f13.net

Might as well start this topic, as it's going to show up sooner or later.

Three things, listed in order of dislike, from least to greatest.

1 - The fact that I have to choose full screen every time I start up.

2 - The way the shards are set up so that the servers can't distinguish who's clicking what and therefore quests get bugged.

3 - Other. Fucking. Players. Asshats asking for spoilers in chat and the bitches whining about said spoilers in the same chat are equally annoying. Sartre was right, Hell is other people.

Lack of auto-join f13 channel function for the chat.

Badly designed puzzles.  This has always been a huge pet peeve of mine though.  Stuff like Dirty Laundry or the Patient Records one are likely to catch you up on things which aren't even really part of the puzzle.

Chat bugs
Hitting ESC key doesn't always close the top window and will sometimes open up the options menu, annoying
Playing in 1900x1200 resolution (maybe others, I don't know) trying to click the X to close a window is actually annoying since it's normally off-center and a small area that is needed
Some items are so small they're tough to click on when needed for a quest
There's some latency issues where at times people will lose connection to server roughly every 30seconds (it's annoying as fuck and had it happen twice over the weekend)
Non-party members can mess with certain quests of yours, bad bad design but rare
Crafting is fucking annoying. I like the idea but not the execution.


All these things are pretty minor, otherwise launch and game has been smooth

"Hunt the pixel" search quests. Trying to distinguish "quest paper" from "nonquest paper" on the ground isn't fun, it's just irritating.

Limited quest space.

Only one question, on the limited quest space: don't you feel the game would play (and "taste") very differently if you could mindlessly haul loads of quests the usual way, playing the map more than the stories?

It depends upon your approach to the game.  I view myself as a trouble shooter trying to keep this place from getting any worse.  It bugs the hell out of me to be passing something and unable to evaluate if I should be able to take care of it while I am in the area or wait, or worse, have a quest I'm part way through on the other side of the map but unable to take the one right in front of me.

I'm going to get around to everything, but mostly focus on what's around.  I shouldn't have to remember I passed a quest in the middle-of-nowhere I have to pick up later because my journal was full.

Given that investigation missions may take a while to puzzle out (I do not want to look up spoilers; or worse are bugged), I also hate my "main" mission be blocked.

Understandable.
That said, one tip: add markers to map for quests you want to pick up later.

I feel like the quests are more interesting due to the limited quest space.  It's a tradeoff for sure though.

It'd definitely play different if you didn't have a limit of just one combat+sabotage+investigation quest when at least 50-75% of quests you find is of one of those types. There's some reasonable middle ground between that and the "loads of quests" that'd feel less restrictive, and it has lot to do with our ability to multitask, than with being "mindless".

Heck, they could've just leave the '5 slots aside from main plot' and just let you fill them as you see fit instead of the current 1 of X, 3 of Y.

That'd help a lot.  I've finished all the side missions except at the airport, but have at least half the main missions left to go.

The other things is I tend to, uh, get distracted easily.  It really, really, really irks me to be forced to stay on task when my brain is telling me to change gears.  (Poor Minvaren having to put up with that...)

The investigation quests.  I'm not sure I like anything that needs to be solved with Google.  Some of the clues are just way too obscure, even for someone that's fairly well read and educated.   I did, however, like parts of them and the Madem Roget one at least just tests your knowledge of Kingsmouth and the Secret World in general.

I keep running into a bug where I'll start the game and it'll be single digit FPS.  Takes a reboot to clear it up.

Although I bought the increased running speed, there's no visual indication that I can see that I have it. I don't know where it shows that I have it. Inventory, character sheet, where? 

Needs to be a larger number of active quests.  Maybe increase the main type to at least 2 and sub to at least 4-5.  Right now, you have to do a lot of back tracking in Kingsmouth and it gets to be a chore at times.

It doesn't show anywhere as far as i can tell, but it does work -- in the PvP area i found it was very easy to tell who didn't yet have it, as it wouldn't take me very long to catch up/overtake them.

For the google thing, i can live with it; things like specific passage from the Bible are definitely not something i have memorized, but they fit the context. And even Indiana Jones was helping himself with dad's journal. :why_so_serious:

Just ran into a quest where the "research this outside the game" thing seriously irked me.


I like the fake websites and what not but if I'm supposed to do out of game research it should make that a bit less vague.

I don't like how it seems to take half a second for the cursor to change to gears or magnifying glass when I hover over something and then I further dislike the quarter second it takes between when the cursor does change and when the click will actually work.

I also want an LFD tool.  There is no need for yet another nerd fight over whether or not you like LFD tools.

Bugged quests suck so hard in this game, definitely my biggest problem with the game so far. 

They are far worse than bugged quests in other games, because these quests can be somewhat difficult and take some thought process to begin with.  So now that I know some quests are bugged, I'm constantly asking myself "Is this bugged, or am I just not thinking about this correctly?".  I don't really want to spoil myself if I'm just doing it wrong.  On that note, this list is quite helpful:  http://forums.thesecretworld.com/showthread.php?t=37724

A secondary part of this general issue is the wanky and unintuitive targeting of quest objects.  Sometimes the target isn't even on the object, but above or below it.  So sometimes I think the object is bugged when I'm just not clicking on the right spot.  Luckily this isn't common, but when it has occurred it has been really frustrating.

Toolkits... do they tell you how to arrange the shit you are supposed to be crafting? If they do, I don't know how to access that menu. If they don't, well fuck you, Funcom, I HAVE A TOOLKIT. Aren't there fucking blueprints in this thing that tell me what grid I'm supposed to put things in, or am I just supposed to bang around like a monkey with a bone until I hit the right spot on the obelisk?

There are a few quests that give most of the basic shapes.   You can also put an item in the disassemble slot and it shows you the pattern for that item type.

There's a link to all the patterns in the crafting thread.

There is one quest right by the sheriff's office at the beginning of Kingsmouth. It's called "Zen and the Art of Weapon Mainteinance". It gives you a book that you are supposed to use to complete the quest which is nothing else but a crafting tutorial. The book stays with you and it shows all the shapes.

Yes. Every puzzle should be solveable in game. It's nice that you cheat if you want to, but an in game only 'hardcore' mode is nice.

I saw that book. Now, how do I bring read that book again after the quest is done?

http://forums.thesecretworld.com/showthread.php?t=30030

Press J and change the dropdown to "Completed Missions"

They only do it for the investigations so it's fine.  It's set in the modern world so it bridges the gap between game and reality in a very cool way.  It's why you can bring up an ingame web browser with google.  If something gets too silly you can just google the answer instead of the hint.

For example:
Also: Orochi Group. (http://www.orochi-group.net/)  You see their posters in the starting area so it's not a spoiler.  They made an actual corporate website for a fictitious corporation that is in game.  Yes, it might have some info you could use.  That's awesome.

I've crashed a fair number of times.  Usually when I'm interacting with part of the interface.  Two crashes so far when trying on clothes.  One when using the in game browser.  Seems less stable on my machine than from beta.

Men in Black Vans also illustrates a rather frustrating aspect of this game.  Multiple people all clicking on the same fucking object where you have to click shit in the right order.  FFS.  Don't make us share the same goddamn object.  Griefapalooza.

Sprint needs to be a toggle that *temporarily* turns off when hit in combat or something. Having to reapply it after every fight is kinda annoying (more so than mounting, since it seems like you're expected to sprint all the time)

I finally was adjusted and accepting having to re-sprint after each fight, until I would start hitting sprint, casting a heal (which turns off sprint at the beginning of the cast not at the end), then having to hit sprint again. At that point I had no more patience for lack of a toggle

I'm constantly accidently double tapping movement keys which executes a crazy roll/flip which also takes me out of sprint.  Slightly annoying.

I like the toggle idea but on some of the mario jumping type things you have to be able to move slowly and so now you would need a toggle to enable walk and by this point the programmer starts glaring at you.

I'd still take a toggle with the annoyance for the incredibly rare times walking may be beneficial than having to recast sprint after every single battle and then hoping your party members also remember to cast sprint after every single battle.

You can turn that off in options. I think it's in General > Weapon Swapping for some weird reason (holdover from AoC options?)

same thing

Should probably post this in 'things I like'....

Funcom is there for me every time my willpower wanes on this title. Issues with the beta event kept me from playing. Now I'm just about to cave and they've locked my account pending something something in email that they haven't sent me (actually, two emails: one that said my account was locked the other was a password reset when I didn't get the email about the lock). After a half hour of dicking around, the urge has passed and I'll just go run that new circuit in the basement instead.

Thanks again, Funcom.

edit: Works every time!  :grin: :oh_i_see:

I dislike mindless bashing of this game on various blogs and message boards .OK you dont like it - move one. Funcom deserves Kudos for releasing a playable game without major bugs. It is also very original and imho very well made game -story, world, writing. Its a niche game and needs every help it can get so we companies can produce more  games like this instead of WoW clones.

Sad part is SWTOR will be probably lots more successful than this in the long run.And while SWTOR was not bad in story department ,TSW really shows you how "story" MMO should be made

Whoa there.  There's still an unacceptably large chunk of the player base suffering from repeated client crashes.  Not to mention some pretty bad performance from the client.  It's a step up for Funcom but let's not say crazy shit like "without major bugs".

I have a gun.  I'm supposed to be an expert with this gun.  Why, I ask, does it still take me round after round to kill a mob?  Don't put modern weapons in the game and expect me to blow through clip after clip to kill a menial mob.  I hated this in SWTOR with lasers and light sabres.  I hate it here. 

I like what this game is trying to do more than I like the actual implementation.  I just can't seem to stay interested in it longer than an hour before running back to WoT.  It's funny because I really want to like and support this game for its efforts. 

You're not really using a gun at all.   Well, not in the way you think.

"You are the magic behind the magic bullet"

Ehh it's not like you don't put shell after shell into another target in WoT most of the time to kill it, either. Unrealistic game mechanics are unrealistic.

Not to mention who knows how many bullets does it really take to take down a zombie or a sea monster from norse myths? There's room for make-believe there.

My machine has 8 GB memory and TSW takes 1.9 GB AT MOST. preferring to hitch and stop every time it want to load resource from HDD. Its 2012. I have memory -use it FFS

During the CTD I had today, it mentioned something about "32bit" in the exe name.  Guessing that's why the 2GB limit is there...

Is there a way to resize the character window?  I pushed up the 3 UI scales by 10% which helped a lot on other stuff, but I still have to squint when swapping gear.

TheSecretWorldDX11.exe *32

If you mean the one that pops up on "C", just zoom in on your character, the HUD around it will grow along with it.

That's the one, and I play MMOGs 100% zoomed out.

...which explains why the character window was the size of my thumb on a 27" monitor...   :uhrr:

That would technically require two code branches.  Something which apparently terrifies this industry.

Yet APB did it.  :oh_i_see:

Wouldn't it technically require just setting bigger size for the cache game is already using to hold its recently loaded shit in?

edit: nvm, separate branch for 64 bit

As much grief as 10.7 has been causing me, it's nice to see a company with the balls to rip off the bandage.

MS should announce the sunset of all 32 bit OS versions and drop the price on 7 64bit to $30 for a couple months. Hell, sell it through Steam  :why_so_serious:

And no 32bit version of anything ever again outside a VM.

Oh, things I don't like:

Font size in tooltips and skill/ability screens. The godawful grey-on-grey of the chat context menu. While I do like the idea of granularity of UI scaling, only giving a couple options kinda dampens the effect. Also, 'large' font size is not. (1080p)

The Inventory also seems to not allow me to drop things in all the slots, wonky.

Things to hate on:

Sell list order isn't at all related to inventory list order. I put everything I wanted to keep at the end of my inventory, wound up selling it. Buyback UI is.. dicey at best (sold 40 items, buyback had.. 2)

Puzzle quests in the open world don't seem to work right without some form of unique phasing per player. Essentially: other players being anywhere near you when you're trying to do something in order SUCKS.

I click on the QL to sort things and then use that as a reference for what I want to sell. Works for me.

That's what the problem was?  Thanks, because I couldn't figure out why it was messing up for him, either.  I never thought of trying to zoom on my character.

So, is glyph crafting bugged? I can't seem to make any. Using the right QL of components and everything.

There is one tier, I think it's four, that doesn't seem to work.  I hear some of the blues don't either.

I've a blue QL3 glyph kit and a green QL4 that doesn't work either.

I don't like solo instances. GW2 wins this battle as story quests can be completed in groups, where as when in a group once you hit a solo-instance the entire fun of being in a group is paused

Last night I was finishing the main story line in the desert which separated the duo I was in. I ended up finishing it in about 10-15mins while my partner did not finish at all causing us to not be able to progress at the same rate. I'd much rather have mobs scale for more people, and even faction restricted grouping would be welcomed for this.

I know the chat issues have been mentioned several times in this thread, but still. Did the guys programming the chat system arrive through a time portal from 2001?

Game does need phasing, or at least a way to switch dimensions at will (out of combat, ofc). I play during Euro times, so I didn't have too many problems with other people messing with quest objects -- but at least 3 of the missions I've done so far had a bug that required me to switch dimensions. Thankfully there was always someone in general chat who completed the mission in a non-buggy dimension and could give me a lift. Someone also said in general chat that entering/leaving the persistent pvp battleground thing works, but when I tried that, it kept dumping me into the same (bugged) dimension...

Would imagine the code for chat was pretty much copy/pasted from Anarchy Online -> Age of Conan so that's more or less a yes. :why_so_serious:

(ok to be fair the chat system in AO was revamped at some point after 2001 and TSW looks like this more recent incarnation)

Hey, first major loss of access.  Game won't let me log in at all.  Even put in my retail key (btw, if you don't do this, you WILL get locked out).

Yay Funcom.  

edit: Crisis over.  That was a little scary, though I got hacked.

Blue Mountain is just too damn hard.  High mob density/agro radius so adds are common and kiting is impossible.  Mobs individually are way, way harder than the toughest thing in SC.  So any add = death.  It's a good thing the death penalty is basically non-existant other than a corpse run, because I would be dead broke by now otherwise given how much I've died in this zone.  it isn't pretty. 

I hear Egypt is actually easier than Blue Mountain.  Which really tells the whole story.

Ehh. Its not easier. Its just by egypt people usually get decent gear and have decent AP/SP builds.

Around blue mountain is when you are expected to have a good two weapon deck build with some utility healing and such thrown in.  The problem is that's probably too soon, game is rather complicated.  Most might need to switch to a dps weapon/heal weapon build to solo around then.

I've been running a pretty well refined penetration based shotgun/blood and died maybe twice in the Savage Coast.  It was a cakewalk.  I have both active and passive heals, stuns, good DPS.  The only thing I could think of doing differently is trying to build as a tank instead, which may work better but is so far away skill point wise as to being basically irrelevant in terms of my options.

I can solo individual mobs but they take me to around half health (mainly because you can't kite at all in most areas so you just have to stand there and tank hits).  Then there's the respawn rate/mob proximity/agro radius that makes it impossible to avoid adds, and any adds are just death.  Not to mention the dark areas where you literally can't see any possible adds in the first place.  Whomever designed the bog is a sadistic fucking bastard.  

I'm well geared too.  All QL6.  7 points in shotgun/7 points in blood magic.  Good mix of talismans.

I think most people that did alright in BM most likely are Illumunati or Templar and have the PvP buff to some extent.  100 hit rating and 100 defense rating would be a godsend for me right now.  As a Dragon on permanent 0 PvP buff this shit is really, really, excruciatingly hard.  Every time I get an add (which happens quite often and is impossible to avoid much of the time) I just get up from the keyboard and get a glass of water and prepare for the run back to the corpse.  

I hated the bog too (shades which pull you in  and stun). Though I hated akkab permaslow broodmarks lots more. Key to that whole area is to thread really damn careful.



Oh well I am illuminati. But  I did BM in beta and I didnt have buffs then. It is not very easy area, but  I liked it. I considered its sorta of a puzzle to make trough the mobs and complete quests in there

What starts pissing me off are bugged mobs, that go full health immediately and don't die anymore (game goes "Cannot cast on dead target", yet it keeps shooting at me). And mobs that tend to spawn a pet once a while suddenly bugging out and siccing like 10 on you at once. Really nice.

I have a green QL4 one that doesn't.

This may just be because it's early in the game's life, but levelling dungeons are pretty darn hard for full pugs. Polaris and Inferno have a lot of things that go beyond staying out of fire - adds that need to be burst down and killed at certain spots, tank kiting, straight up dps races that have a very high chance of wiping the group, etc.... this stuff needs a fair bit of coordination.

Now I'm fine with challenges like this and enjoyed the few pugs I did even when we wiped over and over because the tank didn't hold aggro on the adds+boss / dps was too slow / people stood in the fire, but I'm not sure this is a good idea long-term... of course keeping the elite-tier dungeons hard is fine.



edit: Regarding Blue Mountain Difficulty - I made a beeline to the token vendor to pick up two blue QL6 weapons and two blue QL5 glyphs, I highly recommend doing this no matter what. I play a glass cannon shotgun/AR build (transitioning to shotgun/ele), and there were definitely rough spots. In particular, the Scavenger quest is borderline impossible solo - good thing the area was crawling with other people so we joined up and did it quick-like. Areas with the moths are also killers, an add usually means death (and they LOVE to patrol into you while you're fighting one of them).
Another thing I noticed is a quest where you had to kill 13 zombies in 8 [?] minutes... all of them 'normal' mobs with 5-6k hp. You pretty much NEED a full dps spec for this!

The frustration level is starting to get to me. Polaris was a fantastic dungeon, but healing it was not fun whatsoever, it was tense and felt like work--I was spamming constantly, even spamming a builder between fights to load up for the next encounter. Blue mountain is what everyone bitches about, but moving on to the Savage Coast feels like getting hit with a brick and despite dying repeatedly, the one quest I was able to finish gave me a reward that was a QL higher, but had virtually the same stats as what I pulled out of Polaris.

The idea that a game should actually be challenging instead of a snooze to max level is attractive to me, but I don't think I can hack this.

The difficulty didn't bother me but the group forming does.   Is there some way to inspect a player's gear/build?   Polaris should be higher too.   QL3 is too early to start doing healer/tank builds.

I hate the resistant/double hp mobs in Transylvania.

Right-click on their hp window thingie and there's inspect in context menu, iirc. Doesn't include build, but does show the gear. Builds can be saved and linked in chat though, so you could perhaps examine it that way too, if they're willing to cooperate that is.

 I never ask for builds when recruiting for group. I do ask builds though from players who performed extremely well (on dps char or heals) so maybe I can learn something new

I wouldn't care but most people don't have taunt or whatever by Polaris.  The gear matters though.   Good to know I can check it.

Well you can't have it both ways .Game is not faceroll. It gets difficult. Sometimes completing a quest is sorta a puzzle of in itself ( how to not get swarmed by adds/patrols and how to kill the damn tough end boss) .Then there are elite dungeons. Then there are nightmare ones  (I successfully facerolled everything up to nightmare dungeons, thanks to beta experience, but   they flattened me hard despite all that)

It's not too early, it just means you do the entire zone twice. Well the entire second half.

More seriously, it is just something that goes back to the old school thing of keeping a DPS and tank set. I can't remember ever needing to do two sets as a healer before, but it's not that terrible. It would be trivial if the game was super popular and there were a dozen sites where you could look up exactly what gear drops from what quest.


Probably not. I suppose I care whether or not I can keep going which is more than I can say for any game for the last 8 years.

Yea but the end of the newbie zone is not the place to start that.

Oh FFS, chat is down again.

And I list  several way to get gear fast:

1) Buy blue gear QL6  for solomon ilsand sequins at Blue mountains (thats a great start for fresh characters who just finished kingsmouth)
2) Farm lair mobs for green QL10 ( need a group of 2 in ql5+)
3) Run Ankh+ dungeons (ql8,9,10 pieces)
4) Farm elite dungeons (that is probably fastest way to get geared, all you need really is some ql8 pieces and knowledge how the dungeons work)

Running elites is really easy actually . Inferno is stupidly easy for elite dungeon and can get you  gear for everything else.

Where are the lair mobs in Kingsmouth?

South east in the sea

And lair wise not all lair mobs are same and their difficulty is not tied with the zone. They are all high hp, high dmg  dungeon like mobs. The one u want farm would be solos or in small groups of 1-3. I think quarry lair is probably easiest one for farming of the one  I seen. Scorched desert has some of the easiest lair mobs as well ( but not all)

p.s. Ever present bugs get annoying. The chat breaking all the time just gets on my nerves since I am trying to get some money by selling gear. The  bugs which been there since beta still there - broken gear manager, broken  windowed mode on start ,2 dozen or so bugged quest. Really damn funcom - get it fixed.

Heh.  I ran in to Lutefisk while exploring.  I didn't realize he was a rare lair boss with 80k health...  There was no way I could solo him with QL3 gear without a flawless execution, but he didn't hit so hard that I couldn't survive running away.

Only thing I really don't like so far is that there's something with the sounds that don't seem to keep up with the animations of the powers. Seems like sometimes the sound works, other times not, still other times it sounds like in a tunnel. Haven't fiddled too much with settings.

The other minor annoyance is the lack of fast travel outside of Argatha for long distance and meetup for ports to a local graveyard. It actually isn't too bad though. Kingsmouth is not West Karana, so while I dred "long runs" from the airport to Police HQ, it actually goes pretty quick.

heh, I went into him full bore. failed.

For long distances I just /reset and respawn at the closest graveyard to where I want to go.  The repair costs are so minimal that it isn't a big deal at all.

Had hoped the patch would have solved the issue of #f13 vanishing every single time you zone but nope...  :heartbreak:

Do the chat channels at least work today?  Makes it really hard to duo when you can't even emote to chat.  (/em didn't work, and Funcom chooses way too bizarre emote keywords to try and pantomime it out.)

/em doesn't work but I think /me does. Am I wrong?

I bought the 100% increase to sprint and it has helped a lot, everything is less than three minutes away and you can just run past enemies.  That winds up being less travel time than most mmos since you're always questing within the same zone, not like I have to go from Stormwind to Gadgetzan or something like that.

Chat channels work just fine so far, hopefully with the patch they won't collapse as the server load increases but too early to tell for certain I suppose.

Edit: Just lost all the chat channels so guess it's still fubar'd. /Em does work still though.

You see it but no one else does when the chat channels crap out.

Wasn't me using it though...
And not sure what the heck happened there, Paroid didn't seem to have any issues with it and once it came back up not only has it stayed up I no longer have to re-assign the chat channels for my custom tabs like F13 every time I zone.  :awesome_for_real:

Fuck you, Something Wicked.


Hell is other people.

Yeah, that quest is interesting cause it

Yeah, they have few quests like that, with single "current" state that's altered by anyone present, vs i dunno, some discrete phasing with order tracked separately for each player or group. I'm guessing they wanted to avoid situation like, few people spawn their own version of quest boss at the same time... but this alternative isn't exactly a better outcome.

I had that with

Yeah that's another one which suffers from the exact same problem. Luckily there isn't many quests like that (or i was just lucky to miss them)

Those type of quests are about the only thing so far in the game that makes me go "WTF were they thinking?". I dunno, maybe they were hoping we'd all form spontaneous groups to complete them and make new friends or something. Which might have worked 10 years ago but sadly 95% of the modern MMO playerbase are knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing fucktards who couldn't find their own arse with both hands and a fucking map.

 :geezer:

There are a couple of those quests in the beginning (Men In Black Vans, Something Wicked, Vision) then almost none of them until Egypt when there are another 3-4. Though the two that were bugged for sure are supposedly fixed with today's patch. So there aren't many, but when there are they are mostly near each other which makes it worse when you have multiple bugged investigation quests in a row.

Amazingly enough, for the one in Egypt people actually exercised restraint [!!] and huddled around in the center of the room while one person who knew what he was doing ran around and solved the puzzle. (2 puzzles actually in subsequent phases)

Of course it helps that for that quest you only need to be present in the room when someone solves the quest - don't need to solve it yourself.

I'm thinking of another set of quests where you have to light the torches and then play with the crystals right after. In addition to multiple people being able to participate, the crystals part was broken where you couldn't even interact with them when it bugged out.

I am pretty sure they designed them like that on purpose. They want people to figure out how to make things work, be it a dungeon, an aggro range, some mobs skills, or some stupid player behaviour. I might be wrong, but at this point it's obvious that they didn't design TSW thinking "how can we make everything as simple as possible for players?" They bet LOTS of money on the opposite thing: "The players have to adapt to our game, or we don't want them around". Like the limited number of quests for example and only to quote the widely most hated thing in beta which they totally stood for against anyone's best judgement. And SO FAR they placed a fucking unbelievable winning bet. It might change in the future, but so far they bet on the limping loser, and they are banking unexpected money on it.

You may be right, but the quest-griefing mechanic doesn't feel like part of the dark horse bet they made. It feels more like something that was in for a smaller population and may have worked with them but not with a much larger population.

If you mean the 'Terrible Secret' one, that's the one I meant... braziers then crystals then statues (so three phases of "don't screw with others"). I just did it today after the hotfix, worked surprisingly well! That said, I agree that these things need per-player state handling, phasing, or heck, even instancing.

Onto Things That I Don't Like: random chat bugs can still diaf (can't get enough of chat-related complaining because...srsly). Was in an Ankh pug just now where groupchat worked just fine until the healer DC'd on the second-to-last-boss and the tank/group leader left the instance to get someone else. When he returned, groupchat broke and I wasn't even able to send tells to the tank and the new healer (said person x is not online). Was fun trying to coordinate the last bosses that half the group hasn't done before... we still won, though.

edit: I'm actually playing solo right now and I can see the groupchat of the DC'd healer's NEW Ankh group :roflcopter:

Exactly. I have no problem adapting to all the other things they do differently in the game. Hell, I thought the questing limitations were really bizarre in the beginning but once I got used to them I actually like the system. I actually know why I'm doing a mission in TSW as opposed to other games where I just had a laundry list of shit I didn't really care about. Even in SWTOR by the time I'd get back to some quest givers I'd have completely forgotten why the hell I was talking to them.

But the design for these particular missions doesn't seem like something you can always adapt to. Sure, you can try and talk to the people who are just running around and spam-clicking things and hoping for the best (or just doing it for shit n giggles) but you're not guaranteed success. I just feel like that particular mechanic could have been designed better whether it be through instancing or phasing or something else.

Best way i found in beta was really just sit back and play with my skill wheel or outfit collection until whoever happened to be around got done and moved on. :why_so_serious:

What's that 100% thingy and where can I buy it?

You can purchase the speed increases from your faction HQ mobility vendor, 100% is the third upgrade and you have to do them in order costing 1.6m pax or so in total and they only unlock as you reach certain faction ranks, think it's 2 & 5 for the first two, no idea about the last one.

Two and Four.  The first one is the biggest boost, and costs 100k, which is doable if you don't buy a lot of clothes.

The third rank of sprint speedup is at faction rank 8.  Note that if you happen to be trying to buy 2 ranks at once for a silly reason, like you had hoped you could skip the previous rank, you need to close and reopen the vendor after purchasing each rank for the next rank to show up as purchasable.

Realy hating nightmare drop nerf. Nightmare are "nightmare" to run with PUGs, I dont know how these people managed to get gatekepeer down but most dps are god awful. I switched from tanking to DPS just so I can have at least one person in the group doing 800+ dps, and because of 16 hour lock down its rather hard to get people you friended before to run with you.

Now even if you manage put together a decent group now all you get is  same loot as elites .

The next patch's notes Falc just posted say they epic items will be going back onto nightmare bosses.

Fucking bugged quests from important quest givers. Both the Black House and Taking the Purple bugged on me at lunch (Purple bugged on me yesterday as well). I petitioned in-game, but don't know if that's going to help at all.

Taking the Purple was working on Huldra yesterday. Seraphim used the "meet up" feature with me to come over and get it completed so we could try that if you're online later?

Petitioning has a strange effect. I was stuck on 'Taking the Purple' yesterday, so switched quest and carried on after petitioning.

Logged on this morning to find myself in front of the house, back on 'Taking the purple' and automatically on the next stage past the bug.

Very good customer service, if slightly mystifying when I first logged on!

Same thing happened to me with "Life Imitating Art" (tier 3 was bugged before 1.01). It's probably less stressful this way for the GMs, too!

Ah nice. Tbh, I didn't even realize until late last night that I could hit the main cities for clothing. I'm rolling in cash because I haven't bought basically anything, so 100k for the first set is doable.

Fits the theme of the game  :oh_i_see:

Came up in the Things you Like thread:

Sound-only puzzles. I'm not hearing impaired, but I can't play with my headphones very loud or my wife will think I'm only pretending to listen to her  :awesome_for_real:

Colors. I am partlally color deficient and following blood trails is a pita unless I monkey with the graphics settings. I can appreciate why they wouldn't want to fix it, but it's not like color deficiency isn't rare among males.

THE FUCKING BOG.  Worst mob density/aggro range combo ever.  It's like Karnor's Castle set in a swamp.

I don't really get why they wouldn't want to fix it when at least one quest actually colours the trails of stains you're supposed to follow bright yellow (the colour used throughout the game for outlines to mark interactive objects) So any arguments they might want to use against appear to apply selectively, at best.

How the fuck is anyone supposed to complete the raven pentagram, there's always a retard around who just starts putting down feathers in random spots.

Talk to them. Try to make them reason. Try to have them understand. Dealing with idiots is a quest in itself. Eventually you can cheat, which is: wait for them to leave.

I ended up cheating because words did nothing. NOTHING.

I hope nothing challenging uses this mechanic.

When morons are ruining my questing experience like that, I hope into fusang and complete a few objectives.  Hopefully by the time I'm done, they are gone.

They already made some concessions for the color blind. The original highlight color was red but was switched to yellow in the second open beta weekend.

I really wish there were chat bubbles because it's pretty easy to miss anyone talking in /say in the chat window. As well the separate /tell window is kind of terrible with no notification except a flashing tab.

No sound when you get a tell. 

No way to know if a friend logs off or on.  Have to always spam shift+F.

No way to know if a friend is in the same instanced world.

Porting 10 times from Agartha to get back to a zone.

High mob density with high aggro radius. 

Little to no correlation between the rating of a quest and its actual difficulty.

BUGGY FUCKING QUESTS!

The game is a bit too griefer friendly.

Actually there is a message but it's simple white text and blends in with general/lfg/faction chat or whatever you have going on in your chat tab, so you probably won't notice it. An easy way of changing chat colours would be really useful.

You also get a sound if you get a tell. There's a toggle for it in settings.

Jesus, this game really should not have been an MMO. There are literally no circumstances when I want to see other players. They can only either harm my progress or destroy the atmosphere.

All I'll say is... "The Cost of Magic" in Transylvania, Tier 4 in particular. I hope you like jumping puzzles...  :why_so_serious:

(I did manage to complete that phase in 15 mins or so, but there was a non-trivial amount of RAEG involved)

I loved that quest, then obtaining the lore on those platforms as well.....cruel cruel bastards at funcom with some of their lore placement :grin:

The fanboys. It's great that the devs are so active on the official boards and people are coming up with really creative workarounds like the scripts to autojoin channels, but you can't comment on something that doesn't work or suggest something could be done better without a swarm of rabid idiots explaining that everything is perfect and you should be burned at the stake as a heretic for suggesting otherwise.

Not having the f13 channel functional = 0% chance of me grouping.

The chat channel not working is really a big huge downer. Anyone who is scouting the forums has any info about it? Is it just us or did the patch officially killed all custom chat channels? And is there any word on fixes?

I found one thread on it and no official response, but it seems to be widespread if not universal. (It was actually what spurred my prior fanboy post as there were many helpful people explaining it was not a problem.)

What I've found is that the last thing from Ragnar was stating that they know a problem exists and that 1.0.2 was fixing some of the problems (this was one week ago). Then the robot-like customer service person (not Ragnar, the one in public support) on the forums is just stating how he apologizes and is sorry it isn't working for whomever creates a thread on the topic, and that 1.0.2 fixed some of the issues, never truly acknowledging that 1.0.2 fucked up more than it fixed.

Seems like they managed to break sprint in some instances.  Ohh, funcom.

More hats, dammit!

Can you imagine how well a "hat pack" would sell on their store? 

Chat issues
Broken quests, sadly, usually the really fun ones.
The Big Terrible Picture Tier 3 in Egypt. You have to move these light beams to hit a certain spot and 1) They're bugged all to hell and 2) just when you almost have it some random idiot will run up and completely ignoring your says and tells will start jacking with the beams.

Have you learned nothing from Valve, Funcom?

Friends list not a per-account thing  :oh_i_see:

This is probably my only peeve as well, the public-space quests specifically designed for solo experiences, but where users can screw it up easily. They are already on the right track with personalized zones, though of course they've been doing that since it was a Big Deal(tm) in AO. But it really feels like a throwback experience that you can have your designed-to-be-soloed quest borked by some random passerby.

Not game-breakingly bad, just something I can't see being acceptable save for those who appreciate the nostalgia of Emporer trains in CB  :grin:

Even those people didn't like the D'Vinn train.

YOU have been backstabbed for a gajillion by Ambassador D'Vinn!

God, once I got firmly into the, "You can pretty much one-shot this asshole" level range, I used to love sitting in that tower and just fucking D'Vinn's shit up for hours on end.

Countless noobs thanked me, but I didn't do it for them. I did it for me.

I don't like that someone used the name "Sjofn" before me.  :heartbreak:

Your punishment for not trusting me and buying this on day one. You were going to cave in anyway (and this time for good reasons), why the wait?

I am only playing because Ingmar is, I gave no shits about The Secret World, and honestly I still give no shits about it, but I figure I can kick around in it a little bit. I've given plenty of MMOs I've given no shits about a try before, why stop now?

I was joking, of course. You may not give a shit, but I am glad you are playing. I don't know you well but I really had a feeling that both you and Ingmar would have liked this one. That's probably why I kept thinking you and Ingmar would have caved in, and felt particularly strange that of all people specifically you two were not playing it, cause I really thought it was totally your kind of MMORPG.

We'll see.

I played it a very little bit (we have a birthday party to go to today and D&D tomorrow, we are WASTING OUR FREE TIME) and the story stuff will probably interest me, although I've never been hugely into this type of story, but I am really not sure about the combat. It depends on the combat learning curve to see if it annoys me too much to keep going to get to the interesting bits. Lucky for the game, my tolerance for iffy combat is pretty high if the story is good enough.  :why_so_serious:

Name of yours and Ingmar's chars? Let's cynically play together.

Yea. But like Surly, that created periodic fun at level 25, 30, 40 and beyond. Used to love sitting in the tunnel twisting AE Mezz. Final time I went back I'd one-shot just for kicks. But it was great for the hero complex :). I assume the same was true for folks who came up through Blackburrow? All my characters were eastern.

Oh, I did both. The darkpaws were my bitches too...

It was fun to go back and safe fall to the bottom of BB as a monk.

Honestly, it took me so many tries to come up with a name I didn't hate, I kinda forgot what it was. I'll post in the thread when I log in again later. :P

For reals, I have a character named Ka-Bang, ffs.

Single server tech is not nice to naming characters, but at least you won't get all your cool names to have them taken away ala TOR.

GW2 has a far better solution on the naming thing.

Champion's has a better naming solution.  If there was one thing other companies could borrow, it should be that.

Yes, allowing people to use spaces and up to 18 letters is just awesome. Makes up for very unique names. Love that.

[deluded fangirl]Eve Online allows 24 characters and a space[/deluded fangirl]

You enjoyed BOTH Dragon Ages, I think your tolerance for shitty combat is supremely high.  :why_so_serious:

Yeah, but the price you pay for that is having to play Eve Online.  :why_so_serious:

Ha ha, DA:O was actually exactly what I was thinking of when I wrote that.  :heart:

Wait, Funcom broke more with a patch than it fixed? Unpossible.

I do not like how my character's mouth is slightly open and that she never gets to talk, so she just sort of comes across as a gawking idiot in all her cut scenes.  :heartbreak:

She swallowed a magic bee, dammit! I'd like to see you talking after that!

That was my assumption. You are incappible of speech.

And even though the protagonist is mute (a lot of NPCs acknowledge this, btw), you still get to play with facial expressions and stuff sometimes. The one that stands out for me is in Savage Coast when the Indian guy is berating his niece at the bait shop as the PC enters, finishes his monologue with "and here's the person who'll solve our problem" and both of them look meaningfully towards the PC. The PC obviously responds to this by looking out the door behind him :awesome_for_real:

Yeah. Also remember during the intro video, you end up vomiting energy. That can't be good for your vocal chords. Also, the isolation in your messy room for a week could really indicate (poorly) that you are going through shock for many things, including finding out that you can't speak anymore. And, since every NPC you speak with knows you are a "bee", they seem to be aware of the fact that the "Bees" are powerful but can't speak.

The only problem with that theory is the questions you can ask most of the NPCs.

I'm pretty sure you can talk, you just don't do it often.

Though I've said it before, I really like how they handle it.

I don't like how the don't like thread is longer than the like thread.

Yeah that kind of bothers me too, because I feel it might give the wrong impression to those who sort of glance at the forum and move on.  But it's just the nature of things.  People nitpick and complain about specific negative things but aren't going to point out every positive event.  If I were to make a single post about every specific thing I've liked about this game in that thread it would be pretty large.

And some of the stuff in this thread is silly. Like this:

I don't like that I just hit the Savage Coast last night  :grin: I'm soooo slooow. In my defense, I did play Komoto all the way through Kingsmouth before taking Bryn all the way through Kingsmouth.

The likes are quite a bit longer than the dislikes, but the dislikes are pretty annoying (chat problems, issues with GUI scaling ranging from small elements to not being able to place items in 1/2 the inventory window). Stuff that can be endured, but hopefully they push out some fixes soon. It's like an inverse of GW2, I love GW2's UI and comfort features, but I like the actual game of TSW better.

I can deal with being mute (I have come around on voiced protagonists but I am perfectly content with a silent one as well), but I don't like that I have zero input into her muteness. Yes, occassionally she deigns to react to something, but most of the time she is a slack-jawed, expressionless mute with the personality of a piece of wet tissue paper and zero agency. I enjoy the "dialogue" (moar liek monologues am i rite?) that is spoken at me, but I feel a huge disconnect from my character and I find that to be unfortunate. This isn't a this-specific-game-and-only-this-game complaint, though, I never like when a game does that.

Also the combat animations are kind of dumb (I particularly hate the magic ones) and the character models have the weirdest proportions. :P


I do like the game alright, don't get me wrong! But it does have a bunch of things that bug me.  :heart:

My list so far:

- The models are weird looking (legs are slightly too short on the women for example and in some outfits they end up looking really strange), and despite all the dress up options I am not really happy with how my guy looks. They need a lot more (and better) hair options for a start.
- My total lack of agency or input into the storyline bothers me a lot. This game *is* what people were saying SWTOR would be; sitting through someone reading the WoW quest giver text to you before you can go get your bear asses. This is *partially* mitigated by the good writing and voice acting for some of the characters; others are not so good and you get stuck listening to them when you don't want to be and there's no feeling of contributing yourself to keep you interested (sherriff lady in Kingsport, I am looking at you.) SWTOR may have ruined this for me forever, I hate not having a voice or any choices in the conversations.


And the thing that will probably cause me to quit:

- The quest restriction thing is the worst fucking thing ever. The game has sent me to the fire station in Kingsport 3 goddamn times so far, if I could take a reasonable number of quests at the same time I wouldn't have to repeat shit like that. It is indefensibly bad.

Odd, I actually really, really like this myself. Sure, sometimes it's a bit annoying but in general I feel like I have 1 or 2 things to focus on and usually I find all new quests as I'm finishing up old ones.

Ya. Everyone hates it at first, and end up appreciating it when they pick up the pace of the game. Usually.

I hated the crap out of it in Kingsmouth, but ended up getting used to it. Not sure it's really better than quest hubs (and in some cases it's used to kinda-cheaply reuse the same area for a different quest), but it's nowhere near as egregious as e.g. what LOTRO has you do in the Lothlorien questline. It definitely helps that you can just phone in for the reward after you finish a mission, and usually find some sort of quest starting item nearby that takes you to a nearby quest giver so you can carry on.

I could forgive it with phasing or a coherent narrative order, but when I can see stuff lying around that I know I would be able to grab if I had the right quest but oops I can't take it at the same time, it just pisses me off. It actually hurts immersion more for me than the other way around would.

The game is very questLINE oriented, scripted, most quests are heavily tiered, and many require a bit of thinking/research/exploration.  So having questhubs would be a bit counterintuitive imo.  You get sent on a mission, you better damn well do it w/o getting ADD for every shinay.

The 'only one quest shows at a time on your tracker' already does an admirable job of keeping you focused. Nothing about what you describe would be broken by allowing me to have say 8 or 10 side quests going at a time instead of 3; those are the ones that are particularly egregious since the start points are scattered all over the freaking place in the world, and when you run across one in the world you're stuck either dropping something you have to pick it up, or trying to remember where it is so you can come back to the middle of nowhere to grab it later (along with the other 3 quests scattered around in random spots that you already had to skip...)

I can't see my feelings on this one changing.

I don't loathe it like I used to, but I'm not to the point of appreciating it, either.

Edit for Ghambit:  And a lot of those thinking puzzles require a break.  The pause/unpause is a clunky way of doing what I do anyways, which is work on something else while I ponder.  Especially if I run across what might be the solution and I have to run across the entire map to unpause and find out I was wrong.

(I agree with Ingmar on something.  The gaming world is being turned on its head!)

Map markers are a godsend for this. Just open the map, right-click and add a note. They're shared across characters too so you'll only have to do it once.

When you see something you cannot pick up without dropping another, just put a marker on the map labeled "quest, for later". It works.

It works, but still sucks. It's busywork to stretch out the content.

I don't mind it anymore.  I think it could be lessened a bit.  Perhaps let you have one of each type, but there really aren't a lot of sabotage or investigation quests to make that big of a difference.  I haven't really even come into the situation lately where having more room for minor quests would even matter.

And I'm a serial quest hoarder.  I am in every game.  The restrictions here just haven't been any sort of deal breaker.

It doesn't suck at all. It's just a stylistical choice you don't like. Some do. It would have been SO MUCH easier for them to drop it.

Yes, it IS a stylistic choice I don't like. That means I think it sucks. You thinking it is just dandy because you are a fanboy for the game (and that's fine!) doesn't change that.

Throwing this post into the "things you like" forum as this really is a great point I forgot about


As for limited quests - I'm with Lant - I couldn't stand it but I'm at a point where I'm used to it. I don't like it or enjoy it, but it isn't a big enough deal to be a gamebreaker either.

 :facepalm:
F13ers that honestly think having a fuckton of quests in their log, along with questhubs, in THIS game... is kinda funny.  If TSW questing was generic you guys would break the feel and point of the game from the onset (along with a few things mechanically) and then come here to complain how much the game sux.

FC made the right call here; I'm fairly steadfast on that one... regardless how much I or others may hate it.  It's a smart design choice.

You don't really understand my point, clearly. I certainly wouldn't bitch about quest hubs if they had them. (In fact I would say it very clearly DOES have quest hubs. What is the police station if not a quest hub?) So far I'm not seeing this amazing narrative structure that would be ruined by having a few extra quests in my log to save me a lot of running.

Going further, if they just had one quest with seven hundred thousand steps, that would also be fine. I don't attach a particular value to having a lot of quests or very few quests; what I object to is making me run through the same area 400 times. It gets to feel like busywork very quickly.

Yeah, it's not so much "waaah, I want 30 quests and a bunch of quest hubs" and a lot more "when I discover a quest in an out of the way spot, I want to be able to pick it up no matter what" and "I don't want to get sent back to the same spot 5 times for no good reason." No narrative coherence would've been lost if I could've picked up first aid kits and ice packs from the firehouse at the same time.

I think once you get out of kingsmouth, even just past the police station, you'll find the quest flow to be smoother.   The police station is a bit of a hub and has a bit of backtracking around town, but for the most part the game relies on a chain of mission givers instead of a cluster.  There are certainly a few weak links in this regard, but overall I was really happy with the system.  I do wish you could take more side quests (6 would be nice), as those aren't as involved.   Actually, there are usually only 2-3 side quests in one spot anyways.  The only reason I particularly care is because the PvP quests count as side quests, which can be annoying if you hop in and out of PvP.

Later on, especially in the Savage Coast, quests usually end remotely near other quest givers, and there's a fantastic flow to them.  It's not really hub-like at all.  I loved it, Savage Coast was probably my favorite zone in the game due to the way the missions flowed.

I really like focusing on one 'story' mission at a time personally.  If you do really want to pick up another mission, your current one does pause and you can pick it up where it left off.  I've felt the need to do that exactly twice in my 4 days of gameplay.

They stated many times that wherever you finish a "unique" quest you should find a "green/side" quest in the immediate proximity that leads you to another quest and so on. By design, you shouldn't even stumble on more than three quest at a time, but that of course can't be true if you just like to explore. Still, their logic is that you HAVE to do one main quest at a time, otherwise you would stop caring about the why and what of it, and you are not really supposed to trip on more than three "greens quests" at the same time. As someone else stated, if you don't like that they tell you how to proceed in the game then sure you are never gonna appreciate this choice and that's fine, but the way the game (and the maps, and the quest placement) is designed makes it flow in a way that would not work with other MMORPGs -which are the ones we have been domesticated to- and that becomes apparent only after you've been playing for a little while.

I think I have 6 or 7 'main' quests available to me currently, so, design failure if their goal is what you say.

The "main quests" really do not deserve to be interrupted or fragmented, with all the cutscenes, pop ups, maps and progressive tiers. I thought we were talking about the side quests. If at this point into the game you feel like packing the main quests up into a more manageable pile, then they didn't fail in the design department, they failed in the narrative department.

I do think they failed a little bit at the beginning design-wise.  Two many mission givers packed into one area (police station).  Too many quest objectives packed into a small area in the town at the beginning.  If you've played MMORPGs you see this as a mission hub and wonder why the hell you can't pick these all up.  I got over it pretty quickly since I was getting rather immersed in the characters and the particular missions and had little desire to game 'effeciciently' in any way at all (took my damn sweet time in Kingsmouth, backtracking became a benefit as I loved the atmosphere so much in that zone).  But after the mission givers started spreading out and hence mission objectives became more spread out, (which happens pretty quickly, to be honest), I felt the system worked better.  From the skatepark onwards it really clicked with me.  

The main quests aren't as bad as the side quests in this respect because they actually have a more coherent narrative, but they're still throwing these at me constantly in situations where I can't pick them up (something sent me by the chuch, oh look, that asshole in there has TWO MORE and I still have 4 undone at the police station, etc.) Tremendously annoying. And yeah I have no idea, maybe it cleans up in later areas but they certainly haven't put their best foot forward in Kingsmouth.

Neither of the 'main' quests I've done so far have had any cut scenes, just some (admittedly nice) handout-type graphics. There's nothing about those that would be hurt by 'interruption' with another quest.

-Lil Johnny: "There's a rampaging Draug on the loose in my mom's office... She's trapped!  Hurry before it eats her! Waaaaaaa"
-John "Ingmar" Doe:  "Pfft... there's a floating smartphone over there.  'Scuse me why I grab another quest to do punk.  I might be back if Policeman#3 gives me a foozle-fetch errand in your mom's bedroom."

 :oh_i_see:

Yeah sorry, the immersion argument is ridiculous. I'm already turning down Lil Johnny's "urgent" quest because I'm on an "urgent" quest from the sherriff - and yet he'll still be there with his urgent problem when I finish.

See, now THIS is how you pad this thread length!

I do wish you could take a few more side quests and maybe one or two of each mission type at the same time AND not have to go back to the quest giver to unpause a quest (that I don't like at all), but I've gotten use to how it is and its certainly not a game breaker for me.  YMMV.

Game doesn't seem like it's a game that wants me to duo with Ingmar, which makes me a little sad. Like we could duo, but ... I don't know. Just doesn't seem like it adds anything, so we'd just as soon do our own thing, since that means Ingmar can dart off into the woods to talk to a squirrel or something if he feels like it, and I can die 600 times to zombies because I suck at pistols.


Also, crafting gives me a headache, but that is probably more because I am dumb than anything.  :why_so_serious:

There are quite a few missions in Transylvania (and a handful earlier on, mostly in the second Egypt zone) where a duo (or a 2-3 person pug) is highly recommended. It may be possible to solo them with an outlast build and/or consumable abuse, but eh.

Not sure where you are now Sjofn, but difficulty kind of ramps up in the second zone -Savage Coast- (unless you hit the jackpot with a very efficient build already or you are just that awesome), and that's where duoing is much, much more needed than in other similar games. Even more so in the third, Blue Mountain, which led many people that are used to mop the floor with mobs until  raids to complain on the official boards about "forced grouping" (which is really not the case here). Granted duoing is still not necessary at all, just more convenient, but when is it ever necessary in post-WoW games?

The whole "better with a duo" thing is another reason why I thought you and Ingmar would have liked this game.

Pistols are so OP in Kingsmouth. I was farming the golems by the airport with QL1 gear, hell mostly newb QL0 talismans.

In SC I've been dying more regularly, usually due to crown whites, so I should know better. But I've gotta try. So far the questing has been fine, a couple bad adds if I get a bit too loopy with my circle strafing. If I had a pocket tank or healer, it'd be much easier, I'd think.

Kingsmouth is sort of the newbie zone.  Theres not much there that requires grouping or grouping makes easier.  The next zone, Savage Coast, and beyond is completely different story.  I've never been killed so many times in an MMO in such a short period of time.  I've died more in TSW so far than the last 2 years or so of playing WoW and SWTOR combined.  You will die and die often after Kingsmouth if you go solo.

I wonder how we'd play differently if we couldn't see NPC difficulty. I would certainly die a lot more, so maybe that would just be annoying. (Or maybe stealth would be more important? You have no idea if that zombie will rip you head off .. or die when you sneeze on it)

The issue for me is it doesn't seem to *support* duoing very well, what with the solo instances and such. SWTOR sets a really high bar on the duoing thing, though - no other MMO measures up either - so I'm not going to harp on this one issue much.

It doesnt support duoing well because decks are too dynamic.  For instance, my deck has absolutely no self-synergy but for just about every other build out there I can lay a condition on that they can take advantage of whilst I draw hate.  But... it's not a "good" deck.   :oh_i_see:

Finding the combos between groupmembers on VOIP is a game unto itself.  Reminds me of CoOp MtG.

Mainly it's the solo instances for me.  I would really, really, really like to not have to split my group up to do 'main' missions.

I build synergy with my own powers.  I might with a duo, but that'd just make me even more effective.

The more I look at some of the face models in this game the more they freak me out, especially on older people. I had to stop looking at whatshername Creed during her scenes. At some point she stopped looking like 'older human woman' and started looking like 'frightening toad demon'.

And I'm sorry Falc, but your character frightens me.  :grin:

Yeah, I should have explained the duoing thing better. The solo instances are a good example, actually, it makes it so you have to split up and wait for the other person (because you'll never get past it at the same rate, especially if you're duoing with me and there are vaguely platformy things to accomplish in the instance). We do sometimes split up for main missions in SWTOR, but that's because of spoilers, not because the game makes us (and we never split if it's a story he or I have seen, like our smuggler/trooper duo ... I had already seen the trooper story, and he had already seen the smuggler one).

Maybe once we get past Kingsmouth we'll try duoing a bit more, but like Ingmar said, SWTOR set the bar pretty high for duoing for us. I don't hold it against the game, really, it's just a slight bummer. But! I have seen you guys talk about how it's much better with encouraging helping fresher characters with lower level crap because of how the skill system works, so it gets points for that. I'll mention it in the "things I like" thread if I ever actually experience it. ;)


PS: I know it's pretty much me who sucks with the pistols/elemental build. My sword/chaos tank dude hasn't died yet, but poor pistol girl has eaten dirt about a billion times. I need to just accept I sux @ deepz.

HEY!
My character is famous! (http://www.facebook.com/thesecretworld/posts/335980093149811)  :grin:
(And no I didn't post it myself)

EDIT: Rightmost one is Seraphim's char (Leanan).

I absolutely agree with Ingmar and SJofn about the solo instances. I've duo'd almost entirely from Blue Mountain through the rest of the content and the solo instances were always annoying as hell (and at a point we were predicting when they would happen). That said - next run through with another character I'll once again try to avoid being solo completely. The game is just much faster with a partner with the only downside being solo instances.

Link doesn't work for me.

You probably don't have a Facebook account. Basically it is a picture of 5 TSW characters posted on the main TSW Facebook feed, with Falc's Brazilian transsexual front and center.

Hahahaha. They need a better layout for their skill-wheel thingy. The whole click-on-things-in-the-middle-scroll-up-an-down-on-the-left thing is not really working for me. It would also be good to be able to have two sets of skill-trees open at the same time, to compare and correlate.

I don't like what appears to be completely random mobs being chained together and aggroing me from a mile away because they think I'm picking on their best friend or something. I was fighting something that was hanging out all by itself, and I watched as two other mobs (from QUITE FAR AWAY) decide "hey, fuck that chick, let's get her!"

I managed to drag one of the "heals on glancing hit" mobs away from from their area in the city of the sun god, and got to watch random passerbys try to take it on.

The other thing to be careful with, especially if you're mucking around with Thor's Hammer and elementalism, is that the main elementalist skill bonus turns every single elementalist spell into an aoe potentially.  This can cause problems with pulling and has gotten me killed more than a few times.

Found a quest mob that wasn't spawning last night, so I opened a ticket. Results:

On the good side:
 - Only took about 10 minutes to respond.
 - CSR was polite, able to spell and punctuate properly, and didn't do any BY THE LIGHT OF ELUNE roleplaying stuff when I got my tell.

On the bad side:
 - He wasn't able/allowed to spawn the mob for me or advance the quest past that step.

Bad side wins, I sent them a nasty note about it in the feedback email I got.

Yeah, it wasn't an AE issue (although I DID do that occassionally on my pistols/elementalist character I hate and have rejected utterly), just a "what the hell, why did THOSE two come at me" thing. Like there were a couple of other mobs between me and the one I pulled and the two that joined in, that's how far away they were.

The game gets fairly predictable about those, eventually. By the time I finished the last zone in Transylvania, enemy groups were typically
- swarm mobs with little hp (three circles next to their name) in groups of 3-8 OR 2-3 with a normal mob
- weak mobs with moderate hp (one circle, but noticably less HP than normal) in groups of 2 [sometimes 3 in 'hard' areas]
- normal mobs with normal hp (one circle) solo [groups of 2 in 'hard' areas]
- strong mobs with high hp (skull, flag, crown) solo

Mobs also seem to have WAY better hearing than eyesight (goes double for Orochi in infiltration missions). I could sneak behind big brutes without them noticing, but if I aggroed a patrol like 10 meters from them...  :ye_gods:

Re the bugged mob spawn: interesting, I had the opposite experience - didn't receive a response right away, but when I logged back in the next day my quest had been advanced to the next tier... otoh this was during launch week. Maybe they've been told that the quest has been "fixed" even though it hasn't?

One quest bugging me right now: in the amusement park in SC, put down the four dudes; last dude you kill spawns a revenant. First time, I'm down to 1/3rd, revenant takes me out. Go back and spawn at the max distance...the original dude is there and aggroes on me, I might have been able to kill him from half health, but the rev would've smoked me.

I just did that one last night and it was really tight. The guy actually respawned on me while I was fighting the revenant, so I was fighting both. I barely managed to get the revenant down, had to run away from the other guy etc.

Yeah, that was tough for me the first time. I remember that was the first quest that forced me to modify my "uber (I thought so) DPS build". Switched all my items to +HP and put in a healing passive and a healing active. Sometimes you just have to have an alternative build you use only for certain fights. A tankish one, a healerish one, and so on.

Where did you get a full set of alternate items that early into the game?

Uhm. I don't know what to tell you. Honestly, I've been a completionist, meaning I refused to go to Savage Coast until I did every quest I could find (without looking for it) in Kingsmouth. I guess at that point I had spent enough time that my inventory was overflowing and I was creating extra bags to organize them into DPS and TANKING gear (I refused to even think about healing).

But what gives out free AWESOME stuff in Kingsmouth is the dungeon, Polaris. As stated multiple times, it's a 30 minutes run, it's beautiful, it's fun, and every boss (there's five) drops 1 or 2 guaranteed blues. In this game blue items are not just better, they are "specialized" items. Meaning they lack some basic stats you can find on green items but they push on some others, making them quite weird but effective for some specific builds.

I don't know if you went through Polaris yet. If you haven't, do yourself a favour and do it. it's awesome. Also, you can totally craft yourself a set of specific talismans by the time you are in savage Coast provided you didn't leave Kingsmouth too soon.

EDIT: As Sky found out at some point, an area of Kingsmouth that kind of gives out free green items of all sorts is the golem area. Easily farmable, easy XP, and one green item out of three or something like that.

I did literally every quest in Kingsmouth myself. You saved all your QL1/2 stuff once you had upgraded to QL3?

Pharm the golems. They're also decent for deck building practice imo.

Falc, between this and the power set thread, I get what you're saying. Problem is the buggy gear manager thing. I'm constantly tweaking my build but don't stray too far from the core of what works as much as I would if the gear presets were saving properly (because I'll forget what I had originally :)

I'll be looking at swapping out my two aoe actives for single targets, the aoe hinder is decent but really anything can replace the generic aoe I've been using, I have a couple good options (though I'm about 12 AP from Big Forty-Five which would be ideal).

edit: the dudes down on the beach in SC by the Overlook seem to drop talismans pretty good, too. Respawn is pretty brisk, though.

I haven't done any dungeons yet; there's no working chat to organize it with f13 people, and the couple people I've seen on in the Illuminati guild are working on other things and I don't want to drag them back to run me through a dungeon for a game I probably won't subscribe to, it seems like a waste of their time. Is there a group finder tool? I didn't see one but I didn't look too hard.

Any one of us would likely run Polaris again.  No dungeon finder.  I've done nothing but pugs.  4 good v. 1 shit group so far.  You'll likely see higher QL players in any run, which ups the chance for success. 

For Dungeons, get Sjofn into Bee Country and work from there (unless you have a Templar guy too). We run dungeons all the time and it's kind of a staple to make a welcome group for anybody who hasn't been in a dungeon yet.

While the custom chat is screwed, what's worked for me in forming groups is just asking someone in one of the other guilds if they would ask in their /cabal channel if anyone wants to run X, Y, or Z dungeons to msg me. I know, :work:, but it gets the groups going.

Also - do not feel bad about asking people to go backwards for dungeon running, the higher QL get xp all the same and the quest gives a fixed amount of ap/sp, so even though the higher QL don't receive loot - they do receive coin and ap/sp
Edit: think of mentoring systems that are beneficial to the one doing the mentoring - it's like that where as long as you're doing something then your character is improving

Dungeons teleport everyone to them.  All you need is one individual there.

Yeah, seriously, ditto on the higher ql in dungeons thing.  I'll go any time.  The money/ap/sp payout is still fabulous at higher qls.  You still get rewarded really well for helping.  I've said that a few times now, and I'll keep saying it (although I should probably say it more in the like thread than the dislike thread).

As said, while there is no Dungeon Finder and the F13 chat is fubar'd just add the F13 people to your friends list and drop us a /tell, quite a few of us are more than happy to help you through the dungeons even if we've outgrown them.

Yeah, I enjoyed the run through in Polaris, everyone was nice enough to let me sit through cutscenes and lead me to the lore items for my first run.

Buggy main quests are not making me feel better about the whole "only one main quest at a time" thing.

We did our first real duoing last night, the support for duoing is worse than I thought. There have been a number of quests where not only does clicking on an item in the environment not count for both players, the other player actually has to wait around for it to respawn.  :heartbreak:

The number of quests with broken spawns is also distressingly high, at least 3 or 4 so far.

To be fair, the respawning items respawned pretty fast, so it's still a step up from, say, WoW in that regard.


There was one quest where a thing had to respawn, though, and it took forever. That thing DID count for both of us, but we had to wait for it for a while after someone else did the thing right before us.

There seem to be some pretty serious bugs with a lot of the spawn timers, yeah. So far I've seen problems with:

- Black House quest
- League of Monster Slayers quest
- that side quest you just mentioned
- one of the quests in Kingsmouth, already forgotten which one, was a side quest

Every single one of them was a broken/slow respawn thing.

No men's dress shirts in the regular shop.  :heartbreak:

Solo instances are starting to irritate me, just because a bunch of them don't need to be solo.  :cry2:

We have two quest people to finish in Savage Coast, though. We are TRUCKING ALONG.

Lumi Phone Call mission to London when I'm close to QL8 and mission requires full QL10 to finish. After 2 hours of failing (screw timer missions) - forums reveals information that mission is triggered by overall exp, not your QL.

Magic. It doesn't feel Lovecraftian; it doesn't fuck you over the more you use it, so it ends up feeling more fantasy/superhero-ish than supernatural horror.

They do call you a superhero a lot in this game, though. So clearly they agree.  :why_so_serious:

Blood magic has certainly killed me several times by using it. But I get your point.

The plus side of it is I can recreate my thane from DAOC. Hammers/elementalism here I come, once I get some points saved up.

But will he be able to dodge?  :why_so_serious:

Having the tier of an investigation mission I've been working on get completed because someone else runs in, goggles the answer and completes it in about 2 minutes. Happened to me today on Big Terrible Picture tier 4 and seriously pissed me off. Fucking horrible, stupid design.

Weirdly, the tech for that is there as missions in Fusang update just fine when a group member captures a respawn point or gets a killing blow.  The facility one works even past that, probably if you're in the room.

You just have to be within the main entrance, just inside the glowy wall right behind the turret, to get credit for facility captures.   I'm pretty sure you do have to be in the sentinel's chamber to get the buff though.

Jesus Christ I hate PvP, nothing but AR healer spam in battlegrounds and over populated Templars in Fusang.  Those bonuses Templar get from zerging Fusange are awesome, everyone else sucks.  Getting angry.  Thought I might grind out some purple gear in PvP, no fucking way.

PvP on Grim server is home of the Goons, Illuminati. There's really no point in going to Fusang at all on my server. Especially because, yes, when you go there it's nothing but an Assault Rifle fest with the occasional melee AOE tank spammers. It's really irritating.

That fucking interrupt/DoT on the bitter servant in Ella's Mansion 1904 edition. Is that a group-only quest? I didn't see the solo/instance thing pop. In fact, I had no idea the mirror was going to dump me into the past in the first place. Whatever, I am not prepared or spec'd or something for getting the basement key, presumably from that thing.

I know I did the mirror quest as almost the first thing after entering Blue Mountain, so everything conned yellow to me. While it was a challenge, it was definitely doable solo. Pretty sure you need a reliable way of healing though. Plus AoE attacks for a later stage of the quest.

The AOE heals the mobs do in the 1960's portion of that quest are goddamn annoying (especially because it's a fucking escort quest). I don't remember having much trouble with the 1904 version, but I'm doing crit/penetration blade/blood DPS build with a heal thrown in there when I need it solo.

It's not so much the stun as much as the DoT component. I can't barely break even heal-wise, but there's not enough time to rotate damage in that gets past her heals. It's probably my particular build. I'll come back to the mission later. Plenty to do, which actually goes into the "like" thread.

I did that one with the ele/shotgun strike/crit build (linked in the build thread, but it's a small variation of the 'cookie cutter endgame shotgun/ele dps spec'), and just burst her down before healing got out of control. The Blue Mountain fight where I had a lot of problems was the one where you had to keep the damn zombies from eating the bait. Since I play ele, all of my attacks can proc a small AOE, which is enough for the zombies to decide they'd all rather eat my face instead of the bait...

I got devastated by the third faction quest. Took me two hours, about 15 tries and four complete revisions of my deck including spending points on fist and assault rifles from scratch in order to get ANY kind of heals. You won't see it until about 37 millions XP, but when you do you better bring some healing abilities or lots of HP gear.

I don't much care for having to find the portal in a new zone before I can use the thingy to get back to it. Not a huge deal, but still irritating. I assume it's to prevent newbies from stumbling into a higher zone but meh. Let 'em learn by getting murdered!

Which one was that?

Hate: I think someone else already mentioned it but I just did it now.  Whichever dev came up with "The Cost of Magic" sabotage quest is evil.

Not to make this all about me, but looking a bit further into it, apparently the best way to go at her is with physical damage which as a Blood/Ele is something I distinctly lack :) Ah well.

Good to see the comments on other hard spots that are coming, particularly your comment about an upcoming Zombie quest since, like your build, a lot of my rotation includes some type of AOE.

More deck building to come...

Even though it doesn't tell you, it is indeed a solo instance.

Speaking of which: I still hate how many there are, especially since most of them are only solo because shut up that's why. I would lose nothing by having Ingmar in there with me. >< See, this is why I feel like the game doesn't really want people to duo a lot. They split you from your partner all the freaking time!

I've also noticed that while I like not having to run my ass back a mile to the quest giver to turn in, I feel a weird disconnect because of it. I finish a quest and get a pat on the head from my faction person (and occassionally from someone from the Illuminati), but I get no actual closure from the person who wanted me to do it in the first place. Even an occassional "hey, thanks!" message from them instead of my faction dude (more often than not scolding me that I CAN'T SAVE EVERYONE STOP THAT) would help with that, I think.

You are not the only one complaining about solo-instances. Ragnar Tornquist (I think it was him) actually posted in a thread concerning the issue, his reply basically was:

A) But, but, there are only 6 non-story solo instances anyway. And most of them are on Solomon Island.
B) Solo-instances have encounters and challenges aimed at a single person, which multiple players could easily break.
C) Ok, ok. I admit you are right. We are going to open up some instances to groups.

There's instances in Transylvania that seem to fit the bill for solo instance, but we've done them quite nicely in groups.

It seems that this game has put the final nail in the coffin of my 470 GTX.  My Twin Frozr has been limping along with one of two fans working.  The remaining functional fan stopped spinning during Cost of Magic (double fuck that quest) and only after manually flicking it, was it able to spin again.  But, it doesn't look like it can keep up with the game anymore.  Fan spins like hell and the temps keep going up. 

Guess I won't be playing for a couple weeks while I RMA it.   :sad_panda:

Sounds like your vidcard is not a fan of jumping puzzles. (ok, that was pretty bad)


Re solo instances: I think the toughest one was 'rogue agent' (second faction mission), that one caused me to reevaluate my lifetinker around with my build and pick up quite a few extra abilities until I could get a combination of burst+sustain that allowed me to do it effectively. But yea, I can see a problem in a dedicated duo (especially if using builds that have good synergy in a duo, but not so hot solo).

As much as I hate solo instances, it is true they become less frequent later on, but still no reason for them to even exist. Even faction quests shouldn't be soloed, but I would like if they limited grouping only to one's faction. The most difficult was definitely the double agent, but I hear there's a trick to it so people don't have to be idiots (like I was) and brute force their way through.

Also: I love the Cost of Magic. Especially listening to people realize there's more than just the quest step up there

Been debating on whether or not to piss on y'all's cheerios, but then I figured if any "combat-first' folks were on the fence about this, a dissenting opinion might save them some cash, so here goes.

Honestly I'm not liking the game.  Combat is annoying the hell out of me.  If you are gong to include a dodge mechanic in your game, your combat controls have to be tight.  All to frequently I need to press keys multiple times - since dodge is a double-touch,... yeah.  I realize I'm spoiled by CO and Dark Souls.  Based upon what people were saying up front, I knew that I'd probably be disappointed, I just underestimated by how much.

I like the characters, and some of the settings, but I don't understand the love the monster models get.  For example, I think that the specters look cartoonish, they remind me of the "Nightmare before Christmas" characters.  The moths/insect mobs are ok, but they don't belong in the black goat woods - need tentacles in the black goat woods.  Was expecting filth there (I think filth and infected humans are done well), was disappointed they chose bugs.

From a setting perspective, I liked the Savage Coast by far the most - Black House, Overlook Hotel, and the light house were all done very well.  Black House is a buggy nightmare though.

Not enjoying the skills/deck building.  Been going elemental/blood (started with fist, had to shift after Kingsmouth because the heals don't scale, would have loved a respec) - grinding AP for skills that don't end up seeming to make that much of a difference is disappointing (I'm going with a chain/afflict build similar to the build Ard is using).  I'm feeling like equipment matters far more than skills/skill synergies.  Probably I'm too low-level (QL5, just entered Blue Mountain) to be seeing the difference that a good build brings, but since I'd have to grind to get the chance to try different things I'm never going to find out.

Buggy quests - I've opened a ticket every night for the last four nights.  Only once was it something I was doing 'wrong' (see spoiler).  Since quests are the primary means of progressing, this is hard to overlook.

I hate that my character is a mute halfwit.

I don't have any idea what my faction's (Dragon) goals are other than, "chaos is kool!" or "push all the buttons, turn all the knobs - you don't need to understand".  Other than getting a hummer the first day on the job, I have no connection to my faction, no reason to be risking my life for the chance to help them "test and refine the model".

TL:DR; if you rank combat as more or much more important than story, chances are that you won't like this game.  Story is not overcoming clunky combat controls and my lack of interest in the skills.  Dislike how weak my character feels, especially as I progress.

The thing about power scaling is that it's not your skills that you need to work on it's your gear that determines almost everything about how much damage/healing you do. If you concentrate on dps then your healing will suck no matter how good the skills you are using. If you're using greens then you will feel very underpowered compared to using blues.

This probably won't change your opinion of the game but if you run some dungeons and get blue gear you would likely be amazed at how much more powerful you feel.

I did some more PVP in Fusang last night. I've come to the conclusion I don't like it. I want to like it. I love the Fusang zone itself. But is there no way I can make myself LESS susceptible to stuns? As it is, PVP tends to be "Who gets the stun in first" in 1v1 and anywhere else it's "Whose team can spam stun the other team faster." It's mostly about getting the first hit, because that first hit is usually a fucking stun, and getting stunned then 1-shotted = NOT FUN.

It reminds me a bit of early DAoC in that regard.

The only way out of the stun monster is the misc ability "Sleight of Hand". 40 seconds recast with 7 seconds immunity. Pretty sweet and quite mandatory in PvP.

That said, on some servers Fusang is unplayable due to faction imbalance, and definitely unplayable unless you are using one of the popular builds and/or are geared with high QL stuff.

About the "active dodge" argument Typhon makes, that is used mostly in dungeons, and used a lot in PvP. For solo/normal playing they didn't want to alienate all those players who are still moaning about the lack of a /face function and got pretty scared when they heard they, god forbid, might have to actively dodge.

I'm Templar. On Arcadia, it seems like every time I zone into Fusang, we have the majority of anima wells and facilities already sewn up.

And then I get one-shotted.

Tips for Fusang: do not even consider entering unless you can sport 6000 HP, minimum.

To be fair, you can still enter and join the zerg and get an anima well and the facility for a whopping 200k XP in about five minutes, but do not expect to have fun.


Long story short: Fusang has a lot of potential, but at the moment is a huge disappointment. Not SWTOR's Ilum levels of disappointment, but definitely another wasted opportunity so far.

Starting to feel like I am running out of steam in Blue Mountain. The quests are getting less interesting, and the ones that are interesting (like the haunted house with the 3 time periods) get bogged down in endless combat slogs.

On Leviathan, Fusang is almost always empty enough that I can easily hop in and grab a well and zone out without incident.  Only gotten in at the same time as there was a decent sized Templar group once and had a blast.  But, we had pretty serious numbers on the Illumanti group that was in there and there were only a smattering of Dragons.

I tried Fusang 3 times (Arcadia), Dragon was hopelessly outnumbered every time. Still managed to get a facility or two while the two zergs took a timeout to stomp on each other instead of us, though.

But yea, pvp is really not this game's strong point imo. (then again - one month until GW2)

If you are Templar all you have to do is run with the zerg and stay at range.  Also realize that a lot of people in fusang will be in ql10 gear and there is no scaling or anything if you are still in ql3.

I'm dragon and yesterday was the first time I ever managed to capture a facility.  We of course lost it soon after.  It really bothers me that Templar on my server get an 18% xp buff along with all the other buffs.  That's crazy.  If they ever introduce raiding you will have trouble getting groups if you aren't templar due to all the extra hit, crit etc.

Depends on what server you're from! On Leviathan, my Templar will occassionally have a buff because we own Stonehenge, and that's it. Most of the time, I got nothin'. My Dragon had everything when I was dinking around on him last night, although as far as I can tell, the Illuminati usually have the bulk of stuff.

Not the last few days (unless the buff display is broken.)

Well, the Templars certainly haven't had it, so I guess the Dragons have gone to hell with themselves or something.

double post . . .

Equipment matters a lot.

However, skills also matter a lot. The complication is that just getting the "better" skills, ie the ones higher up the skill tree which need more AP, doesn't necessarily help. What matters is creating a deck with skills that complement each other, and it's not until you've been playing a while and have enough skills to experiment and try different combinations that you realise what's possible.

I thought my character was pretty much finished as far as soloing/DPS was concerned some time ago. I had skills, including an elite passive and elite active, and seemed to be doing fine. Then I realised I'd just scratched the surface and I've been experimenting with new things every day, changing a passive here or an active there, slowly building a better character.

They do a shit shit shitty job of helping the player discover this in game.  I played 3 toons to QL6 gear before I realized that higher AP costs didn't mean better and I'm a veteran of every MMO to date. 

The game is more like GW/MtG than your standard MMO and not enough is done to highlight this.     

I don't understand what point you're trying to make here.  I think the active dodge is a decent design idea.  I think the timer on the dodge makes sense.  I use dodge.  I'm annoyed that my use of dodge is not 99.9% consistent.

To be clear:
I want to use active dodge frequently in solo/normal.  The bugs lay down that "I'm gonna charge you!" pattern every 10 seconds.  My problem isn't in knowing when to use it, or reacting in time to use it.  My problem is that the game engine drops keystrokes due to the engine not being responsive enough and the dodge doesn't trigger - UI hiccup or server-side lag shouldn't make me miss my dodge. 

Yes, I realize that it has a cooldown, I'm not talking about when dodge is on a cooldown.  The UI very nicely shows how long you have to wait till you can use the active dodge again - no problem with that either.

Said another way; I can hit the keys just fine, and at the appropriate time, but the engine itself is too busy choking on something else when I hit the keys and drops the keystrokes.

I'd accept that maybe it was me that sucked, if other people in different posts didn't mention they had the same issues.

Not to be annoying but why would you use active dodge for the bug charge? All you need to do on that is side step it. Active dodge really only seems handy for the circle and wedge AEs where you have trouble getting out of the area in time without it.

Because it's fun?  I love doing the jump flips and use it even when I don't have to!

It's a game, damnit!  :grin:

The point I was trying to make is:

if active dodge was more "needed" in standard solo play a vast amount of usual-mmo players would hate it cause oh my god this game is too hard. So they decided to implement it but to limit its importance to the "slightly harder" parts of the game.

Not a defense of Funcom, just an explanation of why it isn't really used in normal/solo zones. They could simply make the AOE timers a bit quicker to make the dodges more meaningful, but that would enrage the MMO veterans with goofy hands and little coordination.

Uh, not liking active dodge type mechanics is nothing to do with difficulty.

Are you using the double-tap to dodge or have you bound it to a key? I have it bound to one of the thumb buttons on my mouse and have never encountered any issues with it not working. I actually disabled the double-tap functionality since I found myself accidentally dodging when I didn't want to.

I was feeling much the same towards the end of BM. Egypt was like a breath of fresh air when I finally got there. Even if every second mob seems to have "spite"  :oh_i_see:

Active dodge doesn't bother me, personally, but it does when I am trying to double tap and the game is all "derp." Most of the time I just walk out of the AE instead because it's more consistent (and doesn't interrupt my focus pistol dump, which I am inevitably casting right when they do one of their you-should-dodge-this abilities  :why_so_serious:). I also don't like when I DO get out of the area of effect but the game doesn't think I did.  :oh_i_see:

Preach it brother!  That is exactly the reason - because I want to.  But because I can't count on it to fire properly, I step out of the way instead.

Circle and wedge AEs - mobs that lay these down I'd say that I have less problem with because I'm constantly circle/spiral strafing.  Dodge not working isn't getting me killed, dodge not working consistently is annoying as fuck, to me (and I recognize that I'm not 'everyone', 'most people', or 'calm and rational in regards to this issue')

I am not talking specifically about you. Sure one can dislike it and adapt to it cause it's not a gamebreaking "dislike".
Then there are those who die a lot because of it SO you hate it and unsubscribe. If players die too much they unsubscribe. Funcom had to make sure that the new (for the genre) mechanics were harmless to the average MMORPG player or it would have costed them money.

Regardless if it feels harder or not to me and you, lots of players on the beta boards were complaining about the game being too boring (!) and hard because it forced you to move around mobs.

Consider it an advanced move for PvP and dungeons.

Active dodge is especially awesome when you're trying to tip toe forward and instead forward roll into the giant flesh golem you didn't want to be in melee range of.  :why_so_serious:  Then you have to backpedal nonchalantly so everyone knows you meant to do that and totally weren't milliseconds away from wiping the encounter.

The game, at least in my hours of getting out of the fire last night, seems to be pretty accurate when you are and aren't successful in getting out of the way.   I really haven't had a problem in thinking I've gotten out and instead getting hit except when I think I can dodge the cone/dash by standing right next to the mob.  They seem to have a small radius around them where you probably shouldn't be.

Ingmarr, you need to do Inferno.  Have fun dodging those instadeath red crosshairs you can barely see. Muahaha.

I have a nostromo n52 and it has this thumb-thingee that I use to control my fwd/back/strafe (like a digital game controller pad).  To your point, I find it accidentally fires a fair amount, but I know that is me switching from fwd/strafe/fwd/strafe too fast.  I'll try what you suggested, thanks!

Why, why do they hate us?

On the 'getting hit when I'm outside the zone' so far it has only happened to me on moths that have significantly larger models than regular moths, it happens consistently every time with those. Otherwise I haven't seen an issue with that.

No idea, but they hate us pretty hard. You're dodging red on black/grey/brown/red background.  The final boss in Inferno is a massive middle finger.    

At least in some other dungeons, you're dodging blue.  I can dodge blue just fine.

Probably doing it while you follow a red blood trail on green/brown ground too.

I am basically Ingmar's seeing-eye-Sjofn on the "follow the blood trail!" missions. Although to be honest, they can be a little hard to see even if you AREN'T a sub-human colorblind derphead.

I couldn't even do that one, and I'm not color blind.

Dodge:  Even using double-tap dodge, I've never had a problem with dodge not working when I want it to.  Lift off the movement keys entirely for a half second and then cleanly double tap.  I have 100% dodge success rate as long as I don't fuck it up.  I do accidentally dodge now and then when I didn't want to, which is a bit annoying but rare enough that I don't really care.  And yeah, if the double-tap doesn't work for you, rebind!

Blue Mountain:  Blue Mountain kind of sucks.  It has good missions, but interspersed with bad ones along with areas that are just sadistic in mob type/placement/density.  If you get burnt out on it I would suggest blitzing through the main quest and the mansion and going to Egypt.  Egypt is just a better zone overall and IMO easier, or at least less frustrating.  The individual mobs are slightly harder in Egypt but the spawn density is in general more spread out and reasonable.

Combat:  I love the combat in this game and honestly don't really get the problems people have with it, other than the slow pace.  It does take longer to kill the average mob than in other MMOs which may be a big deal for some people.  I don't mind the slower pace combat, but I may be out of the ordinary in that regard.  The feel of combat though is great for me though.  I find the controls to be tight.  My character does exactly what I want it to, so I find those complaints to be really opposite of my experience.  Maybe it's melee that feels bad?  Never tried that.  But with my ranged (mid ranged) builds, combat is definitely satisfying to me.  That part may be somewhat a matter of builds.  I've really enjoyed my builds and they keep things satisfying and pretty fresh.  I've got a hinder-based Shotgun/Pistol build that is entirely focused on me staggering my hinders which I enjoy.  Plus Shake and Bake is an awesome skill.  Then I've got a shotgun/blood penetration/impair/shield build which is also quite satisfying to use.  It could be I got lucky with the builds I picked being more fun than others, or I just like the combat and others don't.  Hard to know. 

PvP:  Pretty bad.  Not much point in going out until you come up with a legit PvP build, which is honestly not on the list of my priorities at the moment.  At least you can just zerg fusang, but that's not fun.  It wasn't fun in DAOC unless it was a relic raid, and it's not fun here.  They should give out the misc-PvP abilities for free.  Then I'd consider it.

I have to admit I was waiting to see what kind of non-standard peripheral wasn't being blamed for 'the engine's' dropping keystrokes.

 :grin:

didn't have a problem in CO or Amular   :grin:

I dunno man. There's almost nothing "easy" about this game if one's background is WoW and maybe you've heard of that RvR thing. The most off-putting thing is the decks themselves. It harkens back to the wft-do-I-do-now days before people just went to UO.stratics for the fotm 7xGM build. Then replace everyone's understanding of normal "heal" with only absorb HoTs, make levels some unpredictable Rank/QL/level-like thing, and ensure all advanced abilities don't show any on-paper improvement over the basic ones.  :-)

In other words, anyone looking for a normal diku is going to need to power through a whole bunch of not-WoW things before getting off-put by a functioning dodge.

Having said that, it seems like Dodge does something even in solo. I haven't run the numbers, nor looked it up, and maybe it's just wishful thinking. But it seems like it adds to Evade.

Having to RMA my 470 GTX. I think my weekend marathon playing (family was outta town) was too much for a card what was already down a fan.   Back to the 8800 GT.  Runs the game fine (frame rate aint bad in DX9 and doesn't look too bad), but the fan makes an unholy racket.   Even cranking down all the graphics options, the sucker spins like it's trying to take flight.  

Finished Cost of Magic.  FUCK YOU, QUEST.  Luckily two of the parts were pretty easy (ghoul pond and the land mine/tripwire/deadfalls) and the jumping puzzle was shorter than I expected.  I did leave that piece of lore sitting around, because, fuck it, I wanted to be done.  I missed the very last jump 4 times.  :tantrum:

Outside of active dodge, this is interesting: Devs stated multiple times that circle strafing mobs forces an animation on them, hurting their dps against you. I circle strafe all the time cause it's a PvP habit and breaks the monotony of fighting the AI, and it helps me in better placement and awareness of my surrounding (patrols, etc), but I have no idea if their statement holds true or not.

Hehe that is good to know, since I the same. It's kind of a poor-man's kiting in my book, particularly when there's nearby ads.

Fastedit: moved newb question to newb question thread.

So like. On the one hand, it's nice that the game acknowledges that hey! There may be ladies who are totally into ladies! On the other, I do not like that the game is convinced I am one of them. And I do not like that this probably never happens to dude characters (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong there!).

Really, it's just bound up in the "I have absolutely no agency whatsoever, being a slackjawed mute" thing I dislike. But it still is something I do not like. So here it is.

Hmm. Which situations are you referring to? Didn't really have the same vibe (as girl templar). Overall I would say the mute, passive behaviour leads to appearing  as rather cautious, shy person.

The patch deleted, from my inventory:

- my pistols
- the glyph out of my occult talisman
- an indeterminate number of my potions

 :oh_i_see:

In the new Kingsmouth quest, the Queen Slut was completely up in my face, sexually harrassing me, which coupled with the Dragon intro has me all "stop that."

fake edit: Ingmar, do not sneak between me and calapine!

Awww. Bah. Can't think of anyone hitting on me yet. Execpt that demon in Hell ("You, me...") and probably Danny Dufresne in his dreams.

Certainly Zaha in Transylvania who it is said is lesbian never hit on me. So it's probably just that particular quest that does it.

Oooh!  Where!?!

(I'm kidding.  :-P)

I beg of you. Visit the PC build thread and buy the Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme Plus II I've linked a zillion times now. If the 3-fan version won't fit in your case, get the 2-fan version. Cool temps, max the potential of any card, almost no noise at all under load. It's not cheap, but it can transfer to future gpus for years.

On circle strafing:  I just have been doing it out of habit, too. Be nice if it was worth something.

Already sent off the card.  I don't think I want to spend money on cooling a 8800.  I'll just live with the mini-XBOX sound coming out of my PC for the time being and annoy you all with the incessant whining.  :why_so_serious:

I should hope you're kidding, I totally said where right in my post!  :why_so_serious:

Think of slapping it on the 8800 as installation practice. Then OC the shit out of the 8800. When the RMA replacement comes in, rip it off the 8800 and put it on the replacement card.

If I had the money I'd remove the Twin Frozr on my 2nd GTX460 and put an Accelero on it. I blame kickstarter for this.

Kingsmouth is a big zone.

Argh.  Right-clicking items now only pastes into chat.  I can't seem to make it stop doing that (tried logging out and back in even).  I can't figure out how to activate the item for my current quest, etc.  Very frustrating.  Known issue?

Probably a bug. Maybe you just had your chat window open for input when trying.  But this is Funcom, anything is possible.

Filed a petition and moments later it started working again.  GM contacted me and theorized that maybe the ctrl key was stuck (since ctrl-rightclick is the paste-to-chat action).  Will try mucking with ctrl if it happens again...

I've had that happen but it is odd that you were able to do stuff like post etc. with the button stuck if that's really the case.

Am I the only one with off-center subtitles?  Most of my subtitles are left-justified.  It looks weird.

Yeah, I'm not entirely convinced of that explanation, but haven't managed to reproduce the issue again.

EDIT: It happened again, I tapped CTRL, then everything started working again.  I think the game may have a bug where it loses key-up events on meta-keys sometimes.  At least it's easy to work around.

I've had this issue as well, thanks for sharing the fix

It would be nice if sprint in this game worked like it does in SWTOR: a toggle that automatically reactivates when you leave combat instead of constantly having to manually recast it.

Edit: also, it would be really nice if somewhere on the abilities it told you the range.  I assume a 'dash' attack is some kind of charge, but what's the range?  Would be nice to know before I buy it.  :oh_i_see:

Seems it's just the way they do it. Frequently the subtitles are long enough to require multiple lines, so maybe they just thought it'd be weirder to have effectively whole paragraphs centered.

Click the downward pointing triangle underneath the AP cost for a more detailed description of skills.

ToR didn't have it auto-activate at first either.  Hopefully that gets patched in.

As for abilities, there's an interface option you can selection to get more detailed power descriptions.

I'm going to pick on some more minor things, but overall I actually like the game (outside of that one terrible bug)...  but I actually like it as a single-player game.  If this were a one-time purchase that I could just play through slowly whenever with no sub fee, I'd buy it.  As an MMO though, I still have my doubts.

So, another nitpick: They give you a friends list but there's no indication at all of when a friend comes online or goes offline unless you leave the window open.  It's a large window, with no way to resize it.  This is silly.  Also, there's a box I checked in Settings that's supposed to enable an audio cue when someone sends me a tell, but I didn't hear any cue when someone sent me a tell.  :uhrr:

Yeah if I could wave a wand and make this the F2P one instead of SWTOR I'd be pretty happy. This one just feels like the 'come back occasionally when you feel like it' game.

From a post on the forums:


Also, the instant AR builder has a 10m range that you can take to 20m with a passive.  If something has a specific range other than the default for the weapon, it will say it in the ability.  You do see this a lot for hammer/shotgun or anything with differently shaped attacks.

Yeah the shotgun cone attacks are like 5-7m or so, they're also not all the same.

It must have been some skills with 'standard' ranges for the weapon type I was running into is why it seemed so inconsistent in showing ranges.  Like there's a blade skill that says it'll teleport you, but the only range it lists is the minimum teleport range, not the maximum.  Spiral of Death it's called.

The charge type abilities can be sort of buggy, by the way.

I think both games are similar in this aspect - at least all my guildies played swtor as sort of a SP game with occasional co-op (paying the box price, and only subbing until getting 'to the end of the story' with one char), ditto with tsw.

SWTOR has more replay value for people who like alts, I think, but I can see it being a pretty similar thing, yeah.

SWTOR is a lot more fun in a duo than TSW is, though.  :why_so_serious:

Things I don't like: Arcardia is down

I think all the servers (except for chat) just fell over and died a painful death.

Yeah, servers officially down for an hour. Free weekend extended 6 hours to compensate

Doesn't help when that was the hour I had to play this afternoon.

Update: Game still sucks as a duo. Now we had a fed-ex side quest that spawns something that's trying to take it from you. That's fine, except you cannot both do it unless you like having one spawn for each of you, every two steps. And there's a horrible snare involved that makes it so you can't just jog on your merry way. Quest obviously wants you to solo it all by your lonesome.

Fuck that quest!

The other new side quest we found today involves escorting something around, except it leaves the area of its own quest and fails you for leaving the area. Even if you stay in the area and watch it walk around it bugs out, disappears itself, and fails you.  :oh_i_see:

That quest is terrible on its own.  I doubt I'll alt at all, but I hope it's not part of an achievement.

I was actually thinking, before today, that I might give the game another month, but spending all my play time battling bugs and overtuned quests today (after my last session prior ending when I hit another progress-stopping bug in Hell and Bach, that at least was solved today) probably killed that dead. I think I came to this conclusion the 4th time I died trying to finish Rogue Agent; I would have just left it for later but I was afraid I wouldn't be able to get the quest back if I paused it because it doesn't have a physical quest giver.

You can get all faction quests in your home city - for dragon you 'pick them up' from the fountain in the main hub.

Rogue agent is probably the hardest solo quest before you hit endgame, imo.

If it hadn't come on the heels of the parade of buggy crap and more solo instances that don't need to be solo instances today it probably would have bothered me less. I forgot to mention another one we ran into, in the new Carter Unleashed quest:


EDIT: Maybe I will end up paying for another month, since I can log into the game but not my account on the website.  :oh_i_see:

Derp.  :facepalm:

(Running away should still work if I get outside the circle though.)

There are many, many quests like that.  If you keep dying or are thinking something is impossible just take a minute to read the journal, see if you have any usable quest items and look around the area for interactables.

It was so awesome dying like 10 times to some revenant before figuring out how I actually had to kill it.

It's usually the player being derpy on those situations. I had one last night where I had to use this chain gun thing I grabbed in a previous part of the quest. Didn't occur to me to use the third thing after the previous two steps had me use the first two things  :why_so_serious:

I died pretty hard, and on the (short) run back, the light went off. Killed it quick and easy the second time.

I actually file that under things I like, can't just set the controls to cruise for the night, have to stop and think once in a while.

I don't like that I forgot to do 30 quests.

That's got to be the quest in Blue Mountain to take the package to the Franklin Mansion while the Jilted Bridge tries to stop you. That bitch IS EVIL.

Also, don't like the chainsaw quest at fucking all. Having to 1) equip the chainsaw and 2) use an inventory skill that you can't put on your attack skill bar in order to use the chainsaw is just fuckstupid. I died like 5 times and said "FUCK THIS QUEST."

I was wondering last night if I hit 30 or not. Being down that hour or whatever really put a crimp in my TSW time (probably a solid quarter of it) for the weekend.
Are you using a locked bag for consumables? I just put the inventory skill thingy in there, I keep a slot open because they come along infrequently.

I forgot about the 30 quest thing until it was too late (this was before yesterday's little rage fest) which is too bad, because it could have 'fixed' my complaint about the only dress shirts for men being from the pay store!

Yep, that's the one!

Yep. It's very easy to right click or click one too many times trying to get that skill off while 6 zombies are chewing on you and end up with the skill on your cursor instead of firing off. One of the reasons I don't like the consumables as well - too much of a PITA to set up. GIVE ME A HOTKEY!

It's interesting how people have totally different experiences. I breezed through the chainsaw quest and felt like frigging Ash from Army of Darkness while doing it. I want a chainsaw as one of those new weapons they're talking about! Like Sky I just put it in my locked consumable bag and went to town. The issue you probably had is that there is a short pause after you click it before the chainsaw swings which sometimes leads to "did I actually click it or not?" At least it does for me. :)

As for the jilted bride quest it can be duoed but it does make it rougher. My wife and I did it and it was kind of annoying. Still, concentrating fire on the brides made them die relatively quickly so it worked out. But yes, it was very annoying in a duo, no question at all.

I think it may be bugged, as someone said she's only supposed to spawn a couple of times, but for us we would kill one just in time for a new one to spawn. In a duo. And we mow through things together fairly quickly. It was just endlessly spawning her, basically. So ... yeah. Probably bugged. Which doesn't help.

There are too many "Hard" quests in Transylvania. There are almost none of these up until this point (like 4 total in Egypt).

Should be a bounty for a certain two people, but it kind of sucks for me.  When I'm on my normal play schedule, it's somewhat hard to find a duo/trio.

I thought the missions told you if it was 'normal' or 'hard' or whatnot compared to your QL or something?  I could have sworn I once saw one that the first time I looked at it (but didn't take since I'd have had to drop something) said 'hard' but when I came back later to actually take it and do it it said 'normal'.  But I could just be insane and have that all wrong.

Yes, Easy/Normal/Hard is like quest coloring in other games., at least at the super-newb levels I was playing at.  Don't know how that relationship holds up down the line (even given QL's wonkiness with mob coloring).

When you get to city of the sun god, you're going to be pretty near max QL.  So, hard changes from "difficult quest" to having nightmare mobs and being very difficult/impossible solo.

That sounds like it could be quite a problem since the game doesn't seem to lend itself well to group questing.

Well, other games do that too. Possibly just a question of marking them more clearly.

I've been able to solo all the hard quests in Transylvania with the build I posted in the power sets thread. The core of the build is having a high crit rating, passives that give you a HoT from attacking and then abusing the hell out of the Empower passive elite from fists. Once you have those you're good to go, although having a way to apply afflicted and using Clearing the Path helps the DPS a lot, especially against groups. I was mainly using green talismans when I first started so it's not even that gear dependent, just throw one one or two tank pieces and one or two heal ones and you're good to go.

If they're 'outside' quests - that is, there's no random solo instance in the quest - it works okay. It's basically like duoing in WoW, with the occassional "aw fuck you" of it being annoying (most quests, the clickies don't count for both and you have to wait for them to respawn, for example). The kill ten cthulhurats quests are a breeze, though.

My builds aren't good enough to handle them.  I was able to breeze through a couple in Besieged Farmlands when I bugged my penetration chance to 100%, however.   :awesome_for_real:

To put it into WoW terms, Hard early on is like a quest 2 levels above you.  Once you hit QL10, they're basically "Group 2/3". 

I began with a couple HoT passives, but it quickly got fairly pointless vs other stuff that pumped deeps. Maybe with some heal items, but without them the HoTs really sucked.

I don't like that Funcom was sneaky and used my old credit card info to subscribe me for another month when I have eaten all the content. :P

Same here... their billing system is about 20 kinds of clownshoes. I'm kinda PO'd about that actually, and can't really do anything until I get back from vacation in a week-and-a-half... at which point it'll be too late anyway. :uhrr:

Otoh I got 1200 of Funcom Funny Money(tm) when they mistakenly charged me for a month of sub right after I ordered, so um...yay?

Moral of the story: if you ever gave funcom your CC info, you have a nonzero chance of getting Proper Fucked.

The point there is Empowerment though that gives you some 120 health everytime the HoT crits even without any heal rating.
Stopped using it somewhere in Egypt myself to free up 2 passive slots for more damage and using Turn the Tables for a little active healing, worked really well but most Hard quests in Transylvania I wasn't able to solo when still in green equip.
Few dungeon runs later and full blue makes most of them fairly easy however.

I don't like the way quests sometimes lead you into solo instances.

I've never had a problem duoing quests outside of those instances, with a buddy or some random stranger who invites me to a group because they can see we are on the same quest. They generally seem to work exactly as they do when you are solo, except that if anyone gets an update then the whole group gets the update if they are reasonably close.

so its probably been said already but / not taking you straight to chat is annoying as hell.

They fixed the Black Marks in Fusang, back to 7 for taking a facility...  :heartbreak:

Yep. Go into control options and change it from / to /  :oh_i_see:

They have it defaulted to the / on the numpad, change it to the / you actually use.

ooh thanks

It honestly gets much better starting in Egypt as there are less solo instances (which are awful for grouping). It's still not perfect (:funcom: afterall) but it's not solomon islands level of retarded either. IIRC there was probably 5-10 solo instances in all of Egypt, and even less than that in Trans (outside of the main questline)


Is it using the turret you mentioned or are you just fighting the bugged mobs in Trans that have 100% pen chance? There's a number of mobs in Farmlands where players would penetrate 100% of the time if they had something like 50+ pen rating, was awesome :awesome_for_real:


Mother fucker.  :heartbreak:


And it still doesn't work perfectly. A lot of the time you have to hit / twice to get it to chat with the / in front of the command you may be trying to type. So if I'm in a channel that is defaulted to talking to the cabal and mean to talk to group, I have to hit //group because the first one won't be entered.

It was caused by fighting those pudgy looking ghouls.  Your penetration chance would just start ramping up until it got stuck at 100%.  Thing is, you could fight anything after getting it to 100% and it'd stay there.  Persisted through death as well.  Entering Agartha or crossing a major zone line seemed to reset it. 

This worked in both Besieged Farmlands and the Shadowy Forest.

Fuck you, Orochi Group quest. Man, that quest was ANNOYING. It wasn't as bad as the chainsaw thing, but constantly getting knocked out by security bots got old. I keep wanting some kind of stealth button but that's probably just me being overly-trained by FPS-type games where stealth is just a matter of crouching. TBH, it's kind of refreshing having quests that annoy you because you can't just bull through them, but it can still be quite irritating getting stunned slapped by floating robot eyes for standing in the wrong place. At least they don't kill you.

And fuck you, Bog. That is easily one of the most irritating areas in an MMOG ever.

That might be what I'm thinking of. All I know is it was awesome.

Yep. I'd recommend anyone reaching that point to just skip the quests there and move on to Egypt. While the mobs in Egypt con one level higher, they are actually easier to kill than the late BM ones.

Honestly, the bog was mildly annoying, but I can't see why it's so hated. I did it so fast and without many problem even though I am "almost" a melee class. What's all the fuss? The DOTing pools and pulling shades?I read so much hate about it that I was expecting EQ's Befallen levels of aggro, respawn and other mixed crap. Maybe that's what saved me, having the most dreadful expectations?

Wait to try The Castle in carpathian  :heartbreak:

So much hate for the castle, and I like the orochi camps.  I'd like to find the person who designed that one in a dark alley some night.

Also on the bog, they might have nerfed the spawn rates and locations by the time you got to it.  You might have also been over QL.   It's still bad, but it used to be worse.  They did it in like 1.0.3.

This is the first I've read of other people talking about the bog, and I will say it was definitely the worst part of the game so far for me.  Sooooo annoying.  Definitely the most annoyingly punishing area of the game so far.  But yeah, I can imagine being surprised it isn't worse if you've read tons of complaints about it.  It isn't so much that it's annoying to an unheard-of degree, but that it very much stands out as the most obnoxious area in the game (as of late egypt, at least).

Yups, good description. It's not the "worst area in mmos ever" but it's definitly in the context of TSW.

Unusual high mob density.
Filth pools that stack a DOT up to deadly levels in seconds.
Mobs standing in the filth.
Mobs having a pull-attack that ports you to them.
High respawn rate

Not undo able or a cock block, but certainly annoying.

The Castle.  This is making me want to unsub.

Yah, this sort of nonsense is just too much.  Even the Cost of Magic wasn't this bad.

First time through the castle probably took me at least 15 tries, did it yesterday and only got caught once.  The thing that really screwed me up about the mission

Same thing that I did, but it was fun trying imo.


For the bog - yeah it's not even close to Befallen level of bad, but it is TSW's equivalent. I think a lot of it was that any place you stepped you were pulled into the filth and it just became annoying. If they just mixed up the mobs a little more so that not every pond had someone pulling you into filth it wouldn't have been bad. I was ql9 or so when I went there and it was still annoying

Also, just because it was mentioned, Cost of Magic :Love_Letters:

I read a spoiler site that listed a few ways to just blitz through it.  So I stayed up another 30 minutes and did just that.  Then I got caught 4-5 times even getting into the Grey's room.  :oh_i_see:

Luckily while learning how to cheese it, I got fair warning of the end boss.  Died once (got caught like 3 times again), and then just threw on 2 more tank pieces, a heal piece, swapped in Lick Your Wounds, the passive that makes strikes Debilitate, and Anima shot (which I really didn't use).  Turned him into a minor annoyance.  This might be a viable setup for doing any Hard content, as I took almost no damage but was still able to dish it out well enough.  I don't even think Forged in Fire procc'd at all.

Ohh quest bugs.  Too Deep 4/4 may be bugged on your instance.  Just a FYI.  LE SIGH.

It's been broken since the 1.1 patch.  I keep mentioning it on the f13 channel, I probably should have posted here, given how much of a pain in the ass it is to get to the bottom there.  Sorry about that.

Yep, it's a bummer.  Had a good partner (some random guy that was in the same area, did a few quests) and that kind of took the wind out of our sails. I think there's something in the center you're supposed to click but it doesn't work.   Bad thing is that I haven't noticed it on the upcoming patch.   :oh_i_see:

Yeah I ran into that one the other day. From what I've read, there should be 4 special mobs down there that you have to kill and then when you click the thing it spawns the boss. But it looks like those mobs aren't respawning after being killed as there was no sign of them when I was there.

I also lucked into a group for hards in that zone, whole thing disbanded after hitting that bug.

Kickstarter ate my gaming funds, cancelled :(

Made it about 1/2 into Blue Mt in a month :)

I did finally manage to log into my account to cancel it. Apparently I didn't realize that my game account, and my account account, are not the same account. Not sure why it works like that, or why the website doesn't say 'hey dumbass don't use your game account' on the page.

PvP is horribly unbalanced and gear based and just totally broken.  Some tank spec guy just mowed down 20+ people, his health did not move.

I watch tank/heal-spec guys in PvE do this all the time.  Takes a while to kill things, but yah... non-moving health. 

It was a glance tank, apparently glances heal him and you take damage back.  Tons of undergeared newbs (like me) constantly glancing him kept him healed enough that the actual geared players couldn't take him down, and his AE sword abilities were doing plenty of dmg.

So awesome. The only problem is getting enough AP for all my dream builds...

I could make this into a multiplayer game, but there's no sense of urgency to do so. Therefore, while I intellectually understand the monthly fee, I am not getting anything personally for it. It'd be like making Skyrim $15/mo (and no, I don't expect ESO to be that).

TSW is a fun game with a great look, a cool story, a great storytelling technique and an interesting combat and character building system. They don't need to change anything. I'm just getting too old for the same game that 10 years ago I might have taken a few days off of work to put some serious time into. And I'm no longer interested in paying a few monthly fees just to complete a story arc that back in the day I could have banged out before the first bill hit.

This post right there should be put into the "Things you like" thread.

A glance tank is what I'm working on for my Dragon.  Looks like a really interesting concept.

They hurt, bad without the right stats. Just remember if you find yourself up against one of these monsters - impairs make tanks unable to glance, at which point they drop much faster. It's also important to know that so as a glance tank you bring CC breakers

Well, it's glance plus other things.  And I mainly solo, so no idea if it'd hold up in a dungeon.

Most of the damage and survival comes from being glanced.

As for solo vs group, skills are a bit different (generally still using blade/chaos though) and you want about 80/20 tank/dps gear for normal and elite tanking (don't know what you're running now), but for most dungeons you'll be fine as stacking defense works great until a couple snags in some NM mode that I'm seeing. I tanked elites just fine with def/evade stats

Just cancelled.  I don't hate it, but it's definitely starting to get a bit painful to log in.  It's not a big "I can't believe they fucked THIS up" kind of problem, it's just a million little things that irk me.

Minor things that bugged me:

-The real money clothing thing irks me.  I can't seem to find an outfit I like, and the prices on the clothes are pretty steep.  I don't begrudge them their money, but being asked to pay a sub on top of that rubs me the wrong way.  I'll happily come back when it's F2P and probably grab an outfit or two then, but it just feels too price gougey right now.  I can't get into a game where I hate the way my character looks, and unlike most MMOs, I don't think sticking around will improve that, because the gear I'm getting from quests and loot mostly doesn't change my appearance as far as I've noticed.

-Combat seemed repetitive, as others have pointed out.  I'm willing to concede that this may be because I never got far enough to really diversify (part way through the Savage Coast), but every fight felt a bit grindy and samey to me, and there's a ton of fighting in this game.  If the mobs had less HP or something this wouldn't be as much of a problem, but it just feels like a chore going anywhere or doing anything because I have to constantly stop and throw the same 1111123 sequence two or three times at every enemy that's standing by the side of the road.

-Maybe I shouldn't have picked Dragon, I don't know if the other factions have better stories or what, but so far, Dragon is just a pile of WTF.  I find some artifact, kill some monsters, send in a mission report, and I get back some bullshit fortune cookie metaphor about scorpions or some shit.  I mean, I get that we're supposed to be inscrutable weirdos, but I have something like 28 hours /played and I still have no goddamn idea what the hell I'm supposed to be doing or why I'm here or what even is going on beyond "viking zombie invasion, possibly related to a magic tchotchke".  Their faction outfit is kinda lame, too.

-I think I might have made the wrong weapon choice.  Grabbed chaos at the beginning, thinking I'd be a Bruce Lee type guy, but there's no real good martial arts outfit that I can find, and even if there was, I'm stuck with this big damn hubcap tied to my back for some reason.  Plus, it just doesn't feel appropriate to the setting, fighting zombies with kung fu feels wrong, I don't need to start throwing out flying crane kicks or whatever when I'm fighting against a shambling monster that can barely stand.  I tried switching to pistols, but got bored re-doing everything trying to skill up, figured I'd tough it out in the hopes that maybe I'll stop fighting zombies someday.

-New England is dragging on and on and on.  I don't know if the ENTIRE game is fighting zombies, but the box blurb claims a bunch of exciting locations like Egypt and Transylvania while I've spent I think literally 24 in game hours in the exotic lands of Maine fighting zombies, the most overused horror cliche on the market.  I was psyched for the first few hours of it, sure, but I am so ready for something new.  But no, looks like more zombies, more Maine.  Ugh.

I dunno, I don't HATE the game, it just doesn't grab me.  There's a lot of stuff I like, I'll probably be back when it's F2P, but for now, it just feels like a drag.

I love the game for what it is but also cancelled before the free month was up.  Something about it just didn't hook me.  I have no real complaints with the game and loved the puzzles and atmosphere.  I just gradually lost interest after finishing Egypt. 

Not enough community building. Games are good and all, but we stay for the people.

I think this is a big problem with a lot of games lately, i can't find a single reason why i would want other people playing TSW with me.  This is a single player, maybe coop game with multiplayer pvp, no reason for it to be an mmo whatsoever.

I can't argue with that.  I don't really care since this is probably my favorite single player RPG I've played since Vampire: Bloodlines, but it's MMO foundation is questionable at best.   Thanks to instancing and not many people playing the game people generally haven't gotten in the way too much, but I still have to admit that other people have probably detracted from my experience more than they have benefited it. They did do a good job with the 5 man instances, but that's really all that it has going for it in the multiplayer component at least for me.

I don't plan to play longer than the one month with original purchase (Ok, maybe one more month....)  I expect this game will go f2p after not too long.  I was really surprised it wasn't that way from the beginning.  It seems to be set up quite well for that and plays like one too.  If it goes f2p, I'll continue to enjoy it.  I just can't justfiy paying a monthy sub for a single player game.  The pvp is not adequate for a sub considering it is far below what I expect these days from completely f2p games out there.

They could pump out add-on questlines and expansions for purchase in their store a la LotRO.  I was really reluctant to pay the upfront cost to begin with.  It just looked so different (and is,) I had to give it a shot.

Ok, so I bought this a few weeks back and have been playing it quite a bit up to this point, but I think I'm finally done.  The game is decent overall, but it frankly would have worked better if they had made it a single player RPG, instead of an MMO, which restricted the game play mechanics.  The MMO aspects of the game are minimal overall.  I do really enjoy the setting, however.

In the end though, it just stopped being fun to play.  Biggest culprit was the inability to run more than one quest at a time.  I think this killed it for me worst than anything.  It got so fucking tedious running back and forth across the map constantly, when I could have been using that time to actually play.  Just drove me nuts and made the game tedious.  Final nail in the coffin was the lack of respec.  Killed it for me as I nerfed the shit out of my character when I tried to change into a different build, since I found I wasn't enjoying the one I started with.  I noticed I fell way behind the power curve after this, however, and it made it even more tedious to play.  Horrible design decision.

Canceled my account before free month was up.  Maybe someday I'll find a new MMO where I last longer than that.   :oh_i_see:

Eh? You dont have to move around the map at all.  Just ./reset to an anima well.   Lack of respec?  Huh? 

Respec = ability to take the points out of skills you purchased, and put them into something else.

We had this argument before.

Positives of TSW system w.r.t. respecs:

- While there's no respec, you at least don't have to make a new character to try something new.
- Any character can eventually learn every skill

Negatives:

- Having to go back and repeat all the same shit you already did to get skill points in new lines to the point where they're usable doesn't feel any better than rerolling. Arguably feels worse since the character has no identity from the story and also no identity from spec.

For me (and presumably Teleku) the negative is bigger than the positive, obviously not everyone agrees.

I know what a respec is.  Should've put that in green.
Anyways, I gimped myself in KM by trying to roll a hybrid chaos ele build.  It took all of one evening to get back on track and be viable; not a single second of which was wasted re-doing missions.  To each his own I guess, but I dont really see the problem here.  And hell, I'll be using the skills I 'specced' out of anyways.

Aside from maybe Rift, there's been no better 'respec' MMO out there imo.

It may not be instant, but just putting the AP you gain into a new spec while you keep your old one for a little while is a simple answer to this problem that is easy and effective.  If you are past the first few zones it won't take long at all either. I never once repeated anything in the game and had 'respecced' without any problem twice before Egypt, and a few times more by the end of Egypt.  Now perhaps not changing weapons every time, but fully changing the theme and abilities used in the builds I was employing, for sure.  I can sort of seeing it being a concern if you gimp yourself early before the AP flows, but early on you should be able to get through with just about any spec, so you still shouldn't be forced to repeat anything.  

Honestly, my favorite thing about this game:  One mission at a time.  It allows for legitimately good writing and story presentation.  It allows for missions that keep the attention of the player through multiple steps and possibly complicated solutions.  They don't have to worry about the player trying to complete 10 quests at a time and can actually go into depth in presenting a framework for what you are doing.  Even with something as basic as kill quests there is a meatiness to them, a framework that is lacking when you don't have the writing, character, and atmosphere to back it up.  This results in it feeling more like a good single player RPG than an MMO.  For me it takes away the grind and replaces it with a relaxed mood allowing one to appreciate story, setting, and atmosphere.  And it makes anything else feel like a total grindfest to me.  GW2 PvE, being totally the opposite of this approach, is totally ruined for me thanks to this game.

On the first point, I respec'ed to a totally different weapon, which may have been the problem.  But still, I don't see the drawback to just allowing a respec.  And Ingmar is correct, I really don't want to repeat shit, but that's what I've been told to do in game and from what I can see browsing other forums.  Just too much extra effort when they could put in a simple solution.  And apologies if you guys have argued over all this already, didn't feel like going back and re-reading all the threads.

On the second point, going to flat out disagree.  I felt there was zero difference between the questing in this game and in WoW/TOR.  It opens up with a nice cinematic scene, sure, but after that its all the same shit.  I ran around and killed zombie rats, then the next tier said I need to go find a paper, so I run around the highlighted area till I see a clickable thing, then it tells me to go kill more shit in another area, then I go find something else it tells me to click.  I didn't even know what was happening story wise most missions.  Just click, click, kill, kill, click.  Exactly the same as WoW in game play, but worst than TOR for quest interaction.  In TOR I got strung along with multiple cut scenes and dialog (which sort of forces you to pay attention), and could even make decisions.  For almost all the quests in this game, once you start it, unless you go click the top left quest log to read the description of the latest tier, you have no idea whats going on.  TOR was better for story and interaction, IMO.

Except now, I can't even work on multiple quests at the same time.  Frankly, this made the game feel like a big grind to me.  In WoW or TOR, I was constantly running through quests and felt like I was always advancing and accomplishing things.  Here I felt like I was artificially being forced to slowly grind my way through shit.

Fair enough.  I can't stand the questing in WoW or ToR at all, but damn do I enjoy it here.  Being really into the atmosphere and setting go a long way no doubt.   I never felt like I didn't know what I was doing, but I did religiously read quest text, and took my time with every bit of dialogue/fluff, so I always felt involved with the story (and I find the story in most of these missions to be much more interesting than what you find elsewhere, even if mechanically it is often similar [not always]).  This game really succeded in turning off my 'achiever mode' (no levels and lateral progression really helped with that too), and felt the way a single player RPG feels to me.  If I was still in achiever mode, I likely would have hated it as well.

-His angst sounds like classic Kingsmouth w/o the benefit of a helping hand (who the hell told him to reroll???).  As said before, FC fucked up a tad with that zone and the lack of any real helpful tutorial.  And older players had the benefit of a healthy playerbase back then.  Also Kingsmouth mostly sucked till near the end unless you had people playing around you; Polaris and the Orochi sections saved it.

-The game was literally designed upside down.  The final zones almost seemed as if they were fleshed out first.

-Boring missions??  Today I performed a hit for an old methuselah that turns into an owl in her spare time.  Only she neglected to tell me the hills were full of snipers.  Had to use cover and terrain to finish what was supposed to be a simple "kill 3 foozles" mission.   :oh_i_see:   After that I got called into an elite wherein we wiped about 6 times due to various fuckups on our part.  Easily solved by better planning and a quick skill change here and there.    In a few hours I had gained over 50AP.

Meh, I give up explaining - I'm starting to feel like a Falconeer.  We'll see what happens after tomorrow's content patch.  Things should be completely different with the new LFG tool, another ability wheel, and a bunch of other stuff to play with.  My cabal has its hands full already just hunting for fragments and running NM's.  How the hell one would need more is beyond me.

Anyways if you havent seen tomorrow's patch video:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8k1r-A3UAE

Pretty much this, you shouldn't have had to respec nor repeat content but more skill advice from experienced players would have helped. Quest limits irritated me initially but like trias says I eventually learned to take my time.

It's also mentioned that you shouldn't need to backtrack too often because the end point of a quest tends to be close to some other thing/place of note.

Definitely feels like a Single player RPG than an MMO at times though which is its downfall but I love it almost enough to get lifetime sub (almost).

Friends being ahead doesn't bother me since I actually want to experience content. Occassionally doing Fusang PVP dailies also boosts your AP gain.

But if you're not enjoying the writing/quests then there's no point to stay subbed.

Is there any way to juggle the quest you've got in that system or change the order you complete them in? I'm thinking of the supply run quest in Kingsmouth the Sherrif sends you on. I couldn't work out how I could pick things up in a different order or get both the medpacks she wanted and the cool pack the explosives guy wanted from the Fire station at the same time?

I'm rarely in Achiever Mode.  I also bounce between things a lot, which is both good and bad.  However it meant that the limitation on number of quests to take felt very restrictive and unnatural because it forced me to play in a way I'm not comfortable with.

I still like the game as a whole, but for me it's a downside.

Yeah, sorry guys, wasn't trying to rag on any of you or anything.  Just got upset with the game and figured I'd post my thoughts on it while uninstalling.  You all have valid points, and I can see why you would enjoy it, but it just wasn't working for me.  Lantyssa hit it perfectly.  The quest thing felt artificial, and forced me to play in a way I never like to play, which just soured the entire experience no matter what I was doing.

The point about the lack of information is also valid.  The game was fairly confusing right off, and I spent half the game minimized with google up to figure out what to do.  I 're-rolled' because I just wasn't having fun with my weapons combo, and wanted to try something different.  When I started, I was throwing points into stuff willy nilly at first without much thought, because I just assumed there obviously would be a respec option (then once I had the hang of things, just respec into a good build).  Since, you know, its not the year 2000 and every game has it.  Woops!

Still, it was a great effort.  I really hope they turn this into a single player rpg someday, heh.

Unfortunately I'm still experiencing an mmo craving right now, so guess its time to shell out even more money for Guild Wars 2.  I was sort of hoping this game would keep me involved for a long time till the craving passed, then I could wait out Guild Wars damn 'No Steam' policy.  Alas, looks like I'll cave.  :(

The problem with the questing is that the game does an absolutely terrible job (indeed no job at all) of telling you that they have completely reversed the normal questing paradigm in the game. I was*incredibly* frustrated when I first started playing because I could only do one quest, had to constantly run back to pick up the other quests I had missed and felt overwhelmed because I kept finding quests when exploring that I couldn't pick up because I could only run one quest and felt overwhelmed!

In the end someone explained it to me,and now it feels incredibly easy and organic when playing. There will always be a quest to pick up at the end off chain, and you should never 'run back' for a quest. You will eventually get back to where you started and can do another quest then - the whole game works in circles, rather than the hub model that other games use (and what this game looks like when you first get somewhere and find 5 main quests there).

It's a fantastic way of doing things and really helps their storyline - but it's completely foreign to other games, looks incredibly badly designed when you start playing, and the game doesn't tell you at all about this but just expects you to 'learn it'.

The quests you run into while questing are the green ones which you can have three of on top of one main/sabotage/investigation quest, you can also have one dungeon quest and the overarching zone quest.

Also*  that might have been mentioned before, but leveling works opposite to other MMORPGs. At first AP/SP come in slow and then start taking up speed. When you are doing Egypt or Romania it's possible to fill out an entire inner section within half an hour. So really any points 'mis-allocated' earlier do not matter at all when deeper inside the game.

*(it's bad to start a sentence with also, right?)

Well yes, you see those, but I also kept running into new quest givers all the time while doing a quest, and yes it was frustrating.  Never really noticed the circular thing, but I did have the tendency to always go back to the original quest giver until I had done everything they offered, then moved on to a new one, so there you go.

I believe so.

But sometimes it's okay.

I simply add notes to the map marking where there's stuff I wanna do.  When I'm done with said stuff, I erase the bookmark unless I intend to repeat it.  This keeps one from having to sift back through the mission log or wander around looking for missions.  The mission log btw, I wish was ordered chronologically by completion. 

 :oh_i_see:

I can now see why I have problems with this game and why it annoys me so much - I just don't work like that. That kind of inefficiency drives me nuts.

And frankly the game actually doesn't really work like that in my experience, not through the first 3 zones at least.

It absolutely did for me. There was always a breadcrumb quest at the end of a main quest that led to another main quest giver. at the end of beta they even did a specific pass and asked folks to identify quests which didn't have a breadcrumb quest near so they could add one to ensure the flow worked.

Re. effieciency - it's more efficient than the standard wow quest hub model in that you are always questing - you never spend time running back anywhere. It's just very foreign to that model and difficult to get used to.

Yeah that is how it worked for me, but not on my first character/run through. This problem I chalk up more to poor documentation than anything though, as on my second character when I finally stopped worrying about returning to the first quest area I found it flowed really well (even in the KM/SC/BM areas).

Though it really is going against everything that has been driven into us the last 7+ years and it's tough to get used to cmopletely, I still find myself trying to go back to the original quest area I started at for that day.

But there was often nothing that led *back* to the other quests that you didn't do yet on the prior main quest giver, and that's setting aside how the side quests derailed you off the 'route' all the time.

I had 3 or 4 different quests send me running back to the fire house in Kingsport to do different things there. Same thing in the amusement park in the next zone. If that's not backtracking I don't know what is.

I can't remember not finding my way back eventually, though yes there was backtracking to the same area multiple times (I don't think anyone said otherwise, only that you don't spend time returning to the quest giver specifically).

Yeah, the best part is getting quest rewards without having to return. I still don't like the quest limitations but I do adore and notice running along a given quest and finding the repeatable side quest like a message in a bottle. That's nice.

Not having to run back to turn in is great from a gameplay perspective, but it actually sometimes is really weird/bad from a narrative perspective - no closing dialogue from the quest giver in some cases really makes no sense.

The closing dialogue is in the window showing rewards. I'd [almost] agree that not returning to the quest giver is bad from a narrative perspective if it was not a modern setting, though even in games where there is magic I'd be alright with that too if it was as magical world.

The closing dialog is always from home base though, never from the quest givers.

In most situations, it makes no sense to go back to the quest giver unless you're actually bringing them something (which you do occasionally).  You're not working for them, you're working for your faction.  Your reports go to your faction.  You have a cell phone, super human thumbs, and 3-5 bars of reception everywhere.

Exactly what Rasix said.

A cell phone that your faction handler can send physical objects through! It's incredible.  :why_so_serious:

They have wizards on staff.  They can SMS you a forgotten demi-god if you'd like one.

If anything puts me off this game right now, it's the constant popping up of those whatchamacallitwhosisthings.  Every time I stop to look something up or try and figure something out, they suddenly appear and try to eat me.  I just don't have the concentration skills to remember what the bloody fucking hell I was doing before I killed it.  What the fucking fuck, Secret World???

I'm pissed off.

Other than the first one that you get the quest from they are non aggro, you can ignore them unless you use AoE and are fighting something else.  They are quite annoying and it was a bad idea.

Oh.  Maybe I forgot to do that quest or something.  Thanks.

It also stops on the 7th :)

You mean the thingies that pop up every two minutes?  I hope that's what you're talking about because it not being a permanent feature gives me hope.

Yes, those are part of the Mayan end of the world event thingie that has been going on for the hollidays.  There are morninlight (kinda like a scientology cult thing) tents in the main cities were you can trade 15 of the mayan k'ins you get from those guys for a max level blue weapon.

So that's the big deal about hanging out at the hippie camp and letting its wards kill them. It looks terribly dull, but at least there is some kind of payoff, I guess.

And still super lame.

At least the associated quests are a metric fuck ton of xp, those mobs bugging newbies is a really dumb move though.

Yeah, the quests themselves are awesome. The dbags farming them is just dumb.

Trying to learn the game, and having mobs pop up making me avoid using aoe, sucks. A lot.

Hold out another week.

5 days really, but yes i agree this was an ill timed and not very well thought part of the event.  Those things really should stay away from newbies or require a conscious choice to take part.

Oh, and if you pick up a fragile looking skull from one of them as a newbie: don't right click on it.

You can click off the debuff if you accidentally used one.

I don't like that when I log in the character selection my character has yellow lips and glowing yellow nipples and is wearing a black thong even though I have a perfectly acceptable t-shirt and cargo trousers.  Why do I even HAVE nipples.  I don't need nipples in a game.  And when I get in the game, I have my proper clothing on.  Why does the game insist that I see my nipples before I play?  It makes me annoyed.

Apparently, I need to go trolling the spoiler sites. I've finished everything in Kingsmouth. I've run Polaris. I ran to Blue Mtn. and snagged a QL6 blade. I have a blue QL3 fist weapon and AR from Polaris. I have some other blue gear from Polaris.

I can't seem to survive very long in the Savage Coast. I'm thinking that my builds suck and I just haven't yet found the right set of abilities . . . but I was wading through stuff in Kingsmouth. If this continues, then I might just go grind APs in Kingsmouth -- but I'd rather see new content, not redo old or farm mayan zombies.

What are you using atm? maybe it is salvageable still.

I am pretty far into the blades/AR deck build. Some of the AR powers are deep into the outer ring skills. Just to be safe, I threw a bunch of my post-Polaris APs into the Blades/Fist deck.

So, basically, I'm heavy on blades, moderate on AR, and light on Fist.

Bamboo cutter + shoot em' up + clearing the path is what makes that build, that is a guaranteed penetrate on every finisher.  After that work on the passives that exploit the automatic penetrates, specially sudden return. The AR/blade build is what i used at first and it did pretty well even in blue mountains.

Yeah, this is me, too.  I couldn't manage Savage Coast so it's back to Kingsmouth for me.  I don't mind so much, though.  There's a lot of quests that I haven't done and even the easy ones are pretty much always kind of fun. 

My first build was pistols/elemental and that got me almost all the way through to the end of Transylvania. It's only toward the end when I started finding myself repeatedly outmatched. Part of that was because I was still running around with QL8 green gear. If there's one thing to be said for the goddamn Mayans, it's that they've helped me get some better shit from the morninglighters, including kickass QL10 blue weapons.

That said, I've started over with a shotgun/hammer combo and that's been positively beastly. Most things are dead before I get down to half heath.

Hmmm, maybe we need a critique my build thread.

It would also get me motivated enough to compile a post for the character name three that lists people who are still apparently playing.

Savage coast was alright for me but it was those A'kab with the constant rushes.

What elite are you using? Stunning Swirl the Impair Elite for inner ring blades is amazing and I used it all the way to Translyvania

Most of the time i use the build i posted here (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=22886.0), stunning swirl is perfectly fine for any blades build though.  Unless you go glance, in which case art of war is the only way to go.

Do you know what I don't like doing?  The "That'll leave a mark" quest during an "End of the World" event.  That's what.

And also:  THAT'LL???  Really?  Was the quest written by the late Buddy Holly? 

Sorry.  I'm annoyed because I can't figure out what the stupid Hatchling is or what it does!  The Google didn't help me.  Hatchling.  Another word that sounds dodgy to me.  Oh well.  And I super stubbed my toe.  Otherwise, I'm just as ill-spoken as the rest of ya'll. 

Dammit.

It's a pet, click it in the inventory and you get an ak'ab baby to follow you around.

It looks mushy.

Mostly what it does is make disgusting noises.  I can't stand fighting those things.

Nobody can. From the sound to the cheesy charge attack to the way they seem to always push you into the aggro zones of at least two others. Ak'kab suck.

Please tell me that once I finish Solomon Island, I am done with them. Please?

I don't recall any in Egypt.

I am only just barely into Egypt, but wow! Awesome.

I am a bit pissed that I still cannot find kits that use the materials I have comined to sacred level, but at least I get normal rune drops now.

You won't get those kits til Transylvania.

Heh, well so much for saving up metal to make an uber sword.

I can make you a few weapons if you'd like. I've got a shitload of metal and kits.

I don't know about now, what with inflation and all, but when the auction house first came out you could get all sorts of blues really cheap so long as they were less than ql10.  Maybe try the tradepost if you haven't already.

I need to FIND the damn AH. As I recall, I stumbled upon it exploring London once. No idea how I got there or how to get back. Guess it's time to look at the map again -- but I know how to get  from Agartha to the clothes shop, and that's what counts.

EDIT -- Surly, that'd be awesome. I was saving and upgrading metal to sacred with some stupid notion that I'd make a sword not as good as this ugly as sin QL6 Blue Mtn sword (looks like a native american fratboy paddle) and then use my mold kit thing to make it not ugly. Now that I am in Egypt, I suspect I'll find a superior QL sword pretty shortly.

It's the building across the street from the clothes shop on the north west side.  Also has your bank and mail so it's worth going there.

Mail? I might have mail? I figured there'd be a UI indicator if I had in-game mail, kind of like SWTOR. The game doesn't really do a great job of introducing you to some of these things.

What's your character's name? I'll throw a few things at you tonight.

RevDrSlack.


Fnord.

Fnord.

Slack, ya...get that thing I sent ya?

I did, thanks! I sent you a mail back, and have been helping a buddy with his first "Federal case" by drafting a response to a motion for summary judgment. It's been taking up all of my play time. I haven't even been on past that day, but the sword was making a massive difference that day.

My current goal is to get my end of this helping done tonight so that I might have time to game before Friday.

You know what's awesome? Getting stuck on geometry and left unable to move, typing /stuck, and being told, "You don't seem to be stuck."

EDIT: Especially when it happens near the end of a solo instance.