Why?

Included page "clone:yokaiblog" does not exist (create it now)

Sarcan and I host our guides and FAQs for The Secret World here because it's really tedious to write and maintain long guides and FAQs inside of forums. Also, this wiki engine offers a built-in Google Translate feature for every page, which can be helpful for TSW's wide international audience. Also, most of the bigger game wikis and guide sites are full of annoying advertising spam, and the wikis can be especially hostile to posting guidance and advice. Here, we can keep everything updated nicely, no one can revert or delete our stuff, and one link from forums will always point to the latest and greatest. Also, this wiki engine renders nicely iPad-friendly websites.

So enjoy what you find under our two respective Guides/FAQs menus, and keep checking this home page regularly for notices about new updates and changes.

BTW, the traffic to this site is not monetized in any way, and you are not subjected to any advertising. This information resource is just a labor of love.

Update notices

Yokai - More corroboration of possible Hit Rating bug - 31 Jul 2012 15:55

Tags: bugs

No replies yet from any Funcom dev, but over on the TestLive forum more players are chiming in with feedback that they are definitiely seeing a bug with too much Hit Rating actually causing more glances and evades, not less. The feedback seems to indicate that the magic breaking point is somewhere between 500 and 600 Hit Rating. Here's another example:

I went hit rate on some gear and I am running around 678 or so. The best I can tell is around 600 or 500 somathing does go wrong. i am getting evades and glances in elite runs and even on transylvina mobs. I went hit rate so even when i put on 1 or 2 pecies of tank gear for hps i should be asured to hit nm mobs.

Deffinatly needs to be checked. - Comments: 0

Yokai - FAQ update and Talisman Mechanics update - 30 Jul 2012 20:07

Tags: updates

I've updated the answer for Are multi-hit abilities better than single-hit abilities in the Combat Mechanics section of my FAQ to be more clear about the relative strengths and weaknesses of multi-hit versus single-hit attack subtypes. I also explain how to calculate exactly the increased chance of proccing an on-hit passive with a multi-hit attack. To summarize, it's not clear-cut that multi-hit is better, even if you are building around juicy on-hit passives like Live Wire from Elementalism. Yes, something like a 4-tick-per-second focus attack will increase your chance per second of proccing Live Wire significantly, but this is counterbalanced by some outright bugginess of the queueing behavior for various multi-hit attacks (especially the 1-second focus attacks like Hair Trigger), and also by decreased mobility that many multi-hit abilities cause.

On a different note, I've also updated my Talisman Mechanics guide to clarify that in the Live environment, the actual percentage ratio of stats conferred by your talismans is actually 21/16/10 and not 25/15/10. Details in the guide. I also took this opportunity to add two sections on Tips for farming up a starting set of blue talismans and Tips for farming up a set of purple talismans. - Comments: 0

Sarcan - Crafting Patterns - 28 Jul 2012 06:08

Tags: crafting firework glyphs patterns tsw

Updated the Crafting Page yet again. Added placeholder charts for Glyph Values and some addition discoveries about how Glyph Values compare to Dropped Glyphs. Values should fill in pretty quickly once I dedicate some time to just do it.

Secondly I figured out the Rocket Firework pattern.

Enjoy - Comments: 3

Yokai - Rumors, lies, and allegations about tanking - 27 Jul 2012 15:54

Tags:

No updates to any guides just yet, but I have been trying to do a lot of compilation and collating of the current state of tanking over on the main forums. (Because my primary cabal role is usually main tank.) Today, I simply present you with a few interesting tidbits that are not in the primary flow of opinion and information that most tanks see. Are these true? I don't know; I'm not in a position to test them for myself yet.

Allegation #1: Hit Rating is bugged and will actually cause more glances and evades if you go over 400-ish total Hit Rating. Remember, you might have as much as 300 Hit Rating just from your passive "World Domination" buff from PvP. If you feel like "why the hell am I glancing so much?", try actually dropping your hit rating below the reputed threshold for this reputed bug.

Allegation #2: Heal Tanking is possibly a strong method of hate generation in Nightmare dungeons. Especially if you use Blood as your healing weapon. Some players have posted interesting details from a few angles. For one, healers report frequently that Blood barriers seem to generate full hate for both the heal and the barrier component of the ability immediately upon casting it, and that the huge team-wide heal + barrier of Cold Blooded is especially prone to pull aggro right off a tank who is otherwise holding aggro fairly well. (Although I must report that my main healer never pulls off me with Cold Blooded, but I really stack a lot of hate multipliers.) For two, some tanks report they have good success with using healing not only to generate hate, but to even out their spike damage a bit. Third, and most intriguing, I've see several reports that Exquisite Corpse might be a wee bit broken in a good way. Apparently, EC will fully mitigate 50% of any attack that hits it. Even a huge attack, and the NM bosses can put out some really large attacks. So, for example, if an 8K boss attack hits your puny EC, they'll of course blow up the EC in that one single hit, but not before the EC barrier mitigates that 8K attack down to only 4K that actually gets through to you. Yes, I thought that might make you crook and eyebrow and go "huh?!". So what I wonder is whether a healtank setup with something like Chaos/Blood might actually be viable in NM dungeons (at least until Funcom decides to nerf EC or Cold Blooded). You'd use Cold-Blooded as your hate generator after the boss resets hate, and you'd use EC as a mitigation shield every time you knew a big hit might be coming. If you try this out, please report back!

Update: Player Krytical provided some excellent feedback about #2. Here ya go:

I messed around extensively with chaos/fists and chaos/blood healer tanks. They worked pretty well in elites to the point I could run SH with 4 DPSers, but it didn't hold up with my regular nightmare group. Survivability was fine, arguably more sustainable than the classic chaos/blade tank, but even with 3 healing pieces and 300% threat multiplier the DPSers would pull aggro occasionally. The build worked perfectly with sub 1.5K DPS, but I was not able to hold aggro against 2k+ DPSers, which my chaos/blade tank has no issues doing with just 2 DPS pieces. - Comments: 4

Yokai - Male deck costume screenshots added at last - 23 Jul 2012 20:18

Tags:

Thanks to forum poster Warrender, we now have screenshots of all male faction deck costumes! Look in my Faction deck costumes page to compare and contrast all the female and male screenshots side by side. Thanks so much for your hard work, Warrender! - Comments: 0

Sarcan - Deck Builder - 20 Jul 2012 21:53

Tags: builder builds deck decks tsw

I have starting using a wonderful site TSW Deck Builder to build my decks. There is so much great functionality here that allows you to really narrow in on what you want your deck to do and the selection of the abilities. I know in talking with the creator that there are more features to come, so stay tuned.

With that in mind, I have added a Deck Build and Builds Section to my Random Information Page to start documenting some of the decks that I am using here for people to reference. - Comments: 1

Sarcan - Crafting Patterns - 20 Jul 2012 14:50

Tags: crafting patterns update

Crafting Patterns page has been updated to now include almost all of the values for the Consumables by QL.

I am still working on getting enough Sacred and Pure materials to verify the rest of the values. Also once I have enough Pure materials I can verify the existence of the Pure Anima, a persist through death consumable which is suppose to be a pattern of

X
X X X
X X X

If I can get it to work then I will added it to the crafting page. Currently the pattern does light up but have not been able to successfully combine as of yet. (Verified by David, thank you)

Crafting Patterns page updated to reflect addition of Pure Anima.

I have also added Fireworks to the list.

Enjoy, and thank you for using our site for all you TSW information needs. - Comments: 2

Yokai - Current state of Hit/Pen/Crit - 18 Jul 2012 16:33

Tags: updates

I'm throwing this here just as a placeholder until I can find more time to update my FAQ and (still in-progress) Tanking guide to match. This info comes courtesy of poster KodiakX on the TestLive forums:

Once you reach enough Penetrate rating you reduce the chance that your attacks will be blocked down to such a negligible rating it should never happen. The DPS numbers from ACT collaborate this theory as with 0-200 Pen rating a Straw Dummy will block 13-15% of the time. At 300 Pen rating it will only block around 8-10% of the time. At 400 Pen rating you are down to 5% block. At 950 Pen rating you're not only at 0% blocks but you're also at a whopping 40% odd Pen chance with skills like Iron Maiden can easily push you into the 50% range entirely reliably (against a Straw Dummy).

Naturally as the difficulty of your encounters goes up so does the base Block %. For example tonight in Nightmares with 499 Pen Rating I was at a 5% block rate over all on average. This only furthers the problem described where you need ever increasing amounts of Penetrate and Hit Rating to mitigate factors like Glancing and Block.

If I was a betting man I'd wager that you need around 600 Pen and 600 Hit Rating to never get Glanced or Blocked. Eyeballing Glyph Kit amounts that'd mean out of roughly 1900 odd stat points (280 Head, 280 Weapon, 250 Major x3, 200 Minor x3 as rough estimates based on upgrades so far towards 10.4 glyphs) you could go 600 hit, 600 pen, and then have 700ish odd stats to play around with. You could dump that into Crit, but then you'd have no Crit Power to back it up. If you go with more Pen that'll leave you with about 300-400 of extra stats with nothing to do with them. Probably would put it into Crit still (roughly 20% crit total) enough to handle buffs/debuffs like in Darkness War's protection.

This still leads to the same invariable scenario where basically Crit is just garbage as a stat compared to Pen. - Comments: 3

Sarcan - Ability Spreadsheet - 17 Jul 2012 03:10

Tags: update

Thanks to Daniel 'Elijah' Bishop we have better functionality to the Ability Spreadsheet. Now instead of having to get the name and then the code for you selected abilities, you just need the name. Then head over to the Deck Concepts tab and enter the names of your selected abilities and the descriptions will appear, assuming you spelled the names correctly.

Thank you Elijah for making my spreadsheet easier to use for the whole community.

Happy Deck building - Comments: 0

Yokai and Sarcan thank you all - 16 Jul 2012 15:37

Tags: traffic updates

We'd like to take a moment to thank all the readers who have made use of this information resource in just the first two weeks since The Secret World officially launched. We both appreciate that a large percentage of players seem to find our hard work useful.

One number not shown in the screenshot below is the number of link-thrus coming from the official forums, which is 17,426. This means a lot to us because for some unknown reason, Funcom forum moderators are refusing to provide an "uber guide to all guides" thread that compiles all the great guides and FAQs and guide sites into one convenient sticky post in the General forums there. They seem to be pointedly ignoring all the good external websites such as this one and also Aela's and Rhyal's very fine TSW Guides site, even though both of our guide sites are non-commercial (no monetization or ads at all) and pure labors of love for the community.

ybstats_mid_july.png

Anyway, thank you to everyone, and please keep helping other players by pointing them to this site (and the tswguides) site when you know we've got answers to a pain point or question that somebody is asking/complaining about on the forums. We all want to help TSW succeed because Funcom has really created something truly new in the MMO genre, and we'd love to see it be a big enough financial success to entice other development shops to take similar risks and improve/expand this genre we all love so much.

Yokai and Sarcan salute you! - Comments: 1

page 1 of 3123next »

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License