#SWL: My Starting Warlock
Secret World Legends is on one level a relaunch of The Secret World and I am totally excited to see new people getting to experience the wonderful world of TSW/SWL. For those of us that have played TSW before, the other level is a remake of the game, and hopefully one that makes things better.
The first area I encountered where there were changes was the character creation process. Sure things work pretty much the same as TSW and as any MMO, but one thing that always made TSW unique was a classless system. Secret World Legends kinda does away with the lack of classes – kinda, because it’s really still there under the hood. New players are presented with a choice of 9 different classes that represent various combinations of primary and secondary weapons. These are the only way you can get your character started as a new player to SWL.
TSW provided an open book where players could select any combination they chose, but that was good and bad. Good because you had unlimited choices, bad because as a new player, you weren’t really sure what worked well together. Behind the scenes in TSW, if you followed along certain paths of skills, you’d eventually stumble upon the “classes” and you’d be able to get a set of class clothing once you obtained the skills to complete a class. SWL seems to go the opposite direction – you select a class and get abilities for that class leading to a class outfit, but you have to “open” up the other skills and abilities from other weapons with ingame currency. Basically, you can eventually get to the same set of unlimited skill combinations that TSW gave you access to from the outset. I can see the benefits for a new player – they don’t have to worry about what weapon combos work well together instead, you’re guided to a good workable class.
I think this’ll be a good step in helping new players become comfortable with the game. Old timers might think this is holding someone’s hand, but in a game that can be complex and intricate like SWL/TSW, a little help up at the start of your character can help retain more players.
In any case, my favored Blade/Blood combination wasn’t available among the 9 starter classes so I am giving the Warlock class a try. They’re based on Blood as primary and Assault Rifle as secondary weapon. The description indicates one of the more difficult starter classes, but it also focuses on healing.
We’ll see how this goes.