The Kestrel Minority

Thought I'd post some details from the beta regarding gameplay, world design and so on.

The questing is mostly familiar but with some unique aspects. Quests come in three forms (well four with story I guess) action, gathering and investigation. Action and gathering should be pretty self explanatory, investigation is a bit more unique and requires a bit of thinking, usually they give you a clue or a puzzle to solve and no directions outside of that, sometimes you might have to find a specific location form the clue while another example is to figure out to look up a specific part in the Bible for the next clue. Gathering is the only one you usually have to turn in in a specific place, the rest can just be turned in when done.

All the quests do have a voiced introduction/cutscene to them as well as a text description, there is however no dialogue and your character is very very silent which is a shame, still a lot more interesting that just a bunch of text though.

Character customization was a bit limited in the beta, the launcher even says there is much more options in the full game, they don't lie about being able to look how you want though, clothes and gear are completely different items, clothes however are a bit expensive.

The one hub that was in this weekend had several open buildings like stores, a café shop, a pub, templar HQ as well as a park so there are plenty of viable RP spots. The questing areas are pretty well populated with mobs but are very well done and atmospheric and could probably serve for RP too, I spent the whole weekend, 20 hours, mostly questing in one area and there are still more quests (although locked in beta) and I'm not remotely tired of it.

PVP and Dungeons wasn't really part of this beta weekend but I've still be able to gather that there is a open free for all arena in London (don't know about the other hubs) and three PVP zones, two of these zones seem to be regular queued zones while one is "persistent" not sure how that works though. I also know there will be several dungeons available in at least three difficulty levels (if that means any can be done in any difficulty or there is a number for each difficulty I don't know) but no raids, not at launch anyway.

The interface is beautiful but not very customizable besides all windows being movable. There was a bit of an inconsistency where some windows had a X button to close them while other didn't.

Feel free to ask if you have questions

How does healing work in this game?

From what I saw the healing skills come in two varieties (might be more among the advanced skills that are locked) and can work in different ways.
The first type are the direct heals that heal your defensive target, some of these also applied a shield to the target. The second type are indirect, for example an attack that heals your defensive target for a fixed amount plus the same amount as a percentage of the damage you do to your target or a passive ability that heals a set amount of friendly targets around an enemy for a certain amount if you still have resources on the target when it died (some skill types build spendable resources on targets).

Maybe I should explain defensive target. Basically, friendly and hostile targets are seperate, by default you are set as the defensive target but if you target another player they become the defensive target but your main target (hostile) remain unchanged.

It felt a bit like the heals was a bit weak but that might be it being a beta,because neither I nor Zen really geared for healing or maybe one player isn't supposed to heal a whole group, not sure .

I only just looked into this game. It looks interesting but the portrayal of the Illuminati is very disappointing, pure conspiracy theory bunk and none of the intellectualism and rationality of the original movement... actually, what I saw didn't even resemble the historical Illuminati. But I only read the brief summary on the site, so if any of you know of any kind of depth to this organization, please share.

Wealth and power are such painfully simple motivations and there's only so many ways to make it interesting in a character.

Unfortunatly we can only play as Templars in the beta as of yet, and not very far either. It's likely the other two factions will be unlocked for the beta in the following weekends and when they do unlock I'll make sure to comment.

In the meantime, there is this thread over on the secret world forums which has done a good job of collecting most of the lore information for the three factions in one place.

Here are a few more notes I took during the second beta weekend. Still no access to Dungeons or PVP but I do have some PVP related info.


First of, I said before that the UI wasn't customizable, turns out I was a bit wrong there, in a way, fact is the GUI is highly but not simply moddable. All of it is controlled by XML and Flash files, in the games folders there is a GUI folder which contains a default and a custom folder, if the game detects any (correctly made and named) files in the custom folder these will be loaded instead of the default UI, there are loads of potential for GUI mods here, you could actually replace the UI completely, but it will be far from as simple as in SWTOR.
That said, all the windows in the game are movable to begin with and you can add inventory bags that are always visible (useful for healing potions and so on. The party frames can't be moved in the beta but that's listed as a "known issue" so I assume it will be in the final game.

Ability points are earnt every 40000 XP and skill points are earnt every 60000 XP and missions can be done again 24 hours after you last completed it, in other words, you could do all your "leveling" (no actually levels but can't think of another word) in one area if you wanted to or you can go help a friend who just started a new character and still receive money and a useful amount of XP from doing so (tough the gear rewards probably wont be much use ).

There are no speach boubles ( ) and to make things worse we can't change text colour in chat (say and region chat unfortunately have the same colours), but you can create new tabs and chat windows and control what channels show in them.

And some PVP info, this is all from looking trough the UI, not actually playing PVP.
While the game relies on gear for stats the PVP will be fair as players select one of three faction uniforms (Tank,DPS,Healer) for PVP Warzones, I.E PVP depends on player skill rather than gear.
When a faction controlls one of the two Battlefield (by having the most wins, resets every X mins) or controlling any of the points in the Persistant Warzone the faction gains a buff to various stats and XP gain, not clear if this is a PVP only buff or if it effects all gameplay.

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I also thought, to give maybe a bit of sense of how combat and abilities work in The Secret World I'd show you the ability build I've made and what the various skills do.
So those are the abilities, well their icons anyway, now to how they work, I'll leave damage numbers out as that won't really mean anything without proper context. Keep in mind these are all very early-game abilities, I only have access to 14 abilities (passive and active) for every weapon, in the final game there is another 42 per weapon.

First we have my two builder abilities (Slot one and slot five on the active skills), this is a thing I really like about The Secret World, you are in control of both building and spending resources. These two are very simple, they both generate resources for the two weapons equipped, the first one is called Shock, it's an Elementalism ability, it's ranged and it has a 1 second cast. The other is called Pump Action and it uses my shotgun, its range is much shorter than that of spark but and the damage is lower, instead it has no cast time (seem to be true for all close range/melee builders) and does damage to up to 5 enemies in a 60 degree 7 meter long cone in front of me. I like to get up close and use pump action to build resources more quickly than I can with Shock though I make sure to cast Shock every now and then because of one of my passives which I'll get to in a bit.
A final note on building resources, magic resources (Elementalism, Chaos and blood magic) builds a pool of up to 5 resources in me, the caster, they decay out of combat. Gun resources (Shotgun, Assault Rifles and pistols) build on the target so any enemy hit by one of my builders gets a shotgun resource put on it (so you could use the cone builder on a group of enemies and then a consumer on all of them individually). And last, melee weapon resource build on the user just like magic, but unlike magic they also regenerate even if you do not use a builder, the generation is however quite slow in combat but quick out of combat.

So, on to my consumers and one special active ability.
First we have Combust, it's the second active ability equipped, it consumes 2 elemental resources (1 if target is hindered, that is rooted or slowed), has a 1.5 second cast and deals a pretty good deal of damage. Combust is my main attack against single targets.

The third equipped ability is called Electrical Storm though I prefer to call it chain lightning, it costs 3 elemental resources and does a bit less damage than combust but will after having hit my target hit up to an additional 4 enemies, won't jump further than 3 enemies. Excellent for groups of enemies.

Ability number four is a bit special, it's called Anima Charge, it's instant cast and costs nothing but have a 20 second cooldown, when I use it the next elemental ability I use will activate for free (and one of my passives make it really awesome).

Ability number six is called Buckshot, 1.5 second cast, a six second cooldown and I think it consumes all shotgun resources although it doesn't explicitly say, deals a fair amount of damage and a bit extra if there are five shotgun resources on the target, still not as my as combust but my shotgun isnt as good as my elementalism focus so that could be why. Not a main ability but it'd be a shame to let all the shotgun resources I build go to waste.

And the last of the active abilities, Thor's Hammer, two second cast, 15 second cooldown, costs 5 elemental resource and deals a load of damage. I think this is the strongest single target attack in the beta.

Ok, so passives. I'm guessing everyone can figure out that these all give me some kind of buff or augment and ability in one way or another. One thing special about passives are that unlike the active abilities they do not care about your equipped weapons so you can use something like the passive I have in slot 3 without actually using elementalism.

The first one is called Volatile Current, it augments Shock a bit making it add a dot to it's target that deals a bit of damage every second for 8 second, added up the dot does about as much damage as shock does when it hit's the target.

Second passive is Elemental precision, it increases all damage dealt by my elemental abilities by 10%.

The third passive is fun, it's called Elemental Force, every time I attack it builds a counter, when there are 7 counters my next attack will be a critical and reset the counter.

The fourth passive is Rapid Combustion, it reduces the cast time of combust by half a second.

The fifth passive is called High Voltage, it augments my Anima Charge making so it also makes my next attack a critical. So, with this Anima Charge will make my next attack free and a critical, guess what I use this for, that's right, casting Thor's Hammer.

Last two passives are shotgun passives, I'm not that deep in the shotgun tree yet so these aren't the best I could get from there even in the beta.

So, passive six, called Hit & Run, if an enemy dies with any shotgun resources remaining on them an explosion occurs around that enemy dealing a bit of damage to up to 5 enemies in a three meter radius. (Pistols have a similar passive that instead heals any friends around the killed enemy.)

And finally, passive number seven, Sawed Off, augments Pump Action causing it to make targets weakened (debuffed, some abilities have bonuses against weakened enemies just like my combust have a bonus against hindered enemies) by a single stack of Debilitated, this reduces all damage dealt by the target by 3% per stack for 10 seconds, can stack up to 10 times.

Hopefully that gives someone interested a look in to the combat (as DPS) in the Secret World.

Still can't provide any of my own insight on the dungeons but here is a good article that talks about them and introduces the second dungeons in the game (first was shown in a video a while back), going to hell as early as the second dungeon, figured that would be later if ever

http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/05/24 ... -instance/

I compiled a list of people who are currently playing the game (and told us in the thread about possible guild expansion).

Ginger - "Eithna"
Endmyn - "Raehnar"
Dabrin - "Inkwell"
Zenosis - Evaline "Taffie" Dark
Yogash - "Effie", "Valrim"

Valrim is better known to most as Thumbes...

Endmyn's main is Raehnar and mark the societies too as I'm not sure if cabals can be cross-faction...