Wreckage on Dantooine - A Bold Experiment

Aside from a new story update, patch 7.8 also gave us a new zone that is very unlike SWTOR's typical content updates. The crash site on Dantooine was explicitly designed around being filled with dynamic encounters, with everything being centred around them.

It consists of three sub-zones or biomes, and each one has one of three states or levels. Doing dynamic encounters in the area levels them up, and once all three biomes have hit level three, an instance with a special nightmare-difficulty boss designed for a group of four unlocks for a limited time.

There's no time limit on the level progression itself, so biomes don't regress in levels if there aren't enough people around (unless the planetary instance shuts down entirely). Worst case there just isn't any advancement for a while. Unlike normal dynamic encounters, the ones on Dantooine aren't on a timer, so they just sit there forever until someone comes along and actually completes them. Progress for all encounters applies to everyone taking part, and once it's completed, it goes away and another encounter spawns somewhere else.

It honestly sounds a bit like something out of another MMO, and I've seen people who've played Guild Wars 2 compare it to some of the zones in that game, namely Verdant Brink and Silver Wastes. Having never played GW2, I have no idea how accurate that comparison is, but it does seem very clear that the zone is very "un-SWTOR-like".

My own first impression was quite positive, even if the experience was quite chaotic. I did have to roll my eyes a bit when literally the very first encounter I attempted to do turned out to be bugged on launch, followed by another bug preventing me from progressing the introductory quest line. However, I eventually managed to resolve the latter with a workaround and quickly found myself getting swept along by the crowd. I didn't even care that much about achieving anything specific, I just followed the masses around and tried to click or attack things wherever we went in an attempt to get credit for whatever it was we were currently doing. So that was fun.

However, I also heard quite a bit of less positive feedback from other players. All three biomes are very hostile, with various environmental debuffs slowing and damaging you, with the idea being that progression through the reputation track will unlock various counters to that which will make things less painful. Most of the time it's impossible to mount up, and even as a healer I found myself dying quite a bit.

Now, I wasn't terribly deterred by that, but I can definitely see how others might be. The comparison that came to mind for me personally was The Maw from WoW's Shadowlands expansion, which I thought was a fine enough endgame zone at the time but which seemed to be almost universally disliked.

Population is another concern, and I saw someone from Shae Vizla comment that for them, the crash site zone was effectively dead on arrival since there aren't enough endgame players on that server to make it viable. While it's very much possible to progress the zone at a slower pace, many enemies are very tough and have huge amounts of health, to the point that I'm pretty sure that quite a few encounters are not actually soloable. Even as someone who's a big proponent of group content, I find that a bit concerning, and I hope that the devs will at least review the tuning of some of these encounters.

There's one in the glacial area for example that has multiple stages, and on the final stage you're supposed to defeat six champion mobs, three of which have a knockback while the other three have a long stun. Mr Commando and I attempted to duo this as tank and healer and were killed pretty quickly, as we were both simply stunlocked and whacked to death with no means of defending ourselves. We did eventually complete the encounter after a few more people joined in, as with the mobs taking turns attacking and killing different people, we could eventually zerg them down, but it was hardly what I'd call an optimal experience.

At the same time I really want to love the new zone because I really appreciate that the devs are trying something different with it. I guess one downside of trying to keep all content relevant forever is that adding more of the same type of content, be it daily areas or flashpoints, hits diminishing returns after a while. Adding a completely new type of endgame on the other hand has a chance of engaging people in new and exciting ways.

From my point of view, the zone is very beautiful and following other people around to dispatch enemies together can be very zen. The area is also very explorable, as it's been out for a week and even the content creators that constantly gather data and are trying to write guides are still in the process of figuring some things out. A lot of rewards simply drop from killing different mobs, so as long as you keep running along and hitting things, you're bound to be rewarded in some way.

I haven't attempted the four-man boss yet as it's supposed to be super hard and we haven't got a guild group together yet to attempt it in earnest. Having this boss be the "reward" for levelling up all the zones has also been somewhat contentious, as it's odd to let more casual players progress through the entire zone just to suddenly have them hit a wall at the end of the quest line. While Eric Musco has stated that unlocking enough of the reputation buffs should make the boss accessible to all eventually - as they are supposed to massively lower the difficulty - I don't think that's very well communicated in game right now.

Looking at it from the perspective of NiM raiders on the other hand, it's probably a bit odd to be reliant on "the masses" to level up all the biomes just so you can access the boss and work on your progression. I personally don't think it's a huge deal as I'm very much in favour of different types of players working together synergistically, but we'll see what the community reception is like in the long run.

Either way I applaud the dev team for trying something different with this zone, and I at least am absolutely planning to spend a lot of time there over the next few months.