The Secret World: Bees, Bugs and FunCompetence

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

«‹›9 »

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Not really a fan of the holy trinity but if you drop it you better have a system in mind that's not stupid (hello GW2).

# ¿ Jun 21, 2013 10:53

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 14, 2024 05:04

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

I wouldn't say the dungeons are disconnected from the story missions, since they fill in the blanks and are all connected to the overarching themes. They are not necessary to follow the main plot though.

Rookersh posted:

Bunch of questions.

- What would I be if I went shotguns/assault rifles? Don't want no magic or melee in my lovecraftian game.

- Is there any real difference between the "groups"? I'm not a big fan of the crazy magical ideal the Dragon seems to go for, and the "Old Money!" Templars also don't really sit that well with me. On the other hand crazy one world order Illuminati sounds hilarious to me. I know you get different handlers, but is there enough story that making another character to see the other guys stuff would be worth it? Is there a definitive "best" one? I'm going through each class in SWTOR right now for the different stories, so if they are different/worth it enough I might be willing to check out all three.

- I've heard there is a Cthulu "raid", does this game have story mode style thing for raids, so you can see them without a group, or will I need to whore myself out to goons to get into this stuff?

AR/shotgun is one of the cookie-cutter combinations for the endgame (nightmare dungeons + the raid), for levelling it's fine like just about every other weapon combination. You don't have to use magic if you don't want to (in fact nightmare beginner builds are usually pistol/shotgun) and only tanks are forced to use melee weapons.

More on factions here: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3552793&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=9#post416662589

It comes down to deck/uniform outfits and two faction-specific missions each. And mission debriefings but they're mostly in text form. The illuminati are actually the money guys, templars are more about libraries, artifacts and proper clothing. Kirsten Geary, the illuminati handler, is pretty entertaining but I wouldn't say the illuminati win anything "handily", there's simply no best faction unless you REALLY love PvP (then "best" is server-specific) and you could make alts to do all the different faction missions but that requires getting skills to about quality level 8 so you can finish Egypt and start the pre-Transylvania mission of your faction.

There's no alternative way to do the tentacle monster raid, but the boss most people call Cthulhu is in the very first 5-man dungeon (they reused the model for a lair raid later). Some of the dungeons can eventually be soloed in their normal version but it's not hard to get people for them or their elite variants. Join Mumble/the awful chat channel and you usually find someone to run you through.

orcane fucked around with this message at 15:29 on Jun 21, 2013

# ¿ Jun 21, 2013 15:17

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

press "T"

# ¿ Jun 22, 2013 17:05

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Ibram Gaunt posted:

Are enemies supposed to be kinda damage spongy? I'm in mostly QL4-5 gear and poo poo just takes forever to kill with my AR, it also makes handling multiple non swarm-type enemies a royal pain. Is this just something I need to grit my teeth and deal with or have I somehow hosed myself up? I'm focusing mostly on the damage trees with only shot of anima for some much needed self healing at the moment.

Also the aggro mechanics in some areas are baffling, it's usually fine but places like the north woods in the second Kingsmouth area is completely absurd. You basically are in a state of constant fighting with no time to rest.

They are more spongy than in similar games, I think. A fight with one enemy is a bit more of a challenge and if you aggro a second or third you risk dying unless your build or gear is really good, the game is mostly designed that way but you can work around this somewhat. Potions can help, and so can specific builds or abilities.

And I know this area, I had the pleasure of getting my alt killed there repeatedly last week. The problem in that ak'ab area (actually all ak'ab areas) is that destroying things like brood marks will always spawn one or two more big ak'ab, and there are plenty of patrolling ak'ab which will aggro if their buddies get attacked nearby so it's easy to accidentally aggro a ton of them. I think at one point I was AoEing some little bugs for the item mission there and suddenly had like 10 ak'ab charging me from all directions.

Dark_Swordmaster posted:

Was playing with a friend when we got the Orochi Polaris dungeon at the bridge on Solomon Island. It's recommended for 5 players and I don't know what QL, but it's listed as "normal" on the mission difficulty. I'm assuming the two of us trying it by ourselves will just get rolled and should seek goon backup to do it at some point. Yes?

Dungeons generally require 5-man groups. You need quite a QL-advantage to 2-man or solo the lower level ones. Finding a group for them is easy though, there are almost always people who'll join a normal dungeon if you ask in general chat.

# ¿ Jun 23, 2013 23:42

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Pubbies are pubbies ie. it's a bit of a gamble - often you will have reasonably competent players, sometimes you will get the sort that makes a boss fight take three times as long as usual because their DPS is very low or they keep dying to every boss mechanic.

The first three normal dungeons (Polaris, Hell Raised and Darkness War) are easy enough thoush so they rarely go wrong. The probability for a miserable time sharply rises with Ankh and Hell Fallen which have DPS and execution checks a lot of pubbies in that level range can't do properly.

Things get slightly better in elite dungeons because there's often people in QL10 purples or full blues who know what they're doing (or have the raw numbers to compensate for being bad) and run the dungeon for money or aux upgrade kits. The chance to get utter failures in your group is always there, and Slaughterhouse has a very high chance to turn into a wipefest by the 2nd boss.

# ¿ Jun 24, 2013 00:10

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Half the time I pug the (normal difficulty) Ur-draug fight lasts 3 night phases, people do 200 DPS in QL10 blues or I get people who can't break the shield on NKL-107 to avoid 10k volts. YMMV.

The "some overgeared guy who makes the run much smoother" thing is always nice when it happens tho. Note: You can get goons to be that guy if you're on Mumble or in awful chat.

# ¿ Jun 24, 2013 11:07

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Fruits of the sea posted:

Is it just me or is the crafting system really buggy? If I hit the clear assembly items button, everything in the crafting window disappears completely from my inventory and only reappears if I exit and log in again. Also if place an extra ingredient into a recipe that already works, it "breaks" the recipe, so that I can't make the item, even if I remove the wrong ingredient. I'm forced to remove everything from the window and then place it all back, before I can actually make the item.

Also, is making weapons really as simple as just placing 7 identical pieces of metal in the right pattern along with a toolkit? The descriptions for the element ingredients seem to hint that they can add modifiers to "items" but it isn't clear whether that includes weapons or not.

You can try ctrl-shift-f1 (I think?) or /reloadui if things disappear from your inventory. The inventory can be buggy at times but to me it's not constantly so. The crafting window frequently bugs out though, and the thing you noticed with "breaking" valid recipes with additional stuff is probably a side effect of Funcom disabling crafting of multiple items with stacks of materials in the past (due to bugs).

The elemental materials have effects on what sort of talisman/potion/gadget you create but weapons always consist of metal. In talismans the choice of material determines if you make a DPS, tank or healing item, but weapons just have the universal weapon power stat.

# ¿ Jun 24, 2013 13:48

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

You only get cutscenes with Geary before/after new regions, otherwise it's just text debriefings. You can always walk up to her and go through the conversations if you miss her, though. The trio from the tutorial flashback shows up in the raid and I think we're supposed to see them again in Tokyo but yeah, early 2013 and all that :woop:

Swalloing the bee (happens in the first seconds of starting the game so I won't spoiler that) enabled you to harness the life energy (anima) which makes you able to throw magic and shoot curveball bullets etc. All players are these ~~bee-controllec mechas~~ anima sorcerers which are needed to fight the impending doom. The plot's PoV is faction-centric but in the zones you're doing the same missions - it's presented as doing work in line with the interests of your faction and the survival of mankind, but that the factions are still very much in conflict with each other despite of a superficial truce.

orcane fucked around with this message at 15:23 on Jun 24, 2013

# ¿ Jun 24, 2013 15:15

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Often (not always because of Funcom) you still get kill credit by attacking your target even if someone else tags mission mob first. But yeah resetting tiers works too although it's a bit clunky.

# ¿ Jun 24, 2013 16:21

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Rookersh posted:

So, I did /chat join awful, and am in channel #awful, but nobody else seems to be in it. Is it just usually dead around 2:30pm pacific time, or did I mess something up?

Also, where do I buy the Cairo expansion? Apparently the last two issues are not included with the base game? Don't really care about rebuying them, but can't seem to find them on the item store.

Let me rephrase what RevDr said. Of the people who just log in for raids and those who show up once a month to see if there's anything new, hardly anyone uses awful chat. No one uses cabal chat. Hugh, me and several of the people who joined more recently do log into awful chat either manually or with the auto-login scripts. It's just that number of players is pretty low, before maybe 5pm EST there's hardly anyone online (I often was but I can't really play for the next two weeks). As Plat said /chat list awful (I run that with the auto-login script so I see who's on every zone change) shows you if anyone is there. Mumble works more reliably if you want to get the veterans on the line, though. But facts are not a lot of goons still play TSW regularly. Raid nights see a lot of activity but that's it.

The DLC issues 5 and 6 are in the item store under "Boosts", then "Account". Everyone had to buy issue 6 (with monthly bonus points for subscribers) and issue 5 was only free for people who had an active subscription/were on their first months by the end of last year.

# ¿ Jun 24, 2013 23:32

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Dark_Swordmaster posted:

Stupid question: Issues are account-wide, right? I didn't even notice I was selecting a character when in the store and "bought" (1200 bonus points!) the issues "for" my alt, but my primary can also utilize the issues right?

Yes. The mission pack will be in "delivered items" for all your characters, although I don't know if you actually have to claim it with each one.

# ¿ Jun 25, 2013 00:41

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Rookersh posted:

So I assume for leeching, I want attack power over healing power, correct?

e: I remember someone mentioning some abilities can be used with any weapon. Is there a list of these? Only plan to go AR/Shotgun, but if there's an ability in Chaos that gives me 75% increased damage with all weapons, that sounds like something that would be good to know.

If that's leeching while soloing, you mainly want attack rating and few healing pieces (one or two, possibly). For group healing it gets trickier and depends on what content you're doing and how powerful your gear is in general.

Also, most passives work with all weapons, exceptions are stated in the description. While weapons are usually unrestricted, proc conditions are specific. The best passives add 5-10% to all damage, like Fluid Defence, Twist the Knife, Ferocity, Lethality or each weapon's 10% bonus passive. Elemental Force is probably worth it too. In the beginning flat damage procs can also be good, but be aware you will eventually outscale them.

Dark_Swordmaster posted:

What exactly does it mean they may be invalidated any time after 30 days? As in it's a limited offer, or just that, "Hey, they may randomly disappear. gently caress if we know."?

Bonus points expire eventually, although I think they announce if they purge them.

orcane fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Jun 25, 2013

# ¿ Jun 25, 2013 02:26

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

The thing is AR doesn't have a single target consumer in the inner wheel so the grenade is all a newbie has a vailable for a while. They also don't get an AoE builder but that's a bit less of a problem (it's noticeably more annoying than shotgun for early Kingsmouth though).

Also wow, they want 1280 points for that princess outfit, with lifetime discount, so 1600 without it :wtc:

# ¿ Jun 25, 2013 19:25

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Get three round burst and possibly suppressing fire then ignore the outer ring for a while. Don't spend too much on self-healing if you can just kill things faster instead.

Zephonith posted:

But it's such a nice tiara

If you buy one of those outfits account-wide, does it get unlocked for both female and male characters or do you have to buy the versions separately? Because now I want to make a Jaime Lannister Templar alt...

Gender-specific, sadly.

# ¿ Jun 25, 2013 22:49

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Only raging spergs need stuff like that.

:getin:

# ¿ Jun 26, 2013 00:45

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Manifestations are no fun :colbert:

# ¿ Jun 26, 2013 13:18

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

I don't know, I liked that event (and I may or may not have gotten my first alt some reasonable XP and loot by pulling poo poo through the Scientology camp's wards :woop:

), although not technically due to the spawning zombies I kept aggroing with the elemental damage skill (randomly do some AE damage). I also just barely got to QL10 during the last days of the event so I missed a bunch of achievements and rewards as I only managed to finish the dungeon once (in its harder variant despite of pubbies being terrible).

Also, they've said that may come back in some form. Nothing stops them from reusing the code to spawn Ak'ab on us every holiday season or something.

Edit: "Powered by Dreamworld Technology" what?

orcane fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Jun 26, 2013

# ¿ Jun 26, 2013 16:56

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Well I'm sure they can tweak the random mob spawn annoyance next time. Unless they forget to change it and go on holidays immediately after launching the event. Again.

# ¿ Jun 26, 2013 18:52

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Sometimes reloading the UI (ctrl-shift-F1 or /reloadui) suffices.

Dark_Swordmaster posted:

I spent forty Soloman Island coins on a blue assault rifle at the Vinice dealer... But I never got the gun. Did I buy a recipe or something?

Also a protip, save the tokens for the QL6 blue weapons you can buy in Blue Mountain. Takes a bit more SP but it's well worth it, you can use them until you get Ankh/later dungeon blues or QL9/10 greens.

# ¿ Jun 26, 2013 19:19

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Honestly I wouldn't actually reward them for being completely terrible about customer relations* and support. Unless you want to play really badly. Technically they should be able to help but it's kind of hit and miss how long it takes them to respond.

I also just went to the TSW forums to see what experiences people had who had their account hacked in the past, and while it was a year ago, it never ceases to amaze me how even the shittiest company behaviour will find valiant defenders with the dumbest justifications. Account hacked? TSW can't be hacked, you're lying. Items stolen after the hack? Just be happy you can still play, suck it up and play from scratch, because account security isn't Funcom's responsibility. Support not getting back to you for a week after a hack? Guess you lied and they don't respond to cheaters.
:smug:

_{*They do care if people critizice their precious store clothes or if some internet drama queen spends half a day on a train in game. That warrants replies and personal ingame visits by the game director and a personal audience in WiP Tokyo.}

# ¿ Jun 27, 2013 11:12

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

No, Seoul is useless unless you have to go there for a mission. Sorry if you're dragon.

I did read about a lot of people who barely managed to fix the first machines, and completely gave up on the last one and took the easy way out. I guess in some way that is a pretty good, if meta justification. But it does beg the question, how worthwhile is it to base future game development on whether or not you pissed off enough of your players with certain game mechanics.

# ¿ Jun 28, 2013 17:12

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

There are a few areas in which that doesn't work (but most then end not too far from another major mission dispenser NPC). It's really refreshing. I also liked the exploration element there is to this design - the first time I ran through the zones I accidentally missed quite a few optional missions even though I didn't mean to "skip content".

# ¿ Jun 28, 2013 19:11

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

There were always differences in how hard nightmare mobs actually are. The werewolves hit like freight trains, pull you around, explode into filth and what not. The mushrooms are only dangerous if you afflict them or let yourself get overwhelmed, in my experience. They're still harder than other nightmare mobs though. The easiest ones are those whose nightmare special effect you can easily nullify - things like "if you get healed you go immune to their exposed debuff they stack on you" or "weaken them takes off most of their damage buff/damage reduction" are really easy to counter with a single passive. Things like "keeps gaining damage as the fight goes on" aren't.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2013 15:48

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Heads up: Due to their digital summer sale, TSW is currently :10bux:

on Amazon.

If you don't want to spend that without trying the game first, ask here and someone can give you a trial key.

orcane fucked around with this message at 15:43 on Jun 30, 2013

# ¿ Jun 30, 2013 15:40

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Captain Oblivious posted:

Googling information relevant to the task at hand (ISBNs, circuit info, etc) isn't cheating and is how the game is meant to be played.

Googling the exact solution IS cheating and there's really no need for it.

I don't know, I still enjoy investigation missions if I "get" them without going to find all the details myself. Stuff like translations from Latin to runes or Romanian to English is at some point just time consuming tedium. The same thing goes for getting the ISBN of a specific book they used among dozens of editions. Or actually playing Simon Says with a melody of up to 14 notes, three times in a row.

# ¿ Jul 1, 2013 20:33

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Nombres posted:

I honestly barely count The Red Thread as an investigation mission. The puzzles were so sparse and there was so much combat - especially in the last tier at the chapel - that it was pretty much a normal red mission. I have no idea why they called it one.

Yeah that's one of the reasons I don't like current Transylvania. There are so few of them, and then they consist of crap like Red Thread and Singing Stones. Singing Stones isn't really terrible but I've done that sort of quest too many times in Ogri'la back in 2007.

# ¿ Jul 2, 2013 00:02

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Bursk posted:

If a US buddy buys this and sends me the key (I'm in the UK) will I be able to use it okay? And are there Euro servers for the game, and if so, could I go on them if I use the US-bought key?

The servers are global (actually they're in the US), there's only one game version and I think your billing address/location only determines what currency they charge you for their funbux/subscriptions.

# ¿ Jul 2, 2013 00:14

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Cleretic posted:

Invariably, the majority of an RP community needs a good, solid punch in the mouth. The question is what they did to deserve it, and on TSW it's usually taking things way too loving seriously.

EDIT: Actually no, the TSW RP community needs a punch in the mouth because of their enforcing of their own views onto others. The tactical earpiece is a solid personification of that, but way too often they misinterpret things and just force their own misinterpretation on everybody else. I did painstaking research to ensure that my character has 'correct' opinions, grounded in established lore, and people will assue she's just talking vitriolic poo poo because that lore doesn't exactly paint anyone in a good light.

Is your character called Lilith? If not you can't call yourself RPer, sorry.

# ¿ Jul 2, 2013 13:49

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

I think Plat would have had dealings with her :lol:

And I really hope I will be able to find people on Friday to run this event stuff because that's the only time I can play during the anniversary stuff

# ¿ Jul 2, 2013 17:17

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

The1DevoidoName posted:

I wanted to try this world of surreptitious sorcery.

Can someone be so good as to PM me a referral key?

Sent.

# ¿ Jul 3, 2013 14:13

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Marx posted:

Some of the outfits or items are gender specific, otherwise I don't know.

IIRC all of them are gender specific, even if you buy the account-wide unlocks for 25% more.

Usually you also have to get the items from "delivered items", on characters on which you didn't buy the new clothes.

# ¿ Jul 3, 2013 21:34

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Yeah I just switched to leech poo poo for that fight. It's really bad if your attacks are multi-hit otherwise.

# ¿ Jul 6, 2013 14:09

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

guppy posted:

I have to agree with him actually. It's not hard to get through the fights, but it's a miserable experience with sub-1-FPS framerates, easy griefing on some of them, and terribly long fights to try to get things with low drop rates.

Yeah the idea is not that bad, perhaps, but the execution is a mess. Funcom keeps making stuff their own client/servers can't handle. Then they go on holidays.

Bad timing aside (this event couldn't have come out at a worse time for me), I'd like the event as such, fighting some bosses and getting some extras for it. But the bosses aren't very interesting to fight (few zergable outdoor bosses in any MMO ever were), and the lag, the massive FPS drops (from 40+ with details on 3 and 4 to 1-5 with details on low) and zone-hopping made worse by TSW's atrocious loading times, it's a really awful package. At least I haven't seen a boss attempt being griefed yet...

# ¿ Jul 6, 2013 18:14

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Yeah with reasonable boss HP and none of this rare drop crap, people who just want the rewards would do them once, maybe a few more times if they need the AP, and then move on. But now everyone keeps farming them even (and really, with 15 million HP doing them in smaller teams would be terrible) if they don't really want to, making the lag that much worse (and if you don't do them I hope you didn't want to run normal dungeons or finish missions nearby the boss spawn zones).

# ¿ Jul 6, 2013 18:53

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

I got three pets early but since then it's been all fireworks. Why :qq:

# ¿ Jul 6, 2013 21:31

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Fasheem posted:

Misjah's quest timer mod is the best. Wish I'd known about it when I was running Tyler Freeborn over and over.

With 5 characters times 8 bosses it gets hilariously cluttered, too. It's good I don't have time for this now :haw:

# ¿ Jul 7, 2013 11:12

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

HughGRect posted:

In regards to the lore, devs have stated the lore will be around after the golems go away.

I want the pet but since I'll be away for ten days, I'll have to try that on my notebook. Which already struggles just running London with low details. This is going to be fun.

# ¿ Jul 10, 2013 13:28

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Loading Agartha, 3 fps. I think this isn't going to work on the notebook :haw:

# ¿ Jul 11, 2013 20:34

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Len posted:

I called out a few golems during the event. But I probably won't have anything to show from it.

Of course not. You didn't circle-jerk enough _{(nor did I, despite of calling out golems, correcting spawn info/coordinates and helping people with instance info)}

I like that they're sometimes doing these "helper" awards but so far everytime they've done it in an rear end-backwards way (see also the "medic" rewards of the last ARG, although I'm not sure they ever sent them out). I'd actually rather they didn't reward anyone than randomly rewarding people who shouted the loudest and judged by GMs who have proven to be useless in every other aspect before.

# ¿ Jul 15, 2013 14:39

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 14, 2024 05:04

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

It's hotkey combat except you are more mobile (you generally "cast" on the run and there's a dodge roll on a medium cooldown) and you only have 7+1 active abilities at any time. The avoiding-bad-poo poo mechanics aren't revolutionary but you get to move a lot in harder content. Actual ability "rotations" or priority systems aren't too complex, most of the time it comes down to 5 builder 2 consumer with some cooldown management thrown in. There's some variety with weapons which don't use consumers which use all resources at once, buffs which trigger if you hit something seven times etc. but that's restricted to certain builds.

The item shop mainly sells cosmetic stuff like clothes, titles or pets. There are a few AP/SP boosters which mainly help with the initial rush to QL10 and one or two full builds but are otherwise unnecessary due to how the weapon skills and ability wheel fill up as you just play higher level zones. There's nothing pay-to-win about it.

orcane fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Jul 16, 2013

# ¿ Jul 16, 2013 19:09

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

«‹›9 »