I continue to log into the public test server almost every day. I've never been this engaged with testing anything in SWTOR before; it's quite strange.
First there's the new ops boss. I won't spoil anything about the theme or detailed mechanics, don't worry, but I do want to talk a bit about the experience of testing itself. Back when I tried XR-53 on the PTS, I went in with a group where at least a few people already knew what to expect, we killed it after a relatively small number of tries, and then we got an achievement at the end. It wasn't that dissimilar to trying a boss on the live servers for the first time.
This time around, things have been very different. I mentioned in a previous post that the ops entrance is right at the Odessen spawn-in point, which I assume is not going to be how it's going to work when the operation is finalised. When you go through the portal, you get teleported right into a room with the boss - no trash, nothing. Additionally, there's a droid called M4R-TN (Martin, like the ops dev - get it?) who not only offers repairs, but also has a number of consoles next to him that allow you to tweak things about the boss fight, such as in- or decreasing its health and damage output - a true test environment.
If you wanted to, you could dial down the boss's health to next to nothing and one-shot it. But what for? There's no achievement at this stage, or loot. It's up to you, the player, to decide how easy or hard you want the fight to be, purely for the sake of fun, and that's surprisingly difficult.
I'm guessing like most people, we initially tried to simply do the boss fight as presented, without tweaking anything. We also went in blind, because it's fun to discover things by ourselves. And that did work decently enough for story mode.
Veteran mode was a different matter though - so much damage! So much going on! Pure chaos. Trying to figure things out by yourself is fun for a while, but only until it isn't anymore. I've got to confess here that I've also learned over time that my ops team and I aren't actually very good at figuring out boss mechanics by ourselves. We have a tendency to completely misunderstand what's going on at times, and then coming up with ideas based on those misunderstandings that only make things worse. Myself, I just get completely overwhelmed at some point.
It made me realise that for how much I love operations in SWTOR, I'm a bit like the cliché of a WoW Classic raider - good at a 20-year-old fight that I've had opportunity to practice for literal years, but better not present me with anything new or even remotely difficult - as I'll just freeze up, even if I was actively asking for something new before. It's not entirely the same situation, but there are definitely parallels. I like the familiar, and SWTOR has given me plenty of opportunity to get used to things.
The other week I did multiple runs of Terror from Beyond, and it occurred to me that Operator IX on veteran mode is actually a pretty complex and hard to explain fight, what with everything that goes on with the colour mechanics. It doesn't seem so bad to me now after years of repetition, but the first people to figure out the encounter probably also had to spend quite a bit of time wiping, reading tooltips and experimenting in order to figure out exactly what to do at each stage and in what order. I've tried to take comfort in that thought at times when the new boss felt impossibly overwhelming to me - reminding myself that it won't seem half as bad once I've had time to properly understand and digest what's actually happening at each stage.
So after initially just dialling down the boss's damage a lot so we wouldn't die quite so quickly and had more time to actually figure out key mechanics, we did slowly get a grip on those.. but things were still messy and would quickly fall apart entirely. When I happened to come across a video from someone whose team had killed the boss on the PTS only the other day, I watched it, and it immediately taught us some things to improve.
This meant that the other night we finally realised that we'd hit a point where we understood what we were supposed to do; we just didn't have the numbers to execute it. We'd already reduced the default damage by half, but now we also had to reduce the boss's health, because we were hitting what's effectively the soft enrage with the boss still close to half health. (Mr Commando used to call that point "the 50% mechanic" - see my earlier point about us misunderstanding what's happening sometimes.)
On the next attempt we reduced the boss's health massively and he died with ease. So now the last exercise is going to be to dial the numbers up and down a bit more to see how much more we can take, but then I think we'll be done testing this particular fight for now. We've learned the mechanics and will be prepared in that regard. But if it goes live with the current default health and damage numbers, we won't kill it for a long time regardless.
The person who posted the kill video with the boss set to default values said the tuning felt good to them. In the video I could see that they were doing almost double my team's healing and about a third more damage. I mean, good for them, they are clearly good at the game - I just wish they were aware that what they are bringing to the table is not what the average group that attempts a veteran mode is going to have. I'm desperately hoping that the data we've provided by wiping over and over again is at least sending a signal in that regard, but I do still worry that it won't be enough. I suspect that not many who find the boss too hard in its current state will go through the process of wiping for hours to understand what's going on and fine-tune the numbers; most will probably just give up. And then the data set will just consist of the most elite NiM raiders killing it with ease, suggesting that everything is fine and dandy. I don't know. I can only keep trying.
The other thing that I've been spending time on is levelling lowbies with the new difficulty toggle set to veteran or master. I'll probably have another post about that in me at some point, but it's just so weirdly compelling to me. Since I'm playing so much and generating Conquest points, I've also set our PTS guild to invade a planet every week. Since there's no competition, we win every time. I know it's only temporary and doesn't mean anything, but I enjoy seeing "TSS PTS" being the conquerors of an increasing number of planets...
