Hotblooded on Hoth

 ... is the name of a weekly seasons objective that asks you to kill the two world bosses on Hoth, Gargath and Snowblind. It's an easy 12-pointer if you're in a guild, plus killing these particular bosses also counts towards other goals you might potentially have, such as completing the weekly world boss quest, recruiting Qyzen Fess into your Alliance, or progress towards the Aratech Coral speeder, which (among other things) requires you to kill both of these bosses three times each.

If you're not in a guild, or just can't make your guild's usual time for these sorts of events, things are a bit trickier, though not as bad as they used to be. Thanks to shared tagging, it's viable to just kind of loiter in the area, and then simply join the fight once a proper group comes along, even if they're of the opposite faction.

Sometimes that works well, but other times it just takes forever for an actual group to show up. It seemed like a solid plan to me last week to just hang out next to each world boss with the game minimised, tabbing back in every so often to make sure I didn't get logged out for being AFK, but otherwise simply doing something else on the side while keeping an ear out for sounds of battle or other players approaching.

However, doing this on four servers, I spent literal hours just staring at Snowblind and Gargath's butts (even if it was intermittent), and it honestly got a bit demotivating after a while, especially since getting in on one kill was no guarantee that you'd get in on the same group killing the other world boss as well, in which case the camping process would have to start all over again.

I spent so much time stalking Gargath that I learned that he only moves if you get too close to him, specifically a distance of less than 67 meters. As soon as he's further away from players than that, he stops and just stands still. The more you know!

Another useful lesson I learned was that most pugs seem to be doing the bosses in reverse order compared to how I'm used to doing them. My usual M.O. when I'm leading a guild group is to simply go left to right from the Republic base, which means Gargath first and Snowblind second. However, every time I caught a group killing Gargath while lurking, I would rush to Snowblind's hunting grounds right afterwards (which are a looong trip from the nearest Republic base) just to find nothing but his corpse there.

Initially I thought that I was simply too slow getting there, but at one point a group at Snowblind threw me an invite, and they immediately told me that they were going to go do Gargath right after. That was on Leviathan, where I also learned that they apparently call Gargath "Titi" there - or at least the leader of that group did. Silly French people!

Anyway, once I changed my strategy to camping Snowblind first and then rushing to Gargath (who has a quick travel point much closer to his spawn) I started to have better luck with getting both kills in one go.

The other thing I found myself thinking about was that it's a bit of a shame to have cross-faction tagging but no ability to actually work together. Once I was waiting at Snowblind on a Commando healer, and a small group of Imps decided to pull the boss. I joined in to help out with dps, but of course my damage as a healer was nothing to write home about. I noticed that they had no healer though! However, me throwing down kolto bombs did nothing for them due to the faction barrier separating us. Eventually they wiped and I was in fact the last person standing, until the boss took me out too. As much as I think SWTOR's faction conflict is crucial to the narrative, in that moment it just seemed a bit dumb that my kolto wasn't working on them. (Though at least one of the Imps respecced to healer after that and they were able to successfully kill it on the next try.)