f13.net

As it should have been since the get go.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WDWa9Aqu-g&feature=em-uploademail

Interesting.  I just hope they don't make it quite as restrictive as SWTOR's FTP is.

Looks like there are no restrictions, instead all the new content will be DLC.

Here is a link to the FAQ (http://forums.thesecretworld.com/showthread.php?t=62789)

It seems like a good plan, everything is free guild wars style (you still have to buy the box) with regular DLC to replace the monthly updates from the looks of it.

That's a good f2p plan. New content, cosmetics and a convenience boost for the subs (assuming your free points is enough to buy the DLC) and a good game experience for free players. In a game that has a lot of space for new cosmetic items and content.

I hope that funding model is sufficient to keep them going and fund quality content.

What's the initiate pack?

And yes, it's already live. I kept getting postings from them referencing the end of the world on 12/12/12. Very well played by them.

I think I'll check it out. I hope they do well.

Finally.  Really a shame that they didn't see the writing on the wall after SWTOR (like everyone else) that the sub only model is dead. 

Everyone check out the game!  It rocks.

I'm really pleased with this, since I didn't have enough free time to justify subbing despite really liking the game.

I might be wrong here, but it still requires purchasing the box. So, unless a trial program starts soon, they won't have that many people trying it anyway since it's 30 goddamn dollars/euros/pounds/x.

There should be a trial that limits the number of ability/skill points you can acquire and allows you to only play in Kingsmouth.  Once people have a feel for the game, then let them choose whether or not they want to drop $30 to buy the rest of the game.  Its still a great deal at $30 and most people would more than get their moneys worth.

I have a lifetime sub, though i havent played in these past months, but still somehow can't get myself to regret it.
Should really check the game out again some time tbh, it was amazing :)

Interesting, this plan relies entirely on still putting out regular content packs.  I did not think they had the resources for that anymore.

Eeeexcellent!

This is great news. I may get the urge to play this again.  Likely just replay the entire story line at some point.  Further purchases will be dependent on the type and quality of content put out. 

This sounds like a good F2P plan.

That totally works for me. I just need to find the time to play it in addition to all the other stuff I want to play.

Really glad they went this route.  I wanted to play, and I don't mind buying a couple of cosmetic items, but I didn't have the time to justify a sub.

And they chose the f2p model I favor.  Hope it works out well for them.

Slight regret here because the lifetime sub was a present but ah well.

Still an amazing gaming experience and much more memorable then WoW even though I spent more time in Ironforge then in all of TSW

At first I was slightly annoyed that this happened a couple days after I finally got around to uninstalling this, but upon reflection I just don't see myself ever coming back to this one.

Everyone please come back.  I didn't start playing until December and it's lonely in F13 chat.  :cry:

Still have to buy box :( ehhh, maybe after steam sales.

Awesome news, downloading now.

I might give this a go for a week or two around Christmas.  The office is closed and I'll have free time.  Hmm..

I will definitely take a look at this in the new year.

That's my plan. I already spent some money on GW2 this month so this goes into January's gaming budget.

This is excellent. Just picked up the box during Microsoft store Black Friday sales for $10, haven't installed yet.

Wow, just got to the point where I pick a weapon skill and wowzers that's a lot of shit to think about. There a lazy-shit cliffnotes explanation of the skill system?

From what I remember, you don't have to stress too much about your choices because it's not hard to change your mind and just start up a new weapon.  All the inner circle stuff is relatively cheap.

And there isn't a limit to skill points, and they become easier to get as you get further along so it becomes easier and easier to branch out.

Well some of my models weren't loading so I tried to have the patcher fix the game and now I can't get into the game because it says it has to download 160 mb and I'm getting 300 bytes a second. That's pretty cool.

Will i get at least 30 hours or more for my 30 bucks?

I should think so.  I'm fairly sick of MMOs these days, and I still made it a month, or two, before cancelling.  The PvP is tacked on as an afterthought, but the PvE was pretty good, especially the investigation missions.

I'm not sure I got quite to 30 hours, but most of the other f13 people who played it seem to have liked it more than I did, so that's probably a good sign for you.

Main thing is to pick two weapons that go well together.  Hammer shotgun is nice but a lot of people go blade and... chaos I think.  Claws, rifles and blood are all heal centric so don't combine two of those (one is fine).

Actually it doesn't matter if you combine them, all weapons are almost equally good at dps if you ignore their other role.  Fist, pistol and rifle are healing, blade hammer and chaos are tanking.

It might not matter in the first zone but once you get to a zone where they expect you to have two weapons that synergize properly you will be gimped.  Since you can unlock everything you can just choose a better weapon to train into so being gimped is a very short term problem in TSW.

There are whole spreadsheets and such but a better option is just to follow a popular build until you learn about all the complexities yourself.

http://wordpress.tswguides.com/tsw-build-page/

Your first test if your build sucks will be the Bogeyman at the amusement park in the second zone.  The game will blatantly slap you across the face in that fight if yours is terrible.  Thankfully it's pretty easy to fix, and that fight doesn't really require anything outside the cheaper inner wheel.

Hmm,my build (or my.play) must have sucked worse than yours, I got stopped by a quest in Kingsmouth, I think the last mainline before going to the next zone?

Whatever it was, it finally convinced me that I had to have a healing weapon and ranged would be nice too so I dropped Hammer for Assault Rifle to go with my Shotgun and never looked back.  An hour later I was able to easily beat the mission that had stymied me previously.

This game is well worth $30 as a single player experience, and is even better with a friend or three.  It was too narrowly focused to justify a subscription for me, but I'll gladly return on occasion now that it's free and most likely willingly pay for cosmetics or content as I go if they don't get too greedy with the pricing.

The bogeyman is just special because it's one of the first fully instanced full on boss fights that acts sorta like a solo dungeon, with full on boss mechanics.  Pretty much every ability on your bar matters going up against him, and it needs to be focused (although there are a bunch of different ways to go about it) and not scattershot across a bunch of different concepts.  Alternately, you can just overlevel him and squash him with ql10 gear.

The boogeyman is just a bitch because you gotta run like halfway accross the map to avoid his instakill AE.

IIRC you can just LOS the AOE - I pulled him into one of those crevices around the center of the map, and just ducked around the edge when he started casting. Took a while, but took him down without taking much damage (I was running a pure dps build, no heals)

Yeah, Boogeyman was easy, even with a poor spec imo, if you LOS'd using the broken/deteriorated building in the middle on the hill. Full Elem without even equipping a second weapon at that point, since I didn't understand the system. It was definitely fun listening to people complain about the fight though

$15.00 on Amazon right now  :awesome_for_real:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007VTVKG6/ (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007VTVKG6/)

Re: builds, I've been using Yokai's site (http://yokaiblog.wikidot.com/yokaibuilds#toc13) as a guide.

In particular, this build:


It's been working out pretty well so far, and I'm pretty lazy about upgrading my gear.

I started playing in December, so I'm way late to the game obviously, and I tried to read up on the TSW Guide site before I picked a combo.  My first time around I tried Shotgun / Pistols, and at a certain point I started feeling gimped (when I entered the 2nd zone, Savage Coast).  So I restarted as Illuminati and went dps Fist / Blades, with the idea of heading towards the Thaumaturge deck, and I did better but I still wasn't cruising.  Multiple mobs in particular give me trouble and those charging / swarming ak'ab brood things in Black Goat woods suck balls, but I've been able to start and creep through the quests in SC.

If you're completely unsure I'd go with one of the TSW Guide builds or even one of the new starter decks they added.  You can access them from the skill screen sidebar thing.  That's what I did using Fist / Blood.  You at least get a change of clothes out of the deal, and by the time I was done with Kingsmouth that was a good thing as I was sick of looking at the default outfit.


Here's a something I learned up playing Kingsmouth twice through:

Save your Sequins.  About 3/4 of the way through KS you get higher QL weapons as quest rewards.  I had a high level player tell me to "save them and run to Blue Mountain vendors and buy new weps, then get glyphs".  So on my second go round I did exactly that and I had like 120 something Sequins.  I read up and found that Blue Mountain is the zone after the Savage Coast, so I made a Wetlands style fun run through a higher level zone and found the weapon vendors and bought two QL 6 weapons.  I think there's a market or something in game to buy glyphs but if it's there I haven't found it yet.  Anyway the QL 6 weapons make a noticeable difference in damage.  Not as much as I thought they would but I can certainly tell compared to my other toon who's sporting a QL 3 shotgun I bought in KS. (doh)


Speaking of which - I've heard you can mail things to your alts - can anyone explain how / where to do this please?



 

Also, don't ever restart.  It is much easier to switch to something new on the fly.

Everything mail related is done in London, at the Bank.

f13 chat works now?  :why_so_serious:

Should expect something in the Steam sale, considering Amazon's already selling this on sale this week for $15.

You should get an incredible single player experience for 30 bucks.

Well, okay then. Bought and downloading now. Thanks for the heads up!

Pretty fun but the ability to only run one main mission at a time makes me kinda stabby. Like I run all over Kingsmouth to get bomb parts but I can't also take the supply run quest where I run to pretty much the same parts of town to pick up other items.

They get a lot better at planning missions around that later, you really won't have any reason to have more than one.

I came to enjoy the single mission. I think it made me enjoy the actual stories a lot more.

Also is there any point to kiting or should I just plant and facetank enemies outside of dodging their telegraphed moves?

If you have a hinder build, it's probably how you want to fight.  Past Kingsmouth town, stuff does get a bit harder.  Most of my solo builds had some inherent tankiness, so I'd just open from range and then facetank.

Ranged v. melee comes more into play for dungeon runs.  Not surprisingly, ranged is a lot easier (at least when I played) just because you have an easier time reacting to what's going on.

Some builds can use snares and so kiting is viable but I wouldn't grow dependant on it because if you stay long enough to get to the most difficult zones there are counter effects that will prevent the use of most snares.

Snare isn't the right word, I think they are called hinderence but my memory sucks.

Hinder is snare, impair is stun.

I seem to remember one of the devs posting that simply circle-strafing improved survivability by around 30% but no idea if it was ever proven or not.

Also the "here's how combat works" hallucination being started by a mystic BJ on the Dragon side made me laugh my ass off.

Ranged means you're better at the NM Dungeons so yeah... just go with what's fun and take your time  :heart:

I think by the time you hit Egypt you'll get major dividends if you start to invest in alternatives to the stun lock win combos though since Transylvania is very anti impair (No idea about hinders)

Glad this is f2p now!  I am heavy into SWTOR, but plan to try this over the holidays.  Is melee a good playstyle?  Some games it's much safer and effective to plink away at range.  I wonder how survivable you are in melee.

I hear in endgame stuff melee is much harder, but for everything else its worked fine for me.

I played ele/shotgun, which meant I was practically in melee range anyway (shotgun passive for +damage the closer you are to the opponent coupled with the VERY limited range of shotguns in the first place). That said, kiting can be very useful, especially in dungeons where you need to keep adds off the healer etc. In my case this meant switching out my 'Do or Die' DPS increaser elite for the inner-ring shotgun elite (cone AOE hinder on a short-ish cooldown).

Melee is harder, but I found it a lot of fun.  For general play you can get by with either.

Right now I'm using one of the starter decks, "commando", which is Assault Rifle/Shotgun. Seems to have good synergy for AOE and single target damage, and for slogs it's basically anima shot spam. No stuns or snares however.

Melee's fine until you start the road for endgame raiding as others have said.

And from what i hear in the endgame it is technically "better", you just get the shit kicked out of you.

I'm hoping the terrible server lag and disconnects are due to it selling well. Frequent multiple second delays on a button press and warping / out of sync mobs is making it interesting.

The skill wheel is extremely unfriendly because all the complexity is available immediately and it is far from obvious. I think I get how it fits together now, and I like the idea of how it works, but trying to come up with builds quickly blows my mind. The number of combinations and too little idea of what matters makes it easy to lose focus.

This approach of no rush to end-game, repeatable content and horizontal progression really suits a subscription free game though. It means there's less stress about whether I'm enjoying it enough to play enough to justify the fee. I hope they can make it work for them, because I have always loved the setting.

Are you in the first zone? I've been playing pretty heavily and haven't experienced any lag or delays.

Yep... killing Zombies

Looks like it's a bad router at their provider (Cogent) since lots of other Asia-Pacific (http://forums.thesecretworld.com/showthread.php?t=63151) players are seeing the same thing. Oh well, maybe Funcom will notice / care when they get back from holidays.

Your best bet early on is it just pick one of pre-built decks and then once you're more comfortable  with the game then start picking the skills you want.

Oh, half the fun is running face first into the "wheel o' skill" and taking an impression. That Dojo where you could play with the weapons was 2 hours of play all by itself.

I picked my first set of abilities based on how cool I thought the Puritan outfit looked. :awesome_for_real:

Perfectly valid reason and exactly why i went for the slayer deck.

The wheel almost killed the game for me. I'm guessing that you can't unlock skills once done. I started mace/machine gun but am wishing I'd gone claws.

Given that I've finished the zombie road to the first quest giver I'd be tempted to restart, but the thought of using the character generator again makes me cringe (is it even possible to make an Asian character).

Can you ignore previous points you've put in decks and start a new part of the wheel (diminished due to established points I know). Is it possible to develop most/all of the wheel in the life of the game. My biggest wish is a way to reset it all I must admit.

This is what comes of a diet of WoW I guess because GW/GW2 et al has more forgiving skill selection and EvE was a lot more obvious in what you need to train compared to TSW.

I'm having fun in TSW but I'm glad it's F2P as unless I get my head around it I'm going to lose interest.

It's been a while since I played, but unless they changed it, you can unlock every skill if you feel like it.  There's no prereqs for unlocking inner ring skills, no cap on skill points, and you can equip any weapon you find/buy that you meet the level requirements for.  Also, you can re-do previous quests; essentially every quest is a daily.  There's really no reason to re-start unless you want a different faction, as I recall.

If you want to restart with claws or something, you can either struggle on for a bit with your current setup and just put the points into claws instead of your current gear until you feel sufficiently caught up, or you can get some claws and go back to the beginning and re-do the newbie quests tomorrow.

You can invest in any weapon at anytime. The only limitation is you have to have X amount of points invested to unlocked the next part of the wheel for that weapon (need the cheapest skills in a weapon's tree in order to unlock the next skill as you've learned by now). So you can have 15 points in AR/Hammer and then the next points you get you could just start investing them into fists, while you keep your AR/Hammer abilities. The passives from one weapon can (almost always) work with any other weapon. So Hammer's crit bonus passive will work with your fist build, and so on.

As for restarting - no point really unless you want to switch factions or change your character in the creation stage of making them. You'll start earning points fast enough that those 50-100 points you have in AR/Hammer now will seem like almost nothing soon enough (later on you can earn anywhere from 50-250 points in a night). You're never really done investing points until you've trained in every skill available.

As for the points being diminished - yes and no. You don't have to switch to a weapon you want right away because you like the weapon, which is good since that weapon will not be up to par as far as investing skill points (the points you invest in the weapons themselves to increase it's offensive or defensive abilities). As for the skill points (the parts which give you active/passive abilities for your hotkeys and what not) the inner circle of the wheel really was (it's been a couple of months since I checked/played, but it is probably still accurate) close to be as powerful as the outter ring. Lots of builds use inner ring abilities even at end game.

Probably not the most coherent as this was written in a hurry, but it should help a bit for what you were questioning

Thanks guys, that makes it a lot easier than I thought

Also passives from one tree work with all weapons, except the ones that affect specific abilities of course.  Active abilities do require that you wield the weapon that they come from.  A good build has passives from all over the wheel eventually.

I was hoping that was the case.

So that does mean you might as well just pick the faction that works for you and play through on a single character? Since it looks like the faction differences are in appearance and characterization rather than content. I seem to remember people giving templar the nod as most amusing.

Certainly a lot of the Dragon ones are mystic ambiguity.


They seem to alternate between fairly generic and ugly. I like the writing in the cut scenes but the character animations and models are pretty janky and look a bit stunned / stoned. Which is enhanced by being voiceless.

Yeah, pick the faction you like the most. There were only two differences that I remember, pvp and cabals. Cabals were (I don't know if they are anymore) limited to joining with only those in your faction. For PVP, the difference was in Fusang as Templar, and at times Illuminati, were overpopulated. For storyline entertainment, I thought Illuminati were the most entertaining, Templar were more of a dry humor type of entertaining (when there was humor), I didn't play much dragon but it seemed more free spirited, "everything happens for a reason" type of faction.

Raiding and dungeons factions made no difference. Questing didn't matter. Oh, there were the cosmetics from completing a deck in the abilities wheel as each faction had different decks with faction themed outfits.

I imagine templars are actually the least amusing, but i haven't actually played them.  Illuminati is pretty hilarious, but the only real difference are the end of quest emails so it is not a very big deal.

Dragon is mostly smug sort of "It looks meaningless and random to you, but we see further". It's a neat device but it doesn't really go anywhere in terms of meaning or creating goals. But that's always been the hard part of a neutral faction.

Yeah my Dragon character is the most progressed and I'm kinda bored with the "Ah yes, good job. Just continue doing whatever you want to do, because we know that if we just plop you here you have a 93.5242% chance of fixing all the shit that we want fixed there." thing.

The Illuminati is pure tongue-in-cheek, "Yeah, I know it's weird that we don't think any of this shit is weird but we've been around the block. Trust us, you'll be thinking zombie outbreaks are boring inside of a couple months so just roll with all this weird shit. Ciao!" complete with "Fun Fact" texts with weird minutia which is pretty funny.

(https://dl.dropbox.com/u/82533/tsw/Asraix_picture085-small.jpg)

I think I've screenshotted just about every Kirsten Geary response.  This was probably my favorite, just because it makes fun of Templars.

TSW is such a fun game and terribly under-rated.

It's janky and confusing. Surface appeal counts for far too much sadly.

I'm happy with it, because I love the setting, the writing and messing around with game mechanics is a hobby in itself. But the wife who got quite addicted to playing GW2 didn't even make it past the NPC models ("He looks like a zombie!") and animation in the intro movie, and the idea of her being confronted with the skill wheel, crafting, gearing and missions has no chance of ending well. The GW2 zones also have a scenic beauty and detail, but I think that's also partly because replicating a modern day setting is a lot more demanding.

Then again not going to try the sales pitch till the AU region lag is confirmed as fixed.

Yesterday some guy told me about "the fairly well known Mayan secret to loot".  He told me in /tell because it's a secret.   :ye_gods:  Is it an exploit?  He said no but some people think it's an exploit.  Is it?  I tried to look for it in the forums but it only took about a minute for me to lose the will to live.  I don't like official game forums.   :uhrr:

The mayan secret is just to stand in one place and kill all the mayans that spawn. You can almost set it and forget it, since you can script actions here like you could in SWG. It's almost like AFK farming. Exploit? Not so much. Lame? Definitely.

Okay, thanks.  If it's not fun, I don't want to do it anyway.  If I wanted to do something not fun, I'd be doing laundry.

The constant Mayan spawn is annoying. I have discovered that taking the related side quest makes it stop, but that ties up the slot. I guess I will just take the APs and loot.

The really annoying thing is they tend to pop up when you're in the middle of a tough fight and then everything goes sideways.

They are not aggro though, just watch the AoEs.

Not all of them. However there is a basic zombie model one with a specific name that is very much aggro.

Guess it sucks to be you if five out of your seven skills are AoE. ;D

Blades spec is too much fun. Have assault rifle too, but that's limited to 1 of 7 slots so far. Will finishing the first two bars of the inner ring gimp me if I max out both? It sure seems possible based on my current AP progression.

Gunslinger was my first and still most used spec. LOOOOOTS of AOE. Basically, any scenario leaves me fucked if the Mayans show up. Was in a raid on the Nameless Days big bad in Egypt when a shitload of Mayans showed up. They all beelined for me. Dead by dawn.

True about the surface appeal, but if you are looking for some depth, Funcom did a nice job on this game, in my opinion. Of course, I'm also on a recent return to playing Asheron's Call, and I didn't realize how much these MMOGs have been simplified until I tried this again. Some of the simplifications and improvements are nice and make getting into the games much easier, but I think consequently also removed a lot of dpeth, freedom, and "RPG-ness" from the games in the process. Even with the simplified magic system, AC1 casters are far more interesting than subsequent takes. Then again, the bajillion buffs available are still a bit insane.

There seems to complexity to TSW. For instance, item crafting seems odd without looking shit up online. I haven't done so yet in the hopes that there will be more than the fortune teller and roadie side quests.

On the other hand, I like that I can tell my AP wheel, "Hey, I want to go for a blades/AR spec" and have it tell me which outer wheel shit that I need. If I am correct, I will be most of the way to that deck before I leave Kingsmouth. I keep finding little quests that I haven't yet done and can't bring myself to move on to the Savage Coast.

The best thing about horizontal progression is that it encourages really exploring the hell out of the content. I can take my time in Kingsmouth because I won't get the gear to trivialize it and the gain in SP/AP won't do it alone. I guess I could even come back and do it again later if I wanted to skill up a new weapon combo much later. Though unlike GW2 the gearing is pretty vertical from what I can see.

It looks like the game pretends it doesn't need an auto-attack which is a shame. The CoH version would be very nice because you're going to spend a fair amount of time spamming a builder of some sort.

You're doing it right.

It's only now that I've settled on what I'll max out. Blades because they're cool. Exorcist outfit also comes with or without the hat and it's my favourite. Nothing says class like white and red  :drill: :drillf: :heart:

Neg. Gas masks + blaclk and blue.

I saw someone today that had unlocked the entire wheel and got a universal deck called "Panoptic Core" plus an outfit that looked a lot like Havok's from the X-Men.

I don't even really know what a deck is yet but I want a big one!

Were were thinking Tron.  Havoc is a good call.  The outfit looks really cool though.

Specially if you also wear the rocketeer helmet.

Picking a deck and tweaking it slightly has made the game much easier. Still hate the mayans though.

I'd agree with you there. My first run with the game I thought I'd be all "experienced" gamer and skip the deck stuff. Ended up with a pistol/chaos build that only had evade for mitigation and no healing.

This time I picked a deck - I'm about 2/3 in to Haruspex (Elemental/Blood) and I run around easily solo tanking stuff that was whipping my first character's ass.