![]() ![]() ![]() Skill wheel secret world code#During my time in The Secret World, I've discovered the existence of Dutch painter Frans Hals, I've "hacked" into the "real-life" Orochi Group website to learn the name of some dead guy's wife, and I've even learned to translate Morse code (sort of). The cerebral challenges that these missions pose are fiendishly clever at times and borderline impossible at others, but they all twist your brain in ways that MMO quests never have before. Investigation missions are also one of TSW's biggest appeals to me. It may not be as intuitive as it could be, but the depth and freedom are astounding. Anyway, questionable analogies aside, I love TSW's approach to character progression. You don't go to a buffet and eat a metric ton of General Tso's you get some rice and crab rangoon to go with it (anyone suddenly craving Chinese?). This is really the beauty of the skill wheel. A few DPS skills here, a couple of heals there, some complementary passives, and voila! Everything suddenly went much more smoothly than before. So this time around, instead of going knee-deep into a single skill category, I spread out. What finally clicked is that there was no reason to take just the DPS skills, and in fact the game was encouraging me to use those interesting, flexible builds I'd yammered on about. All the times I had raved to my friends about the exciting, varied builds you could create with the myriad combinations on the skill wheel hadn't sunk in. I thought to myself, "I want to build a DPS character, so I should take only the abilities that maximize my DPS, wear only DPS gear, and basically breathe DPS day in and out." I wasn't even listening to myself. When I jumped into TSW for the first time, I knew that the entire skill wheel was open to me, but I was still stuck in the mindset of a class-based game. Amusingly, one of The Secret World's best features is the very one that caused the game to not "click" with me at first, and I think I've determined why that is. Let's start by talking about one of the game's main draws: the skill wheel. So here I am to tell you why it clicked, and of course, why I play The Secret World. I figured I'd probably be replaying Kingsmouth and/or Savage Coast just to get the AP to rectify my build anyway, so I scrapped him and started from the beginning. Last I left my Illuminati agent Rouage, he had hit something of a brick wall in Blue Mountain thanks to a very short-sighted and subpar character build. I had kept my subscription running, as I knew that even if I wasn't actively playing, I still wanted to support Funcom's endeavors with what I felt was a remarkably refreshing entry into the stagnant MMO marketplace. Last week, I finally gave into the guilt and hopped back into the game. But for some reason, it just didn't click, and so TSW sat unloved, guilt-inducingly staring at me from my desktop. Then finally the fateful day came that TSW went live, and I loved it. "It's like real life if the universe were written by horror authors," I enthused, rambling on and on about the innovative investigation missions, the unique skill wheel progression system, the fresh modern-day setting, and so on and so forth. I spent many a conversation extolling the game's many virtues to my gaming friends. ![]() I'll be the first to admit that I've been one of The Secret World's biggest fanboys ever since Funcom first announced its horror-flavored entry to the MMO space. ![]()
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