Finally Free To Play (but requires box purchase)

[Kageru]

Yep... killing Zombies

Looks like it's a bad router at their provider (Cogent) since lots of other Asia-Pacific players are seeing the same thing. Oh well, maybe Funcom will notice / care when they get back from holidays.

[Ginaz]

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.

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.

[Kageru]

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.

[Ginaz]

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.

[Threash]

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

[Setanta]

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.

[Kail]

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.

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.

[Segoris]

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

[Setanta]

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

[Threash]

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.

[Kageru]

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.

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).

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.

[Segoris]

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.

[Threash]

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.

[Kageru]

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.

[Fabricated]

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.

[Rasix]

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

[Soukyan]

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

[Kageru]

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.

[Signe]

Yesterday some guy told me about "the fairly well known Mayan secret to loot".  He told me in /tell because it's a secret.     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.   

[Surlyboi]

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.

[Signe]

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.

[CmdrSlack]

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.

[Surlyboi]

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.

[Threash]

They are not aggro though, just watch the AoEs.

[CmdrSlack]

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

[Lantyssa]

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

[CmdrSlack]

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.

[Surlyboi]

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.

[Soukyan]

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.

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.

[CmdrSlack]

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.

[Kageru]

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.

[Llyse]

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

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 

[CmdrSlack]

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

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 

Neg. Gas masks + blaclk and blue.

[Surlyboi]

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.

[Signe]

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