Colicoid War Game

It's been over a week since I did this flashpoint, but I still wanted to write about it because it really left an impression on me. I would describe my first experience with it as both hilarious and horrible, and I immediately found myself wondering whether it would turn out to be the SWTOR equivalent of WoW's Oculus back in WOTLK, a.k.a. an instance that took you far enough out of your comfort zone that most people ended up hating it and avoided it like the plague.

Obviously in discussing the details of the flashpoint, this post will contain spoilers about what happens in it, but I don't think that there's any reason to worry too much about it - there isn't really any story beyond what Master Satele tells you at the start, which is this: The Colicoids have lots of weapons for sale, but instead of simply handling trade like normal people, they want any potential buyers to go overcome a deadly obstacle course in order to prove themselves. What a ridiculous idea, why do we have to bother with this again? Oh, the Empire has already agreed to participate and we can't let them win? Sigh... I wouldn't be surprised if Imperial players got told in turn that they have to go because the Republic's already doing it.

Anyway, our group entered the flash point, saw some friendly Colicoids, entered the competition area... and was presented with four gun turrets in the middle of a field.

Nooo, not a vehicle fight!

Funnily enough, it wasn't actually that... vehicular? You just had to aim the gun at the enemies and it would shoot on its own. Silly us actually sabotaged ourselves on our first attempt because we expected there to be more button pushing, so we kept clicking and mashing keys, which just caused us to get dismounted over and over again. I even managed to make my gun turret disappear completely and we had to reset the flashpoint to get a new one, because three guns simply weren't enough. Take note, this is the first flashpoint where you definitely can't supplement your group with companions, you absolutely do need four real people.

Now, even though the gun firing turned out to be extremely basic, we still wiped on this encounter three or four times. How hard can it be to shoot a bunch of slowly advancing unfriendly Colicoids? Harder than you'd think, apparently. Specifically, there are some that start shooting from range, and if you don't target them fast enough, they'll seriously mess you up.

Anyway, eventually we finally got a message that we had apparently passed this trial, with me dead and everyone else on low health but alive.

Phew, let's move on... to another four gun turrets. Let's do the same thing again, only harder! /facepalm. Fortunately the encounter didn't actually seem to be that much harder, and we managed to beat it on the first attempt - though lots of enemies were still alive by the time the completion message came up, and they ended up killing all of us except our Shadow, who had the good sense to vanish when we got overwhelmed.

Still, that was the gun turret part of the flashpoint done. Next we died in a corridor full of rock-hard droids that wiped us until we made sure to use proper crowd control.

As we emerged from that corridor, I found myself reminded of... Huttball? What? Don't worry, they didn't actually make us play that in there, but the scenery with all the ramps and fire certainly bore a certain resemblance to The Pit. Some droids were patrolling the area too, so we pulled the first one... and learned that they all have a knockback, as more or less the entire party went flying into the lava below. This would quickly become a theme, because even though we knew about it now, it was still easy to accidentally get too close while trying to avoid the fire. Fortunately the rule of people falling down being funny still applied, but it was happening at such a high frequency that it came close to actually grating on some people's nerves.

All these things were just distractions though, as the real obstacle of the area were a bunch of linked forcefields that could be disabled if someone held a button down in a certain place. The idea seemed to be something like: one person holds down the first button, which opens the forcefield to the second button, so someone else then goes to press that to open the forcefield to the third button... it wasn't really too complicated, but I couldn't honestly claim to remember the details because I found that the droids and the fire were quite distracting. We only really muddled through because someone else managed to keep a clear head and figured out what to do in what order. It didn't help that the droids appeared to be on a short respawn timer as well, so someone caught on their own between force fields could suddenly find themselves facing a droid too. Good times.

Just like with the gun turrets, once wasn't good enough, and the Colicoids made us go through the whole spiel twice. At least it was smooth sailing after that: just a light side/dark side choice that was actually quite entertaining, a couple more mobs and then the last boss.

All in all, I had a lot of fun, but I have to say that I'd definitely be weary of pugging this one for a while. Vehicle fights, rapidly respawning droids that kill with knockbacks, and force field leapfrogging take a certain amount of patience to appreciate.