I’m using an elemental/blood build that procs affliction and passive barriers off an elemental chain builder, then uses Blaze to generate regular large single target damage with something like a 50% crit chance when associated passive is equipped and the target is afflicted. Then on the blood side of things, a small heal/high barrier builder and The Scarlet Arts for a big multihit heal/barrier combo. Less crucial components include Anima Charge for a free Thor’s Hammer every so often and passives that proc small heals on barrier application and additional chain attacks off crits. Elitewise the active’s been various things, but the passive elite starts as the 9 pt +40% barrier skill in the inner ring blood healing branch, and is now Clotting, the 50 pt from one of the outer ring healing branches. Clotting stacks a huge amount of additional barrier over time on any barrier application -plus- stacking physical and magical protection temp buffs, and does fire off passive applications, so is freaking incredible.
Aside from Clotting, none of the core skills are 50 pointers and there’s some room to flex. It’s probably far from perfect, but I get by. The big things about solo builds, though, are mainly just have some tanking or some healing for survival, don’t just focus on DPS, and have some appropriate gear as well. Heals don’t do that much to keep you alive unless you’ve got some heal rating.
Long term, remember that passives can be taken from any weapon tree and used with any other weapon as long as they’re not specifically tied to a particular active skill.
And, oh yeah, fuck that anti-affliction area in Transylvania. There is not enough hate. I just put on a tank build for that crap. Or more often pretend it doesn’t exist.
Blade/shotgun is solid–synergy on penetration and the sword has great defense skills. Fists is an awesome healing skill, so good for solo and dungeons.
Ooh, they added lowbie Decks. That’s kind of a neat little carrot for starting over.
Think I’ll go Blade/Fist to start (first 60-70 points) and then build off that. Both weapons seem like great foundations for group and solo utility.
Fist is nice. It’s most like traditional healing in other games, so it’s easy to work with. AR does some crazy stuff at the very high end with leech healing allowing the healer to also push high damage(or so I hear; I’ve never healed high end group content), but fist seems better for just pouring on the heals without worrying about enemy targets. I personally found blood to be a pain in the ass for group healing.
I hear fist is also great burst damage, but I’ve never tried it out for that.
Razgon
1886
I have the same itch occocasionally - Then I remembery Egypt. Take two steps, get attacked, take another two steps, attacked, move one step, get attacked. Its worse than Bards Tale 3! Mob density is way too high.
I use an AR/shotgun build that penetrates often and heals me up nicely. The build I copied it from encouraged the sole use of AR skills but part of me couldn’t break from wasting secondary weapon points.
Wolff
1888
Back in the day I found tankyness aoe builds amazing for soloing. I think I was hammer shotgun. Shotgun primarily for the weakness buff. Hammer has some awesome pbaoe. Allows me to gather up a number of mobs in high density areas and have the tools for taking on tougher enemies solo.
did they ever add additional weapons?
Any build tips for a complete and utter neophyte? Useful quickstart guides? Or do you favor a leap of faith? :)
My download will be ready in about an hour.
I only hit Egypt last weekend, so maybe they changed it, but while there are a couple of parts of Scorched Desert that feel a bit like that, a lot of it has reasonable maneuvering space and I’ve found it’s not that hard to just Sprint IV my way through the more densely populated parts of the zone (unless my goal is inside those zones, in which case there’s significantly more combat.).
Sorta. They added “auxiliary” weapons like the rocket launcher, chainsaw, quantum brace, and whip. They’re way more expensive than the base weapons, have to be unlocked, and have substantially fewer skills (but the ones they do have look pretty powerful and the quantum brace in particular looks like it’s super-interesting mechanically). They go into a new auxiliary weapon slot.
Yeah, the aux weapons are very cool late game rewards.
Mob density: I think the worst is Blue Mountains. The /reset travel technique helps a lot.
Builds: faith should work fine at first. It’s very easy to switch weapons If you want to change. As the game progresses, quests give more and more XP. By the third zone, you should have a basic build in place. The most important thing is to look for synergies between abilities (the four states, plus critical and penetration).
I still see the “My first 60” page here as a good starting point.
http://wordpress.tswguides.com/tsw-build-page/
(The 60 part of “my first” is your first 60 action points you earn in the game)
Be sure to post your character name! I’m going to be starting my new character today as well, name will likely be some form of “Triggercut”, but not that exactly because I have a guy I may return to who’s decently high level by that name.
I made a freckled redhead named Jessica Lovecraft who will probably be running around Kingsmouth today. :)
Any thoughts on Chaos magic? What is it exactly? DPS? I was thinking about pairing it up with either fist or hammer and be really melee focused.
Chaos is tanking, but it will also do fine damage and give a little self healing. It’s also a good source of one of the Weaken debuffs which are very strong, and if you get Breakdown you can get that same debuff with a sword or hammer, so Chaos is a strong investment if you like melee.
Thanks, Trig. I’m patching now, but I’ll post as soon as I get in – probably Hotfreak or some other Pollard-inspired name.
As far as I can tell, all of the weapons have DPS-focused branches on their skill tree, but they also have support, healing or tanking branches depending. Fist, Assault Rifle and Blood are the healing weapons, Chaos, Hammer and Blade are the tanking weapons, and Elementalism, Pistols and Shotguns are support.
While I wait for Cryptic to get a decent PVP patch on Neverwinter, I thought of trying this again. How often are they updating? They were talking like it was gonna be monthly content patches, but I can’t imagine they can afford that. And is there a QT3 TSW revival in the offing?
There have been two paid mission packs so far, one dropped in mid-December, the other in March. They also added some free content with each of those. A raid was introduced in late November, and it looks like a raid-scale boss or something (maybe not a full on raid) was introduced in mid-April. They’ve been doing non-content patching a couple times a month. There were also three previous “issue” content drops, but that was under the prior business model so probably doesn’t reflect their current circumstances.
I’ll look for CutoutWitch Jones…
