As I write this it’s less than 48 hours until head start for The Secret World pre-orders. As much as I’ve been on-the-fence about the games chances so far, I’m now convinced that it really is a worthwhile, very playable game.
Not that I’ve really ever doubted whether I’ll enjoy it. The imagination shown even in just the preview ads convinced me there was more to the game than yet another attempt at a WoW-killer. It was intelligent and slightly disturbing. But the combat system seemed very limited, and the best MMO isn’t going to survive with boring combat.
Well, after four open betas, I can say with certainty that I do find combat in The Secret World interesting, and challenging. It isn’t just about mashing a couple of buttons.
The key to learning this was when I realized that using a single weapon was inefficient. I was treating the active ability bar much as I do in Guild Wars: stack as many abilities for my primary role as I can, because any abilities from my secondary role are inherently weaker, so they’re wasting slots on the ability bar. So in the penultimate beta weekend I geared Khaer out with nothing but sword attacks and sword passives.
But when I kept being killed in the entry area of The Savage Coast, the zone immediately after Kingsmouth, I took a break to rethink that strategy. First I added a heal from the blood magic line, and a blood magic attack to build resources. I still got killed, but I noticed that I didn’t need the blood magic attack; my sword attacks built resources for both equipped weapons, swords and blood magic. That should have been obvious from beta 1, and I felt pretty stupid for not knowing / not noticing, but I wasn’t paying enough attention.
So I dropped the blood magic attack, but kept the heal, since the sword attacks allowed me to use it. I still died.
And then I realized that if I was building blood magic resources, using them only for a heal was wasteful. I could add a consumer – a powerful attack that uses resources rather than adds them. Of course I had a couple of sword consumers equipped, but when I thought it was blood magic attacks that fed a blood magic consumer and sword attacks that fed a sword consumer it seemed pointless. But a few sword attacks allow me to use two consumers instead of one. And so do blood magic attacks, and I had single-target blood magic abilities where swords were mostly area effect.
So – why not slot at least one blood magic single-target, one sword AE, one blood magic consumer and one sword consumer (blood magic being AE and sword single-target, as it happens). And a heal. That’s 5/7 abilities, all of which are useful and distinct. Add an elite sword skill and one other and I’m done. Already I have a more useful set of spells than my multiple sword AE builders and sword AE and single-target consumers that I’d had previously. And already I have to think about how to use them, building resources mostly with single-target if there’s one mob or I’m at range, and an AE for multiples or up close. And using consumers at different intervals – Blade Dance consumes all five blade resources, but Infection only takes three blood magic resources, so I can bleed them off while preparing for Blade Dance. Or devote them to Angelic Aegis, the barrier / heal.
So then I started thinking about passives. In every MMO I’ve played previously, there’s physical damage and magic damage, generally subdivided into piercing, slashing, etc. for physical damage, and elemental, disease, divine or similar (often subdivided into heat, electrical etc.) for magic. Doing magic damage doesn’t improve your piercing skill.
But in The Secret World, while there are resists to different kinds of damage sources, the buffs and debuffs they apply are shared between different ability types. My sword skills were generally improved with impairments – similar to snaring / slowing, while blood magic mostly generates afflictions, i.e. damage over time. There are other combinations that have more synergy than those two. However, there is a blood magic passive that increases penetration while a target is afflicted – and penetration directly improves sword damage. So by slotting that, my blood magic abilities buffed sword attacks slightly. And slotting the improvement to heal is almost a must, and the ability that takes the direct damage of the first blood magic attack and turns it into an affliction – now that improves that attack directly, but also turns it into a penetration buff. In the end it was harder to decide what I didn’t need to slot than what I did, since most active skills have a corresponding passive that improves it in some way.
Armed with a better-thought-out set of actives and passives, I had less trouble with the area that killed me outright, and much more fun working through it. Even so, it wasn’t trivial, but choosing abilities is the difference between surviving a fight with 10% health left and getting squished while the mob is still at 40%.
So the meta-game of selecting abilities is interesting and necessary, but once you’ve chosen them, using them is not a matter of spamming a button.
One of my gripes about Rift gameplay is how it was possible to mega-game the combat system by creating a macro that would always use the best attack. My cleric had a one-button combat macro. So while I could slot a huge number of skills, what I would do is run up to a golem and push 1-1-1-1-1-1 until it died. Casters couldn’t use quite as simple a system, since it relies on cooldowns, where most spells have casting times instead, but still it was possible to macro high-damage long-cooldown spells so that you’d always cast them when they were available.
I don’t see a combat macro being helpful in The Secret World, even if they’re allowed.
So choosing abilities gives: higher utility (damage / healing) through multiple consumers, higher utility through synergy, and more thoughtful combat.
I still died plenty. The Savage Coast is much harder than Kingsmouth. Some of the woodland wildlife was quite unkillable at my level of gear, and I had to try to avoid mobs, not always successfully. Everything I needed to kill while questing I could, but it was a close call often. But in my book that’s how it should be. TSW feels dangerous and scary.
Then there’s The Black House. It was almost at Phantasmagoria levels of creepiness. I couldn’t finish it; it seemed to be broken, but I might have been missing something. That’s easy to do in The Secret World. I’m looking forward to the chance to finish it after the game releases. That, and many other quests