Review and refresh of skills?

quix0te

This is directed at Funcom, if anybody there reads these forums.  So TSW had a steam sale last week, and I went on facebook and encouraged people to try it out for 10$.  But I always have some reservations.  The Secret World setting is SO GOOD, with really neat missions, tremendous flavor, and cool NPCs.  But the character design is SO BAD.  When I was leveling, I would look at the skill options available to me (pistol/blades, later blood too) and have no enthusiasm for the skills I could buy.  I would play the content, and pile up skill points but when I bought a skill, it was a means to an end, to work my way up to another skill I actually wanted up the tree.  

The worst experience came after I capped out my character and thought, "I'll start over".  I went looking at the other weapon options and just couldn't muster any enthusiasm.  Pistol/blades/blood had (a few) good synergies with focus, penetration and crits.  What I discovered was that the other weapons didn't even have that many synergies.  

As the new players come onto your servers, I hope you want them to tell their friends "This game is awesome!" rather than "This game is cool but...." I'd like to encourage you to address two issues:

1)Put some synergies in the second tier of your weapon skills, the 9pt. and 12 pt. slots, so that there are more possible weapon combos.  Give shotguns a penetration synergy, AR a dodge synergy and elemental a focus synergy (for example).  This willl allow more replayability, and also save some of your new players frustration as they begin to figure out your wonky character system and realize they've chosen a bad weapon pairing due to poor synergies.  I don't know if you have access to datamining, but if you do, look at what skills are rarely used in each tree, and change those slots into one of these synergies.

2)Make each skill clearly superior in some way, even if its a tradeoff of another element.  For example, when I was leveling blades, I encountered bamboo cutter.  Bamboo cutter is identical to blade torrent.  The only difference I could find was that blade torrent built a LOT of aggro, and BC didn't.  Otherwise they were the same ability.  Just looking at other blade skills, I saw fortunate strike.  Thats a putrid passive.  It comes down to a small damage increase when you could instead have perfect storm which tacked on a DoT that more than doubled the damage of blade torrent.  Fortunate strike is just terrible.  But you swallow that turd pill to get further up the tree.  You NEVER want your players to feel like that. "I spent points on this lousy power I'll never use just to open up the next power".  Voracity is also godawful.

This is why I'm not playing your game anymore.  I went looking at the skill trees and couldn't find any that didn't piss me off, and the vast majority didn't synergize.

Funcom, if you read this, go through your data, find the abilities and passives nobody uses, and swap them for abilities and passives that tie together disparate weapons, like hindered for elemental and penetrating for chaos.  Make higher tier abilities better than lower tier abilities, even if its just a 10% damage increase or a small chance of an effect triggering that synergizes with another weapons special case.

TalulaRose

Link to an in game help channel by players.

 

Need help in-game? [Presenting the Sanctuary]

http://forums.thesecretworld.com/showthread.php?t=76927

 

Here is sticky on top of the game forum called "Builds and Decks".

General Build Guidelines

• TSWGuides' "My first 60" Point starting builds - has several starter builds for the early zones of the game.
• Protection (Phys/Mag) vs Mitigation (Evade/Glance/Block)

PVP Build Guides

• PVP Builds (Consolidated)

Tanking Build Guides

• Tanking Stats Revisited by Primislas
• Katarina1: Healtank & Leechtank Guide (High Performance)
• Tank NM -Shotgun/Blade- High Mobility, Single Target, Ranged Capability
• Bringing Hammers Back. A Blunt Approach to Tanking NM
• Ciritty's Pink tanking guide (Not furry!)
• Tanking: the current state of things
• Tanking: Evade vs Block vs Defence
• Blade/Chaos Tanking - Normal, Elite & Nightmare Dungeons

Healing Build Guides

• The Reaper: The Complete Guide to Leeching (Beyond Healing)
• Fist Healing - Normal, Elite & Nightmares
• Bloody Assault - An AR/Blood Healer build
• Empowerment to the People! Theorycrafting for Fist Healers
• Aela's End Game Fist Healing Guide(s)
• Blood/fist healing guide for normal, elite and nightmares
• Fist/pistol endgame healing builds/guide

Damage Build Guides

• Joining the Special Special Forces: A DPS Player's Primer
• Nightmare Dungeon DPS Build Theory & Practice
• End-game DPS guide by Katarina1

Hybrid Build Guides

• One build to Solo Transylvania
• Introducing the Full Support to Nightmares
• Regen like Wolverine (a good solo farming build)
• The Bard - A DPS Hybrid

Build Guide Sites/Blogs
Note: The sites listed below have TSW character build information on them. These are community driven sites and therefore we have no control over their content.

• The Secret Database - Builds

Deck Builders
These external sites have tools to let you experiment with ability selection to find how your weapons and abilities synergize with each other.

• Drakkashi's TSW Ability Wheel
• TSW Deck Builder by Darxide (originally from Pyrinoc)

 

Here is a link to a player run site for builds.

 

http://www.tswdb.com/builds/

 

 

500+ abilities and somehow you cannot find synergy?

 

And since one character can learn every ability there was no need to restart.

 

 

 

Octagon7711

Thanks for the guides.  I've seen a lot of these before, but it's nice to have them all together.  What happens is people buy the game, start playing, pick skills that sound good, start getting their butts kick as they get to higher levels, then start going to forums and researching how to put together a stronger build (if they don't just give up). 

So they discover the skills they picked have no synergy, or were nerfed, and they have to rebuild, because you can't respect, you start adapting your build or just make a new character, you did learn something but it feels like you wasted a lot of time.  Eve is the same way.  You can't just jump in and play you have to do heavy research first in order to come up with a strong build and not have wasted or non-optimal points.  Also not a fan of having to take skills you'll never use because they're next on the skill tree, in order to get to the skill you need.

quix0te

Thanks Talulla, but I wasn't fishing for help in building a character (although now that you've posted that, I'll look and see if there are any good elemental/blood or elemental/shotgun builds).  I was just asking the devs to clear away or improvesome of the 'deadweight' abilities in the skill trees in favor of abilities that give a weapon synergies they didn't have before so that I can build a character I want, not one that fits into the narrow 'strike zone' of synergies between various weapons.

aesperus

Sadly, the setting (atmosphere) of this game has always been by far it's best quality. It also has some really interesting quests, and the dungeons aren't bad either.

However, the combat's always been a bit dull (though most people looked passed it because the setting was so cool!). Given how long the game's been out it's highly unlikely we'll see much of a skill revamp. They could trim some of the fat (more useless abilities), and maybe add a couple new combos in their place; but that's not going to make the combat much better, tbh.

One of the biggest issues with combat in this game (besides some of the clunky animations), is that there's too much sameness in the abilities. No matter what spec you go with you're essentially playing the same way. Build a resource, spend it on something powerful. Probably the most interesting build in terms of synergy is the boon stripping / nuking spec, but that's it. And sadly it's useless for 99.9% of the game. There are almost no parts of the game that make such a spec necessary, and in PvP most of the time you can actually kill faster just using a standard vanilla nuke spec.

Kimikaze

They have done a lot of changes to rarely used abilities and adjusted how the states system works in some situations to try and increase build diversity. I strongly disagree on making outer ring abilities more powerful, the horizontal progression is one of the advantages with the system. I do however agree that it can be hard to get excited about other weapons (or later abilities in the same weapon) if you already have found a combination you enjoy. The only weapon that really has a unique twist to it is the quantum brace imo, so that does not help much. For me it was going for passives from the other weapons to refine my deck that motivated me, not the weapons themselves.

Ortwig

Originally posted by Octagon7711

Thanks for the guides.  I've seen a lot of these before, but it's nice to have them all together.  What happens is people buy the game, start playing, pick skills that sound good, start getting their butts kick as they get to higher levels, then start going to forums and researching how to put together a stronger build (if they don't just give up). 

So they discover the skills they picked have no synergy, or were nerfed, and they have to rebuild, because you can't respect, you start adapting your build or just make a new character, you did learn something but it feels like you wasted a lot of time.  Eve is the same way.  You can't just jump in and play you have to do heavy research first in order to come up with a strong build and not have wasted or non-optimal points.  Also not a fan of having to take skills you'll never use because they're next on the skill tree, in order to get to the skill you need.

The highlighted sentence is probably one of the biggest misperceptions about combat.  Because each character can unlock the entire set of weapons and abilities, and the entire set of skills, there is never a need to respec.  Re-rolling a new character simply puts you back at ground zero, when often all that's needed is a tweak to the current set of abilities to improve synergies between actives and passives.  Often, it's simply picking a condition that your actives weapons are triggering and looking for a few passives that better exploit that condition, and it generally does not require a lot of AP work to get them.

Granted there is a bit of a learning curve, and the system doesn't really work like any other current MMO, but that doesn't mean there aren't good and effective builds that can be made from a build that isn't working so well.  It;s really just a matter of course correction, not major surgery.  And there are plenty of sites and people willing to help with advice, if that's what's needed too.

Ortwig

To the OP: the problem you are running into is looking at the abilities in a vacuum.  While any single ability may not seem like a lot, when paired with certain other abilities (actives or passives), the can make very effective combos, especially if you are looking for a particular effect, or building a deck for a particular role in the trinity.

In the example you mention regarding Blade Torrent and Bamboo Cutter, you may very specifically want a deck that builds more aggro, especially if you are tanking, while for a dps or support deck you obviously want to avoid that.  The skills are similar, but different enough that you can identify a specific purpose to using them and build decks for each.

In fact, the whole purpose behind the skills is to allow you to create your own swiss-army knife and be able to swap them in and out based on the need at hand.  You may want a soloing deck, maybe one specifically set to single target, one for AOEs.  And of course decks for each of the trinity roles.

It sounds like you are thinking about each of these abilities as powers in and of themselves, when you need to look at the effect you are trying to build, then create sets of abilities that make sense for that effect.  Use the Gear Manager to build a whole bunch of decks, then use them like golf clubs -- specific sets for specific purposes.

Hariken

Originally posted by Octagon7711

Thanks for the guides.  I've seen a lot of these before, but it's nice to have them all together.  What happens is people buy the game, start playing, pick skills that sound good, start getting their butts kick as they get to higher levels, then start going to forums and researching how to put together a stronger build (if they don't just give up). 

So they discover the skills they picked have no synergy, or were nerfed, and they have to rebuild, because you can't respect, you start adapting your build or just make a new character, you did learn something but it feels like you wasted a lot of time.  Eve is the same way.  You can't just jump in and play you have to do heavy research first in order to come up with a strong build and not have wasted or non-optimal points.  Also not a fan of having to take skills you'll never use because they're next on the skill tree, in order to get to the skill you need.

This is the game's big problem and you never hear about this. New players pick the skills that sound fun to them. And pretty much are. But once you get out of those starter area's it all goes to crap. I've heard this so many times from ex player's of the game. Why have so many different skills when most of them don't work well together. People will only take death so much before they get tired of the game. No wonder its F2P now. Great setting and story telling but players shouldn't have to spend most of their time researching decks than having fun playing the game.