This space will document the game design for TERA Arise. It represents the overarching goal that we will work towards in the coming years of development on the project.

The documentation here is aspirational; not everything has been implemented yet.

Some familiarity with the systems and mechanics of the original TERA is assumed throughout. Familiarity with programming is assumed for the technical portions.

There are a number of major problems with TERA that we aim to solve:

• Most of the overworld is lifeless and functionally pointless at endgame, with players mostly congregating in a few major cities or near dungeons and fishing spots.

• As with many MMOs before it, the leveling experience is largely a waste of time, a miserably boring experience, and teaches you almost nothing for the endgame.

• Dungeons during leveling are largely a joke in terms of difficulty, and similarly, there's often a huge difficulty gap between normal and hard mode dungeons, where normal modes are too easy.

• Every major patch brings in a new set of gear or overhauls the gear system, such that players feel little attachment to their gear, or burn out from the gearing treadmill.

• Seasonal dungeon rotations mean that players can be stuck with dungeons they dislike for many months at a time, leading to some going on hiatus.

• There is not much for players to do in the game once they have finished their daily dungeon runs; this results in players spending a lot of time AFK in major cities or fishing.

• As with most free-to-play MMOs, monetization efforts hurt character progression systems badly.

• Lack of any kind of official scripting API has led to an explosion in third-party tools based on network interception, not all of which has been positive.

There's a litany of smaller tangential problems, but these are the most significant ones that deserve the most effort.

Some core combat mechanics have been altered in TERA Arise.

Determination of whether a player is attacking from the front, side, or back has been made slightly more lenient. In particular, the front and back of an entity are now 120° arcs, while sides are 60°. Additionally, only a player's position is considered for these calculations, where previously direction was factored in.

Another change is the introduction of the break mechanic. Bosses have a break gauge which is filled by using CC (knockdown, stun, and stagger) skills, and which decays over time. When full, the boss is stunned for 5 seconds and takes increased damage, during which the gauge empties back to zero. Ordinary CC skills only deal small amounts of break damage, but break-oriented have ways to deal massive break damage.

The card collection system has been greatly simplified. It is no longer necessary to collect card fragments in order to assemble a 'full' card, cards no longer have rarities, and card fusion has been removed.

Cards are collected by simply completing relevant content. For example, the Bahaar card is randomly obtained by defeating him in a dungeon run, the Crayfish card is randomly obtained by catching it during fishing, and so on. The drop chance for cards is significantly higher in TERA Arise. Location and character cards are guaranteed story quest rewards.

Cards that you have already collected can be sold to a vendor for gold.

Like , this new card collection design is an extra incentive to engage with all game systems and mechanics. The new design also ensures that players will make progress on their collection naturally as they progress through leveling, and that everyone is able to complete their collection in a very reasonable amount of time.

We have near-total freedom to tweak and redefine classes as we see fit. Almost all skills have been redesigned or rebalanced in some way.

One of the more radical changes we make in this regard is that every class now has dual aspects, in a similar way to how berserkers, brawlers, and warriors can either be damage dealers or tanks. This allows more flexible party compositions and thus faster instance matching. Aspect selection is done by picking one of two on a passive skill. This choice will automatically influence other systems (e.g. a player's role in instance matching).

Some of these new class aspects blur the lines between roles (in the trinity sense). For example, lancers can sacrifice personal damage and debuffing ability in order to be able to tank and heal at the same time, mystics can sacrifice a large portion of their healing output to beef up the damage output of themselves and their minions, reapers can sacrifice personal damage to enable life absorption on their skills which can then be dispersed to party members, etc.

Additionally, an entirely new break role has been introduced which some classes have aspects for. A breaker is still a damage dealer, but sacrifices some of their own damage potential to dish out massive , enabling higher damage for the rest of the team.

TODO: Everything.

The gear system has been redesigned so that players are working on their equipment from the very beginning of the game, enchantment effort is never wasted, and choices are much more meaningful.

A player starts the game with a set of class-appropriate equipment of common rarity that has one random option and infusion option, and can be enchanted to +5. As the player levels up past specific thresholds (25, 50, 75, 100), they will gain access to higher-rarity equipment (uncommon, rare, superior, mythic) through dungeon story quests. Each jump in rarity adds an extra random option and infusion option, and increases the enchantment limit by +5 (though mythic equipment has no enchantment limit). When switching to a new piece of equipment, the enchantment levels from the old item can be transferred over, but options and etchings are lost.

TODO: Rings, earrings, necklace, circlet, brooch, mask, belt, innerwear, relic, halidom?

TODO: Crystals?

TODO: Etchings?

TODO: Infusions?

Gathering and crafting mechanics took a backseat to most other systems in TERA. We are returning to the MMORPG roots where these systems actually meaningfully contribute to the game's economy and socialization. In particular, some gear upgrade materials come from crafting, which in turn require gathering.

In TERA Arise, all gathered materials remain relevant even at endgame, so there is an actual incentive to go and gather outside of just Northern Arun. Higher gathering levels result in faster gathering.

The amount of production points that a player has now scales with their gathering and crafting levels. Additionally, fishing is now considered a gathering activity and therefore spends production points.

Crafting professions have been overhauled:

• Brewing: Enables crafting HP/MP potions, buff potions, etc.

• Cooking: Enables crafting various party buff foods.

• Etching: Enables crafting randomized gear etchings.

• Refining: Enables crafting various composite gear upgrade materials.

• Smithing: Enables crafting certain 'lore-friendly' .

There is no longer a limit on how many crafting professions can be maxed out on a single character.

Artisan and master tests have been removed. Players can now craft most recipes at any level, but the profession's level determines the number of items produced for some recipes, and the likelihood of failing a craft entirely for some others.

As we are not doing monetization, mounts, costumes, weapon skins, etc are available from mount and fashion vendors in exchange for Fashion Coupons. Fashion Coupons can be earned from doing structured activities such as , , etc.

The available cosmetic items and mounts will rotate on a basis, but Fashion Coupons are valid for all seasons.

A small subset of cosmetic items are only available as rewards from seasonal leaderboards.

Every cosmetic item and mount available from vendors can be bought directly for a set amount of Fashion Coupons, but it is also possible to buy RNG boxes for a lesser amount of Fashion Coupons which contain a random item from a pool of related items.

Some cosmetic items are only available through .

In general, a lot of the busywork achievements that just have you kill mobs a certain number of times, or interact with objects a certain number of times, are removed. Achievements like this are, well, not achievements. We instead focus on a wider array of achievements that actually require you to do something exceptional, difficult, or plain odd. We do, however, keep the achievements related to story progression, first-time dungeon clears, and similar.

We do away with achievements that do not count towards a laurel; it feels bad to spend time on unlocking an achievement and then not getting any closer to a higher laurel. Additionally, the grind to regain laurels with every major patch is removed; achievements are never made 'legacy' nor, for that matter, made unobtainable.

Achievement rewards are overhauled. Most of them were useless amounts of money or items that are barely relevant. Instead, we give rewards that actually make sense for the stage of the game that the player is likely to be at based on the achievement.

achievements for leaderboard ranking in grant special titles until the same season returns.

To liven up the overworld, we introduce a variety of spontaneous events that occur throughout a province. These are similar in nature to Guardian Missions, and tie into that system for rewards, but 'spontaneous' really is the keyword here. You are not able to just magically teleport to the events; you have to actually go out into the world and happen upon them. That said, for larger events, we broadcast a message to the entire province or zone when they occur.

Events occur frequently enough and with enough density that a player should not have to travel for more than a handful of minutes (at the high end) to find one.

The events are anything from a random traveling villager getting attacked, to a world boss appearing and roaming through a zone, to a camp or town being assaulted by waves of mobs. The sky is the limit here.

Of course, for these events to not just end up as dead content, they actually have to be rewarding. Events will give specific gear upgrade materials depending on which province they occur in. This also prevents players from simply seeking out the province deemed to have the easiest events. There is a daily cap on how many rewards can be obtained from major and minor event quests, but players are free to grind events for experience indefinitely.

The entire Exodor Archipelago has been repurposed for overworld events which are significantly harder than those found in the rest of the overworld, and which grant significantly more experience. Additionally, it has PvP enabled in all zones. It is only accessible by players at max .

As a further measure to make the overworld feel more alive, the concept of channels is entirely removed. Where necessary, changes are made to ensure that players do not have to fight over a single mob or object.

Rifts and trials are two game modes that, together with and , provide the opportunity for virtually infinite competitive PvE experiences. Both modes will have a party go through a series of increasingly difficult, consecutive challenges until they can no longer progress further. There is no upper limit on the number of challenges.

A rift is a random series of dungeons selected from a pool. These dungeons contain mobs, mini-bosses, and main bosses as you would expect. There is a wide variety of dungeons in this game mode, so some will be easier than others.

A trial is a random series of boss fights selected from a seasonal pool. These all take place in arena maps. The bosses in this game mode are generally the most challenging and intense in the game - Bahaar, Darkan, Lakan, RK-9, Shandra Manaya, and so on.

All rifts and trials feature the hardest version of a dungeon or boss.

Players will be ranked on leaderboards based on the highest cleared challenge level, as well as the clear time of each challenge. Rewards are distributed by parcel after each individual clear. Players are free to withdraw at any point, e.g. if the current challenge is too hard.

Rifts and trials must be completed with the same 5-person party throughout; it is not possible to start a run with less than 5 players, nor is it possible to swap out players in the middle of a run.

In TERA Arise, every class will have learned all of its core rotation skills by level 50, which roughly corresponds to being halfway through all story quests. Additionally, the order in which skills are taught has been overhauled to make a lot more sense and make each class feel better to play sooner. Only certain niche skills will be learned after level 50. are available from level 1.

Skill levels have been removed, so there is no longer a need to upgrade lots of skills constantly during leveling. Similarly, skill advancement levels have been removed as these were just senseless power creep. This means that skills have their full effects immediately.

Almost all skills now have skill options, and they are unlockable immediately when learning the skill. Options now have a much more profound effect on skills, altering all sorts of properties all at once, such as CC effect(s), damage, critical chance, AoE size, range, cooldown, animation speed, invulnerability frames, block effects, target debuffs, etc.

Skill hits now split their damage as an X% physical hit and a Y% magical hit, with related to physical and magical damage applying to each hit as appropriate.

In order to add more meaningful build diversity to the game, TERA Arise removes a lot of the 'useless' glyphs in the game and adds a larger set of attractive glyphs. As a result, instead of being able to get all the 'essential' glyphs and still have plenty of points to spare, players actually have to make more meaningful glyph choices, somewhat tailored to their skill option choices, forming a more distinct playstyle.

Glyph rarities have been removed, and all glyphs for a skill are available immediately upon unlocking that skill.

TERA Arise features a quarterly season system with , , , leaderboards, and ranking rewards.

Every quarter of the year is a distinct season; that is, January through March, April through June, July through September, and October through December. The leaderboards are reset at the beginning of each season, where rewards for the previous season are also distributed based on rankings.

Separate leaderboards exist for rifts, trials, one seasonal raid, and two seasonal hard mode dungeons. Note that all dungeons and raids are accessible at all times (e.g. through ) regardless of which are part of the current seasonal leaderboard.

As a rule of thumb, with an experienced party, dungeons are designed to take around 20-30 minutes to complete, with each boss taking around 5-8 minutes. Where necessary, story dungeons have been tuned to adhere to this rule by way of teleportals and movement speed buffs.

The difficulty of normal mode dungeons has been brought up somewhat so that the gap between normal mode and hard mode is not as huge.

Through instance matching, players are now able to queue for a dungeon roulette, with normal mode and hard mode having separate roulettes. Using these can result in getting matched into any dungeon in the game. If there are players queued for specific dungeons (e.g. story dungeons), the roulette will first prioritize matching with those players; otherwise, a completely random dungeon is chosen. Some gear upgrade materials are only available through the roulette. This system adds variety to daily dungeon runs while also ensuring that players can get matches for story dungeons.

A different 10-player raid is available in each which can be cleared once per week. Raids have been redesigned to be significantly more difficult and can only be accessed in hard mode. An experienced party will take a few hours on average to clear a raid, while an expert party that avoids wipes entirely can clear a raid in less than an hour.

Adventure Coins have been removed; players can run dungeons as many times as they like. However, gear upgrade material rewards are significantly diminished after a certain number of daily runs.

The main story mostly proceeds as it did in TERA, but it ends around the beginning of the Exodor storyline, as we repurpose Exodor for and cut the vast majority of its story quests. Story quests proceed linearly rather than the original mess at level 65+ where you can get a mountain of story quests dropped on you all at once.

The vast majority of side quests in the game are cut; only those that add meaningful context to the story are kept. As a rule of thumb, when completing all quests in a province, the player should only spend half as much time on side quests as they do on story quests - ideally less.

Guardian Mission quests are repurposed for overworld events.

Repeatable side quests and faction quests are cut entirely.

Due to the tighter , all level requirements for quests are removed.

TERA, like most MMOs, scales player power massively with levels and gear. This has the unfortunate effect of making it meaningless for endgame players to interact with new players. When the level cap was raised from 65 to 70, and the journey to 70 took quite a while, it became clear that it is possible for players of different levels to play together, as long as the power curve is not completely bonkers.

For TERA Arise, we apply this idea to the entire level range; that is, the difference between a level 1 player and a max level player should roughly be the difference between a level 65 and level 70 player in TERA. This will lay the groundwork for other game systems to allow new and veteran players to play together at almost any point. It also has the desirable side effect of making balancing of the entire game much more manageable.

To further facilitate cooperation between new and veteran players, the server implements a power scaling algorithm for all structured activities (, , etc). This is based on simple level synchronization.

The level 'cap' is raised from 70 to 100 - mainly because it's a nicer, rounder number. The progression from level 1 to 100 requires linearly increasing amounts of experience.

An 'overleveling' system is added, allowing players to go beyond level 100. Overlevels only give very tiny stat boosts compared to normal levels and take massively increasing amounts of experience. To set expectations here: It should take 5+ years of daily play for a player to reach level 125 or so. Overleveling mostly serves as a prestige/veterancy indicator.

TODO: Everything.

Several core stats have been changed, added, or removed in TERA Arise.

Crit factor has been replaced with critical chance; it is now simply your percentage chance to land a critical hit. There is a hard cap to how much critical chance can be built on a character that will never change: 5% base, 10% from gear, 35% from gear options, for a total of 50%. (In other words, any endgame character will have at least 15%.) Additionally, the modifier for attacking from behind has been changed from 1.6 to 1.5, while the side modifier has been changed from 1.2 to 1.25.

To facilitate the changes to critical chance, crit resist factor has been removed from all NPCs. Additionally, crit resist factor has been replaced with critical chance reduction and is now simply the percentage subtracted from the opponent's critical chance. Building critical chance reduction is mainly intended for PvP, but can also help against NPC attacks.

Base critical power has been changed from 2 to 1.5.

New physical/magical critical chance and critical chance reduction stats have been introduced.

To avoid punishing certain class aspects depending on the fight, NPCs no longer have physical and magical resistance; instead, these stats can only be built by players, e.g. to counter specific NPC attacks, or specific classes in PvP. Physical/magical piercing and ignore stats have been completely removed.

TODO: Break stats.

Stats related to reduction of weakening (green) and DoT (purple) effects have been removed.

Balance, balance factor, impact, and impact factor have all been removed. The effect of these stats is now innate to classes and specific NPCs.

TODO: Everything.

TODO: Everything.

TODO: Everything.

TODO: Everything.

TODO: Everything.

TODO: Everything.

TODO: Everything.

TODO: Everything.

TERA Arise has a number of security features to combat botting and illegitimate modding.

When connecting to a TERA Arise server, the server sends a serialized .NET assembly called the 'security module'. In order to communicate with the server, the client must load and execute this module. Among other things, the module dictates the packet operation code mappings for the session, and provides the key and initialization vector for decrypting the client's data center file. (The encryption parameters for the data center file are randomly generated for every TERA Arise release.)

Loading the module causes it to periodically scan for modifications to the client's code, as well as look for reverse engineering tools that are attached to the client process. A watchdog component also periodically lets the server know if it spots something suspicious (e.g. a known bot program). Anything out of the ordinary causes the game process to terminate.

A security module is only valid for a certain time period; attempting to execute it outside of this validity period causes the module to terminate the calling process. Additionally, the server has many different security modules in play at any given time, and generates new ones periodically. The module picked for a given session is random.

To prevent the client from executing a malicious security module from an imposter server, the client and server employ mTLS. This lets the client be certain that the server is, in fact, a legitimate TERA Arise server, and it gives the server a high degree of confidence (though not absolute) that the client is also legitimate. Every TERA Arise release ships with new certificates generated from a new certificate authority, meaning that only a matching client/server pair can actually talk to each other.

TODO: Everything.

We provide an official scripting engine and extensibility API as part of the symbiote module that gets loaded into the client. We have the freedom to define the API shape in whatever way we like. The ultimate goal is that players should never have to resort to network interception or memory manipulation to do legitimate modding.

This scripting engine is based on ClearScript. The choice of JavaScript is deliberate; the TERA community is already quite familiar with it due to TERA Proxy and TERA Toolbox historically being based on it.

TODO: Everything.

TODO: Everything.

The game's old, slow, and ugly HUD based on Scaleform GFx is replaced with a new HUD based on Avalonia which is built with modern design principles and performance in mind. The Avalonia HUD is integrated into the game by way of a custom Avalonia platform that uses Win2D to integrate into the game's rendering swap chain.

Besides improved usability and performance, this also gives us more freedom to modify the HUD in whatever way makes sense for TERA Arise.

TODO: Everything.

TERA Arise uses a new QUIC-based network protocol, as well as a more compact packet serialization format for a subset of the game's packets. This new protocol also eschews TERA's hopelessly insecure PIKE-based encryption in favor of standard TLS as required by QUIC. Stream prioritization is used to ensure that urgent packets (e.g. ones related to combat) are delivered faster than others (e.g. ones related to guilds, chat, etc), and ensures that transient packet loss in one stream does not affect the whole connection.

Overall, the QUIC-based protocol should result in lower latency, higher throughput, and more reliability. This in turns translates to a more responsive gameplay experience.