Advanced

Physical and Magical Crit Power

Q: How is this different from normal crit power?

A: Unlike normal crit power, physical and magical crit power directly change the value of physical and magical amplification during a critical strike.

I call the product of physical and magical crit power pseudo amplification.

True Amplification vs Pseudo Amplification

Q: What is the difference between true and pseudo amplification?

A: Pseudo amplification is simply the product of physical and magical amplification and physical and magical crit power. True amplification is the stat that appears on your character profile.

Pseudo amplification has always technically always existed but nobody really referred to it in any way. I coined the term to talk about its value with the valkyrie with regards to diminishing returns of true amplification. Simply put, you take your physical amplification and multiply it by your bonus physical crit power and likewise with magical amplification and magical crit power.

Example 1:

100,000 physical amplification

50,000 magical amplification

Best in Slot physical crit power of base 2.0 + 0.42 = 2.42

Jewelry Line: 0.02 physical crit power vs 1638 physical amplification

100,000 x 2.44 = 244,000 pseudo physical amplification vs 101,638 true amplification x 2.42 = 245,964

True amplification from physical amplification on jewelry wins. Using physical crit power over physical amplification at this point would result in a diminishing return.

Example 2:

150,000 physical amplification

75,000 magical amplification

Best in Slot physical crit power of base 2.0 + 0.42 = 2.42

Jewelry Line: 0.02 physical crit power vs 1638 physical amplification

200,000 x 2.44 = 488,000 pseudo physical amplification vs 201,638 true amplification x 2.42 = 487,964

Pseudo amplification through physical crit power on jewelry wins. Using physical amplification over physical crit power at this point would result in a diminishing return.

Diminishing Returns

Q: What are diminishing returns?

A: Diminishing returns is the point at where a certain stat that was good to build before, is no longer as good as another stat to build. Diminishing returns exist with every stat in the game except impact and balance.

Common examples are crit factor, power, physical amplification, magical amplification, normal crit power, physical crit power, magical crit power and can even include skill damage at super exorbitant levels. Other examples are physical and magical pierce vs physical and magical shred vs physical and magical ignore as well as endurance vs crit resist vs hp.

Calculating diminishing returns actually requires a lot of trial and error testing as well as a lot of math. Sometimes it can be obvious where as other times it could be pretty hard to spot. I won't really say too much about this as there are a lot of guides that go into a lot more depth than what I am willing to go into here. If you are interested about this kind of stuff, I suggest joining the TERA theory crafting discord: https://discord.gg/zY7bbFp

Understanding of Modifiers

I won't really go too in depth with this, however I'll state a couple of things with it real quick.

1. Your "base" Power is 100 + whatever the grey number is. Get your power to they grey number + 100 and you'll have even grey and green attack modifiers.

2. Your "base" Endurance is 50 + 80. Get your endurance to 50 + 80 and you'll have even grey and green defensive modifiers.

3. Crit Factor does not work the same way as attack and defense modifiers, but it does go off Castanic's 1% to crit from behind, as well as the Carving Crystal and percentage chance to crit glyphs.

Normal Crit Power Explained

Q: How does crit power work in Tera?

A: If you open your profile, every character has a default crit power of 2.0. This means if your attack does 100 damage, a critical hit would be 100 multiplied by 2.0 = 200. If you use a superior tier Nostrum, a green number will pop up beside it that reads: "+ 1.42". This means that if you do 100 damage regularly, you will do 100 multiplied by 3.42 (the sum of your base 2.0 crit power and the nostrum's +1.42 power) for a total of 342 damage.

If you have any crit power rolled on your gear, it will appear next to your default 2.0, added in with your nostrum effects if you have it on. Your weapon crystals (from older gear) activate differently, as it only proc's when you meet the prerequisites of the crystals. So for an example: if you have a focused crystal equipped, you will not get that bonus crit power added in until after you do damaged to an enraged monster and after the monster loses its enraged, the effect stops until the next enraged phase.

Burst vs Sustained

Q: What is the difference between burst and sustained damage and damage dealers?

A: Burst damage refers to a large amount of damage dealt all at once, whereas sustained damage refers to smaller amounts of damage dealt, generally quicker but spread out over time equaling about that of the burst's. Burst and sustained damage dealers as a class is a little more complicated however.

Tera has a lot of burst/sustain mix between their classes. While Tera's classes tend to be more burst for the main part, it could be argued that skills that increase the user's stats and/or decrease cooldowns just grant a higher sustained damage and aren't burst at all. However, when we think of these skills being synergized to be used with enraged phases, there is an undeniable burst present.

Understanding Metas

Q: What is a Meta?

A: META stands for Most Effective Tactic Available.

Q: Does the Meta change?

A: Yes. Due to patching, balancing, rebalancing and just new content in general, many players like to try new different things to experiment, discover, and try to change the meta.

Q: Are there multiple Metas?

A: Generally there's a single Meta but there are instances where multiple Metas can exist.

Metas can change in Tera depending on the dungeon, the glyphs, the class and the party composition as a whole. Here are some differences that can change the metas:

• Sandbag bosses versus bosses that move and attack a lot
• Different tanks
• Different healers
• Difference in party damage

As you can see there are many things that can affect the meta. The important thing is to be versatile as a player, discover new techniques and strategies and implement them.

Correct Backside

Q: The boss keeps turning and I'm having a hard time getting back crits. What do I do?

A: Check this out. The red coned area is where the actual "backside" is whereas the blue coned area is where it appears to be.

Q: I'm behind the boss and I still am not getting any back crits. What's wrong?

A: If you're a melee class or using melee skills, just back up a bit. Chances are you backstabbed or something under the boss and it just isn't registering. However, if you're a ranged class or are using ranged skills check this out (credit goes to them). The trick with using ranged skills and getting back crits from them is to make sure you are positioned behind the boss, facing the boss and parallel with the boss. If you are angled in or are perpendicular with them, it will not count as a back crit.

note: certain bosses such as Bahaar is an exception of this rule as his backside is updated in real-time.

Side Critting

You can actually side crit from the front and the back.

Watch this video.

All credit goes to them.

While ranged classes can use a Spiteful Crystal and crit from the rear and the back, any class can use a Wrathful crystal and get the frontal crit damage proc while critting from the side. Turning your camera to the side makes it count as a frontal crit for whatever reason.

Slaying

Q: What is "slaying"?

A: Slaying is a term used to describe players who purposely drop below 50% of their health pool to activate older gear's slaying weapon crystal. The crystal increases crit power by quite a bit and is used in dungeons where they are trying to do a lot of damage. Certain classes can benefit from slaying runs more than others as their skills have a natural slaying effect to them (ex: Slayer's Fury Strike ; Berserker's Lethal Strike).

While players who use slaying crystals will definitely did more damage, they had to play almost perfectly as they most likely died in one hit. Players who used this crystal most likely did not receive any heals as it would put them over the 50% HP threshold needed to proc the crystal. Those who run with this crystal would bring their own health potions.

note: try to stay away from Vigorously dyads as a whole as it heals you and can push you out of slaying range.

note: those of the Amani race actually can get 100% damage reduction when below 30%. for this reason, you may see a lot of Amani tanks.

Ethicals: Injecting, Skill Prediction, & Scripting

In super simple terms, injecting is basically the modification of packets that you send to the server. "Skill prediction" modifies the timing of the packets you send to simulate lower ping (latency/delay).

A few of the bugs associated with this include, but are not limited to:

• Desync- This is common already in Tera because the server is trying to pinpoint each character and their actions. An easy way to describe it would be that it showed you hit someone on your screen but then they weren't actually there. This could be the other way around as well.
• Ghosting- This is when you press a skill, the animation goes off, but the damage and the cooldown do not. You can kind of do this with dreamslash but you have to roll to cancel it. With ghosting, it cancels automatically or something. A common one I've noticed with people who use Skill Prediction is Overhead Slash and Shining Crescent. For whatever reason, they use the skill and the animation goes off but they just keep spamming it. I'm not too sure on what causes this and I'm not the expert in Skill Prediction so I'll leave you to figure it out.
• Skills going off even though they should not have- I see this a lot in PvP and its always easy to tell who's got skill prediction due to the obvious nature of this. Certain skils are slower than others, and such is the case with Slash and Overhead Slash. You can Slash someone with Skill Prediction in mid-animation of Overhead Slash and instead of getting staggered out of it, their stun will apply. Valk against valk this is very annoying to deal with. There are other broken skills that work this way as a valk and it takes away from the integrity of pvp altogether because at this point it isn't ping vs ping, its someone with injection vs someone without.

For Valkyrie specific Ethicals, please join the Valkyrie Discord, give yourself the Valk role and go to #ethics channel: https://discord.gg/M345WBe