Recon Diary: The Secret World Pt. 2

So, continuing on with The Secret World and getting a little more experience in the game, I've found a few nasty bugs that are somewhat game breaking. As with any MMO, it seems likely that these will eventually be fixed in a future patch, but they can be pretty damaging to the experience.

First, you have some quests that bug out on a regular basis so much so that you become accustomed to seeing people asking in general chat if the quests are bugged out "again." You can sometimes find yourself standing over a spot where an object is supposed to spawn and just waiting there forever. The only way to fix it, so far as I know, is to petition for help from a GM. Fortunately, the GMs usually respond almost immediately, like within 10 seconds. It's pretty impressive, actually.

Second, and what I find to be personally even more annoying, is that there is a system in the game for swapping out equipment and abilities for specific, pre-set builds, but it is horribly bugged. You select one of the builds, and it attempts to swap out your gear. You get a couple items successfully swapped out, but for no reason you find most of your equipment slots are just emptied, even though you have the items in your inventory. In fact, it sometimes happens that items that don't even need to be swapped out wind up being placed in your inventory anyway. This makes it extremely difficult to manage equipment because the inventory can get rather large and disorganized. If you have a lot of loot items that you might want to trade, sell or disassemble, it gets even worse because you aren't sure what you were using to begin with. This makes the freedom to build your character how you see fit seem more overwhelming than previously because now you can't even keep your equipment straight.

As to grouping, healing can be hard in the game. Unlike games with a more set character progression system, you're not guaranteed to have any of the types of heals you might have at a given level. Instead, you just have to purchase them on your own and build your character out that way. That means making sure you have abilities that allow you to keep healing when you need to and how you need to, including group heals and direct heals as well as heals you can cast without attacking, which becomes a problem with some of the assault rifle heals, I've found. Assault rifles use a sort of leech heal, meaning that you need to attack something to heal, making it hard to build up the necessary combo points to cast a badly needed heal when necessary. And watch that tab targetting... Ho boy!