Can you instantly do a 180 and spin as fast as you move your cursor?

Different games have handled this in different ways in the past, including practically instant turns and facings with continuous updates, delayed updates in intervals, a turn speed independent of aim speed in which your shots won’t actually line up until your character’s facing catches up, or not actually adjusting facing at all until one performs a movement or action. So how does this work in TERA?

In TERA, there are no limits to how fast you can move your aiming reticle and look around and aim, aside from your own mousing and sensitivity settings. Just like a standard quality PC FPS game, it feels solid and responsive; there is no delayed reaction. What is known is that when you move or perform a reticle aim based action, such as many projectiles, it updates your facing direction instantly and fires, at least client side. Forward makes you run and face toward your reticle, left or right to the sides, but what is also interesting is that back makes you turn your back, exposing it. It is not a backpedal; you turn 180 and run toward the camera with direction opposing the reticle while still looking and aiming forward. It’s possible that some skills may continually update your facing during a hold or channel, but the previous holds true for most situations.

However, there is an additional and very important consideration for melee attacks and other various actions that differs from many projectiles. As seen in many other action adventure and action RPG game systems, those actions’ perform direction is based on facing, not camera or reticle. You must position the facing of your character into the direction you wish to attack first. For example, if you are running away or toward the enemy at an angle besides straight at, and swinging your weapon, you will swing it toward the facing instead of to wherever your reticle may be at during that moment. This may feel weird to those unfamiliar to the genre, but you can easily and quickly adjust your facing and the resulting directional path on the fly by holding or tapping a direction in between actions, using your reticle aim for fine tuning angles. Additionally, this allows you to pan and scan your surroundings, to keep field awareness while still focusing actively on a target. This mechanism may initially seem like a chore and place additional demands on melee classes, but is actually a potentially strong tool that offers many conveniences.

Why should you care about facing in TERA aside from the obvious matter of directing your actions? For one, positional damage skills and modifiers, as well as the potential to snare people with melee hits to their back. So you should be mindful of how you move, and how you face, or else suffer from misses and punishable situations.