Preventing reinventing the wheel

Oh, man, I don’t do charts. Haven’t got a clue how to interpret the information in it. Sorry!

It’s a good document with a lot of information and will become more meaningful later I’m sure. Don’t worry yourself with it now though it’s just something extra if you really want some information on several aspects of the game down the road.

Okie doke. Got it bookmarked.

You’ve probably seen this already, gives a fairly good rundown on the options:

https://www.tswdb.com/miscellaneous/the-ultimate-beginner-guide/

As far as healing classes/passive hit goes, for instance I started 2 healers, 1 tank, 2 DPS ‘classes’ and never noticed any difference in any of them regarding hitting, missing, damage etc. In the early stages of the game the differences are small, and by the stage where you are worried about such stats you’ve already geared up and unlocked other weapons groups etc to cover it.

As mentioned earlier, your big choices are Faction (for flavor, not performance), Range to fight at (melee combos are trickier than ranged combos), and Weapon Mechanics - if you find Grenades annoying you won’t enjoy Assault Rifle, if you you get really annoyed at taking damage from your own powers you won’t enjoy Blood, if you want to spam powers endlessly and hate getting shut down by overheating you won’t enjoy Elementalism etc.

That said, you will be unlocking 1-2 new weapons fairly soon anyway the only choice you are ‘stuck’ with is Faction for concept/flavor.

MadBadger,

That’s good to know. I’m ultimately would like to be a healer in end game (if I even get that far), but I’m not going to start two healing weapons right off the bat. However, I do want to have some good healing in case I need it, but I’m first going to give some thought to what I really want to play.

Thanks again!

Unfortunately most of the end game has no need for healers, so at the current meta it’s a wasted effort. :frowning:

Shotgun has some nice ‘keep me alive while fighting’ healing potential, and works well with either the Hammer or the Pistol as the starter weapons that pair with it. Has some group bonuses as well.

You know, if that’s the case, I can work with that. I mean, that means I can do more of other stuff rather than just concentrate on being a healer. That works!

Currently i suppose in Elite 8 and up, the bosses hit too hard for healing to mean much. The Tank either mitigates, survives and hardly take damage, or they don’t mitigate and get 1shot. Unfortunately you also see tanks bringing that with them into lower dungeons where the tank might as well Allocate for more dps, than the healer going full DPS. You can get to heal, but be prepared to be asked to DPS. Some fights it’s very beneficial to still bring heals for DPS if there is anything dealing them damage. There is also still content at endgame that does need healers, it is dungeons in particular that doesn’t need them at times.

Got it. Thanks much!

All healer classes start with 2 healing weapons.

Eventually you can unlock all 9 weapons and get passives from all 9.

Ah, okay. So since I chose a healing class, right now, then, I can’t get any hit point (or whatever they are that help you from glancing) passives. I think I got it.

Any problem with Hit Rating will first start showing up by the time you hit the third/last map of the New England area. You get introduced to glyphs early on this map as well, so maybe go out of your way to buy some Accurate Glyphs (+Hit Rating) at this point. Otherwise as mentioned you can unlock a 3rd weapon fairly early, which would include the passives. So pick any of the non healing weapons as your third weapon (healing = Fist/Rifle/Blood), and focus on getting the Hit Rating passives.

the Passives like Hit Rating (round icons) are global and part of your basic build, so you don’t have to use Pistols to get the Hit Rating from Pistols.

Excellent. I get it!! Thanks/

It is indeed good to start with 2 hit glyphs, but eventually you will only need 1 intricate hit glyph. It will be enough glance reduction for both DPSing and tanking. The way I did it, was that I kept upgrading my only one hit glyph to keep up with the tiers I was running. As a tank, if I was missing glance reduction, I used a gadget to interrupt which is not able to glance. DPS setup for glyphs is 1 hit, 5x crit and 3x crit power (usually crit power on weapons and one on talisman). Same rule applies to sustain tanking method. If you want to go “classic” tank method, then your glyph setup is a bit different. In all cases, you will need to make sure to have that 1 hit rating glyph which you will upgrade among the tiers (or try to keep up with the tiers actually), unless you are pure healer.

I’ll allow myself to expand a bit on this. Only your currently drawn weapon applies it’s effects in combat. In a way you can view the 2 Weapon Glyphs as 1 Talisman Glyph. The reason you wanna use Crit Power in the weapon is because you don’t want Hit or Crit Chance there. Crit Chance is by far the most expensive glyph so you don’t wanna double up on it. Hit Rating is the most important glyph when it comes to upgrading priority, so if you had to upgrade two instead of one for the same result, it would be more time consuming. For DPS as Tipsu said, this means 1 Hit (tali), 5 Crit Chance (tali) and 2 (3) Crit Power (tali + 2 weapons).

Most tanks use the DPS glyph setup as well. As for healers, two of the weapons don’t require you to hit anything (fist and blood) when healing, and as such you don’t need Hit Rating. This is prolly why they decided to not have Hit Rating passives with healing weapons. For Rifle healing i believe you still need Hit Rating for the full effect, but it does do some standard healing regardless of the damage you deal. For these reasons for healing purposes you could go with 5x Crit Rating, 2x Crit Power in the talisman, and then put Crit Rating or Power on Fist and Blood weapons, and Hit Rating on a Rifle.

The healer setup falls to the ground if you also wanna use the same set for DPS, in which case your Blood or Fist weapon would fail to hit the target. You can either make a Hit Rating Tali to swap in when you DPS, or have a 2nd Blood or Fist weapon that hold Hit Rating in them, or ultimately go with the default DPS setup.

Considering you’re crit and crit power soft capped after you get 5 crit and 2 crit power glyphs, you’d get almost nothing by going into an extra crit or crit power for healing gear, so getting 1 hit for that gear won’t break your stats, and will actually allow you to use some extra utility abilities without being worried about glances.

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IMHO, the biggest tip for SWL newbees is “don’t play a pure healer”. They’re not needed. Hybrid DPS with heal options, like an AR or Blood DPS with some healing slotted are really nice to have around, but someone that only heals and does nothing else is somewhat unwanted.

Other than that, the only other tip I’d have for a newbee is to unlock all weapons and grab the to-hit stats from them after unlocking any necessary build passives. This tip likely won’t make sense until you’ve played a bit and have a feeling for how the weapon system works.

Check the “How to Build All Weapons” page for great newbee build tips.

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For super-new players…

i recommend:

  1. Enjoy the story
  2. Get Radiant talismans and Mk III weapons (say …Of Energy). Common, cheap ones, not extraordinary rares.
  3. Enjoy the story - rather than rush to the next zone, feel free to finish the one you’re in before moving on.

Also:
4) Recommend SWL to a friend/stranger. Assuming you think they’ll have fun and enjoy the game.
5) Worry about endgame/gear stuff in due course, but it’s not first and foremost, imho.