The Secret World

in game event will be from dec21st ->jan 7th. Bla bla rare stuff pets bla.

What do you get a game that is based on horror and zombies for the end of the world? More zombies..


In a different tone
This video was a random click on youtube because I was bored, but the overt symbols in it is amusing to me. Supposedly her record label is a pyramid, but the gas masks , end of the world them to the lyrics , and the chorus of we rise all scream illuminati theme for the game.

I am highly amused

Ok so late to the show- waited for the ftp 15 dollar deal and got it...heh.

So is there a server people are on or does it matter? Not even sure do they do guilds or groups and if so, should I be in it? Does it matter what faction you choose for a guild?

Servers matter only for PvP. PvP is really bad and you shouldn't do it unless that changes.

Factions matter only for PvP and flavor. Pick the faction whose flavor appeals to you.

They do guilds, TSW calls them Cabals. They are faction-specific, although there may be cross-faction Cabals and/or umbrella corporations later. It's up to you if you want to be in one and which one. Misconception is probably top dog for progression stuff, but most people don't want to be that serious. I personally am in the SA goon cabals, which is not an option open to you if you are not an SA goon. There are not inherent advantages to being in one like WoW, where you got bonus XP or reduced repair costs or whatever, only whatever advantages your cabal happens to provide, like people to group with regularly or cabal bank stuff or whatever.

I admit that I haven't read this thread before the last couple of pages, but I'm with walTer. Is there a night of the week when people get together? Is there a guild to join? Do the locals (aka, those reading and posting in this thread) have a dire need for some particular kind of character?

There is no BF cabal that I'm aware of. You could start one if you want. I am on most nights (Raiser) and can answer questions or help out, but I'm heavily involved in my cabal and will not be leaving.

If you want to build for ease of grouping, healers are the most frequently needed early on, and both tanks and healers at endgame. At endgame, though, good DPS -- in damage output, not-getting-killed ability, and utility all -- are not to be scoffed at. Good DPS are in demand, although of course bad DPS abound. I wouldn't worry too much about what BF people need more of.

I do have a Templar alt (Reiser) that I'm kind of lazily playing occasionally, he could use some dungeons and whatnot. I can also just come on my main and destroy things if necessary.

All good info thanks.

Right now I am at the "i just woke up in the it is all in my mind tutorial" so I need to get my brain around the game but yeah maybe we can work on a BF group for people that are super casual.

Ah damage, tank etc...lol I have been playing GW2 so much I forgot that I need to pay attention to this here. :)

From what I've been told by Ini you can eventually do everything, so it doesn't really matter too much what you decide to do initially (since it will only effect your levelling and stuff)

That is correct. There are no classes or levels and every character can eventually do everything.

I recommend you make sure you have a functional solo build rather than beelining for all the healing stuff or whatever -- I did that for a while and it was possible but very slow. (TSW makes this less of an issue, though -- you have to go through the early abilities to get to the late ones, and you will usually have to pick up some offensive abilities on the way to the healing ones.)

My advice is to focus on solo early on, then add needed group skills. There are too many places where you are forced to go solo to focus on group first.

Here is a good site for newbs, as he has a bunch of builds you can achieve early on, instead of the end game super builds most sites focus on.

And yes, even though nearly everybody still focuses on the holy trio roles, TSW is much more flexible in reality. You can have healer-tanks, ranged DPS heals, whatever you want nearly.

Oh, and gear matters. A lot.

Oh, and the limitation for Cabals to be faction specific is a major pain in the ass. Apparently they figured everybody was going to be really, really into PvP, and even then I really wish they had gone another route for choosing who would be fighting whom.

Great stuff ty!

Now one more question and it is probably stupid BUT... I took magic as my starter which I am quite enjoying but I want to wield the machine gun as well so I found on, put a skill point in it and I am allowed to put the weapon in my secondary slot but I cannot seem to use it. Is there a "swap weapon" button? Do I neee to be a higher level? Am I just doing it all wrong?

fwiw, I am still just poking around in the starter zone for now.

Weapon swaps happen automatically when you use a skill from that weapon type, you'll have to buy those skills with AP. Your skill bar contains skills from both weapons, they aren't separate bars.

Too bad you couldn't save the car textures.

Hopefully this will be the last game where anyone is foolish enough to lifetime sub.

Yeah, I don't know what's up with that car. The weird thing is, there are other cars around, and they look fine. It's just this one that's fucked up.

As much as I don't really care for this game it was wise of them to shift to this model. Better to do it like this than to go to a SOE style of make the game utter shit unless you want to put down coin.

Why? I still wish I had lifetimed to TSW, and I have never regretted my lifetime to LOTRO, even though I'm currently not happy with the entire state of the game now. I got years of good fun out of it, and saved money in the long run. And indeed I am still playing.

People just need to understand that 1) there are no guarantees, and 2) you're taking a chance. #2 in itself isn't a bad thing, as long as you understand point 1.

I paid lifetime to throw money at Funcom for making this game. I never expected what they are giving us for the grandmaster now nor did I expect the game to last extremely long without some sort of revamp.
I just wanted to encourage developing the ideas in this game into something more workable. If you purchase with that intent it is no different than a kickstarter, folk give tips to waitresses so on so forth.

I don't know why anyone else has to care that someone else purchased a lifetime sub.

I'm glad you don't feel burned, but I do and a bunch of others do too. I won't be lifetiming anything ever again if there aren't changes.

Anyway, Issue #5 is out and is apparently AMAZING. A bunch of people I know were raving that if this was the quality of upcoming content it was absolutely worth paying for. I haven't started it yet.

I haven't tried a build like yours, but offhand here's some stuff I'm noticing about yours:

1. Four of your seven passives are about healing, and so is at least one of your actives. I forget the exact details. That's DPS abilities you're leaving on the table. Which is fine, but then you need the healing. With a more damage-focused build, things will die faster. I've had the most success by just maximizing my damage output.

2. You're running AR/Chaos. When you use one melee weapon, you're essentially all melee, because your ability to do anything with your melee weapon requires you to be in melee range. I like to use Slow The Advance when soloing too, but that's because with two ranged weapons I can take advantage of the Hinder to pile on damage. Your ability to do that is severely limited because your main builder and one of your finishers is melee. So Slow The Advance isn't able to do its job very well for you. If you want to continue with a hybrid ranged/melee build you may want to change how you're approaching it.

3. I don't remember for sure but I think frenzies are all AOEs right? They'll do much less damage to a single target. (Changing this will mean changing pretty much your whole build, since a lot of your passives are built around frenzies.)

4. Escalation is not great for damage. You can do better. It does apply Exposed if you slot Intensity as a passive, but not only does that take a valuable passive slot, most things that aren't dungeon bosses will probably die long before you've put up 10 stacks of Exposed on it.

If you want to stick with those two weapons I can try to see if I can assemble something workable from them when I get home tonight. I'll see if I can catch you on IRC.

I'm not sure you're supposed to, especially since even some of the heavy hitting combat skills have self healing built in. Now you might have one skillset dedicated for group play where you have little to no healing, but shift from out of that as soon as you go solo again.

Also, as counter intuitive as it is, the assault rifle is a group healing tool, with the heals tied to the DPS you are doing (the more DPS, the more healing). I can kinda see the logic, as you are supposed to be "supporting" your squad with it.

In other news... To my surprise I see that they are still offering the Grandmaster's Pack, which includes Lifetime, so I guess we'll be seeing if I put my money where my mouth is. It's going to have to wait for after the New Year though. I am completely tapped out with the Holidays...

Not arguing with you here, but I am curious-- does not Lifetime become basically a free subscription now, with all the benefits of a paid subscription for the life of the game? Isn't this fair?

It's exactly what Turbine did with theirs, and there were few complaints, although to be fair by the time F2P came along all us Lifetimers were already well beyond the breakeven point. As I've said, if Lotro where to end right now I've still saved money on my lifetime, even if that wasn't the reason to get it in the first place.

Yes sort of. I discussed this a bit upthread. There's two ways to compare and neither comes out favorably.

Vs. Subscription

Subscription is $15/mo., which is now $10 worth of Funcom Points, 10% off the shop, and a monthly item. Sometimes new content will cost less than that, giving you money left over for fun stuff. Not very much, because most of the cool stuff is more than that.

Lifetime is exactly the same, except 20% off. That is not much of a thank-you to the people who supported TSW early and big.


Vs. F2P

According to Funcom, lifetimers and subscribers will always be able to buy the new content with their stipend, so it will never be more than $10. This first one will be $5. So expect a price of $5-10 per issue. That's less than $15. You won't get the free monthly item; value that however you wish. You also don't get the discount. You would have to buy a lot of stuff for the discount to break even, more than I think most people will and certainly more than I will.


If they'd given us the stipend they're giving us now and also the content, I'd be satisfied. I don't think that's asking very much. Subscribers could have the deal they have now, which seems fair since the idea would be to subscribe to content updates. In general, none of us object to the Bee 2 Play transition or the new compensation model, but the way they've handled it speaks volumes about their disrespect and apathy towards lifetimers. We gave them a lot of fucking money.

In many ways the deal isn't "bad" in a vacuum, but compared to what things look like for lifetime vs. people starting now on the B2P model, there's very little differentiation. I don't want power-buying or anything like that, everyone should be on even footing gameplay-wise, but I think we are more than entitled to a bit of love for our support. As for lifetiming the game at all, I think we all expected F2P/B2P at some point, but this was very soon and makes the complaints I have somewhat more... egregious.

Lum, I haven't spent any time testing it but maybe try something like this:

Active

1. Safety Off
2. Three Round Burst
3. Four Horsemen
4. Suppressing Fire
5. Lock & Load
6. Amor Fati
7. Domino Effect (Elite) (lots of options here)

Passive

1. Extra Bullet
2. Eagle Eye
3. Improved Bursts
4. Ferocity
5. Twist the Knife
6. Iron Maiden
7. Live Wire (Elite) (this is really expensive and will only be helpful once you have some crit on your gear, just slot whatever til you can get it, maybe Seal the Deal or From the Abyss)

Lots of other options as well -- Mad Skills as a passive, for example.

Yeah, that's all stuff to work towards, I don't expect you to have all of it yet. In the meantime it will hopefully illustrate the kinds of synergy you're looking for and the general idea behind a "kill everything fast" build.

Is there a breakdown somewhere of how the F2P works for this re: microtransactions and buying content? I might pick it up if there's a Steam daily or flash sale on it. A friend was enthusing about it when it was P2P.

http://brokenforum.com/index.php?threads/the-secret-world.1924/page-15#post-373176

Cool.

I'll probably bite if it goes on sale somewhere.

That is sort of true. Future DLC will have a cost attached. If you buy it during December, you get the new DLC for free, otherwise it's $5.

Everyone is pretty happy with the DLC, it is real cool.

A heads up for people considering starting now. We're right in the middle of our "End of the World" event (where else but TSW?), which, while fun and all, has the added "feature" of zombies climbing out of the soil nearly wherever you go. This can be a little confusing to a new player, since if you kill the zombie you immediately get more zombies. The good news is that they don't aggro unless you attack first. The bad news is there are a *lot* of AOE attacks in TSW.

I'm actually buying the Secret World for a couple of my friends as a Christmas gift, but I'm holding off getting them started in it until after the event. Things can be confusing enough in Kingsmouth without *extra* zombies....

Yeah, you really have to control your AOE attacks at the moment, because otherwise, you can get wiped quite quickly by these things. Neopythia and I didn't notice a One Death spawning while we were fighting Draug with new characters, and so it accidentally got aggroed by our AOE, and then killed - and a second one spawned instantly, also died, which instantly triggered the spawning of a Seven Death, that handily wiped us.

I think that's quite reasonable. On top of showing your support, the expectation was that you'd hit a break-even point in a bit more than a year. Now the replacement scheme pushes the break-even point out past two years, and possibly longer depending on what the actual cost of the content winds up being. That's a poor way to treat your staunchest and earliest supporters, and stuff like this is one of the main reasons I've never bought a lifetime sub to any new game.

The reality is that they've got your money and probably already accounted for it last fiscal year. As you're not a source of new revenue anymore, you're at the bottom of the priority list. At this point the business folks (who are the ones actually in charge) are going to be looking for the minimum way to get you to shut up and go away.

So being relatively new to the game let me ask a few things.

The game is hard, yeah? After coming over from a Ranger in GW2 which is an amazingly powerful and easy character to play, I find that I really need to watch myself in this game.

Leveling- It seems to be pretty slow- I don't mean in a bad way but I just want to make sure I am doing things right. I have spent many hours in Kingsmouth and things seem to move pretty slowly...Seems right?

Weapons and gear- at this stage, is it better to just use drops or should I buy better ones to meet my level?

Crafting...it seems somewhat complicated or am I just lame? Also, should I be crafting my gear already?

And finally, regarding skills, at this low level should I be overly worried about a perfect build yet or just do a bit of experimenting before I really start to specialize ? It seems that you are allowed enough points and the way the game is made that you have a lot of freedom to make a build but also to switch builds fairly easily to fit your current situation.

As for Maggie up there, well yeah they seem to be pretty lax on things in here. heh

The game will start kicking your ass around Blue Mountain if you haven't worked out a good build. If you are having trouble before then it is likely you're doing something wrong. What's your deck look like?

The later areas will give more XP and therefore more AP and SP.

I just use quest and dungeon drops.

Don't worry too much about crafting til endgame.

Don't sweat it too much about your build being perfect, but start to look for synergies, and make sure you have a sensible set of abilities. Very generally, you'll probably want something like this for your actives:

1. Single-target builder
2. Weapon 1 consumer
3. Weapon 2 consumer
4. AOE builder
5. Cooldown 1
6. Cooldown 2
7. Elite

Your single target builder should be something of the same type as at least one consumer if possible. You can depart from this template but it's a good starting point.

There are some good soloing builds available, I can post some if you need.

First up, I am not looking for massive amounts of info- I don't want to be THAT GUY...last nite a guy on general- Where do I buy guns, what money do you use, how do I start a quest, can I change my hair?...non-stop- lol.

That said - good tips - thank you. Here is my mess so far: http://chronicle.thesecretworld.com/character/Fir-e

I chose Elemental because - eh dunno, but I wanted some magic and frankly it seems do do the deed- it seems to hit pretty darn hard. Double pistols thrown into the mix because, well double pistols are cool. What I really need to figure out is this- 1) is that combo just stupid? and 2) if not, then I need to know what types of stats on gear I need to look for.

If my weapon choice is bad, ugh well I like Elemental- it does seem to hit like a brick and the THOR HAMMER OF DOOM!!!!! is great, but I would really miss my dual pistols but I can live without them, I guess, if it is a bad combo choice.

Oh that is easy to link
http://chronicle.thesecretworld.com/character/ThornFalconeye

I get confused a lot with my key layout, is there any way to have a second weapon set on shift or something? I can play Keyboard hero but I cannot find a way to hit 6 and 7 without my hand leaving the keyboard.and me looking down.

I know you can re-bind the Aux ability (8) so I'm assuming you can rebind the others. One of my cabal-mates rebinds it to R because he always has Rocket Jump in that slot (as do I, actually).

Pistols/Ele is okay. I wouldn't run the late nightmares with it but it should carry you through just fine. Both are very crit-heavy; there's also a lot of Chains in both but Chains are mostly not helpful unless you know ahead of time you only care about AOE. Your build is kind of a mess, though. Here's some things I noticed off the bat.

Active stuff:

1. You have lots of Strike attacks. That's good! You can use passives that buff Strike attacks.

2. You have lots of builders. That's bad. You need exactly one single-target builder. Take your pick of the best available to you for either weapon. I think The Business is probably slightly better damage but it isn't a Strike. (I don't think Pistols have any Strikes.) You don't need Ignition, The Business, and Ignite.

3. Electrical Storm is okay, you may want to use an AOE builder instead of an AOE consumer, though. Up to you.

4. Molten Earth is a good choice for a soloing elite. You'll probably want a few others eventually for dungeoning, especially Do Or Die (in Miscellaneous).

5. Doing what I said will leave you with some empty slots, probably two. Those can be DPS or survivability cooldowns, like Anima Charge. Use these if you overpull or otherwise find yourself in a tight corner.

Passive stuff:

6. Volatile Current buffs Shock. You aren't using Shock. Get rid of it.

7. Get rid of your passives that exploit Hindered. Hinders tend to be on long cooldowns and those passive slots are better spent. You also can't use them in dungeons, because Hindering dungeon bosses is Very Bad -- I'll explain this in a sec). You have two of those passives. (Don't use passives that exploit Impaired either, for the same reason.)

The reason Hindering dungeon bosses is bad is that they get a stack of Rising Vigour every time they're Hindered or Impaired. At 3 stacks, they're immune. If the tank needs to interrupt something, and Rising Vigour is stacked to three, he's fucked. No one should Hinder or Impair dungeon bosses except the tank, ever, unless they ask.

8. Affliction is nice, especially if you're using abilities that exploit Afflicted (notice Lum's deck does this), but if they don't stack you may find that you're overwriting it. Still useful maybe, but something to consider.

9. In theory, your rotation is 6/7ths Elemental (5x Elemental builder, 1x Elemental consumer, 1x Pistol consumer). That makes Elemental Precision probably worth it, and Straight Shooter probably not. (If you don't have better options, you can leave it in for now.)

10. This is really expensive and probably a good ways in your future, but Live Wire is one of the best DPS passives, especially in a crit-heavy build, so you may want to move towards that. (Seal The Deal is good too, IIRC.) That tends to work a little better in Burst and Focus builds since they hit more than once per use and thus have more opportunities to crit. (Before you get too excited, you can only crit once per ability, but it's more chances per use for it to happen.) In the meantime, use whatever, but definitely don't waste your Elite passive slot on something that requires Hindered to work.

Hopefully that will get you a good start. I can help more if you need.