The other endgame dungeons need to be restored back to their original levels, gear output and locations.

These dungeons would be Sigil Adstringo, Ascent of Saravash, and Suryati's Peak.



The decision to redesign those three dungeons for lower level play have caused following issues:

-> Endgame gear sources and varieties lost.
Some of the unique equipment that came from these dungeons had particular set bonuses that benefited certain classes more for certain roles.

Right now, there is only one dungeon available, Fane of Kaprima, to obtain the t12 gears needed to tackle Balder's Temple. The set bonuses of the gears from this single dungeon are not optimum for certain classes (like berserkers and archers), and has had a side effect of limiting the effectiveness potential for players of those classes in places like Balder's Temple.

The end result is the wide-spread perception that these classes are ill-suited for tackling places like BT and leads to ostracizing of those classes from dungeon runs. This is only because some of the equipment that would make these classes viable are only available in our version of TERA as t9 instead of t12.


-> Progression options lost
The mechanics of Fane of Kaprima are very unforgiving for particular party compositions, and made it difficult for players who chose those classes to advance their character.

In kTERA, the existence of the other three dungeons allowed a choice for varied parties to choose the dungeon they were best configured to tackle.

As it stands, there are few desirable party compositions and classes that can run Fane of Kaprima at decent pace. This further hurts the players of those excluded classes because they have lost a progression option simultaneously with the loss of the equipment they could obtain.


-> Smoother Progression = Not achieved
The challenge offered by these dungeons is rendered pointless since most players will be over-leveled when they reach that point of quest progression.

If they bothered, people just do these dungeons once and then forget about them the next day. Others skip them entirely, since clearing these dungeons is not necessary to progress the story.

The trade off is that we lost three well-designed and challenging dungeons that could supplement the endgame grind in return for three out-of-place dungeons that are experienced for a day.


-> Originating zone quests and immersion are broken
The removal of these dungeons from their proper endgame zones broke many quests in those regions. The EME dev team is forced to go back and fix up the broken quests, such as those in Seeliewood, and this backtracking takes away from their time that could be spent in going forward to improve TERA.

When all was done, the story line in these regions end abruptly. It is confusing to players who were expecting to follow up on the climax that would have been resolved in the removed dungeons.



Some of the following can be achieved if EME restores the dungeons back to match kTERA:

1. Restoring the dungeons should return the affected end-game regions back to their proper state as was intended by the BHS developers for players to enjoy.

2. The monotony of the pre-Balder's Temple grind that was solely limited to Fane of Kaprima would be increased threefold and help with the variety of TERA's endgame experience.

3. There will be more than one journey path for players to prepare themselves for Balder's Temple and allow for more viable party compositions up to that point.

4. More varied sources of equipment and items that can aid in enabling players of certain classes to become viable and desirable for tackling the difficult instances that come after.



I urge that this change be done before the community further deteriorates from class and party preference clashes. The restoration of the three dungeons will at least help afflicted classes and certain party formations become viable and reduce the basis behind the exclusion mentality going around at high level instance runs. The issues plaguing the endgame dungeon runs will also affect Nexus play, since it is also a demanding high-tier game element that requires the best out of its players. By putting these dungeons back where they belong, EME will strike down two birds with one stone by helping with the class/party desirability issues in dungon runs as well as prevent the same issues from arising in TERA's other grouping experiences such as the Nexus.



Fellow players and EME staff, please consider these points and weigh in on them with your thoughts.

I'm SO glad someone else feels this way about the state of dungeons right now!

It's probably no coincidence we were just talking about this very same issues in our guild last night.

What I don't understand is why they didn't leave the original dungeons in the game as a hard mode. In fact I don't see why they don't do this RIGHT NOW to help with some of the problems we're hitting on at end game.

Also from a story standpoint... well without AoS, Scyhtaea Fae for example just utterly dead ends because of what they did to the dungeon. The quests there are SUPPOSED to culminate in you saving the region... but instead you just run out of stuff to do and go off the Bastion or Argonea.

(That is, for example, with all the argonized Tuwangis you see around in the Fae? In AoS you're killing off their leader!)

TL;DR version


Put those three dungeons back to their proper status so we can:

A) have more ways to farm gear other than just Fane of Kaprima, and lose that stale endgame taste of running just one instance endlessly for t12s

B) provide new (old) gear sets that will make help undesirable classes (berskerkers, archers etc) more 'useful' for t13 parties

C) fix up the broken zones that had their dungeons ripped out from them

D) prevent the same 'elitist' crap happening with lvl60 dungeon runs from also happening to upcoming endgame content like Nexus and Training Grounds

Agreed on every point.

I thought SA and AoS were fun as hell, but they stuck out sorely when placed side-by-side with the far easier storyline dungeons of comparable level. The difficulty jump from the storyline instances is vast, and higher level players will almost universally advise newcomers to skip them.

For good reason, too: they are so unrewarding when compared to the "real" dungeons that there is very little incentive NOT to bypass the content completely. I know I can't be the only one who walked out of SA thinking "that was pretty, but a huge waste of time." In the state that they're in, they might as well have been completely discarded.

Meanwhile, NA TERA's endgame is rapidly gaining infamy for a sore lack of variety -- something that even the Nexus update will be hard pressed to fix.

The need to restore these instances to their original status is compelling.

Agreed. This post is spot-on.

Where are the set bonuses? I don't think I've ever seen any.

Yep, well said.

I took the time to log on so to bump this and to so my support. When ran Sigil and AoS i had so much fun. I enjoy them a lot more than ebon tower and lab of terror. I would very much like to see them implemented for lvl 60 play, hardmode or not.

In context of dungeons, the "desirable" set of them be at most 3 - 4 of them on the way to 60 - and then everything else at 60 (including HM if appropriate) with overlapping drop tables so people can have some [semblance] of variety - and choice of opponents matching perhaps certain classes better. It's like, logical ? Or not ?

Everything else is throwing the content out of the window - considering the leveling pace of the game. 11 dungeons (inc. AH hard) - of those 8 in [40..57] - that's the imbecility of rare proportions. In that bracket ... 45, 48, 48, 48, 48(HM) - what the hell is that ? Then 3 another ones at 58 ? The hell for again - story part and forget they exist ?

The saddest thing is, that EnM actually have enough leverage to get the proper adjustments done, and they had enough time to do that properly. And what did they do ? ...

It literally looks as if they had some tiny team, disconnected from reality and completely unaware of the game - how it works, what issues it has - the team doing "cool" things. Like - how awesome it is to give people 4(?) instances at 48. Or some complete other utter nonsense. And many other game alterations they are responsible for seem to confirm that, vastly.

Agreed on all accounts. The changes EME made should be undone. The other day I was looking for an AoS party on LFG and received 10 or so responses from level 57+ players. Also, the pain of waiting 2 hours for an LFD party only to be kicked because of your "sub-optimal" class or ilvl is a game breaker for many.