1921

The 50 point capstone skills are definitely better than the inner ring stuff. And no refunds.

1922

Don’t worry about points. You can’t really make a mistake, as the further you go the faster you get points, and there’s no cap.

With the exception of a few broken-ish skills, on an individual basis skills are extremely well balanced in relative power. Outer ring skills aren’t more powerful; they’re more specialized. That specialization makes them in fact weaker rather than stronger than the early abilities if you look at them in isolation and don’t plan your current loadout well. The strength comes from the interactions of these highly specialized skills, and getting more points mostly lets you fine tune your build.

So, again, don’t worry about it. You really don’t need to rush straight to the more expensive skills, but if you want to that’s fine as well. There’s no cap on the points you can earn, and the growth accelerates rather than diminishes. Experiment without fear to see what weapons you like.

(This is PVE advice. PVP has some seriously weird skill interactions going on, but PVP is a fucking mess in this game anyway. My build advice for PVP would be “Close the game and go play anything else.”)

1923

I played December through March. I tried most nightmares but only cleared the first 3. We created our own group of newbies and learned the dungeons slowly. Wipe, change approach next week, wipe a bit more, repeat. I never found a decent guild. The newbie ones were too newbie and the high level ones filled with kEwLL d00ds.

First, there’s no respec.

The rough equivalent of levels and tiers would be the SP Ql levels.

Kingsmouth QL 0-1
Swordcoast? QL2
Blue Mountains QL4-7? This is a very big zone and gets rough. I found it easier to skip the last content and go straight to Egypt - there I found nice green QL7s off the first newbie missions and then went back to clear the mountains
and so on

Each zone has a dungeon.
Normal - QL2-QL9
Elite QL10 - each normal dungeon has an elite version. Tougher mobs, more hps/dmg. Blue QL10 drops.
Nightmare QL10 - purple QL10 drops. Also get tokens for each mob you clear. Mobs have new mechanics. This is what people yell about doing 18/18. They mean do all 18 bosses out of the first 3 nightmare dungeons - Polaris, Hell, and the Aztec vs Viking with lots of adds.

Dammit, I write like Idrisz.

AP/SP - spend it as you get it, no big deal. Focus on two weapons, balance out your expenditures so you can equip the gear you loot. If you want some gold ping me on steam but I remember if gold was useful. It’s all about pvp and nightmare dungeon tokens at the end.

Decks: Just about any two weapons work till you get to elite/nightmare. Then you’ll try to refine DPS/Tank/Healer with utility. Shotgun is a very popular and useful secondary weapon because it allows you to use Cleanup - cleanup will clean any afflictions from the entire party no matter where they are. Very very useful - other cleanses are limited by range or amount of targets. It’s expensive, I think one of the 50 AP skills. Don’t worry about saving AP/sp till you get to elite dungeons.

Basically get a single target builder, and two consumers. Most solo builds just mean you add a bit of survivability, whether it’s tankiness or self-healing capability. Sometimes you want more AOE, maybe even AOE builder.

Mods: Topbar useful, as is Deck manager. You have no limit on builds, it’s a very pretty interface and you can experiment all you want. The built-in one was prone to bugging out. You won’t be changing much gear anyway at first.

Dungeons:
I played Sword/chaos as a dungeon tank. Tanks and healers are critical in dungeons - unless there’s a DPS check you can finish some encounters after losing a DPS or two. It doesn’t take much to die, a split second of lag or loss of concentration. My group was adults in their 30s and 40s, a bit slow but manageable. Dungeons are a lot of fun, and expect to die. The key is learning the tells and different skills. A tank has a limited amount of interrupts they can use, so they need to learn which are the most critical to interrupt. I took notes somewhere but you won’t need these for a couple of months:

Polaris -
Boss 1
Deep Calling - Impair this
Echo - Impair this or the DPS dies. I’m usually going blah blah blah and forget to do this. DPS dies but we win anyway.

Boss 2 - Sorceress. Nothing special.

Boss 3 - Impair hack and echo.

Boss 4 - Run up to end, fight big mother. Someone needs a cleanse or you’ll die. Cleanse after she blows up.

Boss 5 - Tank has little to do, this is the one DPS and healer have to pay attention.

Boss 6 - Get very tanky, get survival skills (like stoicism to cut down 30% of incoming dmg). beginning healers can have problems keeping tank up so those skills help a lot while the weakens stack up on monster. It used to be easier for tank to stack weakens but the sword nerf made a big difference. The first 30-40 seconds are the tough ones to survive.

===
The rest is a copy paste from old notes I probably cribbed if you need more detail:

===
Section Four: 18/18 Tips and Tricks, General Boss Advice

Polaris:
Whole dungeon:

Iron Maiden with your tank afflicting is great for this dungeon, as it increases your penetration rate by 10%, and reduces enemy block rate (which is boosted in this dungeon) by 10%

First Boss, Haughbui Jarl:

Watch the boss’s cast bar. If Deep Calling gets past the tank’s impair, be ready to move out of purple circles on the ground.
Mjolnir’s Echo, if it gets past the tank’s impair, will drop aggro–if this happens, stop dps and prepare to avoid the boss while the tank re-establishes aggro.

Second Boss: Blarbane Sorceress:

A fairly basic boss fight—the boss will occasionally cast a self-shield and an aoe cloud that does unimpressive damage, as well as summon some weak adds. Focus the boss down–if someone happens to have a purge within their build, that can remove the boss’s barrier to make the fight even faster.

Third boss, The Varangian:

The first part of this fight has two ‘phases’, just like in elite and normal. As the boss’s health drops, he will disappear under the water and summon adds for you to kill, then re-appear in another place indicated by a glowing white circle. When he re-appears, his aggro table has been dropped. This means you need to give your tank a couple seconds to hold aggro again. Much like the first boss, keep an eye out for purple aoe and Mjolnir’s Echo dropping the boss’s aggro table. After the first or second submerges, save your dps cooldowns (Breaching Shot from Shotgun, Deadly Aim from Pistols, or Short Fuse from elementalism, for example) for the next portion of the fight:

The containers in the next room. The lightning damage is a bit more to worry about on nightmare, but most healers can manage the strain of the dps doing a coordinated burn at this point without needing to jump between containers. If your healer has difficulty enough to cause a wipe, consider slotting such actives as:

Greater Good, from Pistol
Flak Jacket (and Full Flak Jacket passive) from Shotgun
Reap and Sew (from Assault Rifle)

To give your healer a helping hand.

Fourth boss, Haughbui Mother:

The tank will generally stand at the far end of the room—give them enough time to pull the boss there, and make SURE to stand away from the boss. This is to allow the tank to ‘eat’ the bombs that spawn at that end and be healed up, allowing the dps to focus on the boss without dying. Eventually, the boss will explode into three adds—generally, your want to use your dps cooldowns as the explosion happens, as well as one Shotgun user using Clean-up to make healing significantly easier. The faster the adds die, the less likely you are to wipe.

Fifth Boss, Primordial Dweller:

This boss has a couple new mechanics in the form of bomb adds, much like the previous boss, but you must deal with them now. Bombs adds (which look like walking pinecones) will spawn periodically until this boss is below 50%. When they get near you, they will hinder you and then attempt to explode on top of you. They can be dps’d down, or drawn away from the rest of the party to be exploded safely.

IF an add gets on top of you, you can escape death by doing the following:

  1. Use Sleight of Hand (survivalism active) to remove the hinder and run away
  2. Use Death From Above (Rocket launcher auxillary active) to launch yourself away
  3. An extremely well-timed dodge. I recommend trying the above two first.

One of this boss’s casts, Tide Wall, can be impaired much like the second boss by the tank to make the fight significantly faster—failing that, a purge such as Clean-up or Magnetic Variance (passive) can be used.

As the fight drags on, more and more smaller adds will spawn. Generally, they’ll make a direct line for your healer. Make his life easier by burning them down as you see them. One or two dps with a spare slot for an aoe can take care of them very quickly.

Sixth Boss, The Ur-Draug:

The Ur-Draug has a couple changes from previous difficulties to pay attention to:

  1. As the boss gets low on health, he will periodically do a ‘Bubble phase’ in which he re-emerges from the water in the center, blasting jets of water as you hide behind the rocks. However, he will now snare the entire party every time he does this, then re-emerge in the same spot you were hiding in, killing you if you are still there.

My recommendation: 1 (or if low dps, 2) people slot Clean-Up to remove the snare from the entire party.

As the snare is removed, watch which way your tank runs, and go THE OTHER way, so you don’t get cleaved by the boss.

  1. When the boss gets very low on health (below 50-60kish) all the hiding spot rocks in the room will explode, killing anyone who is standing near them.

Solution: Don’t stand near the rocks during dps phases.

  1. The Ur-Thing adds during hiding phases are now nearly unkillable.

Solution: Ignore them and let the tank pick them up. Barring unbelievably bad luck, they never become such an issue that your healer cannot keep your tank up through their damage.

  1. In well-geared and high dps groups, the boss can be burned down through the hiding phase. This is a split-second call, and I only recommend doing this if your group is doing very well and it has been decided on beforehand. A split decision here will result in a wipe.
1924

Dungeon 2 - Hell Raised:

The Fever Pitch passive is good in this dungeon for reducing your glance rate.

The last fight, Machine tyrant is the most challenging of the 18 bosses. A few tips for the tank - there’s a nice skill that lets you run away faster after you use a consumer. I was experimenting with a ranged tank setup for this boss. All you need is agitator (300% agro). I tried sword/shotgun (another cleanup!) and rifle/shotgun but my rifle was only blue, didn’t have any purples.

He doesn’t hit that hard, but being in the red circles is deadly. I don’t think you can’t interrupt anything the boss does. If the healer dies you’ll wipe. There’s a bit of fencing near the spawn in point. If you run up and jump up you can reset the encounter. This saves you a bit of repair bills when you lose some people. There’s a DPS/enrage mechanic I think. You can lose a DPS I think, but losing tank or healer is a wipe. Very frustrating. What we did while learning is limit the number of tries (say 3) and then just move on.

DPS can go back to full dps, there’s no macroshock here so they won’t need hit point gear.

Rest is cribbed notes if you need more details:

Hell Raised:

The Fever Pitch passive is good in this dungeon for reducing your glance rate.

First boss, Antimony Ministrix:

I recommend 1 health minor talisman plus health pure anima:

1 QL10 consumable toolkit plus 7 Pure Water in the following pattern:

OXO
XXX
XXX

With X indicating the Pure Water positions. This is because a Macroshock penetrate can 1-shot a dps who has only 3k health, and a macroshock will 1-shot dps who have only 1970 health. Run the boss around ring, avoid the aoe, and burn her down. If your healer has difficulties with the Lifeburn debuff, have one person slot a cleanse (Cleansing Drone from pistols, or Clean Up from shotgun) to help.

Second boss, Corroder:

Entirely unchanged from previous difficulties outside of higher damage numbers. Sit on his rear and burn him down.

Third Boss, Hardwired Fleshtank:

Higher damage numbers, but generally unchanged. Dance to the platforms that aren’t on fire. Death From Above from rocket launchers with a Auxillary Mod to reduce the health damage helps here for movement.

Fourth Boss, Traumadriver:

Also mostly the same. Avoid the aoe, bring a cleanse if the DoT gives your group problems.

Fifth Boss, Recursia Many-In-One:

You want to bring your hp up to ~3600 again for her, because Macroshock is back. I’ve seen multiple people die to penetrate macroshocks here at 2900 hp, and even had it happen to myself multiple times.

At the start of the add phase, the boss will now apply Lifeburn to the entire party. Once again, Clean Up from Shotgun is the most efficient way to handle this. Yay Cleanup. During the add phase, you will want to stay on the outer edge of the room whenever possible, as the boss will place a yellow bubble at the position of a random player. If an enemy is within one of these bubbles, do not shoot it, or the bubble will kill you. Staying on the outer area, away from adds when possible, keeps the adds from staying within the bubbles, giving you more time to take them down.

Save your biggest dps cooldowns for the final 20-25% of the boss’s health.

6th Boss: Machine Tyrant

I’ll be frank with you: For many people, this is going to be hard.

Many groups run this fight with 3 shotgun users using Clean Up, most often among the dps. Clean Up is used in a pre-determined rotation to keep Lifeburn from stacking up on the players. Keep a healing or HoT potion on hand in case the rotation goes wrong. If Lifeburn hits before Cleanup is off cooldown, consider waiting until it has 7-8 seconds remaining–hitting cleanup here can allow it to take both the first two stacks, and the next two depending on the timing.

Other things to watch out for:

  1. The fight now has a 5 minute enrage timer. After enrage hits, you have 5, maybe 10 seconds to kill the boss before a complete wipe of the group.

  2. Anima wells now deal damage to anyone who stands within them, at a rate of about 900-1000 per second. If one spawns on you, IMMEDIATELY dodge out of it.

  3. Shooting the boss while his yellow shield is up (which happens when Anima Depletion from being dragged through an anima well wears off, or when he runs to the center for a bombardment phase) can kill you instantly.

  4. During bombardment phases, keep an eye out for the new anima well–start moving there well before the phase ends to give yourself more dps uptime on the boss.

  5. As with previous difficulties, avoid the red bombardment circles. Don’t attempt to dash across them to dodge, run around them and lead them away from other people. The circle that chases you is just as capable of killing your teammates. Death From Above and column dash abilities can give you more options if you have the active slots available here.

  6. Again, for many, this fight is going to be hard. One-shotting it is nice, but be prepared to die frequently when learning it for your first time. Don’t get frustrated, and keep at it.

1925

Darkness Wars - probably the easiest. Lots and lots of adds.

There’s a trick that devs found surprising but judged not an exploit. It’s not necessary but it makes the last boss a LOT easier.

you have one DPS slot provoke and confuse.

The last big dog will do this nasty move you cannot interrupt. So the DPS will TAUNT it, then immediatly detaunt. This makes the dog run towards DPS and cancel his special attack, then go back to tank.

==
The big moth: This one is frustrating to a lot of people. The key is that the bug goes straight towards the FARTHEST guy, and never the tank. So if you keep one guy very far away all he has to do is the Prometheus perpendicular move and it’s safe.

Keep all kills and bloody circles in the edges. Tell the DPS to take their time because adds do very little damage. I demonstrate by tagging the four initial and sitting down.

I can’t find my notes on this but I don’t remember anything else special.

This concludes my series. There’s other low-hanging bosses you can try in the other dungeons. Just run the first few till you wipe, next week you get a bit farther as you gear up and each comes up with ideas.

1926

Thanks for all the info, Wisefool.

Just one thing to note. By the time I got through Kingsmouth, I was entirely in QL3 gear. By the time I had run through the main missions at the university in the Savage Coast, I was all in QL4. So far I have only seen QL4 drop in the Savage Coast, but the sequin dudes do sell QL5 gear.

1927

You probably want to wait until Blue Mountains to be spending your sequins. You can (somewhat) easily dash through the blue mountains and pick up QL6 weapons etc from the merchants there and then go back to Savage Coast. Not necessary by any means, but a little shortcut if you’re in the mood for it. Also, note that the tokens you get are specific to the Kingsmouth/Savage Coast/Blue Mountains area, so they won’t be worth very much once you head to Egypt.

1928

QL5 gear drops on the west side of the Savage Coast map: the forest north of Innsmouth Academy, and the bay filled with draug across from Ami’s cabin and the sequin dudes. Possibly also around the filth pool.

Blue Mountain south half is QL5, north half is QL6, Quarry (the big circle in the middle) QL10. And mind the lesson you should learn when you first cross the bridge near the Blue Mountain entrance. I won’t spoil it.

1929

Appreciated! Got online for a bit yesterday as work is FINALLY ramping down for the holiday weekend.

1930

Thanks, red guy. I’m heading over to that part of the map next.

Jonathan, too late on the sequins; I’ve already spent a bunch. I will hoard them from now on – thanks for the tip. I do still need massive amounts of skill points to be able to wear QL6 gear, though.

1931

And once again the stupidly hard puzzles are sapping my desire to continue playing this game. Not to spoil anything, but fuck that Digging Deeper quest.

1932

Just skip the missions you can’t complete. Don’t let it turn you off the whole game!

1933

Digging Deeper is an investigation mission. Those share two traits:

  • They are completely optional
  • They are difficult puzzles, generally requiring a great deal of time (and Google) to solve

Some people love these, especially as they rely only on player knowledge and persistence, not gear. If you just want to advance your character, though, these missions can be a real roadblock. Spoil yourself on a help site, save them for later or skip them completely.

Heck, there are later ones that require knowledge of dead languages. You’re not expected to power through that stuff ;)

1934

Oh I’m fully aware of the investigation missions and their purpose in the game. My problems are thus:

a) I’m a completionist in MMOs, skipping them isn’t an option.
b) As you say, some require knowledge of topics that not everyone is expected to know (examples: Morris Code, Biblical details, sheet music), so these missions either require a great deal of time and research (which doesn’t guarantee an answer) or spoilers, both of which are unacceptable to me. I actually had to look up the first investigation mission 3 times (beta, first play, second play) because the information they give you and its execution within the game made so little sense. A perfect example of this (and you can go back earlier in this thread and see my post) was when I spent hours and hours in the City Hall looking through the filing cabinets because I was led to believe the answer to the mission was in one of the drawers.

I understand these missions are suppose to take a long time to solve, but there’s no middle ground here. I would say 90% of the time the investigation missions end up with me putting hours into it only to get stuck on a part of it, get frustrated, spoil myself, and then get frustrated at the game because the information it gave me was misleading, or it was trivial, or some poorly executed game mechanic, etc…

I really love the idea of the investigation missions, I just personally believe they did a terrible job in their implementation into the game.

1935

If you won’t skip them, you won’t put in research time, and you won’t cheat, than yeah, you’re fucked. But those are all self-imposed limitations! Let them go! BREATHE THE AIR OF FREEDOOOOMMMM

1936

They’re effectively ARG puzzles, except that you don’t -have- to work with other people to solve them. Lots of obliqueness and hints that need multiple layers of deciphering. Personally, I eventually decided I was going to give them a good faith effort, run stuff as far as I could on my own (with no shame whatsoever about morse code translating apps or similar resources), and then look shit up as and when it became necessary. Or, instead of painstakingly hand-copying stuff like the Hell and Bach satanic alphabet to decode it, just using versions people had put up online. All of these quests are solvable without spoilers but some of them require a twistier brain than I’ve got or a lot more labor than I’m willing to put into them, at which point I feel satisfied if I can just get to the “what am I supposed to do here?” without necessarily executing all of the thing I’m supposed to do on my own.

Personally I prefer puzzles like DROD where I know the rules up front and the goal up front and it’s just a question of figuring out a series of moves that gets me to that goal according to the rules, but I appreciate that TSW at least has puzzles.

1937

I just do the investigations au naturel until I get really stuck. By “really stuck” I mean more than about 10 mins trying to figure it out on my own, then I look up a spoiler. I get enough out of the bits where I’m using my own brain to enjoy them, but damned if I’m going to spend hours of my life on a stupid puzzle.

I think the biggest problem with puzzles in games is “puzzle game logic” - it’s so seldom logical. It’s like crosswords - you have to be simpatico with the baroque twists and turns of the mind that made them.

1938

While I don’t try to do the investigations naked, I pretty much follow gurugeorge’s pattern. ;) Sometimes, I realize I “should” be able to get it, so I put in a little extra time. Sometimes it’s obvious that I need to do research. One of the things that gets me is when I am asked to go to a mysterious somewhere that is clearly particular place; if I’m mistaken about where that place is, I could, conceivably, spend a lot of my precious gaming time on a wild goose chase.

I feel for completionists, however. Either you have to treat these missions like their own separate, challenging, adventure game and take the time to do them – thus destroying the MMO “pace” – or you have to overcome some fundamental tendencies in yourself.

1939

Thanks for the comments guys. I guess as long as I give them a good shot, spoilers are okay. Just going to have to accept how difficult some of them can be and quickly move on.

1940

I loved Digging Deeper once I figured out what I was doing wrong on a section. Took me a few tries, but it was worth it.