In the City of the Sun God
In roughly the past week I have been spending my time in The City of the Sun God, the second Egyptian zone in The Secret World. For me, this was a noticeably different experience from the other zones. The reason for this was primarily the NPCs that I met in this zone.
The entrance to the City of the Sun God
Contrary to other MMOs, many of the NPCs one meets and talks to are people that I remember and/or relate to them and their situation in some way. In the City of the Sun God that was a bit … difficult, I found. They do have certain personalities and I remember some of them because of that and the dialogue is well written. But ancient Egyptians trapped into statues in a zone that did not have much to indicate that this is a contemporary setting… no, this was not my favourite zone.
I still like the zone though, it has been fun to play through a lot of the content. It just that many of the other zones simply were more fun to me. I did skip a couple of the missions, so I might have missed some of the good stuff. At some point I will probably return to do those later – I know there was at least one investigation mission that I skipped and I want to try out these at some point.
As perhaps expected the zone contains more of the same type of enemies that are found in the previous Eqyptian zone; cultists, ghouls, locust and some golems, with a splash of Jinns. And filth of course. And there are mummies also, can’t have an ancient Egyptian city without mummies.
There are some tricky fights and that is quite good. I do like it when the majority of the fighting is going rather swift, but without getting tedious. Then from time to time there is a fight that I really stuggle with and I sometimes perhaps die. In those case there may be because I made a mistake, or it gets me thinking how I can do this better. And then try again and in the end be successful. These are the victories that feels the best – I think The Secret World is going a pretty good job with providing these moments from time to time.
Tonight I decided to finish the main story mission in the zone, which I almost did. I succeeded with the expected battle (after a few attempts, i.e. one of these moments I mentioned), but the whole thing seems to have bugged out after completing that tier and I believe I ended up in the wrong spot. It has been petitioned, so hopefully it will sort itself out eventually.
For now though I feel that I am done with the ancient city and I move on to an area slightly closer to home – Transylvania.
A ding world 
I need to pick your brain at some point after reading this and seeing you’re xxx/claw build. I just got back to TSW and, being a little bored (and frustrated) with my old no-range blade/xx build, I’m casting about for interesting new combos. I like the survivability and possible later healing aspect of claws, not to mention the fact that they look cool… Tried a claw/chaos build for a bit and oooo it’s FUN, but it also has no ranged component I’ve discovered yet.
Anyway, your thoughts welcome since you’ve been playing this more than most I know and I’ve forgotten almost everything I learned in my 4+ months away. My head is exploding from trying to remember useful synergies…
Chaos + Claws are indeed fun, but they are pretty much melee only. Most of the time I have played melee builds, but have realized that melee builds can be pretty good for solo combat, but can be challenging in dungeons (unless you are the tank).
For ranged, I have been playing around with various combinations with Assault Rifle primarily. The inner wheel abilities are pretty decent starting points; the Support line is not very strong damage, but with the leech heal the survival factor can be decent – what kind of talismans one equip will make a significant difference.
The Engage line is better as far as damage output, but without the heals.
I have an alt in Savage Coast currently which uses an assault rifle/blade combo which works pretty good so far – still only Savage Coast though, so may need some tuning. On my main I am trying out an assault rifle/shotgun combo. Has worked better than my claws/chaos in some cases, but worse in others – part of that may be that I am more used to my melee build.
That one is more about damage output (kill them before they kill you) than any extreme survival abilities – I only have a Turn The Tables for self-.heal on that one currently.
I tried an assault rifle/chaos also, but need to go back to the drawing board with that one, did not work out so well.
I have on my to-do list to write a post about build experiences; that will probably happen at the earliest this weekend.