More DvL World Boss Hunting

Has it really been one and a half years since I last posted about hunting DvL world bosses? Apparently it has.

At the time, I mentioned that I was hoping to persuade my guildies to do more of them, but we never really ended up doing that. The CXP payout wasn't actually that good for the effort, especially after other activities got buffed, and the bugged achievement gave everyone the feeling that it was better to wait for it to be fixed before trying to kill any more of these bosses - until we just kind of... forgot.

With the recent ennui however, fringe activities to break our weekly operations routine are suddenly in demand again, so we've been going back to hunting. We've had some decent successes actually, and with the achievement long since fixed, we've been making progress towards that as well. Here's a video of one of our more recent kills, Overseer Qezzed:



I actually have two more recordings like that lying around that I still need to trim and upload. Why? I'm not sure; these are hardly tough kills. I guess I like to document my guild's achievements, but it also feels vaguely helpful to add these because there is still so little information about these bosses out there, especially with how apathetic Dulfy seems to have become about SWTOR (though she still posts updates about the Cartel Market and stuff like that). Even with beloved community members like Vulkk and Swtorista trying to fill in the gaps, Dulfy's guide to the DvL bosses remains the only one out there that I'm aware of, and it hasn't been updated in a long while, though some commenters have left useful tips in the comments. Those are easy to miss though if you habitually avoid the cesspit that's Dulfy's comment section.

Things that my guild and I have learned by doing so far:

The bosses don't seem to be tied to specific planets. I guess I have no evidence that there aren't rules of some sort that prevent boss X from spawning on planet Y, but we've seen a bunch of different bosses spawn in the same spot as well as the same boss appear on different planets, so it's quite possible that anything goes.

The bosses have at least two different sets of Force abilities, one that includes dropping lightning pillars on players and a Force execution like Raptus's from Dread Palace, and another consisting of a Trail of Agony type ability (like you get on the Revan fight in Temple of Sacrifice) and AoE damage over time. Getting stunned in a puddle of bad stuff is a real risk in either case and you've got to be ready to use your stun breaker quickly when needed or else you'll go down. It seems to me that this is less likely to occur if you bring more people to the fight, as it gives the harmful abilities the option to spread out more instead of one person getting targeted by several effects at once, but I'm not entirely sure about that. We've done several bosses with as few as eight people but they pretty much always involve someone dying and having to run back or needing revival.

I probably shouldn't tell you this to avoid competition, but so far the Dune Sea on Tatooine has seemed like the best place to hunt, as it has at least five spawn spots in pretty close proximity, and people are less likely to engage and despawn the bosses by accident. I've actually done the latter on Hoth myself, when I mistook a world boss spawn for a random champion and didn't realise my mistake until my Sentinel had already leapt in and was Force-choked to death in short order.

It also seems to me that the bosses are actually easier to kill on lower level planets. Sure, you get level synced, but we all know that being levelled down by a lot still leaves you pretty powerful compared to the average same-level mob, and on a lower-level planet this effect is more pronounced. In other words, I've noticed that we seem to do a lot less dying on Tatooine than on Hoth.

All that said, we haven't actually engaged a single light side boss yet! I'm very much looking forward to seeing how those are different (if at all). Initially we were only going after the dark side bosses because most of us main light side characters and we were basically roleplaying our alignment, but lately the dark side has also been winning a lot, leaving us with no real choice.