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A few basic questions about TSW...
Little_Bird
Member Posts: 2
Hi!
I purchased TSW sometime ago on my Steam account but I haven't gotten around to playing it (because I'm engaged in another MMO with family and friends). However, I have an opening now and would love to try TSW and I have a few questions before I install it:
- Is it possible to play through the bulk of the lore of the game by not engaging in the more time consuming activities (such as 'heroic mode' dungeons over and over etc)?
- What is the community like in the game? I know this is not really an objective question, but would still love to hear from players!
- After one has played through the "leveling up" or more single player oriented quests, what do people end up doing after that? Or what is the end-game portion of the game like? (My priority is more story-line and lore oriented at least at the start.)
Thanks for any and all help and advise!
Little Bird
Comments
1. Almost everything in the game except "end-game" dungeons are soloable with the right skillset and decent gear. However best gear does come from nightmare dungeons.
2. Community is pretty amazing compared to most MMO these days. People help each other most the time and will answer questions. I've never had any quarrels with anyone yet.
3. End game is pvp and elite dungeons aka nightmare mode. For the most part, this is why I hate the game. Finding groups as a low geared player is near impossible. The game has a horrible horrible horrible group finder, so mostly chat is spammed to hell to find a group. PVP is ruled by those with good gear. Dungeon gear will always be far superior to a normal geared player.
Between, there is no leveling. The only thing you do is earn AP to learn skills. I guess you could call it leveling, but there are no levels per say, just amount of skills you know.
"End-game" PvE content in TSW consists of 5-person dungeons, a couple of single-boss raids, Nightmare and Lair areas in the open world zones, and as of two days ago, Scenarios (similar concept to LOTRO's Skirmishes: instanced missions with variable difficulty levels and group sizes). "Nightmare" open-world areas & the associated missions can be done solo with the right build & adequate gear; Lairs are designed for groups.
Some of the story and lore is contained in the eight dungeons and the first raid; the Nightmare (hardmode) dungeons do not add anything extra to these, they differ mechanically and in rewards.
The best gear in game is obtained through Nightmare dungeons and the New York raid; however this gear is not necessary to do any of the open world content or the main story.
PvP I won't comment on as I generally avoid it.
Apropos of the poster above's comments about group finding for Nightmare dungeons: your best bet for getting into them these days is to use the custom chat channel #noobmares (see this thread on the TSW forums). The rudimentary LFG tool is hardly used for them, and LFG chat in Agartha is (a) full of spam from people looking for ridiculously overgeared speedruns and (b) is only accessible if you're either in Agartha, and thus not doing much else apart from looking for a group, or in a dungeon already.
Thank you dancingstar & HikaruShidou, all I wanted to know and more!
Really glad to hear that End-Game and Story-Line is separated *for the most part*. I understand that some lore flows over to End-Game and Dungeons like all games!
Will start tonight! Thanks again!
To expand a little on the above posts (all good info), the PvP in the game has a small but dedicated following, primarily focused on theorycrafting builds, and countering other popular builds (glance tanks were the rage for awhile). Coming up with a good build that counters what other players are doing in the battlegrounds can be fun or not, depending on your preference. And yes, if you don't take the time to learn and prep, you will die frequently and fast.
There are 3 battlegrounds -- Fusang (the largest), El Dorado and Stonehenge (the minigames). All are server agnostic, though Fusang has battlegroups based on your home server. Being undergeared in PvP is the big hurdle, and after that it becomes about customizing your build. There are also 3 fight clubs (London, New York and Seoul), where tournaments are scheduled fairly regularly for solo and team fights).
In general, the players are friendly to newcomers and will help you get acclimated. Here's a coupla links:
http://forums.thesecretworld.com/showthread.php?t=60445
http://forums.thesecretworld.com/showthread.php?t=74493
2 community is fairly average, better than say wow, but worse than say daoc or coh.
3 while leveling is different, end game is pure wow clone, grinding dungeons to get the next item set. The dungeons are very good though. The pvp sucks, but no worse than most modern mmos - e.g. swtor, Neverwinter.
The game is probably best played as a single player story based game with other people in the world. The community is nice when it comes to chat but overall there just isn't a community.
You can replay quests so there is no reason you ever need to do dungeons if you don't want to. You don't need the gear from them for the basic game.
Poster above me has it right, TSW is a fantastic and rather unique single player online RPG with some less than impressive MMO elements. Play it like that, and you certainly can up to Transsylvania, and you won't be disappointed.
Unfortunately it looks like that's about to change. The new scenario system is an intrigueing addition to the game, but for some reason FunCom wants it to function as a gear check for upcoming content. As things currently stand, casuals will have a very hard time getting past it, thereby locking many of them out of Tokyo.
There'll probably be some adjustments, but then again FunCom are in the state they are in now exactly because of knucklehead decisions like that...
Well IF you are going for all the achievements and 200/200 augments, then Scenarios / augments will be an insane grind, certainly (the AP cost alone will be several times that of completing the Ability Wheel).
BUT getting the 80 tokens you need for Tokyo access is scarcely going to require hardcore grinding, in fact could probably be done by running 1 or 2 normal mode Scenarios a week between now and whenever #9 finally goes live. Insisting on treating TSW as a single player game will make it take longer though.