The Secret World Tips and Advice

The Secret World Tips and Advice by Jonray

General

1. Dialogue choices are more than one line. If you’re talking to an NPC, keep clicking on the dialogue choice until it turns to a green check mark. Some of the best writing is in those extra bits of voiceover.
2. When you create a new bag from your inventory, if you click on the lock button, it stays open when you close the inventory. This is how you can create an “item hotbar” say for your anima potions.
3. When hunting for lore bits, don’t forget to look up. Not everything is at ground level.
4. There is a demon in the Hatian Market in London who sells tacos. These tacos (at 100 PAX each) buff your out-of-combat healing rate, thus allowing you to return into combat more quickly. (Credit: Trobed)

Death & Resurrection
[credit for much of this to Alainna]

1. You have to discover new anima wells to be able to use them for resurrection. Discover just means getting close to them.
2. When you die, you can choose to resurrect at any of the anima wells in the zone that you have already discovered.
3. Once you resurrect, running back to your body is OPTIONAL. You can just right-click on the anima well and come back to life at that location.
4. If you choose to go back to your body, once you get back within 14 meters of your body, you’ll be able to sense the mobs that are nearby. You can resurrect anywhere within a 14 foot circle, so pick your spot carefully. Don’t forget to look behind you!
5. If your anima well is very close to where your body is, it is possible to get back and resurrect BEFORE the mobs have cleared their hate for you. Take your time or else you’re going to come back at 1/2 life with the mobs chasing you down to kill you again. And since they did it once…

Loot & Items

1. Quick looting – be in range of the loot icon, press v. Everything from the mob will automatically be added to your inventory.
2. While weapons may drop for you, the chances of them being the one you were hoping for are slim. So don’t wait for that Blood Focus to drop, figure out a way to get one.
3. Once you’ve selected your first weapon and you’re about to leave to meet your primary contact in your faction, turn around and go back into the training area. You can pick up the other 8 weapons. You won’t get the AP/SP rewards, but you can at least equip yourself.
4. Speaking of starting weapons, make sure you get Boone’s quest right as you enter Kingsmouth. The final reward in that quest line is a weapon once you reach the police station in Kingsmouth. My tactic has been to use that for my 2nd weapon.
5. If you forget to get the starter weapons before you hit Kingsmouth town, you could also just buy one from a vendor in the station. They only cost 100 coins; so your first loot drop or two probably covered the cost.

Anima and Skill Points

1. Spending AP is going to be a long term topic and will result in much theorycrafting and chest beating about the “best way” to do it. Simply know that at the early stages, it’s kind of hard to really gimp yourself to the point of needing a re-roll.
2. Spending SP on the other hand should have more thought put into it. Since you only get one SP for every 3 AP, the time spent in acquiring them is higher, therefore think before dumping them into stuff you don’t really care about.
3. Don’t forget to spend SP on your Talisman skills! First, levelling your talismans are going to be important to your gear progression. Second, the bonuses for each point spent on Talismans are greater than the incremental bonuses on weapon skills.
4. If you do decide to bank SP, realize that there is a hard cap of 40. Once you reach 40 unspent SP, anything else you earn is going to be wasted.
5. One way to experiment with abilities is to bank some AP, then go back to your main hub city and go back into the training area. While you’re in there, you can spend AP to try out things, then reset them to get back your pool.

Skills – General

1. While you can always move during combat, there is a “self-snare” applied when using some skills. This is most pronounced with ranged skills, although magic skills also have some. Melee does not. So if you want to move quickly in combat, use melee skills.
2. The b key brings up the ingame browser window. Handy when you’re looking for hints on some of the puzzle quests.
3. If you have a Ground Target Area of Effect (GTAoE) skill, you can use CTRL-[hotkey#] to target the ground under the feet of your current target. If the target moves, your attack is still centered on the position they were when you fired the attack, though.
4. Related to the previous, pressing CTRL-SHIFT will toggle the “GTAoE centered on target” behavior. This means that once the “Use my target’s location” functionality is toggled, you won’t have to use the CTRL-[hotkey], it will automatically work that way until you toggle it off again.
5. If you have a defensive target other than yourself, holding down the ALT key will switch your defensive target to you temporarily. This is especially useful when spec’d as a healer as you can be healing your tank, switch to heal yourself, then back to the tank without having to click on different targets. (Credit: RpTheHotrod)

Quests & Zones

1. Don’t use the Police Station as your “first quest hub”. Pick a quest line, follow it to the end. Once you get to the end, there’s usually a new starter for a new quest line nearby. Eventually you’ll end up looping back to the station, and then you can pick up a new quest line to start.
2. Based on the early experience, the main zones seem to be gated on your gear level. It’s not a “hard gate”. You can go to a zone without having the recommended gear level. For instance, once most of your gear is about QL 3, you’re probably ready to move to the Savage Coast. You could go there with QL 1 gear. You’d just get your arse handed to you in a baggie.
3. Related to the above, you don’t have to do every quest in a zone to move on. Since you can come back to a zone any time (or if you plan to play an alt at some point), restrain yourself from grabbing every quest you come across. That will give you something to explore once you’ve played all the way through the main quest lines in the zones.
4. If you come across a mission you can’t pick up at the moment (because of limits), remember that you can add your own markers onto the map; so you can note the location of the mission so that you can come back to it later.
5. Some “hard” or even “very hard” missions aren’t necessarily too difficult to complete. Many missions don’t have any killing required. So the mission may be ranked “hard” because the mobs around the thing you have to find would be difficult for you to kill. If you’re good at sneaking past them, avoiding aggro, etc. however they can be worth the risk in the bonus xp you get for finishing them.

Crafting

1. Base Materials have to be refined to be useful. Put a stack of them (5+) in your crafting window and hit “Assemble” to get an Imperfect material.
2. Note! We said “5+”, you can put a stack of 22 Base Materials into the crafting window and keep clicking Assemble. It will refine materials until the stack size is less than the required 5. In this example, you’d get 4 Imperfect materials and have 2 Base materials left over. (credit: Frunch)
3. In addition to disassembling weapons and talismans, you can disassemble Anima potions as well. So when you have collected a bunch of QL 2 healing potions, you may as well disassemble the QL 1 potions.
4. You can also un-refine materials. If you unrefine an Imperfect material, you get 4 Base materials in exchange. Probably not as useful at the beginning as it may be in later tiers when you have a more advanced mat, but need to create a lower QL item.

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