30/11/2014

New Facts and Figures from Bioware

Some interesting news about SWTOR came out in the past week.

First off, there was the press event that was held in California two weeks ago and about which the people who attended weren't allowed to talk until the start of this week. Heather from Pretty Little Sith posted a great, in-depth report about it on her site.

Can I just say how pleasant it was to read a Q&A where people actually asked sensible questions? No offense to the Community Cantinas, but all too often the people attending there ask terrible questions during the Q&A sessions, usually things along the lines of "When will we (ever) see [insert feature here]?", to which the answer is always something vague about how it sounds like a cool idea and they'd quite like to do it but probably not any time soon. So it was really refreshing to see a Q&A where the people asking the questions were actually in touch with the community and had clearly given their questions some thought.

It was also nice to see the devs "come out of their shells" a bit so to speak and be able to elaborate on certain issues, such as their stance on datamining. I was happy to hear that they are planning to double-down on Bioware cinematics next year, which will hopefully mean more PvE content at a faster pace than we've seen recently. I think GSF and GSH added value to the game, but I agree with their stance that they shouldn't try to add more feature expansions just for the sake of adding new features when nothing really jumps out at them as making a good addition.

I'm also a sucker for stats and statistics and found it interesting that they revealed that fewer than two percent of all free players hit their weekly warzone cap, which goes very much against the commonly touted assumption that letting free players queue more often and/or for ranked play would fix any queueing issues once and for all.

Apparently the number of guilds who participate in Conquest is going up, something that definitely matches my experience. I noted that during the last Total Galactic War, the event ended with ten empty spots on the leaderboard on The Red Eclipse. This week it's already been completely filled up. (And my guild has been beaten by a Polish guild I'd never even heard of before.)

A lesson they apparently learned for Shadow of Revan is that they need to make the questing content "worthwhile" because apparently "many" people levelled to 55 without even going to Makeb. Again, this is something I can attest to... I did complete Makeb several times, but most of my alts haven't actually done it, because once you'd seen the story, the planet wasn't really very rewarding in terms of gameplay.

On Wednesday Bioware also released a new infographic about SWTOR on the official website. I was quite excited about this as I feel that they've become very coy about numbers of any kind ever since the free-to-play conversion (which is kind of understandable considering that things like decreasing sub numbers made for terrible PR, but still). It wasn't quite as interesting as I would have hoped (for example I felt that all the emphasis on the length of the cinematic story content wasn't all that relevant or interesting) but there were still some fascinating tidbits of information in it.

For example the class distribution shows Empire and Republic on nearly even ground, with the two Jedi classes being the most popular - which is kind of what you'd expect in a Star Wars game, but this wasn't true at launch! When Bioware first released information about class distribution back at the guild summit in 2012, the Sith inquisitor was by far the most popular class for some reason, making up 19% of the player population. Now they are down to roughly 14%. Meanwhile the total population of Jedi (knights and consulars put together) has risen from making up roughly 17% of the playerbase to over 30%. Also, the Empire in general was a lot more popular than the Republic at launch, but the population seems to have evened out since then, with Imperial characters outnumbering the Republic only by a few hundred thousand. (Though something is slightly off with these numbers, as they talk about 57 million characters created at the top of the graphic, but the numbers listed in the class distribution bit actually add up to nearly 60 million, which I find a bit confusing. If it was the other way round, you could argue that 3 million characters were created and then deleted, but you can't have more characters exist than were ever created...)

The number of player ships listed is also interesting, as acquiring your ship requires you to actually complete your class storyline on Coruscant or Dromund Kaas, so this implies that only about 11% of all characters even complete the prologue. Now, while there are probably some odd exceptions like people who level purely by GSF and ignore their class story or characters that exist purely as name placeholders, this certainly reminds me of the old WoW statistic that revealed that only 30% of new players made it to level 10, and how even that was actually amazingly good by MMO standards.

As somewhat of a counterpoint, the 635 million hours invested in the game make for an average of 11 hours per character... now if you consider that 90% of the people who try the game stop playing relatively early, that leaves a lot of hours for the people who actually do stick with the game.

Shoraan on the forums also pointed out that it's kind of surprising just how close the number of mob kills and PvP kills listed on the infographic are, which implies that about one PvP kill happens for every 2.5 PvE kills. Considering the hundreds and thousands of mobs you mow down while levelling and doing dailies, that's actually a lot of PvP happening in a game that isn't really focused on it.

26/11/2014

My Other Bounty Hunter is a Powertech

 

And so is this one.

... wait, what?

Even as someone who generally enjoys levelling at a more sedate pace, I made use of the 12x XP pre-order bonus to level a second Sorcerer, as she was a character that I felt was kind of stuck in limbo. While I had a strong sentimental attachment to her due to having created her fairly early in the game, levelling her up felt kind of pointless considering that I already had a max level character of the same class, sex and advanced class.

As it happens, I had the exact same problem with a Chiss Powertech of mine (as I levelled a Rattataki PT last year), with the only difference being that she had "already" made it to level forty in the time since launch. Again, the 12x XP seemed like a good opportunity to finish off her story and round out her character.

Unlike with the Sith inquisitor, I have to say that I seemed to enjoy the bounty hunter story more the second time around, though I find it hard to put my finger on why. There were still bits that I didn't like (first and foremost the Taris storyline, and the way chapter three kicks off), but on the whole it felt more... coherent than I remembered it. And I did note in my post about my first playthrough that my experience of the story had been very fragmented at the time, which probably contributed to my lack of enthusiasm for it the first time around.

Since I already had a character of the same class, sex and advanced class, my ways of mixing things up were limited, but I did find a couple. For one thing I specced into dps instead of tanking, but oddly enough that didn't actually feel all that different while questing. (Death from Above is still the way to go.)

I also took Mako with me everywhere instead of Gault, who had been my Rattataki Powertech's companion of choice most of the time. Seeing a different companion react to story developments is at least one way of getting to see things from a different perspective.

In fact, my companions surprised me by showing me a little bit of inter-companion story that I hadn't seen before. Since I'm not too bothered with maxing out my companions on alts when I've already played the class before, I had almost no affection with Torian, but a lot with Mako (with whom I had actually quested). Imagine my surprise when during one of my later conversations with Mako, she suddenly expressed interest in Torian! Unlike on my Rattataki, where I romanced him, my Chiss felt indifferent about him and encouraged Mako to make a move - so the two actually became a couple, with one conversation being about them having dinner together and other references appearing in random conversation as well. When I later chose a flirt option while talking to Torian during a story mission, Mako chimed in with a joking comment about how I should keep my hands off him.


I was kind of curious whether I could trigger a jealous showdown along the lines of what can happen between Risha and Akaavi for male smugglers if I decided to put the moves on Torian after all, but I didn't want to risk it because... I didn't want to hurt Mako's feelings. Yes, I'm that pathetic. I don't want to make my NPC friends sad.

Since my Rattataki was fully light side, I decided to go down a more neutral route on this character. It definitely felt like the most natural state for a bounty hunter. Sadly I didn't notice it making much of a difference to the story. Earlier on, I shot a person whom my light side hunter allowed to get away. When I let them get away, this person came back to try and kill me. On this character, another person tried to kill me instead. Ho hum.

The very last choice you get to make in the bounty hunter story is an interesting one, and part of me certainly wanted to choose "the other option" compared to what I had done before, if for no other reason than to see the consequences. Sadly said option is just waaay too unbefitting of a bounty hunter (in my opinion) so I made the same choice that I made before. I suppose it's my own fault I didn't get to see a different ending.

I did play a bit differently compared to how I levelled my Sorcererer with the XP boost, in so far as I actually took the time to explore all the planets and get most of the datacrons on the way this time. I just had to engage with the world in some way aside from the class story or I would have gone batty.

Time flew by pretty quickly anyway, which was helped by the fact that I had fewer issues with missions bugging out and granting less XP than they were supposed to. I was level 53 when I finished my class story and moved to Makeb, which meant that I was "done" after only two mesas there.

As a bonus, getting this character to 55 meant that I finally got the achievement for maxing out all the different crew skills, as I was only missing Armstech, which just so happened to be what this character has been from day one. With a max-level Chiss I've now also got the all the legacy unlocks for different species except for Miraluka - and those are the one species I strongly dislike anyway (there's just something about characters with no visible eyes).

With twelve characters at the current level cap, I feel that I'm in a great position for next week's expansion launch. That just leaves the question of which of them to level to sixty first - and how.

20/11/2014

How People Play Conquests

I've been recording the conquest participation of my guildies for eleven weeks now, as well as generally observing how other people talk about their interest in conquest, and I think I've managed to identify roughly five different ways in which people participate in this part of the game so far. Note that these aren't set in stone and it's perfectly possible for someone to change their play style and move from one group to another.

The Reluctant Tagalong

The Reluctant Tagalong has decided that they don't really like conquest. Doesn't matter how nicely you ask in the guild message of the day that everyone should please make a bit of an effort to score conquest points this week, they just don't enjoy it, and they couldn't care less about their personal target. However, you can generally coax them into contributing a little by dragging them along to guild activities while downplaying the conquest aspect. "Hey, we're going to run Scum storymode in a bit, do you want to bring your newest alt? She could probably use the gear..." If they tag along, that extra person adds another three thousand points to your guild score at operation completion whether they care about it or not.

The Oblivious Contributor

The Oblivious Contributor barely even has a passing awareness of conquest and doesn't really try to hit their target, ever. However, depending on their play style, it might just happen anyway! Dedicated PvPers commonly fall into this group due to the sheer number of warzones they play over the course of a week. If they do happen to hit their target towards the end of it, they are probably confused by the extra mission reward popping up out of nowhere.

The Irregular

The Irregular doesn't really have strong feelings about conquest one way or another, but they are not a creature of routine. They may not even log into the game every week! (It's unlikely that this is someone from your regular ops team.) Most weeks you can't expect to get much of a contribution out of this person, but if you make a point of advertising that the guild will make a co-ordinated effort during a particular week, and they happen to be online, they'll be happy to do a bit of "work" for the good of the guild and do their part to contribute towards any shared goals.

The Clockwork Conqueror

The Clockwork Conqueror has decided that they really like conquest and it has become a central point of their gameplay. They'll hit their personal target on at least one character every week, but usually they'll take a couple of alts along for the ride as well. After all, it's fun! With a couple of players like these, your guild can end up scoring pretty impressive numbers even when you've told people to take it easy this week. After all, why would they take it easy while they are having fun?

The Crafting Magnate

The Crafting Magnate is very rich in-game and enjoys the privilege of being able to create conquest points by effectively converting credits into conquest points via crafting. They'll log in several times a day to send all their companions out to craft and will accumulate a high amount of points this way without actually having to invest a lot of play time. If they have a lot of alts, they can single-handedly earn scores in the millions and carry a guild to victory that way. Players who are less rich may try to play the role of the crafting magnate temporarily, to give the guild a boost during a particular competitive stage, but will quickly run into the problem of running out of money and materials.

Have you seen any of these in your guild? And how would you classify yourself, if you participate in conquests at all? I'm probably a bit of a Clockwork Conqueror, though I'm starting to feel a little burnt out on it.

15/11/2014

Gathering in my Stronghold

I've written about how I'm not much of an interior decorator and how I like the quick travel options introduced to the game with Strongholds, but one aspect of housing I haven't talked about yet is what decorations have added to gathering crew skills.


If riding a tauntaun on Tatooine is wrong, I don't want to be right.

Basically, I really love the little gathering nodes that you can place as decorations inside your stronghold. As far as I'm aware you can only get them from participating in conquests, though since they are not bound, there is always the alternative option of simply buying them from someone else. Aside from the sheer fun I've had with conquests so far, opening that little reward box every time I hit my personal target has added a nice little bit of extra enjoyment to the whole thing for me. There is something of a collectible appeal to the nodes... can I catch them all? I've started to organise them in such a manner that I can easily remember which type of material can be found on which node (which isn't necessarily self-evident, especially with the plants), and I've been pleased to see that the number of gaps (that is to say, nodes I don't own yet) is shrinking every week.

In comparison to previous ways of gathering materials, they have both pros and cons, though I feel that the former far outweigh the latter. Let's get the cons out of the way first:

Cons:

- A single gathering action from a decorative node takes a whole 15 seconds.
- Each time you gather there is a pretty high chance that you'll trigger the resource exhaustion debuff, which won't let you gather again for four hours.
- Nodes also have an internal cooldown of several minutes, so if you got resource exhaustion and log on an alt to immediately gather from the same node, you'll have to wait.

Pros:

- After the initial time or money investment, the nodes are yours forever and inexhaustible.
- They can be placed in a convenient location where it's easy to gather every time you log on.
- Every character is capable of gathering from any node, even if they don't have the corresponding crew skill.
- With crew skill missions, there is often a chance that the result will be somewhat randomised, e.g. an archaeology mission for rank 3 artifact fragments could either give you Ancient Artifact Fragments (which I often need) or Prehistoric Artifact Fragments (which are way too common in my opinion). The nodes allow you to specifically target the type of resource you actually want.

It's that last point in particular that has been a real boon to me, because for some reason I always find myself confronted with massive imbalances on any material tier that can wield more than one result. It's wonderfully refreshing to be able to just focus on farming what I need. I suppose I always would have had the option to go farming out in the world, but for some reason I've never considered that a viable alternative in this game - probably because travel can be such a pain.

On a side note, all the crafting material decorations also serve their purpose as decorations pretty well. The metal scrap piles and artifacts are a great way of making a room look cluttered (e.g. a storeroom), and the archaeology crystals add a beautiful splash of colour to any apartment. Many of the bioanalysis nodes also make for great substitutes for "proper" potted plants, many of which can be quite expensive.

11/11/2014

Community Love

As a blogger I'm probably more involved with the community of my game of choice than most players, but sometimes I still feel that it would be nice to stay on top of things more efficiently than I currently do. Sadly I'm a bit old school in terms of my social networking. I like blogs, but they are not as popular as they used to be. I never watch livestreams, just the occasional recording of a highlight. I use Twitter, but only very sporadically. And while I like podcasts, I find it frustrating how hard it is to keep up with them. (Compare the time investment of reading ten blogs to that of listening to ten podcasts!)

The one thing I have been trying to do is to always keep my blogroll and link list updated, removing sites that have gone dead and adding new ones as I find them, even if I don't actually visit them consistently. The power of simply being connected is not to be underestimated. I'm happy to say that these link lists have seen some serious growth this year. I even had to split the podcasts off into their own section, since having everything in one place was starting to get unwieldy.

I think back to around mid-2012 and how frustrating it was to see the game I loved shrink as much as it did, which meant that at least one fan site closed up shop pretty much every other week. I see something similar happening to Wildstar right now, except that (at least from the outside) it looks like what they are going through is even worse. Either way the remaining fans have my sympathy. Word of mouth is important, and seeing others lose faith in your game or even badmouthing it can be very demotivating.

I felt that 2013 was a fairly quiet year for the SWTOR community. The game stabilised and the people bashing it moved on to greener pastures and newer games, but there wasn't exactly a huge amount of good news to report either.

But this year... I've been feeling really good about the game and what I've been seeing in the community. Revenue is apparently down, but EA actually dared to talk about the game in a positive way again earlier this year, and I felt that this surge of interest was reflected in community activity as well. New podcasts cropped up left and right, and they banded together for co-operative projects to share the love. New fan sites appeared to cover new demands - when Galactic Strongholds came out for example, TOR Decorating immediately provided an amazing go-to resource for this new part of the game.

My favourite new addition is more recent: SWTOR Network, a moderated aggregate site for game and community related news and opinion pieces. No more having to click through all the links in my side bar when I'm looking for what's new; I can just go to SWTOR Network and see it all neatly condensed in one place.

If you haven't been that involved with the community outside of the game yourself recently, I can only recommend giving it (another) look. There are a lot of dedicated content creators out there now, and it's a pleasure to read or listen to them. (And if you're a content creator yourself, why not share your stuff on SWTOR Network for all to see?)

07/11/2014

My Second Sorc - A 12x XP Story


This is Dormaba. She was one of my earliest alts, probably the fourth of fifth character I ever created. I had heard some good things about the Sith inquisitor story at the time and came up with a character concept for a light side Sith. Of course, when my character opened her mouth for the first time, I had to discover that it didn't matter what you said, the voice actor for the female inquisitor managed to make all of it sound incredibly snarky, which wasn't really what I'd had in mind. I knew that my character probably wasn't going to manage anything better than a neutral attitude before I'd even left Korriban. I quite enjoyed the Sith starter planet, but towards the end of Dromund Kaas my enthusiasm abruptly fizzled out. Look for artifacts for my master, without even knowing what and why? Meh. Eventually I managed to continue the story anyway, but it was in very rare and small bursts of gameplay. Nearly three years later, Dormaba was still only level 30 and had yet to set foot on Alderaan. I didn't help that I had rolled up another Sorcerer in the meantime and actually levelled that one to the cap.

Cue this whole 12x XP thing.

My initial impressions of it were humorous. Gaining nearly a full level just for handing in a single quest is pretty silly. I tried to mix things up a bit by doing some exploring in between class missions, but quickly found myself frustrated by how much travelling I had to do compared to engaging in actual gameplay. When you do all of the missions on a given planet you're generally forced to travel around in a small-ish area and get several quests done at once. When you're just following your class story on the other hand, you're constantly moving from map to map, to the point where you almost spend more time travelling than actually playing through the story.

I also noticed that my XP gains were wacky in more than one way. The floating text, the listed XP reward in the mission window and in the chat box almost never seemed to agree on a number, and sometimes it seemed to bug out completely, granting me little to no XP at all. Other people agreed with me on the forums that there seemed to be some sort of bug, while some claimed that it was just a graphical glitch. I think that if I was supposed to earn enough XP to earn a level and then I didn't actually level up, there's more than a UI malfunction going on - unless someone has actually been able to gain levels by resetting their UI or relogging.

Due to this I was falling somewhat behind as I was approaching level 40 and did the Quesh planetary storyline to bolster my experience gains a little. (Plus you can't go down on Quesh without picking up the starter mission to this chain, and I hate abandoning quests.) Around this level I also noticed that my gear was starting to seriously fall behind and that it had a very noticeable effect. I managed to catch up a little by spending some planetary commendations, but it was never quite enough. After a while I started to find gold mobs hard to kill, and later even silvers. I think the only thing that kept me afloat was my 700+ presence stat, which loses some of its potency by the higher levels but still provides a significant advantage compared to a character that doesn't have that additional companion power to fall back on.

The final boss fight of my class story was a real endurance test considering how underpowered my character was, which wasn't helped by the fact that Khem Val, my companion of choice, insisted on running into the circles of Bad that the boss kept placing on the floor throughout. In the end it was easier to just put Khem on passive every so often and kite the boss around the room on my own.

Money and crew skills were also an issue. I managed to stay on top of my artifice since I had materials stocked up on my other characters that I could fall back on, but I think that if I hadn't had that stockpile saved up, it would have been a pain to gather enough materials while levelling so quickly. It was also costly. While it helped that skill training was free, training crafting schematics was a considerable drain on my finances. I thought I was doing okay, hovering between 100k und 200k credits for the longest time - until I hit 400 artifice, went to train all the new schematics and suddenly found myself completely broke before I had even learned everything. I couldn't even afford to fly to the next planet to continue questing there. That was rather awkward.

Gameplay was engaging enough, as I specced my little Sorc into the lightning tree, dps being something that I had never seriously tried on either my Sage or my other Sorc. I used to joke that Sorcerers were boring, with all their abilities being lightning, lightning and yet more lightning, but there was actually something pretty satisfying about being able to get several quick zaps off in a row.

I also had time to really pay attention to the story and found myself wondering whether I was going to feel differently about it the second time around. (You may or may not recall that the inquisitor story wasn't one of my favourites.) The answer is pretty much no. If anything, the highs were a little less impressive the second time around since the surprise effect was gone, while all the times my character was cringing in pain and falling over were all the more noticeable. As I still don't have the guts to make a character go full-on dark side, my floundering around on neutral ground didn't seem to result in any noticeable differences in the story either - until the end, where my almost perfectly grey Sith was given a different honourary name by the Dark Council than my light side inquisitor, which I thought was neat.

Continuing to Makeb was pretty funny. If at all possible, the XP gains there seemed even more insane than the class story ones had been (even if they are supposed to be based on the same multiplier). The GSI support satellite system was a godsend and underlined just how undergeared my character was, considering that her health more than doubled every time I clicked on that shiny console. Suddenly things died at a speed and with an ease that was much closer to what I was used to, and it was nice. Relogging outside of a base and suddenly losing the buff in the middle of enemy territory was scary though.


I also enjoyed visiting Makeb again, somewhat to my own surprise. Immediately after 2.0 I kind of overdosed on it, with too many of characters having gone there in too short a period of time, but returning to it after a bit of a break, I enjoyed the story again, as well as just looking at the environment with its wacky beasts and strange flowers. (Balloon plants?) The moment I hit 55, my motivation to keep questing took its usual nosedive though.

Overall it was a pleasant enough experience and nice change of pace, though I do think there are definite disadvantages to levelling a character this way, aside from things like the financial issues I already mentioned. Spending all your time in class story phases feels lonely as you rarely encounter other players, and personally I felt that limiting myself to the class story resulted in me getting less of a "feel" for the character than usual. All those light and dark side decisions you get to make in the side stories really help with shaping a character's personality.

04/11/2014

Of Uncleansable DoTs and Other Combat Changes

Last Thursday's livestream apparently provided a lot of information about the global combat changes coming with 3.0 that were previously only hinted at. I didn't watch it myself, but as usual Dulfy has a helpful summary.

I have to admit that I was somewhat surprised by just how much whining and gnashing of teeth is going on in the comment section of that article. I know that people are always afraid of change, and I've frequently been sceptical about some of Bioware's decisions myself, but the amount of comments about how the sky is falling and the game is going to fail is truly staggering this time around - especially since a lot of them don't seem to be based on anything but the fact that dps numbers will be nerfed across the board. Sure, everyone likes to see their numbers increase and nobody likes to be nerfed, but at the end of the day I've always felt that especially in SWTOR this is a relatively minor part of the experience compared to other MMOs. I mean, this is the same game where for the longest time you couldn't even see a mission's rewards until you had completed it, and yet that didn't put anyone off questing.

I'm pretty sure that shortly after 3.0 nobody will even care about this anymore, because the nerf only really hits people at level 55, and most of us will quickly level past that point as soon as it's possible. People decry it as an insult that they might be doing as much damage at 60 as they are currently doing at 55, but what is really being lost? You get a bunch of new content to play through!

Anyway, aside from the general dps changes, a whole bunch of other things have been announced, some of which I'd like to comment on:

Raid Buffs

A number of new buffs will be introduced with the aim of encouraging people "to bring players of every base class." I have no idea how this is going to be pan out, I just wanted to say that it cracks me up that this is basically the complete opposite of WoW's much-touted slogan: "Bring the player, not the class."

DoTs

The cooldown of all cleansing abilities will be increased to 12 seconds. I'm on board with this as I've previously complained about "cleanse-spamming" being an annoying mechanic from a healer's point of view. I do wonder how they are going to adjust fights like Nefra, which are currently all about the cleanse spam.

In PvP all DoTs will become uncleansable. Now, I'm not a fan of this at all, however to be honest Bioware has been going in that direction for a while, with more and more specs getting "cleanse immunity" for certain abilities. At least this way I'll know to never waste a cleanse on a DoT again. Currently the system has become pretty obtuse, as you don't just need to learn to recognise the DoTs of each type that your class can cleanse by their tiny icon, you then also have to memorise which of them (and note that these are not highlighted in any way) are uncleansable due to an immunity.

In turn they want to make all CCs cleansable - which surprised me in so far as I thought that a lot of them already were.

The issue that remains is that Bioware seems to thinks that DoT classes need even more help with doing damage in PvP, which isn't really backed up by my own experiences. Without cleanses, DoTs will become completely unescapable. At least I can try to run away from an opponent in melee or break line of sight on continous ranged attacks. A DoT only needs to hit you once to stay with you and do its full damage.

Interrupts

Interrupt cooldowns will be increased across the board, to 12 seconds for melee and 18 seconds for ranged. I have mixed feelings about this. While playing my baby Vanguard as Tactics with the shortened interrupt cooldown I sure enjoyed being able to shut down so many casts. But with a class as my main that is extremely dependent on cast-time abilities I also found it frustrating sometimes just how easily a moderately competent team could keep me shut down in PvP.

The thing that kind of worries me is this change's effect on PvE. Unlike DoTs, interrupts are a key component on a huge number of fights, not just in operations, but also on class story bosses and even some trash mobs. I can see Bioware going back to make balance changes on big boss fights like Kephess in Explosive Conflict, where it might become impossible to shut down the quick chain casts of the droids at the start once interrupt cooldowns have been increased. But what about all those smaller fights that will suddenly become harder? Not sure about that.

Buff/debuff changes

I was super excited when I first heard that they were finally making changes to the buff/debuff UI, but from the looks of it, the raid frames - which is where I as a healer would need an update the most - won't be included. This sucks. The only positive spin I can put on this is that these changes show that they are at least aware of debuff tracking being a problem and might eventually get around to fixing it on the ops frames as well.

01/11/2014

My 10th Level 55

Back in March I wrote a post called "Levelling My 10th Alt", in which I mused on how to keep the levelling process fresh when you've already done it more than a couple of times, and wondered which of my alts was going to be the next one to hit the level cap. As happens to me quite frequently in this game, I got distracted by max-level activities soon afterwards, and for the next six months, none of my alts really went anywhere. I think my Vanguard still hasn't finished her class story on Balmorra.

My Shadow actually hit 50 back in April but my pet tank and I felt little drive to continue levelling our consular duo for some reason and only got back to it very sporadically. This weekend however, we finally got there: while we're only at the end of Voss in terms of story progression, we went to Corellia to do some heroics for this week's conquest event, and those provided us with the last bit of XP we needed to hit 55.


I'm oddly happy to have reached the nice, round milestone of having ten characters at the level cap, and specifically to finally have a tank on Republic side. (Not to mention that Shadow/Assassin was the only advanced class I hadn't played to the cap in either of its incarnations yet.) While I levelled my Powertech in tanking spec last year, we don't run endgame content in our Imperial alt guild that often these days. I think I tanked Dread Fortress on story mode twice, Scum and Villainy once and that was it.

Based on my experiences back in WoW and in general, tanking isn't exactly my calling, but I can do a decent enough job at it with a bit of practice, and especially when it comes to alt runs tanks are often something that we're short on.

I'm also a very lazy raider to be honest, in so far as I tend to only really pay attention to the parts of each fight that are actually relevant to my role. Seeing how I'm playing a healer the vast majority of the time, with a healer main and two healer alts at 55, this means that I don't have much of  a clue about a lot of important fight mechanics. I vividly remember the first time I came along to Terror from Beyond as dps and just how much of a surprise I was in for during the second phase of the Terror fight. You mean I have to do something other than stand on a single platform most of the time and cast the occasional heal?!

While I've had a chance to do pretty much all operations as dps at least on the easier difficulties by now, tanking is still a great unknown to me when it comes to endgame. I think I'll quite enjoy getting a chance to finally unravel those old familiar fights from the one point of view from which I haven't seen them before.

(While my Guardian is one of my oldest alts, I've just never felt like speccing her for tanking. I'm not sure why; it just doesn't feel right for her.)