Customization in TERA comes in many shapes—crystal shapes, to be specific. Enhancement Crystals play a key role in customizing your character from the very beginning. All weapons and armor in TERA contain between two and four crystal sockets to enhance your skills. Red crystals (for your weapon) enhance attacks and damage, while blue crystals (for your armor) support your defenses.

Acquire crystals through drops, from vendors, and by trading with other players. You can customize over and over again by replacing the crystals you’ve already got. Certain crystals lend themselves for certain situations, and TERA lets you easily swap crystals in and out for various situations. Hunting bosses? Put in crystals especially for bosses; mutinous crystals inflict more damage to bosses while anarchic crystals reduce damage taken from bosses. Get new gear upgrades? Just pop the crystals you already have out of your old gear and socket them into the new!

Warriors who constantly slip behind their enemy may prefer glistening, savage, and backbiting crystals. Attacks from behind inflict more crit damage with savage and backbiting. Plus crits from the rear will now give back MP (glistening).

Lancers love anarchic (less damage from bosses) and dauntless (shield from bosses when knocked down) crystals for tanking in dungeons, but they usually swap them out while questing. Crystals that decrease damage and shield from enraged monsters like poised and empyrean crystals are always useful; everybody enrages.

Berserkers and slayers thrive on skills that knock the enemy down. For them?  Brutal crystals mean more damage to knocked-down opponents, while cruel crystals increase attack power against knocked-down foes.

With a party taking damage, priests and mystics find brilliant crystals essential to provide overall mana regeneration, but switch to domineering (more damage to minions) and hunter’s crystals (more damage to monsters) when soloing.

Sorcerers and archers dish out big damage, so they have an appetite for a focused-carving combo. Carving crystals increase their crit chance then focused crystals deal more crit damage to enraged monsters.