The Secret World Synergize Any Two Weapons Guide

The Secret World Synergize Any Two Weapons Guide by Yokai

If you’ve seen Seki’s wonderful synergy charts (here), you might be tempted to think that the weapon combo you were really hoping to play with might not synergize very well. For example, you might want to play with Pistols and Blood Magic as your two equipped weapons, but then you look at Seki’s charts (or the in-game ability wheel) and you don’t see too many overlapping areas of synergy between Pistol/Blood. So you think to yourself “Well, Pistol/Blood is not a good combination because there aren’t enough synergies between the two.”

I see this assumption reflected a lot in posts here when people talk about weapon choice and synergies. I’m here to explain how this is a WRONG assumption, and how you should really be looking at Seki’s charts. The Funcom designers and devs do in fact mean it when they say “you can play with ANY weapons you like”, because there is in fact a way to synergize ANY two equipped weapons.

Concepts and terms

The way this works centers around this fact that not everyone seems to be fully aware of: You can equip a passive ability from ANY weapon, not just from your two equipped weapons.

I’m going to introduce a new term that will help you understand the following explanation of mechanics:

Bridge passive – Any passive ability from a non-equipped weapon that synergizes between one attribute from equipped weapon A and one attribute from equipped weapon B.

The basic technique

1. Choose the two weapons you’d LIKE to equip and use together.
2. Note the State and Trigger attributes of your two equipped weapons that are listed in Seki’s “Master Table”.
3. Identify all other weapons in Seki’s “Master Table” that share at least one State or Trigger attribute from your equipped weapon A and at least one State or Trigger attribute from your equipped weapon B. All such weapons will contain some bridge passives that will create a synergy between your two equipped weapons.

One concrete example of the technique

Assume you want to equip Pistol/Blood and find the bridge passives that will create additional synergies that they do not directly share with each other. Here is Seki’s “Master Table” with annotations that demonstrate the steps in the basic process outlined above. The green boxes highlight the types of synergies between Pistol/Blood that you can create through bridge passives.

Next, lets assume you wanted Pistols as one of your weapons in part because you want your playstyle to revolve around crits, hindering (snares/roots), and weaken (debuffs). Blood is there primarily for heals, but you know that various healing abilities from Blood are likely to also induce Impairment effects, Affliction effects, and to improve the likelyhood of Penetrating hits. So you want to look for ways to synergize your Pistols when such things happen as a result of your chosen Blood abilities.

The green boxes in the chart show you exactly where to look for bridge passives that can create this type of synergy between Blood and Pistols. The weapons containing such bridge passives in this case are Shotgun, Elemental Magic, Hammers, and Chaos Magic.

So, since crits and hindering are two key elements of the playstyle you’re going for (i.e., a “crit-hindering build”), the chart above tells you that the best places to look for bridge passives that will suit your build are in Elemental Magic and Hammers. Elemental shows a bridge between Affliction and both Crit and Hindering. Hammer shows a bridge between Impair and Crit.

So we go poking around in the ability wheel cells for Elemental Magic, and what do we find as a cheap, easy to acquire passive bridge in one of the inner “basic” rings for Elemental Magic? Why, this little gem:

Mind over Matter (passive)
Your critical hits cause the target to be Afflicted with a damage over time effect which deals 7 magical damage every second for 5 seconds.

Even better, this passive ability is the very first ability in the cell, so you can buy it for practically nothing. Just a minor blip in your AP that you’re mostly spending on Pistol and Blood abilities at first. So for a simple, cheap investment in one single ability from Elemental Magic, you now have a bridge passive that will apply an Affliction DOT every time you make a critical hit from your Pistols. And there are sure to be some Blood Actives and passives that will do many nice things when used on an Afflicted target.

Why focus on only State and Trigger attributes for this technique?

I direct you to focus primarily on looking for bridge passives across the State and Trigger attributes because frankly, that’s where most of the abilities that create a synergistic effect are most likely to be.

It is entirely possible that there will be a passive ability somewhere that, for example, synergizes between Hindering and a Chain attack that successfully hits multiple targets, but I’m guessing that synergies like this, if they exist at all, will be far fewer than synergies across State/Trigger attributes. We won’t know for sure until we can see the full Ability Wheel on May 11.

Conclusion

So there you have it. A way to look at Seki’s wonderful charts in a completely new and useful way. I hope this is helpful to those of you who’ve been agonizing over weapon choice when the first Open Beta weekend starts.

Now, a final proviso. While using bridge passives in this way can indeed help you create synergies between any two equipped weapons, the min-maxers among you will still find *more* potential synergies if you choose equipped weapon combos that that share a lot of overlapping synergies per Seki’s charts. For example, Blades will offer *more* potential ways to synergize with Blood than Pistols will, because there’s a huge overlap of attributes between Blades/Blood.

But this can be misleading in itself. While there are more *possible* ways to synergize between Blades/Blood, you cannot take advantage of *all* of them in a single build, because you’re limited to only 7 active and 7 passive abilities. What I’m trying to say here is that ultimately, in any one build, you are going to be forced to choose a tight focus and there will likely be room for only a few synergistic skills. (Those of you who played Guild Wars 1 will instantly understand why this is an important constraint.)

So ultimately, you’ll be able to flesh out a nice build focus even from a more limited set of possible bridge-based synergies. All that choosing two closely-aligned weapons (per Seki’s charts) does for you is give you a wider set of possible synergies to choose from, but you still have to whittle down all those possible choices to just a few specific ones. So on that level of things, bridge passives are in one way completely equal to non-bridge synergies.