Okay, lots more detail on TSW:
Combat should feel fairly familiar to players of other MMOs. You have a power bar and some powers have cooldowns. There’s an active dodge, and it’s important; telegraphed attacks are usually pretty powerful and/or carry secondary effects (knockdowns and other crowd control) that you want to avoid. (This is especially true in dungeons and in the late-game Tokyo zone.)
Setting, leveling, classes, gear, and missions are pretty far from the typical MMO, though.
Classes and Leveling
It’s designed as a classless system, but the common tank/healer/dps trinity holds sway in group content. Every character can learn every ability and use them to equal effect, however, so you can switch roles any time you’re out of combat, as long as you carry the gear for your alternate roles. There’s a gear manager that lets you save combinations of powers and gear, so that you can switch easily between them.
There are no “levels”, as such, though the average quality of gear you have equipped is treated as sort of level-equivalent–your “quality level”. As you earn XP, you gain Ability Points and Skill Points. Ability Points are used to buy powers. You spend Skill Points to upgrade your skill with the various weapon and talisman types; this gives bonuses and increases the quality of gear you can equip. There are other skill tracks that can be unlocked(Aux weapons, Augments, and AEGIS skills), but they don’t come into play until later.
Tip: Each weapon has two skill tracks. It’s generally best to pick one track for each weapon and stick with it. Better quality weapons are more valuable than the bonuses from the second track. (You’ll eventually fill all the skill tracks, though.)
Gear
You can have two weapons equipped at a time (plus an auxiliary with its own active and passive, once you unlock those). The weapons you have equipped determine which active powers you can use, but you can mix and match passives from all the weapon trees. This makes for a pretty deep build system, but there are also pre-made builds (decks) and lots of build recommendations online, if you don’t want to get into the build design too much.
Weapons (and their associated powers) tend to be fitted for different roles. Hammer and Chaos Magic are generally considered tank weapons. Blades are mostly tankish or solo survival weapons. Elemental Magic, Shotgun, and Pistols are mostly dps/support. Blood Magic can go dps or healing. Assault Rifle is the “leech” weapon; it heals by doing damage to enemies, making it very effective for soloing and for backup healing. Fist weapons tend to be primarily used for healing.
Tip: A Blades/Assault Rifle build is one of the most forgiving, survivable options for solo play and learning the ropes. It’s not as good in dungeons (where you generally don’t want to be in melee range unless you’re the tank), but you can focus on AR powers for those, if necessary.
“Armor” consists of talismans that buff various stats. They tend to be oriented toward a specific role: dps talismans have attack rating, healing talis have heal rating, tank talis have health. They can be slotted with glyphs that provide buffs to other stats, so you might see a heal talisman with a glyph that increases crit rate (crit rate is important to healers). Talismans do not affect your appearance–something CoH vets appreciate, since it means you don’t have to compromise your look to equip better gear. (Weapons do show up on your character model, but you can choose to hide them when they’re not in use.)
Weapons and talis take up only one inventory slot each (in fact, that’s true of all items), and your inventory size can be upgraded quite a bit with in-game currency, so it’s practical to carry a full set of gear for each role you’re prepared to play.
Crafting
The crafting system is Minecraft-like. You arrange materials in a pattern in your crafting window, press a button, and you get the item. It doesn’t generally see much use outside of puzzles and other mission-specific crafting until late in the game, when it’s used heavily in upgrading and customizing end-game gear. Every now and then, though, it comes in handy–especially for making weapons on the fly. Sometimes a team *really *needs one more shotgun. A few scraps of metal and some ability points, and boom, you’ve got enough of a shotgun build to cover it.
Quests
Not all missions are combat-oriented. Notable variations are sabotage missions–in which you avoid traps and enemies to reach an objective–and investigation missions, which involve puzzles and research. The latter are unlike anything I’ve seen in other MMOs, and when I say “research”, I mean that you will often need to open a browser (there’s one built into the game) and do real research. You may need to reference Bible passages, translate text from other languages, investigate websites, and many other things to solve these missions.
Mission contacts tend to be spread out a bit more than in other games, avoiding the densely packed “quest hubs”. There are also minor side missions scattered around the environment–you might get a mission by finding a lost cell phone on the ground, a note tacked to a tree, or a ransacked delivery van.
Theme
The theme varies somewhat from region to region. The starting region is an island in New England, and it’s got strong elements of Stephen King, H. P. Lovecraft, and zombie apocalypse. The Egypt region is a little more pulp adventurish, with an Indiana Jones flavor, though there’s still plenty of horror. Transylvania is vampires, werewolves, fairy tales…and Cold War superscience. Tokyo is, as you might expect, pretty strongly Japanese horror-themed. The underlying story throughout all the regions is pretty Lovecraftian.
Community
The in-game community is pretty helpful. I recommend that new players join the Sanctuary chat channel, which was created primarily to support newbies. There are other helpful channels as well (Badgers for achievements and Noobmares for getting started in Nightmare mode dungeons, for example), but the denizens of Sanctuary can probably point you to those as needed.
Okay, that was a huge wall of text, but I think I hit the most important stuff. If you’ve got questions, though, I’ll answer them as best I can.
