Dead Air: TSW

As the discussion in the comments following yesterday's post makes it painfully clear, when it comes to playing MMOs, "builds" are not my strong point. If you're going to play an MMO designed around a giant skill wheel, however, there's no point whining about it, you just have to knuckle down, read the mouseovers and get theorycrafting.

Naturally my first recourse was to google for someone else's work but as this Reddit thread complains most of the builds that come up on a search are long out of date. Fortunately there was someone I could steal from - me!

Presenting The Presenter!
The one and only screenshot I managed to grab

For all I said about The Secret World being an easy game to come back to it does still rely on the returning player having some vague memory of what happened last time around. Last night I knocked off the rest of The Meowling without incident and fought my way into the abandoned soviet bunker in Transylvania for the showdown with The Presenter to conclude this year's new Halloween quest, The Broadcast.

Only The Presenter had other ideas. I fought him twice and lost twice, each battle taking ten to fifteen minutes. If I concentrated on survival I could still be fighting him now - he and his coterie of broadcast-bedazzled spooks together struggled to take me under 90% health. On the other hand, he wasn't showing much sign of dying either, since I seemed to have the approximate DPS of an elderly rabbit dual-wielding limp lettuce leaves.

If it wasn't for his incredibly irritating habit of running from room to room and making me chase him while his spectral fan club whaled away at my unprotected back this so-called fight might have gone on even longer but in the end sheer tedium wore me down and he got the better of me. Half an hour of that and I'd had enough.

It was apparent that I'd need to rethink my build or get better gear and  wasn't convinced I wanted to see the end of the quest enough to do either. Last year I ran into exactly the same issue with The Vanishing of Tyler Freeborn. I put a lot of effort into fixing that and my hard work got me nowhere. It's an experience I wasn't keen to repeat.

Scuse me! Coming through!

After I'd moaned about it passive-aggressively at some length in the comments here, Sylow very kindly offered to help me figure out a build that would bring my time-to-kill into single figures (minutes that would be, not seconds). By the time I read his comment, though, I'd figured out a build all by myself. Or rather, I'd stumbled across the five builds I'd worked up the last time I had this problem, all neatly tucked away in the Gear Management tab I'd completely forgotten existed.

I found it right after I'd spent maybe an hour going through Actives and Passives trying to match Builders and Consumers, affliction and impairment, Blades and Assault Rifle until I'd made myself thoroughly cross-eyed and confused. At least I was able to confirm my own consistency of approach because the new build I arrived at was extremely similar to the one I'd stored away under the name DPS+Leech.

Just as well, too, because I was so eager to take a look at it I didn't think that slotting it would wipe the one I'd just spent an hour working on. Never mind. It was good practice. Or something.

Equipped with my old-new build (the one that had so singularly failed to progress me past my 50k hit point roadblock in the Tyler Freeborn quest, something I was conveniently choosing to leave forgotten) I raced through the black tunnels of the festering underground facility, ducking ghosts and knocking over barrels of irradiated waste until I was once again face to face with The Presenter.

I died, of course. Only this time he was at least taking damage at a reasonable pace. And I thought I knew where I needed to improve to make progress. First off, get my back to a wall and stop those ghosts getting behind me. Second, figure out an actual rotation for these skills that would get those synergies flowing.

And it worked. Almost all the damage I took occurred on the between-room runs when the ghosts had free shots. Other than that my health stayed up while his went down, just as it should. It got quite close near the end, when I panicked because I thought I might actually win for once and fell off my rhythm, and I did have to drink a couple of Elixirs along the way because of those darn ghosts, but in the end I was still standing and he wasn't and that's all that really counts.



The quest itself had a somewhat muted coda. As is usual in TSW it left me feeling little the wiser about what had been going on and feeling that I'd almost certainly missed something important. I love that feeling. It's one of the best features of the game.

How much more I'll be playing I wouldn't like to guess. I took a quick look at my gear and it's more sub-par than I remembered - mostly green Q10s with one or two blue Q9s. I have a green Q10 blade but my rifle is a Q8 blue - I have a Q10 green rifle but it lowers all the important stats in comparison to the Q8. What all that means I'm not really sure.

I think I saw Rick Wakeman play this thing on Tales From Topographic Oceans

This is the thing with MMOs: as Alysianah at Mystic Worlds confirms, the grind is real. If you want to do more than dabble then there nearly always comes a point when you just have to get your head down, read the guides, study the tool-tips, farm the mats, kill the mobs, knock out the dailies and do all those other things that make playing in virtual worlds feel like having a imaginary, unpaid job.

The Secret World has the best stories in MMOs but that's a lot of work, even for a good story. Also for a waistcoat, which was the reward I got.