After completing each of the eight dungeons on the Elite difficulty, it came to my attention that there is more to life than just blowing stuff up. Crazy, I know. So in the interest of preparing for Nightmare modes, I thought it would be wise to invest in a few utility builds. While there are barely a handful of situations in the Elites where utility is useful (but not necessarily required), I know from the Looking for Group channel that they are more or less required for safe passage through a Nightmare dungeon.

Utility in The Secret World is much the same as it is in every MMOG: stuns, purges, cleanses, and debuffs. Each of these abilities is usually narrowed into the scope of one or two different weapon choices. This means no single person can be the jack-of-all-trades, making group composition important. By building a few decks each with one or two specific utilities, you can ensure that you will be an asset to any group.

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The Assault Rifle Decks Guide has been updated to version 3. Just some minor changes to tweak HPS and DPS and narrowed the focus of the DPS decks (with alternatives listed). After some good feedback in the forums, I’ve narrowed down these decks and branched some of them into dual-weapon decks, favoring Blood Magic.

A quick summary: Call Your Shots was a mistaken carry over from version 1 and has been correctly replaced with Sharp Shooter. It does the exact same thing except the latter ability doesn’t drop on glance. Bloodshot, from the Blood Magic tree, replaced Anima Vessel in the Hip Shooter and Full Auto decks, making them focused DPS builds using two weapon resources. Finally, the AR Soloist deck dropped Post-op in favor of Leech Therapy after I realized it did indeed affect the player and not just the group. As usual, click the link to read the details!

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Today I spent some time with the Combat Holograms in the Illuminati HQ, New York. It felt good to be back to the old business of smashing abilities against a dummy and tracking the data on ACT. Wanna do it yourself? Check out this thread. Needless to say, after a couple hours of killing (yes, actually killing the dummies), I’ve got a much better grasp on assault rifle abilities. And the payoff is this post.

A quick summary: Safety Off is in fact better damage per second than both Anima Shot and Hip Shooter. However, Hip Shooter is a mere 25 or so dps short of Safety Off, while Anima Shot lags just 10 dps less further. The tradeoffs around using each ability for the primary point builder is fairly obvious, with each making a compelling reason for use. Read through the cut for the details on these point builders and an all new deck for raw dps.

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The last two days in The Secret World have had several tests of patience and no small amount of frustration. While TSW has been a success at launch, there is a whole lot of fine-tuning, polish, and basic bug fixing that needs to be done. With Ragnar’s ambitious State of the Game plan, Funcom has a full plate - and by plate I mean platter buffet to feed an African country. Honestly, I have my doubts on whether Funcom can deliver; they plan to deliver more content, faster than even Trion does with RIFT. If they pull it off, The Secret World will be a strong competitor for years to come.

Now to the important part of the blog today: Assault Rifle builds. Keeping in mind the Mercenary deck, I followed the build up until I started getting into the harder content in Kingsmouth, realizing the build simply wasn’t meant to solo. Any good solo build requires some amount of healing. So I went off the reservation and started building my own decks, with the consideration that I wanted a viable tanking build to swing with if grouping became a problem. Read through the cut for details on my Assault Rifle damage and support builds.

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I’ve gone back and forth on this game, I know. First I loved it, then I said it wasn’t for me, and now I’ve forked over the $50 to buy it. Will it last til the first sub-up? We shall see, but there are a lot of positives leaning me toward yes. But before I put the time into designing a unique page for the game here at Die by the Arrow, I’m going to start a little journal and see how things go.

Where did the change of heart come from? I think it mostly boiled down to the fact that beta progress is beta - you don’t get to keep it. I’ve played in many betas. Way back in the day when there was this MMOG called The Realm - yeah, that’s when I started beta testing. Up until TSW though, I didn’t really care that my progress would be wiped. With this game, progress is everything and to develop your character into the beast you want it to be, it requires a lot of time (and a good number of repeated quests). So losing the progress from beta was a bit of a crushing blow. Now with early access, there’s no looming wipe, so my brain has registered that the game is in fact fun, so why not give it a go. And it begins with day one.

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The last two days in The Secret World have had several tests of patience and no small amount of frustration. While TSW has been a success at launch, there is a whole lot of fine-tuning, polish, and basic bug fixing that needs to be done. With Ragnar’s ambitious State of the Game plan, Funcom has a full plate - and by plate I mean platter buffet to feed an African country. Honestly, I have my doubts on whether Funcom can deliver; they plan to deliver more content, faster than even Trion does with RIFT. If they pull it off, The Secret World will be a strong competitor for years to come.

Now to the important part of the blog today: Assault Rifle builds. Keeping in mind the Mercenary deck, I followed the build up until I started getting into the harder content in Kingsmouth, realizing the build simply wasn’t meant to solo. Any good solo build requires some amount of healing. So I went off the reservation and started building my own decks, with the consideration that I wanted a viable tanking build to swing with if grouping became a problem. Read through the cut for details on my Assault Rifle builds and a glance at my tanking deck.

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The official one week mark starting with early access passed just yesterday. I spent a whole lot of time trying to stream Friday; I cleaned up about half the Blue Mountains, finished off the first Illuminati story mission line, and ranked up to 7 in the Illuminati pecking order. I also did a brief achievement hunt, completing a handful of lore and exploration achievements in Kingsmouth and Savage Coast. Not bad for a week’s worth of gaming with around 58 hours played.

The last few days have really been smooth sailing through the story mission; I polished off the Savage Coast (had to finish a few bugged quests), finished the quests from the northern bridge in Kingsmouth that I forgot about, and did a ton of dungeon runs, mostly Inferno. Overall, I’d say the first week of The Secret World went noticeably better than I expected considering I hadn’t put 48 hours of TSW gaming into one week since the second week of closed beta testing. There are a few standout discussion points I encountered along the way, so read through the break for more.

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The pre-launch early access of TSW fell on a weekend, meaning it had to compete with family time. TSW isn’t The Elder Scrolls or Halo, so it couldn’t compete. As such, I only had a few hours to play TSW the last two days, so I’m going to roll them into a single diary day.

Day 2 only amounted to a few hours, but I managed to pack in QL3 for both Merc and Goon decks, almost entirely clear Kingsmouth quests, and even got a Polaris run in. Considering that I really only played for about 4 hours the entire weekend, it just goes to show how much TSW can offer in a short amount of time. So… details?

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