Day 10: Death

This is the tenth and last post in my 10 Days of SWTOR Screenshots challenge. Click on any screenshot to see a larger version.

Strictly speaking you never "die" in The Old Republic, because it wouldn't make sense lore-wise. You only get "defeated" - but "I'm dead" is just so much easier to say.

Last time I went through this challenge, I was still relatively new to the game and I was still constantly discovering new and interesting ways to die. After more than three years of playing however... well, not so much anymore. My alts rarely die while levelling unless my companion decides to charge off and overpull, or something respawns on my head at a very inconvenient moment, and neither is generally very interesting (just annoying). So when it comes to looking at interesting ways of dying, operations are the way to go these days, because that and PvP are the only places where you're expected to die frequently, regardless of your skill.

For example, if a boss or an add has a particularly powerful knockback, your body can end up landing in strange places. Pictured: me staring at one of my guildies on his Sniper alt, who had somehow managed to die above Draxus' gate in Dread Fortress.

 

A line that you'll often hear in operations is: "Slash stuck, everyone!" The /stuck command, which moves you if you get physically stuck on an obstacle somewhere in the world, has the nice side effect of killing you if you're in combat at the time. This has led to it seeing lots of use in operations to get people to "die up quickly" when it becomes obvious that a fight is going to be a lost cause and it's better to start over.

Some time ago a visual bug was introduced which causes your character to not fall over when you /stuck - on your screen at least. You still die and fall down on everyone else's monitors. This can lead to some strange images, like this one of my trooper seemingly "defiantly" standing up to a roaring Thrasher, even though I was already dead at the time.

While wiping quickly is good form for regular raiders, sometimes trying to stay alive for as long as possible is just too hard to resist, just to see if you can. This is particularly fun on a Sage, since their Force Barrier (which grants complete immunity to all effects for its duration) allows them to survive for a little while even when things have gone majorly pear-shaped, so you can briefly enjoy the illusion of being extremely powerful... until the bubble runs out.

When you're dead and know that you won't receive a combat res, that's a great time to take screenshots, especially if other people are slow to type /stuck (or the group is genuinely still trying to down the boss). From a vantage point on the floor, any boss looks even more imposing than usual, and you can capture all kinds of heroic last stands... or the moment just before a missile is about to kill your fellow healer.

I hope you all enjoyed (or at least didn't mind) this series. The posts for it were a lot easier and faster to write than many of my usual, (trying to be) more thoughtful ones, and I thought that it also provided a good opportunity to talk about random gameplay observations that usually wouldn't warrant a post of their own.