The Secret World: Bees, Bugs and FunCompetence

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > The MMO HMO > The Secret World: Bees, Bugs and FunCompetence

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OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

doomfunk posted:

The last runspeed upgrade is amazing, too. If they're saying skip the first one, I guess that's only mildly stupid of them. If they're saying skip all sprint upgrades, they're completely retarded.

You'll spend far more time ~~waiting for DoTs to expire~~ sprinting in this game than doing anything else, it's pretty much the main thing that limits how fast you do everything else and you should get all of the sprint upgrades as soon as you can.

# ¿ Aug 10, 2013 05:22

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# ¿ May 18, 2024 05:23

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

orcane posted:

Still, the wards exploit was pretty clear-cut. GM statements to that effect had been around since the 2nd or 3rd day of the event. The exploit wasn't accidentally dragging a few zombies through camp/academy wards, it was doing it on purpose to farm them for their rewards and event points. No one cared about people who killed a handful of zombies that way while doing missions in Kingsmouth/Savage Coast, and those people weren't the reason Funcom decided to give out the rewards to everyone.

Even if it was an exploit, it speaks to how bad they are at what's becoming more and more crucial: Getting updates out fast, especially for things like that which should have been fixable with a server-only patch, and they just got done with the exact same "let's not bother rushing a band-aid hotfix for something that'll be a missed opportunity in a week" problem with the hosed Fusang queue, even when they admitted they knew what was causing it.

# ¿ Aug 12, 2013 05:16

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

Brain In A Jar posted:

I'm running Pistols/Ele, with a focus on applying Afflicted and crits, stacking +dmg when afflicted and extra hit on afflicted passives.

Mini-version of my advice for making a cookie cutter level grinding spec:
- Use a melee spec because Breakdown and inner-wheel defensive cooldowns are just way too good
- By "melee spec" I mean sword/hammer with Clearing the Path and Raging Volcano
- Don't blow your defensive cooldowns when enemies are winding up AoE attacks you're going to step out of
- Get 3k max HP and otherwise stack attack power
- Rush skill level 9 on your weapons so you can get QL10s from the auction house and also never glance, which will massively increase your damage

# ¿ Aug 16, 2013 04:54

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

orcane posted:

The only way to "stack" attack rating is with blues, BTW.

Greens still come in two varieties with AR, there are high-HP and low-HP varieties, you should pretty much always go with the low-HP varieties.

quote:

And don't rush QL9 weapons by excluding everything else, especially if you have higher QL talismans from somewhere - yes your damage will increase, but your "level" is based on your highest skill levels and you'll get much less XP from red and orange "devastating" and "very hard" mobs/missions.

It seems more likely that mission "difficulty" is determined by total SP spent, since I rushed a QL10 and everything in Transylvania was still at Devastating. All the more reason to rush a weapon then, because HP gains from talismans are pretty static across quality levels, but getting glances off the table will give you an enormous damage increase and, beyond that, weapon power gives a lot more bang for the item slot buck anyway.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2013 08:35

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

Jedit posted:

I have a QL10 weapon and I still get glances.

Okay, not never, but a shitload less in Transylvania and somewhere between a shitload less and never in Egypt compared to what you'll see if you keep your SP distribution even. I had a point where my blade was as SL 9 and my hammer was at SL 6 in Egypt and every time I hit my hammer consumer it would glance everything and my blade hardly ever did, it's really important.

orcane posted:

That doesn't match my experience at all.

The original reason I rushed SL 9 in the first place was to get missions out of Devastating, and it didn't work. I don't know why you WOULDN'T want to do it if that was true, it has zero disadvantage aside from removing XP penalties on missions that give boatloads of it and don't actually get any harder if you bump your skill level up.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2013 14:36

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

Reverend Dr posted:

Simply beautiful

So they can make testlive restricted to players with a membership, but they can't make your DLC unlocks on testlive based on whether you have a membership. Funcom.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2013 02:17

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

Dark_Swordmaster posted:

I get I'm always using a loving pipe unless there's a comically large Mario-esque hammer around.

One of the mid-QL blues, I think QL7, is a giant pipe wrench.

# ¿ Aug 31, 2013 01:17

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

Frankenstein Dad posted:

You didn't gimp your xp, because mobs give the same amount of xp regardless of the strength of your character, and the amount of xp needed to gain one AP is always 40,000. Missions are a slightly different matter, with those above your "level" giving reduced rewards. It's something like this:

I think missions below your level degrade XP past a certain point too. I went back to check some investigation missions that I skipped at one point and the XP had dropped considerably.

The Locator posted:

I was wondering why the rewards weren't matching up with what the quest said. Doh.

The rewards should reflect the degraded value, it's just split up: The first half of the total XP is split into equal chunks for each tier, and then completing it and sending the report awards the second half.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2013 19:24

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

GEMorris posted:

This applies to investigation missions only. Used to you couldn't repeat them, Funcom then made them repeatable but for vastly reduced XP.

Non-Investigation mission reward XP does not degrade, ever.

People really need to stop making things up and check their facts before posting stuff like this.

I'm not referring to the degradation from redoing them, I mean there are investigation missions that I haven't done on some characters in New England that I'm pretty sure are listing diminished rewards.

I'll double-check and see if I can find some examples.

e: Okay, apparently that's not it, it's just that there's a ridiculous amount of variation in their base XP even in the same zone for some reason.

OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 04:40 on Sep 4, 2013

# ¿ Sep 4, 2013 04:20

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

Shelter blows because there are only 3 good healing elites, and the only one of those that isn't an AoE is Radiance, which is basically a tank-healing oh poo poo button. If you're on a fight that needs a tank-healing oh-poo poo button, spamming Shelter is either unnecessary, or takes so long that the tank will die. If you're not, then an AoE healing elite is pretty much all you need, especially if you took Cold Blooded, which would have been a solid elite if it only hit your defensive target, but is instead disgustingly good.

Also running /Blood is basically done for 3 skills: Cold Blooded, Exquisite Corpse, and Scarlet Arts. You can take Blood Shield as a builder if you hate killing yourself, but really spamming out Exquisite Corpse a lot is really good because it's bugged and if the shield is up at all, the entire hit will do 50% damage even if the shield only partly absorbs it.

Fist/Pistol is probably better for tank healing though because Deadly Aim and Support Drone give you a lot of room to screw up on tank healing.

OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 05:40 on Sep 12, 2013

# ¿ Sep 12, 2013 05:37

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

Toshimo posted:

Healing.

Correct answer: Casting Breaching Shot and Cleanup.

Also you seriously don't need to min-max fist/blood in 18s, you can bring trash gear and heal tanks with trash gear because Cold Blooded makes AOE damage not matter at all and Exquisite Corpse has obscene throughput for the cast time and resource cost. The healing requirement for 18s is easily reachable, the place where you lose is to geared-out leech specs that can do damage while healing, which helps tremendously on damage races, fights where phases are skippable with enough damage, and retarded PUGs that get wiped down to just the healer and tank.

OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 01:52 on Sep 14, 2013

# ¿ Sep 14, 2013 01:49

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

guppy posted:

[*] Opinions vary, but personally I think you should choose either leeching or maximum damage output, not both. (I prefer to maximize damage. Leeching works, and is very safe, but it's very slow.)

"Paladin" builds in this have the problem of needing a lot of heal rating to outpace damage and not building off-hand resources, which costs them a lot of damage. They're pretty pointless in general because there is nothing in solo content that you can't kill before your max health runs out by just adjusting your max health, and if something doesn't kill you, then you just Taco and you're back to full in a few seconds.

If you really need defense, then defensive cooldown abilities are a much better idea because their cooldowns are short (most of the CD will burn off between pulls) and they do a much better job of handling high-damage situations since the amount of damage they prevent scales with the amount of damage you'd take. Just do the smart thing and blow your CDs when you're about to take unavoidable damage, not when something is winding up an avoidable AOE attack.

The only heal I'd really recommend is the Regeneration passive for Martial Discipline because it's bugged and heals for a lot.

quote:

[*] I'm not sure what you should want as an Elite. Most of us use Fluid Defence, and that would probably be my recommendation, but we are also dungeon focused. At any rate, I'd scrap Experience.

Cool, Calm and Collected tends to be better with junker gear because it's ridiculously easy to get crits without gear with Elemental Force, penetration is better but it's also more gear-dependent.

mango sentinel posted:

Finally, between Shotgun and Elemental, which will be a more useful secondary for leveling with AR?

Ele is pretty special-purpose, i.e. something you take when you need a purge, the manifestation damage buff, Short Fuse, or you're running a finisher spam build like Bloodshot or Clearing the Path with Closer and Highly Strung.

Shotgun is probably better for soloing. Shotgun Turret is an incredibly good finisher for solo stuff, Breaching Shot is always good, and the good skills in it (i.e. Striker, Out for a Kill) tend to come early.

# ¿ Sep 22, 2013 21:49

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

Noobmares are usually a clusterfuck of people dying horribly from standing in poo poo and failing DPS checks, and healing is the least gear dependent role by a lot, so you're probably better off farming elites for a full blue set of heal gear from elites and then going straight to the usual NM pickup avenues.

Fist/Blood is an absolute cakewalk for healing, get Shadow Medic, Cold Blooded, Exquisite Corpse, Empowerment, and you're pretty much done.

As far as glyphs and signets:

Signets are a separate slottable for items. Signets are the grindiest exchangeable items in the game right now, so you should NEVER slot one on an item that isn't a custom purple (read: one you bought from Nightwatch dealers). DO NOT slot them on Nightmare drops.

Dropped glyphs you can do whatever with, they're worth basically nothing because the good glyphs are crafted and upgraded using Nightwatch kits.

OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 02:55 on Sep 23, 2013

# ¿ Sep 23, 2013 02:50

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

guppy posted:

I talked about this with Plat last night, but yeah, I've noticed people are harder to heal lately.

Something happened earlier that knocked a bunch of offensive stats down in effectiveness in the same completely-unmentioned way. They probably changed the scaling of rating stats and left it out of the patch notes because mentioning under-the-hood mechanics is not the Funcom way.

# ¿ Sep 25, 2013 04:17

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

The Dragon are a paradox: Depth through shallowness. They tell you of grand schemes, but the details are gibberish. You can only assume that the obscurity hides a larger plan, but they could just be pulling it out of their rear end as they go. They could be amateurs, but all they have to do is tease you with granules of a grand plan and you'll assume that they've got the whole universe down. The less they explain, the more you fill in, so their power isn't in their plan, it's in their power to drag you along thinking there's a plan waiting.

There can only be one conclusion: The Dragon are Funcom's writers.

OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 05:29 on Sep 27, 2013

# ¿ Sep 27, 2013 05:26

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# ¿ May 18, 2024 05:23

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

considering I have 800 pure metal in my bank, which has been collecting dust because nobody uses crafted weapons ever, that doesn't seem so bad.

# ¿ Oct 6, 2013 02:25

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > The MMO HMO > The Secret World: Bees, Bugs and FunCompetence

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