The Stuff of Legends

The accumulation of stuff is what makes the Secret World go round.

Diaochan acquiring her powers in Secret World Legends

When you play an MMO for a while, you tend to accumulate stuff. This usually includes gear and equipment, cosmetic and vanity items such as clothing, pets, currencies and mounts.

After playing The Secret World for five years, I amassed a lot of stuff. Some of it, I had to leave behind when moving on to the game’s reboot, Secret World Legends. But fortunately I was able to take the majority of the clothing, emotes, pets and mounts with me when I finally switched games.

Having played Secret World Legends for a couple of weeks now, I’m starting to get used to collecting all the new gear, currencies and cosmetics it has to offer.

You can take it with you

Acquiring your powers in Secret World Legends

If you’re a previous player of The Secret World and are moving on to Secret World Legends, you’ll probably want to keep most of your cosmetics (clothes and face makeup options), pets, sprint customisations (mounts) and unlocked emotes. Fortunately, the game developers have provided this option for us.

If you had an active TSW account before the launch of SWL on 26 June 2017, then you probably are able to log into SWL using your original TSW account username and password details. On the account management page for SWL, there should be an option for “TSW Legacy Transfer”.

Clicking the legacy transfer button will initiate a one-time-only snapshot of everything you’ve unlocked on your TSW account across all characters. It includes most of the clothing you can access via the dressing room (with exceptions such as the faction-specific deck clothing), unlocked emotes such as the dances that were acquired from event bags, any unlocked pets and sprint customisations.

As you can only do this snapshot once ever, I’d recommend that before you do it, head into TSW and grab anything you want to have copied over to SWL. Visit Pangaea and blow all your Pax Romana on clothing. Open the item store and spend any remaining bonus points on the exclusive store outfits, pets and sprints. Finish any achievements that offer unique clothing – most notably the Unseen achievement in TSW offers a black balaclava that isn’t available in SWL (in SWL there’s a brand new Unseen outfit you can earn anew instead).

Once you complete the legacy transfer snapshot, you’ll find that the button disappears from your SWL account page forever. You should then find that it has copied over any remaining subscription time, or for lifetime subscribers it should have unlocked lifetime patron status in SWL. You’re also given two additional character slot unlocks for being a former TSW player.

The TSW Legacy Transfer option is only available for a limited time. Funcom has said that it will disappear “sometime in August 2017”, so make sure you don’t miss out. Even if you’re not thinking of playing Secret World Legends in the immediate future, you’ll be glad that you had the chance to copy over all your stuff.

After creating a new character in SWL and going through the tutorial, once you arrive in Agartha, you should be able to access your delivered items storage, where there’s a “Claim TSW vanity items” button. This will unlock all of the copied stuff from TSW on your SWL character. It should also be available for any and all future characters you may create in Secret World Legends.

Welcome to the mall of Agartha

In Secret World Legends, Agartha has been transformed into a social hub, complete with vendors and social areas.

Wearing a pink and green outfit at Axel's restaurant in Secret World Legends

Some of the vendors in Agartha replace the old Item Store from TSW. For example, there’s a vendor that sells titles you can set to appear on your character’s nameplate. There’s also vendors for a few sprint customisations, some pets and a selection of special clothing items.

For other sprints, pets and clothing that you might want to obtain, you can find these directly through their respective interfaces. For example, after opening the sprint and pet window with shift+P, any pets and mounts you don’t own will be displayed greyed out. If they are available for purchase, you should see a buy button with the required currency.

On the Dressing Room screen, you can preview outfits on your character and also directly purchase ones that you don’t own, or wear ones that you have already unlocked. If you see another player wearing something you like, and it’s a piece of clothing that is purchaseable, then you can inspect their character and buy it directly from the inspection window (the clothing will have a little green plus icon you can click to buy).

In Agartha, you’ll also find the auction/exchange and access to bank storage. By default, a new character will have 35 inventory slots and 24 bank slots to hold any stuff you pick up. These can be expanded through slot purchases, but they’re quite pricey, so you might want to get used to some inventory management.

Time is money

The two main currencies you’ll need to buy stuff in the game are Marks of Favour and Aurum. These are both exchangeable for each other.

Marks of Favour represents time and effort spent in the game and is earned by completing daily challenges. Each day, your character can earn up to 10,000 marks by completing all available daily challenges (or up to 12,000 marks for patrons who earn 20 per cent more as a subscriber bonus). It’s also the main currency used in the auction system where you can sell items to other players in return for their marks.

The premium currency in the game is Aurum, and this can be obtained by purchasing it with real money. Premium items, services and cosmetics are usually priced in Aurum – such as bank slot upgrades and top-level sprint speed upgrades.

There’s a currency exchange system where you can interchange Marks of Favour for Aurum and vice versa. So, if you prefer not to spend any real money on the game, you can instead earn Marks of Favour and then trade it through the currency exchange for another player’s Aurum. Or, if you have money to spend and would like to buy things that are priced in Marks of Favour, you can trade your Aurum for marks.

Marks of Favour are earned per character, whereas Aurum is available accountwide and shared between all of your characters. In this way, you can move Marks of Favour between your characters by exchanging it for Aurum and then converting it back again on the desired character.

Legendary journey

You character is not the only thing that gains levels in Secret World Legends. Your gear is also on a journey with you to become legendary.

Salubrio in Agartha, in Secret World Legends

You equip talismans and weapons to increase your combat effectiveness, and these can be levelled up to increase their power. The starter gear you’re given during the tutorial starts off as standard level (green) gear. If you wanted to, you could keep it throughout the game and keep upgrading it until it becomes legendary level (red) gear.

Gear also comes in three different levels of quality, denoted by their name prefix or suffix and visually with one to three golden pips on their icons. In the case of talismans, you’re given medium quality (two pips) luminous talismans after the tutorial and from completing main story quests. There are also lower quality (one pip) “faded” and higher quality (three pips) “radiant” versions of the same talisman out there. Ideally, you’ll want to aim at getting a full set of radiant talismans, and then levelling those up to legendary level, as those have slightly higher base stats than the same gear in faded and luminous quality variants.

You’ll also find “extraordinary” gear in dungeons. After defeating each boss in a dungeon, you can loot its reward chest. To open the chest, you’ll need a dungeon key – you’re given ten of these (18 if you’re a patron) for free each day. Inside the chest, you have a random chance to gain either an extraordinary talisman or weapon, or a can of weapon or talisman distillate – basically a can of experience points you can use to level up your gear.

Extraordinary gear is just like other gear, except that it also comes with an additional special proc effect which can trigger during combat. So if you can find three pip versions of these, they’re probably worth keeping for yourself or selling on the auction house.

Distillates are also desirable, as you’ll need a lot of these to level up your gear. Intriguingly, this system of “empowerment” by using XP canisters to level up your weapons loosely resembles the original AEGIS gear levelling system from The Secret World – it’s like they took elements of it and applied it to all gear throughout Secret World Legends.

At the moment, my current gearing goal is getting a full set of radiant extraordinary talismans and MK III extraordinary weapons, and then starting to level that up. These are extremely rare to obtain in dungeons – I haven’t found any myself, despite running a lot of dungeons. I mainly get the gear I want by buying it off the auction house from other players luckier than me!

Upon reaching level 50, you also unlock access to scenarios, which are solo/dual simulations to protect a bunch of survivors against waves of enemies. These award glyphs and glyph distillates to upgrade your gear stats.

Then at “end game” when you’ve achieved high level gear and combat prowess, you should be able to handle lairs, which are sectioned off areas on each of the playfields around the open world with extremely challenging enemies designed for groups. Lairs mainly award signets and signet distillates to further upgrade your gear with special proc effects.

Available now, for a limited time!

So, if gear mainly comes from mission rewards, and dungeon/scenario/lair chests, then what do regular enemy mobs in the open world drop as loot? Upon reaching level 15, you’ll  find that they start to drop “caches”.

These are loot lockboxes which have a chance to get you some extremely powerful weapons, unique cosmetic items, powerful distillates and a special token currency called Third Age Fragments.

Since the game launched, we’ve had “Agarthan caches” which have weapons and cosmetics themed around Agartha and the style of the Hollow Earth. Information provided by the game suggests that themed caches will be around for a limited period of time, and then will be replaced by other new themed caches.

I guess I’d better try to get as much of the cool stuff out of them while I can. But fortunately you can also keep a stack of these in your bank and open them even if they stop being obtainable in the open world. To open them, you’ll need to buy cache keys with aurum; or if you’re a patron you can claim a free cache key every day along with your daily log in reward.

As with most random chance loot, you’ll have to be lucky if you want a particular item from the caches. Alternatively, you can find other players selling the items from the caches on the auction house.

Just scratching the surface

That’s my overview of what I’ve learnt about stuff in Secret World Legends so far. I hope it helped if you’re new to the game or a veteran TSW player moving over to SWL and were confused about all the new currencies, items, levelling systems and gear.

There’s a lot more depth and things to learn about gear levelling, such as the fusion system or sacrificing matching trash gear for a 2.5X empowerment XP boost. I’d recommend joining the Sanctuary chat channel or a good cabal if you want to ask other players questions or for more advice.

What are your gear goals in Secret World Legends? Are there any particular extraordinary talismans or weapons you have your eye on for the special effects? What do you think of the empowerment and fusion system, compared to how gear worked in The Secret World or in other MMOs?

I hope to see you at the end of my legendary journey.

Author: Galactrix

Totally into various games and MMOs and previously appeared on podcasts. Noob blogger.

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