Attis Station

The other day my tiny Shadow tank made it to Quesh. The class quest there leads you to a place called Attis Station, and without giving away any story spoilers, I think it's safe to say that you've got to fight some bad guys in it. The thing that makes this particular mission stand out from many others is that the bad guys are quite a bit tougher than in most class story installments. In fact, the phase is closer in difficulty to a [Heroic 2] mission than to most solo ones, featuring pulls of one weak mob and two strong ones, a strong mob plus elite combo, and one group of no less than three strong opponents. For some classes, a setup like this would be outright impossible to solo.

Not so for the Jedi consular: regardless of whether you chose to be a Shadow or a Sage, you'll have a tank, a dps and a healing companion by this point, so whatever setup you picked for your character, you'll have a companion to complement it. You'll also have access to a sixty-second crowd control, an interrupt, and at least one stun, not to mention extra abilities only available to your chosen advanced class. Basically, as a consular of that level, you have all the abilities needed to solo something of [Heroic 2] difficulty if you know what you're doing... but do you?

On the consular class forum you can find quite a few threads about Attis Station, full of people expressing confusion about how to overcome this challenge. One thread I found had no less than 22 pages. Most of them don't so much complain that it's too hard... they just aren't sure what they are doing wrong.

As an experienced player (and somewhat over-levelled for the planet on top of it), I had no problems with the mission of course, but I remember finding it at least somewhat challenging the first time I did it, on my Sage.

Taking the strongest mob out of the equation by using crowd control goes without saying.

There are other class missions that have inspired similar threads. At the time I'm writing this, there's a ten-page thread on the first page of the consular class forum that asks how to defeat the final boss of chapter one. This is one I don't recall ever having any difficulties with, but apparently he does a big cast that will one-shot the player if not interrupted. As an MMO vet, interrupting anything that looks nasty comes to me pretty much automatically, so I never even found out about it being a one-shot. But to a genuinely new player who might not even be used to paying attention to cast bars, even something as "simple" as having to interrupt a single ability can seem baffling.

I think it's really nice that SWTOR has these slightly more challenging class quests sprinkled in among the easier ones every now and then. I don't think that any of them should be prohibitively difficult (after all the focus during the class story is on the story, not so much the gameplay), but keeping in mind that this is an MMO, I think it's beneficial to train players in the very basics of how to play their class as they level up. The class story is the ideal vehicle for this as well because it's the one piece of content that almost everyone will do as they level up, and it can be tailored specifically towards the abilities of the class. A setup like Attis Station would be cruel and (at level) pretty much impossible for a class with no crowd control for example - but since it's a story exclusive to consulars, the devs know that you'll have some CC available and can require its use.

Features like WoW's recent insta-max level if you preorder their next expansion have once again ignited the discussion about the value of an MMO's levelling game vs. what you do at the level cap, and one argument that I often hear is that levelling doesn't teach you anything relevant to the elder game anyway. I don't agree with that, though I'll concede that levelling in WoW certainly teaches you a lot less these days than it used to. The thing that people tend to forget is that it doesn't have to be that way - and it's certainly increased my appreciation for the fact that SWTOR, while far from being a difficult game while levelling up, at least "dares" to challenge you enough to encourage you to get comfortable with all your class's key abilities.