Troopers All The Way Down

Time for a bit of whimsy! The other night we didn't have enough people to run an operation and ended up doing a hardmode flashpoint instead... with four troopers, because that's who we had online.

It was pretty damn fun. I know that our class stories make us all out to be special snowflakes, but let's be honest: troopers are meant to come in packs. Nothing like a whole group of them running around shooting things and shouting: "Go Havoc Squad!"

We decided to do Battle of Ilum simply because several of us hadn't done it before. It's a good thing that we were all quite overgeared, because otherwise not having any class buffs other than our own probably would have been annoying. As it was, we only had to deal with two other minor issues:

First off, pretty much all the loot was utterly useless to us, and not because we were already well geared as it was, but because we couldn't use anything but trooper loot! Other classes can at least give drops with different stats to their companions, but all the trooper companions are also troopers! In an RNG-based system, having the entire group limited to only a single loot type is not very efficient.

And of course there was the issue of interrupts, seeing how three of us were Commandos and thus the only advanced class without one. We hadn't looked into whether Battle of Ilum required much interrupting, but fortunately we managed to power through most of it without any issues... until the last boss blew us up with his Force Explosion.

At least our health levels were high enough so that we didn't all die to it straight away, which actually gave us a chance to continue fighting for a bit and figure out which of his abilities had just killed people; otherwise we might not even have realised it at first. On the second attempt we then had our tank on strict interrupt duty for that ability only and fortunately he did a good job of it - but I sure felt bad about placing all that responsibility on his shoulders alone. So far I haven't encountered any content that's unbeatable with only one interrupter, but I do think that many encounters feel like they expect you to probably have more than one.

One of our Jedi consulars has already brought up the idea of having an all-consular run as well. I kind of hope they go through with it just because I think it would be funny. There are other options for unusual group setups as well; for example you could make an all-stealth run with Shadows and scoundrels... possibilities, possibilities.

On another note, I was standing at the fleet tonight when someone whispered me asking whether I was Shintar from Going Commando. "A fan!" I thought. I wasn't quite right, but it was even better: it turned out that Issy from I can do Alts, me and I have been playing on the same server all along without even knowing it (possibly because we play on opposite factions). Now I really have to dust off at least one of those Empire alts I think...