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.)

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!

Pugette's Journey Is Nearing Its End

Pugette, my Commando alt who's levelling through flashpoints and whose adventures I've been recording on video, has reached level 64 today, so she only has only six more levels to go! I expect that my next post about this series will be my last one. I will probably have some more things to say about the project as a whole at that point, but for now, here is once again a summary of the last six weeks/episodes:

Episode 19: Getting Nostalgic in Directive 7 - As I continue to queue for both master modes and a diminishing number of veteran modes, I mostly keep getting instant queue pops for the former but every now and then also still for the latter. This run was part of the second category. Directive 7 is one of those places that always makes me super nostalgic for the game's early days because I associate so many funny stories with it, some of which I shared in the video. The way the run progressed also gave me reason to detour into some adventures I used to have during my time pugging in WoW.

Episode 20: Testing the Puggability of Crisis on Umbara - I was so excited to get the new flashpoint as my random! I had only done it with guildies before and therefore had zero idea what it would be like with a pug. My main impression at the start was that there was a lot of damage flying around and I couldn't imagine doing it without a healer. But when we got to the bonus boss, things got really interesting... I won't spoil the rest!

Episode 21: Unexpected Developments in MM Czerka Core Meltdown - This flashpoint defied my expectations because I remembered the desert boss being very hard to heal while having no issues whatsoever with the jungle boss. Apparently this has been reversed at some point! Also, a 15-minute wait for a new tank after our first one abandoned us led to some interesting experimentation with companion tanking.

Episode 22: Killing ALL THE THINGS in Taral V - At last, Pugette was able to advance her Jedi Prisoner quest line through Taral V, veteran mode this time. I was endlessly amused by the fact that after I explained at the start (and in previous videos) that most people just want to skip most of the trash in this instance, I of course ended up in a group that actually wanted to do both bonuses. The group's zeal for killing absolutely everything was actually pretty comical.

Episode 23: Getting chatted up outside MM Depths of Manaan - Just as I started recording this episode, I got whispers from some random person who started with some innocuous but pointless questions, causing me to predict that he was going to ask if I was a real girl next... and he promptly obliged, allowing me to nicely capture the awkwardness that comes with playing a female character online at times on screen. The instance itself went very well, especially considering that it's one of the tougher master modes. In fact my team seemed to engage in a game of one-upmanship with achievements, trying to convince each other that they were the one who knew the flashpoint best.

Episode 24: Inconsiderate Tanking in MM Esseles - This was a fairly uneventful run, except that our tank seemed to think that "tanking" means constantly charging ahead to solo things and ignoring what's going on with the rest of the group. Fortunately it wasn't much of an issue considering the low difficulty of the flashpoint, and at first I even laughed about it, but after a while it did get a bit annoying.

Happy Grinding!

I've thought for a while that Neverwinter is a perfect secondary MMO to play alongside SWTOR because its strengths lie in exactly the opposite places compared to SWTOR's. Not only does it provide me with a fantasy fix whenever I want one, it's also a great game to grind in. While grinding in MMOs has received a bad reputation over the past few years, I think that it absolutely has its place as a type of content - it just shouldn't be the only thing to do. Sometimes however, my mood is just right for a bit of mindless mob killing or performing other simple in-game tasks without much context that still give me the feeling that I'm progressing my character.

SWTOR has generally been bad at providing this because most content requires attention, whether because there is some sort of story going on or because it's of a difficulty level that requires your full focus (e.g. raiding or PvP). Command XP didn't feel like a good addition at first because it made the mistake of wanting to be the only road to gear in town and on top of that it was painfully slow to get anywhere with it initially. With all the changes and buffs it's received since then, it's in a much better place though, and when Bioware announced that we were going to get a week of double Command XP this week (when I had already taken time off work no less), my ears certainly perked up.

Why would I even grind CXP though? My main's already at rank 300 and in full 248 gear. Well, as I said above, sometimes I actually enjoy a bit of grinding - and with Command ranks advancing at twice the usual rate, I figured that it might actually feel rewarding to work on some alts. Not just for the gear - I read somewhere that dataminers have discovered that achievements for getting all eight classes to Command rank 300 might be coming up at some point. As silly as that sounds, for some reason this is the kind of achievement that really tickles my fancy, and I figured I might as well get a head-start this week.

My third character to hit Command rank 300

On Tuesday I was doing a round of Iokath dailies on my Guardian (before the event had even started) and quickly found myself feeling somewhat confused when after completing only two missions or so, I had already gained two Command levels. It was at this point that I noticed some guildies talking about how most dailies were bugged and giving way more XP than usual - fifteen times more than usual in fact! One of them joked about me being an exploiter now, which didn't really worry me as big part of actual exploiting is doing something that isn't part of normal gameplay... but it certainly felt odd, especially when the double rewards event started soon afterwards and those crazy numbers became even higher. Fortunately CS soon confirmed that nobody had to worry about "exploiting" this bug, and Musco's and Keith's official responses on the forums were examples of unusually good PR management for SWTOR: Basically they confirmed that it was a bug, but they could see why people enjoyed it and didn't consider it game-breaking, so they told people that they should enjoy it while it lasts. Keith even took feedback and noted that dailies were probably due for a CXP boost, even if it shouldn't be quite this much.

So I actually did three daily areas on Tuesday, which is a lot for me as someone who's not a lover of dailies. I had no particular urge to just grind on one character like crazy, but instead saw it as an opportunity to give some love to alts that I usually don't play that much anymore. I was reminded that the alignment-resetting bug in Section X still exists when my Guardian was suddenly demoted from Light V to neutral - good thing she wasn't wearing anything with an alignment requirement. In-between I also queued for a couple of GSF matches, since that was the bonus activity for the day, and got what I think is my highest ever kill count in a match!

(This was on an alt with completely un-upgraded ships by the way, and I still think of myself as a very mediocre if not below average GSF player - but I always do a lot better myself if the rest of my team is strong than if I'm surrounded by people just as bad or even worse than me.)

On Wednesday the featured activity of the day were flashpoints, so I figured I would do some more dailies while waiting for pops, but my Imperial healer alts always got hardmode groups so quickly that they never had time to go anywhere. I actually ran six master mode flashpoints in a row that afternoon - I wouldn't have rated flashpoints as a grindy activity previously since they do require a certain minimum amount of attention, but in actuality it was less than I thought, especially in places like the Black Talon. None of my pugs were awful either, though I was a little sad inside when people insisted on running past the bonus boss in BT even though we were on the right step of the chain and he was right there. Some people just seem to be allergic to doing bonuses in the same way that I'm allergic to skipping them. I was somewhat compensated by tanks who later pushed for the bonus in both Boarding Party and Cademimu, which is somewhat rare from my experience.

In the evening I also queued up on my Marauder, who did get to do some more dailies while waiting in the dps queue. The Czerka Core Meltdown I got into had one of the most heart-breaking pug moments I've ever seen, as after two wipes on the Vrblther (WTB some vowels please; I can't believe I spelled that right) the tank told our Sorc healer that he should probably leave and work on his gear some more and/or get more healing practice before trying hardmodes again. "If that's what you want," the healer said and exited the area - he looked so dejected! It was true though that his gear was pretty poor (not sure if bolster still helps if you're level 70) and he did silly things like spam Force Storm on the adds while people were dying all around him, but I still felt bad for him... I was also surprised because he had managed to successfully heal us through the Duneclaw, and I always considered that one much harder to heal. After he had quit, the tank whipped out his Vette to heal and on the next attempt nobody's health even did as much as dip. Companions, man.

Of course today any plans to continue grinding were foiled by a broken patch that was so bad that Bioware had to take the servers offline again immediately after its drop and haven't been able to bring them back up again at the time of writing this. The current ETA doesn't have them coming back before the end of the evening for us Europeans either, but they've said that they'll consider extending the event to make up for the lost time. Who'd have thought that a day would come where I'd be eager to spend some more time grinding dailies in this game...

Using Kolto Stations in Tactical Flashpoints

The Dark vs. Light event had me running a lot of tactical flashpoints while levelling, and I'm happy to report that on the whole, it's been a pretty smooth experience. When I performed my flashpoint levelling experiment shortly after 4.0, I found that being a healer seemed to help a lot with ensuring any given pug's success, but these past couple of months I've done pretty well even while queuing as tank or dps. That's not to say that there were never any wipes, but those tended to be random screw-ups rather than hard road blocks or any sort of inherent incompetence on part of the player base.

In fact, I got the impression that overall, players have learned to handle tacticals a lot better than they did even a few months ago. Presumably more people have had a chance to get used to how they work and can help their less experienced brethren by making the average run more likely to be successful.

One subject that's been on my mind a lot though is the use of kolto stations on bosses. Again, in most cases there are no issues, but I remember actually getting into an argument with someone in Kuat about how to best utilise them, and since I have a blog (and he presumably doesn't) I get to spread my point of view more widely. Hah!

Basically, there are three core facts to consider about the kolto stations available for boss fights in tacticals:

- Clicking on one casts a big heal on the person doing the clicking and puts an also pretty sizeable heal over time on everyone in the party (assuming they are in the same room, the range is pretty large but not infinite).

- After it's been clicked, the kolto station goes on cooldown for about thirty seconds.

- There is a limited amount of kolto stations available.

From these, three basic consequences arise:

- Since the heal over time gets put on everyone, everyone in the group can use the kolto stations to heal other people.

- However, since the one actually clicking also gets that big heal on top of it, you get the most bang for your buck if the person with the heaviest injuries (which is usually the one with the aggro, whether they are a tank or not) does the clicking.

- Since the kolto stations have a cooldown and there are a limited number of them, it is possible to "mis-use" them by clicking at the wrong time and end up with no option to heal when it's actually needed.

This in turn means that there are basically two things that can go wrong:

From my experience, most deaths and wipes on bosses occur because nobody bothered to click a kolto station at all. Sometimes you'll get people complaining "why didn't you click", but fact of the matter is that nobody is "the healer" (this whole post is working on the assumption that you don't have one, or you wouldn't have to rely on the kolto stations to begin with), so you can't blame any one person for not doing the clicking. If you notice that you have the boss on you and are taking heavy damage, it's best to run for your nearest kolto station at about fifty percent health. For the reasons mentioned above, it's best if you do the clicking yourself.

However, sometimes things can prevent the de facto tank from reaching a station in time, such as when the boss decides to stun or knock them down at a bad moment. If you see that happening and it looks like the injured person won't make it to the console in time, it's OK to click on it even if you're not the one who's the most hurt. Some big bosses also make it really hard to click the kolto stations through their sheer bulk. I remember that on the desert boss in Czerka Core Meltdown I actually had to ask someone else to click for me before, because even though I always had the aggro, the boss's bulk in my face made it impossible for me to actually target the kolto stations even when they were right next to me.

Now, deaths from people being overeager to click are a lot rarer - but they do happen, especially on bosses that have very few kolto stations. Station Guardian One in KDY is a good example, since he's only surrounded by two, which are located on opposite sides of the room. A low-level damage dealer will take quite a lot of damage from him if they have aggro, and personally I found that the only way to survive this was basically to run back and forth between the two kolto stations non-stop. However, this was all ruined if someone else decided to click on one in-between, as the heal over time alone wasn't enough to keep me up until the next cooldown, forcing me to either die or drop aggro and let someone else get killed. It's particularly annoying when I'm almost at the kolto station, nothing is holding me back, and yet someone else clicks on it right in front of me - you're not helping!

Bosses with three kolto stations aren't quite as tricky but can still be close calls depending on how squishy you are - examples where I've had groups struggle include the droid boss in Taral V and HK-47 in False Emperor.

All that said, it's worth reiterating again that your reliance on kolto stations can vary a lot depending on what kind of group you get. If you've got a well-geared max-level character in the group you might find yourself breezing through fights even without a tank or healer and it really doesn't matter who clicks on the kolto stations or when, as they merely serve to get people topped off every now and then. However, if you do find yourself struggling with an encounter for some reason, I've found that making sure that your group optimises their use of the available kolto stations is usually the first step towards success.

Flashpoint Friday: Czerka Core Meltdown

In today's Flashpoint Friday I'd like to talk about Czerka Core Meltdown. Would you believe that I had virtually no useful screenshots of that place? On the plus side, when I ran it today to grab some, I got a nice chatty group with two players who were new to the flashpoint and enjoyed being shown around.

General Facts

Like its "twin", Czerka Corporate Labs, Core Meltdown was released as part of patch 2.3 in August 2013. Said patch was called Titans of Industry, just like the accompanying quest line for both flashpoints.

They were the first flashpoints to be released as role-neutral (though Bioware hadn't come up with the term "tactical" yet), though they still came with a hardmode version that required a trinity group. Both flashpoints were also part of the CZ-198 weekly quest until patch 3.2, which meant that people ran them a lot at max level (then 55)... until that requirement was dropped, that is.

Core Meltdown is a straight continuation of the story started in Czerka Corporate Labs.

Fights

The trash, consisting of guard droids and a couple of "experiments", is fairly unimpressive - like the trash in Corporate Labs, it was clearly designed to be easy on groups without a tank or healer - but at least it's not completely without variety. The bosses however range from interesting to challenging.

The first two bosses can be done in any order and are both large beasts kept in special habitats that also play a role in fighting them. (I'm actually a bit unclear on why you need to kill them to progress to the end, but hey... video game logic!)

One of them, a giant Vrblblblther, summons groups of flappy little adds and needs to be weakened by repeatedly being dragged near giant spores that you need to pop at the right time. The other one, a desert Duneclaw, is surrounded by generators that simulate a sandstorm and do heavy AoE damage. Every time one activates, you have to drag the boss towards it so that his smash attack destroys the generator and ends the sandstorm.

Since the boss needs to be directed in both fights, stable aggro is really helpful, but even if you don't have that, whoever has aggro at any given moment will have to take responsibility and lead the boss towards the right spot. This can be a considerable challenge for a pug! The Duneclaw also has the added difficulty of the sandstorms doing considerable AoE damage, which means that it's the boss most likely to result in a "wipefest" (quote from one of my puggers) if you don't have a healer and a tank and/or several of your party members are low level. If the group is reasonably balanced, it's not too bad. I also remember this boss's hardmode version being a bit of a turning point for my Scoundrel because I failed really hard at healing through the fight as a hybrid spec (back when that was a thing), leaving me with the lesson not to go back in there again unless my character was fully prepared.

The last boss, the Vigilant, is something of an odd duck. He (as well as the trash leading up to him) are obviously supposed to be these scary experimental super soldiers created by Czerka... but they all look like flesh raiders, mobs that can otherwise only be found on Tython. It's kind of hard to be impressed by something that reminds you of the wimpy enemies from the starter zone.

Mechanics-wise, the fight is also strange, as you spend more time fighting the environment - taking down static props and spawned adds - than the boss himself. He just waits until you've finished all of that, then pounces down and pretty much dies within a minute.

Story

After having defeated the corrupt Czerka special executive Rasmus Blys in Corporate Labs, it's time to secure the rest of the facility, and Blys managed to activate the mysterious "Vigilant" security system before he died. What could it be?

After having unlocked a way to the core by shutting down all the security systems, including various animal habitats, you finally face the Vigilant: Turns out the mysterious security system is basically one big monster. Once you defeat it, the facility is yours.

Conclusion

I have kind of mixed feelings about Czerka Core Meltdown. First off, it has the same pros and cons as Corporate Labs: The lack of a meaningful story and of interactive cut scenes makes it feel a bit out of place in a Bioware game but also makes it much more repeatable than many other flashpoints.

That said, I also feel that Core Meltdown doesn't come together as well as Corporate Labs. Individual set pieces are well done, but there's a certain feeling of... "What is all of this?" Finding out that the much talked-about top secret security system is just a slightly silly looking monster is a bit of an anti-climax.

On the other hand, the fights are more interesting than those in Corporate Labs in terms of mechanics, with the Duneclaw in particular being one of the more challenging bosses to be found in random flashpoints today. Depending on who you run with, that can also be a bad thing of course...

My Mercenary's Grand Finale

In what's probably going to be my last post of the year, I'm proud to announce that my flashpoint-levelling Mercenary has hit level 65! The arrival of double XP provided a boost for the last couple of levels that I actually welcomed for a change, and her last few runs were all good. I'll make another post in a couple of days to talk about what I feel I've learned from this experiment, but for now, let me summarise my last couple of flashpoint pugs:

Cademimu
I levelled: 58-59

Cademimu, old friend, we meet again. This was a run with no Sith: just three Mercenaries (including me) and one Sniper. It made me feel like I was part of a proper strike team - I love it when random groups come together like that. Also, with three Mercs we had so much fun with knockbacks!

Team Tech Users

For all the Cademimu runs I've done on this character, this was actually the first one where people trapped the first boss's droid companion correctly and didn't get themselves trapped instead. The Wookiee boss got burned down so quickly that we got absolutely swarmed by Ugnaughts, though we survived. And nobody died on Ortol either, which I believe was a first for me as well (though one guy ate a lot of fire and came close).

In what may well have been the most hilarious moment of this character's pugging career, someone unexpectedly aborted the little conversation at the end for the whole group because he "made the wrong choice", as he had trouble remembering which of his alts were supposed to be good and which ones evil. Hardcore RP on The Red Eclipse, guys!

Czerka Core Meltdown
I levelled: 59-61

Just what I needed to complete the CZ-198 story quest! My companions for this flashpoint were a level 40 and two lowbies who were only 16 and 17 respectively. The latter two gave the impression that they were at least new to the flashpoint, but at the same time they seemed reasonably skilled and learned quickly, even if the Vrblther boss was a bit of a pain until they took note that he needed to be pulled towards the spores.

The Duneclaw had me a bit worried as I had heard unpleasant things about it, and they were certainly true. The AoE damage from the sandstorm generators is absolutely insane considering that groups are supposed to be able to do this without a healer! Even with my heals and constant console clicking we barely stayed alive. In fact, we did wipe twice: first because at least the lowbies didn't seem to know what to do, and then because while I was effectively tanking through heal aggro, I had trouble clicking the consoles at the same time as the giant boss in my face sometimes made it literally impossible to click on them. However, after I complained about this the rest of the group made a point of clicking them for me and we eventually came away successful.

Boarding Party
I levelled: 61-62

This was my first run with three players who were all from the same guild - in this case, the amusingly named "Howling Teapot Gang". We did the bonus boss because someone was hoping for a furniture drop; the boss didn't oblige however.

Blood Hunt
I levelled: 62-63

I'll be honest: I swallowed when I saw that it was Blood Hunt again. Was this going to be another one of those runs where we are fine until Jos and Valk and then everything falls apart?

In an amusing twist, I was actually the one being backfilled this time, with the rest of the group already waiting at the Mandalorian Couple of Doom. Everyone was amused when I immediately knew what was going on and I was told that three people had already quit before me.

You could tell that the three remaining players had had time to practice, because they were absolutely ace at staying alive via kiting and using defensive cooldowns and self heals. The only problem were deaths to knockbacks, which still occurred, especially in the second phase. We wiped two or three times and had one near-wipe where the bosses suddenly reset. In the end we finally managed to get Jos down in phase two and then it was just me and the level 50 Operative left alive, with me spending most of my time healing myself through Valk's sweeping gunfire and the Operative doing desperate dps. I eventually got the killing blow, dinged 63 in the process and the crowd went wild. I'm not kidding, one guy was yelling in all caps that we were gods among men, haha! It was pretty epic, and just like the last time I bested these guys in a pug group, everyone was ridiculously happy at the end.

BOOM!

Hammer Station
I levelled: 63-64

In this run we had a legendary level 65 Marauder who seemed to be suffering from Twitchy Sentinel Syndrome at first, which annoyed me initially, however I soon saw that he was actually pretty mindful of the rest of the group - he respected crowd control and in places where we snuck past bits of trash he waited for everyone to make it past safely before continuing. He also did pretty good dps, which prompted me to inspect him. I was almost disappointed that he was "only" wearing 208 gear. Still, even with that our enemies pretty much melted... on the last boss, one of the lower level dps got knocked to his death right at the start, and by the time he had managed to run back in the boss was already dead.

Boarding Party
I levelled: 64-65

This run was slightly annoying in that we had a level 65 Sniper who kept breaking my CC and the level 29 Mercenary who was marked as a damage dealer appeared to actually be a healer - at least I didn't see him use any actual dps spec abilities and he seemed to spend a lot of time throwing extra heals around. This made everything a bit slow and painful - basically the sort of run I would have declined to join if I had known that there was another healer in the group. Still, in the end it wasn't too bad and we did both bonuses, which is always a big plus in my book. And of course I hit max level!

... while being pebbled in the face by a Jedi consular.

Now I feel I should really do my class story on Dromund Kaas to at least get my ship - it wouldn't do to be asked to join an ops run on Oricon and be unable to actually get there...

When did that happen? (Czerka)

I've said before that I'm not a huge fan of dailies. I'm happy enough to do them occasionally if they benefit me in some way, but I don't really do them just to pass the time, nor do I like it if a game makes them feel mandatory.

Nonetheless the Czerka weekly was one mission that I often picked up on alts before doing a random flashpoint, because it was the one weekly quest associated with dailies that also required two flashpoint runs, and there was always a chance that my random flashpoint might end up being one of the required ones, which would then allow me to kill two birds with one stone if I did the dailies as well. I didn't want that opportunity to go to waste. It was therefore with some surprise that I noticed yesterday, when I logged on one of said alts with the Czerka weekly in her log, that it had been changed to not require runs of Czerka Corporate Labs and Czerka Core Meltdown anymore.

Instead, both were replaced by a single new [Heroic 2+] quest to kill a newly placed champion droid. I went to check it out and found that at level sixty I could solo said droid with ease. I reckon that it should be possible for lower levels as well, though class and gear will probably matter somewhat in that case.

I also tried to find out when this change actually happened and Reddit quickly educated me that it was apparently made with 3.2: "[WEEKLY] Czerka Dissolution and [WEEKLY] Czerka Takeover no longer require completion of the two Czerka flashpoints. Instead, a new daily Heroic 2+ mission has been added to the mission terminal on CZ-198."

I wonder what Bioware's thought process behind this change was. My own guess would be time. When CZ-198 first came out, I actually applauded the step to connect the "group" portion of the weekly to flashpoints instead of heroic quests, as you have reasons to run those other than their connection to dailies, which introduced a new dynamic to getting the weekly done. Plus with the group finder it's always been easier to find a group for a flashpoint than for a heroic quest (as its functionality for finding heroic groups remains woefully inadequate to this day).

However, looking at it now, the end result was obviously that doing the Czerka weekly took quite a bit more time than any of the other planetary weekly quests. Even assuming instant pops and a good group, running through both Czerka Corporate Labs and Core Meltdown would probably take you at least thirty minutes, if not longer. For comparison, most heroic quests associated with weeklies can be done in about five to ten minutes these days. I wouldn't be surprised if this put people off doing the Czerka weekly, even if they did the regular dailies. So I suppose in the interest of keeping things equal this change makes sense.

Did you know about this change?

Day 6: Environments

This is the sixth post in my 10 Days of SWTOR Screenshots challenge. Click on any screenshot to see a larger version.
 

First off, we have a sight that is not particularly pretty, but interesting. As a general rule, SWTOR's worlds are fairly static (and just to be clear: I'm perfectly OK with that; based on experiences in other games I wouldn't actually want the world to change too much), but every now and then something happens that does change the environment - like here on Alderaan, where the Spike from the Rakghoul Resurgence event left a very visible mark. I wonder how many players these days realise that the crashed spaceship in the northern Dune Sea on Tatooine also wasn't originally there at launch?

I always thought that the entrance area to Czerka Core Meltdown looks pretty inviting before it suffers its, erm, core meltdown. Taking this screenshot gave me way more trouble than it should have by the way, as the place repeatedly shut down just before I had found a good angle.

It took me many runs through this place on Hoth to realise just how imposing this Ice Fortress really looks. As I've mentioned before, I just don't look up enough.

NPCs can also add to the environment, though in SWTOR they don't do this nearly as often as I would like. This example of a Krak'jya appearing to peacefully sit by the water was one that stood out to me. There's also a Jungle Wampa on Rishi and another Krak'jya on Yavin 4 that appear to be sleeping (lying down) where they spawn, which means that I always mistake them for corpses and aggro them.

It's one thing to be intellectually aware that Nar Shaddaa is Hutta's moon, but it's quite another to look up into the sky and see Hutta actually hanging there in all its swampy glory. Eww...

This shot of the setting twin suns is from the intro cinematic for the Tatooine stronghold. All the stronghold intros offer some pretty amazing views. Bioware said that they were planning to give us the option to re-watch these cinematics somehow and I'd really like that (especially as changes in your strongholds are actually visible in the cinematic), however I'm afraid that it's probably not something they consider important enough to actually divert resources to it any time soon.

Aurebesh Posters

While sorting through my latest batch of screenshots the other night, I found this picture taken in one of the Czerka flashpoints. It's easy to just run through these without paying much attention to the environment, so I was pleasantly surprised when I actually paused to look at a wall for a moment during a tactical run and noticed this interesting looking poster.

I looked up an image of the Aurebesh alphabet and transcribed the text into Latin letters, which made me think that it must've been from the entrance to the jungle habitat in Core Meltdown, since it says:

Dromund Kaas

On the remote jungle world of Dromund Kaas, the Sith have spent a thousand years building their mighty war machine to prepare for an assault on the galaxy.

Appropriate, but also a little disappointing in my opinion. I would've expected them to tell you something about the critters they were keeping in the habitat instead of just a vague note about their home planet. That's kind of like visiting the lions in the zoo and the sign at the enclosure just tells you about the continent of Africa.

Also, my inner language geek couldn't help but notice that the Aurebesh alphabet has separate letters for sounds like "th", yet on the poster they always just use the ones for t and h together. Sloppy!

A quick look at my screenshot folder also revealed this slightly older screenshot I took of posters on the Republic fleet. The ones on the side say:

Fly with the best
Sign up now!

And the one in the middle says:

Protect the Republic
Become a Starfighter pilot

Now I want to go back to Core Meltdown just to check what they have to say about the desert habitat area/Tatooine. And I should really pay more attention to those signs in general, now that I've figured out how easy they are to transcribe.

Random Revelations

My random PvE pursuits continue.

I actually got all the datacrons except the two Makeb ones on my main now. Yes, even the Green Matrix Shard on Belsavis. I got lucky in so far as it "only" took me about an hour to find the four Rakata Energy Cubes I needed. Pet Tank advised me that I should make the most of my work by parking some alts at the datacron location to see if I could quickly relog to get the Matrix Shard on all of them while the datacron was still active and without having to collect more cubes. Despite of Belsavis' long loading screen, I managed to click on it with a total of three characters, and I probably could have squeezed a fourth one in if I had been optimistic enough to bring a fourth one along in the first place.

Oddly enough, the endurance datacron on Quesh was probably the next hardest one. You used to be able to access it on your own (the SWTOR Spy guide hasn't been updated since those days), but I already knew that wasn't possible anymore. However, until fairly recently, Pet Tank and I were always able to get it with the two of us when we were levelling on Quesh, with one person clicking the outside panel and the other activating the two inside the cave in quick succession. Except the last time we got there, we found that the latter was suddenly impossible to do, even with a speed boost. I got lucky in that when I went to get it on Shin, there was already another guy there looking to group up for it, so I just had to coax Pet Tank into logging in to be our third.

All in all, it wasn't too bad an exercise as I had already made significant progress before this latest hunting session, but I don't think I could run another alt through all of it again right away. I look at the status of the datacron codex category on some of my alts, see things like "2 out of 69" and it just makes me want to weep.

On Imperial side, I've continued running flashpoints on my Operative and my Marauder. In this post-automated-group-finder world, most groups are fairly quiet, but I've noticed that everyone still says hello at the start and goodbye/thank you at the end. People also remain fairly easygoing for the most part. I was surprised to find that not all pugs hate listening to cut scenes or doing bonus bosses, even at endgame. One time I zoned into False Emperor HM and the tank dropped group the instant he saw which instance it was. We ended up three-manning it with Kaliyo tanking and never got a replacement tank despite of having requeued.

My favourite pug was probably the Core Meltdown hardmode run where upon zoning in I noticed that our tank had only about 23k health. I wondered whether I should say anything, but decided to see how things went first and leave it up to the healer to complain if he wanted to. Surprisingly, the healer managed to keep our paper tank upright throughout the whole thing, except on the sandstorm boss, where the other Marauder (who was way overgeared) simply dps-tanked the rest of the fight. It was just a little comical.

In other news, my guild has run EC NiM a lot in the past few weeks, to get tanks for people and to finish up achievements. I still don't have a tank, but at least EC is now the third operation for which I have 100% achievement completion. Every time we loot a chest with Molecular Stabilizers in there, someone makes a joke about how they are so excited about the loot, to mock its supposed worthlessness now compared to how much we all used to crave those "stabs" back before 2.0. Imagine my surprise then, when I checked the GTN to see whether anyone was still buying them, just to find that they were actually selling for more than Exotic Element Equalizers, the current blue crafting materials. I always knew that there was a segment of the population that lingered at 50 - basically anyone who hasn't bought Rise of the Hutt Cartel or subscribed for at least a month since they made it a free addition to the sub. But to see people actually care enough to craft old endgame level gear, to buy old crafting materials at higher prices than current crafting materials... that just boggles the mind.

Last night we undermanned an EV story mode on Imperial alts, and meant to take a guildie with us who was only level 48. He bounced off the door with an error message about needing to be level 50 to enter operations. We all scratched our heads in confusion, since we could distinctly remember taking sub-50 players into ops with us before. I asked on the forums and someone pointed out to me that this was a change made in patch 2.1 - over a year ago. I felt like such a noob... also a bit sad though. Did it really hurt anyone to be able to take along people who were a couple of levels lower?

The Czerka Flashpoints in Review

So I've had a chance to try Czerka Corporate Labs and Czerka Core Meltdown (the two new flashpoints) on both difficulties since my last post. I have to admit - and I hate to say this because in general I really love what Bioware does with flashpoints - that I initially felt a teeny weeny bit disappointed by the experience.

Why? Because both flashpoints are quite thin on story. In fact, I believe that they are the first flashpoints in the game that do not contain a single interactive cut scene. There are some voice-overs as you progress through the building, and a little non-interactive cut scene as you approach the last boss in each instance, but that's it. Previously even the more "dungeon crawl like" flashpoints at least contained a little bit of non-combat player interaction, even if it was just to make a simple light/dark side choice at a console.

I can only hazard a guess as to why Bioware decided to go down this road, and I bet that endgame players who routinely chain-run instances for commendations will love this more streamlined experience with no "space-barring", but to me it feels like an essential part of what makes SWTOR's flashpoints unique has gone missing here. That makes me a bit sad. I liked the intro mission to the whole thing well enough, but then it was just a matter of going in, killing everything in the way and coming out again. That just felt a bit... lacking to me.

There were good things about the experience too of course.

The new model for story modes not requiring a proper trinity group seems to work well. On the longer/tougher boss fights there are "kolto stations" spread around the room which you can click on if your group doesn't have a healer for example. As a side effect the whole thing feels ridiculously easy if you actually do happen to have a tank and healer, but... it's story mode. It doesn't really matter.

As for hardmode, there's the usual debate about whether it is correctly tuned. This forum thread says it's not; supposedly it's too hard. When one of my guild's tanks came out of the hardmodes for the first time, he immediately commented that he found them too easy - but he's also used to tanking nightmare operations. If flashpoints that are supposed to be on par with hardmode Hammer Station and Athiss were challenging to him (keep in mind that unlike Lost Island back in the day, this is not supposed to be a new "tier"), I'd actually be worried.

Myself, I also went in with a guild group in full 72 gear and we had an easy time, unsurprisingly. I did notice however that there were parts, especially on some boss fights, where the incoming damage seemed quite considerable. I can see those being very hard on lesser geared groups.

In regards to trash, I loved the mechanic with the red and blue mobs in Corporate Labs. Silly but fun, even if the red ones do pretty harsh amounts of AoE damage on hard.

On the visual front, Core Meltdown in particular offers some gorgeous environments. I loved all the different habitats. And as one of my guildies commented, the sound effects are pretty atmospheric as well. I'll have to take some more screenshots there next time I get a chance (and assuming the game decides to cooperate with my print screen button, which it didn't tonight).