A Good Start to the Season

You may find it hard to believe after my outrage at how gutted the Esseles and the Black Talon feel without cut scenes, but I've actually had a pretty good start to Galactic Season 9 in spite of that. Patch day was a bit rough, with my game crashing to desktop something like seven times, but once I learned that this was caused by hovering over one specific UI element, I was once again too amazed by just how weird MMO bugs can be sometimes to really be mad about that. (Plus, once I knew what was causing it, it was easy to avoid. They then patched the issue a couple days later.)

The flashpoint theme has actually felt surprisingly invigorating. I've long said that I'm a big fan of flashpoints, but I'm not immune to incentives, and the fact that there's literally been nothing to earn for me in flashpoints for a couple of years now has admittedly discouraged me from running them. I would rarely go for the seasons objectives that required you to run two specific flashpoints because they were just too time-consuming and felt inefficient. The dedicated weekly objective for this season only requiring a single quick veteran mode run makes a world of a difference, and I was genuinely surprised that I actually had fun blitzing through Athiss six times this past week.

My favourite run was the one with my husband on our home server, where he actually bothered to go into one of the side alcoves to use his scavenging to repair the broken combat droid there, something I hadn't done in so long that I'd genuinely forgotten that it was even a thing. One of the guildies in our group then kept casting a heal over time on it to keep it alive, to the point that the temporary pet was actually still alive when we got to the last boss. This is where we learned that the living fire debuff can go on non-player characters! The poor droid didn't manage to survive that one, but it was good for a laugh. 

The other weekly objectives for the first two weeks were pretty good too, with some nice softballs that didn't take too much time to complete on multiple servers while also earning me new achievements.

My personal biggest delight last week though was that there was also an objective to run any random master mode flashpoint, which I did on five out of six servers. (Sadly I couldn't get the queue to pop on Shae Vizla even while queueing as a tank.)

Even better, not a single one of them was Hammer Station, even though I had queued for the full selection. I had the expectation that most people would use the new feature that allows you to exclude a few flashpoints without losing your random bonus to primarily veto long or difficult ones, but maybe there are more fellow Spammer Station haters out there than expected who are actually excluding that one instead.

Either way, the random master mode flashpoints I got put into were Assault on Tython (twice), Battle of Rishi, Lost Island and Crisis on Umbara. The latter must have been nerfed a lot since I last did it, as my group completed it successfully without wiping despite feeling pretty mid in terms of skill. I know there's been some gear inflation since 7.0, but the first two bosses barely even seemed to do any damage, and we pulled the bonus boss by accident with a bunch of trash and still killed that successfully too. Not that I'm complaining!

Battle of Rishi had me busting out my Shadow's tank spec on Satele Shan, which I had actually set up some time ago but then never ended up using. I was very pleased with myself for how I guided the rest of the group through the run after someone expressed that it had been a while and they weren't sure they remembered what to do. Trying to model good tank behaviour!

Lost Island was the most memorable one though, as that was what I got on the Leviathan server while queueing on my Sage as a healer. It quickly became obvious that the tank and one of the damage dealers knew basically nothing about the flashpoint, while the other damage dealer gave the vibes of someone who had done it before and generally knew how to play but couldn't fully remember all the tactics properly. It was pretty funny to read the chat and try to make sense of it, as my knowledge of French is very limited. I think I could generally get the vibe/general topic, but not necessarily what exactly people were trying to say.

Unsurprisingly we wiped something like five times on the second boss as everyone but me kept getting knocked off the platform. I tried to use Google Translate to explain where people needed to stand, but either the translation made no sense or they intentionally decided to ignore me because I sounded too weird, as they didn't appear to listen to my advice. Fortunately they eventually seemingly managed to figure it out on their own and we were victorious. The remaining two bosses after that were comparatively easy, but I still felt like I was carrying pretty hard, healing people through some significant amounts of "standing in bad".

I felt properly giddy after we finished, both excited and relieved that we'd succeeded despite our difficulties, but also a bit amused by how ridiculous the whole experience had felt. The dps who'd given me vibes of having some idea of what to do whispered me afterwards to... I don't know, I'm guessing it was something like "we're queueing again" though it might have meant something completely different; I genuinely had no clue. I just logged off because I'd definitely had enough for that evening.

I'm hoping to see that objective pop up more often though.

A Farewell to Pug Cut Scenes

I said in my post about the dev live stream last month that the most impactful announcement to me was that patch 7.1.1 was going to remove all cut scenes and group conversations from group finder flashpoints. While this was widely welcomed, I'm personally not convinced that it's the right decision for the devs to give in to the worst impulses of people who are always in a hurry, but we'll see how things play out. The patch went live this week, and either way it's done for now.

I just wanted to pay my own little tribute to all these cut scenes that I will no longer get to see, because I used to love taking screenshots of those group moments in pugs, so I dug through my screenshot folder archive and compiled some for this post. 

I was kind of surprised that the oldest screenshot of this kind I could find was the above scene from Battle of Ilum from 2016, but then I remembered that I was mostly unable to take screenshots during cut scenes for the game's first two years (not sure they ever fixed that bug) and yeah, I guess that checks out. You can tell that it's an older screenshot because everyone's outfits are relatively old school, with the Jedi in Thexan's robes being the most "modern" looking.

This shot on the other hand was from 2020, when I documented levelling a character purely through flashpoints for the second time and found that Battle of Ilum was a surprisingly common one to get randomly (if you excluded Hammer Station like I did). Gotta love the Twi'lek barely covering her privates on the ice planet. (No, I don't. I mostly dislike those kinds of outfits and in the cut scenes I found them quite immersion-breaking to be honest.)

The flashpoint I loved the most for group cut scenes was, ironically, one that only had a single one: Czerka Corporate Labs. However, it does have this brief moment at the end where your group enters the final boss room in this really cinematic looking way and I always loved capturing that one. I'm not kidding, I have so many shots of this scene. Here, have some more:

If you want to play a little game, you can try to pick out which character is mine in each shot! Or just generally let me know which character out of all the ones pictured you think looks the best. Or which group looks the most cohesive as a team. There are just so many things to ogle.

I almost forgot that Czerka Core Meltdown has a similar cut scene because it just doesn't work nearly as well. The above screenshot is cropped to focus more on the characters, because the camera is quite zoomed out if you look at the whole screen.

After Corporate Labs, I remember I kind of waited for Bioware to recreate that group cut scene magic in any of the flashpoints that followed but they never quite got there. The above shot from the end of Battle of Rishi is about as close as it got, and that, too required some cropping/zooming in.

A shot from Korriban Incursion. "Everyone with their weapons drawn" is another classic in terms of moments that looked great in screenshots.

Ah, Directive 7, one of the most interesting side stories from the base game that was never ever mentioned again anywhere. And another flashpoint with lots of little cut scenes (and even more trash mobs) that many hated for taking too long. But again, I quite enjoyed seeing my pug groups look cool and kick ass while facing off against Mentor.

Let's finish up with another screenshot from Battle of Ilum that stands for something else I'll miss: the dark side/light side choices. The image doesn't actually show the choice, but I saved it under the name "light side pug" - so the fact that I had ended up in a group of all light side characters on Imperial side stood out to me. I loved it when I found my people! And when someone disagreed about what the "right" choice was in a certain scenario, there was usually some friendly banter to be had. No more.

(Just as a disclaimer so nobody gets the wrong idea: I didn't "force" any of these pugs to wait for me while I was watching cut scenes. My attitude was always to skip if people wanted to skip, and watch if people wanted to watch, but you could easily get some great shots of certain moments even while space-barring through most of the conversation.)

Master Mode Flashpoint Tips: Commander Mokan

Introduction

As mentioned previously, I've been running a lot of master mode flashpoints with guildies over the past couple of weeks, and one of the nice things about this has been achieving true mastery of some of the harder boss fights in them. I've said in the past that I generally like challenging fights, but the problem is that spending all night wiping on a boss just to finally be triumphant in the end is an experience with diminishing returns. Wiping again the second and third time you do the boss, because the fight is still hard, is simply not that fun. However, there does come a point when after doing it a few more times you actually achieve true mastery of the mechanics, and then it becomes fun again when you one-shot those very same tough bosses and can revel in just how pro you are now.

I thought it would be nice to share some of the insights I gained about a few of the tougher flashpoint bosses this way, and I wanted to start with Commander Mokan, more commonly known as the bonus boss in master mode Battle of Rishi. I killed him back in the day when he was new, but it was painful and messy, and while I went on to kill him again after that, the fight remained confusing and frustrating to me all the same.

The problem is that while there are some guides out there such as Dulfy's or Vulkk's, I found that they focus more on explaining what the boss does instead of telling you what you need to do. (I do absolutely recommend them if you want to gain a deeper understanding of how everything works.) For me though, it's all nice and well to know that the tank needs to be cleansed, but just when is the best time for that? And yes, I know that I want exactly four stacks of the green debuff, but something always seems to go wrong no matter how we go about getting them, so what's up with that? Fear not, for I'm going to explain to you exactly what you need to do, and you'll probably be surprised by how straightforward it is once you boil it down to the basics.

The boss in a nutshell

He basically alternates between two phases, which I shall simply call "green phase" and "red phase". During red phase, all he does is stand there and channel an AoE that does massive damage to everyone in the room. During green phase, he alternates between doing two things: cast a conal AoE on the tank (he does this three times), and put down a green circle on a non-tank (this he also does three times). No person will get more than one circle on them during each green phase, unless someone has died and been revived, stealthed out, or the tank lost aggro. If that happens, you're probably about to wipe. The fight always starts with a green phase.

What to do as a tank

Congratulations, you've got the easy job! Just point him away from the rest of the group, hold aggro, and try not to die.

As it's really important that you don't lose aggro at any point, I recommend starting with a "taunt fluff", which is to say that you taunt the boss on pull, use your AoE taunt as soon as the taunt debuff runs out, and then use your single target taunt again as soon as it comes off cooldown. This should generally see you through safely even against the most overzealous damage dealers.

Use available damage reduction cooldowns during the red phase to make things easier on the healer, but make sure not to use anything that purges debuffs on you, as that will cause you to lose all your green stacks and result in death.

What to do as a damage dealer

Make sure to stand on the opposite side of the boss from the tank and spread out during green phase, so that when a green circle hits you, nobody else gets hit at the same time. Also try not to pull aggro. During red phase, stack up on the boss to make healing easier, and use any damage reduction cooldowns you have.

The big challenge for dps during green phase is

Circle Management

If you are the first person to get a green circle thrown at you, stand in it until you have two stacks, then move out. Once the second circle lands on someone else, step into that briefly to get your stacks up to four.

If you are the second person to get a green circle thrown at you, stand in it until you have four stacks, then move out.

If the first two circles have landed on other people and you know that the last one will be on you, step into the second circle to get two stacks from it, then step away. When the third circle lands on you, get another two stacks to get up to four. Then stack up for red phase, which will be imminent.

Rinse and repeat when the boss goes back to green phase, and continue until he's dead.

What to do as a healer

As a healer you undoubtedly have the hardest job in this fight, but it's still not quite as bad as it may seem at first. First off, you have to practice circle management as described above, just like the dps, while also healing people.

You will also have to cleanse the tank, but this is actually really straightforward: just cast cleanse on them twice per green phase (when they first get hit by the green cone, and then again whenever your cleanse is off cooldown). I used to fret about when to cleanse and how often but it's really that simple, as the tank always gets six stacks of the debuff on them throughout the duration of a single green phase, and by removing two you leave them at the desired four.

During red phase, make sure to stack up with everyone else and use all your big AoE heals.

I hope that by following these simple steps, you too will soon be able to one-shot this guy, making him just another stepping stone on your journey through Battle of Rishi.

Finishing Up My Flashpoint Levelling

In real time it took much, much longer than expected - four months! - but Nautalie the Shadow has finally hit level 75. Here's how she spent her last few levels levelling through flashpoints:

Blood Hunt
I levelled: 70-70

Even with completing both the weekly to do five veteran flashpoints and my personal conquest by doing this flashpoint, I just missed out on levelling up from this one, but that wasn't entirely surprising.

When we entered, one person left instantly, presumably because that person hadn't run Blood Hunt in a while and still thought that it's the horrible pug killer it used to be a couple of years ago. We got a replacement that resulted in our group having two tanks and a healer, with me being the only damage dealer. Unsurprisingly that made for quite a slow run - Torch went through no less than four "firestorm" phases for example - but on the plus side we were never really in danger of dying.

I noticed that one of the tanks and the healer were from the same guild: Nostrum Dolus, who were known as the best SWTOR PvP guild in the world back in the days of 8v8 ranked. I remember always being relieved whenever I saw one of their members in a random warzone back in the day, because even one of them was enough to give our side a significant performance boost. They've been inactive for many years now though. I made no secret of my fond memories in party chat and they claimed to have been the guild's actual founders, who apparently hadn't played since Rise of the Hutt Cartel.

Hammer Station
I levelled: 70-71

I couldn't resist getting a quick random in on another Wednesday morning, which reliably placed me in Hammer Station. Nobody in our all dps group was level 75, which made things a little more challenging than your average run, though not terribly so.

We spent about a full minute standing in front of the elevator shortcut, waiting for someone to slice it, before we admitted to ourselves that nobody had slicing and moved on.

Someone also charged right past the turrets again, which - unsurprisingly - was not a good idea in a full group of levellers without a healer. (Remember: it traps you in combat for the rest of the flashpoint so that nobody can regenerate any health.) One guy died and was lucky in so far as I was able to stealth out and revive him afterwards.

Objective Meridian
I levelled: 71-72

With only seven of what are probably the most unpopular flashpoints selected, I wasn't surprised that I had to wait a little while for a group to be formed. Then I had a couple of pops that someone always rejected, as if they knew what might be coming... but eventually I got into what was probably the least offensive of my choices, the new flashpoint Objective Meridian.

This didn't prevent someone from leaving the moment we zoned in. I don't really get it, as this one's really quite fun and easy, but I guess just like I have a dislike for Hammer Station, for some people anything that's not Hammer Station is unacceptable. Fortunately the others weren't perturbed by this and the group leader queued us for a replacement almost immediately. Two or three trash pulls later the group was full again.

Incidentally, this was a full consular group! The other three characters were Sages. Fortunately one of them was a healer, which made things a lot smoother than they could have been otherwise. In hindsight I think this might also have been the first time that I ran this flashpoint on veteran mode - I can't tell for sure since the achievement counter treats solo and veteran mode as the same thing. Or maybe I did it with my guildies once just after Onslaught had come out.

Anyway, thanks to the healer it was mostly a walk in the park. I took it upon myself to taunt things off the Sages in an attempt to keep things simple for them too. This worked very well for the most part except for the last boss, where I just couldn't hold aggro to save my life. Also, the others enjoyed spreading out across the entire platform so that I spent more time running around chasing Malgus in circles than actually doing damage. We even wiped once, as all but one of us got knocked to our deaths near the end. (Resilience didn't save me. /cry) On the next try we got him down without problems though.

Depths of Manaan
I levelled: 72-73

I had re-queued for this one because Nautalie was at the step in the Forged Alliances arc where she needed it for story progression. I got into a group with two other damage dealers and a tank. The tank left the moment we zoned in and we replaced him with another dps.

I didn't have a great feeling when we almost wiped on the very first pull. I don't know if our damage was just that low or what, but I felt like I had to blow every single cooldown on every mob group to make it through alive.

On Sairisi I made the mistake of not asking whether everyone knew what to do, which resulted in people spending ages hitting shielded targets and being utterly useless. Meanwhile I was tanking and just running back and forth between the two kolto stations just to stay alive. (Did you know that there are only two kolto stations next to Sairisi? Made survival quite a tight affair.)

Anyway, eventually we did get him down and started watching the cut scene featuring Jakarro. I had space-barred through but apparently somebody else was watching, so I waited, and waited, and waited... and suddenly we were all kicked out of the instance as our group lead had disconnected. Now I was lead and we ran back in, but the DCed guy came back on within a minute anyway.

At this point one of the other dps quit and I queued us for a replacement. Unfortunately the previously DC-ed guy chose this moment to leave the group as well, causing the group finder to bug out in the usual manner. Disheartened by how this kind of situation had gone previously, I asked the last person remaining (a Commando and the person who had joined us after the start to replace the tank) whether she wanted to continue with companions or quit... and she wanted to go on, yay!

So I summoned my influence level 6 Qyzen to tank and she whipped out Elara to heal and we finished the instance just fine. We did have one wipe on Ortuno as my trooper friend wasn't quick enough to put Elara on passive to drag her out of the puddles of doom, but once she knew to watch out for that we downed him just fine, even if it took a while.

After the run she whispered me asking if I wanted to join her guild. I declined politely, explaining that I already had a guild, but it still gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling.

What a hero.

Battle of Rishi
I levelled: 73-73

This was a pretty smooth and fast four-dps run. We skipped a lot of trash though (which is admittedly pretty easy in this flashpoint), which once again resulted in barely any XP for me.

Also, I was kind of bothered by how everyone just kind of expected me to stealth everything for them without even saying anything. There is this bit where you have to click on consoles in three different rooms and one guy literally just ran past all of them to the next boss and then presumably made himself a cup of tea. At least the other two hung back a little to make sure I didn't get in trouble (which I actually did once, though I cloaked and fortunately the mobs evaded instead of going after the rest of the group).

At least I did learn how you can indeed successfully stealth all three consoles. I already knew that it could be done but had never done it myself before, always failing at one in particular, but the unspoken pressure put on me in this run forced me figure it out. Yay I guess?

Legacy of the Rakata
I levelled: 73-74

Sod's Law had it that after grumbling about a run where we skipped so much trash that I barely got any XP, the next day the group finder put me into a full stealth group (two Shadows and two Scoundrels). Mind you, I think we still killed more mobs than the group in Battle of Rishi, simply because there are some objectives on Rakata Prime that require it, plus there were a couple of "oops, I forgot I wasn't actually in stealth" pulls. (Nobody called them that, but I've seen enough of this kind of thing to recognise it when I see it.)

In the end I didn't mind too much because at least a full stealth pug is something unusual and entertaining. On the last boss it was interesting to me that people prioritised killing Arkous over Darok, as I'm used to doing it the other way round.

Czerka Core Meltdown
I levelled: 74-74

Queueing for what I knew was going to be Nautalie's last levelling flashpoint, I had only four options selected: Czerka Core Meltdown and the three traitor flashpoints. I settled in for what I expected to be a bit of a wait but got a pop almost instantly - which meant that it couldn't be anything other than Czerka, seeing how most people seem to avoid and rather dislike the traitor flashpoints. And so it was.

It was another four dps group, and the Commando in the group immediately said that it was his first time. I replied that this was fine and that I'd explain bosses. Unfortunately the rest of the group wasn't quite so co-operative, and the Gunslinger pulled the first boss while I was still typing. It felt deserved that we quickly wiped on that attempt, even though I can't say for sure that it was directly related to the untimely pull.

On the next attempt we killed it just fine, with me tanking and dragging the Duneclaw around the room like a boss. Props to the other group members for clicking the kolto stations though - I couldn't reliably have done it myself without messing up the positioning, and while my health did get pretty low a couple of times, making me sweat, we all survived in the end.

We more or less repeated this performance on the next boss: me once again trying to explain for the Commando while the Gunslinger ran in and pulled anyway. At least this time we didn't wipe, though the Slinger messed up the first pod by popping it too early, before the boss was actually in range. Things went okay though once I taunted the boss off him and resumed tanking. The rest of the flashpoint went smoothly enough.

But then... we were done and I still wasn't 75! Even after handing in the Czerka story quest I was still just a sliver away from dinging.

I considered my options and didn't like either very much: queueing for another flashpoint would have been the most "true" to the project, but dinging on the second mob would have felt kind of anticlimactic and the event would have just been overshadowed by still having to run the whole rest of the flashpoint afterwards. Getting the XP somewhere else on the other hand felt a bit cheeky... but was also going to be much faster and easier... and it was really only a tiny sliver! So I went back to Coruscant to pick up Nautalie's class story again and soon dinged 75 from killing a bunch of back alley thugs.

Full debrief about the project to follow soon!

Day 7: Team #IntPiPoMo

My 10 themed days of SWTOR screenshots in celebration of International Picture Posting Month continue. If you want to see a list of all the themes I'm using, you can find it here.

In my guild's operations I have a comical reputation for wanting to loot everything, and since I'm a bioanalyst on my main that includes hoovering up dead lobels and the like. I'm not alone though! We have a whole "team bioanalyst", but for some reason I still get most of the blame for slowing things down.

I think I mentioned before that I love this cut scene from Czerka Corporate Labs because it can make even pugs look cool. This is my Operative (second from the left) in a random group. (I also posted this one on Twitter before, but I already established that Twitter doesn't count in my mind.)

I seriously have so many screenshots of this scene, haha. Here's my Vanguard tank (far right) in a guild group.

There's a similar scene in Battle of Rishi, but unfortunately it's nowhere near as good as it's too zoomed out and goes on for too long, with the characters walking around and looking kind of confused for no reason. Still, I kept this one because it reminds me of an epic run where I (on my Juggernaut tank, second from the left) had roped a guildie on his newly dinged Operative into healing me through a random master mode. We got Battle of Rishi and it didn't go so well! I think I kept the poor guy up way past his bedtime as we wiped on the last boss over and over again... though we did get him down in the end.

The more things change, the more they stay the same: me and some guildies goofing off between pulls during an ops run.

IntPiPoMo count: 44

Twin Sunmer Games 2018

Two years ago I wrote about my guild organising a fun little social event which we playfully called the "Twin Sunmer Games". We didn't repeat it last year, but this year people decided to revive it, though by running it at the start of September we were only just able to justify still calling it summer games.

The two officers organising it managed to strike a nice balance between old and new, repeating previously popular activities in new locations while also adding something new. The most important addition was to give the new custom Huttball functionality in the Rishi stronghold a try. The one match we played as a guild was quite fun, though we also ran into what I can only guess was a previously undiscovered bug, namely that a new Huttball would respawn before the old one had actually been removed from the game via scoring or being dropped, which led to up to three balls being carried around at the same time. That certainly turned wanting to focus on the ball carrier into an interesting dilemma...

To tie things together, the older activities that we decided to repeat were also made Rishi-themed. So we also played "Hot Ball" (Hot Potato) with the custom Huttball stand in the Rishi stronghold for example. People were complaining a lot about the ball disappearing without doing anything this time, suggesting that it was bugged, though to me it didn't really seem to be happening more often than usual.

A relay run on Rishi was also planned, but then scrapped because we were running short on time. I've been told that the plans for it have been saved for a later date though.

Sticking with the theme, the flashpoint speed run took place in Battle of Rishi this time. Since I still remembered what a pain it had been in the last event to be stuck in a healer-heavy group, I made sure to relog my Guardian for dps. I also remembered the group with the most conservative approach winning last time, but of course our group leader had other ideas! This time the crazy plan was to skip a load of trash by running through to a checkpoint, dying, and letting the Scoundrel in our group vanish and then revive us once the mobs had reset. To be fair, that would have worked if we hadn't messed it up on the first attempt, which resulted in a wipe. As it was, the whole group dying and having to rerun the whole gauntlet up to the first boss was quite a set-back, though we still managed to finish in second place, only mere seconds behind the winners.

I also made a ten-minute video to summarise the event again, in the same style as last time:



If that makes you want to join in the fun, we do accept applications... though in fairness you should know that we don't organise events like these all the time.

Pugging with Shintar: July Update

I know it's August now but this is mostly about videos recorded in July. I thought I would give another update on how my Pugging with Shintar series is progressing for those who aren't subscribed to my YouTube channel (and at this rate, I really need to give these posts their own tag).

Episode 7: Defying the Randomiser - After getting Hammer Station for the third time in six episodes, I decided that while repetition had been fine while I was simply writing about adventures like these, in the video format redoing the same flashpoint over and over again was simply boring and rubbish. As a result, I cut down the run to a few key scenes in the video and then queued again with every flashpoint I'd already done unselected from the group finder list. This time I got Athiss, which was at least something new.

Episode 8: Sneaking Through Red Reaper - I decided to start doing the intros on Nar Shaddaa while the Nightlife Event is running and after a commenter reminded me that I could use the heroic quick travel to get there even without a ship. Forcing the group finder to always give me something new from now on, I ended up in Red Reaper, a place known for its nightmarish trash pulls at the start. Of course since I knew and talked about those, I ended up with a rock-solid group that had no trouble with anything whatsoever and managed to skip even more pulls than usual. In Red Reaper I've never minded because there is no bonus anyway.

Episode 9: Cheerful Musings in Korriban Incursion - After the previous episode I realised that out of sheer habit, I had been uploading these in a lower resolution than I actually use to record, so this episode brought an improvement in video quality as I finally made some adjustments. Korriban Incursion made me particularly talkative because there are so many connections to the Sith starter quests - though I wasn't beyond making mistakes when trying to recall them from memory. I oddly enjoy correcting myself via text overlays while editing the footage later.

Episode 10: An Unlucky Gunslinger in KDY - Finally I got the story quest for Kuat Drive Yards out of my log, after having had it there since level 15 or so. A gunslinger asked early on whether he could do the "rescue ten prisoners" achievement if we got the prison cell scenario, and everyone enthusiastically agreed... but this is a pug, you can already guess how it went.

Episode 11: Sentinel Silliness in Battle of Rishi - I was late with recording this episode due to real life distractions and recorded it on a weekday after work, feeling like I was going to fall asleep at any moment. Oddly enough, this made me even chattier than usual, and I ended up in a group with three sentinels, which I considered very humorous. Also, I enjoyed ranting about Battle of Rishi's wasted potential like I already did in a blog post once here.

Episode 12: Businesslike in Czerka Corporate Labs - After a slightly chaotic start, this flashpoint became quickly dominated by a scantily-clad Commando who was eager to push forward no matter what, clearly thinking that she didn't need the rest of the group. I couldn't fault her ability, but I also couldn't help highlighting it as another type of behaviour that I'm personally not super fond of in my pug groups.

Flashpoint Friday: Battle of Rishi

After talking about Battle of Ilum two weeks ago, I decided to cover another "battle of" this week: Battle of Rishi.

General Facts

Battle of Rishi was released as part of the Shadow of Revan expansion (patch 3.0) in December 2014. Blood Hunt and Battle of Rishi were part of the expansion's main storyline and the first two flashpoints that launched with a solo mode right off the bat. Group-wise they only offered a tactical version initially, with the hardmode getting added in 3.1 two months later. At the time of writing this, more than a year later, Blood Hunt and Battle of Rishi are still the two newest flashpoints in the game, as no additional ones have been released. (Personally I don't think that the Star Fortresses really count, since they can't seem to decide what sort of content they want to be and aren't included in the group finder.)

Fights

Battle of Rishi is a romp across Rishi to take out a massive Revanite signal jammer, so you spend your time fighting Revanites and their droids. The trash is pretty uninteresting, and the bosses... well, they offer some reasonably interesting mechanics but are pretty darn forgettable in terms of story.

The first two boss encounters each feature a Revanite duo consisting of a former Republic and a former Imperial character, first a Wookiee (smuggler?) and an Imperial soldier, then a Sith and a Jedi master. There's a lot of "don't stand in squares/circles on the floor" in both fights, but the second encounter features an interesting mechanic where balls of lightning float towards the middle of the room and you have to "soak them up" or they'll do more damage to the whole group. Like in many duo fights, killing one of the bosses first results in the other enraging, both in the first and in the second encounter. Now, stuff like that sometimes gets announced in big red letters across the screen that say something like: "[Boss name] gets really angry!" In both of these boss fights though, no matter whom you kill first, the same line is used for all of them: "The remaining adversary rages at the death of their ally!" It's like not even the encounter designers could be bothered. "Who cares? Nobody has heard of these guys before and nobody will ever hear from them again after they're dead. They have no personality, no story and no lines. Why bother?"

Exhibits A and B.

To give credit where credit is due, at least the last boss - a walker that conveniently drops from the sky (yes, really) - is quite memorable, at least mechanically. It has this move where it powers up a massive electric discharge... which will one-shot you even in tactical mode. To survive, you have to go stand in a circle and use a console to activate a protective shield around you and any allies. There is plenty of time to do this, so it's not a matter of reflexes or anything, just a question of paying some attention to your environment. Yet the amount of people I've watched die to this... it's always pretty hilarious. I also have my own funny memories of this encounter, such as that one time when our entire group went to stand in the circle like good little players, but then nobody actually bothered to click on the console so we all died anyway, looking very foolish in the process.

On hardmode, there is also a bonus boss, who is probably the most mechanically challenging flashpoint boss I've ever seen in this game - which is quite impressive really! I talked about him a bit in this post. Unfortunately the sheer difficulty of the fight also makes him unappealing to anyone but a well-geared, fully organised group. I think he's cool in theory, but in nearly a year I've only actually bothered to kill him twice myself, which is kind of telling.

Story (spoilers?)

Battle of Rishi is directly integrated into the Shadow of Revan story, so it's hard to talk about it without giving at least minor spoilers for that... the major plot point is that you're fighting Revanites, and both a Republic and an Imperial fleet have just appeared above the planet, manipulated by the Revanites to hopefully annihilate each other. In order to prevent this, you need to contact your faction's representative, but a local signal jammer makes communication with the fleet impossible. So you charter a shuttle and invade yet another Revanite camp to destroy said signal jammer.

The entire flashpoint is just you fighting your way towards your objective, with a brief light/dark side choice near the end where you get to hijack an anti-air cannon and can decide to aim it either at the Revanites or at the enemy faction.

Once the signal jammer has been destroyed, you get in touch with your respective faction's leader in orbit (Satele Shan for Republic players and Darth Marr for Imperials) and they agree to temporarily halt aggressions to figure out what's going on.

Conclusion

I think most of my articles in this series have been pretty positive so far, but Battle of Rishi is not a flashpoint that impressed me. It features pretty environments, and it offers a fun little mob-killing romp for a pug, but other than that... it just seems to have no heart and no real point.

About a year ago, I wrote a post called Solo Flashpoints - Good or Bad Idea? in which I kind of came to the concusion that Bioware doesn't really seem to know what it wants to do with flashpoints. To be honest, I suspect that's part of why we haven't seen any in a year, not just because of KotFE! In the past, they've sometimes been story-light instances for group content, or an excuse to provide a particularly epic final boss battle. Battle of Rishi doesn't really try to do either, as it came with a solo mode from the get-go and is tightly integrated into the storyline, yet the objective of "go destroy that signal jammer" is so dull that it could simply have been a regular quest.

It's particularly interesting to compare Battle of Rishi to its partial namesake Battle of Ilum, which also suffered from having a somewhat lacklustre objective... but all throughout, it still told a story, of how Malgus' new Empire included lots of aliens, of the kinds of characters he had managed to win for his cause. Battle of Rishi is one massive wasted opportunity here, with the Revanites theoretically boasting an interesting background that has inspired both Republic and Imperial soldiers to defect... yet nothing is made of this whatsoever. None of the people you fight ever go beyond being random mooks, and in a game that prides itself in its lore and interesting characters as much as SWTOR, that's just outright shameful.

Blood Hunt and Battle of Rishi hardmode

Even though they were released over a month ago, it was only this past week that I finally got around to trying the hardmode versions of the new 3.0 flashpoints, Battle of Rishi and Blood Hunt. (This is not a bad thing by the way. It's nice when the content is coming out faster than I can actually work my way through it.)

Since I had heard that both of them contained at least one very hard boss, I made sure to get a full guild run together for each one. I'm glad I did it that way, because things got pretty rough at points in both flashpoints.

Commander Mokan in Battle of Rishi is probably the most elaborately designed bonus boss I've seen in the game so far, even more so than the droid boss in Depths of Manaan. He has a whole room to himself that is unused in the tactical version, with clickable things on the tables, and his mechanics are fiddly and extremely unforgiving. The short of it is that there's a stacking debuff going around that needs to be at 3-4 stacks at just the right time or you will die... yet if the debuff ever reaches five stacks, you also die instantly. I don't think it's hard to see how that can be quite difficult to get just right. He's pretty much a mini version of an operations boss, and even with a group that knew the tactics, communicated on voice chat and was way overgeared for the encounter (everyone was in a mix of 192/198 gear), we still wiped many times until we got him down.

I would say that he's overtuned, especially considering that it also seems to be pretty important to have a second dispeller in addition to the healer, but then again, he's "just" a bonus boss. If you're in there with a random pug, you can just skip him and it's no skin off anyone's nose.

The really scary fight was Jos and Valk Beroya in Blood Hunt's hardmode. Specifically we found that during the phase when you fight both of them at once, one of them casts a stacking debuff on the tank that increases damage taken, while the other one spams a high damage ability every now and then, with the result that even in our highly overgeared group I was unable to outheal the incoming damage from that combination. The only way we eventually managed to beat the encounter was by having one of the dps players off-heal whenever another high damage phase came around. I would imagine that you could also work around it with a dps that can taunt off the tank on occasion, but neither an off-healer nor an off-tank are guaranteed in a four-person group, so having that as a requirement to successfully complete the flashpoint just seems wrong.

All in all I was very much reminded of the discussion surrounding the difficulty of level 50 hardmodes at launch, and then again when Lost Island was released. Comparatively speaking, the level 55 hardmodes were relatively easy on release. I never wrote a post about the hardmode flashpoints that came with 3.0, but I thought that they were about on par with the level 55 ones, except for a couple of tough bonus bosses.

Blood Hunt and Battle of Rishi feel more like a throwback to an earlier time, and I'm not against high difficulty in small group content... but I do feel that it's a bit of a problem in this particular case. In a post group-finder world you are expected to frequently run instances with random strangers, which is not at all compatible with high difficulty, and unlike Lost Island back in the day, Battle of Rishi and Blood Hunt don't have a separate category in the group finder, which makes running a random hardmode flashpoint a lot less appealing now, considering that it's complete luck of the draw whether you get something relatively easy or an absolute killer.

Also, at least level 50 HM flashpoints gave tier gier equal to what you could get in normal mode operations back in the day. In Shadow of Revan, Bioware decided for some reason that flashpoints could not be allowed to drop anything worthwhile at all. It's not really a big deal to me personally since I mostly gear up in operations, but it does strike me as incredibly bizarre that the default drop from a hardmode flashpoint boss is a piece of blue 184 gear. I mean, you can buy gear better than that from the basic comm vendor pretty much the instant you hit level 60 - using basic comms which you received while levelling. The effort/reward ratio is just completely out of whack here.

Have you successfully completed these hardmodes yet? What did you think of the difficulty? Would you dare to brave them with a random group?

Solo Flashpoints - Good or Bad Idea?

I have to admit I felt a bit uneasy when I first heard that Bioware was going to include a solo option for flashpoints in Shadow of Revan. I spend a fair amount of time soloing of course, but group content is what keeps me coming back to the game, and since soloing is by default more convenient than doing things in a group and having to be considerate of other people, I know that it's all too easy to make grouping unattractive.

Based on the fact that Bioware has always treated group content with respect, I decided to have faith in them. Yet when I first stepped foot into a solo mode flashpoint, I was taken aback. I was with my pet tank at the time and we had just discovered that we could enter the same solo instance together. If you think that one GSI droid to assist you is OP, just wait until you see multiple copies of it mowing down flashpoint bosses like nobody's business. Not being forced to do things solo is a good thing, but I couldn't help but wonder: If you can do this in a group on easy mode, why would you ever do it in a group on normal mode, if the game doesn't differentiate between the two in any way? (I've since heard that solo mode isn't supposed to give any loot other than basic comms, but I have seen some pieces of gear drop in solo mode so... I don't know about that.)

Of course, then I found out that you can only ever do each solo mode once. At first this struck me as reasonable - let people see the story once and then make them move on, but then I thought: if it's not supposed to drop any gear, what does it matter? If someone wants to repeat the Battle of Rishi solo over and over again, why would this be a problem? I know that I wouldn't want to do this personally, because I find solo mode pretty damn dull. It's okay that it exists, especially where a flashpoint is supposed to advance the story, so you don't have to wait for a group to get going to progress. But in terms of gameplay it's terribly dull. The "Jesus droid" makes it pretty much impossible to die unless you fall off a cliff, as he'll heal you even through continuous standing in fire, so everything just comes down to slowly reducing mob hitpoints at no actual risk to yourself. It's a bit like regular questing, only extremely boring.

Eventually I couldn't help but wonder what exactly the point of flashpoints is supposed to be these days. How did we get to the point where this is the way Bioware wants them to be played? Looking back at the game's launch, the devs have always been a bit schizophrenic about the purpose of group content. Most of it was set up to simply offer gameplay for groups, with stories that were of little to no consequence to the rest of the game. That's why the friendly NPC tells you before your first trip to Coruscant/Dromund Kaas that you can take the shuttle to get on with your class mission right away, or take the Esseles/Black Talon with some friends if you fancy a diversion.

But there were always odd outliers, like the Revan story arc. It's true that at release this storyline wasn't referred to anywhere else in the game, but considering what an iconic character Revan is, it always felt a bit wrong to hide him away in a series of flashpoints like that. Now that Revan has a whole expansion focused on him, it feels outright unacceptable that players might be thrown into that story possibly without ever having learned his backstory in the game if they didn't happen to do the right group content at the right time.

Darth Malgus is another character whose story remains unfinished if you only complete Ilum's planetary story arc - and he's a character that players actually can and do encounter solo. Yet to find out what really happens to him, you have to do the two flashpoints located on Ilum. It seems that there has always been someone at Bioware who adhered to the old school mantra that particularly important/epic boss encounters should require a group to emphasise their epicness. (You know those bosses are badasses if they actually take more than one person to kill!)

As a fan of group content I didn't mind this attitude in the past, but it has always led to backlash from people complaining that they suddenly need a group just to see the ending of what was previously a solo story, and I can understand that. Not to mention that there are disadvantages to handling story this way even if you are happy to group up. Having a story change from solo to group play means that you want to do the group content exactly when you hit that transition point, not later but also not earlier. I'm sure I'm not the only who's ever ended up in Battle of Ilum on an alt, cursing the fact that you haven't advanced the planetary story to the point yet where it actually leads into the flashpoint. Finding yourself in that kind of situation means that a) the flashpoint story is potentially confusing because you're missing vital information and b) you'll have to come back again later purely to finish the associated mission at the "right" time. For this reason I've come to appreciate the approach of making the stories of group content separate and unimportant to the overarching plot, precisely to avoid these kinds of issues. Nobody misses out on anything important if they never go to Athiss. Yet at the same time you can go there any time you like (as far as your level permits it anyway) without being confused.

Looking at the post-launch flashpoints however, there has actually been a move away from this design, which I find both sad and a bit backwards. Kaon Under Siege and Lost Island were the last regular flashpoints with clearly defined side stories in my opinion. Kuat Drive Yards was separate from the rest of the game as well, but I feel that this was only done because it was the only way to make it level neutral (to ensure its story could be played and make sense at any point in the game). The Czerka flashpoints were obviously supposed to be the epic finale to the story of CZ-198... even if beating up a fat businessman and his pet project isn't exactly the height of epic. The Forged Alliances story arc turned everything on its head a little by starting the story in a number of flashpoints, which then cumulated in a solo storyline. Blood Hunt and the Battle of Rishi are neither an introduction nor an epic finale - they hardly feel different from other tasks you complete while on Rishi - however, they are mandatory for storyline progression and you can't continue until you've completed both of them.

A very cinematic scene - but as just one step in a multi-part story, why is this a flashpoint while other things aren't? 

Now, with how integral these latter flashpoints are to the storyline, it makes sense to make them soloable, but I have to admit that at this point I'm wondering why they are flashpoints in the first place. They don't even feature particularly epic enemies. (I like Shae Vizla a lot, but she's just a random Mandalorian. I can't even remember the name of any of the bosses in Battle of Rishi.) If you think that the story is too important to be locked behind a "grouping wall" (and flashpoints are by definition group content), why not just make this stuff the subject of a normal quest? Makeb and Oricon have shown that Bioware can design interesting encounters even for the solo player and outside of instances. I see no reason why Torch's compound and the Revanite base with the signal jammer couldn't have been part of the Rishi map - other than that it probably would have been more work, taking into consideration things like the Mandalorian compound needing a proper exterior instead of being limited to only having an inside.

It feels to me that solo flashpoints are a band-aid applied to a design problem of Bioware's own making, and as so often with band-aids, the end result is a lot less neat than if they had just fixed the core issue. If you just want to tell a story that people can play solo as well as in a group, you can do that through a dedicated quest chain like you've done throughout most of the game. Turning parts of the story into flashpoints seemingly at random just feels clumsy, and leads to all the disadvantages already brought up above. Solo mode leads to tedious "hitpoint grinding" during which it's impossible to die. People who prefer to group are once again faced with the problem of having to get their grouping done at exactly the right time or they can't even move on with the storyline. (But you mustn't go in too early either, or you'll be faced with a lot of dialogue that makes no sense.)

I've done Blood Hunt and Battle of Rishi less than half a dozen times and I'm already tired of them because whether solo or in a group, I have to do them on all of my characters, always at the exact same point, if I want to unlock Yavin 4. This has actually made me resent them somewhat, and unlike at level 55, where I was happy to run any of the offered tacticals for the weekly (and knew that I was free to do so whenever I felt like it), the idea of doing the same at level 60 seems highly unappealing right now.

I'm guessing that Bioware has more plans for solo flashpoints in the future, but personally I hope that they'll reconsider what purpose they actually want flashpoints to serve, and that the answer won't simply be "instanced story quests with scaled up hitpoints". In my opinion designing flashpoints like that degenerates the story experience for both solo players and groups.