Newbee guide for Steam players

Question/Help

TSW has been streamlined , revamped and relaunched as SWL! This makes for a strange combination sometimes as there is 5 years of experience and development butting up against totally new systems. From a lore, story and mission perspective it is fine to use resources from TSW, as the bulk of these things have not changed drastically. On the mechanics side though there have been extensive changes, and the playerbase doesn't yet have a firm lock on builds and theory crafting yet.

It is an exciting time to start playing, as a new player arguably gets the best story experience coupled with the chance to experiment and discover things about the combat and build systems without having "you're doing it wrong!" bashed over their head.

This is not meant to be a comprehensive guide, there are good ones out there already that cover the mechanics of the game in depth. However a new player will probably run into some questions immediately, and this should explain things and answer oft-repeated worries, especially about "wasting" experience, gear or currency.

For a list of all guides mentioned in this post see here:

Funcom’s official FAQ for SWL
SWLDB’s ultimate beginners guide
u/Thirteenera general game guide
u/KElderfall ‘s guide for upgrading and fusing equipment
dps, grouping, tanking, healing, and end game stats by u/MerlinAesalon

Thanks to the following people for contributions and suggestions:

u/Incoherrant, u/blacksun89, u/rivvn, u/Djinngi, u/Newbieshoes

Leveling (your character)

Don’t worry about picking the wrong class, faction, or leveling the wrong ability

The class selection is a bit of a magic trick, as there are not really any traditional classes in SWL. You are not locked in to being a tank or healer based on your starting class, so just pick whatever strikes you as fun, all those starter classes are totally viable to level 50. Still if you want the most frustration free leveling experience and you are not sure, then pick a class with hammer, blade or shotgun, as those weapons have some abilities with strong healing or mitigation.
Likewise one faction is not better than the other mechanically, there are no bonus faction skills or anything like that. What currently differs is almost entirely cosmetic: a few sets unlockable uniforms per faction, unique titles, access to the faction base in the faction home city, some content in the segue missions between each major zone, and the after-action flavor texts from each handler when a mission is completed. In TSW, Cabals (guilds) were same-faction only, and PvP teams were split by faction. Currently cabals have no faction restrictions and the devs have stated they do not want to have faction based PvP anymore. All that said, even though it is cosmetic people have strong opinions about each faction: some despise the arrogance of the Illuminati handler, some find the Templar handler too bland, some are off-put by the obtuse fortune cookie world salad of the Dragon handler. I recommend Illuminati or Templar for your first character simply because they provide better context for the world overall, that said my main faction has always been Dragon!
There is no “server” to select, all players can meet up with all other players. However for lag and atmosphere purposes, mission zones are limited to 15 players per zone. If you want to meet up with friends, right click on their name in chat or in your friends list, and select “meet up.”
Currently the only thing you can’t change is your character’s sex, hairstyle or appearance. In TSW there was a barber and a surgeon, but those features are not in SWL yet. So take a little extra time fiddling with your character’s appearance, there is no firm ETA on when you can change it and you can be sure it will cost you some money to do so.
Current level cap is level 50. There is no word on whether it will be raised for the release of Tokyo or for Season 2. Levels represent major stat increases, the little abilities on the passive skills and the capstones in active skills make for minor stat increases. The bulk of your stats though come from your weapons, which get discussed down below.
Don't feel rushed to unlock all the weapons and abilities with Marks of Favor, and don't feel pressured to buy bonus AP or SP points with Aurum. You will probably not fill out all active and passive skills for your starter picks until Transylvania, which is many hours into the game. If you stick with SWL you will eventually end up buying every skill there is, and with current content difficulty there is no immediate need for extra stats from filling up the passive skills or the active capstones.
By the same token if you picked a weapon and it just isn't working for you, there is no need to reroll your character. Go ahead and unlock a new weapon and its passive tree and start dropping points there. Your experience is not wasted, as the bonus from passive skills (the little +attribute point icons in between the passives for active skills) applies regardless if you have the weapon equipped.
For general gameplay nuts and bolts there is no better guide than SWLDB’s Ultimate Beginner Guide

Leveling (your equipment)

Don’t worry about upgrading the wrong thing

Clothing does not = armor in SWL, unlike the majority of games out there. Clothing is just a cosmetic thing which you can collect, and wearing clothing provides no mechanical bonuses. The “armor” of the game is called talismans.
This is a big one difference from most RPGs but mobs do not drop loot. There are exceptions with special named mobs but the bulk of your loot will come from completing missions. Again, this is not a bug, this is working as intended. Instead of improving your gear with random drops, what you do is level your gear piece by piece.
Your weapons and talismans have individual levels, and you level items by feeding similar items to the one you wish to upgrade. There are a bewildering array of choices here - one pip, two pip, three pip, dungeon drop, suffix. See u/KElderfall ‘s guide for a comprehensive rundown of upgrading and fusing. A smart way to go about picking out and leveling your items would be to pick up a 2-pip dungeon drop (red background, has special effect) or a 3-pip regular drop from off the auction house, and then focus on leveling that up. Some number crunchers in the sub have suggested that there is minimal difference between the value of a 2-pip dungeon item or a 3-pip regular item. The cost of 3-pip dungeon drop is incredible as those are the items everyone wants. HOWEVER there is nothing wrong with leveling the first item that drops into your hands and then using that item as fusion fodder for a good drop or purchase you pick out later.
You unlock the various talisman slots at certain levels, and you won’t see any equipment for that slot drop before that level. Certain missions reward you with what is supposed to be your first piece of that talisman slot.
What mix of items to go with for what role is still under discussion, and is gone into in depth , but for leveling the only thing you should really worry about is getting stuff with +attack. You will not need to start worrying about being a healer or a tank style role until you start running Elite 1 (level 50 dungeons).
General consensus about upgrading is that due to the rate a player earns the Shards of Anima currency and the ever-increasing costs of leveling equipment at the higher levels, players should try to match like with like to maximise the benefit--ie. feed shotguns into shotguns, feed heal head talismans into heal head talismans. Again, because of the way the fusion system works you will end up destroying maxed out green equipment you don’t need in order to improve the equipment you do need, so your main goal is to keep maxing equipment, not necessarily to push a single piece of equipment to higher levels as soon as possible. Also as players of any online RPG will tell you, it pays to have gear laying around to take on multiple roles.
If you follow the above advice, keep in mind that your inventory is going to fill up with equipment fast. When your inventory is getting full upgrade with MoF or, if you know you are not keen on a particular role yet, then get rid of that type of equipment. If you are sure you will not be tanking, sell those tanking equipments to a vendor or the Auction House. I highly recommend maxing out your inventory MoF upgrades to make room.

Social

Type /chat join sanctuary to join the main chatroom of players and find help, join a cabal when you can , the launcher lists all the official communication outlets.

Events and holidays were a big deal in TSW and are important enough to be marked on the [current release roadmap](https://secretworldlegends.com/update-roadmap/. In TSW many required some loose group coordination to complete. You can join the event channel with /chat join Event
While the Funcom managed subreddit is the defacto official message board for the game, there is also a player run forum at https://www.swl-forums.com/

Dungeons and other non-solo content

Hit Shift + V to bring up the menu and queue for group content

Dungeons have six bosses, unique dungeon lore, and item chests which give equipment boosting items or special dungeon equipment upon beating a boss. u/amnesiasoft has a list of the special dungeon equipment and where it drops from. Boss strategies are mostly the same as TSW but there are some differences. You can queue for dungeons from level 10 with the shift + v group finder window.
Note that like most activities in SWL there is a limit to the amount of free loot you can get. With dungeons you only get 10 dungeon keys per day; while this doesn’t prevent you from running a dungeon when you run out of keys, it does mean you can only open up to 10 equipment chests. Note you can skip unlocking the equipment chests. If you have time to run multiple dungeons you can, say, skip all the chests that do not have a special blue light which indicates better loot, or skip all chests but the last boss, and squeeze out a bit more value per key at a loss of time.
Until level 50 you can only run “story” difficulty of a dungeon, past level 50 you get granular levels of Elite difficulty. In old TSW terms, Elite 1 is the previous Elite, Elite 5 is the previous Nightmare. According to u/Glaucon the rewards increment with the Elite difficulty but at the moment some players feel elite 2-4 aren’t worth the effort.
Scenarios (fight waves of monsters solo or duo) and PvP (currently only Shambala, a 10v10 no respawn deathmatch) are also available from the group finder window. PvP is available from 10 along with the first story dungeons, while Scenarios are available at 50 along with Elite dungeons.
Lairs are the dark burned in areas on the zone maps, 1 lair per zone. They are currently the hardest content in the game and require a raid of 10 players to complete. There is no group finder for them, so you need to join a group being advertized or put together your own. In the future, raids will be added to the game which are also 10 player content.
If you want to know more about the current--well, as of the Steam release current--endgame stat and role meta please see the dps, grouping, tanking, healing, and end game stats by u/MerlinAesalon

Currencies

MoF mainly available from dailies, Shards mainly available from missions, Aurum mainly available from credit card

name	acquired from	used to buy
Anima shards	mission completion, killing mobs, vendoring loot, vendoring loot caches, PvP	upgrade equipment, travel, pay death penalty, upgrading Museum
Marks of Favor	daily challenge completion, selling items on AH, selling Aurum on AH	items on the AH, unlocks for weapon and skill pages, first levels of inventory and sprint upgrades, most items sold by vendors, some clothing, Aurum from AH, dungeon keys
Aurum	direct purchase for money from Funcom, buying with MoF on AH	bonus AP and SP on skill and weapon pages, high level sprint, high level personal and bank inventory upgrade, MoF from AH, most clothing, pets and other cosmetics
Third Age Fragments	Loot cache	Cosmetics, pets, special sprints, 2-pip purple equipment
Cache Key	Aurum, 1/day for Patron status sub	Open the loot caches dropped by mobs

Very roughly speaking MoF ends up being more of a neck at the starting levels, Anima shards the neck at higher levels, and then MoF again if you are trying to buy the best weapons and talismans off the AH. The idea is that players who want to open more weapon pages faster or buy the best items off the AH will buy Aurum and sell it for MoF. Players who want to play for free but still want access to some of the paid experience will sell their MoF for Aurum (currently at a 145 MoF : 1 Aurum ratio as of this writing). The main method of getting MoF is doing the daily challenges, though at higher levels you can get much more from selling good dungeon drops. There is currently no way to trade or directly purchase more Anima Shards, however you can still get shards outside of missions by vendoring loot (typically 250-500 shards per item, not affected by level or pips on the item) or by purchasing caches from the AH to vendor. If you want to quickly upgrade equipment and are willing to pay Aurum,however, Funcom is happy to provide you one-use items to upgrade directly from the upgrade window.
As you have likely gathered Aurum is the premium currency of this F2P model. There is no “item store” per sey, rather it is all baked in to the interface in the form of that little + button. Want to purchase more AP? Click on that + in the passive / active ability page. Want to purchase more sprints? Click on the + in your sprint window. Inventory space? + in the inventory. Item upgrades? + in the item upgrade window. You buy Aurum itself from + on the gold bar in the upper left of your UI. With Steam it is expected there will be fewer issues, but FYI people had problems using Hipay in the regular SWL client. Whether or not you use Aurum to boost your experience is up to you.
The caches are the random lootbox of the game. The Agarthan cache is no longer dropping, and the new cache is called the Infernal cache. Either way it is the same thing; around level 15 you will start seeing mobs drop these purple lockboxes, which you can only open with a key that you buy with either Aurum or you get 1/day as a Patron. Opening them gives you a special currency called Third Age Fragments along with a chance at some equipment upgrading items, special weapons and special cosmetics. If you do not plan on dropping money or becoming a patron, you can: sell the cache on the AH for MoF, vendor the cache for 50 Anima Shards, or hold on to it for later because it might sell for more MoF or you might change your mind. Caches stack quite high so keeping them around is feasible. Interestingly, drop rate is apparently based on usage, so if you open the caches you will see more caches drop.

Patron status, is it worth it?

If you are going to spend any real money on the game you should start here

Patron status list
There are enough perks in the Patron system that the value of it really depends on who you ask. Extra AP/SP helps you unlock skills faster, extra MoF helps you unlock things faster, extra XP levels you up faster which makes leveling content easier, extra Anima shards and free teleports and leaps help with item upgrades. One big point of contention here is while being patron gives you more Scenario, Lair and Dungeon keys per day, those keys do not roll over and do not accumulate, meaning if you don’t login for the day then you get no benefit from the extra keys that day. Also, Cache key bonus only gets counted if you claim your login bonus after logging in, but if you do login and claim them, the loot cache keys do accumulate. Basically, Patron status is worth anything only if you log in often.

Effect	F2P	Patron
Marks of Favor	100%	120%
Anima Shards	100%	115%
Ability / Skill points	x1	x2
XP	100%	110%
Anima leap / Teleport	500 per Teleport, 100-350 per Leap	Free
Scenario key	2	3
Dungeon key	10	18
Lair key	3	6
Cache key	0	1
Healing potions	3	6
Healing potion cost	200 MoF	100 MoF
Mission cooldown	68 hours	8 hours
AH remote delivery	None	Free

Is it worth it? The biggest monetary value here is the daily loot cache key; the Patron cost of $12.99 is far less than the cost of buying 30 $1.50 keys separately, so long as you plan to login frequently. Also the keys stack, unlike all the other perks which are very much “use it or lose it.” Arguably the most useful benefit is the reduced mission cooldown - with an 8 hour cooldown you can do the highest reward missions (or the easiest ones for quick Daily Challenge clears) once a day instead of once every 3 days. Or if you are so inclined you can do the same mission almost 3 times per day! The other stuff is all just perks, nice to have and certainly helpful at speeding the grind up but not necessary. If the thought of spending any money towards lockboxes is abhorrent to you then Patron is not worth it. If you are starting out, you play 15 levels and are enjoying the game and have some money to burn, consider picking up Patron because it will help get you leveled up and provide some nice perks. If you are not Patron you still get the same game playing F2P.
I haven’t seen a straight up cost-benefit analysis from someone logging in to do 1 or 2 hours of play (base dailies and a dungeon or two) versus just paying to straight up level your equipment, but I am guessing that the Patron status and the perks thereof will equal a better value than trying to buy weapon and talisman upgrades outright.

What is the point of the game?

Soak in the Lovecraftian Horror, 150 or more hours of great story, unique seasonal events, and usual RPG endgame stuff - no PvP yet though.

Enjoy the story: by the time the final part of Tokyo (November 2017) is released there will be roughly 150 hours of solo mission and main story content to enjoy. The story, writing and atmosphere of the game is often lauded and for good reason. The biggest hook for returning players is that the much alluded-to Season 2 and continuation of the story is supposed to come in early 2018.
Endgame content: after you hit level 50 which is the current max content, what is left to you is the usual RPG grind. Improve your items and skills through PvE content like scenarios, dungeons, lairs and raids, in turn letting you challenge higher levels of difficulty. There is also the museum to unlock, which gives you bonus damage against monsters as well as unique cosmetics, as well as achievement and Lore hunting.
World Events: Like most online games there are special events that happen throughout the year. Currently planned are Halloween and Christmas. Seasonal events in TSW included seasonally locked mission content as well as special bosses, new mobs on the world map, and season-only cosmetics.
PvP: Currently the only PvP option is Shambala which is a 10 v 10 deathmatch, however in TSW there were 3 other PvP battlegrounds which may yet make an appearance.
RP: There is a very rich world of player-run RP, both in game in RP cabals and out of game on forums and in-character Twitter accounts. You might scoff at the idea of RPing but a focused RPer has a totally different outlook and use of the game from a focused PvEer. Try it sometime, if for nothing else you will learn a few things about the game you never considered!

Posted Aug 1, 2017, 10:01 PM UTC · edited

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