f13.net

Here is where I will ask all my questions that will make people wonder if I've ever even played a MMO before!  :why_so_serious:


First random, newbish question: Is there a way to preview what clothes look like before you actually buy them? I could not figure it out. But there's got to be one, right? I hope? Don't make me add another thing to Things I Don't Like, Funcom.

Select an item:

(https://dl.dropbox.com/u/30533848/Kenka_picture001.png)

And click on the Preview all button

(https://dl.dropbox.com/u/30533848/Kenka_picture003.png)

Yeah, and to cancel the preview either click on preview again, or just move your char. The magic disappears as you step in any direction, and you go back to your old dull self.

Christ, I didn't even see that button. Probably because when it is greyed out, it is impossible to read! Also, because I suck at games.

It's teh same way for the cash shop btw, it preview on your actual character - not a separate preview window, so moving of the cash shop is needed. The previews (both of ingame and cash shop) end when you move your character

Next up: Is there an auction house and if so, where is it?

In with the next patch. Next Tuesday, they say.

And as for where, it's the bank in London. Unless they've added them to New York and Seoul and I've missed it?

Mind you I can't see it being used for much. I have 1.5 million Pax and all I can spend it on is clothes.

People will sell crafting crap on it, surely!  :why_so_serious:



There's no way to respec, right? And don't tell me "oh you can buy everything eventually," because that does not help me now.

You can buy everything eventually.

Bad news for my Illuminati lesbian, then, because I fucking hate her spec.

Well, AP isn't exactly hard to come by.  I'm not sure how many you have spent now, but you'll spend the equivalent of an entire inner ring getting a single skill later and it won't even register.   Hell, for a longest time I just didn't even use outer ring skills.

Just start finding something you do like and go for it.  

How do we install Addons/Mods? I didn't even know they existed for TSW until a thread for them popped up here.

It's easy, I threw on that topbar thing just copying four files over.

I hate how she's specced way too much and I'm in too deep to bother, basically. She sucks, I suck, I do not want to farm AP to un-suck her. So goodbye, Conejita! Goodbye, Illuminati! Pelagia the Templar is a go.  :heart:

No respec is dumb.

(https://dl.dropbox.com/u/82533/seinfield.gif)

In the end, you want all the inner skills anyways. I switched from pistols to shotguns about half way through Kingsmouth, which was a little painful but with just a few AP it was easy to get started.

Yes, I get that eventually you can get anything your little heart desires. But when you're in the stupid newbie zone and dying a lot because the spec you picked to go for is terrible for the way you play (I am a meleer, preferably tankish at heart, it seems), having an option to respend your points would be really nice. It makes the newbie experience shitty and makes the stuff you already spent feel "wasted," as I imagine most people starting out are trying to have ONE functional deck before they start playing around with other shit.

Basically I imagine the game likes to be all LOOK HOW FLEXIBLE IT ISSSSSSS only it isn't flexible until you're faux-leveled-up quite a bit. And it's lame.

Are you kidding? I stumbled all the way to Transylvania and I still don't have a full deck. Play it the way you want to play it and just spend the AP on something else. At your state in the game it's all easy anyway and you'll get the points you want in no time. And trust me, you'll probably want those other skills you bought later.

It's not easy, though! You guys are not grasping how shitty that character is and how much I've died as her. My other two characters have died about twice each thus far. Conejita has died roughly ten billion times. I am not blaming the game for this, I know it means I suck at that particular spec, but it is SO painful to play her, I don't want to farm the points I'd need to make her something less shitty. And it makes the lack of respec more glaring to me.

My other two characters basically hum along and I wouldn't think twice about it if I hadn't also seen the other side of it, being a spec I am completely shitty at.


I get that one day I will have points raining from the sky! I do! But I cannot do it on that character, she is that bad. Respec seems like a simple solution. Rerolling works too, though.  :oh_i_see:

Subject change: Ingmar alleges you can make a weapon decorative. Is this true, and if so, how do you do it?

There are toolkits you can buy from certain vendors that strip the appearance of a weapon, and let you combine it with a new weapon (destroying the original in the process).

Cool, thanks!

No, best you can do is head back to the training room to try things out.  You can "respec" whatever points you spend while you're in there, but once you leave they're locked in.


It gets a bit trickier once you're dealing with multiple addons that need to load from the same *Prefs.xml, but if looking at HTML code doesn't throw you into convulsions, it's just some simple copy-and-paste.

Just want to note why making a new character isn't a good solution (unless you really want to change factions)

1)  You're going to be repeating the same quests anyways with your new character.
2)  XP gain from quests just keeps going up, so your AP gain rate will be higher on your current character than a new one.
3)  XP required to get AP never changes. 
4)  Those abilities you unlocked will almost certainly be useful for other builds and combinations later on.

Like trias said, don't reroll, it makes no sense.  You should have some better gear on your current character and will be able to get ap faster on it than on any new character.  Any weapon and spec is good enough for Kingsmouth.  If you are dying a lot in Kingsmouth a new character won't help, you need to do the easier quests to get better gear and weapons and learn the builder/closer mechanic.

With a bit of luck any new character can get a QL3 weapon doing Danny's sabotage quest, just stand near where you get the airplane and wait for someone else to kill the golem beside it, then follow them and they will probably be killing the mauler next.  Only two enemies if you use the stuff you find under the airport.  Then in 18 hours you can do it again and get your second weapon.

Actually I'm with Sjofn on that one, while in Kingsmouth getting those AP to move into a seperate weapon set is too damn slow and painful when you can't kill jack and a single zombie tears you to shreds.
The first Leanan spread out her skills and AP over far too many weapon types without finding something that really clicked before getting tossed under the proverbial buss and remade into a Fist/Chaos specialist and certainly never regretted it...
Bottom line, a respec option early game would be quite helpful not to scare players off before they figure out how skills and abilities work together but since we're not getting it don't be afraid to just kill your character and remake it if you're struggling badly in Kingsmouth.
If you can manage to kill ql2-3 zombies and get to Savage Coast you'll soon find that the mission exp will see you swimming in SP/AP in no time however (or atleast that's how it felt to me at the time).

Yes, it has been explained and demonstrated multiple times why making a new character only makes sense if you want to change faction. Everything else is a waste of time, not efficient in the slightest XP wise, since a new character starts with ZERO ap and zero items, while if you just grab a ql0 weapon with your existant character he/she is exactly like a brand new character, still zero AP or SP in the new role you want to pursue, but with more money and gear (and maybe some stray unspent AP), so able to grow in the new class faster than a new char.

On the topic of respeccing, it's worth noting that while in other games you can respec pretty much freely, what Sjofn would like to do here is more something along the lines of changing class than respeccing. And that is not doable in any other game. So while old habits make us feel that in this game you can't respec while in other you can, reality is you can respec (change build AND class) in this game ANY TIME you want as long as you are not in combat, while in other MMORPGs to respec your build you have to see an NPC, and to "respec" to another class you have to log out.

So this game has free and instant respecs. You have to take off the WoW-coloured glasses to realize that though.

EDIT: Seraphim, what game offers you that? If you picked a class you don't like in any MMORPG, or that you are not good with, you can't respec to a completely different one. especially not in the first few levels where you can't respec AT ALL usually (not even talents). You have to roll another toon. Here, you have more options. Rolling another toon is the least efficient of them all. While adding a respec like the one you seem to want would be like adding to other games a function that allows you to change your class, say, when you are at level 7, or 13, and retain all your XP. No games has that yet, and no one seems to think it's weird.

Protip: Stonehenge, the PvP 5v5 map, gives out 83k XP (that's 2 AP) for a loss and 130K XP (3 AP) for a win. Even if you get in there and do absolutely nothing for 15 minutes you'll get a couple AP. Good if you really feel stuck and could use a bunch of free AP to get to that big improement of an ability, or to flesh out a completely new build/class.

The only time I would recommend restarting to respec is if you find yourself not able to take down an individual mob or one pack of mobs.

The biggest question however is, are you using one weapon or two?

Actually that's good point for this thread, many seem to miss that you can use two seperate weapons even if one is just there to use it's Consumer for extra damage.
Also the fact that Passives can be taken from anywhere without even needing the weapon it's listed under.

I started out that first time with two weapons though, pistols/chaos, did't work and went on to fill most inner circles before calling it quits...
Looking back I'm not really sure how I managed to screw it up that badly but ah well.

To echo Falc, restarting really doesn't make sense. You'll have to re-run the Kingsmouth stuff anyway, so you may as well re-run it with a character who already has a few talismans and passives you can use with the new weapon line. You only gain what, 3AP in a new weapon by rerolling?

My first run through Kingsmouth, I tried to level two weapons equally (blade/AR) and was kind of meh with both, though I was still an effective character. With Bryn, I stuck almost completely with pistol, only branching out for 3 off-weapon passives...and still had enough AP to open the entire inner circle of Elem and a few skills on the outer of Pistol. As Seraph says, I'm just using Elem for Thor's Hammer to consume resources, otherwise I use almost nothing (just the 1AP passive for affliction on crits).

I'd be surprised if there's any such thing as two weapons which, used in combination, can't kill zombies in Kingsmouth.

The tutorial will have given you a starter and a finisher for one weapon. Then you need to spend three AP to get the finisher for your second weapon. Then you are able to kill things.

One issue the game has is that the skill system seems kind of hard when you start out. You die a lot and don't know what you can do to fix it.

(Then it clicks but there's a danger you're thinking "oh, so I'm just meant to do five starters and two finishers over and over?" But then you move on to stage three and realise that there's a lot more to it than that)

It was an Illuminati character.  No loss.

Though if you just need the AP to get started on a new weapon line, have someone help you with a couple of the later quests in Kingsmouth.  They're worth like 5 AP each.  If you must solo it, then just start with the Sheriff again.  You won't be any worse off.

Awesome. Give any of these peeps a /tell in game to join Bee Country. Everyone can invite. It's nice to have some chatting going on from time to time. Useful for tips and gear, too. And instances.

(https://dl.dropbox.com/u/3584773/TSW%20Guild.jpg)

I'm somewhat wanting a limited respec option as well. Something like the first 60-75 ap can be respecced once. This would be nice since there is fuckall explaining anything. This is not a bad thing and would help with reducing frustration in a game that causes a lot of frustration even to those who understand it better than most. 60-75 AP is absolutely fuck all for anyone around QL5 and higher, but for someone QL1-3 it is a couple hours worth

That said - (this is for anyone here really) since the people here can always simply ask for help via a couple quick runs through Inferno or Polaris, that would be the best way to "fix" any build you want to fix. Inferno takes less than 15mins (roughly 10 with a couple QL10 players) and gives 7ap/3sp each run as well as arguably the best looking weapons in the game.

Yeah a one time, early respec would be a nice thing, mostly because the game is terrible at explaining things and the skill system is a lot to take in at once. Yes, you *can* just start spending points on new stuff, and it almost certainly is the more efficient choice, but it *feels* crappier having to get your AP with the skills that were already failing for you, rather than doing it with the new ones you picked, you know?

Also, I still haven't figured out why powder burn had a knockback in the tutorial but doesn't for me now. Probably a passive I'm missing somewhere I guess.

1) I know it's like picking a new class, this is why I was actually okay with rerolling completely, even though it is dumb because
2) The game already sort of has it, it's just you have to be able to farm enough AP to do it. And in the early stage of the game where I am at, it is painful and lame and makes the game feel shitty.


Rerolling wasn't any big deal, yeah I had to do the parts of Kingsmouth I'd already done again but it goes pretty fast when you already know where to go and you aren't stuck with a shitty spec you loathe and are terrible at.


EDIT: Also, I know about using a second weapon. I had that covered. :P

An early respec opton would be nice since new players are shoved into the breach without much of an explaination of how the game works.  It really needs a better tutorial before people get to Kingsmouth.

Where does one buy the higher levels of sprint?

Mobility trainer at your faction HQ.

After you die, why does it take so long to port to the res point/jail in a dungeon?  Is there some kind of resurrection or healing mechanic I'm unaware of that has to timeout?  Can I bring pain from the beyond?

Someone mentioned buffing team members while dead, in a dungeon.

Yah, I did.  But that's when you're alive in the jail.
I'm beginning to think it was just a bug I encountered in Polaris.  I was just wondering around kinda ghostlike, with no option to release.   Didnt happen again though.

It sounds like a bug. I mean, in this game when you die in a boss fight you are supposed to stay in jail until the fight is over. And it's a lovely challenging mechanic. But I have never heard of any delay between death and respawning in jail. I really wonder if it's a rare bug. Did it happen more than once? In one dungeon or more than one? And which one(s)?

What does the blue part of my XP bar meeeeeeeeeean?

I think blue XP is for AP, yellow XP is for SP. IMO they should've go WAR-style on this and put some bars above your bars (dawg)

Opposite colors, but yes.

The entire bar represents one SP, each notch represents getting one of the three AP you get since 1SP = 3AP.  I believe the bar is blue until it passes an AP notch and then that section turns yellow to represent you passed an AP notch.  You can see the notches so there is no real reason for them to change the colours but whatever.

I think the XP bar is divided in three sections. Every section is 40k XP and it is worth an AP. When you fill the whole bar (meaning all the three sections) you get an SP and the bar resets.

In short, it takes 40k Xp to get an AP and 120k XP to get an SP. The different colours are not SP/AP, they are just a simple way to show you that you have completed a section. Yellow means a section is complete, blue is your progress towards the next.

EDIT: This might end up being a tip for noobs: when you look at quest XP, always remember that an AP is always 40k XP. So if a quest reward is, say, 180k XP, it means it'll earn you 4AP and a half (also, 1SP and a half), no matter what zone or QL are you.

Uh, that basically means yellow = AP and blue = SP...

Except blue is AP too.

In true mmo fashion, the xp bar isn't really visible on my screen because the very bottom gets cut off due to overscan.

Uh, get a better monitor?  :awesome_for_real:

That is ... an odd way of doing it, but that explains why the part of the bar that was blue kept being random lengths every time I glanced at my XP bar! But now I know it means I can ignore it, hooray! <3

I just thought of another question! When people say they're QL4 or whatever, what exactly do they mean?

Ooh ooh I can answer that one. It means their average gear level.

OK, I figured it was something like that, but I wanted to confirm.

Is DX11 worth running?  Still feels unstable to me on a Radeon.
Comparatively, are the framerates better with the same settings on DX9?

Dunno.  I crash when I tend to play for a while.  I get these white boxes on screen and then the game dies.  Sometimes it'll give me a message that the graphics driver crashed, and I need to restart.  :oh_i_see:  Could be my card, which has a bad fan. I don't get crazy temps or anything, but the game just isn't reliably stable.   I'm not sure DX9 would fix it, and I kind of like that I get 60-90FPS with AA on.

I also get a pretty sweet bug where my FPS drops to single digits upon login and won't clear up until a reboot.   :awesome_for_real:


Gear and skill yes.  But I guess you can't wear the gear without the skills, so skill is redundant.   It doesn't tell you this (maybe it does in a tip), but high skill will mean you glance less.  It's like level determining your hit chance in WoW.

Just for a primer you can do Polaris at around QL3 (perhaps QL2 if you're getting carried), Inferno at QL 5, Darkness War at QL6, Ankh at QL7, and Hell Within at QL8.  Those are all of the normal dungeons.  I haven't done an elite yet.

I found the xp bar so confusing that I just turned it off.  The decision was made specifically when I turned in a quest and it appeared to move a tiny amount, until I realized it had gone fully around once, plus that tiny amount.  This was like halfway through kingsmouth.  At that point I realized the game wasn't really built around an xp bar and that it barely made sense when displayed as a bar at all.

Good to know, because I had no idea!  :why_so_serious:

I think I'm QL5? On my Templar? Hooray? She's pretty decent as a faux-tank for our duo, Ingmar might have more of an opinion on that though, since he's DPS bitch.  :grin:

Anyone know exactly how beneficial it is to raise the secondary bar for a weapon type? Say, I already raised the "damage" bar to 6 and use a QL6 weapon, does the lower "healing" bar only affect it's mouseover effect or does it change something else for heal abilities too?

About DX11: I am using a Radeon 6950 and the game is perfectly stable and looks (subjectivly) better than DX9. What might be needed though is disabling Tesselation. It looks pretty nifty (Try London and watch the cobble-stone street when turning it on) but it turns the game into a stutterfest. FPS meter drops from 40ish to low 20ies.

As far as I can tell, it uses whichever is higher to calculate whatever it needs to based off of QL.  For purposes of abilities and gear, both tracks are identical.

It allows higher QL items to be used and reduces the tendency to get glancing hits on mobs

The talismans each have their own benefit, which is listed in the skills screen.

The higher your weapon ability the less often you will glance or miss so taking a weapon to 10 even if you only have a ql5 item can help.  To actually answer your question about the second bar I'm really not sure, to me it "feels" like I miss and glance less when I fill up both bars but I have no actual numbers.  I would put it as a low priority though, max out your one line of each weapon you use, max out the talismans and then when you have sp to spare you may as well do the secondary bars.

The first bar is DPS for all weapons while the second bar was always intended as the support bar, specific for all weapons/roles. What is obvious though is that they kind of dropped the ball on it (they probably had too much stuff cooking for launch and balancing), and I wouldn't be surprised if they completely revamped the "secondary" bars at some point.

I would actually max out the talismans first, and only put points into skill up to where they're needed to equip your QL of weapons. Then after that max out your weapons.

The talismans give these benefits at level 10:

Head:  249 Magical Protection
Major:  470 Max Health Increase
Minor:  249 Physical Protection.

If you're at QL 5 the monsters you fight shouldn't require you have to QL 10 weapons.  So survivability would of greater importance.

Also there is an immense difference between Greens/Blues/Purples. QL 10 Greens aren't that great QL 8 Blues are at least as good if not better and QL 8 purples are much better. I know that sounds obvious but the difference is more pronounced than most games.

Is there some magic secret when it comes to equipping something or moving something into a slot? I have to try several times before it takes.

I just right click things (note there is no warning if you do this with a store window open.)

Nevermind!

My problem was in Disassemblying stuff in the crafter window. I didn't realize that some things can't be disassembled.

If you're at the bank, you can move things from your bank to the crafting window, but you can't move stuff from there to your bank, you have to put it in your inventory first.

I did notice a wierd bug I think. I had a stack of 3 QL5 weapon kits I was trying to add to the cabal bank. There was a stack of 17 QL5 kits there. I dragged my stack onto that stack, but I don't think it took. I lost my 3 but the cabal stack didn't go up to 20. Which is a shame because I had those three because I took them from the cabal bank.

Now, random newb question:

Does the Dodge effect only work at the moment the key is pressed and the rest of the timer bar is just countdown timer to refresh? Or does the countdown bar signify you're in a "Dodge" state ala Evade+? I think it's the former but I wanted to be sure.

The former, it's instant and has a recharge time.

I think if you check back later you will find that there are 20 in the stack. It just takes forever to update.

So how do I increase my damage output? Via weapon upgrades, or new skills, or does it happen when I level?

I really haven't done much reading about the mechanics of this game (as usual!) but am really enjoying muddling through.

Weapon and talisman upgrades. Attack rating, penetration, hit rating.

Skills aren't necessarily higher DPS as you go from newbie to advanced skills. Rather they have more secondary effects and you improve DPS by combining skills so they add to the above based on what effects you do. Like one skill causes the target to be afflicted and another skill causes you to gain penetration against afflicted targets.

Improve your weapon skills, too. I'm in a more or less QL3-4 area (SC) and my pistol skills is QL 5 or 6 and I snuck across Blue Mt to get QL 6 pistols, which really amped up my dps.

You should check out the mechanics, there area some odd little twists to how things work together.

Learn to differentiate between builders and finishers.  You'll find a lot of stuff like "on a hit, u get a crit counter" then you'll find stuff like "on a crit, you'll hinder," and stuff like "if hindered then afflict."  And on and on.   Right now my best attk relies on 4 active abilities and 3 passives.

Yeah, I am reading all my abilities and skills and using them in combo correctly. (I'm fists/blood with most of the inner rings bought).

It just seems like it takes a long time to kill easy mobs. They don't kill me either but it's not quick. I was wondering if I was doing something wrong or not.

I think my weapons are L1 or L2, so I've only trained up those things to L2. Would training higher than the items make my skills more effective?

From what I can tell the passive benefits from having the weapon skills at higher level are really, really small, which is a big contrast to the talisman passives. Stuff just takes a while to die in this game when you're solo.

There is so much that can be optimized, but because of the complpexity of the system it's hard to help others unless they are using your same weapon combo that you are an expert at. All I can tell you is that with pretty much all weapon combinations you should be able to kill even level mobs in a couple of rotations, meaning 15 seconds top, but ideally 7 to 10 seconds. This is my experience with many "early" builds, cosidering beta too. That is, of course, unless you are going very tanky or veary healy, in which cases obviously your kill-time is going up.

Creating synergies between your weapons and their passives, and developing a rotation you get comfortable at dishing out efficiently is the key to destroy simple, predictable mobs. I am sorry I am not very useful, and I agree with everyone else when they say the game does NOTHING to help you understand how to optimize your dps, but the bottom line is that the bottleneck is "you" (not you you), and you have to find ways to release your character's full potential. Which is to devastate even conning mobs very quickly.

9 seconds in SC. It was maybe 14s in Kings. Also, having weapons skills at or above a region's overall QL means less glancing, which is huge.

Best advice I can give is to pick a thing and stick to that until it works really well, then start branching out a bit. You should really stick to an overall theme (Bryn's is pistols, crit, attack, hit) and build around that for a while. Pick a trinity fork and gear for it (gear is split into dps/heal/tank), Bryn is pure dps. Focus on one half of the weapon skill duo (they are all split into a dps/other format, choose dps for solo) and the three talisman groups.

That should get you through SC, you should have enough AP/SP by the end of SC to start experimenting outside the basic setup. Don't forget to spend some time practicing rotations on mobs until you get one you like.

Fist blood are two healer weapons so you won't die but it will take a long time to kill stuff.

Well, early on your builds won't synergize well, even when you pick two that go together really great.  AP takes a little while to ramp up, but by the time you finish the first story arc, it stops being much of an issue.

In this game, you never really kill shit quick.  At least I don't.  It's not like in other MMOs, where a normal mob usually kicks it with your first finisher.  But with different weapons and skill choices you can trend closer to survivability, sustain, or burst. My hammer/shotgun build does steady damage and reduces the effectiveness of my target by a lot.  In contrast, my elem/AR build hits like a goddamn semi-truck (even without a blue elem focus), but gets hit hard back.

Raising your weapon skill higher than your equipped weapon will have two benefits: your passive will increase in power (this gets more noticeable as you get higher) and you'll glance less.  It's like being higher level compared to what you're fighting. Generally though, if you're at or little above what you can get as far as weapons go, you're doing fine.  Raising your talisman skills might give more tangible solo benefits as you'll get free defensive stats and HP.

So, I've done pretty much all the missions in Kingsmouth -- there's one by the scrapyard and one or two around the airport that I can't pull off -- monsters con red and seriously mess me up.  My main quest line (Illuminati) is at 8/16 () and the reward message implies I'm not ready for the next stage yet, which I agree with.

Mostly QL2 gear, lacking in glyphs, have a QL3 AR and Sword, but survivability on reds is lousy.  SP is at 2 across the board (weapons and talismans).  I have the entire inner ring of AR and elemental unlocked, almost all of blades, and a couple outer ring AR skills.

Should I be farming for better talismans?  Crafting?  Raising SP?  I feel like there are a *lot* of variables here.  I'm under the impression that raising SP will "improve" the con (red may become orange, etc) but by itself won't significantly alter my damage or healing -- just my ability to equip better gear, right?

Try dipping your feet into the next zone. It might not be as impossible as you think, QL3 weapons should be fine.

Also if you want some relatively painless AP try Fusang PvP. As long as your side has enough people just run with the zerg and pick up the Facility Capture and Anima well capture and its 225K xp and some pvp tokens.

Yeah, it's not horribly scary after all.  I am told the critters around the airport are for QL10ish endgame type stuff.  I definitely need to round out my gear and keep tuning my deck, but it's not a roadblock.

It's sad that the main quest sends you to a new zone usually way before you are done with the current. Sure no one forces you to blindly push forward, but lots of people I know thought it was time to go just because the main quest said so, and as a result not only they ended up being severely underpowered, but they skipped a lot of content.

Raising SP doesn't change the con level but it does let you use higher level talismans and weapons, once you equip those the con will change.  If you are in QL2 I don't think much should be conning red to you in Kingsmouth though.  There are two areas around the airport that are meant for QL10 geared people, don't mess with those at all, no quest you will get will make you face them either.  The caged in warehouse cargo type area of the airport is one, and the coast line on the north of the airport is the other.

Don't raise everything to level two with your sp, just focus on your talismans and the two weapons you actually use.  You get small benefits to raising them but more importantly it lets you equip better stuff.  Raise your weapons so that you can use QL6 gear (so you would need one of the two lines up to level 5), then once you have 50 tokens stick to the roads and sprint up to the trailer park in blue mountain to buy a nice blue QL6 weapon, remember to put a glyph in it.

If you like grinding you can kill hulks on priest island in Kingsmouth, they always drop something and in a couple hours you could have a full set of QL3 gear.

I'm pretty sure I got pretty good coverage of Kingsmouth.  Will have to loop back and double-check, but I've hiked all over it doing all kinds of crazy quests.   Though, hm, I should definitely hike around the waterfront just in case, didn't do much there.

Yeah, the areas near the airport were what had me thinking I still had work to do.   I'm only putting SP into my talisman skills and primary/secondary weapon skills as needed to equip the gear I have. 

Sure. Just be careful, the Main Quest pulls the same stunt in Savage Coast trying to push you towards Blue Mountain. Don't fall for it  :why_so_serious:

I enjoy the quests too much to rush ahead to a new zone before having investigated everything in the current one.   No matter how snarky my Illuminati masters are about my random do-gooding, I will not foolishly rush ahead ^^

Sure does. I bumped my major talisman to 6 and BLAM a ton of blue con mobs around me, which had just been white. Since I'm still in QL4.5 gear, it's a bit misleading (as I found by trying to tackle the sleeping god which was green con).

Quinton, make sure to mark any quests you pass up at the time on the map. It's mostly set up to move you through things fairly linearly, but I poke around alot and come across a few here and there. I generally only advance the main quest when I've exhausted an area.

For QL3 farming, the golems between the scrapyard and airport were easiest for me, also good for mobility training.
By primary/secondary do you mean on the same weapon or you're pursuing both weapons? If you advance both lines under a single weapon (the dps/support lines), it waters things down a bit. I found it best to focus on one weapon and talismans for Kings. Even though I'm 4/5 done with SC at this point, I've still let my Elemental lag a bit behind my primary stuff (as I only use one active Elem skill).

I read in that FAQ linked from the useful info thread that your "level" for the purpose of con is some combination of your two highest weapon skill levels and your talisman skill levels.  I also recall seeing monsters change to an easier con level after spending more SP.   It would seem like the downsides of spending SP before you have gear that it enables are less certainty about what difficult stuff is and less XP.

I mean both my weapons (main and off hand).

Hmm yeah I was mistaken, it is just your SP ranks, not what you're actually wearing.

http://yokaiblog.wikidot.com/guides:tswfaq#toc7

Ok, you should be good as long as you're not branching into both lines early on (both lines in a single weapon, I mean). One thing about focusing on mostly the pistols and talismans, I was able to sneak over to Blue Mt and get a QL6 pistol early on for SC which made things much easier. My talismans are lagging pretty good now, though.

I'm spread a little thin due to investing AP and SP into Elementalism too.  I started AR+Elementalism and then shifted to AR+Blades, which feels a little more effective at the moment.

Just so you know the areas with red mobs in them around the airport are not involved in any of the main quest stuff, nor in any of the quests you can get in Kingsport at your QL, so I'm not sure you should need to skip anything. You should also already be getting QL3 talisman rewards from a number of the quests in the 2nd half of Kingsport so you may have missed some stuff.

EDIT for Sky:

Uh, ok.  So I'm going through the Illuminati flashback thing and I tried to rearrange my shotgun skills.  One of them disappeared and I can't find any way to get it back again. The 'Character Skills' and 'Ability Wheel' menu things don't bring up any windows to get the skill back again.

Edit: also, is there any reason to *not* just leave sprint on all the time?

In the tutorial? Hmmm. Normally you'd just go into the character wheel and drag the skill down to the bar, but if that isn't available in the tutorial I'm not sure what you would do. ~FUNCOM~

Restart or just run through it?  You can't fail but there are a few things you have to kill.  This is probably a Funcom thing, so I'm assuming there's no graceful way around it.

It would be nice if you didn't have to resprint after combat, but you do.  I don't find many reasons to ever have it off.

Yeah the only thing I can think of to try otherwise would be relogging (which I'd guess would restart it anyway thinking about it.)

It was the cone shotgun blast thing I lost but I was still able to finish it.  I have to wonder though if someone were even more stupid than me and lost all their skills what they could do?

Restarting it would *probably* work - they're not really "your" skills as you'll find out a bit further on. (Also you will be annoyed to discover that the real version of powder burn has no knockback!)

I wasn't planning on using shotguns anyway.  Maybe something like Blades/Blood or Blades/Chaos.  We'll see how much I can gimp myself as I try to figure things out.  :awesome_for_real:

Both are good, though Blades/Chaos suffers from no ranged attacks.

Just got into this. Fun, but it runs like ass on my system. Apparently I am right at the minimum specs: Q6600 2.4Ghz, 3Gigs RAM (1 died), GTX 460. I'm fairly sure my old HDD and low amounts of RAM are to blame. But any tips on improving performance, besides the obvious turning shit to low and buying more RAM? Didn't see much on the official forums.

It's actually running better than I thought it would for me.  I upped my setting to medium and it's running fine.  If it still runs well in more populated areas I might try upping some of the settings a bit more.

Question: is there any way to assign colors to any of the chat channels?  That would make it a lot easier to pick out channels and whatnot.

So I remade my character since I didn't like the name.  I wasn't very far in anyway (only past the Tokyo flashback thing) so no big deal.  I started the flashback thing again, and decided to move a couple of abilities on the hotbar again being REALLY SUPER CAREFUL to make sure the ability was lined up perfectly on the bar.  Lost the healing ability anyway, of course.  Which means I can't heal the NPC dude and advance the mission.

Logged out and logged back in.  Upon logging back in, *all* the abilities are gone so I have *none*.  Plus both doors of the subway car are closed so I'm trapped in the car.

Way to put your best foot forward here, Funcom!

You'd think after the first time you'd stop moving abilities.  Once you see a Funcom bug, assume it's reproduceable.

edit: I'll see if I can reproduce that tonight for giggles.  I'll make some sort of templar throw away character. 

You'd think, right?  I mean, it's totally my fault that there's a literally game breaking bug that's really easy to fall into within the very first mission you get.

This is exactly why I didn't purchase the game to begin with.  Oh well, off to something that actually works.

While I do agree that it's pretty sucky to have a bug like that in a tutorial mission, I must admit that I find it sort of hilariously anal that you would bother moving your temporary abilities around for what you already knew to be a 5-10 minute tutorial mission, especially given that you were conscious of the fact that you had to do so carefully since you knew about a potential bug.

Edit:  To clarify, I'm really not saying that that makes it an ok bug to have.  I'm just making fun of your behavior as a completely separate thing.  Just so we're clear. ;)

Oh, I know my behavior isn't typical.  But I've been playing MMOs for so long that my fingers automatically go for particular kinds of abilities by rote on the keyboard, so it's actually hard for me to play with abilities just kind of placed at random.  

That a game stopping bug like this made it out of beta is just mind-boggling.  I got in touch with a GM and he literally had no idea what I was talking about.  The only 'solution' he was eventually able to come up with was 'can you log out and come back later while I research this?'  That's the first time in all my years of MMOs that a GM has told me to leave the game because he didn't know what to do.

Well, it's the first we've heard of it here. Could be a result of the 1.1 patch

Yeah, I actually think that might be the case, as I'm almost certain that I logged off without incident during that mission several times (fiddling with driver settings) and nothing like that ever happened.  Could very well be new.

Reproduced it and submitted a bug report.  I was able to do it right away once you get kneecapper, but getting the heal and others to disappear took quite a bit of swapping.  If you move abilities around during that mission, it's probably best to not drag them over one another (or just don't do it for the short time it takes to finish).

I only lost multiples when I had logged out and logged back in trying to see if that would bring back the lost heal.  When I logged back in *all* the skills were gone and I was trapped in the reset subway car.

So if this is a new bug from the recent patch, that's more forgivable but it's also really, really unfortunate timing on their part with the trial weekend and all.

You actually don't even need to do the mission, if you turn around and go to the other closed subway gate and click on it, it'll allow you leave and abandon the mission with no foul effect.

Except skipping an important part of the story.

Turns out there was a bunch of Kingsmouth I hadn't finished -- some missions from the Orochi folks, missions from the guy at the airport (including a fun high-xp investigation mission), and a mission or two from Deputy Andy (who could use some counseling...). 

I'm still stewing about builds and want to experiment more, but having been through Polaris once, done the Motel missions twice, caught up on Kingsmouth missions, and with 60AP and 30SP to spend and all of the inner rings of Assault Rifle, Blade, and Elementalism unlocked, I'm feeling good.  Those akab still mess me up a bit though ^^

Quinton, do not skip the dungeons. Very easy to get a group going from General or LFG chat. Also f13 custom channel. They are too good to be missed. Also, big rewards, but they are awesome even without the rewards. The Orochi couple up north is the entrance to the first one. Overlook motel in Savage Coast is the second.

Definitely not skipping the dungeons.  Did Polaris with Seraphim and Segoris (thanks again guys!) and have some friends that want to run it so I'll probably be there again this weekend.  Hit the one from the motel after (in a PUG, recruited Seraphim to tank when they couldn't find a tank in LFG).  Both were a blast.  Looking forward to going back (I need more blue itams!)

I love that pair of Orochi Group MIBs - they're a riot.

Ah, perhaps not clear from my previous post -- once I figured out I had a pile of uncompleted content I went back and completed it.  This is not a game where I want to leave missions undone and dungeons unexplored.

Awesome. I like that there's an achievement for each zone basically telling you if you did all the quests or missed something (at least all the quests that are not green/sides).

Why is part of my exp bar gold and part of it blue?  I was assuming there was some kind of rested thing going on, but the ratio of gold/blue never seems to change.

AP is gold and SP is blue.

Not quite. The bar is split into three segments. While a segment is filling it's blue and when it's full it turns gold and you get an AP. When you fill the whole bar you get a SP (and an AP I think but not 100% positive).

An entire bar is one SP and three AP.  It's divided into three so you can see when you've earned the AP, which is the gold portion.

So the blue is what you've earned, and the gold is the last AP you got?

No, just ignore it entirely, its nearly meaningless. I keep meaning to look and see if there's a way to just not even show it, it has no value.

Do they get better? Because Polaris was, I dunno, fine as such things go in MMOs, but nothing about the story or layout or anything jumped out to me as particularly special or different - if anything it was the most WoW-y experience I've had in the game so far.

Are you serious, what about the ending?  That came out of nowhere and was awesome.

The ending didn't seem particular MY GOODNESS WHAT A TWIST to me, no.

This.  I was grinning like none other at the end of polaris. 

Maybe I have just been doing this too long, but I sort of saw that coming. I thought to myself, "That was FAR too short and nothing interesting happened at all." Then the end happened and I was like, "Ah."

Glad other people got excited over it, though!  :drillf:

What's cool about Dungeons, and Polaris to begin with:

1) No trash mobs. First time in any MMORPG I've ever played. That alone makes them the best instanced dungeons I've ever played.
2) Very strong theme, carried out with voiceovers and cutscenes. Unique open environment. Lore hunting is another sweet bonus. And the final twist is hardly just OK considering I (personally) never witnessed anything like in any other MMORPG. Dungeon over, oh no it's not! Awesome final battle ensues with a boss and mechanics that most games would keep for higest level raids.
3) Boss battles that require you to think and adapt right away (Unless you went in with an overgeared group). Not from level 50, or 30. From the beginning of the game.
4) Did I mention no trash mobs? This deserves two spots. It's just that awesome.

All good if you are not impressed, but I am curious about what are your favourite dungeons ever, in any game of your choice, so I can get an idea of what scale you are using.

Mechanically speaking there was nothing about the dungeon that was tremendously different than a WoW 5 man, including 'complicated' boss mechanics, pretty much every dungeon in WoW (added post TBC) has a guy or 3 as complicated as him. Hide behind rocks, run out of AE. Even at least some the noob dungeons do more complicated things than they used to. They do voiceovers and cut scenes now too in places. (SWTOR obviously does this as well, and I still find the fact that they're participatory a huge advantage but I know that's not important to everyone.)

The 'surprise!' mob has been done a number of times in other games I've seen, the one that leaps to mind first is Anub'Arak collapsing the arena in WotLK (granted, that was a raid.) Stonecore does it towards the start of the instance, with the big worm that suddenly eats that poor evil gnome.  Deadmines on heroic has a pretty crazy version of the 'surprise fight' with the whole dream sequence obstacle course thing. City of Heroes likes to ambush you during taskforces (what I would consider the closest thing to group dungeons in that game) - probably the best handled 'Surprise!' I've seen in an MMO to date still is the Babbage ambush that hits you when you think you're safely traveling from one door mission to another.  If I thought about it more I expect some others would come to mind. SWTOR's surprises tend to be more dramatic/narrative surprises than "hey look an extra boss!" and I won't spoil any here. I swear it happened to me in Guild Wars (1) a couple times but I can't remember where off hand.

There were a few trash mobs.  :-P But yeah that was a decent change, probably the one thing that really stood out to me. And obviously I do like the lore entries, I wish every game had collectible journal entries like this/SWTOR/WAR (CoH badges are a less exciting proto-version. WAR still did this best I think (oh god I praised WAR.))

I'm not saying the dungeon wasn't a good one, but it wasn't out of line with the current level of polish other companies are doing in this area (and in some cases have been doing for a while, Arthas chasing you around the Halls of Reflection comes to mind.) Probably would have helped if it was in a more interesting looking location, soggy shipping containers are hard to make look cool.

Really I should just stop being startled by your enthusiasm.  :grin:

The CoX ambushes were always a little rude when an ambush would spawn as the hero it was INTENDED for superjumped/flew/ran away, completely oblivious, while much lower heroes suddenly got smeared across the asphalt. <3

Ingmar, we just have very different tastes. Not sure if you were enthusiastic about it but you liked SWTOR. Me and you are from different planets.

I am pretty sure everyone and their cat is aware of this, but the celebration weekend is about to end. Reward for finishing 30 missions before monday:

• 1200 bonus points (worth €10 in Funcom points)
• a t-shirt

Official info below spoiler:

Speaking of lore, looks like I missed one in Polaris. So I guess I need to run that again. And probably the motel room 13 one, too (since I just started Blue Mt).

For Polaris did you kill the guy under the stairs after the first boss? I think he spawns after you go up them.

I want to change my build. I just hit level 4 or whatever. I started out fists/blood, then switched to AR/blood. Now I want to try Ele/AR, because I want to kill things faster, and because I seem to have very little crowd control.

Should I go back to Kingsmouth and redo quests there in order to get AP/SP? I've been struggling somewhat in Savage Coast with some of the quests (they all con hard to me), and I figure it's because I changed skills.

(Jack's Back quest, and the side quest near it at the end were horribly hard; I finished the first but not the second).

It would be radically faster to go back to kingsmouth and redo the quests for ap and loot.  Pick up the QL3 weapon for your new choices too.  You will want to max out the entire inner ring at some point anyways, may as well save your ar/blood talents.

Friends don't let friends reroll in TSW.

The way I figure it is eventually I'll want *all* the skills, or at least will want outer ring skills from most of the weapon types, so I'd never want to start over and throw away that AP. 

I've found that the game is pretty good about providing a lot of repeatable quests, so stopping moving forward or taking a slight step back and building up AP / items / coins is not terrible. 

Where do I pick up a QL3 weapon? I tried to buy something on the auction house and it did not work. I remember getting one in a quest but forget which quest (Polaris maybe?). Are dungeon quests also repeatable?

Yeah, I wasn't planning on rerolling. That would be silly, I already have 3 inner rings practically completed.

I like the idea of AR/blood more than I like the reality of it. Maybe I just don't have enough in it yet.

You can buy good weapons at the council of Venice merchants with Sequins of Solomon Island tokens. That's the easiest way to get decent weapons. Also, Polaris always proved 1 or 2 QL3 Blue weapons, on top of the automatic one you get as a reward for completing the dungeon the first time.

I think one of the missions from Danny awards a QL3 weapons as well doesn't it?

I think it's the missions near Danny, at the Orochi camp up north near Polaris, and the ones at the airport in the hangar. They're repeatable as well. otherwise, use some materials and ql3 weapon blueprints and craft a weapon of your choice

Rerolling was the best thing I did.  :why_so_serious:

As others have said it is Danny's sabotage mission.  The auction house doesn't work very well, there is a fan made mod to fix it (http://www.secretui.com/downloads/fileinfo.php?id=51).  I don't know why funcom can't fix something as important as the auction house before a fan...

I would not spend your tokens on the ql3 weapon from the council vendor, wait and buy the ql6 in blue mountain, they both cost the same number of tokens.