The Secret World

[Gord]

There are different builders that come with different side-effects. E.g. AoE builder, single target, some come with aggro,etc. Ultimately most skills of a weapon tree are very similar though, or rather fall into a few different categories and vary in small details.

 

[Norfleet]

Ah, well, I'm used to boring MMO combat by now. STO's combat essentially involves repeatedly pounding a single button over and over until everything dies. Are there things to do that aren't combat? In STO, actual combat constitutes maybe 5-10% of gameplay, at least to my resource-acquisition-centric thinking. And where do I download this thing? Someone offered me this code, but I can't find where to download the game first so it will be ready to roll.

So I assume there aren't various ways to build up besides the builder 1 attack? Since in CO you can also use Blocking, Energy Unlocks, Passives, and one of Force Shield's Advantages to build up energy without Energy Builder. If there isn't a list of alternate means of building up, yea it must be dreadfully dull.

Fancy seeing you here, Vaarna.

And I dunno. A builder attack is probably at least a little more engrossing than simply WAITING. STO's combat essentially amounted to cooldowns online -> spacebar online. You have a large number of attacks, basically no reason to use them since otherwise you are not really attacking, so you just pound the shit out of them.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

I brought up CO mostly because in CO the builder attack is only rarely used, mostly just in the opening volley or to draw aggro with melee builders. Otherwise you have so many tools at your disposal that you are effectively limited by your maximum energy when it comes to using abilities, rather than the need to build up energy since you probably recharge almost instantly (or just instantly, if using Force Shield advantage and tanking).

 

[Gord]

In STW you have builders, which make up your standard attacks, consumers, which only work after building ressources and finally some usually slightly more fancy or effective cooldown abilities.

I guess usually characters will have two weapons they focus in, so you can adapt a bit to the situation at hand, giving some more flexibility and variance.

Nevertheless, TSWs MMO combat is not overly great and I too think that the game would have been better as a single-player game - or maybe SP with some MP features.
Anyway, one should play it for the setting and the story rather than the grind and character building. At least that's my impression, but of course ymmv.

 

[Norfleet]

You are probably right, in the conventional sense. However, I have consistently found that success is achieved through rejection of conventionally accepted means. What is sane is never what is successful, because if it is sane, someone has done it already, and either it didn't work, or they already have a head start on you, so you will never win that way. One can only succeed by being crazier than the last guy.

In any event, setting and story are secondary to victory. Once you WIN, you can afford frippery like that, until then, victory is life.

 

[Humppaleka]

I appreciate the added discussion around this game but holy sperg batman.

 

[Cromwell]

Playing tsw to win is like buying 200 books and putting them in your shelf for others to see, but only reading one after you put 100 more there because your friend had you beat with 50 books more than you. To be effective in tsw in the mo sense of farming and what not you would have to skip a lot of content which has neas to no combat content but can take you hours to solve (depending on you either willing to read solutions ortackling the riddle by yourself). They have a ingame browser for a reason and the puzzles in this game are as far as I know not even meant to be solved by everyone.

I remmber, for example, a puzzle in the illuminati crypts under the first town which was impossible for me because I have zero knowledge about music.

 

[Norfleet]

Playing tsw to win is like buying 200 books and putting them in your shelf for others to see, but only reading one after you put 100 more there because your friend had you beat with 50 books more than you. To be effective in tsw in the mo sense of farming and what not you would have to skip a lot of content which has neas to no combat content but can take you hours to solve (depending on you either willing to read solutions ortackling the riddle by yourself). They have a ingame browser for a reason and the puzzles in this game are as far as I know not even meant to be solved by everyone.

I suppose those puzzles will provide the occasionally amusing diversion when on break from farming for whatever reason. But...farming. BUILD MORE FARMS!

 

[Gord]

I remmber, for example, a puzzle in the illuminati crypts under the first town which was impossible for me because I have zero knowledge about music.

That stage wasn't so bad, but of course you need to be able to read notes. What got me was the next stage since at the time I had absolutely no knowledge about the emotes, let alone the possibility that they are integrated into the game in that way. Which made that stage at the same time very cool and very wtf.

The investigation missions are some of the best stuff in the game (I would even say that some of them are amongst the best quests I have seen in any game), even though they can be pretty obscure or hard sometimes.

 

[Bubbles]

I remmber, for example, a puzzle in the illuminati crypts under the first town which was impossible for me because I have zero knowledge about music.

You don't need to know anything about music to figure out the relation between "Music of the Seasons" and "1723", especially with an in-game browser.

 

[Cromwell]

I remmber, for example, a puzzle in the illuminati crypts under the first town which was impossible for me because I have zero knowledge about music.

....of course you need to be able to read notes.

Exactly this quest and as far as I remember this was one of the easier puzzles the game throws at you in Investigation missions.

 

[bozia2012]

The goal of the program is to create the first voyager.

The program is glorious, all who guard it are glorious.

 

[Nael]

I remmber, for example, a puzzle in the illuminati crypts under the first town which was impossible for me because I have zero knowledge about music.

....of course you need to be able to read notes.

Exactly this quest and as far as I remember this was one of the easier puzzles the game throws at you in Investigation missions.

My "favorite" investigation missions are the ones that require you to translate a language like Japanese, Greek, Moldovan, or Egyptian Hieroglyphs AND solve a riddle contained within the translated message. I've never used so many spoilers in a game as TSW and I enjoy a challenge as much as anyone but taking a whole day to fucking learn Kanji or any assortment of dead or half-dead languages to solve a riddle is insane.

 

[Cromwell]

I remmber, for example, a puzzle in the illuminati crypts under the first town which was impossible for me because I have zero knowledge about music.

....of course you need to be able to read notes.

Exactly this quest and as far as I remember this was one of the easier puzzles the game throws at you in Investigation missions.

My "favorite" investigation missions are the ones that require you to translate a language like Japanese, Greek, Moldovan, or Egyptian Hieroglyphs AND solve a riddle contained within the translated message. I've never used so many spoilers in a game as TSW and I enjoy a challenge as much as anyone but taking a whole day to fucking learn Kanji or any assortment of dead or half-dead languages to solve a riddle is insane.

Gilrfriend actually got me to tsw and she does such stuff as far as I know she has her own tsw notebook and will happily spend the better part of a day trying to solve such stuff

 

[Gord]

Sometimes I wish I had the patience, but at some point I just look it up (I try to use as little clues as possible though).
I eventually always end up thinking that my free time for playing is a bit too limited to spend hours of it sitting over an obscure riddle. :D

 

[Nael]

I remmber, for example, a puzzle in the illuminati crypts under the first town which was impossible for me because I have zero knowledge about music.

....of course you need to be able to read notes.

Exactly this quest and as far as I remember this was one of the easier puzzles the game throws at you in Investigation missions.

My "favorite" investigation missions are the ones that require you to translate a language like Japanese, Greek, Moldovan, or Egyptian Hieroglyphs AND solve a riddle contained within the translated message. I've never used so many spoilers in a game as TSW and I enjoy a challenge as much as anyone but taking a whole day to fucking learn Kanji or any assortment of dead or half-dead languages to solve a riddle is insane.

Gilrfriend actually got me to tsw and she does such stuff as far as I know she has her own tsw notebook and will happily spend the better part of a day trying to solve such stuff

My hat's off to her then. Like Gord I do as much as I can on my own but there comes a time when I look at how I'm spending precious hours and just take my lumps and at least try and learn from the spoiler what the mission was trying to teach me. I've gotten an interesting education to be sure and I think that is value enough.

 

[Zombra]

I love doing the Investigations "properly" ... sucks on the occasions when the translation or whatever is wrong though ...

 

[Cyberarmy]

You can use in game browser to solve most the puzzles, there were some special "in game sites" that gave hints for most the investigation quests. But yeah, some of them are very overwhelming. We tried to figure that "Hell&Bach" questline for a very long time and at last only able to do it with trial and error.

 

[Eyeball]

TSW easily has the best think-out-of-the-box puzzles I've seen in a video game, let alone an MMO. My favourite part was probably that one puzzle where you had to guess somebody's personal password. There was zero information about it in the game, but by googling his (fictional) company, you were able to find his worker profile and deduct his password from that.

One of the best detective games ever. Just wish it was a better MMO.

 

[bozia2012]

I suck at riddles, so whenever I'm stuck for a longer period and starting to get irritated - I check how to get to next step. Then again I try to continue alone.

 

[murloc_gypsy]

Just bought the Massive Edition on steam sale. Started playing a bit yesterday. Daaamn this is some fine writing and story.

But the combat is so derpy it makes me wanna cry. Is there a particular build for which this isn't so noticeable?

 

[bozia2012]

Just bought the Massive Edition on steam sale. Started playing a bit yesterday. Daaamn this is some fine writing and story.

And it gets even better oh no the hardon-

But the combat is so derpy it makes me wanna cry. Is there a particular build for which this isn't so noticeable?

The combat is MMO-derpy, so better just avoid it if you can. The only thing that kept me from whining about the combat is the difficulty level - I find it quite challenging.

Below are the builds I've played, dunno if they will work for you. You can also check http://www.tswdb.com/builds/ for some up-to-date builds.

When the game came out, I went for a blade/assault rifle build and soloed the entire campaign. It was low-dps, but kinda tanky. It went something like this:

http://www.tsw-builder.com/#91v100172144106952902950p951332353403721101421


Since a long time I'm soloing with blade/chaos - more aoe oriented and based on healing procs (no active heals), so you just dps and CC:

http://www.tsw-builder.com/#15v550170144522106133113p332421536721110310353


For starters it's good to go with tanking weapon (Hammer, Sword) and a healing weapon (Fist, AR) - you need the most effective and straightforward active skills. After you get closer to 100% you can basically go with anything you want.

Melee weapons buff themselves to 5 resources and stay like that when you're out of combat, so you can do some nasty stuff like Bubbles mentioned - start with 2 consumers (then you can pop aoe stun or evade buff and build resources while mobs can't do shit).

 

[Gord]

Does anyone know if there's some list of all the old radio plays that currently play on the old radios for the TSW Halloween special?

I've only been able to identify "Death robbery" which plays in the Kingsmouth cemetery.

Edit: Suspense - Ghost Hunt with Ralph Edwards plays in the Black House at Savage Coast

 

[bylam]

http://wiki.crygaia.com/view/Paranormal_Shortwave

There is a list there, with links.

 

[bozia2012]

Ah, standing in the Transylvanian rain while listening to "The Thing on the Fourble Board"...