Mayans, Egypt and Blue Mountains

I started playing The Secret World in the pre-order early access (plus in the beta weekends), but until just a few days ago I never got past the Solomon Island zones. Part of the reason for that was a busy Real Life during summer, but also that NCSoft announced the termination of City of Heroes and Paragon Studios. During those three months from that announcement, I focused only on playing City of Heroes.

So after the termination it was time to resume playing again, but I postponed it a bit – partially to try out some other games also first (Planetside 2, DCUO on PC, Vanguard, Perpetuum). But once I got back into The Secret World I was initially somewhat intimidated – how was it things worked now again? But after a slow start things started to come back and after running a couple of missions I knew again why I love this game.

Is it just me, or is it a bit hot here?

Before my 3 month pause of playing the game I was playing in Blue Mountains and had around 110-120 unspent AP. Thus two of my initial objectives where to finish the first story mission (Dawning of and Endless Night) and also work a bit on my Chaos/Fist build – it worked ok as-is, but had been the same for a quite some time, since early Savage Coast.

Completing the story mission was easier than I had anticipated – in the back of my head I remembered some comments about difficulties with some missions in the Blue Mountain part, but it was pretty manageable. The end raised some new questions and it was quite good in that regard – eager to find out more what is going on.

Beautiful Eqyptian moon…that was certainly what was on my mind then

The next story mission was shorter and quicker and lead the way to Egypt, which was nice and exciting to see some new scenery. Not that I was tired of Solomon Island and Blue Mountains; in fact I quite enjoyed most of the time in Blue Mountains. I have been going back and and forth between Scorched Desert and Blue Mountains a couple of times lately, doing both new and old missions in Blue Mountains as well.

But Eqypt has been quite enjoyable as well and it is nice to see new challenges, enemies and people to interact with.

In most MMOs I am an altoholic – I create many different characters. Part of the reason for that is because I enjoy the variation, different play styles, different outfits, different roles. But since The Secret World allows most of that in one character and that I can repeat pretty much whatever mission I want in the game, all those altoholic tendencies have gone into the same character. Right now I have unlocked the whole inner ability wheel and I have a couple of different builds to work on and some skill points in a couple of different weapons.

I promise, there actually _is_ a big monster behind you!

This is contrary to what some people think is the optimal way to play the game, but as Funcom says – “you can become anything you want to be, without restrictions”. This is an approach that works for me and I am quite happy with that. Although I think I will need more Gear Manager slots…

I have some more team-oriented builds I have created, but will need to get a bit more team play with those to learn and practice, so I hope to do more dungeons. In fact, I havce only done one dungeon once so far – Polaris, which was pretty much during the first week I played. So I have a bit catching up to do in that department. Luckily I think with my Cabal conglomerate and that Funcom dropped the subscription fee will create good opportunities to play even the early dungeons in normal mode.

Right now there is an “End of days” event going on, since it is the end of the Mayan Calendar. This includes some big monsters wandering around, some dungeon and Mayan zombies that spawn wherever you go. The last part is something you really cannot avoid – as soon as you stand still in one place for a short while, a Mayan zombie will spawn and you may need to fight it. I have not looked into all the details of the event, but some of the things it drops are QL5 blue weapons (blades and hammers primarily – would not expect the old Mayans to use assault rifles…), plus drops to allow your self to change into a Mayan zombies of different types, for 20 minutes.

If you keep defeating the spawned Mayans there will be a bit tougher spawns until the final one, which conned red to me and was too tough for me to defeat on my own. The big monsters are three different Harbingers of Nameless Days. It seems one gets a mission to defeat them if you are nearby one of them and the other day I did just that with my cabal conglomerate. It was a pretty fun experience, especially since I had not played together at the same time with as many in the cabal(s) at the same time as during this occasion.

As it is now The Secret World is by far my favourite game to play now and any other games will probably suffer a bit because of that – there is only so much time for playing games.