PSA: Struggling with Chapters?

I've got some videos on my YouTube channel of me killing a number of KotFE and KotET chapter bosses on veteran and master mode. You can find additional info about that and links to everything in this post - one of the few pieces of blog content I've put out over the years that vaguely resembles something like a guide.

I've noticed that over the last month there's been an increase in people watching and commenting on these - now, some of that might simply be more people playing the game again after the launch of the expansion, but it's not just that. A lot of players seem to be struggling even with story mode at the moment - as was highlighted by fellow blogger Roger from the Contains Moderate Peril blog:

Stuck fighting Vaylin in Visions in the Dark – KotFE Chapter 12. Firstly, why haven't I got the option of a companion? None are available according to GUI. Plus being a ranged DPS class is a real liability in this boss fight. Any suggestions? #SWTOR

— Roger Edwards (@ModeratePeril) March 14, 2022

He eventually got the fight down, but was not at all happy with the experience. I did try to assist a little on Twitter, but it's not a great format for giving detailed advice on anything. Above all I felt like I must be missing some crucial bit of information, considering that he was playing on story mode, which is often so easy that it borders on boring... heck, my last post on here was about a story fight that is so easy that it can literally complete itself without any player input.

Then again, we've also just had a new expansion and that can sometimes cause strange things to happen with tuning. A boss fight having the wrong damage and health values for its designated difficulty is certainly something we've seen happen before, but without more information it was hard to judge what exactly was going wrong.

The post I linked at the start already contains a bunch of generic advice for beating the harder fights in KotFE and KotET chapters, but I suppose the overall tone of that is aimed at players who are already at a more advanced level since they're intentionally looking to challenge themselves with the higher difficulty levels. I thought I'd use this post to present a few bullet points for more casual story players that might find themselves stuck on a fight.

• First off, make sure that you've got all your active abilities on your bar by checking the abilities tab (by default bound to P). The class changes that came with Legacy of the Sith may have caused some things to disappear from your bar. You can also change your ability tree on the combat styles tab of your character sheet to see whether there are any abilities there that you can swap around to be more useful in the particular situation that you're stuck in. If you've just been playing through the story and not much else, there may well be a number of buttons that you've never bothered to use before because you simply didn't have to. However, if you're struggling to stay alive, make sure you find all your damage reduction or self heal abilities and then remember to actually use them during the fight - all classes have at least a couple of these. This is particularly pertinent for fights like the one against Vaylin in KotFE chapter twelve, which was the one Roger struggled with.
• The fight against the Purifier Droids in KotET chapter four seems to be giving people the most trouble at the moment. First off, try using the somewhat counter-intuitive strategy demonstrated in this video here. It's counter-intuitive because according to the story you're supposed to be defending the room you're in, but in practice it's much easier to run out and fight somewhere else. If you're still struggling though, it's worth noting that Bioware has acknowledged this chapter as currently bugged (too many droids, potentially also an issue with the additional NPCs not engaging properly). There's a patch meant to be deployed next Tuesday which is supposed to fix a load of bugs, but I don't currently know whether this issue will be one of the ones addressed.
• It's worth knowing that while chapters can only be progressed solo, other people can join you to help out with a fight. To do this, invite them to a group, right-click on your portrait and there'll be an option somewhere to invite them to your instance, which should give them a teleportation prompt. This might not work in all situations (I found this out the hard way when I wanted to help a guildie kill the rancor in KotET chapter six but it kept putting me in there in Zakuulan knight disguise and therefore unable to fight), but it's a workaround for some.
• Finally, if you're just replaying the story and actually already know what happens because you previously did it on another character, keep in mind that if your level is high enough, the console on your ship should let you skip ahead to the start of KotET (if you're stuck in KotFE) or Iokath (if you're stuck in KotET). Potentially you can skip even further ahead to Ossus, but I'm assuming that you do actually want to play through as much story as possible. You might not like this option since it will resolve important story choices for you automatically based on a template, but I'm just mentioning it as another possibility if you're stuck and really want to move on.