Last time I wrote about my progress in TSW, I was doing elite dungeons. Them being sandwiched between normal leveling dungeons and the “real” end-game nightmare dungeons, I didn’t spend a lot of time in them. After a couple of game nights, I had successfully pugged all elite dungeons and fulfilled that half of the “nightmare certification” list. All that was left was to defeat the Gatekeeper, who tests you before he lets you enter the branch of Agartha that leads for the nightmare dungeons.t

That fight was a bit of a letdown. It might have been because I was a healer, but I did it on try 3, and that only because I had to learn that he uses a debuff on you that you have to remove with a gimmick ability I had never put on my hotbars before. I heard horror stories from DPS doing their version, though… so it might have been a case of unequal balancing.

The premise was quite nice: the gatekeeper summed a “tank” that you had to keep up while dodging ground effects. At some point, “DPS” came in, one of which promptly decided to stand in the fire. You had to keep everyone up until the Gatekeeper was satisfied with your performance. I think it’s a very good idea to make sure you know what you’re doing before playing with the big boys, but it felt just a little too easy.

Yeah, yeah, thanks. No where do I pick up my certificate?

Since then, I’ve done three rounds of “18s” or “24s” (I just don’t have time at the moment to play on weekdays… I feel like watching old comedy shows is about all I’m able to do in the evening). By the way, I wonder who came up with that name. If you don’t know (and for me for reference in case I might need it years down the road), “18s” means the three nightmare dungeons that are considered easiest: The Polaris, Hell Raised, and The Darkness War. “24s” adds Hell Fallen. The number supposedly comes from the fact that each dungeon has 6 bosses. I have no idea where the “s” comes from, though. You certainly can’t run the same dungeons multiple times in a row on nightmare difficulty because they have an 18-hour lockout. Maybe it’s from the earlier days of the game, when nightmare wasn’t the default difficulty for the older population, and Elites were farmed? Who knows.

Anyway, I’ve done some nightmare dungeons, and most of the time, they worked pretty well. The “noobmares” chat channel is great for someone like me who is starting out with nightmares. There is not a lot of “rush rush” pressure during runs, which I certainly appreciate. There are also many well-geared players hanging out in there, which certainly helps. I also took the chance to interview my tanks afterwards to see whether they noticed anything I could improve on. Most of them were pretty happy and just noted I should work on positioning. In the beginning, I had problems with sometimes getting out of range of my tanks on fights in large areas with equally large ground effects (Machine Tyrant, especially). Switching auxiliary weapons from the healing-focused quantum brace to the rocket launcher seems to have solved that problem. Death from Above, a.k.a. the rocket jump, helped a lot with positioning. Yes, you can do a rocket jump in TSW! Isn’t it adorable?

So, anyway, nightmares going mostly well, so far. Yay! I’m happy that, apart from an occasional unnecessary death… or from blowing all my healing abilities on the tank, before I realizing that I had targeted a DPS, and the tank consequently dying… I’ve been coping with nightmares pretty well. Of course, it probably helps a lot to have, on average, at least two highly-geared people with you every run. I did meet a few annoying DPS, though. In one run, we had a fresh tank (with decent gear, but no tanking experience) and a DPS who found it funny to steal aggro from him… all the time… and die. We managed to pull through in any case, but that was more stressful than it needed to be. Then there was the group who had two DPS that were abysmally low on damage. So low that, in fact, we called the run on Machine Tyrant because we couldn’t get it down before the enrage.  Didn’t help that people died regularly on fights, either. But that’s the downside of pugging channels: you win some, you lose some. And it’s definitely better than an automatic dungeon-group-slap-togetherer, because it seems the runs are at least slightly more social that way. You still have players who’ve done it 50 times and just want to get it over with to get the bullion for upgrades, but at least there’s some talking and friendlisting involved before, during or after the runs.

… or, when it comes to healing, I’m on the fence. Specifically, when it comes to TSW healing, but there are some general topics mixed in, too.

So on my return to TSW I decided to go the healer route for group content. The reasoning was like this:

1. I’m not gonna play DPS. I just don’t like playing DPS in group settings any more. I play it all the time when I solo, I want to do something different when I group. Besides, I like to fill a “supporting” role.
2. There is no pure support role in TSW, like the EQ2 bards and enchanters or the RIFT Archons. At least not for group content. Maybe for raids, I don’t know.
3. I’ve played tanks before, and I like tanking. But I’ve played little organized group content these last years, and I notice I’ve become very nervous about potentially underperforming in groups. I’d need new confidence to retry a role that always seems to end up having to know everything about every boss to succeed. Besides, coming late to a game makes tanking hard, if you end up with DPSers in your group that massively outgear you.
4. So, that leaves healing. Why not, I’ve never done that seriously, outside of leveling a Disc priest in WoW during Cataclysm.

Now, healing isn’t bad. It can actually be quite fun. At the moment, I’m rocking a Fist/Blood deck, which means I have a lot of healing choices, mostly dots and shields, with some oh-shit instant heals for nasty situations. It has served me well in Elite dungeons (TSW’s second-tier group content).

All green, all healing.

I like being able to support other players (point 2), and I got back some limited confidence in my playing abilities in a group context (point 3). Picking up people from the brink of death is fun, if sometimes pretty frantic. There’s just one thing about TSW healing that I noticed:

I really miss the mana bar.

See, with a mana bar, your healing decisions become less tactic and more strategic: which heal do I use? Can I wait for a few more moments to regen mana? Do I then have to use a more expensive heal? Which choice is the better one?

During vanilla WoW, I played a mage for some time as some sort of an alt. Endgame mage meant frost, and frost meant spamming one button most of the time. However, I enjoyed the mana management game immensely. Interleaving potions, mana gems (of different qualities), evocation (with a spirit staff to switch to), and, if I got really lucky, synchronizing those with an Innervate… the tactic game was boring, but the strategic game was an additional, appealing, slower gameplay layer on top.

Anyway, the problem with TSW is that it doesn’t have a mana bar. All abilities follow a builder–consumer ability style, even heals. Some abilities cost nothing and give you resources; others consume resources for more powerful effects. That makes the game very tactic and not very strategic: building up resources happens anyway, and since you are capped at 5, even if you spend them, you’ll have them back in no time. Conversely, that builder–consumer scheme means that every moment you don’t use an ability is wasted; as a healer, filling every gap with spamming builder heals because they don’t cost anything and potentially keep someone alive is a good tactic. And during downtimes in fights, where nobody is taking any damage, you are completely useless. In other games, using the downtime to regen mana felt like doing something sensible. In TSW, I feel like I’m twiddling thumbs in fight pauses for no beneficial effect at all, especially on fights that have the boss disappear and the others DPSing some temporary target that doesn’t deal damage.

I guess that’s one of the reasons people drift away from pure healing builds as their gear gets better. Most seem to end up running a healing leech build. Which I imagine can be lots of fun: I love classes that heal by dealing damage. I had lots of fun playing my Disciple in Vanguard or my Chloromage in RIFT before they overhauled that part of the game. But the gear requirements in TSW to run a leech healer well are very steep, ands I won’t be able to reach them for some time.

And then there’s the whole thing with watching health bars. That’s a more general remark and doesn’t have anything to do with TSW. But I noticed that I feel more disconnected from the world. When I played a tank, my impression was that 80% of good tanking was being aware of your surroundings. That worked pretty well: you tanked some boss or adds in the middle of your screen and just scanned the periphery regularly.

As a healer, I noticed that I have a harder time keeping awareness of my surroundings. Half the time, I watch health bars at the border of the screen. That runs the risk of getting boring. Every fight ends up being the same for a good amount of time, because, in a way, your primary enemy as a healer are the health bars, and you have to focus on those. I’ve gotten to the point where I rarely kill myself or others any more by missing environmental effects in the world, but I still feel like someone who’s texting while driving: watching the health bars… watching… watching… oh snap, I gotta move! I’m slowly getting used to it, but it still feels weird. I wish there was a better way of integrating healing into the world.

So yeah, I still enjoy TSW, and I enjoy doing group content, too. The community, overall, is refreshingly non-toxic, and the fact that there’s no randomized, auto-group-creating dungeon finder probably helps with that. I enjoy healing, but I do have some beefs with it.

Hm, maybe I should try tanking again. Start with some beginner dungeons for newbies…

There are always a few games I have on my back burner, which I don’t play, but update in regular intervals. If I ever feel like playing them again, I won’t have to spend a whole evening updating, and miss the window of opportunity to get back into the game.

TSW is one of those games. I was really looking forward to it when it got released, and got a lot of playtime out of it for two months or so. Then I went on vacation for three weeks, and I never got back into the game.

However, earlier this year, the Tokyo expansion was finally released. If you read this blog regularly, you know that I have an affection for Japan in general, and Tokyo in specific. The first introductory mission of TSW, which gave you something of a sneak preview into Tokyo, made me smile and hope for a quick release of the area which was already announced at launch. Alas, it took longer than expected (and probably longer than Funcom had planned; I bet they had plans for faster releases that relied on higher player and revenue numbers). But when it finally arrived, I knew I’d return to the game sooner or later, to have a look at Funcom’s twisted version of the city.

Of course, one does not simply walk into Tokyo. Getting into there requires at least a decent amount of end-game gear (if not necessarily of the highest quality), and finishing the story line.

Last time, I had left my character, Anselm “Tabascun” Arenberg, in the Besieged Farmlands, the first Transylvania zone. As I logged in, I remembered one of the reasons that had soured the game for me. Or two, actually. First, the Besieged Farmlands didn’t appeal to me in atmosphere. After Egypt, which I really liked, with some interesting characters such as Ptahmose and Saïd, and my favorite scenery (desert!), the game sent you to a dingy, run-down Romanian village. Second, there was a huge increase in difficulty between The City of the Sun God (the last zone of Egypt) and the Besieged Farmlands. Last time, that combination of high difficulty and unappealing scenery drove me away. However, this time I decided to give the game another chance, and bit the bullet. The good thing is that missions in Transylvania give you a lot of XP, so you only have to slog through a few missions before you can afford additional skills better suited to the area. Combined with level-appropriate drops, I soon managed to survive. Well, most of the time. TSW is probably the least forgiving game I (ir)regularly play. One mispull at the wrong time can send you the graveyard unless you massively outgear the challenge.

Soon, I was back on track and could concentrate on the things that I love about the game. Everything is weird and slightly off in The Secret World. It is the MMO closest to a David Lynch movie. And I love David Lynch movies. In fact, sometimes you wonder whether you aren’t actually playing inside a David Lynch movie:

Just missing a slice of damn fine cherry pie.

Of course, there are also grown-up men having a seemingly inappropriate attachment to teddy bears:

But it’s all good, because it’s a special bear. Well, at least it talks. But only to that guy. Which we’ll just believe, because Secret World. And because otherwise, we’d have to deal with a clinically insane guy with a weapon. Of which there are enough in TSW already.

As long as it doesn’t eat your face…

Add to that clinically insane girls, or at least very-aggressive-if-need-be girls, and you end up in nasty situations. Like when you enter a nursery, and you see that:

Cleanup on aisle 3! Bring bleach.

Of course, it wasn’t your run-of-the-mill nursery: this one had laboratories for human genetic and paranormal experiments, and some of the children grew both powerful and aggressive… and developed their own sense of symmetry.

Looks like a happy childhood alright.

In short, TSW delivers what I was looking for: creepy and atmospheric scenery and missions. We’ll have to see about long-term viability, though. Most missions are great the first time around, but the shock effects and surprises obviously only work once. And Funcom definitely won’t be able to provide content as fast as I can consume it. Plus, before Tokyo they set an ugly gate: to get your “certification”, you have to collect tokens that you can only get in scenarios. Those work like LotRO’s skirmishes, and I hate those: run a procedurally-generated mission in an instanced area with random enemy waves, over and over again. We’ll see how that goes.

I really like the game, but if I want to stay with it, I’ll probably have to find a cabal to do stuff with on a regular basis. Grouping for those scenarios might also take the sting out of them. We’ll see. If all else fails, I can always return to the game later when Funcom has released more content packs.