and their answer to that problem is fishing -- an activity that is the antithesis of fast and action paced.
What you're complaining about that has been removed, or altered, were more of an antithesis to Tera's combat, than fishing is.
I don't think they all fall into that category. My complaints involved removing campfires, charms, the old fashion system, reputation dailies (these weren't removed, but they're basically obsolete), and making it possible to insta-warp to any dungeon's entrance from anywhere in the world. I have many other complaints (like removing blast from the past), but that's not the purpose of this thread. We've already been over campfires and charms, and I don't really disagree that they were annoying in combat compared to nostrums. But reputation dailies served an important purpose: in addition to just being extra fluff content, they also provided incentive for players to go to other regions and participate in the game's world, which made the game feel alive since you'd walk around and see people actually doing things. The saving-up aspect of the shop also gave players another reason to log in and another thing to look forward to, and since most rep dailies involved fighting stuff, it at least tried to tie into the game's niche action combat. Insta-warping isn't even related to combat so I don't know how you can call fast travel the 'antithesis of action combat,' but making it possible for everyone to just sit in highwatch all day kills 99% of the game's world and probably deters new players who feel like they're playing a single player game when they're sent outside velika. Back before vanguard fast travel was a thing, when a new dungeon came out, the town nearby effectively became the new hub for a lot of people, and so the game constantly felt like it was changing with each patch. It was a little thing, but little things add up. Now it's gone. The old fashion system is another one of those things. It has nothing to do with combat, but it adds an additional element to the game so it doesn't feel bare bones and skeletal like it does right now.
Perhaps the issue isn't so much that fishing feels like the opposite of tera's combat, but that fishing is being introduced as the sole alternative to mindlessly killing things, now that all the other fluff is gone. By themselves, all of the things I mentioned are not enough to feel like good fluff. But together, they form a cohesive whole that produces a living game world and enough 'extra' stuff to make the experience feel at least a little more varied than it does not. Since all of those things are gone, fishing is burdened with filling that entire void by itself, and I just don't think it can.
...
But whether we agree or disagree there is beside my main point, which is that that tera's history is full of systems (like the ones that I've just discussed, heck, gathering comes to mind as well. I hated gathering, but you can't deny that it's another 'thing' that's just tossed to the side) that BHS implements, neglects, and then either removes or renders so obsolete that no player would partake in them. Again, whether you think those systems are fun or not isn't the point. I don't really care if you think the old systems were good or bad; I'm not a fan of them all, either. I'm just positive that unless something different is done in this case (namely, alternating the rewards in the fishing system so that the singular good reward doesn't become oversaturated and worthless, or not making it another grindy gear fest), we'll just see people fishing for a month and then it'll be empty.
It's also silly to say "don't copy other games" when there's actually nothing that BHS has done that is unique to Tera.
I wonder, could
anything be considered original by your broad definition of it?
Find me a game with the exact feel of tera's combat. I know others who've looked and they can't find it. BDO comes close, but it's not the same. It's actually infuriating, because this game is so bad sometimes but nobody's bothered just stealing their combat system and making a better MMO. Seriously, if you know of a game that has tera's combat, please tell me so I can go play it instead. Otherwise, don't say Tera has nothing unique going for it.
Heck, talking about campfires -- yeah, campfires exist in other games. You can start a fire in runescape and cook fish on it. But campfires as an element of the combat experience? The game pushing players in an already intimate raiding experience (5 people isn't many) to sit together and wait, for the mutual benefit of the group? Now, I'll admit, maybe if you google hard enough you can find another game with a similar system, but that was pretty unique to me. Some people had complaints about it, which is fair. It wasn't perfect. NONE of this stuff is perfect. But instead of tweaking it, they scrapped it and now we have one (1) pot in place of that entire old system which had a purpose behind it.
Also the new UI looks like garbage. I don't think the old UI was perfect. I think it could've been tweaked. Should've been. It hurt people's performance and definitely had some issues. But this new one is literally standard 2018 generic MMO UI, and it's just sad to see something that was pretty detailed (especially the laurels; I know they had performance issues of their own but they were gorgeous) turn into this ugly streamlined thing that other MMOs are adopting.
That's it from me though! I doubt we'll ever see eye to eye on this, which is fine, and most of this stuff is completely beside the main point anyway.