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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
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
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.
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
Sarcan - Crafting Updates - 15 Jul 2012 20:27
Tags: update
Thanks to a fan submission (Thanks Evie) of the values of Kickback Gadgets from a QL10 Kit, the crafting pages has been updated to include them. I have also added the ability to view the Kickbacks sorted by Effect or by Trigger (A suggestion made by Evie). And to make the page view cleaner, the charts are collapsible so you only have to view the chart you wish to see.
Enjoy - Comments: 0
Yokai - updates to FAQ sections dealing with Hit Rating and glance rate - 12 Jul 2012 16:07
Tags: updates
Some of my original FAQ sections that deal with stats, hit roll order during combat, Hit Rating, and glance rates were drafted back during closed beta, and some UI changes and new information called for some revisions to make these sections more clear and accurate. Specific sections in the FAQ that changed are:
- What is the hit roll order? What hit types are mutually exclusive?
- Which hit type is the strongest to build around?
- How does Hit Rating differ from Attack Rating?
To summarize the essential new/changed info for those of you already familiar with the preceding FAQ details:
- For better clarity, what I formerly referred to as Glancing Chance I am now calling Enemy Glance Chance, because the hit roll mechanics are identical to Enemy Evade Chance, and because Funcom probably just wasn't careful with their naming conventions in the Closed Beta Character Sheet when Glancing Chance was still listed there. (It really should have been Enemy Glance Chance all along.)
- There are no longer any stats related to Glance Chance or Enemy Glance Chance in the live Character Sheet. So these are conceptual stats that we know only from glimpses in CB and statements by devs in CB and by some more recent testing by several dedicated players.
- Your (hidden) base Glance Chance is 10% at 0 Defense Rating. Increasing Defense Rating to a positive value will also increase Glance Chance to a positive percentage value.
- Your (hidden) Enemy Glance Chance is 0% at 0 Hit Rating. Increasing Hit Rating to a positive value will also increase Enemy Glance Chance.
- During the "glance roll" portion of combat, the attacker's Enemy Glance Chance is subtracted from the defender's Glance Chance. The resulting percentage is the chance of the attackers hit to glance.
- Since it's apparent now that Evade rolls and Glance rolls work in identical ways with identical underlying "Chance" percentages, I think it's safe to extrapolate those same details to the Block and Penetration Rolls too. So I've expanded on the details of those two rolls in the What is the hit roll order section. - Comments: 0
Sarcan - SP Growth Chart - 11 Jul 2012 20:41
Tags: update
I have added an SP Growth Chart to my Random Information Page, under Theorycraft section. I am gathering the Combat and Healing Power values based on various gear Attack and Heal Rating. I have posted what I have thus far to show how I am gathering the data in case anyone would like to submit data to help.
This data will eventually result in formulas that will allow us to build gear calculators.
If you would like to help with this project or any other data gathering project, please let Yokai or I know what you would like to help with and how.
Thank you for following our site. - Comments: 0
Yokai - Important update to FAQ description about passive triggering by multi-hit versus single-hit - 10 Jul 2012 15:41
Tags: updates
Apparently, I missed an 11th hour decision by the devs late in Closed Beta about how they were fixing the inherent problem with multi-hit abilities. (For most of beta, most multi-hit abilities could trigger far more passive reactions than single-hit abilities, which was clearly imbalanced in PvP.) The last statement I saw/verified from devs near the end of closed beta was that they were changing all passives to trigger only once per activation of an active ability. Apparently they later clarified or changed their mind as follows. (Paraphrasing) "all passives now have an internal cooldown of one second, so that we don't screw over people who use long channels".
I've therefore revised the Why aren't multi-hit abilities inherently better than single-hit abilities? answer in my FAQ, in the Combat Mechanics section. - Comments: 0
Sarcan - Crafting Updates - 08 Jul 2012 15:52
Tags: update
I am in the process of updating the crafting page with known values and cleaning up the formating. I have also added an area for Gadgets.
I will also be adding areas for each tool kit by QL level and the resulting items, there will be holes in the information for a bit as I work on getting the matertials to find the values. If you would like to help in filling in the holes, your help will be greatly appreciated.
Stay tuned for more data than you can digest in a single helping :) - Comments: 1
