Weekend Master Mode Flashpoint Pugs

I'm glad to not have to think about seasons anymore for a while, but that doesn't mean that I was unaware that one of this week's weekly objectives was to run a random master mode flashpoint. I decided I might as well server hop and queue for a few while there was increased interest in the activity - not for seasons, but for fun.

I started by logging into Tulak Hord quite late on Saturday evening, expecting a long wait in the queue - if anything was still going to happen at all this late in the day - but got a nearly instant pop for my Commando healer. It took me to the Esseles, which was welcomed as this was one of the flashpoints that character still needed for her Aratech Ice quest.

I was kind of amused when the tank asked whether he should rush through and drag a bunch of trash mobs along like people do on veteran mode, because in my mind, playing like that is usually a sign of someone who's in a hurry and has little consideration for the other players in their group. Someone politely asking the rest of their team whether he should be rushing felt quite bizarre to me. There was a bit of back and forth about it in chat which mostly revealed that nobody had a strong opinion on the matter, and the tank eventually just settled on taking it (relatively) slowly and going at a more relaxed pace instead, which was fine by me. (Though we still didn't really go slowly, we just killed things as we pulled them instead of going for some giant drive-by pile-up.) We also did the bonus boss and everything.

I then logged over to Satele Shan, where I queued my Shadow as both tank and dps but seemed to have no luck. Just as Mr Commando was telling me that he was going to bed and I replied that I was thinking about doing the same, I finally got a pop as dps. (It was close to midnight my time by this point.) It was for Shrine of Silence.

There was a part of me that immediately thought that this was a baaad idea, starting a difficult master mode with a low chance of success so late. Mr Commando came over and looked over my shoulder. "Oh, you're doing that one," he commented. "Which difficulty is it?" I responded in the tiny voice of someone who's very aware that she's done something naughty: "Master mode". He rolled his eyes and said that he'd see me in two hours then.

In reality, I did get a chance to say good night to him a bit earlier, when I died on the second boss and was stuck being unable to revive for several minutes, which was a good opportunity for an AFK break. However, he wasn't entirely wrong otherwise, even though the group progressed through most of the flashpoint with no major problems, including the bonus boss. On the second encounter with the two mystics both the tank and I got knocked off the platform (which was what enforced the above-mentioned AFK break) but the healer and remaining dps were able to finish the fight off without us.

I had opened up Starparse at one point to get an idea of our dps since I remembered the last boss being a brutal dps check, and both the other dps (a Guardian) and me on my Shadow were pretty close in terms of numbers - not amazing, but not terrible either. I was starting to get my hopes up that maybe we could do this, but when we actually did reach the last boss I got an immediate reality check when our first attempt resulted in a wipe with the boss still having more than 30% of his health left.

After the second wipe I honestly half expected the group to fall apart - everyone had been very nice and communicative up to this point, so I wouldn't have been upset or surprised if someone had piped up with something along the lines of "sorry, but it looks like this one's not happening" but in actuality, nobody in the group showed even the slightest doubt that we'd be able to do it if we just kept trying, so I felt like I owed it to them to do my best as well (and I could definitely tell that I had room for improvement).

At one point I realised that I'd misunderstood one of the tank's instructions about the adds, and when I correctly started to completely ignore them, the next attempt went a lot better. I did notice that the Guardian dps still seemed to be chasing adds however, so I suggested in chat that we should both just focus the boss at the end. He didn't really respond and just kept doing the same thing, but our attempts kept getting slightly better regardless, which led to us wiping at something like 5% at one point.

Suddenly the Guardian spoke up to suggest that we should just nuke the boss and I was like "that's what I've been saying, yes!" - and on the next attempt we killed it with nobody even dying. It was sooo satisfying. I looted a cool trooper armour set as well, which I put on Lieutenant Iresso. It was getting close to 2 a.m. for me by this point, so Mr Commando had been more on point than expected, but it felt so worth it.

The next morning I queued for a master mode flashpoint on Leviathan (I'd already been trying earlier on Saturday but with no success) and when I finally got a pop as healer it took me to Hammer Station - a place I'm not usually a fan of, but after Shrine of Silence it seemed like a good palate cleanser. That's what I thought at first at least, but then one of the dps typed in chat that we should just run and charged off through all the trash on their own. Unsurprisingly, they died, and then all the mobs they had aggroed turned around and killed the rest of us. I sighed and rolled my eyes, but in fairness, the person actually apologised and then we just did everything normally and it went fine.

Finally, in the early afternoon I threw myself in the queue with my trooper on Star Forge, queued as both tank and dps. I was surprised by how long my wait was, considering my flexibility and how busy Star Forge usually is. At three different times I got a pop that someone declined instantly, before anyone could've possibly had had time to even look at the proposed group make-up, which I thought was weird. Finally on the fourth go an actual group formed with me as its healer.

We got into Crisis on Umbara, another flashpoint that I tend to think of as not exactly trivial on master mode, but things seemed to be going well enough. Our pace was on the slow side and there were some deaths from people clearly not being familiar (enough) with certain mechanics, but nothing really major. We even managed to kill the Alpha Slybex.

I was just starting to think how nice it was to be in that stage of an expansion where everyone is a bit overgeared and you can carry a couple of people not really knowing what they're doing but then we got to the final boss and it wiped the floor with us. I went through every single one of my cooldowns but the adds were just absolutely swarming us and things weren't dying nearly quickly enough. After two wipes I suggested that we could pull the boss down the hill to create a funnel and make the adds a bit more manageable, and even though nobody responded, people complied. That wasn't an instant success, but I think we got the boss down on what was overall our fourth attempt or so. So that was good, I was just a bit weirded out by the way people were clearly reading and acting upon the chat but not responding to me at all. Apart from a "hi" at the beginning and a "ty" after a revive, nobody but me said anything all run, which was quite a contrast to how chatty my groups on all the other servers had been.

Either way, I quite enjoyed this round of pugs and I'll try to keep using seasonal master mode objectives as a reminder to queue up for these more often.