It always surprises me when I google something that I think should be fairly well known, just because I want to double-check a specific detail for example, and then it turns out there's actually (next to) no content about that thing out there. In this particular case, said "thing" is the bonus boss of master mode Legacy of the Rakata, a flashpoint that has been in the game for about nine years at the time of writing this. So I thought I'd write a quick guide on how to deal with it myself.
I wouldn't say that this is a particularly hard flashpoint boss, but he's not trivially easy either. It's definitely not the type of fight where you can just wing it and hope for the best - you have to understand the boss's abilities and coordinate with the rest of your group.
The boss in a nutshell
He sits inside a small bunker and you'll want to stay inside said bunker for the entire fight, as leaving it while in combat causes annoying womp rat adds to spawn. However, once a minute he also does a massive channelled AoE called Unstable Barrier that is as big as the bunker and that you can't just stand in.
I think the intended way to deal with this was that you would run out during the AoE and deal with womp rats as needed, however I've never actually seen it done this way as it's actually possible to avoid the AoE damage without leaving the building: by breaking line of sight to the boss and hiding behind the vase highlighted in the screenshot below:
What to do as a tank
Make sure you have your back against one of the bunker walls, as the boss frequently does a knockback in a frontal cone and you don't want to go flying out of the building and cause womp rats to spawn unnecessarily. You'll also want to be facing him away from the rest of the group.
Ideally you'll want to have your back against one of the bunker's side walls, so the rest of your party can stand on the other side, and if someone gets aggro, at least they'll only bounce off the wall there and won't be knocked outside either.
When you see the Unstable Barrier cast, run behind the vase to line of sight the boss, then jump back into the fight once the channel is over.
What to do as a damage dealer
Stand behind the boss so you don't get hit by his knockback. Ideally the tank should position the boss in such a way that you'll still be able to have a wall behind you as well, just in case aggro is unstable and the boss twitches. Note that you'll want to stand directly behind the boss even if you're ranged, as standing at a distance will cause him to constantly yank you back into melee range and interrupt your casts.
When you see the Unstable Barrier cast, run behind the vase to line of sight the boss, then jump back into the fight once it the channel over.
What to do as a healer
Stand directly behind the boss with the rest of the damage dealers to avoid both his knockback and his grapple. Focus on healing the tank as the boss hits quite hard, and everyone else should be nicely grouped up for some splash AoE healing. When you see the Unstable Barrier cast, run behind the vase to line
of sight the boss, do some more AoE healing there (the rest of the group should have come with you!), then jump back into the fight once the AoE damage is over.
Note for everyone
Hiding behind the vase and actually breaking line of sight with the boss requires a certain amount of precision. Watch your health bar, and if your health keeps ticking down, you're not in quite the right spot yet.
It's also technically possible to just power through the AoE without hiding at all if your healer is sufficiently overgeared and the group has the right damage reduction cooldowns available. A Gunslinger's Diversion and Scrambling Field are hugely powerful in this fight for example and can negate the majority of an Unstable Barrier's damage to the whole group if deployed at the right time. Various personal damage reduction cooldowns also work. However, I would only advise going with this strategy if the healer is comfortable with it and you have a plan for how to negate Unstable Barrier's damage once every minute for the entirety of the fight.
My guild hits the large Conquest yield target with ease nowadays, even during the most quiet of times, but our smaller Imperial alt guild isn't so lucky, meaning that sometimes, it falls on me and other loyal members to actively grind out the missing points on Sunday or Monday evening to get us over the collective finish line.
Last Monday was one of those days, and after doing some dailies and completing the PvP weekly, I noticed that I was on four out of five for the "Socialite II" objective. I decided that completing it by doing a flashpoint would be a good way of hitting my personal target on one more alt, and consulted my spreadsheet to decide whom to take out for a spin. I eventually settled on my Powertech tank and queued up specifically for Legacy of the Rakata, since she had the Forged Alliances story mission for that one.
Being a tank, queueing for master mode resulted in an instant pop (even though it was quite late) and I loaded in to find myself grouped with a Mercenary, a Sorceror and a Scoundrel healer. "I just did this one five minutes ago," opined the Sorc. I replied with "Sorry, I actually queued for this one in specific" and earned the text equivalent of a "grinning squinting face" in reply.
We got on our way and I noticed on the very first trash pull that things were taking quite long to die. Some of the trash groups in this flashpoint have an elite healer in them, and while I interrupted him as much as I could, it felt like we could barely out-dps the heals that were getting through. On the next pull, I actually ended up loading up Starparse, something I rarely do in flashpoints, to see whether I was just imagining things or whether the numbers were going to back me up. It showed both damage dealers barely breaking 10k dps on an AoE pull, and me even overtaking one of them temporarily. Not just my imagination then.
I didn't say anything to the rest of the group of course, because I consider that kind of thing quite rude. We simply continued on, just very slowly as it were. The first boss in Legacy of the Rakata always takes pretty long to die, even with a good dps group, so with this one it took absolute ages. I didn't look at the clock, but I had a lot of time for random musings while tanking the rancor with my back against the wall.
I wonder if this guy has an enrage... if he does, we're sure to find out! I wonder if there are people who would quit over this or try to kick someone... based on the tales guildies tell about their pug experiences sometimes, players certainly get removed from groups for less. If he didn't keep knocking me out of position every so often, forcing me to refocus, I could have read a book by now.
As it turns out, Warchief Rehkta and his Savage War Beast do not have an enrage, and eventually they died. We moved on once again. I was definitely feeling a bit bored by the (lack of) speed by then, as it was late and I had hoped for a relatively quick run, but at the same time it wasn't the worst tanking practice to rotate through every single one of my defensive cooldowns on every pull. I had noted that the healer was the worst geared member of the group, with an item rating of only 318, but they held their own pretty well.
"Wanna do the bonus boss?", the Sorc asked. God no, went my brain, but what I actually typed into chat was: "Sure, if people want to do it I don't mind." We had skipped so much trash however that we hadn't unlocked him yet by the time we moved past his little bunker, so we just had to proceed towards the second boss, Commander Rand.
I was always under the impression that this guy's add phases were tied to his health percentage, but in this run I learned that there's also a timer, so if you're too slow he'll go into another add phase even if you haven't got him that low yet. I think he was only at about half health by the time we got the third round of adds, but as it turns out, he doesn't bother to summon additional waves after the third one either way. The more you know...!
We'd made it all the way to the last trash pull before the final boss when the bonus objective completed to unlock the bonus boss. Just forget about it, I told myself, nobody will want to go back anyway... but I'd said that I was willing to do it! I had to at least ask one more time, in case people were too shy to make any requests of the tank. (Tanks have so much authority, I tell you.)
"Did you want to go back to do the bonus boss then?" I typed into chat. The Sorc expressed enthusiastic assent and immediately turned around. I remained where I was and looked at the other two. They didn't reply but eventually turned around to follow the Sorc as well. That was that then.
Back at the Infinite Army Prototype's little bunker, we engaged in a brief tactics discussion to ensure we were all on the same page in regards to breaking line of sight behind one of the pots whenever he did his big AoE. Staying in and healing through it was obviously out of the question, but I wanted to make sure that everyone knew and agreed on what to do.
Then I pulled... and it didn't go well. As expected, damage was massive (the fight is tougher on the healer than on anyone else in the party) and we died fairly quickly, I think it was shortly after the first AoE phase.
After we'd revived and while we were running back, I said that I was willing to try again, but that there was no shame in not being able to do this boss, considering how much damage he did and that our healer was the least geared member of our party. "Nah, we can do this!" the Sorc replied. The healer just said that they were going to try their best.
And on the second try... we killed it! Much to my surprise. It was messy (we got multiple womp rats, and the Merc further reduced their damage due to constantly running away and getting yanked in again, even after both the Sorc and I typed out in chat that it was best to just stand behind the boss as one doesn't get pulled from there), and it did take what felt like forever - over seven minutes according to the combat log, during which we took 11 million damage. Turns out this guy doesn't have an enrage either, so just not dying was enough to eventually get there. I congratulated everyone on a job well done and then we proceeded to the last boss.
I'll admit that Arkous and Darok were another fight that I was a little worried about due to their damage output, and my health bar did indeed behave like a yo-yo for most of the first phase, even as I desperately cycled through all my cooldowns. With my guildies we always used to kill Darok first due to the fact that he has a random aggro table and can't be taunted, but I noticed that this group focused on Arkous instead. I didn't complain though, seeing how I was struggling to not die while tanking him, and I thought of how the Sorc had said at the beginning that they'd completed this same flashpoint earlier, so they kind of had to know what they're doing?
Indeed, after Arkous' death, things seemed to get significantly easier for a while, and I realised why - Darok decided to focus on Jakarro at first, and with a friendly NPC soaking up much of his damage output, our healer had an easier time keeping the rest of the group topped up. Unfortunately the good times eventually came to an end when Darok changed his mind and had a go at our healer instead - who kept themselves alive for admirably long, but eventually succumbed to his onslaught. Fortunately the boss was already pretty low by that point, so that the rest of us were able to finish him off before he could get us down too.
And that was that! I was pretty shocked when I looked at the time and nearly one and a half hours had passed. For a flashpoint run with only a single, quick wipe, that's incredibly long - by my standards anyway. However, we'd all stuck together and made it through in the end, which was the most important thing. And I guess the reason I felt compelled to write about this run was that it was also a reminder to myself to not get too hung up on things like dps when it doesn't really matter, as it was ultimately a good run and in fact I learned a lot too.
Back in March I wrote a post on here in which I basically gave Bioware a thumbs-up for the way they handled operations in Legacy of the Sith, mainly for the fact that they actually took the time to properly scale them up to the new level cap this time - unlike in Onslaught. I also noted that the content felt incredibly tough at first, but that it seemed obvious that the plan for the long haul was for things to get easier as we geared up, and I was fine with that.
One and a half months later, I feel like I have to qualify that statement a bit. I was fine with the "plan" as it was originally advertised to us, which included the new operation coming out a month or two after Legacy of the Sith's launch and providing us both with new bosses to learn and access to gear upgrades that would allow us to take our power level in the legacy operations up a notch.
Unfortunately, the reality is that LotS has now been out for almost three months and we haven't had any word about as much as a potential release date for 7.1. Raiders have had plenty of time to gear up to the current item level cap of 330, which has certainly helped with making content a bit easier, but truth be told, a lot of operations are still incredibly hard.
Last week my regular team decided to venture into Gods from the Machine on veteran mode, a difficulty setting that we'd cleared with relative ease during the 6.x patch cycle. This time around, we spent hours wiping on just the first boss. When we eventually got him down, one of our tanks commented that the fight had felt a bit like the way it was when it was first released, back when Bioware wasn't planning to ever add a master mode for Gods and intentionally made it quite a bit harder than other veteran modes.
I checked the public logs on Parsely after that and was shocked to find that not a single log for Izax (the last boss of the op) on veteran mode had been uploaded since 7.0. For Scyva, the boss just before him, there was exactly one recorded kill. Now, this doesn't mean that nobody has cleared Gods from the Machine on veteran mode since Legacy of the Sith came out - they might have done it and not uploaded a log after all - but it does point towards the number of raiders capable of doing this content being vanishingly small. And this is the "medium" difficulty for this operation we're talking about!
Now, you could argue that Gods is perhaps a cherry-picked example, as other operations are not as bad on veteran mode and instead have people running into a difficulty wall a couple of bosses into master mode. But regardless of where exactly it happens, it can still be kind of demotivating to come up against these massive number checks that make some of these fights harder than they've been in years. Again, I was totally fine with this being a temporary state of affairs, but the longer we have to wait for Bioware to release the new operation and its new gear tier, the more we run the risk of some people just throwing in the towel out of frustration. Because it's one thing to re-progress old content at the launch of a new expansion, and another to have that same old content actually get considerably harder.
All of this isn't helped by issues of class balance. It's a topic I actually really dislike because I find number crunching quite boring, and I usually don't play at the sort of level where small imbalances make that much of a difference. The problem is that Bioware made major changes to all the classes with LotS, which was pretty much always going to result in worse balance at launch than we've had in a long time - and when you combine this with the highly unforgiving content tuning, more players than ever are going to find themselves in a situation where their preferred class might not be able to do the harder content at all.
Good luck doing some fights without a Scoundrel/Operative healer for example, who can put out nearly twice the AoE healing of a Commando or Sage due to a new, extremely overpowered utility they've been given. The situation is similar for damage dealers - again, Parsely provides some interesting stats here if you look at their numbers for Nefra NiM for example, who functions almost like a target dummy and shows dps Vanguards/Powertechs being able to do nearly twice the damage of Gunnery Commandos. It doesn't really matter on Nefra, but it's not hard to see how on fights with tighter dps checks (of which there are plenty now), you'll have issues if you have people who play classes that do significantly less damage than others.
I know that this isn't really a pressing matter in the sense that it only affects a very small portion of the player base - after all, only a certain percentage of subscribers do operations at all, and an even smaller slice of that group does the harder content. However, Bioware has already decided to commit some resources to ops players this expansion by taking the time to re-tune the legacy operations and giving us a completely new raid (eventually...) - I just don't want them to stumble so close to the finish line by frustrating and losing their audience.
(And on a completely selfish note, as an officer in a long-running guild, I want my loyal ops teams to thrive and have fun, and we're definitely at risk of having certain people run out of patience.)
Last autumn I wrote a post on my WoW blog called "The Toxicity of Damage Meters", in which I laid out why the general WoW community's obsession with measuring everything, all the time, is very off-putting to me. In that post, I cited SWTOR as an example of how to do damage meters right, since SWTOR's more restrictive personal logging gave you access to all the (in my opinion) legitimate uses for meters such as wanting to increase your personal performance or having a shared log in a progression team to better understand damage patterns in difficult content, without any of the downsides such as other players constantly judging everyone around them by their numbers - because you couldn't know anyone's else's numbers unless that person explicitly joined a shared group log with you.
Naturally, not long after I wrote that post, I found out that with the Legacy of the Sith expansion, SWTOR was going to get rid of the personal logging system it had used for a decade, and was instead going to replace it with a system where everyone can see everything, just like in WoW.
Naturally.
My first reaction to this news was very negative, and I was low-key kind of hoping against all reason that Bioware might end up changing their mind at the last minute, but they didn't. Legacy of the Sith is here, and now you can see everyone and anyone's numbers, whether they want you to or not.
Now, the good news is that SWTOR hasn't changed into WoW overnight. Some of that might simply be lack of general awareness about the change to combat logging, considering that it's still early days, but I think that even as this knowledge becomes more widespread, the SWTOR community as a whole isn't really in danger of changing into a bunch of people obsessed with parses. There have always been many similarities between the two games, but there are also important differences that continue to affect the way people behave.
For example group finding and PvP are not cross-server, so if you're a jerk to someone, there might be consequences. Or how about the fact that SWTOR doesn't allow addons? StarParse, the tool most commonly used to turn the combat log into a more readable format, is more of a "companion app", so it's not automatically there every time you log in - I'm sure I'm not the only person who uses it but doesn't actually think about firing it up unless I'm about to enter an operation... which makes it harder for the average person to think about numbers all the time. Not to mention that I think most SWTOR players just aren't as fussed about numbers as players of other MMOs, what with the game's heavy focus on story. I have seen some negative comments about low dps on the forums and in general chat though - places that are rarely friendly at the best of times, mind you, but at least they didn't have that particular stick to wield against their fellow players in the past.
Anyway, this post isn't about anyone behaving badly towards anyone else over what they saw on a damage meter. It's about the impact this change has had on me personally and the way I see myself in the game.
My focus in SWTOR has been on playing healers from day one. I levelled my very first character with my boyfriend at the time, so I specced into Combat Medic as soon as I unlocked my first talent point and never looked back. While I also played and levelled other roles later, healer has always remained my identity, and the only role I played in progression content. I looked at healing meters there to see how well me and my co-healers were sharing the burden, because I didn't want to feel like I was making things difficult for anyone else, but I was always quite content with what I saw.
On the rare occasion when I took a damage dealer to a casual ops run, I usually left StarParse off, even if others were trying to coax people into joining the group log for the "fun" of competition. I knew perfectly well that my dps wasn't great, but I didn't really need to know the details, and I didn't want to opt into serving as a prop for other people to feel better about themselves, or be made to feel like I was making the experience worse for others with my low numbers.
(As an aside, a long time ago, during the early days of the game, I did log myself on the training dummy and tried to improve my performance as a Gunslinger and dps Guardian at one point. When the numbers on the Guardian weren't great, I asked some guildies for advice who enjoyed parsing, and got a response along the lines of "wow, those numbers really are bad, lol" but no actual tips for how to improve. That forever put me off letting others see my dps numbers ever again.)
However, with the combat log change, it was time to face the music. I mean, sure, I technically could've continued to not look at my numbers, but now others would be able to see them anyway, and I figured if that was the case I'd at least like to know what they were seeing, so that I'd know the appropriate amount of shame to feel (or whether I was secretly not so bad after all... who knows?!)
Since healers are always in demand, I still ended up in the healer role for most of our casual ops runs, until we suddenly had too many healers for an Eternity Vault the other week and someone asked me whether I was okay to go dps. I said sure, since I had actually set up a Telekinetics loadout for my Sage healer anyway that I used for questing.
Of course, doing dailies and fighting an operations boss are very different things. I was suddenly very aware of the fact that my legendary implants were both for healing, that I didn't have a dps Tactical, and not even enough accuracy to be effective at fighting an ops boss. I also wasn't entirely sure what my rotation was supposed to be and basically just had a quick glimpse at a guide on my second monitor hoping to reassure myself of the very, very basics, but knowing full well that I wasn't going to suddenly execute a 24-button rotation perfectly.
In the end, the EV run went perfectly fine, but seeing my numbers was pretty painful. We ran with five damage dealers and I was in last place by quite a margin. And while I knew that I had a number of factors working against me, I had really been trying to do the rotation right, so I still felt quite bad.
Which then left me wondering what to do about it, with two basic paths open to me: either don't join ops as dps anymore, or get better at it. The second would normally be more appealing to me, as I do like a bit of a challenge like that, but the thing is... reading dps guides for any class in SWTOR makes me feel so old.
You see, I actually started my raiding career back in WoW as a damage dealer - but that was fifteen years ago during the original Burning Crusade, when many classes could literally do their max dps rotation by simply pressing a single button over and over again, and my shadow priest was considered very sophisticated with her priority system that involved no less than five (!) different abilities. I remember practising the hell out of even that.
Yet when I look at many dps guides for SWTOR, the rotations never seem to involve less than several dozen steps. I'd have to practice for weeks to get good at any of them, and that's assuming I'd be able to get the hang of them at all. I just don't think I have the will or energy for that kind of stuff anymore, especially when it's just to make myself feel better about my numbers on the rare occasion when someone asks me to dps in EV.
Maybe I just need to learn to be more Zen about the knowledge of just how bad I am at dps, but let's just say that this is easier said than done.
I never actually wrote a follow-up to my confused post about day one of the Legacy of the Sith PTS, but that doesn't mean that nothing's been happening. Bioware did provide some more information and context for what they were trying to achieve with what was on display there soon after, but to be honest none of it really changed my opinion from "I'm not really sure about this, but I guess I'll wait and see". The rather confusing initial implementation of the new system on the PTS - which required you to wade through several forum threads to have even the faintest idea of what's going on - didn't exactly help either.
Plus as previously mentioned, the first advanced class/combat style to be tested was Guardian, which I play only casually, so combined with all the other limitations I didn't feel like I could really give any good feedback on that one. After that they tested Sentinels, which I know even less about, as Sentinel/Marauder is probably my least favourite advanced class in the game right now and I play it very little.
However, this past week they added Sniper and Operative, and while I'm not big on Snipers and Gunslingers either, Operative/Scoundrel is something I do play somewhat more frequently, at least in the healer role, so I thought it might be worth checking out.
One thing that was immediately helpful was that they added a very rough work-in-progress UI, which just makes it so much easier to understand what's happening. I wrote in my last post that it felt like they were trying to return to skill trees of a sort, but the new visuals make it clearer that it's more of a merge of the current specialisation "line" and the utility system. So you'll still get a lot of abilities that are tied to your spec as you level up, predetermined like it is now, but then at certain levels, instead of getting a utility point, you may be given a choice of three abilities or passives that modify existing abilities tied to your spec, e.g. as a healing Operative one of my early options was to choose between three passives that added special effects to existing heals. Somehow just seeing it like that made the whole thing immediately less intimidating to me.
In terms of pruning, Operatives didn't seem to have been hit too badly from my point of view. There was a bit of early panic when Sleep Dart was missing from the initial PTS build, which immediately sent everyone's minds racing about the implications of a potential end to crowd control from stealth (no more stealth caps in PvP?!), but that turned out to just have been an error and they added it back in almost immediately. As a healer, all of my heals were still there, and the only thing I noticed being conspicuously absent was the class's raid buff.
Where abilities had been turned into choices, forcing you to pick one out of three, this mostly seemed to be directed at perhaps nerfing the class a bit in PvP by making people choose between things like having more stuns or extra survivability. I don't really have a good read on the details, but that doesn't seem too bad a concept... though the hard stun becoming an elective does make me wonder about PvP balance a bit, even as someone who's more of a PvE person. Every single class having a hard stun on the same cooldown was one of those things the original devs decided to include as an easy balance move... and I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad thing to move away from that, as being stunned in PvP isn't exactly fun, but I can see changing that baseline having a major effect on overall class balance.
With that in mind, I originally wanted to have a bit of a go at seeing how this new setup worked in PvP, but whenever I was on the PTS there weren't enough people queueing. So I went to do a couple of level 75 veteran flashpoints with my guildies instead (since level scaling still isn't implemented the way it is on live). First we did Objective Meridian, in which I healed and it was... actually kinda challening! We even wiped once or twice, and defeating Tau took absolutely forever (which wasn't helped by the fact that only two of us were still standing by the end). This didn't seem down to any weakness of the classes though; more a result of us having none of our usual legacy buffs and all playing characters/roles that we weren't necessarily 100% familiar with. For example one of the new utilities I picked was actually a major buff to one of my heals but then I completely forgot to use it appropriately to take advantage of that.
After that we went into Spirit of Vengeance, and as one of my guildies wanted to try his hand at Operative healing too, I respecced to Concealment - a spec I've actually never played on live, though I did play its Republic equivalent (Scrapper Scoundrel) for a bit when I took my Scoundrel through KotET on master mode. Even with everything being stabby knife moves instead of punches it quickly came back to me how there's a certain rhythm to that spec in terms of building Tactical Advantage and spending it, and I actually found it quite fun, even if I couldn't really tell whether/how it was changed from live. Oh, and we wiped on this flashpoint too, so it wasn't just my healing earlier! But still, it was good fun.
My main takeaway from this round of visiting the PTS is that I'm feeling much more optimistic about what I'm seeing. A big part of my initially rather negative reaction was due to the way the ability changes seemed to have come completely out of the blue, but having a better understanding of what's happening and why certainly makes it all look a lot more palatable and like less of a big deal than it felt like initially.
It's been a while since I've written one of these! I did however have a few more bosses on my list that I really wanted to cover, and one of them is Syndic Zenta in master mode Traitor Among the Chiss. I've been told by some people that they haven't had that many issues with her, but to me she's been a right pain in the rear on more than one occasion, which I think makes it worthwhile to share what I have learned, for the benefit of others who might be having the same difficulties.
The boss in a nutshell
She starts on the floor, then jumps up onto the walkways above her, changes position a few times, then jumps down again and covers the floor in lightning periodically. There are also a lot of adds, and during the top phase she throws some targeted circles around that you should avoid placing on other players. That really is the gist of it, but once again I'll happily point you towards Vulkk or the old Dulfy guide for more details on the mechanics.
What to do as a tank
At the start of the fight, round up the adds on the ground as best as you can while damage dealers focus on AoEing them down. Once Zenta goes up, follow her (either by leaping or via using one of the available grappling hooks) and position yourself just around the corner from the ramp that leads up onto the walkways. Feel free to taunt and hit the boss occasionally, but she shouldn't really be your main priority at this point as she doesn't actually hit that hard. It's more important that you focus on rounding up the adds as they appear and do your best to keep them from overwhelming your healer (who should be standing near you.)
Once Zenta goes down again you're basically racing against a soft enrage as more and more adds will be spawning in rapidly. Use everything you've got to get their attention while staying alive (AoE taunt, stuns, damage reduction cooldowns etc.) and hope that the dps can kill her in time before you and the healer both get overwhelmed.
What to do as a damage dealer
Start off by killing the adds on the ground, then dps the boss until she goes up. Follow her and continue to focus your damage on her, but keep an eye on the tank and healer, and jump over to them occasionally to mop up the pile of adds that will accumulate on them. When Zenta goes down again, just nuke her from range if you can.
If you're playing a melee class, make sure to wait a few seconds as she will cast her big lightning floor move almost immediately, and you don't want to jump right into it. Then jump down after it and nuke her with all you've got (while also hitting what damage reduction cooldowns you've got available) before the swarms of unending adds overwhelm your tank and healer.
What to do as a healer
At the start, you can hide behind a nearby crate to the left to avoid getting sniped. Once Zenta goes up, stick close to your tank as you will be getting healing aggro on any and all adds that spawn, and you'll rely on the tank picking them up to stay alive. Keep an eye on dps taking damage as well, though it shouldn't be too bad on them. Once Zenta goes down again, leave the damage dealers to their fate and focus on just keeping yourself and the tank alive as best as you can. If you can survive until Zenta's defeated, all remaining adds vanish automatically.
I previously wrote about Commander Mokan, whom I consider one of the hardest flashpoint bosses in the game. The thing that makes Mokan hard is understanding the tactics involved - however, once you've internalised all the steps, the actual execution isn't all that tricky aside from the healer having to be capable of a certain degree of multitasking.
Today I'd like to write about a boss that is also one of the hardest flashpoint bosses in the game, but for completely different reasons: the Umbaran Spider Tank at the end of Crisis on Umbara. This one's no puzzle at all (stay out of the fire and kill adds) but the problem lies in the requirements for perfect execution, which are pretty harsh on master mode. Also, unlike Mokan, killing the Umbaran Spider Tank is not optional, meaning that he's driven many a group to despair, and pugs will often drop out as soon as they see that their queueing for a random master mode has landed them in Umbara, even though it only takes 20-30 minutes to complete if you can one-shot everything. The problem is that most groups won't get that experience; instead they'll just wipe a lot and often end up abandoning the whole thing.
I am not above these problems myself, and have only ever had a single what I would call a "perfect kill" of this boss, where we killed it right where it spawns, it was a one-shot and everyone was still alive by the end of the fight. To this day I'm not entirely sure how we did that; I think our dps must have just been awesome that day. More commonly there've been at least a handful of wipes involved, and by the end we're often just as dead as the Spider Tank, with the only difference being that we're allowed to get up again and loot while the tank does not get that luxury.
That was until I was taught the strategy I describe in this post. It's fair to describe it as "cheesy", as it involves fighting the boss in a way that clearly wasn't exactly what the developers had in mind when they designed the encounter, but as it doesn't actually avoid any of the mechanics I don't consider it exploitative. Just like the best way to beat the Purifier Droids in KotET chapter four on veteran/master mode is to leg it into a different building, this fight can be made a lot more manageable by moving the boss and forcing the add spawns into a funnel that makes them a little easier to control. It's no miracle solution to suddenly making the fight easy, but it does take a significant amount of pressure off the group by giving them more wiggle room to handle the adds before they maul the healer.
The boss in a nutshell
Once again I can recommend what both Vulkk and Dulfy have to say about this fight if you want to know the exact details of every ability the boss does, but the short of it is that on top of damaging the tank it does both a painful knockdown and places fire circles on random group members that make it a constant challenge to stay alive. At certain health percentages a wave of adds spawns in, and once the boss gets low on health an unending stream of adds begins, forcing you to burn it quickly. While dps is important, the main challenge of the encounter is simply staying alive, as a particularly unlucky combo of the same person getting stunned and hit by a fire circle can be absolutely devastating to their health bar, and all this happens while the healer will struggle not to get eaten by the adds.
What to do as a tank
After the little cut scene has played, send the rest of your group back down the hill, just around the bend where a bunch of kolto barrels are lying on the ground. Pull the boss and start running down the hill; it will evade at some point. Then repeat this manoeuvrer - this time the boss won't evade but will instead follow you all the way down to the rest of the group.
Try to position the boss so that it's not straight up against the cliff face, so that there's a bit of room to run around it on all sides. Keep it facing away from the rest of the group as much as you can but run out of fire when you must. When adds come down the hill and run past you, you can also hit them with AoE; hopefully the dps should be able to take care of them for the most part though. What to do as a damage dealer
After the little cut scene has played, run back down the hill to where a bunch of kolto barrels are lying on the ground. Wait for the tank to bring the boss all the way down to you, then start to dps. Try to stay away from each other to avoid more than one person being hit by any ability, and run out of fire circles as quickly as you can. Also try to retain some awareness of where the healer is hiding, so that you break line of sight as little as possible and don't run out of range.
Whenever adds come down the hill, try to resist the urge to run up and get them as soon as they get close - let them come down. By default they will aggro on the healer, and if the healer breaks line of sight properly the adds should bunch up nicely close to them, at the bottom of the hill. At that point you want to charge in and kill them quickly (but still avoid standing on top of other dps or the healer while doing so).
When the boss is at around thirty percent health, mop up any adds that may still be around before continuing to dps (just look at the red dots on the mini map). At about twenty percent an infinite stream of adds will start spawning, so just focus on nuking the boss at that point. With the adds taking some time to run down the hill, you should be able to kill the boss before they reach the group and start causing trouble, so that you then only have to deal with getting rid of them after the boss is already dead.
What to do as a healer
After the little cut scene has played, run back down the hill to where a bunch of kolto barrels are lying on the ground. Try to hide behind one of the "tentacle trees" there, or on the other side of the path. (See the spots marked with a healer marker in the above screenshot.) Move when the boss puts a fire circle on you and if you lose line of sight of group members you need to heal, but try to stay behind one of the trees as much as you can, so that the adds will have a long way to run when they come in. Once they start bunching up near you, the dps should quickly AoE them down.
Note for everyone
One of the reasons to fight by the kolto barrels is that you can pop them for some extra healing if it feels like the healer can't keep up with the damage at any point. Keep in mind that they don't respawn though, so if you use them all up and wipe you don't get them back for the next attempt.
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.
I expected these to be really tough based on what I remembered from veteran mode (and recalling a guildie wiping endlessly on chapter ten one night), but things weren't nearly as bad as I thought - it was almost a breeze!
Ironically, the fight that challenged me the most was the one where I least expected it, and that was the one against the junction guardians Faedral and Zaamsk. I noted on veteran mode that it "must be rough without a long-duration crowd control" but that it seemed okay as long as you did have one, and I figured that master mode would be the same. In reality... it was and it wasn't. I can hardly begin to imagine how you would beat these two without crowd control (actually, I found a video of a Juggernaut doing it successfully here after I wrote this), but even with my Sage having Force Lift available it was still the fight that caused me the most deaths in these two chapters. Even after I started the encounter by immediately taking Faedral out of the picture, Zaamsk's attacks on their own still hit nightmarishly hard. You just could not get hit by one of his red circles, or take an entire Full Auto to the face, as either would be instant death, not to mention that there were adds as well. This is the one fight I really would have wanted to record for this post but unfortunately I messed up so I didn't get a usable recording. I didn't want to replay the entire chapter just for the purposes of getting a video, so you'll have to make do with a verbal description.
Basically the way I finally beat Zaamsk was by interrupting / dodging out of as many of his attacks as I could and kiting him towards the entrance at the same time. Whenever he did that jump into the air that ends with him unavoidably landing on your head, I used what meagre damage reduction cooldowns I had. (I specced into the utilities to gain DR from both my instant self-heal and my aggro drop fairly early into this playthrough.) I was almost surprised when I got him down, though of course by that point I was all out of tricks and died to Faedral as soon as he came out of CC.
Conveniently, this is where I discovered that if you manage to kill one of them, he stays dead and at least on the next attempt you only have to deal with one enemy, which helps a lot, though it still didn't prevent me from dying to Faedral alone even more often than I had to Zaamsk. I seemed like I just couldn't take any of his attacks at all. So I remembered Captain Lazna Delothrea and went for the "heroic moment full burn while chaining stuns" strategy again, and that worked on the first try.
The Knights of Zakuul in the Overwatch were as annoying as I remembered from veteran mode, but as dps I found it much easier to kill them with a bit of kiting, and some I just "skipped", which is to say I made a run for the exit as far as I could, died, and then respawned without having to bother with them at all.
Tayvor Slen was easier than I expected and I got him down on the first try, though it was a close call at the end. This fight was the only one I actually recorded out of these two chapters, so here you go:
In chapter eleven I mainly remembered the droid boss near the end being an issue, but he was once again surprisingly easy as dps compared to the healing role I had chosen for veteran mode, as Aric just had to stand there and heal while I ran around and quickly controlled / picked off any adds.
The hardest mob in chapter eleven (in my opinion) was actually one of the random Knights guarding the back of the building, as he would go in and out of stealth and had some weird special attack called something like Stealth Strike, which hit like a truck, had huge range, and - despite of the name - didn't actually require him to be in stealth. I did eventually get him down by once again relying on kiting as much as I could.
Like my Imperial alts, my master mode KoTFE project has been somewhat challenging to keep up with, but I haven't forgotten about it and am in fact up to the start of chapter ten now.
Chapter seven was fairly uneventful. There were several fights that would have had the potential to be challenging, but none of them actually turned out to be. In fact, the only time I remember dying is when the Exalted sicced his minions on me, and that's because the previous cut scene has you transition straight into combat with a significant number of mobs and I didn't manage to get the situation under control quickly enough to not have them kill me. When I actually had the chance to initiate combat on my own terms it went just fine.
Chapter eight had another walker that was a bit annoying (I'm really starting to dislike walkers of all kinds on my Sage) but the real surprise came in the form of Captain Lazna Delothrea, an unassuming Knight of Zakuul with some weak Skytrooper adds. I did remember her being a bit tricky on veteran mode, but on master she was an absolute killer, pouncing on you from quite a distance, just to follow this up with a stun and vicious stab that would reduce you to about a quarter of your health in one go.
I initially tried to go for my usual quick burn strategy, but since I seemed to be unable to take more than about a third of her health off before she came after me, I decided that I'd probably be better off trying to outlast her in my healing spec. I did a lot of fiddling then: getting Koth's meagre influence level of five up into the twenties at least, and trying to get HK-55 to make himself useful in some manner. Unfortunately I learned that the latter's contribution to the fight is worse than useless: he's immune to damage but also doesn't do any, though his useless shots are still capable of breaking crowd control somehow. I tried kiting around a container on the right, towards the platform at the back, around the structure on the left, but nothing worked as the Captain's ability to close any gaps quickly was just too powerful.
After more than a dozen wipes or so I finally grew sufficiently tired to google for advice and found this one video of someone successfully doing the fight - by going for a quick burn and using various legacy abilities from his heroic moment to chain more stuns than usual. Reminded me a lot of a video that an anonymous commenter linked in response to my post about KotET chapter six, in which I had stated that I couldn't see anyone killing the Rancor in the pit on a melee class. In said video a similar tactic to chain stuns was used to do just that.
The only thing that had me sceptical was that the video maker had been playing an Assassin - a class that is not short on defensive cooldowns, unlike my Sage. Still, I gave it a try... and what do you know, it worked, though it was close. Made me feel rather sheepish for having wasted so much time on all those drawn-out kiting attempts that didn't really go anywhere.
The final Arcann fight of the chapter was comparatively easy, though I decided to record and upload it to YouTube anyway, since the only other video of it I could find didn't show how you can use the power conduits around the area to stun him and take down his absorption shield.
Chapter nine doesn't actually have a master mode of course, but I still wanted to mention it just to repeat my annoyance about how it still has icons for veteran and master mode in the chapter interface that can't be filled. Just make it like the HK bonus chapter already and take them out.
Just like when I did them on veteran mode, I'm finding that the KotFE chapters seem to fly by on master mode, and I'm actually eager to do more. They are much better balanced than the KotET ones, and while I still think that giving trash mobs the ability to kill you in three hits is not the best way of creating difficulty, I've got to admit that I'm deriving a certain entertainment out of puzzling out how to best tackle each fight. It certainly turns all the mobs between cut scenes into more than annoying bumps on the road.
After respeccing my Sage in chapter three I actually left her in Telekinetics spec (just to promptly go "oops" when I joined a story mode EC run as a healer and didn't realise that I was still set up to dps until we pulled the first boss). Burning things down quickly feels much more fun than endlessly drawn-out engagements, and the fact that I don't really know what I'm doing also adds a dimension of learning how to play to the whole thing.
Chapter four was fairly unremarkable; I just kept practising my default tactic of trying to nuke things as quickly as possible while slowly back-pedalling away from them. What was kind of funny was that I momentarily forgot that part of the chapter actually takes place in the outside world and the mobs were therefore not actually dangerous in any way - I've never crept around the Eternal Swamp that carefully before! The iknayid mini-boss at the end of the chapter killed me with its adds, but not before I had successfully taken down the boss itself.
In chapter five I remembered the Skytrooper Control Droid giving me trouble on veteran mode and the master mode version didn't disappoint either, though the difficulty seemed about the same actually. Playing as dps with a healing companion instead of as a healer with a tanking companion I had to change my approach a little however, making sure to get aggro on adds quickly so they wouldn't all shoot Lana, while also being cognisant of the fact that she wasn't able to keep up with healing me through the damage very well. In the recording I made of the fight you can see me messing up in more than one way, such as accidentally tab-targeting to the boss while he was immune to damage, thinking of using heroic moment way too late and letting Lana die, but I still made it through. I think the most useful tip I can give is to pause for a moment when you're down to a single add to give yourself a chance to get both you and your companion healed up as much as you can, as that's about the point at which you will be exposed to the least damage.
Chapter six featured all the fun of the Scion trial of course, which I recalled being interesting on veteran mode as well. I decided against uploading any recordings of it in the end however as I didn't find any of the fights too tough, despite of suffering a few deaths. With the first two batches of Scions it certainly helps that if you kill one of the two, the killed one won't respawn even if you die, leaving you to contend with only a single enemy afterwards. With the second batch (Vanat and Berusal) I even found that after dying to their initial ambush, I could just pull them separately (or at least Berusal didn't even aggro after I cast a CC on Vanat). Just watch out for Force Crush, that was still a one-shot on me even in full 248 gear.
The end of the chapter featured the fun of fighting Heskal without a companion of course, which went down similarly to how I did it veteran mode, with me focusing on doing damage while he was channeling Debris Storm (while avoiding its red circles obviously) and spending the rest of the time trying to line of sight his Turbulence, which still took off most of my health even in full 248 if I allowed it to hit me. It is interruptable the normal way too, but with my fairly long cooldown on that it felt safer to "save it" for situations when I might find myself unable to use line of sight instead. The parts when he summoned the various vision adds were actually kind of funny due to how little health they have: As I have the utility that causes your bubble to cause a bit of backlash damage, they basically kept killing themselves instantly as soon as they attacked.
I expect the next few chapters will continue to be relatively painless - the ones I'm most worried about based on my veteran mode experiences are chapter ten for its insane trash and sixteen for a potentially even more merciless incarnation of the Arcann fight. Nonethless, I'm actually looking forward to all of them!
With over a year having passed since I completed KotFE on veteran mode and four months since I finished KotET on master mode, I've been overdue for ticking that last achievement off the list: KotFE master mode. To be honest, the main thing that was holding me back was indecision in regards to which character to take into it.
My Sage was an obvious choice. As my main alt she's the character I know how to play best after my main, and she's really overdue for getting KotFE and beyond done from a story point of view as well. I had originally planned to take her through it as my second character after my main, but then kept putting it off due to worries about another light side playthrough not resulting in enough variety and all of the consular companions except Qyzen remaining missing. With Iresso having returned recently and Zenith at least on the radar, there's definitely some incentive there to finally get started in order to see their return stories. On the other hand... Sages are kind of lacking in damage reduction cooldowns, and just how many times do I want to heal things to death anyway?
It was mainly the latter which made me consider my Gunslinger as an alternative choice. Taking a damage dealer with great survival cooldowns through the content just seemed much more appealing from a mechanics point of view. Then again, I already have a smuggler all caught up with the current storyline; could I really justify taking another through when I hadn't completed KotFE/KotET on all base classes yet?
Sentiment and story eventually won out over gameplay considerations, and so Golu began her journey into KotFE. I was immediately treated to some cringe-worthy cut scenes as the bug that causes certain armour sets to display their Imperial look on Republic side apparently still isn't fixed yet.
Anyway, as was my experience with veteran mode, so far KotFE's master mode hasn't been nearly as bad as KotET's, which is why I figured I could summarise the first three chapters in a single post.
I knew chapter one couldn't be that hard since I remembered that there had been a time when people had made a point of speed-running it for CXP, to the point where Bioware felt the need to nerf its rewards. I died a couple of times to some of the skytrooper mini bosses since my damage output was low and I misjudged what to interrupt sometimes, but that was a simple learning experience. Only the last boss seemed to pose a little bit of a challenge, but even he was relatively easy to defeat with a bit of pillar-humping.
Chapter two was a similar experience, which was again not unexpected, as that too had had a reputation for making a good CXP farm for a while. The trash hit less hard as well. I had to laugh though when one of the mini bosses that are based on your class literally one-shot me when I failed to interrupt one of his casts.
The one thing I was curious about was the Monolith fight at the end, because somewhat contrary to the former I had also heard reports of this fight being quite hard. I ended up one-shotting him myself, but it was very slow and involved my character running in circles and healing herself for ten minutes. Afterwards I googled the fight to figure out what I had been missing and apparently you can climb on a rock in a certain spot where he can't hit you and easily beat him that way. Oh well, my way feels more legit to me even if it took longer!
The biggest and very unexpected road block I ran into so far came in the form of the Ground Assault Walker mini boss in chapter three that blocks your way just before you cross that bridge on your way to the droid factory. This is where the Sage's lack of damage reduction cooldowns really hurt me for the first time, because I couldn't survive more than a couple of hits from the walker and the small, fenced-in area wasn't really suited to kiting or breaking line of sight either.
I started by giving Lana some gifts to raise her measly influence rank from one to at least fifteen, but after that seemed to make no noticeable difference I decided that clearly the solution was instead to burn down the walker myself before it could kill me. So I did something I'd never done before: I respecced my Sage to dps, and funnily enough, just like in KotET chapter one, totally clueless dps was the way to victory over skilled healing. Even though I neither knew how to play Telekinetics nor had any accuracy on my gear, I one-shot the boss on my next attempt (though the adds got me afterwards... but it didn't matter because the boss was dead). I expect that this will be something that I'll have to repeat in future chapters.
This past Sunday was a big day for my guild ops team (we are back to having two separate progression teams and I'm still getting used to everything we do not automatically equalling "the guild" anymore): We defeated the Terror From Beyond on master mode for the first time.
Now, strictly speaking I got the achievement for doing this more than three years ago already, back when you could out-level the older operations to a certain degree and overpower them that way, before they were all level-synced. In fact, I remember a TFB run with some people who were taking such delight in how overpowered they were that they decided to ignore all the Terror's mechanics in the second phase of the fight and just plinked away at it despite of its large damage resistance until it entered the final phase of the encounter... and somehow, it worked.
Sort of an achievement, dated February 2015, with us overpowering the Terror by five levels.
However, this Sunday was our first time actually beating it at level, and boy, did it take us a long time. I didn't make a note of the exact date when we first started attempting the fight, but I do have some video footage that goes back as far as October. Now, we didn't literally spend nine months wiping on the boss - there were many weeks when we didn't even attempt it at all for one reason or another, such as not having enough people online, or not having a good team composition, or just plain old tiredness. However, we never seriously switched to a different progression target in all that time, so even without constant wiping on the same boss, nine months are a very long time to feel like you've basically hit a progression brick wall.
In hindsight I think the biggest challenges for us were simply the fight's length (this fight was the reason I changed my video recording software from allowing me to save the last ten minutes of gameplay to saving the last fifteen minutes - because I realised ten minutes wouldn't be enough to capture the whole fight), and how many opportunities it gives you to die. It's not that there are any mechanics that are super tricky to execute correctly, but your mind wandering at a bad time during the fifteen minute duration of the fight could be enough to wipe the group already. We actually suffered far more deaths early in the fight than in the later phases, I think at least partially because people started to zone out from all the repetition, which just led to even more mistakes.
So the final kill was super exciting to me, and as I often do I made a video out of it. Even at nearly twice the original speed it's still over seven minutes long, because that's just the kind of fight it is.
I actually really appreciated the way it ended up challenging me. While I've always liked TFB as an operation, the final fight was never really one of my favourites because as a healer the second phase in particular is actually pretty boring. There is all this exciting stuff going on with people jumping around between platforms, but as a healer you simply don't have to.
While working on this encounter however, we soon realised that the dps check was extremely high and even with all of our damage dealers trying their hardest, we were still a little off, which led to one of our members concocting a plan to get the second tank and one of the healers involved in adding more damage to make up the difference. As my usual co-healer is a Sage and it's a bit easier to add dps as a Commando due to the way the class manages its resources, I was soon instructed to run with the dps and hit tentacles in phase two as well (which you can see in the video).
This was actually quite confusing to me initially as despite of all my years of playing this game I've very rarely done anything but heal in operations, and certainly not on the harder difficulties. On our first tries involving this new strategy I made pretty much all the newbie mistakes I'd seen damage dealers make over the years, such as getting slammed to death by a tentacle, accidentally jumping on a tank platform, or simply falling to my death at random after running off a platform at a bad angle. To my credit though, at least I didn't do any of those things more than once. In the final attempt I was playing it quite cautiously, opting out of dpsing a few times when I felt that a bit of extra healing was more important at the time, but in the end my contribution still made enough of a difference for us to get the kill.
The whole thing did make me a bit philosophical as well though, because again: nine months. I'm actually kind of surprised we didn't end up losing more people during that time simply because they gave up hope / ran out of motivation. In a way this record-length expansion cycle is both a blessing and a curse: On the one hand it gives us extra time to work on bosses we never had a chance to down while they were current because there was always another level cap increase coming that changed up the game again. On the other hand... we spend ridiculous amounts of time banging our heads against the same bosses without going anywhere. Raiding is often considered a bit of a wacky pastime by many, but right now it feels even more insane to me than usual (even if I still enjoy it).
Last year I dipped my toes into veteran mode chapters for the first time. (Gosh, has it really been a full year since that fateful encounter with the vine cat?) I did complete both KotFE and KotET eventually but concluded that I probably wasn't going to attempt master mode any time soon, since I wasn't interested in repeating the story on characters that had already done it and none of my alts seemed well-suited to jumping right into the most difficult version of the content available.
However, it has been a year, more returning companions have given me an incentive to take more characters through the "Knights of..." expansions, and good gear for alts is about as easy to come by right now as it's likely ever going to be this expansion cycle, so I thought that I might as well give it a go, once again defying chronological order and starting with KotET instead of KotFE.
Unfortunately, already the first chapter didn't go well at first. I quickly got stuck on my Operative and soon gave up on it, downgrading the difficulty to story just to finish the chapter. Then I tried again on my Scoundrel. I don't know why I expected different results really, since that's essentially the same class, but I guess I figured that having slightly better gear and having completed all the Star Fortresses (which actually gives you some small perks in this chapter) would give me an edge somehow. And it actually did!
So last night I finally managed to complete one chapter, after several hours of fighting and dying and about a million credits in repairs. Ow.
Similar to what happened during my veteran mode experience, I found myself quite annoyed by how few resources there seemed to be about this particular content, even a year later. So I decided that I'm going to write down everything I learned that might help someone else with completing this chapter, and I'm planning to do the same for continuous chapters, assuming that they'll continue to be challenging.
So, where to start?
Like in many veteran mode chapters, get ready to die to trash a lot. At least for most of the first half of this chapter there are usually also some NPCs involved in the fighting, which helps to keep aggro off you. Nonetheless, be prepared to die to sudden (near-)one-shots and to not let this put you off. At least with most trash, you can simply get up again, dust yourself off and just soldier on - whatever you already killed will stay dead, so it's just a matter of slowly whittling away at the enemy's numbers.
The first real road block I encountered was the PA-717 Planetary Assault Goliath a.k.a. the big droid boss you run into early on. In fact, this was actually the fight that gave me by far the most trouble throughout the whole chapter, which made me feel extra bad about being unable to find anyone even talking about having had difficulties with it.
The first issue I ran into was the conal AoE attack that he starts with and which he repeats often. Just something to step out of, right? Sure, but tell that to Lana. And with my Scoundrel being a healer, it was usually Lana who had the aggro! I experimented with different set-ups but no matter what role I set her to, it just didn't work. As dps she would usually get one-shot. As tank she could take a couple of hits, but it was still too much damage, too quickly to keep her alive for longer than a few seconds. With both her and me healing, we could stay alive for a little while but got absolutely nothing done. And trying to manually move her out of the AoE didn't seem viable with how frequently and quickly it got cast.
In the end I did something I'd never done before: I respecced to dps, even though I have zero experience with it as a Scoundrel (unless you count me playing a hybrid spec for a while before Shadow of Revan did away with those). And as it turned out, in this case even bad and clueless dps was better than anything else, because with me on dps and Lana healing, I consistently kept aggro and could make sure to always aim the AoEs away from squishy old Lana.
The next problem I had was the inescapable AoE knockback the droid does every so often. It tended to knock me out of the boss's regular range, at which point he starts spamming instant orbital strikes on you which hurt a lot. Usually he then also yanks you right back, but that's a lot of time you spend sort of incapacitated and getting nuked. I died to this a lot. Until I took note of the little Voss flag next to the boss that is! By running next to it every time he wound up one of his knockbacks, I could just bounce off the flag harmlessly and then get right back into the action.
Finally, there are the mines, which move around and cannot be destroyed from range. Initially I was pinning all my hopes on getting help from "Deadeye" Leyta - if you destroyed the Tatooine Star Fortress before starting the chapter, she helps you out with a snipe ability that can actually destroy mines. However, it only works on one at a time and has a really long cooldown (on master mode anyway, I can't remember what it was like on story mode). I mean, it's still handy to have, but with the sheer amount of mines going around, it's not much more than a drop in the bucket.
In the end I realised that I simply had to take out some of the mines purposefully while hitting a damage reduction cooldown. As a Scoundrel I found my roll very useful for this. This helped me remove the worst offenders while minimising the damage they would cause. I even recorded a video of me finally beating the fight:
Note that it was still far from a perfect run - for example you can see me rolling right past the flag at one point and getting knocked back anyway! But it was good enough, and combined with a bit of luck I actually made it through. Boy, did that feel good.
The next bits of trash were easy enough, and having destroyed the Voss Star Fortress prior to the chapter, I also got free bonus completion from Rokuss. The next real challenge was the defense of the Tower of Prophecy, where I actually found my regular old healing spec pretty useful, as I spent most of the first half of it just healing myself and the NPCs while trying to break line of sight with the constant stream of adds. Since almost all of them were weak, they fortunately died quickly enough to the fire of the NPCs.
The real challenge comes when the three Horizon Guards come in, because all three of them cast an undodgeable thunderous blast that is once again a (near-)one-shot. At first I actually had to laugh at how quickly I died every time they appeared - I usually didn't even have time to do anything, not to mention understand what was going on.
My eventual approach was to immediately dodge behind the ramp leading upstairs as soon as they spawned, to use the way it breaks line of sight to avoid the one-shot - though not without putting down a Bushwhack at the door first, to make sure that I'd gain at least some aggro on the Guards and they wouldn't just immediately go and kill the NPCs instead. This was a bit RNG dependent to be honest. The NPCs would usually kill one of the Horizon Guards quite quickly, but the other two would go after me. Now, if I got unlucky they would both stick to me and then I'd usually die because I couldn't dodge both of their abilities simultaneously. However, as you can once again see in my video of the kill, when things went well, the second Horizon Guard would initially go after me but then turn around and go after the NPCs again, while losing enough time in the process to give the NPCs time to kill him as well. That only left me to deal with the last one, and he was easy enough to kite around a pillar at the back.
You can also see in the video that I was a bit hesitant initially when the last boss came in because I expected him to have thunderous blast too, but he's actually safe to approach and in fact better to nuke quickly while interrupting all his big casts.
Next came walking the walk to the Shrine of Healing and well... you probably won't need a guide for that but it was still pretty tedious. I've died at least once on that section pretty much every time I've done it, regardless of difficulty setting, and master mode cranks that up to eleven. Specifically there are rocket troopers to watch out for (handily marked by giant red arrows over their heads), whose long cast will take off about a third of your walker's health in one go. Oh, and they usually come in packs of four, so you can do the maths. Once you know what to look out for it's not too hard to take them out first, but the first time a set of them spawns you'll probably see your walker get blown to smithereens before you've even realised what's happening.
Also, to add insult to injury, the repair teams are for some reason unable to heal your walker back to full on master mode; they only repair you a little bit. But hey, like with most of the other trash, it's just a matter of attrition. The slow walk back every time I died never felt longer though.
The walker boss at the end also sports rocket trooper adds now but otherwise functions similar to veteran mode. Just keep walking in circles around him and shooting him whenever he's not in an immunity bubble, hit your shield if you happen to get rooted in the big beam, and kill adds as they come... unless the walker is really close to death, then it might be better to just go for a quick final nuke.
The inside of the shrine features some more hard-hitting trash mobs... /yawn. And I've got nothing on how to fight Senya because light side all the way, baby.
I hope that this will help some people at least, and if you have any tips of your own to share, feel free to do so in the comments. There just doesn't seem to be that much interest in these master mode chapters beyond farming a select few easy ones for CXP, considering that nobody seems to have written a comprehensive guide about them to this day.
