Funcom Is Making Changes To The Secret World's Combat

The other day, The Secret World's Issue 13.1 patch went live. It caused quite a bit of controversy, as it nerfed the previously instant casting skill Anima Shot by adding a one second cast time and thus snare them in place during the cast. In response to the backlash, a Funcom employee stepped in to offer an explanation. Initially, the plan was to increase the passive boost it provided as an offset, but the changes did not go live at the same time.

Ultimately, the goal was to "balance the gameplay discrepancy between melee and Ranged characters." Melee characters have more to avoid, they have to keep up with their target, etc. The ideal plan was to give melee characters instantaneous skill casts while giving ranged characters "a cast-time shorter than the Global Cooldown," but that wouldn't be possible.

Instead, partly due to the backlash, they will be "removing the casting snare effect" from every character. They will then reduce cooldowns on "all Melee dashes and charges" to make sure that they can "get in the action faster." This was due to the fact that they find The Secret World's combat to be "the most fun when movement is encouraged rather than being artificially hindered."