Pugging Trench Runner

I've previously talked about how the current Galactic Season's focus on uprisings was off to a rough start, though things improved once Broadsword applied some difficulty nerfs and replaced veteran mode in the group finder with story mode.

Since then, I've pugged the uprising of the week on at least some servers pretty much every week with no issues. Until last week that is, when it was Trench Runner time. It had been a little while since I'd last run that particular uprising before that week, but from what I'd heard from people who'd given it a go more recently, it was both very good for progressing the seasonal meta achievement to kill empowered mobs and one of the more challenging uprisings.

I got to experience that for myself when I got into a run on my level 63 Sniper on Satele Shan. Everyone else in the group was also still levelling, with the highest level being a level 79 Juggernaut. The other two members of the group were another Juggernaut in their 40s and a low-level... something, I forget what their combat style even was, but they were only level 18 and by their own admission fresh off of Hutta and new to uprisings as a whole.

Things did not start off too well as we suffered several deaths right at the start, and the low-level quickly became very apologetic, clearly assuming that it was their fault somehow. I assured them that it was alright and that this was simply one of the tougher uprisings.

However, things continued to be messy. I kind of expected one of the Juggernauts to pull by virtue of being melee, but everyone kept standing around awkwardly, waiting for someone else to pull. Eventually I got impatient and did so myself, just to die on every pull where I did so. At one point I realised that I was high enough level now to spec into the Sniper's OP self-heal in cover and did that in hopes of increasing my survivability, but it still wasn't quite enough. I tried kiting, but if I wasn't shooting things, they just weren't dying.

It just felt like nobody but me was really doing much damage to anything at all (not least because whenever I pulled, I'd keep aggro on absolutely everything until I died). I even fired up Starparse to understand what was going on and it showed people doing about 3k dps each, which seemed crazy with everyone being scaled up to 80. I figured that simply couldn't be correct and had to be distorted by the long periods in combat when you were just waiting for things to spawn. (After the run, I had a closer look at the log and at least one of the Juggernauts was spending most of their time just hitting their basic attack.)

Regardless, we slowly bumbled onwards despite the dying and sometimes full wiping, until we got to the third bunker, where we just ran into a hard wall, always wiping within a minute at best. "Alright, tactics time," I said and started to explain how the turret worked and how we needed it to kill most of the adds at the top. I explained how we needed to kill at least some of the adds on the ground as well and couldn't just nuke the boss because we were taking too much damage. And to their credit, people tried! But we just couldn't do it.

I think on our best attempt, the low-level handled the turret while we killed the first few rounds of unavoidable adds, but things were dying so slowly and we were taking so much damage in the process that we used up both kolto buffs in the vicinity and they took ages to respawn. At some point the lowbie would get kicked out of the turret controls and I would take over, but while I was shooting the walkers and droids at the top, the rest of the group in the trench would wipe quickly, at best having gotten the boss to about fifty percent health.

I don't recall how many times we tried this, but eventually I just didn't know what else to suggest. The lowbie was a bit helpless by nature and neither of the Juggernauts seemed to be using any survival cooldowns from what I could see, but trying to teach people how exactly to use their class toolkit seemed to go a bit beyond what's appropriate in a piece of group content that's meant to take about ten to fifteen minutes.

Eventually I just thanked everyone for trying and left (after sending the lowbie one more reassuring whisper that it wasn't their fault and that the combination of people not using their abilities and being put into one of the tougher uprisings was just unfortunate.) A few minutes later I re-queued and got another pop quite quickly - this time with a group of three eighties with whom we blitzed through the whole thing without any real issues. However, I still felt bad about the group I had abandoned, especially for that lowbie who'd tried an uprising for the first time ever and had been keen to follow instructions but we just couldn't make it happen. I can only hope they weren't completely discouraged by the experience, and that the devs maybe revisit this uprising in particular in terms of tuning before the season is over.

This was just one of those situations where I'm never quite sure what the right solution should be. Does story mode content really need to be tuned down to the point where it can be completed with a group of people just hitting their basic attack? Part of me wants to yell no and argue that it's okay to push people a little bit to learn how to play the game. But then, how are people supposed to learn how to play while being put into group content with strangers where there's an expectation that it's supposed to be super accessible and that you can be in and out in ten minutes?

(As a side note, the swarms of mobs gave crazy XP. Just from that one aborted run followed by the full run that I completed shortly afterwards, my Sniper gained three levels. So there's that, I guess.)

SWTOR Teases the Return of a Popular Character

This weekend the annual Star Wars Celebration event took place, this time in Japan, and several SWTOR devs were in attendance. They were also able to arrange for a short segment about SWTOR to play on the big screen, which is not an unimpressive feat and makes good business sense. Most of it consists of Narrative Director Ashley Ruhl basically talking about how great the game is while old footage runs in the background, which should work well enough to intrigue Star Wars fans who may have never heard of the game and/or to remind lapsed old-timers that the game is still around and getting updates.

The last minute of the video clip features a teaser for the next story update that is a mix of old and new footage, so it's not quite clear whether the new bits are from 7.6, 7.7 or what. (The fact that locations in the new shots are recognisable as Tatooine and Ilum makes me think it might be footage from the unreleased 7.6 story, based on what we were told about that update last year.) Since this whole thing went down in the middle of the night in my time zone, I woke up the next morning to find a lot of chatter on social media involving the word SPOILERS (in all caps).

This actually made me a little hesitant to click on the video since I don't like to be spoiled, but then I figured what the heck - one area in which the SWTOR devs have never disappointed me is in terms of treating the story with respect, and I don't recall a single instance where they gave away crucial plot points in advance. And indeed, after watching the video it seems to me that all the people warning of spoilers were perhaps a bit overzealous. I appreciate that the community is overprotective in that regard instead of lackadaisical - and there are people who don't want to know anything about new content in advance - but to me things like a brief action shot or a mere mention of a certain character making an appearance do not qualify as spoilers. So I will go ahead and talk about the content of the teaser trailer in this post, which means that this is also your heads-up in case you really don't want to know anything at all about upcoming content, to not watch the last minute of the below video or read the rest of this post.

Now, as I mentioned, the teaser doesn't really tell us what exactly is going to happen next in the story, as the voice-over is just Darth Malgus monologuing once again - which is well done, don't get me wrong, but it's also becoming a bit of a trope at this point with how long this particular storyline has been going on.

However, the bit that got everyone excited (and what probably triggered everyone's spoiler alarms) is a shot in which we see a hologram of Darth Jadus. If you're not that big a SWTOR nerd, you may be wondering who Darth Jadus even is. The answer is that he's one of the main antagonists in chapter one of the Imperial agent story, and he's popular with people for a number of reasons.

One is that he's simply a cool-looking character, with a shiny mask that hides his face and a smooth voice. The second is that he's a sort of evil mastermind (those always tend to be popular), and the third is that the big confrontation with him at the end of chapter one of the agent origin story probably has one of the most interesting multiple-choice options of all class stories, in that you can outright side with the bad guy and the game lets you get away with it. It doesn't really change the following chapters as much as you might expect, but it's a cool touch nonetheless.

No matter your character's choices, Darth Jadus is never killed on screen, and worst case for him he's taken prisoner at the end of the chapter and expects to be killed by the Dark Council, but this was never followed up on, so people have long suspected that he might still be alive and were hopeful that he'd make a comeback some day.

Now, we don't know whether that will actually happen - the teaser only shows us a static holo of Jadus, which for all we know could just be a display used as an illustration while somebody mentions him in conversation. That would be a pretty epic troll on the devs' side... but if he does indeed come back, it would certainly be an opportunity to take the story into an interesting new direction.

Social for Seasons

Galactic Seasons are clearly designed to appeal to all kinds of players, from soloer to raider. The mix of weekly objectives isn't always perfectly balanced, but over time things should even out enough so that everyone can complete at least the main season track by only taking part in activities they enjoy. So even if you don't like doing group content for example, and there's a week where most weekly objectives require a group, you should be fine skipping that one while still being able to achieve your goals.

Personally, I'm kind of the opposite of that hypothetical example as I rather like the group objectives. We have a thing called "social night" in my guild, and during seasons we always knock out whatever items require a group on that evening.

Usually there's one or two of these per week, but last week was unusual in that no fewer than five of the eleven available objectives required a large group, plus there were a few more for which having a small group was at least beneficial. My guild group knocked out all five of the large group objectives in short order (pulling in some pugs for Nightmare Pilgrim, but that barely took five minutes) and a few of us also ran the uprising of the week afterwards. I'd initially felt a bit awkward making almost no progress towards any of my seasons objectives for most of the week, just to go and reach 7 out of 7 completed within a single evening on Saturday.

Several guildies also expressed delight at having been able to max out their progression for the week within only a couple of hours. The group objectives are really great that way, in that they require a bit of extra effort to get the group put together, but if you can be efficient about that part, actually completing the tasks themselves is super quick.

That said, I didn't expect to make much progress on the other servers during that week, as I don't have guild events to rely on for progression there, as they are either non-existent or take place at bad hours for me. However, I was really surprised that pretty much on every server, the moment I logged in, went to the fleet and took a look at general chat, someone was putting together a pug group for something, and I managed to join at least one such event on every server.

It wasn't always the same thing either. On Leviathan I got pulled into a DvL boss group for example, while I joined a Sparks of War group on Tulak Hord, and a Nightmare Pilgrim run on a different evening (which got me invited to a large German guild's TeamSpeak server).

It was all rather delightful. I know people often say that SWTOR's MMO parts were an afterthought and not well done, but my experience was always the opposite. When I first started playing back in 2011 I enjoyed the storylines for sure, but the reason I stuck around and didn't go back to WoW was the social aspect and that I was having such a blast raiding and doing group content in the open world. This week actually made me really nostalgic for that, and also made me wonder whether I don't spend too much time in my stronghold nowadays instead of on the fleet. I usually hide general chat because in the places where it's busy it tends to be filled with nonsense at best or utter toxicity at worst, but seeing all those random "looking for more" requests last week really took me back and I wanted to see more of that. 

This week has actually been similar, with another five objectives for large groups. I don't know yet how things will go for my guild on Darth Malgus tomorrow, but since I'm on holiday for a few days, I actually stayed up late on Wednesday and Thursday to join guild events on Shae Vizla and Star Forge, which might see me hitting 7/7 objectives on those servers this week, which hadn't really been my intent at all.

However, even without guild support the ease of objective completion has been amazing. The combination of Dark vs. Light world bosses and the regular world bosses on both Coruscant and Dromund Kaas both being objectives had people logging back and forth between both factions and looking for groups constantly. Leviathan may generally be a small and quiet server, but I've never seen it as packed on Coruscant as when I was killing the bosses there this week. On Star Forge I didn't even bother to look for a group, I just kind of hung around the boss spawns for a bit as a new group was coming by to kill them pretty much every five minutes or so anyway.

I don't think this is the first time I've gone on about how open world group content in this game makes me feel nostalgic, but it's simply true that nothing brings back memories of launch day crowds for me like these kinds of events do.

Lacking Enthusiasm

It's been a bit quiet here recently, and I think it's going to stay that way for a while longer. I'm still playing the game and having fun, but I do kind of feel like I lack things I want to talk about at the moment. I'm a firm believer in the adage that there's never nothing to talk about when it comes to MMOs, but you do need to feel sufficient motivation to sit down and create content about your game of choice, and I haven't had a lot of that recently.

Part of that has had to do with real life, but primarily I'm just a bit down on SWTOR to be honest. Not so down that I don't want to play at all, but lacking that extra level of excitement that makes me want to share my thoughts about it all the time. With the devs seemingly focusing most of their resources on building new story content that they then can't release because of the voice actors' strike and the new season being focused on a theme I don't love, I'm just finding myself a bit short on nice things to say at the moment.

I have a few half-baked posts about evergreen topics in my drafts but those require a bit more energy and work than the more rambly takes about whatever's been going on more recently. And the detailed diaries I kept about my Galactic Seasons progress in the past were something that entertained me at the time but is no longer interesting to me at this point.

Last week I was actually thinking about cutting back my investment in seasons, since I was once again starting to feel a bit stressed out trying to complete my objectives for the week on all servers. It's kind of funny how much more that's become an issue since the addition of Shae Vizla, since you'd think that six servers is only one more than five servers, but looked at differently, doing seasons on all servers now basically requires twenty percent more time, and that's not nothing. I looked back at my posts from Galactic Season 2, when I first started this whole multi-server completion project, and at how much fun I had with it back then, while barely ever feeling stressed at all. I've been wracking my brains about how to get back to that and what might be the best way to perhaps apply some more limitations to my seasonal efforts while still hitting level 100 everywhere, but that's turned out to be trickier than I thought.

The easiest way to go about it of course would be to simply cut a few servers, but that then leaves the question of which ones. Star Forge and Shae Vizla are the ones where I'm the most involved with guilds so surely those should stay no matter what, but I really love my stable of alts on Leviathan too, even if I don't know anyone there... you can't ask me to choose between my babies like that! So I just keep on trucking for now.

At least the weekly uprising is quick and easy now since the devs put story mode into the group finder, and this week has generally been very easy for earning my daily Conquest points since it was Death Mark, a Conquest event that we haven't had in many months due to Galactic Season 7 locking it out for its entire duration, and which makes it incredibly simple to rack up points due to to the repeatable Taskmaster (complete missions anywhere) and Galactic Rampage (kill any mobs, anywhere) objectives.

Sometimes you also get an unexpected windfall in terms of seasons objective completion. I hadn't planned on doing DvL bosses on any server other than Darth Malgus for example, but on Leviathan a guildie was building a pug for them just as I logged on on Tuesday this week, and on Saturday I was up and awake late enough that I managed to leech kills off my guild on Star Forge. On Sunday morning I even stumbled my way into a pug for Colossal Monolith on Shae Vizla of all places, something I definitely hadn't been counting on or actively trying for.

So I'm doing all these things and having fun with them, but that's about as much SWTOR as I can take at the moment, with not much energy or enthusiasm left over for writing about it. I can only hope that 7.7 will bring a couple of new talking points with it whenever it arrives. While I expect that we still won't see any story by then and that master mode Propagator will be out of my league, I've heard talk of the PTS showing dynamic encounters on some new planets, which would definitely be something to get excited about. And well, whenever the voice actors' strike does end, we'll hopefully get one massive story dump all in one go. I'm just not holding my breath for that one at the moment, since we really have no idea when an agreement will be reached and it could still be a while.