- Note: Weapons and Abilities and Skills have been substantially altered in the Dungeon and Raid Rebalance Patch of
October 2020, see Dungeon and Raid Rebalance patch notes - secretworldlegends.com and "Abilities" patch notes section. Weapon pages that have been thoroughly edited to reflect the new changes should have a link to the old version of the page with the pre-patch skills. There are 9 types of core weapons in Secret World Legends.
A succinct distinction between weapons is whether their Abilities and Skills are Healing (Assault Rifle, Blood Magic, and Fist heal directly, with heal-over-time, or leeching attacks) or Aggro (Hammer, Chaos and Shotgun attacks generate Hate to keep monsters attacking the user, thereby Tanking attacks onto themselves and away from other players). The other part of being a Tank is to be hard to kill, and in addition to high HP, Tanks in SWL have damage amelioration abilities, like Knockdown and damage reduction.
The remaining three : Blade, Elementalism and Pistol fit more or less well into the designation of Damage Dealing. Blade had too many defensive abilities to be considered a DPS weapon alone, but this was changed by the 10-1-20 patch.
Weapons are split into three sub-classes: magic, melee, and firearms. Other than the fact that the Melee weapons can only damage at close range this is an aesthetic distinction, and has no impact on game mechanics. Even the "flavor" of each weapon's abilities, as reflected in their mechanics and in-game descriptions, is more focused than the magic/melee/firearms distinction.
Magic weapons include Blood Magic, Chaos, and Elementalism
Melee weapons include Blade, Fist, and Hammer.
Firearms includes Assault Rifle, Pistol, and Shotgun.
- The Ultimate Beginner Guide - TSWDB
- Weapon Abilities Spreadsheet - Ultimate Fist and Hammer & other
- Weapon Abilities Spreadsheet - Energy and Targeting Type
- Abilities and Builds - Funcom Forums