The Secret World | Superior Realities

The holiday lull is always a good time to get caught up on one’s gaming. In my case, I wound up focusing my attention once again on The Secret World and Heroes of the Storm, enjoying the holiday festivities of both.

The Christmas Conspiracy:

After the home-run that was Halloween’s new mission, I was actually a bit disappointing by TSW’s new addition to the Christmas event. I’m sure it’s a lot of fun if you’re a fan of puzzles and/or opera, but I’m not particularly keen on either, so I wound up finding the mission rather tedious.

A new player begged me for help on the final instance because he couldn’t defeat the mobs, but in the end, he wound up carrying me much more than I carried him, because I never would have solved the puzzles on my own. I just shuffled along and beat up Phoenicians like the trained ape I apparently am.

Also, how many damn times are we gonna have to beat Lydia, anyway?

I decided to simply not repeat the mission, but that presented a problem, because the new outfit is supremely swanky. My only hope was to buy everything I wanted — for all my alts — at auction.

So I wound up selling signets, turning Aurei into augment upgrade toolkits to sell, vendoring green toolkits I’d been hoarding, and basically doing everything to make pax short of turning tricks in Darkside. On the plus side, I made thirteen million pax in the first three days.

In the end, I got pretty much everything I wanted, and it cost me a lot less than I initially expected, so I’ve ended the event wealthier than I started.

Thank Grilled Cheesus I didn’t want any of the epic items…

But the event had plenty more to offer. The return of Super Hel and the Mayan Apocalypse is welcome, and I’m very happy they brought back the communal loot bag concept from Halloween.

It’s a great way to bring people together. Sure, you can just dump the loot on the hug-pile that inevitable springs up in Agartha, but where’s the fun in that?

I took mine to Kingsmouth and rounded up a crowd of mainly new or low level players. We had a short impromptu party atop the police station, and one of the lowbies got the zombie polar bear pet, which is the rarest item in this event. It felt good.

And, of course, using the public loot bag earned me the new /dance_single_ladies emote.

It’s amazing. I mean, I’m no Beyonce fan, but this dance is hilarious. Especially on a male character. Especially with fist weapons equipped.

Speaking of a sense of community…

It’s beginning to look a lot like fish-men…

On Christmas Eve, I tuned in for Moiren‘s now-traditional drunken Lovecraftian Christmas carol sing-along livestream.

As has happened in the past, I wound up logging on to join her in her adventures and doing all sorts of random things. I spent much of the time on my latest alt, and the experience proved quite a boon to my fledgling second Dragon.

I was able to mooch free runs through the first three dungeons, which is great because I almost never get to run dungeons in TSW. I was once again reminded of how much I love Darkness War. Epic war, rifts in space and time, and Vikings. What more could anyone want from a video game?

At one point, we wound up killing one of the Vestiges of Nameless Days in the Shadowy Forest. If you want to feel like a badass, spend half an hour running through Transylvania on a character who hasn’t even finished Kingsmouth yet.

EVERYTHING IN THIS ZONE CAN ONE-SHOT ME, AND I DON’T EVEN CARE. TREMBLE BEFORE MY QL1 BLUES.

It’s a bit of a blur after that. I seem to recall a dance party in Niflheim at one point…

With my family scattered to the winds, the holidays can be a bit of a lonely time for me, but a night of virtual Vikings, bad jokes, and drunken songs about Mi-go took a lot of the sting out.

The ice woman cometh:

I haven’t been doing many posts on Heroes of the Storm, but I’m still playing it regularly. I just haven’t had much to say about beyond my initial thoughts. I still think it’s a very fun game somewhat marred by an overbearing business model and an absolutely atrocious community.*

*(To be fair, all game communities are absolutely atrocious. Except TSW’s, which is only partially atrocious.)

However, December was an eventful month for me where Heroes is concerned.

This month saw the long-overdue release of Jaina Proudmoore. After seeing how long it took Anub’arak and Azmodan to make it into the free rotation, I decided to take a chance and buy Jaina as soon as she dropped to 10,000 gold.

I’m glad I did. Jaina almost instantly supplanted Tassadar as my favourite hero. I love her burst, her area of effect damage, her utility, her spell effects, her voice-overs… She’s just a complete blast to play.

I think a lot of it also boils down to being a big fan of Jaina as a character. Or at least the character she used to be.

And that’s the wonderful thing about Heroes. Every character is frozen at their moment of greatest awesomeness. In Heroes, Jaina isn’t some emotionally erratic nincompoop. She’s the calm-headed badass she used to be. If World of Warcraft has failed Jaina, then at least I can still bask in her awesomeness in this game.

A hilarious glitch in Heroes of the Storm

The greatest glitch ever: Jaina Proudmoore surfing on a dinosaur.

I was worried going in, because people on the forums were wailing about Jaina being extremely weak, but I haven’t found that to be the case at all. I’ve had great success with her, consistently. Maybe she’s only effective at relatively low MMR; I don’t know.

Part of the problem might be that Jaina is a very different kind of assassin. People seem to be expecting her to be like Valla or Nova — capable of blowing up single targets effortlessly — but Jaina isn’t very good at that. She’s not a duelist.

Where Jaina excels is in team fights. Her massive area of effect damage and slows are devastating in large brawls, and those are where games are decided. She’s a force to be reckoned with on maps with lots of big team fights in tight spaces, like Cursed Hollow and Blackheart’s Bay.

I loved Jaina so much that I resolved to make her my first hero to reach level ten. I treated myself to one of the new stimpacks (XP boosters) for Christmas, and together with the 25% holiday XP boost, I proceeded to rake in the experience hand over fist.

Even so, it was an abominable grind. I can’t complain too much, since all the rewards for hero leveling past level five are purely cosmetic, but my God, such a grind.

But it was worth it in the end. At long last, I unlocked her master skin, and it is magnificent, especially the red tint.

Don’t think I’ll be unlocking any other master skins any time soon, though.

* * *

Because one isn’t enough, here’s another shot of my Dragon doing the Single Ladies dance:

A few days ago, I did a big post summarizing the state of The Secret World’s Tokyo zone six months after its launch. But fate likes to mock me, because Funcom wasn’t done making big changes to Tokyo. Shortly after I published that post, they published sweeping changes intended to retune the difficulty of Tokyo and make it more approachable for the average player.

Virtually every enemy in Tokyo has now received an across the board nerf of approximately 10%. That is, 10% less damage, health, and shields. In addition to that, many quests now award low level AE capacitors and AEGIS modules, and the sequin cost of AEGIS upgrade kits has been massively reduced.

Despite all the wailing and gnashing on teeth on the forums about “easy mode,” I haven’t found this change to make an enormous difference. It’s noticeable, but it’s not a “to the ground” situation. Things that were challenging before are still challenging — just slightly less so — and things that were easy before are still easy — just slightly more so.

I think what ultimately might be more meaningful is that you can now get a full set of AEGIS gear without trading with other players or grinding until your eyes bleed. This erases my last major complaint about AEGIS, and it should make things a lot less painful for players just entering the zone. A full set of AE capacitors makes a big difference.

Naturally, these changes are quite controversial — according to the MMO community, nothing is ever hard, and any nerf is a grave injustice — but for my part, I think these are positive changes.

I wasn’t really struggling in Tokyo myself, but I’m over-geared, and I have one of the better solo builds around. And even then, it was still a challenge for me. It seems to me the intended audience for Tokyo — newish players fresh from Transylvania in a motley of greens, blues, and issue purples — would get wrecked pretty hard. Even after the nerf, they’re probably still in for a bit of bumpy ride to start.

For me, the biggest positive of the change is that I’m actually enjoying exploring Tokyo now. Before, the fights were too long and brutal for me to want to do much beyond my mission objectives. Now I’m looking into every nook and cranny for lore and missed item missions, as I did in the past zones. It’s given me a much greater appreciation for the care and craftsmanship that went into Tokyo.

Now if only they would do something about the mob density in Orochi Projects…

In other news, I’m certifiably insane.

Enter the Dragon (again):

Most would agree there is very little use for alts in TSW. You can gain every ability and experience the overwhelming majority of content on a single character. If you’re a hopeless completionist or story-hound, you might want to create one character for each of the three factions to experience their storylines.

I now have a fourth character, and I am therefore completely insane.

But what I can say? I love the Dragon. They’re a constantly unfolding riddle, an eternal challenge to your own expectations. They’re endlessly fascinating, and it had been a very long time since I played through their faction content, so I wanted to experience it all again.

Plus, like many altoholics, I think I’m just addicted to that “new character smell.” There’s always a certain thrill to creating a new character and thinking of all the epic adventures that lie ahead, even if it’s all stuff you’ve seen before.

Of course, being me, I spent the first several hours of the new Dragon’s life combing through Pangaea and the cash shop to put together a variety of different outfits for her. I partially modeled her appearance after Nilin from Remember Me, so I did my best to put together a cosplay of that character.

For the most part, though, I’m going to stick with a Dragon-themed outfit I put together that I think is quite stylish.

I’m planning to use fist weapons as her main weapon. I don’t regret switching to blades on my main, but I still have a soft spot for fists, so I’m giving them another go and hoping to stick with them this time. I really enjoy the animations for fist abilities; they have a great feral intensity to them.

For my second weapon, I waffled between chaos and elemental magic. Right now, I’m trying elemental, but I may change my mind later. I picked it because it looks cooler than chaos, I like combining ranged and melee, and I’d never heard of anyone going fist/elemental. I don’t think it’s really that crazy of a combination — I’m actually rather surprised I don’t see people using it — but it’s uncommon enough to make me feel pleasantly hipsterish.

I’m not sure what my long term plan is for the character. I’d like to play through the launch story, but I might move on after that. I’m already splitting my endgame attention between my original Dragon and my Templar. I don’t really need a third character running around Tokyo.

But for now, I’m enjoying playing through everything again.

Superior Realities

Tag Archives: The Secret World

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