Stay away from this game! (Update. Had to fix numbers cause I accidentally made it sound better)

So, I loved TSW. I played it daily for years. When SWL launched I just laughed. However, I decided to give it a shot. It's worse then what everyone is telling you.

SWL took all the good will TSW had and just ruined it. Loot box keys are what $1.5 here? Where as before they were $1 and you got a token you could spend in a lootbox store so if there was an item that was say 20 tokens you wanted you only had to buy 20 lootboxes to have a 100% chance to get it. Here that's gone. Now you can't even buy costumes directly either. All they have are overpriced items. $10 for Sprint V? $25 so you can upgrade the quality of an item because they made the good stuff super rare to drop to squeeze more money out of you. Everything they've done from TSW to SWL has been designed and changed to manipulate you into spending money on their macrotransactions. I say "macro" cause 10 and $25 isn't micro. $15 for a upgrade when the game is designed to take as long as humanly possible to get max level purple to go to yellow and then two yellows to red is a system designed to get you pay money. As someone who can do SH Occult from 0-25 and only get enough distills that only increase my yellow items maybe halfway to a level? When I got nothing but purples? That's a poorly designed grindy and greedy system.

Then it doesn't help we are still missing content from TSW and every patch they just add new clothes to the loot boxes and that's it. We didn't get any new events for a while. Everything is just recycled stuff from TSW but worse. They made the combat easier to understand but the system they use is just the hold targeting system but worse. You can be pointing at one monster but your attack will instead attack a monster that's "closer" off to the left, right, or even behind. You can also be pointing at a monster and right next to it and the game will say "No target near by" even though you're in an active fight and your last attack worked fine but now 5 button presses later and it isn't letting you attack.

End game for this game is the same 4-5 dungeons because they don't let you choose your own dungeons once you're elite+ and the game only seems to randomly choose between 4 dungeons. So, if you don't like those 4 dungeons then you're kind of SoL. Plus you only get 10 keys for the loot now. So, if you want loot from a specific dungeon you have to hope you get that dungeon and then save your keys for it. You can't farm the dungeon at will and you can't farm other dungeons while trying to get that dungeon because you only get 10 chests to open. Each dungeon has 6 bosses. Meaning doing 2 dungeons you don't have enough for all 12 bosses. You can pay 500 Marks for a new key, but I will go over marks later.

Lairs, which are like mini raids, require keys to unlock the loot now so if you liked to do lairs before you can only do one a day. They also made them easier with no confusing table of parts to choose from. You get 3 keys to loot. When you do a lair you'll fight 6 bosses on average. Each boss drops a loot box. It is 700 Marks for a new key.

Scenarios give loot at the end now but you only get 2 keys a day. They also seem to go on forever and the higher level you go the better loot you get. No idea on the marks for these.

Now, what are Marks? Marks are the in game earned real currency. There's anima shards which are just used to fusing and restoring your anima and Marks used for everything else. In a little over a week of doing all dailies and extra dailies you'll earn 30k marks. Good gear, even at low level, will be 10k on average. With better gear getting really high up there. Now, when you sell on the auction house you have to pay a 10% list fee. Not only that when they buy from you the game takes 10%. Meaning you lose a fair amount. So for a item that sells for 300k you will have to pay 30k right away just to list it. If it doesn't sell in the time you have to pay another listing fee. Then when someone buys it, you only get 270k meaning you lose 60k. This was a bug they introduced in TSW after Kaidan came out. They never fixed it and I am sure they never will.

Oh, you're limited to 40 items for free. If you want to upgrade your item inventory by 5 slots, no longer 10, you have to pay $5 real money.

Then you have the lies of "Play how you want" where I have to unlock a weapon class I don't like to play, because they're refusing to unlock them for me even thought I bought TSW, because of solo stuff like Dark Agartha requiring knock down skills. Which BM Fist don't have. And the lies, on the steam page, of "play the story with your friends" where my friends and I kept running into solo mode only sections. Which caused most of them to leave.

If you think "Oh well surely they will add more" lookup the twitch clip of the community manager being asked for story content and he says "That'd be nice, one day perhaps". I'm not sure if I can puts links in here.

The only reason to play this game is the community. However, it is dying. The agartha is bare now and LFG takes forever. The only reason I play is because of a friend who only plays this game. Anytime we group up we just duo dungeons because it takes 10 minutes to hour+ to find a group some days.

Unfortunately, they turned everything in this game into a time sink. Which then they turned into a money sink, and not even $1-$5 but $15-$25 for the time sink savers.

Africa takes about 2 hours to do. Everything in the area was datamined years ago so there is nothing new. Even the big t-rex boss was found in the game files from the beta of TSW. With how stiff and poor some of the animations are in the movies it makes it look like it was stuff they did a long time ago. Like how the animation after you beat Tokyo was originally one of the first animations, the ex director said so on the old forums, and doesn't look anywhere near as good as some of the animations even in KM or Kaidan. There is a wide range of this issue in Africa.

For some reason, you have a loading screen between the agartha and the map. Meaning when you come from agartha you load, then have to use a loading screen right away to get into the map,except one mission that lets you use a back door. Same for when you leave. Plus when you move between districts there's a loading screen. However, when you just jump down from one district there is no loading screen. This means they could just open the fences and let you walk up there. It would be way faster then loading the game again.

Last on Africa, when you beat it you are given a new side mission to go meet someone. However, you don't get this mission until you enter the Agartha. After beating Africa I wait for about 10 minutes, nothing. Then I go the Agartha and there's the mission.

The dungeon finder wont let you be what class you want if it thinks you're not good enough. The issue? I play healer. If I want to run as healer it will only let me do it in Elite 1 even though I have access to 3. E2 and 3 it says I can only be tank in. All my gear is based around healing and healing buffs. Even though I have none of the tank classes unlocked it tells me I can only be tank. It then tells me I can only run DPS for story mode. Despite me running DPS in E3 and heals when my friends and I run a private group.

The eh?: Tokyo Tower is now all one mission. No more random floors. You do all in one go. I've asked and no one has seen the secret floors. So, no one knows if they are in this version.

If you play healer your gear is cheap, as no one heals in this game. The issue? No one heals in this game. Every class has some basic healing abilities. Because of this tanks just heal themselves and DPS do too. Everyone tells you to switch classes.

The good: AEGIS is 98% dead. There are like 3 missions that give AEGIS towers. What sucks about those is you have to rely on the towers because you can no longer damage AEGIS shields.