Around the SWTOR-sphere: October & November 2024

October was a fairly quiet month in terms of how much interesting SWTOR content I saw, but things picked up considerably in November.

• Astute readers may recall that I've already been on Bluesky for over a year, but it was a fairly quiet place for most of that time. The last month or so saw a massive surge in activity however, and suddenly the previously almost non-existent SWTOR community on the site has been popping off like crazy, much to my personal delight. Far be it from me to tell you which social media sites to use or how (if any at all), however if you're a SWTOR player and interested in giving Bluesky a try, Swtorista put together a nice guide for how to get started and how to easily find other people interested in chatting about SWTOR on the site. The game itself has also had an official account over there for almost a year already.
• The OotiniCast, SWTOR's longest-running fan podcast, also had an exciting month as they got to release their 500th episode! They managed to make it a special one too by securing an interview with Keith Kanneg and Eric Musco. They chatted about a number of different topics but the things I personally noted down as interesting were that the upcoming Mac launcher actually came about due to them wanting to update the regular launcher, that porting the game to consoles would be a "monumental" effort, and that whatever the next venture is going to be, it probably won't be a companion. The latter was intriguing to me because I can't quite picture how a non-companion reward would even work with that system, but I guess we'll find out!
  
  The podcast's 501st episode was released immediately afterwards by the way, and had the hosts Chill and Kittykisses do their usual thing while also discussing the interview from the previous episode.
• The State of the Old Republic Podcast, which updates a bit irregularly, also released two episodes in October and November, with the first one mostly talking about the Feast of Prosperity and Galactic Season 7, and the second one talking about the 7.6 dev livestream.
• In more random SWTOR content, big YouTube channel Gamology released a video called David Hayter Reacts to Star Wars The Old Republic. (If you don't know, David Hayter provides the English voice for the male Jedi knight.) The title is a bit misleading because it's not really a reaction video in the classic sense, more of an interview during which he answers some questions about Star Wars in general and his work on SWTOR in specific. It contains some interesting tidbits though, even if the video editors seemingly got Kari Wahlgren (voice of the female Jedi knight) and Xanthe Elbrick (voice of the female Sith inqusitior) mixed up.
• Speaking of Xanthe, an anonymous commenter linked me to a GoFundMe in her name that's supposedly meant to help her recover from colon cancer?! I hadn't heard about that at all and hope she's doing well. I feel a bit weird linking to a health-related GoFundMe because I never know whether these are legit (though this would be a weirdly specific thing to make up and looks real enough to me) plus the general concept of people in the US basically having to beg for money online to not die from routine health problems always makes me freeze in existential dread, but in this instance at least it sounds like she's already on the road to recovery and this is more of friend trying to help her out a bit.
• As we're approaching the end of the year, reddit puts out its annual recaps, and I always tend to find the ones for the subreddits I frequent most regularly quite interesting. I was going to link it here but apparently you can only view recaps on their phone app? Boo. Anyway, I did save one post from the SWTOR subreddit that I personally found interesting recently (not from the recap). If you come here regularly, you already know that the ones that catch my eye usually aren't the most upvoted ones but ones with interesting comments, and so it is with this one as well: "Why is the Kotfe dlc so disliked?", which is a question that I often see newer players ask, and understandably so I think - if you come to the game now and it's just another storyline you play through, it can't possibly seem that bad. Anyway, what I found interesting is that there were a lot of different answers, and even quite a few I didn't personally agree with, even though I was incredibly relieved to leave the "Knights of" era behind myself. Which just goes to show that back then the devs really managed to conjure up a perfect storm of things that ticked off a surprising variety of players in different ways.

Got any good SWTOR-related content of your own to share? Feel free to leave a link in the comments and tell us what you liked about it!

My Experience with the New Lair Boss on the PTS

I wrote at the start of this month that I wasn't sure whether I wanted to try the new lair boss on the PTS or not. Wanting to earn the associated special titles was a point in favour, but my general preference for "going in blind" and being surprised once the content hits the live servers was also a strong argument against it.

In the end an opportunity arose for me to join Swtorista's Team Disco today to have a go at the boss and I decided to take it. (I guess I have Galaxiya to thank for being unable to make it, meaning I could take her spot. Thanks, Galaxiya!) I was glad I did, too, for three reasons:

1. We did get the boss down on both difficulties, earning me the associated titles on the live game.
2. I now know what to expect and have a better idea how to tackle the fight with my guildies once it goes live.
3. It was honestly just good fun, too! The fight had clearly come a long way from that first iteration of the PTS where people couldn't even tell what was supposed to be going on most of the time.
   

Primarily, I was relieved to find that story mode seemed to be at an appropriate difficulty for a story mode, which is to say: easy enough that an inexperienced pick-up group should be able to do it. Several members of our group (including me) had never done the fight before and nobody gave any explanations pre-pull either, but it worked out fine anyway. All the mechanics do fairly low damage, so you can learn as you go and it takes quite a bit of messing up for anyone to take enough damage to die.

If I had to pick anything to criticise here it's that the fight still felt like it took pretty long for a story mode with a group that had quite solid dps output, but that may just have been subjective, and I didn't actually time it. Plus we went in with the standard group setup of two tanks, two healers and four dps - on story mode you could easily swap out a tank and a healer for two more damage dealers to speed things up a bit.

Veteran mode was another pleasant surprise after all the unpleasantness that was my experience with R-4 Anomaly, in the sense that it actually felt like what I'd call a "proper" vet mode, not something bordering on NiM, just trying to please the top 1%. As a healer, there was enough damage going out to give me something to do, but it wasn't so high that I couldn't also throw a few damage abilities into the mix at various points. There was stuff on the floor to dodge, adds and different boss mechanics to watch out for, but at no point did the number of things going on feel overwhelming.

We got the encounter down on what I think was only our third try, though I wouldn't read too much into that as a sign of it being too easy, as several people had worked on it before and could tell the rest of us what to do. The biggest challenge was actually the hard enrage, which kicks in at around the ten minute mark, and was what killed us on our penultimate attempt. We hit it again on the actual kill but managed to get the boss down just before it had the chance to kill us.

I checked to see what feedback others had given on the official forum thread, and winced at several comments along the lines of "I went in with my NiM team, using only one tank and healer, and we thought it was too easy". I just hope the devs don't use that as an excuse to do any last-minute upward-tuning before releasing the patch, because I don't agree that the fight was too easy at all. A vet mode ops boss isn't supposed to be something that's hard for NiM raiders! I did think that some of the suggestions that were given for how to make things harder might actually make for a good master mode version of the encounter later on, if Broadsword ever decides to add that.

However, vet mode struck me as fine as it is. If anything, the fight still seemed quite long and the dps check pretty tight for a group of raiders that aren't at the extreme cutting edge, but I'll assume for now that with more experience and better understanding of the mechanics, groups will be able to improve their damage output and general performance over time, to the point where the enrage timer won't feel quite so challenging anymore.

In general I was pretty happy with everything I saw, and assuming what we experienced is going to be close enough to what will go live in a couple of weeks, I'm actually looking forward to tackling the new boss on the live servers. It will be nice to work on farming materials and schematics for the new augments in a story mode that should be accessible enough to actually do on my guild's social nights, and a vet mode that will pose a bit of a challenge for my regular ops team without making it feel like we're just bashing our heads against a wall.

Character Modernisation Panic on the PTS

I mentioned in my post about the 7.6 livestream that the devs revealed that they're also working on updating NPCs and player characters with new textures, shaders and more. They emphasised that they were aware of how important it was that your character still felt like your character afterwards, and the examples they showed in their previews looked very good.

I didn't expect them to also push this update onto the PTS immediately afterwards, but they did... and I found out about it because there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth about it. Well, actually, the first time I heard about it was when Intisar showed me a before and after screenshot of his main and commented that his Jedi suddenly looked old enough to be her own mother, which just made me laugh. However, as I heard more reports and saw a couple of honestly kind of appalling-looking screenshots, I got curious - something was clearly wrong here.

So I updated the PTS myself to have a look and... honestly, at first I didn't get what the fuss was about, as both my Republic and Imperial main (who are a body type four cyborg/human respectively) pretty much looked fine to me. But then I loaded up some alts and yeah, I could see that things looked rough. Doing my own before and after shots for my Chiss agent and Mirialan smuggler, they both appeared to have aged about twenty years each.

I figured that obviously couldn't be right, considering that it went completely against what had been said and shown on the livestream, so I was still more amused than worried. I posted some feedback on the PTS forums, but in what I thought was a kind of playful tone - you might want to review some settings on these, guys! I also took further heart from seeing posts like this one from someone who has some knowledge about 3D models and textures and showed that a lot of the issues people were seeing could indeed feasibly just be caused by one slider basically being set to the wrong number.

However, the SWTOR community loves a good freak-out and I still saw many posts that weren't just pointing out that something was wrong, but whose authors were seriously upset, threatening to unsubscribe forever over this, and so on and so forth. As someone who's 41 in real life, I was honestly a bit offended by some of the comments that claimed that the changes made their characters look 70 years old. Have you ever seen a 70-year-old in real life, kiddo?! I'll admit that some of the memes people came up with were amusing, but all in all I found the whole thing a bit tiring, considering that it seemed so obvious to me that it was simply a bug on the PTS, which exists specifically so people can find bugs before go-live.

Fortunately the latest PTS update has improved things and the worst of the panic seems to have subsided... though I'm still seeing some criticisms in the new PTS feedback thread, the most poignant of which to me was the one pointing out that the new faces look a lot worse on low graphics settings than the old faces, which I agree is definitely something that should be looked into.

I also had a kind of strange experience when checking out the new update myself, as I basically logged into the PTS, clicked through my characters on the character selection screen one by one and thought "yep, these all look great". However, after I took a few more screenshots for comparison purposes, I lined them up next to the "buggy" faces and they... actually didn't look all that different? As in, there are still some pretty noticeable differences compared to the old faces, and I can still see more wrinkles than I'd necessarily like to on my idealised video game heroines, but at the same time - it didn't bother me at all while in game, only when staring intensely at the close-up shots, which is not something I would usually do while playing.

Bugged PTS vs. updated PTS

Live vs. updated PTS

Bugged PTS vs. updated PTS

Live vs. updated PTS

My conclusion for now is that I'll be fine and will be happy with my characters getting updated, but I also feel like I have no clue how the majority of players will react to these changes. As mentioned, there are still plenty of complaints being raised in the feedback thread, some of which I can kind of see, but others just make me feel like Pam from The Office, going "They're the same picture" (meaning I honestly don't see what all the fuss is about).

And maybe that makes you think that my eyesight is lacking and obviously everyone will still hate this update, to which I'd respond: Will they though? Because I've also spoken to people who saw that very first, bugged update and genuinely thought it was fine too, going "sure, my character looks a bit older than before, but so what". My hunch is that most players will probably be fine, because even if you do notice differences between old and new that you don't like in the direct comparison shots, I reckon most players don't actually spend that much time staring intently at their character's nostrils in everyday play if you get what I mean. I don't think the differences will be as noticeable when you're actually playing the game normally and not glaring at your character like they're about to have their police mugshot taken.

All in all, I guess this goes to prove once again that player character updates in MMOs are a tricky thing. I remember when I briefly resubbed to World of Warcraft in late 2013 after having been away from the game for more than a year, the low-resolution old character models that I'd always liked before suddenly appalled me, as I'd gotten too used to SWTOR's much better-looking avatars. When WoW then updated its models in 2014, I logged in once just to check out my characters' new looks, and while I thought Blizzard did a decent job with the upgrades overall, I also noted at the time that many characters looked older and angrier than before, and ten years later I'm still not over what they did to female tauren. So this kind of thing is always a bit of a gamble, but remembering my own reaction to WoW's old character models in 2013, it's probably also a necessary one if the game is supposed to continue attracting new players.

If you have any doubts about this update yourself, I can only recommend downloading the PTS, copying over some of your characters, and giving feedback in the relevant forum thread. If you've already seen your characters' updated looks, how do you feel about them?

Happy Birthday to the Shae Vizla Server!

One year ago today, the SWTOR devs surprised us all with the sudden and previously unannounced launch of the Shae Vizla APAC server. As someone who lives in Europe but nevertheless jumped right in just to see what it was all about, I had a lot of fun with the fresh server experience. This lasted for about two months, but once Galactic Season 5 and PvP Season 4 were over, activity on the server kind of dropped off a cliff.

Unlike many, I didn't stop playing there myself, but I did dial down my investment a bit, simply treating the server as equal to my other "secondary" servers where I'm mainly active for Galactic Seasons. I'm still in the same guild, my legacy level is up to 43, and while I've still only completed one class story, two other characters are very close to finishing theirs too, which is still more progress than I've made on that front on any other server bar my home on Darth Malgus. However, I've stopped trying to attend guild events that start at 1 a.m. my time (I don't know why all the raids seem to happen at what's lunch time in Sydney) and I no longer attempt to queue for PvP. Group content just isn't happening for me on Shae Vizla.

I wrote about the state of the server six months ago, and as far as I can tell, the situation hasn't changed much since then. You can still get things done if you can find a guild or community that organises events in your time zone, but looking at the Conquest board this week, the numbers actually look even smaller than on Leviathan at this point, indicating a further drop in activity.

I really wish I had something more uplifting to say to celebrate the server's birthday! I guess in another six months it will have outlived the original APAC servers, which were only online from March 2012 to August 2013?

Feel free to share your own Shae Vizla experiences in the comments.

7.6 Dev Stream Reactions

After watching the big Warcraft Direct stream yesterday, it was quite a contrast to spend time on SWTOR's 7.6 dev stream tonight. Smaller studio, fewer viewers, but also a much more relaxed atmosphere and lots of laughs. I was immediately overcome with an urge to make a bunch of gifs of the interactions between Eric Musco and Papa Keith, intending to post them on Bluesky, but it couldn't cope with me uploading any images at the time (I later learned it wasn't just me), so I'll be inserting them into this blog post instead, even if that may seem a bit random!

As usual, if you want the full rundown of every little detail, I recommend watching the recording of the stream yourself or reading a detailed summary elsewhere - Kal already has one up here for example. Over here I'm more choosy with what I talk about and won't mention everything, but I'll add some commentary to make it more interesting. Let's get on with it!

Topical and time-sensitive things first: There's a new Twitch drop for the next 14 days, an Ilum poster deco with a purple border. Handily livestream viewers were able to earn it right away simply by watching the stream as it only requires one hour of watch time. There'll also be another Twitch drop, a purple Vulptilla mount, once 7.6 launches. We weren't given an exact date for that, but from what they did say on the stream it sounds like it will be early December.

Also, effective immediately, there's a big 50% off sale on dyes going on! The interesting thing related to this was that they mentioned that they're planning to make changes to how dyes work soon... I'm sure I'm not the only one whose mind immediately jumped to the notion of making them unlockable in Collections, something I've seen people request more than once. I don't think that will happen though - dye sales have got to be too much of a money-maker for that - but I'm still curious to hear what they've got in mind once the time comes.

We got some info about the 7.6 story, and I tend to not go into too much detail about story previews in these posts, but I did want to note that Imperials will finally get to see Major Anri again, almost three years after Manaan, and that the story is supposedly going to be structured a bit differently, consisting of four threads you can advance in any order, about Shae Vizla, Darth Malgus, the Hidden Chain and Darth Nul's holocron respectively. I'm curious to see how that'll pan out - it could mean more content, but I've got to admit that personally I'm a little worried that "you can do them in any order" means that each "thread" will contain a lot of exposition/cut-scene watching and fewer interesting choices - but we'll see.

Unfortunately after all that talk about how interesting the new story is going to be, we won't actually get to see it at 7.6's release, because while the patch itself will still land as planned, they had to delay the story update part of it because they "currently don't have all the elements [they] need to complete this story", which I've seen people interpret as having to do with the voice actors' strike, though I don't know whether that's just speculation or backed by anything that was said elsewhere.

There was some talk about dynamic encounters and the new lair boss, but I won't go into that here as I already covered those topics in my post about the PTS from last week. They just confirmed that dynamic encounters will only exist on Hoth and Tatooine at launch, with the possible exception of Hidden Chain invasions, which might also happen on other planets from the sounds of it.

The new lair boss is also going to drop crafting materials for new augments, something that people had already caught on to some time ago but that hadn't been officially announced. These new augments will be better than the current gold augments. I guess this will offer a sort of gear progression without further raising overall item rating, though it does make me wonder whether the next gear reset perhaps isn't as far away as I thought.

There was some talk about new Cartel Market items, which I usually don't go into here either, but there was one thing that piqued my interest: there'll be a new decoration bundle called the Remote Outpost Bundle, and it'll come with a small amount of story/gameplay attached from the sounds of it. I was immediately reminded of the encrypted datacubes from back in the day and how people were not happy with those, though I guess a big part of that was that they came from inside Cartel packs, while this will be a direct purchase. I'll make sure to get it when it comes out and will let you know whether it's worth the money or not.

In terms of gameplay, there'll be a new UI feature called comlink to interact with terminals and characters in a more organic way without having to always resort to KOTOR-style cut scenes. They emphasised that this isn't meant to replace cinematics and proper conversations but should simply serve as another option for interactions where appropriate. The example they showed was of someone using a terminal and being given a prompt to enter a password, where in the current system that would bring up the KOTOR-style black bars and mute dialogue options like "enter code" or "walk away". They explained that they could also see this working for characters "texting" you.

PvP Season 7 will still start with the launch of 7.6 and bring an end to 8-man premades, as they'll once again be limited to four people max, and the devs are also disabling the old level 75 set bonuses in PvP to reduce the power of twinks. Not what I personally consider PvP's biggest problems right now, but better than nothing. What did stand out to me was that one of the new season rewards is actually going to be a proper emote instead of the previous "text-only" one, which might actually be something to look forward to for me.

As the stream was getting close to wrapping up, Eric and Keith dropped a few more surprises on us at the end. First off, we'll get a new mount as a free subscriber reward that introduces something new: the ability to have your (humanoid) companion ride in a sidecar beside you and a non-combat pet in the luggage rack. The preview looked hilarious and made me laugh out loud. I'm not sure how much I'll use it but it'll be fun for a little while if nothing else. Plus I appreciate that they decided to make it a sub reward instead of a Cartel Market item. There'll also be two new mounts from dynamic encounter-related achievements that won't show your companion but will include your active mini pet.

Next they announced that they'll do a character name purge for the first time in a long time. If you're a subscriber, all your characters are safe, but if not, you'll want to log into any toons that haven't been logged into since January 1st of this year, else they will be flagged for a rename. I wonder if that'll give me a chance to claim Shintar without the funny i on Tulak Hord, the one server where I don't currently own the name... they also mentioned that they'll try to remember to do this a bit more often in the future to not have all these names taken up by inactive characters.

Finally, a big surprise at the very end: they're working on more art modernisation for planetary environments, but also for player characters. Musco immediately assured everyone that their number one priority was to not change the overall feel of the characters. The examples they showed looked really good, with just more detail on the facial textures and more gloss on the eyes. (When I tried to explain this to Mr Commando afterwards, he said that talking about shiny hair and eyes made me sound like I was trying to sell him a dog!)

All in all, a fun stream with lots of news and some interesting things to look forward to, though the story update being delayed with no clear ETA was a bit of a bummer. What was your favourite part of this stream?

Galactic Season 7 in Review

You might call it premature to review a season that's intended to be live for three more months, but I'm about 80% done with it myself (including my goals on the secondary servers) and I think that's good enough to pass judgement on it.

In a nutshell, that judgement is a resounding "meh", similar to last season, though for completely different reasons. I loved Season 6's stronghold focus (I still use the Copero stronghold a lot on all servers - even bought the matching utility bundle from the Cartel Market), but its story was disappointing and the grindy meta achievement infuriating, meaning the good and the bad kind of cancelled each other out, meaning that all things considered I felt kind of blah about it.

Season 7 had no such problems. There hasn't been anything particularly terrible about it... but unfortunately there hasn't been anything particularly great about it either. It's just been kinda boring in a way I honestly didn't expect.

When the season's theme was first announced, I thought the concept of tying it to an existing world event sounded interesting, and bringing back world bosses that had been removed from the game several years ago sounded like a good idea to me too. However, in practice the fact that there wasn't anything new going on kind of got me down after a while.

I had some fun unlocking bounty hunting achievements on the other servers, where I often hadn't touched Bounty Contract Week before, but on Darth Malgus I already got all those achievements about a decade ago, and there just wasn't anything left for me to chase after. Same thing with the DvL bosses - I know some guildies were happy to finally tick off the achievement to kill them all, but again, I already got that four years ago, and I had so many DvL tokens left over I didn't even really know what to do with them.

I can live with a season without any grand rewards (the white Loth kitten is cute but I don't feel a pet is on the same level as a companion or stronghold), I can live with a season without a story, but I need there to be something.

I even kind of missed the currency drops in a weird way, because at least finding a strange new currency among your loot drops gave you an indication that something was different, even if you weren't following the latest news about the game or paying attention to the seasons UI. This time there just wasn't anything going on in the open that made me feel like a season was actually happening, no gameplay that was different from usual, nor anything new and intriguing out to see in the world (I remember seeing one of the meditation shrines in Season 4 before I'd got to the point of knowing what they were for and they instantly grabbed my attention). It just felt like a whole lot of nothing special.

Even Season 1 felt like it had more of a "vibe" than this, and that had all those tedious daily objectives to kill insectoid mobs on different planets. I was not a fan of those at all, but at least "killing insectoids that you usually wouldn't care about" was a theme! This season's one-minute intro to provide a pretext for why killing two DvL bosses a week should count as "bounty hunting" just wasn't enough.

I did like that we had both a seasonal weekly objective that was easy to solo and one for groups every week, but that's kind of it in terms of things that stood out to me positively. More than anything, this season made me feel like the worst kind of jaded MMO veteran, simply because everything about it felt so much like "been there, done that".

If you had a really good time with this season, please do let me know in the comments! I'd love to hear how other people felt inspired to hunt bounties every week or found fighting the DvL bosses a really novel experience. However, for me it was all just a bit too old hat, and I really hope that the next season will actually have something new to offer for long-time players (even if seasons are inherently about replaying old content to some extent).

Impressions from the 7.6 PTS

A combination of PTS incentives and curiosity about the new dynamic encounter system got me to spend some time on the public test server this past week.

My aging PC doesn't have enough disk space to support having two versions of SWTOR installed nowadays, so I had to put the PTS on my laptop, but that actually worked out quite well this time around as I was travelling last week and had the laptop with me for evening entertainment anyway.

Only two planets have dynamic encounters on the PTS right now: Hoth and Tatooine. It's currently not clear whether that's all 7.6 will launch with or whether these planets were picked for focused testing and we'll be surprised with some more content once the patch goes live. There were some indicators on the PTS galaxy map hinting at dynamic events on other planets like Alderaan and Belsavis, but with no actual content available there so far.

One thing I originally wondered after seeing the sneak peek trailer was whether dynamic encounters would be more like World of Warcraft's world quests (as in, personal to you) or dynamic events in other MMOs (shared and the same for everyone). Interestingly, the answer turned out to be "both". There are two types of events, designated as either "group shared" or "encounter shared". In the former, your progress is personal, and the encounter continues to exist for other players on the map even after you've completed it. In the latter, everyone doing stuff contributes to the event's progression, and once the encounter completes, everyone gets their reward at the same time and it disappears from the map. The shared encounters are generally rarer and can still be soloed if nobody else is around, but they tend to require killing more mobs and can therefore feel like a bit of a slog if you're the only person in the area. On the other hand it's a lot of fun (in my opinion) if there are other players around and you can see things progress really quickly as everybody does their part.

In general gameplay terms, the encounters are about what you'd expect: a lot of kill x mobs and some clicking on shiny things, though there are some standouts where the devs clearly tried to be creative and come up with more varied activities. 

I don't think dynamic events are intended to be a new "main" gameplay mode, though depending on how many planets will get them when 7.6 launches, I'd be curious to see how much levelling you could get done by just doing dynamic encounters - as an experiment if nothing else! Realistically though, I think they are meant to be similar to side missions, just without all the picking up and handing in required. At max level they currently award a tiny number of tech fragments and Conquest commendations, small enough that they wouldn't make for a great primary source of either currency.

One thing that made me wonder a little was how much focus there is on highlighting these new dynamic encounters on the map. The galaxy map highlights planets that have them active, and on the planetary map they show up as big glowy diamonds. There's nothing wrong with that in principle, but it does seem an odd choice when the devs took multiple steps in the past to hide away exploration missions and/or make them less prominent because they were apparently confusing/distracting people. Surely new levellers will get a lot more distracted by all these big glowy indicators on their maps? I dunno.

I'm still a bit torn on whether to try the new lair boss on the PTS as well or not. On the one hand I prefer not to spoil myself when it comes to content like that and would rather see things for the first time on live, but on the other hand every bit of feedback might help with making the Propagator Core a better raid.

The initial round of forum feedback certainly hasn't looked too good. Players were asked what they thought of the fight's different phases, and everyone basically replied "what phases?" because by all accounts, it was just an extremely long slog against an enemy with a lot of hitpoints while trying to manage some bad stuff dropping on the floor.

There has since been another dev post on the forums that basically admitted that almost nothing about the fight was working correctly and that it will see massive changes with the next PTS update. Which is good in the sense that it means the tedious version people experienced in the first week wasn't at all final, though it also makes you wonder why and how an operations boss ended up being put on the PTS in that state in the first place (since you'd expect the devs to be able to verify that at least the very basics are functioning before asking people to play test). I guess I'll have a few more weeks to see how things develop and whether I want to have a go myself.