All about the Codebreaker Title and Shortcut!

I'm not usually someone to write guides, but sometimes I'll come upon a fairly obscure piece of information that seemingly nobody else has posted on the internet yet, and that can be kind of fun to lay out for others. This is one of those occasions, somewhat randomly inspired by my ops group being back in Dxun and me suddenly finding myself wondering whether the Codebreaker shortcut is widely known, as I never saw anyone really talk about it... it's just something that we discovered organically.

A quick Google search for "swtor codebreaker shortcut" just got me the message "It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search", and trying "swtor codebreaker title" resulted in links to a few pages that replicated the codex entry for the title but nothing else. Hopefully this blog post will soon answer anyone's questions on the subject!

The first step to getting the Codebreaker title is to complete the Dxun Cipher achievement. I'm not going to go into detail about how to get this one, because there are already some good guides out there how to get that. Here is one of them. As you can see it requires you to have beaten the first three encounters in the Nature of Progress operation.

After killing the Mutant Trandoshans (boss number four, but it doesn't have to be in the same run as getting the achievement!), on your way to the Huntmaster, you have to pass through this room on the second floor of the main facility where you get ambushed by a trash pull. As you enter, on the left is the door leading to the stairs (yellow arrow), while on the right is the door to the tram/elevator leading to the spaceport and executive lounge (green arrow).

If you don't have the Cipher achievement, trying to use the lift before you've cleared the trash to Huntmaster won't work, as you'll be locked out. If you do have the achievement however, you can go up to the spaceport right away! And this is what grants you the title. Just be aware that if you do this on your own and you don't have stealth, you'll also die, as the tram spits you out right in the middle of a big trash pull.

However, if enough other people in your group have the achievement, you can all click the button simultaneously and go up together. (Timing is important here though, because the ride becomes unusable the moment the first person gets into combat.) Once the trash group at the top exit is dead, the lift becomes usable for everyone as normal. This is a nice way of skipping the stairs, which - while absolutely hilarious the first time - can get a bit old after a while I suppose.

I Should Be So Lucky

I often feel that SWTOR doesn't get enough credit for its open world content. I would never claim that it's the game's main selling point or that other MMOs don't offer more in that area, but if you listen to some people you would think that there is absolutely no reason for you to simply explore and enjoy the game's environments... but there is!

As an example of this, I really love all the named champion mobs that are scattered around the world. Often they won't drop anything interesting and only very few of them will give you a codex entry, but to me it's interesting enough just to find them. Why is this guy so much stronger than all the other mobs around him? Does his name tell me anything interesting? Am I strong enough to take him down on my own? There's just something intriguing about these mobs, and many of them offer a good challenge if you fight them at level.

Last night Pet Tank and I were making our way to Corellia to work on the main quest line that introduces the Seeker Droid mechanic. We were supposed to search Coronet Zoo, which had undergone some visible changes with the 2.0 patch - the most surprising of which was the fact that a ginormous rancor with the unassuming name "Lucky" was ambling around the area now. We weren't quite sure how to classify him. We hadn't heard anything about there being any new world bosses on Corellia, but he had over seven million hitpoints - more than many operations bosses - so he wasn't clearly just another champion mob.

Figuring that we were pretty invincible as a tank/healer duo (/cough), we attacked. We shaved off about 200k of his health (less than three percent) before he managed to flatten us. We were promptly rewarded for our failure by receiving a new codex entry and title: "Unlucky". Hah!

That immediately raised an obvious question of course: if we did manage to kill him, would that make us "Lucky"? The notion was proposed to other guildies who were online at the time, and they too were interested in finding out.

It took a while to get everyone together, but in the end we formed an ops group consisting of eleven people and took him down. Having a full group made the fight a lot easier, though it also helped that he seemed to be a bit buggy, which meant that some of his attacks turned into random raid warnings that read like error messages instead of actually doing any damage:

[damage] [caster=2397000097892] [target=4611686685367674842] [prim
=target] indeed...

The fight took something like ten minutes and was actually pretty boring in terms of mechanics. Personally I was still really happy to have been there though, because for me it was all about the experience of discovering this boss unexpectedly and then finding that there was more to him than met the eye.

He didn't drop anything too exciting, but we did all get "Lucky".

And now that I've written this post, with that title, I wish that I had thought of recording the fight and then making a video out of it to the tune of this song.

2.0 PTS Blues

So the big news this week was that 2.0 landed on the PTS this Wednesday - minus Makeb that is, which I think makes perfect sense. In practice this means that you get to go to a terminal on the fleet to insta-level to 55, play around with the new talent trees and try out the new hardmode flashpoints and operations if you so desire.

Many of my guildies were extremely excited about this, but my own reaction was pretty much a resounding "meh". I felt like the guild's very own grinch... until my guild leader came online and went on a wild rant about how 2.0 supposedly completely breaks Guardian tanks. I was oddly amused and relieved. Hey, at least I'm not the only one who's not super cheerful anymore!

Maybe it's a sign of increased age (I am turning thirty this year after all...), but I'm becoming more and more cynical when it comes to change in MMOs. I know that some degree of change is always going to be needed to keep things fresh, but all too often too much of it just seems arbitrary and more importantly, simply not a good thing. Looking back at my time in WoW, no matter what people say about the game continuously improving, every expansion after Burning Crusade only served to diminish my overall enjoyment of the game. And while it doesn't take more than a cursory glance at the PTS to see that Rise of the Hutt Cartel is not going to handle the new level cap like WoW expansions do, I still find it hard not to be worried about history repeating itself.

"Did you hear that they are introducing an achievement system?" I was asked in what I assume was an attempt to get me excited about 2.0 after all. "Have I mentioned that I don't like achievement systems?" "No..."

I really liked how SWTOR's codex has always been comparatively low-key for an achievement system, and this new addition with newer and brighter random badges does not thrill me. Isn't it incredibly spoilerific to show all your future companions on any and all potential alts to the player right off the bat by attaching them to achievements? From what I've seen of it, most of the achievements are ridiculously silly and grindy things as well: run each flashpoint twenty-five times, kill a thousand mobs on each planet, kill a hundred mobs with each companion out. I joked to guildies about how once the expansion hits, the starter planets are going to be overrun by max-level characters AoEing everything in sight to get their mob kill achievements. Yeah, that sure sounds like it's going to make the game that much more fun...

Looking at the new abilities and talents was a bit of a let-down for me as well. For my main at least, they are all about PvP and focused on increasing Commando mobility, which is a good thing I suppose, though it still does nothing to address the issue of how easily we are completely shut down by interrupts (many of which are ranged anyway). I'm simply reserving judgement on this one until I see how it works in the live game. I still remember getting super excited about the small 1.4 Combat Medic buffs and then they added bugger all to my survivability in practice.

Seeing Kolto Bomb become a trained ability for all Commandos also honestly felt kind of insulting to me. Why do dps need an AoE heal? I felt that Kolto Bomb was the signature and most fun ability that was unique to Combat Medics before. Now it's just another default thing, and in its place we get... a passive buff that makes it heal more if you're specced into healing. Joy. Oh, and we can now spec into Concussion Charge doing healing to allies as well. O-kay... I still don't know what to think about that one, other than that it's funny to see both myself and my companion get healed when I knock back a bunch of mobs while questing.

At least the overall feel of Commando healing seems to be unchanged, as I got to find out while trying out hardmode Hammer Station with some guildies. The only thing I can say about that is... this is so going to get the nerf bat before going live. The first boss in particular was nothing but crazy spam healing and rotating cooldowns, while we were all wearing a full set of what's effectively going to be the new Columi. I reckon that if you were to go in there with anything less, it would simply be impossible at the current damage levels.

Anyway, apparently this is me now at the dawn of a new expansion: full of ennui. Engaging in endgame activities on the live servers suddenly feels a lot less rewarding because after all there is going to be a gear reset soon, and doing things on the PTS doesn't feel rewarding because, well, it's just the PTS! I'm hoping to return to my usual, more cheerful self soon... but until then, at least I can always level some more alts.