The Secret World

(guides are on page 2 and 3 for anyone who can be bothered to actually read. Some of you will no doubt want a guide for finding a guide)

im not anyones alt

Just play blade/chaos, get some self healing passives from fist/blood and away you go.

spam forking paths->clearing the path for AE, spam run rampant->four horseman for single target. win.

Blade (or Hammer)/ Chaos works fine. Another option is an AR plus anything else leech build. Fist is a good secondary if you want to be pure melee using One/Two and Surgical Steel depending on whether you need dps or healing. Anything can be made to work for questing but some builds will feel like you are sanding the hair off your nuts with wire wool.

Be careful of the steep ramp up in difficulty that is Blue Mountains. Don't fuck about before that in terms of spending AP and SP. Pick something and stick to it or you will be grinding quests you have done before for a while.

Helps to have 100% skill wheel unlocked. Here are some things I use to give some people a couple of ideas, opinions to improve them are always welcome, but they've proven VERY effictive so I doubt many improvements can be made still.

Signet farming build (no I don't need a Quarry raid for that, I figured this shit out by myself and people needing a raid for that make me chuckle):
Blade/Chaos Aux: Chainsaw for Diamond Grit
ACTIVES:
1. Escalation
2. Clearing the Path
3. Karma
4. The Art of War
5. Point of Harmony (often replaced by Illusion)
6. Smoke and Mirrors
7. Martial Discipline

PASSIVES:
1. Arterial Pulse (often replaced by Master of Illusions)
2. Resilient Defender
3. Breakdown
4. Leeching Frenzy
5. Shoot em Up
6. Riposte
7. Sixth Sense

NM facerolling healing build for when I'm slacking (non leech): Also my PVP healing build is almost the same:
Fist/Pistol Aux: no preference because I'm facerolling anyway but if I have to choose I'd take rocket launcher to get away fast from things, because I'm a slacker.
1. Cauterize
2. Surgical Steel
3. Empathy
4. Fired Up
5. Deadly Aim
6. BackUp Drone
7. Hair Trigger/Sleight of Hand/Confuse

PASSIVES:
1. Brawler/Mad Skills
2. Shadow Medic
3. Healing Sparks
4. Making Ammends
5. Empowerment
6. Calling the Shots
7. Ready for More.
With this I can do 18/18's or 24/24 by just spamming 3-5 Cauterize/1 Surgical Steel while semi-AFK.

PvP melee ultra-spikey DPS build (the healtank/chickenrunner killer):
Fist/Blade, paired with either flamethrower or rocket launcher:
1. Bushwhack
2. Spiral of Death
3. Blade Torrent
4. Clearing the Path
5. Tear 'Em Up
6. Stunning Swirl
7. Steel Echo

PASSIVES:
1. Shoot Em Up
2. Sharp Blades
3. Street Fighter
4. Pattern Recognition
5. Breakdown
6. Double Dash (for chicken runners, the ICO premade or Laquinte comes to mind)/ Twist the Knife (for healtanks )
7. Seal the Deal

My general pug dps PvP build:
Blade/Hammer with Chainsaw for Diamond Grit
ACTIVES:
1. Blade Torrent
2. Clearing the Path
3. Obsidian Aegis
4. Stunning Swirl
5. Sleight of Hand
6. Steel Echo/Stonewalled (depending how moronic the pug healer is, if we even have a healer because I play a dragon)
7. Martial Discipline

PASSIVES:
1. Contortionist
2. Sharp Blades
3. Breakdown
4. Pattern Recognition
5. Stave Off
6. Riposte
7. Regeneration

The possibilities are endless for a cool PvP build in this game, I just hate people who come with cookie cutter facerollong supressing fire/bloodshot builds and make it my personal mission to kill em as much as I can in minigames.

Cool game for PvP, if Funcom didn't have such shitty minigames and got a clue how to unlag Fusang. Oh well, I still like it...

Lusiphur_sl said:

Blade (or Hammer)/ Chaos works fine. Another option is an AR plus anything else leech build. Fist is a good secondary if you want to be pure melee using One/Two and Surgical Steel depending on whether you need dps or healing. Anything can be made to work for questing but some builds will feel like you are sanding the hair off your nuts with wire wool.

Be careful of the steep ramp up in difficulty that is Blue Mountains. Don't fuck about before that in terms of spending AP and SP. Pick something and stick to it or you will be grinding quests you have done before for a while.

Click to expand...

This. Also make sure your build works with how you like to play. I started AR / Blade and it worked ok, nothing to write home about, I didn't like the feel of AR but it was nice for dungeons. Around the middle of the second zone i went AR / Fist and it solved some of my woes. This game doesn't seem to be very forgiving when you pull 2 - 3 'big' guys. With fist I was able to heal through it and start a war of attrition. In retrospect, more dps would have done the same thing.

Once I started seeing more Healers than Tanks I converted to Blade / Chaos. That was a very respectable solo build as well as tanking. Took me through Blue Mountains very quickly with relatively few problems. The god damn Akab can be really frustrating though in terms of adds.

I am in the City of the Sun god now and I switched again to try out Blade / Shotgun for tanking. Need to work up some DPS skills as well as I think it will do more than Blade / Chaos.

In regards to keeping your skills in check. I would offer that you should do the dungeon of the zone you are in as many times as you can find groups. I started hitting dungeons pretty hard around Darkness Wars / Blue Mountain. You get a surprising number of AP / SP from grinding a dungeon. If you learn the zone enough you can get fresh people through as well without much trouble. If you have an experienced group you can just roll through with relatively no issues.

I am doing this with Ankh as well and I feel like, while I have some fairly horizontal leveling going on, I have enough vertical skills to be useful and still play around. It also gets you some pretty stellar gear even if DPS whines when tanks want a couple pieces of hit gear .

Speaking of quarry raids is there an in game chat people use for LFG? I randomly got invited to a 2 group quarry raid and got like 100 AP in like 30 minutes, shit was bananas.

althuna_sl said:

im not anyones alt

Click to expand...

Everyone knew you were qwerty when you created your account the same day he got rickshawed the first time. They just left you alone because you used to be civil under this account.

On the subject of alts - bwuceli certainly seems to have the same tone of assuming arrogance as qwerty, as well as one post since he was banned...coincidence...?

On a more TSW related note, the intention of a quarry raid is for AP farming, not signet farming.

For solo play, melee builds that synergise well tend to be more powerful - blade/chaos utilising the penetration/self heal passives with Escalation and Clearing the Path for example.

It's tough to beat a pistol/shotgun pure dps build in a dungeon context. Also, if you choose to go down the route of NM dungeon running, the passives used in a dps build (which straddle the entire wheel) will be pretty similar for any weapon combination (things like Lethality, Twist the Knife, Elemental Force, Iron Maiden/Overpenetration, Seal the Deal).

Ultimately, much of the fun in this game is in figuring out the most powerful synergies in a build - for instance afflictions causing penetration rate increase causing self healing etc. However, none of that is necessary to complete the solo story aspect of the game - only to break it and succeed at what little end game there is.

What do people raid in the quarry? I remember I used to do it for weeks on end for signets but it was all easily soloable AE leeching.

We just ran around in a circle killing all the shit for like 11k xp a kill. I think they added some kinda raid mobs to some of the quarrys though.

sike_sl said:

On the subject of alts - bwuceli certainly seems to have the same tone of assuming arrogance as qwerty, as well as one post since he was banned...coincidence...?

Click to expand...

<-- not qwerty, though I like arrogance

Krassus_sl said:

What do people raid in the quarry? I remember I used to do it for weeks on end for signets but it was all easily soloable AE leeching.

Click to expand...

Pop your xp milkshake if you need AP and you'll drown in AP.
Also some signets drop there that don't drop at the airport in Kingsmouth and vice versa. e.g. signet of harmony...
And an hour of farming, typically yields me 30 to 50 signets at Quarry or airport.

For questing:

Actives:
Blade torrent
Out for a kill
Clearing the path
Steel echo
Breaching shot
Art of war
Martial discipline

Passives:
Leeching frenzy (all self healing from this)
Hit&run
Twist the knife
Fluid defence(elite)
Iron maiden
Shoot em up
Elemental force

Try to land clearing the path on 7 elemental force stacks against multiple mobs and out for a kill against singles. It is easy to tack the counters using Boowarnings or Eths buff bars addons from curse.

Make leech pots. They give tons of healing as long as you do dps. Dissasemble attack rating items to get "x fire", put 7 of them in assembly window shaped like a bottle:
-x-
Xxx
Xxx

Buy consumable toolkit ql1 from a venice vendor and put below the main crafting window.

Thanks for the advice all. I am working on a blade/chaos solo build right now as those were the two weapons I liked the feel of the most. Looks like it will take awhile to get going but I grabbed a passive in fist to get some extra healing until I get Karma in chaos.

althuna_sl said:

(guides are on page 2 and 3 for anyone who can be bothered to actually read. Some of you will no doubt want a guide for finding a guide)

Click to expand...

Dude, why are you so negative? That's so 2003.

Hmm, anything to set an AE afflicted state for chaos/blade (clearing the path)? Looks like bloodsport (fist) is where to get that but that is going to take a long time to get.

edit: Looks like Flight of Daggers will do that to some degree before Bloodsport.

Yeah, it's balls. I'll come back to it later.

RobXIII_sl said:

Was this the quest you need to do to rank up your faction...rank? I got stuck here too, then switched to AR/Fist, using full fist heals. I'm probably doing it wrong, but kiting that last mob around the statue and healing to full made it easy, didn't even need to use a potion. When I first did this quest, I had to abort, didn't have enough healing to cover the 3-way fight.

Click to expand...

Kill the adds. When he goes red, run to red statue for shield. When he goes green go to the other one. Its really easy once you realise you just have to keep swapping between the statues. He barely does any damage apart from his big specials.