, seemed most everything works on them though) and blinds (Confirmed) as both of them work on all of the adds. Also, when the adds die they melt into a puddle of acid and do significant damage to anyone that steps in it so be mindful of your environment.

Phase Three: 50-25%
Before you dig into Muada's health again it is important to kite off the remaining adds, they despawn after a while and no more adds should spawn. Once the adds are down have your tank settle Muada back into the same position as Phase one. The only difference between this phase and the first one is the additional AoE to complement Ray Thorn, Swiping Blow. This AoE hits in a 360 degree zone 15 meters around the boss, this needs to be outranged as it does heavy damage and knocks people down.

Every 20 seconds Muada will alternate between Ray Thorn and Swiping blow. To make sure nobody gets hit you run out of Swiping Blow and immediately back in after it ends to avoid Ray Thorn, repeat until the phase ends. Pretty simple.

Phase Four: 25-0%
Muada will use Rage, same as all new phases, and then burrow underground. Shortly after using this skill the text "Muada has created a giant sand hell, run!" pops up on your screen. Following the disembodied words' instructions quickly run out of the central area and onto the sides. I assume if you fail to do this you die horribly. But it's not hard to get out of so no big deal.

Once you're back on the boss he gets a new skill called Neurotoxin which he will randomly cast on party members. It does a medium amount of damage and puts a status effect on the target that cuts its attack and does damage over time. This is curable so clerics make sure you're dispelling the targets of Neurotoxin.

Muada will stop doing Ray Thorn this phase and will switch back to Projectile Vomit (Frontal Cone) and will continue doing Swiping Blow and Neurotoxin. Make sure to keep out-ranging swiping blow whenever Muada uses it and keep burning him down.

This should finish off the fight! Congratulations on defeating Empress Muada!

For those of you curious about the loot she can drop, there are two eternal necklaces (Caster/Melee) that Muada drops that aren't too shabby for PvE and she drops a fabled hat and shields. We got the fabled cleric shield to drop :3.

Thanks for reading!

-Fest
(Tiamat/Assassin/60)

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TERA Online Closed Beta 1 Impressions

So, I get to be a part of all five of Tera online's closed betas as well as their open beta and head start event and that's pretty awesome. I love beta testing MMO's, always have, I love seeing them in their pre-launch phase since it really shows the developer's true colors in regards to how they respond to player input and where their focus is. One thing that never fails to wreck an online community is poor leadership on the developers end. I've seen Aion, one of the more interesting MMO's, fail almost entirely due to a lack of proper and professional management from NC West. I'm hoping En Masse Entertainment is able to prove just how much they care about their players and the virtual community as a whole.

The first closed beta began last Friday and lasted until Sunday, giving us about two and a half days to explore the first areas of the game (Levels 1-22). The whole thing started out a bit rough, due to either En Masse underestimating how many people were in the beta or just a faulty server, and both the open servers took a nose dive after a few minutes. Not a great start but they recovered well and we were happily playing Tera shortly after this crash. The only other thing I'd like to mention here is the queue, oh boy that was a long one...my friend and I waited about an hour to log in, probably why the server crashed, tons of people were part of this test. En Masse quickly sorted everything out and I wasn't stuck in another queue the entire beta, yay for them, it took SWTOR half a month to rid us of long queues.

The Gameplay: What do I need to say about this? Oh yeah, its awesome. I love Tera's gameplay, it gives the player such a high degree of control over their character's movement and combat unlike any MMO I've played before. With the lack of a targeting system Tera forces players to constantly think about their positioning in relation to their targets and making their strikes accurate. This is not the game for people who like to sit around and press 111 222 111 333 5 and expect to win a fight. No, the combat is extremely demanding on the player and your success in combat is ultimately dependent on your ability to be strategic with your fights. This goes double for the Warrior class, which I ended up choosing to play for this test.

The Warrior Class: Widely regarded as one of, if not THE hardest class to play. It is the only class you can select with a 5-star difficulty rating (Yes, En Masse categorized their classes based on difficulty). I'm typically a guy who plays the rogue/assassin type character and I was sorely disappointed by Tera's lack of "rogues" until I realized that the Warrior might as well just be called an assassin. They utilize two swords, focus on evasion, backstabbing, high attack speed, and poisons. Yeah, they're pretty much Tera's assassins minus the focus on daggers (Sadface). My experience with the warrior was a good one, I enjoyed the fast paced combat simply because it keeps me engaged and even when I'm grinding stuff for Guild Quests I still enjoy fighting against the AI.

PvP as a Warrior: Yikes, this was a bit rough at this stage in the game, I was finding myself having trouble dealing with many of the other classes at 22. I know PvP isn't balanced around low levels and you'll typically find more balance at endgame but it was just damaging to the ego when I can't come close to dropping a Slayer despite having similar gear/level. I had the opportunity to fight several slayers (the dudes are everywhere), a few Berserkers (went better than slayers), and some Mystics (Did not go so well). The PvP is fun but I do foresee some balancing issues if not just from observing the reactions and class populations from the Korean/Japanese servers. Slayers essentially dominate most other classes in 1v1 PvP which is somewhat frustrating since most games struggle with balancing their heavy DPS classes for PvP. Aion's Templars and Gladiators were some of the easier classes to play and were near impossible to beat as another melee class unless you were another Glad/Temp. Hopefully the feedback from KR/JP servers will be enough to get some balance for future PvP.

BAM's: "Big Ass Monsters", the "Elites" of Tera Online. These guys are tough at first but the game is based on player skill so much so that you can solo these titans without much issue, aside from how long it takes. People constantly post videos of them soloing these and trying to look awesome. Well, it does kinda look awesome to see a little dude fighting a behemoth all by himself, nimbly dodging through waves of attacks and shelling out damage all the while. Killing a BAM is a lot of fun and typically very rewarding, the drop a lot of loot and crafting materials.

Boss Experience: My friend Shiggy (Slayer) and I (Warrior) decided to take on a field boss to see just how far we could get with two people against a large boss. The result was: We killed it, but it wasn't easy. The particular boss we chose was level 25, three levels above the first beta cap for us, so right away we were put at a level disadvantage. The fight started easily enough, I tanked him while Shiggy put DPS on and tried to stay behind him. This worked until about 70% when the boss started glowing and lighting began to cover over its arms. His attack speed went through the roof and he began a near non-stop barrage of powered up attacks directed at me. Eventually there was one I just couldn't avoid, I figured it was fine to get hit once...I was wrong and died immediately, crushed under this thing's titanic ass. Shiggy took aggro and kited him around while I res'd up and headed back (It was near a teleporter thankfully) and by the time I had gotten back the previously powered up boss was back to normal so we kept bringing him down slowly but surely. Every five or ten minutes the boss would "enrage" again and we were forced to kite him around until it ran out. This became difficult because he started launching projectiles at us if we got too far away...eventually we did kill him without wiping but it was an incredibly lengthy battle and really kept us on our toes. We got some good loot from him including a whopping seven uncommon boss runes which I can use for crafting in the next patch. (Typical BAMs of that level don't drop anywhere near that many). Bosses can be incredibly tough but are quite fun and rewarding.

Instances: I only did one instance that was called "Secret Base". It was a pretty fun experience, lots of elite mobs to fight through and two dynamic boss battles. The bosses are the cool part of these instances, they feel more fluid than typical bosses on MMOs, the ones we fought rarely stood still long enough to let us get in many hits. The bosses don't just sit there and let you hit them, the move around, use long range attacks, I almost felt as if the boss was kiting the players around, how backwards is that? The video of our first encounter with the boss of Secret Base can be seen here.

Overall: Tera left a good impression on me after the first test, I really feel like En Masse is invested in giving us a good gaming experience and providing consistent, innovative content for us in the future. Tera's gameplay definitely makes it stand out from typical MMOs that we've seen in the past. I'm extremely excited for the second closed test beginning on the 24th of February. Thanks for reading! If you'd like to contact me in-game I'll be on Serpentis Isle (I think?) under the name "Cross".

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