A very significant one, in fact.
Prepare to Allocate your Anima! The servers are coming down for Update 2.1.4 tomorrow at 9:00 AM EST / 14:00 UTC / 15:00 CET. Downtime ETA is 3 hours.https://t.co/iD1z275OYW pic.twitter.com/dqSGL172i3
— Secret World Legends (@SecretWorldLgds) November 13, 2017
The short version is this: most MMOs and whatnot have a three-class system. You have DPS, who do damage (‘damage per second’); tanks, who soak up damage and make enemies focus on them; and healers, who keep everybody else alive, and give advantages to your teammates, and purge them of disabilities tossed on them by the enemy, and so forth. Well, the interesting thing about The Secret World and Secret World Legends has been that there’s no real player-character ‘class,’ per se: everybody learns the same weapon skills. Your gear (talismans) was always what determined your role in a dungeon or raid.
The wrinkle is that in TSW — at least, after you finished the main game — it wasn’t that hard to grab serviceable talismans and keep them on hand in your inventory to turn you into a quick tank or whatever. It’s a LOT harder to do that in SWL: grinding gear in more of a long-term thing and getting more inventory slots gets expensive, quick. Real-life money expensive, after a point. Which means, effectively, that there’s a bit of a shortage of tanks and healers. It’s not so bad for the people who are in a good cabal, but if you’re not it’s a problem for pick-up games and whatnot.
So this is why they’re allowing people to adjust their gear. People will be able to pick which proportion of their gear’s stats goes to attack, heal, or hit points, which effectively allows them to simulate tanks or healers on the fly. It’s not a perfect solution, for reasons that I’ll only go into in comments if asked because most of you don’t play this game, but it’s a lot better than nothing. I look forward to seeing how it all plays out.
Moe Lane
Interesting way of looking at the Class system.
It was an interesting system in TSW. There was an ability wheel of active and passive abilities; and most of the passives weren’t linked to specific actives, so there was a heck of a lot of experimentation and refinement going on to get the perfect build for specific situations (Main Game, PvP, lairs, boss raids, dungeons, etc). It was also a lot easier for DPSers and tanks to put debuffs on opponents, or buff themselves. On the other hand, it was almost insanely complicated.
Hopefully it works. The problems involved in switching between roles is one of the things that I’ve been concerned about, particularly as the gear moves further and further up the upgrade tree.