I repeat the links here to make it easier for you to get your questions to me. I have been on break from TSW for a bit, but will be back in more often and updating my Wiki pages as I get new information. So look for future streams of TSW and any other game I play.

Thank you for continuing to visit the Yokai and Sarcan Wiki.

by Sarcan

Because I won't be coming back. I've grown tired of vague promises of making things better from the devs, who to their credit at least try to dialog with their community and who I know are indeed trying to do their best with limited resources. But I have been stepped on too many times now by their ham-handed forum mods who cannot even be arsed to fix a 3-month old bug with their forum software that prevented me from receiving all PMs since live launch, and by their wholesale deletions of reasoned arguments of mine that involved ZERO personal attack or disrespect against anyone.

Best of luck to Funcom and crew, and best of luck to the player community. It was a great idea. But Arenanet has "drank your milkshake" and with good reason. GW2 has kept my rapt attention for more than 2 months now with no sign of abating, and the same goes for the majority of my guild. The sheer amount of things to do and see in GW2 is nothing short of amazing for the genre.

by shannong

by shannong

by Sarcan

For more information on these concepts (and a peek at the hairy math behind them), check out this article by Satrina written for WoW tanks back in the day: http://evilempireguild.org/guides/diminishmath.php

Basically, there are Nightmare-mode tanks here in TSW now asserting that what they observe about Protection so far seems to follow the same basic formula as that used in WoW (for armor mitigation), but perhaps with the constant being derived differently.

What does all this mean in "plain words"? Physical Protection might be very good to prioritize over Defense/Block/Evade. To the point of as much as 1000 total Physical Protection being a "sweet spot" to shoot for (still under debate), with remaining Glyph stat points being spent primarily in Defense, with Block/Evade coming in last and used mainly to ensure a desired number of Block- or Evade-reactive procs (either from abilities or for bosses that are adversely affected when you proc a Block or Evade against them). And remember, you get 249 Physical Protection "for free" from having Skill 10 in Minor Talismans, so that means only +750 Physical Protection needed on your gear glyphs to hit that asserted "sweet spot".

My advice? Keep your eye on the following thread on the official forums. Once the dust settles, I'll be revising my FAQ somewhat based on the results. http://forums.thesecretworld.com/showthread.php?t=51071

by shannong

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.

by shannong

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.

by shannong

Secondly I figured out the Rocket Firework pattern.

Enjoy

by Sarcan

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.

by shannong

by shannong

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.

by Sarcan

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

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.

by Sarcan

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.

by shannong

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

Happy Deck building

by Sarcan

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!

by shannong

Enjoy

by Sarcan

• 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.

by shannong

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.

by Sarcan

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.

by shannong

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 :)

by Sarcan