The Secret World

I was playing again last night after the servers finally came back, and I still feel the combat as overly clunky. Perhaps this is due to some server lag, but the targets AOE base ability for Warlocks seems to use an animation that is suited more for a finisher (big bloody pentagram on the ground) and so is slightly too long for an ability you spam. (I feel it would make more sense as a targeted AOE channeled ability that placed the pentagram on the ground and kept ticking damage as long as you channeled, but whatever)

There's some cognitive dissonance as the single target ability, which gets set to Q by default after the tutorial, is completely pointless as it does less damage than the AOE and only against a single target. Placing it on the Q by default makes you think, initially, that this is some sort of bigger single target attack, but it aint.

Then there's the Drain/Heal ability 'Reap' that, again, is one of the defaults active from the Warlock build which I have yet to see actually work. It requires a Corruption of at least 10 to use, but I never seem to be able to get it to fire off either because I've queued too many basic attacks or because at low levels you heal ludicrously fast anyway so its pointless to use an ability that restores 25% of your missing health.

I understand where they were coming from in terms of making all the intro abilities pretty much the same, but that seems to come at a cost of having meaningful flavor initially and having the initial synergies from the first abilities you choose to buy be rather lackluster.

Yeah I feel that they have partially ruined one of TSW's strongest selling points - the skillwheel. The lore/story/atmosphere is still good.

I'm enjoying it though.. the new itemization system is interesting, not sure if it's better or worse than the old one.. The way items drop really needs some work though. Normal mobs only drop caches (after level 15) which is mostly just vendor trash. Bosses in dungeons seem to drop distillates 95% of the time, and you can only loot 10 (18 for a patron) dungeon bosses per day, so if you run more than the 1.7 (or 3) dungeons in a day then you get absolutely nothing for them.

So generally speaking the item progression is about finding the right kind of item with the right kind of mk3 effect on it as early as possible, then just upgrading that for the life of the game. I found a chaos focus with mk3 protection effect on it from like the 2nd or 3rd quest I completed, so I guess I'm set for life now...

qwertyqweqwertwqert said:

So yeah uninstalled. That may be the worst game I've ever played.

Click to expand...

Confirmed best game ever made.

So, they're capitulating on some of the Fee-to-Play stuff at least.

yeah Livestream stuff so far: just dumping my notes (anyone can trade, Elite dungeons, guaranteed dungeon loot, increase AP/SP at 50) • r/SecretWorldLegends
thumbs up across the board really.. looks like they've actually been looking at what people are saying about it on reddit.

Good to see a breakdown on what their plans are, mostly curious what the plans are for AEGIS or are they just going to scrap it.

Picked it up again and it's still pretty fun. You can still learn every skill, but passives rarely synergize with other weapons which is good and bad.

The single target 'Q' attack is weaker than the aoe, but it doesn't cost any resources so it's still useful. I agree the game doesn't explain that very well and it's a little bit before you fight anything that you'll actually run out of resources on.

Tl;dr game's still fun and qwerty's still wrong about everything

The problem with this revamp is that it doesn't fix the main thing that people hated about it in the first place. Like, their one and only concern should have been to make combat better, and they literally didn't change it at all. Sure, they took out and revamped the way you use and acquire skills but the actual combat looks and feels exactly the same way...horrible and clunky. Why even bother? I've been playing Legends since the beta and it looks and plays just like TSW always has, only easier. No one is going to stick with this game that didn't stick with it before because it has the exact same pros and cons that the original game had. In fact, the removal of the old skill wheels, the complexity, and the difficulty will probably end up costing them more long term players than people who will replace them.

I never had any problems with the combat in either version and in no way found it "horrible and clunky". It's honestly not really better or worse right now, just slightly different. The ability wheel was also pretty cool, but led to a bunch of "must haves" and "worthless abilities/passives that you still had everyone running fotm builds for the most part. In that respect it's a fair trade off.

My biggest pro and cons are the dungeons. Their dungeons waay better than any other MMO, but instead of ever adding more they spent time on making a theatre so people could put on fucking plays.

The difficulty looks like it starts easier, but now they have many different difficulty levels at the end game similar to wow and mythic+. So it should end up being much more difficult than original TSW by the time you get to Elite 10.

People have been bitching about TSWs combat for years. Pretty much every who quits the game lists it as a reason why. If you found it acceptable before it's not surprising you'd find it acceptable now, because it's almost identical.

As far as the biggest pro to the game, it's easily the story. No other MMO comes close.

Bitching about what? It's standard MMO combat but now just requires very slight aiming.

Ambiturner said:

Bitching about what? It's standard MMO combat but now just requires very slight aiming.

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Is complaining about TSW's combat really news to you?

It's only standard in that you move and react with the keyboard the same way you do in other MMOs. But it's a clunky mess. From the way your character moves to the interactions with enemies to the animations, none of it feels right. It feels half-assed. If they did an exit interview of people quitting the game, the overwhelming majority would cite the combat. You could literally read the complaints for days just by typing the issue into Google, but I'll just leave you this one article that sums it perfectly:

The Secret World’s combat is not fine — and it probably won’t be, either

Long and short of it is qwerty was right yet again

Rafterman said:

Is complaining about TSW's combat really news to you?

It's only standard in that you move and react with the keyboard the same way you do in other MMOs. But it's a clunky mess. From the way your character moves to the interactions with enemies to the animations, none of it feels right. It feels half-assed. If they did an exit interview of people quitting the game, the overwhelming majority would cite the combat. You could literally read the complaints for days just by typing the issue into Google, but I'll just leave you this one article that sums it perfectly:

The Secret World’s combat is not fine — and it probably won’t be, either

Click to expand...

Don't care what a shitty blog says, the combat is identical to pretty much all the non-action MMOs. If you think "moving and reacting with a keyboard" is the only similarity then I'm wasting time even responding to you

You're an idiot if you think it's a single "shitty blog" that holds this opinion. It's virtually everyone and if you think otherwise you're not the one wasting your time, I am, because you're ignoring reality. You probably think Shroud of the Avatar has good combat too.

Anyway, I enjoy TSW, but the combat is still shit.

Yeah, no, everyone knows that TSW combat is clunky as shit and doesn't feel good. It has always been one of the main complaints about the game and TSW:L didn't fix it.

It always feel like your character has a stick up his ass somehow.