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Category: The Secret World

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Written by Knoodlepot

Hey all, we hope you are enjoying the fun and challenging dungeons in The Secret World. This blog post will be helpful for seasoned dungeon explorers and those who haven’t yet taken the plunge alike – because we will be talking about the both the basics, the depth and all the wonderful details dungeons have to offer.

The Basics

The missions for dungeons have purple icons, so when you see one out in the game world know that a real team challenge lies ahead. Only one person on the team needs to have the mission, and when he enters the dungeon every player on the team will be offered a teleport into it, no matter where in The Secret World they may be. When inside the dungeon all players will automatically get the mission, so everyone can claim the juicy reward at the end if successful.

There is one dungeon per playfield in The Secret World, and even the first one you discover in Kingsmouth, called The Polaris, offers plenty of tough encounters with smart tactics you need to master. Because of the challenging nature of dungeons it is important that the whole team is prepared. Generally you will need a full team of five, with at least one person able to do decent healing and one person able to do the tanking. The final three need to focus on dishing out the damage.

The Ur-Draug is the Final boss in The Polaris Dungeon

Finishing a dungeon mission will give you a nice XP reward and a rare item. The dungeon bosses themselves also drop rare loot, so doing dungeons is a very good way to keep your character well equipped.  The dungeons also offer their own unique stories, sometimes told by narrators, which will enhance your understanding of the mysteries in The Secret World. All the dungeons have their own tailor made maps, and contain plenty of lore pieces (often cleverly hidden), so there is something for everybody in these dangerous places.

The Boss Fights

We wanted to make the Dungeons in The Secret World as entertaining as possible, so every one of them offer a string of challenging boss fights. We have done away with the need to wade through endless hordes of boring trash mobs, so doing dungeons is one awesome boss fight after another.

The bosses themselves are not only more powerful monsters which do more damage and have more hit points, but all have their own tricks up their sleeves, which you need smart tactics to beat. These tricks can for example be the ability to call down meteors, turn soldiers into walking bombs, freeze you in a block of ice or change the very fabric of space and time itself with a deadly gaze.

It is very important that everyone does their best to master the often intricate tactics needed to beat the bosses. The team will learn most of the tricks as they are introduced gradually throughout the dungeon. The final boss often represents a culmination of these tactics, and the hardest test of the team’s combined skill. The whole team has to work together, with everyone pulling their weight, or risk being ripped to shreds by the horrors which lurk in the dark places of the world.

A Machine Tyrant from Hell

Deeper into the Darkness

As you play The Secret World you will gain access to more and more dungeons. From a wrecked cargo ship off the coast of Solomon Island, reliving a dream of what happened when the Mayans invaded a thousand years ago, climbing down a dark Flith infested dig site in Egypt or venturing into Hell itself.

Though these dungeons are challenging enough, they are merely the beginning of your dungeon experience. After you have completed all the dungeons on Solomon Island and in Egypt you get the chance to test yourself against even harder opponents – Because now you can take on the same dungeons in their Elite mode. You find the entrances to the Elite dungeons in Agartha. 

All the dungeons in Transylvania are also counted as Elite. These let you explore an abandoned Soviet research facility, tackle a full civil war in Hell and witness horrifying experiments done to vampires in the search for ultimate power.

The Elite dungeons offer truly brutal challenges, and the bosses now unleash even more devastating attacks at the players. To master these dungeons you need everything: good abilities which fit well together, good gear and most of all, good teamwork.

The Nightmare beings

Tackling Elite dungeons is no easy feat, but beyond lays the true test for the ultimate dungeon runners – The Nightmare mode. You need to be tough as nails and a master of your role to be able to take on these extreme challenges.

Between you and the Nightmare dungeons stands the Gatekeeper, and you will have to deal with him alone. He offers three tests and you choose one of them. Only after you have succeeded will you be allowed to enter any Nightmare dungeon. The Guardian’s tests are different and made to challenge each of the three main team roles. This means that there is one test for tanks, one for healers and one for the damage dealers. The Guardian challenge will test you to the fullest of your abilities. You will need to be quick, you will need to be versatile and you will need to try many many times. 

The Gatekeeper offers three tests

If you succeed you are deemed ready for the Nightmare dungeons, where awesome loot and staggeringly difficult monsters await you. This time you face the hardest incarnations of the bosses, and they are holding nothing back. 

In addition to mastering all of the earlier tactics the team now also has to show off their full versatility. It is no longer just about damage and hit points or even tactics, it is about being able to counter cruel new attacks and strip away frightening buffs. To be able to take down the Nightmare bosses all the team members need to have a vast variety of abilities to choose from, so that they can adjust their setup according to each boss. 

If a team does not have the tools needed to deal with a specific boss, it will fail.

But even if the hardship is extreme and the challenges may seem virtually insurmountable, the rewards for the victorious few are great. The Nightmare dungeons give epic items as rewards, and even if you are unlucky with the drops you earn special tokens you can use to purchase and upgrade epic weapons and talismans. So there you have a small taste of what the dungeons in The Secret World have to offer. They tell great stories, present clever challenges and give lots and lots of sweet rewards. Though the dungeons are hard and the monsters in them terrible don’t be afraid to try them out. 

Instead – Embrace the challenge and conquer the darkness!

Tor Egil Andersen Junior Communications Manager

Source: thesecretworld