The Secret World

ranalin wrote:

Ya people see that 200k number and freak out that its not millions or close to it.

I swear it's the WoW mindset. People have that old "6 million subscribers" number stuck in their head so anything less than at least half of that they view it as a failure.

The key really is the "cash flow positive" it means there is no risk of a loss, just less profit; which in turn means that the game will keep getting supported.

August State of the Game.

It pretty much boils down to "despite what you have heard, we're still working hard and being awesome."

They also hint at adding in bonus skills gained from the "kill 'X' number of 'Y' type of monsters" achievements later this year. Can't wait.

On a short hiatus to dip my feet into GW2.

I want to give the devs some time to make new clothes for me to buy.

Hopefully they muster up some decent clothing before the bonus points go away because I've still got like 13k bonus points to spend and not much to spend them on.

I feel like I'm stuck, a bit, in Egypt. The last few quests I've tried, I've failed on Hard level solo. Guess I need to shuffle some skills.

What sort of gear bonuses aid survivability with a DPS deck? I was all about health bonuses, but lately I've been trading health for attack/crit stuff, and that seems to help a bit. Not enough for the groups, but I can see I'm killing faster. Any thoughts?

Still love this system and the game. Just need to find some new quests that won't break my back.

State of the Game wrote:

We have a huge and exciting new feature pencilled in for Christmas, which ties into the achievement system and gives a lot more meaning to the usual 'Kill 1,000 Vampires' goals. (After all, who hasn't wondered what it would be like to have some vampiric abilities to play around with?)

Robear wrote:

I feel like I'm stuck, a bit, in Egypt. The last few quests I've tried, I've failed on Hard level solo. Guess I need to shuffle some skills.

What sort of gear bonuses aid survivability with a DPS deck? I was all about health bonuses, but lately I've been trading health for attack/crit stuff, and that seems to help a bit. Not enough for the groups, but I can see I'm killing faster. Any thoughts?

Still love this system and the game. Just need to find some new quests that won't break my back. :-)

Which quests? Don't forget that in Egypt you start having quests that are for QL10+ stuff (i.e. stuff you potentially want to come back and do later).

If you've been stacking health bonuses, you may have been using tanking gear? (i.e. not maximized attack power) If so, you'll probably be happier in a DPS build if you move much more towards a focus on attack: tanking setups magnify the size of the health pool, so they get a lot more mileage out of it (by reducing incoming damage, each HP is worth more, for example). A more pure DPS setup doesn't get that advantage, which means you have to finish things off faster—you really don't want to trade blows with the enemy.

Robear wrote:

I feel like I'm stuck, a bit, in Egypt. The last few quests I've tried, I've failed on Hard level solo. Guess I need to shuffle some skills.

What sort of gear bonuses aid survivability with a DPS deck? I was all about health bonuses, but lately I've been trading health for attack/crit stuff, and that seems to help a bit. Not enough for the groups, but I can see I'm killing faster. Any thoughts?

Still love this system and the game. Just need to find some new quests that won't break my back. :-)

There are many ways to skin a cat in this game so it's hard to be definitive. I'll offer my opinion but others may differ.

First off what is the QL of your weapons? The most important factor is your weapons. In Egypt you want to have the QL8 blues from CoV vendors ASAP. Egypt can be a real chore with anything under QL8 weapons.

As far as survivability goes with a DPS check specialization is pretty important. You will want to have one (two max) blue HP items. The rest should all be AP. Some disagree with the HP gear but I've found one piece of specialized HP gear gives you a great return on investment. I usually will rock a HP head piece or neck piece and they can usually be bought off of the CoV vendors as well. For regular questing you're going to want to stack as much AP as possible so if you have blue AP only gear you can't go wrong with that.

Basically the green levelling gear is okay for the earlier zones but when you start getting to the harder stuff in Egypt and Transylvania the blue specialized gear starts to shine. If you are working with greens make sure you go DPS pretty much across the board with maybe one HP piece.

Now what your gear focuses on such as +def or +crit or +hit yadda yadda yadda that really isn't huge. If you have a build that focuses on one thing then sure, it's really nice to have gear that adds to that. I've found that late game I have to switch builds up enough that gearing towards one specific build isn't terribly helpful to me. I tend to favor +hit because it is always useful. (there is a cap but one you won't hit w/o EPIXX)

I don't know what build you are running either so it's hard for me to comment on that.

Egypt is when stuff starts getting real, though. You'll begin to see mobs that are immune (or even thrive) off of certain status effects and you really need to have some good synergy going. Oh, and QL8 gear. If you are rocking QL6 or even 7 it will be annoying. I simply farmed the city area in The Burning Sands and did the easy quests in the city and when you zone in for tokens. It didn't take too long to gear up that way. Don't try to push too far into the zone until you have QL 8 gear.

(or you could just spec into rifles and roll through Egypt invincible in ql6 gear like I did. Sure, it takes 10-30 seconds to kill most mobs, but you'll never fall below 75% health. :P)

I have level 8 and 9 weapons, so that should be okay. I'll refocus gear towards dps, more. I am in QL 6-8 gear, mostly under 8. That may be part of the issue.

What's AP and HP?

+Attack and +health, respectively. What each one does is somewhat self-explanatory.

If you need help get in touch with me and I'll jump in game and help I kill stuff real good

I don't have some of the good blood heals yet, so I reverted to Wu and am using my new knowledge to kick ass again. Thanks guys!

Finally got Gore to finish out the Wu set. It took me a while because I kept ignoring the main missions. Once I picked them back up again, the tempo picked up and I got lots of AP. Now in the City of the Sun God and loving it!

I'm starting to branch out my skills, I'll probably backtrack to learn how to play some other weapons.

Robear wrote:

Finally got Gore to finish out the Wu set. It took me a while because I kept ignoring the main missions. Once I picked them back up again, the tempo picked up and I got lots of AP. Now in the City of the Sun God and loving it!

I'm starting to branch out my skills, I'll probably backtrack to learn how to play some other weapons.

Sounds like we're at about the same point, I'm just entering the City of the Sun God myself, and I'm about 20 AP off getting the last ability I need for the Paladin outfit. The City of the Sun God looks immense, I wasn't expecting there to be a whole zone behind Cthulhu-Sphinx! Still loving this game, the fact that I'm still having trouble tearing myself away to play a couple of hours of Guild Wars 2 here and there is probably telling.

I'm still in Egypt myself. Finally got my Slayer outfit and am a bit at a loose end as to how to develop my character next.

For no particular reason I've started filling in all the inner circle skills. I'll probably start specializing again at some point; I understand I shouldn't be dependent on any one skill set once I hit Transylvania.

I've also stalled in Egypt, but i was trying to blast my way through. Whenever i hit a rough spot i do all the quests around to get some more points and save the 'hard' modes for later or if i see a group forming jump in then.

I actually stalled out in the Blue Mountains but I think I have done almost everything and should be heading to Egypt soon.

My guy is parked in Trans at the moment. Got tired of doing everything but dungeons solo.

I, as usual, am covering you guys from the rear... Still on the Savage Coast.

Well, I still need to go back and run Darkness War at some point, so I'm not completely done with Solomon Island.

And I'm still missing Lore honeycombs from both Polaris and Hell Rising.

Redwing, look for me this weekend if you want to do some stuff in the City.

I was essentially forced to gear up to Tier 8 wearables and T10 weapons in Egypt, which led to some grinding and an encounter with a bugged quest (bah! - killing Arbeh can fail). I also had to tweak my skills loadout, because I could not DPS fast enough to survive multiple fights, I beefed up my self-heals and rearranged some skills. So that turned out well - I got some excellent experience in skill mixing. And I discovered that while the puzzle missions are one time only, they are great fun and yield a metric feces-ton of skill points.

Now, with Wu, I can DPS well enough that I don't need to modify it for most encounters. But I know how to if I need to. I'm also filling in the inner circle skills, and I've got some weapons picked out to try mixing in next. I'll probably drop back a few areas to get used to them.

Looks like things at FunCom are getting worse. They've apparently laid off most of their Oslo office, including the lead designer.

Funcom lays off lead designer of The Secret World

Wow... that really sucks.

Oh man. I'm not getting good vibes from this...

Enough bad news!

Spoiler:

Someone recut that odd GW2 advertisement, it fits better this way don't you think?

For all the doom and gloom I still do not think it is that bad. As long as they are in the black the game can keep going strong. I think that gennerally this will be a niche title, and while that status may slow dev a bit, the core fan base will be strong enough and large enough to keep things rolling.

Or at least that is the hope.

I think the game will be fine with a smaller but dedicated user base if they can keep their monthly (or near monthly) update schedule. A story focused game like TSW depends on the story continuing to be there.

Issue 2 should have been released yesterday (I actually haven't heard if it went live or not) and they are saying that issue 3 will be released on schedule. The New York raid is still scheduled for the end of October and they are promising a special event for Halloween (which is appropriate for the game since in-game it actually is just after Halloween in 2012). And the Tokyo region is still coming in spring 2013. So I'm confident we're good for a while at least.

ETA: Just saw this on the official forums..

Funcom wrote:

Please note: due to an issue found last night, that could have lead to a severe exploit, we decided to postpone the "Issue #2 - Digging Deeper" update to tomorrow, 13th of September.

We sill still have the announced downtime today for maintenance though.

Although it was a huge surprise when Martin announced his layoff on Twitter Monday morning, it actually happened weeks ago when the big, worldwide layoffs occurred. Martin said the Oslo office got hit particularly hard. He also implied it was part of the cyclic process in the industry when a game moves from development to production maintenance, and he said he's already got something else lined up in the IT industry.

Well, while we wait for Issue 2 to drop, here's the preview video