Hey guys, we’re back int the magical land of Tera to bring a closer look at some of the mechanics of the game. I wasn’t kidding when I said I loved this game, it really is like a mash-up of all my favorite games rolled into one mega package with even more fun stuff thrown in. We’re going to be here awhile. Now then, with that said let’s dive in to enchantment crystals!

As some of you are no doubt familiar, gem slots are a fairly common occurrence in games. Sometimes you don’t see them until much later in the gaming experience, and sometimes you get them extremely early. To start with, let’s see what World of Warcraft does. In WoW, you don’t get gems until at least level 60 and into Burning Crusade content, which is where the profession was introduced. Gems in WoW also have a habit of being monumentally boring, having almost no impact on the way you pay the game. Nearly all of them exist as a brutally simple ‘+X to Y Stat’ gem, and that is literally all. You very quickly run into players who cram only one type of gem into all their armor slots, because the +20 Strength or +20 Spellpower is simply so good it drowns out all the others. The problem is exacerbated by the so-called ‘meta’ gems which can only fit into a special slot in certain helmets, and require multiple color gems to activate. So the good news in, now players have a reason to step away from their ‘One True Gem’ and slot something else in. The problem? Everything else is just as boring and comes straight down to numbers again. Find whatever color and type gives the most healing or life, and shove that in. The meta gems aren’t even all that great. On the one hand, you have metas like ‘1% chance to reflect an enemy spell’ and I mean, come on, that’s just kind of freaking awesome already. I’ve even seen it happen too, managed to kill the enemy mage with his own spell.
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