I know the fanbois will take this as a troll post but I am not trolling and being very honest since I am in the IT field also to quote on this part of the OP..

"For those who haven't, TL;DR: Layoffs have struck to "prepare for the next chapter of business."

Once the layoffs start happening that means change is coming. Yes this happens a lot after a launch, but the trend appears to be happening with many games. Hate to break it to the fanbois but F2P will likely be coming here soon. It might not be a bad thing as LoTR actually is thriving a lot better going to it.

ToR still has at least 600-700k subs and some say still a million and they are going F2P and it all started after the layoffs began.

What got me in the quote from the OP was "prepare for the next chapter of business" which could mean new business model aka F2P. Tera simply doesn't even come close to sub numbers as ToR right now. If you think it does you are blind or really drunk on the Kool-Aid. ToR even added a lot more content weeks after launching (until now) and Tera has not done much. People left. So the next stage is F2P. They already introduced a huge cash shop.

Anyways F2P may actually bring in a lot more subs along with return people. I would say within 3-4 months if not earlier, this game will be F2P or at least announce it is going F2P.

*Alchemy would have still be a useful profession, since you would be able to craft things that you couldn't get out of lucky eggs.

What's funny for all the people predicting doom and gloom of idiots staring fixedly at a meter instead of what's going on with a boss fight, they all seem to ignore the simple fact of the matter: if someone is so fixated on instantaneous DPS meter that they can't read boss tells, dodge aoes, etc, they will be eating tons of damage and dying. Consequently, and naturally, their continuous DPS will drop to [filtered]. DPS over 3 seconds on a single skill rotation is meaningless vs the average DPS over a whole fight; someone who argues otherwise might as well try to say that whoever does the biggest single crit during a fight did the most damage overall.

This is why experienced plays don't need full +12 MW T13 to do HM BT or FoK, they just need to be damn good at hitting as much as they can while getting hit rarely, if ever. Medium, constant DPS will far outpace sporadic high bursts separated by repeated deaths/retreats to heal.

The DPS meter does nothing more than let you give you analytic data (far more practically than painstakingly transcribing hundreds of lines of combat chat yourself). Unless you are in a regular static with 2 other DPS who will never change up their playstyle, and the boss fights are identical each time with no variation on rhythm or random aggro changes/boss skills (hint: never going to happen, every fight is a little different), it is very hard to tell what how your own experiments in DPS optimization are doing (by changing up crystals, buffs, etc) apart from the other party members damage without a good wide data set of DPS numbers.

Regardless, this tool is out in the open and no arguments in this thread will matter the least to its use.

6. PVE game, so surely PVE is fun. Right? Well, sort of. Leveling up to 60 is fun; the dungeons can be challenging once you hit level 48 and require a little more coordination with your party. Unfortunately, once you hit level 60, you will be thrust into a continuous cycle of Fane of Kaprima. If you don’t just buy gear from the broker, expect to run that instance at least 10 times. If you purchase from the broker, you can jump right into Balder’s Temple to go along with your FoK runs. I will not lie; both of these instances are fun. I have no overall complaints with them. However, these are the only two* instances you will be running to gear up. Once you eventually get your Enigmatic gear, you’ll need to run for enchanting fodder or use the broker to get better stats. Don’t worry, though, once you get your +9 gear, you get to do the same instances on Hard Mode.

Of course, there’s Temple of Temerity, which is a 20 minute event with 3 BAMs and waves of mobs attacking a relic. It’s fun for a few times – soloing a BAM that has meaning behind it is a change of pace from the world BAMs that have bad drop rates and take 3+ minutes to vanquish. Despite it being fun, don’t worry. You will need to run, at minimum, of 20 times to get an advanced glyph. Unless, of course, you’re lucky. Speaking of lucky, there’s another place, Kelsiak’s Nest, but normal mode isn’t worth the time (level 58 instance), and despite the hard mode being worth the time, people don’t want to farm dark matter with low drop rates. How boring is that? Besides, it’s no easy task; so you’d better have the best gear before even wasting attempts at him.

I keep the boss still aside from mechanics... it is not that hard. A back roll right as a forward attack comes means no movement (except forwards, and most dps caries forwards.

DfA is in-place

pounce to traverse cut is a 50% mit into a 70%, used quite often.

warriors, when played well, do as well, and in some places better, than lancers.

what i WILL grant you is that it has a very high skill ceiling, and as a result there are a lot of warriors who arent all that good. most start giving up around sky garden (you are not there yet)... the good ones keep on after that

I've been reading a lot of threads bashing TERA's pvp and class utility end-game. First off, this game JUST GOT RELEASED, so, by default, it will not have everything you ever dreamed of in an MMO - but they are working on it.

Now, I understand that there aren't that many skills/spells/combos (not a lot of variety - look @ the priest class for example - mainly healing - few damage spells - so you feel like you are using the same spell from 1 to 60 to deal damage).

Having said that, developers would never release ALL of their finished skills/spells/combos on release date... you would get bored.

This is an investment, i.e: you enjoy it over time... slowly, with each patch and expansion, new spells with crazier graphics, new combos with crazier graphics, will be released and get you all jittery when you log in.

For one thing, I would like to see more priest damage spells later on and some more combos for warriors.

That would make my year.