A History of Story Mode Ops Difficulty

One of the downsides of playing the same MMO for a really, really long time is that you're likely to see certain bad ideas get repeated after a while. I'm guessing this happens because by a certain point you've probably been playing longer than some devs have been working on the game, so that they don't have the same context and experiences with the whole of the game's history as you do.

If you're a content creator like me, you also have the "bonus" of having receipts, meaning you can refer back to old blog posts and go "yep, this was already a bad idea back in 2012, and we said so at the time too". This might sound like it should be satisfying, but in practice it's honestly just deflating to constantly have to repeat yourself and wrestle with the same issues over and over again.

The specific subject that has made me think about this in the past two weeks is the difficulty of story mode operations. When SWTOR came out back in 2011, many people burned through the available raid content really quickly, complaining that it was both too easy and that there was too little of it. This was not my own experience, since I took my time levelling and didn't step foot into an operation until February 2012. And when I did, I loved it. We didn't kill Soa on our first night because everything was so new to us, but even then I noted that he was "still not too bad" and two weeks later I reported that my guild had cleared both EV and KP on story mode.

Explosive Conflict released in April, and I didn't write about clearing it on story mode until the beginning of June, noting that "story mode feels considerably overtuned". For people who weren't around back then this might sound a bit weird if you only know the operation in its current iteration, but back then, a lot of the mechanics that now only exist in veteran and master mode were also part of story mode, plus the gear requirements were pretty tight. Still, I didn't mind too much at the time and I had fun. It was a different time, and we were all still figuring things out - including Bioware. (I'll just say that my complaint from that post that "with 1.3 not containing any new raid content, PvE endgame will be a bit dry for the next couple of months" seems hilariously quaint in hindsight.)

My first experience with Terror from Beyond was a bit messy since it came out around the time that my first guild fell apart, meaning that my first visit there was a semi-pug and we only got two bosses down, but even then I noted, "the people who had told me that Terror from Beyond was a return to easier story modes were not wrong."

When I got to run Scum and Villainy for the first time in April 2013, I once again loved it. We only killed five out of the seven bosses during my first night, but that seemed to be down to the unusual length of the ops more than anything else.

When the two Oricon operations were released in October 2013, my first runs of them, into which we mostly went blind to allow ourselves to be surprised, were amazingly fun. I wrote about my first trip to story mode Dread Fortress (which we cleared in one evening) in this post and commemorated my first trip to Dread Palace with a short video called "Dread Palace in less than 100 seconds" which mostly involves a lot of giggling and squealing and finishes with one of my guildies going "best op ever".

It was as if Bioware was incapable of creating an operation that I didn't love at first sight - until the Shadow of Revan expansion that is. My post about Ravagers and Temple of Sacrifice was called "New Ops: Good Stuff, Needs Some Work" and primarily for one reason: the difficulty. "Sword Squad and the Underlurker in Temple of Sacrifice were probably the worst in terms of requiring both a high damage output as well as flawless coordination. These are not bad things... for a hardmode. But for story mode, which is meant to be the easy way of seeing the content, easy enough that you can do it in a moderately competent pug, this is an absolute killer."

I also still recall my first night in Temple of Sacrifice very vividly, because I still remembered the fun we'd had clearing the Dread ops for the first time and started recording our run initially... However, after several wipes on Sword Squadron I turned the recording off because fun levels were plummeting through the floor and I didn't really want to create any lasting negative memories of that night (as it turns out, that didn't entirely work). Underlurker was eventually nerfed, and significantly at that, though Sword Squadron can remain a bit of a pain in terms of damage output.

This is when the dark times of no new group content additions for several years began, and I later wondered whether it was a coincidence that this came about after these two operations. When we finally got our first new operations boss in the form of Tyth in April 2017, I noted while looking back: "I still think less of Ravagers and Temple of Sacrifice to this day due to their awful initial tuning, which hasn't actually been adjusted all that much even now, not to mention their propensity for pointless red circle syndrome. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if those two operations were at least partially to blame for Bioware's decision to not add any more of that type of content for a long time - raids that unfriendly towards both casual players and mid-level guilds can't have boasted particularly high participation numbers."

As for Tyth himself though, I was once again in love, and why? "When I first went in with my guildies to kill him on story mode, he absolutely melted. [...] "That was way too easy," I heard some guildies mutter, but I was wide-eyed with delight. That's exactly how story mode should be to an over-geared, organised and well-practiced group, or else it will be a killer to pugs. In fact, I'm sure there are pug groups wiping on him even now. And that's okay, because this game isn't about always succeeding at everything on the first attempt. But he should be well within reach of even casual players sticking their noses into a story mode for the first time, and that's how it should be."

The piecemeal releases of later bosses in the same operation had me a bit more sceptical in terms of their difficulty tuning, but Izax was pretty cool. I particularly gave Bioware credit for managing to create a fight that was both very involved but still casual-friendly by employing a little trick: "My favourite part of Bioware trying to make this ridiculously long and initially somewhat complicated fight more casual-friendly without neutering the basic mechanics is that while the encounter is active, the cooldown of all combat resurrections - which is usually five minutes - is reduced to thirty seconds. What this means is that the devs could allow certain mechanics to kill people without frustrating the whole group by enforcing a wipe. As long as you still have control of the fight overall and your healers/res-capable damage dealers are on the ball, you can allow people to fall over and get them up again a ridiculous amount of times. The death still teaches a lesson, leaving the victim with another repair bill and probably feeling slightly sheepish, but things keep rolling and remain fun for the group as a whole." Sadly this mechanic broke at some point and has remained unfixed for years as far as I'm aware, which has made the fight considerably less casual-friendly in later patches.

With the release of Onslaught we got the Nature of Progress operation, for which I had a lot of praise again, though there were a few criticisms too... one of them once again - surprise, surprise - the story mode tuning: "Story mode is no Gods of the Machine for sure (thankfully!), but fights like the two gauntlet bosses still require an amount of co-ordination that I wouldn't expect to find in your average pug. This strikes me as a shame as it once again means that the content will remain inaccessible to many more casual players even on what's supposed to be the easiest difficulty, which is particularly sad considering what a fun operation this is."

There is a very clear theme in all of this: I like my story mode operations to be easy. I think the name story mode more than implies that it should be easy, with its primary purpose being to allow people to see the story. It's okay to have some mechanics that can kill people, and there's nothing wrong with some wiping while you're still figuring out basic mechanics and/or if you're in a pug, but a co-ordinated group of guildies on voice chat should surely be able to breeze through without any major issues and while having a good laugh.

I understand there are incentives for devs to make even story mode somewhat more difficult, for example to prevent people from rushing through the content too quickly, or because it's much easier to sell people on the idea of nerfing something that's initially too hard than the other way round. Though honestly, I've never ever felt bad about an operation supposedly being too easy on story mode. Easy is fun and inclusive and allows for a bit of silliness.

Also, first impressions are important, and if an operation gets a bad reputation early on, it can put people off for a looong time. Ravagers and Temple of Sacrifice aren't viewed as particularly tough after some nerfs and almost eight years after their introduction, but Gods and Dxun are still places that people avoid due to them feeling like too much of a hassle even on story mode. Dxun story mode was actually nerfed pretty considerably with the launch of 7.0, but it took months until people even started to notice because they just reflexively didn't even want to spend as much time there.

Why am I telling you all this? Because by this point, ten days after 7.1, I would have expected to give a brief summary post of what the new operation "R-4 Anomaly" is like, but my regular ops team - used to raiding veteran and master modes - still hasn't been able to kill the last boss on story mode after five nights. We obviously get the mechanics by this point, but we just can't meet the dps check and get overwhelmed by adds at the end. As the fight takes about ten minutes, it's particularly "fun" to go through all that over and over again, just to then wipe with the boss at 0.3% health. It simply overshadows everything else I might have had to say about this new operation.

I'm sure we'll get there eventually, even if it's by sheer luck, but either way it hasn't been something I would call a fun experience. Plus for me it's extra frustrating that I've basically been telling Bioware to not make freaking story mode ops so hard for a freaking decade, and yet here they are doing it again, worse than ever. I just don't understand.

Endgame Pugging So Far

Pugette's adventures at max level continue, though I haven't been able to release new episodes as consistently as I did while I was levelling her through flashpoints. Partially this has been due to holidays etc., but partially also because the episodes about operations in particular actually take a lot more out of me than a simple flashpoint run, so I don't necessarily want to dedicate time to recording one every single week. That and wanting to run each operation when it's the featured op of the day through the group finder limit my options further. I've recorded five more episodes since April:

S2E2: Ragging on Uprisings - My first episode about uprisings actually only went on to reinforce why I don't like them all that much, though I was also reminded of some good things about them.

S2E3: Special Nathema Conspiracy Edition - Because I couldn't resist making an episode about a brand new flashpoint, even if I wasn't going to feature flashpoints in this season otherwise. This also featured what's probably my biggest ever gameplay fail in this series, though it was very funny (and goes to show that you shouldn't mistake my years of experience with much of the older content for innate ability).

S2E4: I love Eternity Vault (but nobody queues for it) - This was a bit of a game changer for me because I had planned to feature some more operations pugs built purely through the group finder, but after three full hours of waiting in the queue I got fed up with it and just joined a group from general chat. This did make me wonder whether SWTOR is seeing a bit of a seasonal population drop-off right now. Also, I committed another major fail in this episode, though I won't spoil what it is.

S2E5: Trying To Find The Fun in Uprisings - By this point I was actually wondering whether including uprisings in this was a good idea because I'm really not enjoying them all that much and I think it's very apparent in the way I talk about them. I feel I'm kind of committed now though. And they do give me a nice break from the more intense operations episodes...

S2E6: Getting into a partial guild run for Explosive Conflict - Here I initially failed to get a group through chat, but came back to it later and then ended up joining what turned out to be a partial guild run. Apologies to any members of BRACTWO whom I might have made look bad in any way; the awkward start to the run really threw me off though.

Tales from the Group Finder: Eternity Vault

I don't often run operations with random groups nowadays since ops are one of the few activities that I regularly get to partake in anyway (with my guild) and you never know how long a pug run is going to take you. Some are super smooth but others can turn into unexpectedly long-winded adventures (to put it mildly). Not having a lot of free time anymore plays into it too.

However.

I've been really curious whether the changes to the group/activity finder in the last patch have made any difference to people's willingness to use the tool to run operations. Most of the time players seemed to avoid it, presumably mostly because of the large degree of uncertainty in regards to when you would get a pop, if at all. It might sound weird to anyone who really hates talking to other people, but often just putting a group together in general chat was simply faster and easier.

Before the patch actually launched, there'd been some speculation about what shape exactly the improvements to the group finder might take. Display of average wait times and group formation progress maybe? Nope. However, Bioware did add a "role in need" display that shows you which role the group finder is currently short on for certain types of content. While the extra reward promised to those who queue up as that role isn't really worth it from my point of view, it has added a new dimension to queueing, because the promise of a guaranteed, fast pop holds more appeal than anything else.

So when the rotation had just switched to Eternity Vault on Sunday afternoon and I saw that healers were needed on Imp side, I decided to hop in on my Sorcerer. I felt slightly disappointed when I didn't get an instant pop, but I guess more than one healer was needed. However, I only had to wait between five and ten minutes for the group to fill up.

Everybody zoned in quickly and of course someone was over-enthusiastic enough to pull the turrets and get us all in combat while we waited for the group to actually assemble. The off-tank asked for someone to share the weekly mission, so I did. Then he asked for it again. I said that I'd already shared it, and I'm guessing someone else did so again. But the off-tank just kept asking. According to the chat log he already had a sharing request but he kept insisting that he didn't. After several more minutes of this he eventually went back out again to pick up the mission himself.

The first boss went smoothly enough, but then came the question of how to deal with the trash. The jumping shortcut seems to be quite well-known by now, but I suck at successfully making the jump as a Sage or Sorc, and nobody else wanted to volunteer for ages. Eventually the off-tank (an Assassin) made it across though and got the speeder sorted. However, another Assassin who was playing dps didn't seem to understand what was happening and tried to stealth his way towards the boss the long way, all on his lonesome. After he pulled something and died, everyone encouraged him to take the speeder this time, but he just left. It took surprisingly long to get a dps replacement, several minutes in fact.

On Gharj I witnessed a bug that I hadn't seen before, which is saying something! When he started jumping up and down on the first platform and a second one appeared, we moved across as usual, but then it was the second platform that suddenly disappeared. Everyone went "wtf" at suddenly finding themselves knee-deep in lava, but fortunately most of the group had the sense to quickly run back, so we only lost two people and were able to revive one of them.

The journey through the jungle was strangely heart-warming, with one guy taking the lead and me and another hanging back to make sure no stragglers got lost. Nobody needed help jumping up the cliff, but I had to rescue two people after they had fallen into lava. The system had designated me as the ops leader by the way, which caused me to somehow feel responsible for the group even though I hadn't had any plans to take charge.

The pylons were kind of amusing in that everyone wanted to click the consoles, to the point that at one time people actually clicked on them on opposite sides, making the wheel go left, right and then left again, wasting a lot of time. Fortunately it wasn't enough to cause a reset though. I also noticed that the Marauder wearing the Crest of the Dread Master (one of the few truly prestigious items of gear in SWTOR) kept nearly killing themselves on the adds with the reflective shield. Bought account?

The Council fight went alright, though I was baffled when the last person still fighting ended up being my co-healer, who was both well-geared and clearly experienced. I joked that they must have felt like taking on a challenge to pit themselves against one of the Marauders as a healer (mobs intended to be fought by damage dealers) to which they replied that they'd known something was wrong as soon as we pulled...

Soa seemed to go smoothly enough, but then he evaded and reset at zero percent - WTF, Bioware. Just how long has this stuff been going on? My co-healer announced that they had to go because "the GF" was giving them evil eyes. It took me a moment to puzzle out what the group finder had to do with anything... Anyway, they left but not without dropping group, so we unfortunately had to initiate a vote kick to make room for a replacement. And then we didn't get one! The wait for a replacement dps earlier had seemed long enough, but this was worse.

People asked me if I was okay solo-healing the fight and I said yes. It's only EV story mode, what can go wrong? Well, everyone but you jumping down onto the wrong platform for example. Wipe again! The third time was the charm though and we finally made it. Coincidentally, the group finder decided to finally give us a second healer just as we had reached the last phase. We warned him in chat that this was what was going on and he had the good sense to leave. I'm not sure how these things work exactly, but I suspect that he might have gained a lockout without any reward otherwise.

Overall, the run felt like a success to me though. I mean, I've also had EV pugs that had to give up on Gharj because he kept enraging... but that is why I never get tired of jumping into random groups. The potential for strange new experiences just knows no bounds.

Day 9: Silly #IntPiPoMo

Want to know what the hashtag is all about? Read all about International Picture Posting Month here. Want to see the full list of themes I'm following while posting screenshots throughout the month? You can find it here.

You know what the "silly" theme means, right? Time for some "interesting" character names and chat!

Not a bad likeness, though I'd see him as more of a Scoundrel than a Sith warrior...

Also: Full pun points for this guy.

Nothing to do with names, just an interesting thing to see on one of the rare occasions that I looked at general chat.

One time after rolling a new character I encountered two lowbie smugglers duelling right outside the cantina on Ord Mantell. Both had their Corso set to healing and were therefore unable to damage each other in any meaningful way. I just found that amusing.

This is me looking longingly after a dead mob that my pet tank knocked to its death inside a Star Fortress. Most of my guildies consider my obsession to not leave any shinies behind ridiculous, but at times like these, it's a hard life...

People who've run Eternity Vault many times will probably be familiar with the trash skipping run inside the jungle biome. I swear Bioware is aware of it as well and tries to sabotage it every so often, because I'm reasonably certain that those manka cats weren't always where they are now! Anyway, during one such run I was amused that someone had actually highlighted part of the way with some  raid markers in an attempt to prevent people from pulling adds or falling into the lava. Not that that ever works...
 

Some people might feel embarrassed when running into someone else wearing the same outfit as themselves, but not me! In fact, I was absolutely delighted when I randomly encountered this handsome chap on the fleet who just happened to wear the exact same set of gear as me and with the same dye in it as well. It wasn't even something from the Cartel Market, so what were the odds?

Trying to take selfies while mounted can lead to strange results, that's all I'm saying.

IntPiPoMo count: 72

Day 10: Death #IntPiPoMo

Wondering what the hashtag in the title is all about? Click here. Want to know all the themes that I have used for my 10 Days of SWTOR Screenshots? You can find the full list here.

As mentioned last year, I pretty much only die in PvP and operations these days... which admittedly does happen a lot though!

Let this one be a stand-in for the countless screenshots I've taken of "embarrassing deaths", as in: deaths or wipes on bosses that we've done so many times it really shouldn't happen anymore! Seriously, how did I die on Soa here? Probably by jumping off a platform the wrong way... As usual, the view from the floor is great though!

This one also kind of falls into the category mentioned above, except that we're dead without actually being dead. There had only been three of us left to finish off Soa, then someone died and the last two of us got caught in a mind trap. No other way out than to slash stuck...

Another one from Eternity Vault, though this one is intentional, as it's part of how you skip most of the trash between the first and second boss. With trash mobs also granting Command XP in Knights of the Eternal Throne, we might want to revise our strategy here though...

OK, I don't feel bad about this one, as this is hardmode Revan. I think this was the only time my group actually gave him a try. Needless to say, we didn't get very far.

I'm never quite sure how people end up dead in the air. I mean, yes I get dying in the middle of a knockback or something, but shouldn't your body continue to be affected by gravity? Apparently not.

During this one night of hardmode Master and Blaster attempts, I suffered massive lag spikes and after one of them I was presented with the above when my game caught back up. My guildies immediately asked why they could hear me laughing hysterically in the background through my pet tank's microphone - apparently they didn't get to enjoy the same view. After I shared the screenshot, much hilarity ensued and the Commando who appears to be diving between my legs here was very apologetic...

Not actually dead (yet) in this one, but using my favourite custom health regeneration item: feign death! I think it's the fake loot beam coming out of your body that really nails it. It's such an ingrained instinct for me to go after these loot beams that guildies using this item get me pretty much every time.

This screenshot is the answer to the question: What happens if you enter a GSF match while on stage two of the rakghoul plague? Answer: Nothing happens during the match, but you're dead as soon as you come out.

I suck at arenas. That is all.

And with that, this series as well as my contributions to International Picture Posting Month come to an end just in time for Knights of the Eternal Throne early access tonight! See you on the other side!

Final IntPiPoMo count: 86

Puzzling

Both of Bioware's most recent releases for SWTOR have contained puzzle elements. In chapter eleven, you had to find the right panels to shoot in order to progress past a forcefield, and this month's Alliance alert is pretty much one big puzzle to solve.

Both prompted similar reactions in me: First I was startled by the unexpected obstacle in my way, then delighted that it was something different from the norm. Then I got a bit annoyed when I couldn't figure out the solution quickly enough. I eventually made it past the forcefield myself, but for the companion mission I ended up looking up a hint online once I'd been stuck for a while.

This got me thinking about puzzles in SWTOR in general. I don't actually recall seeing a whole lot of them in the base game. The first one I remember encountering is during the interlude in the first chapter of the trooper story where you have to deactivate some laser beams in the right order to get to the middle of a room. A fair few datacrons have a puzzle aspect to them as well, but I didn't really bother with them on my first playthrough.

While levelling alts, I remember encountering the heroic mission Shadow Spawn on Dromund Kaas, which requires you to use the runes on a dark altar in the right order, and you figure out the correct order by following the lines of the Sith code. If you don't know them, they are engraved on the runes as well (and show up on their tooltip if you hover over them in your mission item inventory).

On Republic side, Traken-4's Legacy stands out, a former area quest on Balmorra, which requires you to solve a "lights out" puzzle on a three by three grid, which I don't know how to do to this day, but fortunately you can find automated solvers for that kind of thing online.

The operations were the biggest surprise in terms of puzzle aspects, because personally I'd never seen that kind of thing in large group content before. First there were the ancient pylons in Eternity Vault, which feature little combat but require you to figure out the fastest solution to a small puzzle before the fight. Then there was the Fabricator droid in Karagga's Palace, who required several members of your ops group to play Towers of Hanoi. In subsequent operations the "puzzle bosses" were toned down, but an aspect of problem-solving before the fight remained present for a while, from Colonel Vorgath's minefield in Explosive Conflict to Operator's colours in Terror from Beyond and Olok the Shadow's droids in Scum and Villainy. It's only with the Oricon operations that the notion of "puzzle bosses" seemingly came to an end.

In solo and small group content however, Bioware has continued to throw puzzles at us at irregular intervals. The Black Hole featured more than one daily that required a bit of puzzling. The whole Theoretika section of the HK-51 quest line stands out as a particularly memorable example of requiring brains over brawn. The Shroud quest line asked you to solve problems in ways other than fighting as well. Kuat Drive Yards has that ship-building scenario where you get a bonus for figuring out the little logic puzzle and choosing the right components. The Yavin quest line has the mission in the cave where you have to click on the right rune to activate the holocrons. On Ziost there is that short bit where you need to deactivate some panels to be able to run through a pool of water without being electrocuted. And now in KotFE we have the two examples mentioned above.

Do I like these puzzles? I think for the most part I do, but sometimes they've also caused me frustration. I generally like them in group content, because you can pool your resources and figure things out together. (Like when it comes to the aforementioned Traken-4 mission - the first time I ran into it, I was questing with a friend, and while I got annoyed with the puzzle, he enjoyed figuring it out and eventually got it done for both of us.) In ops, the puzzle bosses generally give one or two people the chance to shine with specialised knowledge without requiring everyone to be good at puzzles, though it can be very painful when you end up in a pug where nobody knows how to handle the puzzle aspect.

In what comes as a bit of a surprise to myself, I'm more likely to find puzzles annoying in solo content. It's probably because that's often the content that's focused on progressing the story, and it's annoying to hit a wall there just because you can't figure something out. Also, I'm generally more likely to get annoyed if several puzzles are strung together into one big puzzle, such as on the Theoretika or in the newest Alliance alert mission. I can generally appreciate a single puzzle inserted into a mission at random, though it can still sometimes feel a bit out of place simply because there aren't that many of them in game, so it's always a bit unexpected when instead of shooting things or talking to people, you suddenly find yourself hunting around the environment for the right thing to click or sifting through flavour text for hints. But if several of them show up in a row, it's even more likely that I won't be able to figure something out and will grow tired of the whole thing after a short while.

Do you like puzzles in your MMO experience?

When Old Raids Are New Again

Before Knights of the Fallen Empire launched, I made an announcement on our guild forums that we were going to take it easy for the first couple of weeks of the expansion, since we wanted to give everyone the time they needed to finish the new story and get comfortable with any changes before we were going to organise any group content. But something funny happened: Everyone completed the new storyline really quickly, and then they wanted to raid.

My pet tank and I both had the week of KotFE's official launch off, and after having gone through the story in early access week, we were free to organise operation runs every single day of the week. In fact, these runs were so popular that we frequently had to upgrade the ops size to 16-man, something that we haven't had to do in quite a while. We all knew that those energy levels wouldn't and couldn't last, but it's still been exciting to feel that renewed enthusiasm in the air. It's been fun to run story mode operations with people that aren't usually around that much and to hear everyone's laughter on voice chat.

I haven't had a chance to see all the changes that Bioware has made to the old operations yet, simply because I haven't had a chance yet to run every single op on every single difficulty since 4.0. (In fact, the only nightmare mode I've set foot in has been Dread Fortress to kill Nefra.) But a few things have already been apparent either way.

First off, all the story modes have been subjected to a whole bunch of new nerfs, mostly by making abilities that used to kill people a lot less dangerous or by removing whole mechanics or even phases of a fight altogether. Examples of these include, but are not limited to:

- In EV, the area where the pylon will strike in the last phase of the Soa fight is now highlighted by a glowing blue circle, which has changed the fight from being very difficult to tank (due to the high demands in terms of spatial awareness) to laughably easy.

- In KP, killing the Fabricator droid requires no puzzle solving anymore; any of the consoles can be fired at any time.

- In TFB, Kephess doesn't connect to the pylons anymore during his first phase and just stands there like a dummy. I'm not entirely sure this isn't a bug though.

- In Scum & Villainy, during the Oasis City infiltration, more than one group of people attacking a strike team doesn't trigger the alarm anymore, so you can basically run in as a full group and just steamroll everything together if you like.

- In the Dread Fortress, the way to Gate Commander Draxus isn't barred by a puzzle anymore. Oh, and the exploding droids don't kill people any longer! (R.I.P., most awesome way of killing your guildies.)

- In Temple of Sacrifice, only four people (on 8-man, might be more on 16) need to get the cross mechanic on Underlurker right anymore, the rest can do whatever they like.

I'm not sure that all of these changes were needed or even good ideas, but on the whole I see them as a positive thing. I've always said that story mode should be accessible and easily puggable, and a lot of these changes do help with that, especially by removing mechanics that required the group to be somewhat more co-ordinated that your average pug group usually is. As long as they are still there to challenge us on hardmode, it's fine.

I pugged Temple of Sacrifice as a dps last week and it was an extremely smooth run, an experience that I would have considered unthinkable in this operation pre-4.0. Then again, maybe I just got lucky, as my team did seem to be particularly competent in that case. I also noticed that bolster works really well - when I joined the group I was a little taken aback that one of our group members had only 20k health, considering that a decently geared level 65 character sits on 75k+ at the moment, but once inside the operation they were no weaker than anyone else.

Also, running hardmodes with my guildies has been surprisingly fun so far. I was really worried about how it would feel to wipe on content again that we could easily overpower only a month ago, but so far it hasn't been too bad. For EV, KP and EC in particular it's been so long since they were progression content that they do actually feel pretty fresh again. We've also had some people in our runs who weren't even around when these were "serious" content, and many old-timers had genuinely forgotten a lot of the mechanics.

Karagga HM down with only one man left standing - could be a scene from 2012, but actually it's from two weeks ago.

I'm proud to say that I remembered most of these mechanics. In fact, it was a real joy to do so! Not long ago, Azuriel wrote a post about that sad feeling you get when all that knowledge and skill you acquired while playing a game becomes useless. Doing these old operations again has had pretty much the opposite effect on me: I get to feel important and clever because I still know these things! It sure felt grand to get back into the groove of repeatedly solving the Fabricator puzzle as quickly as possible, or dancing around the Firebrand tank on the ground while dispelling myself. I've got skills, man!

Admittedly I've been less keen on getting back into the 3.0 operations and the ones on Oricon. Somehow those still feel too recent, and I'm still just a little tired of them. But it really helps to have such a huge selection of operations at max-level right now that are all viable ways of gearing up - even if we ran an op every single night of the week, there wouldn't be any repetition and we wouldn't cover everything. That variety really helps to keep things interesting.

So far the fact that we've all been there before hasn't put too much of a dampener on our mood. Ops nights are a strange mix of waxing nostalgic, actually reliving some of the fun, and getting to grips with the way our characters, our group setup and the encounters have changed. I expect that in the long term, there will be annoyances once we run into our first progression wall, but so far it's been surprisingly fun for what's effectively recycled content.

Oh, and of course Bioware managed to (re-)introduce a couple of bugs again, never mind that some of this content has been in the game since lauch. My favourite are what we've come to call "Schrödinger's platforms" in EV, both on the Gharj and on the Soa fight - they only appear for you if you look at the ceiling to watch them fall down, otherwise they remain invisible to you!

In the News: Saying Goodbye to NiMs, Major Conquest Changes Coming

While I was trying to come up with a title for this post and eventually settled on putting "saying goodbye to NiMs" in there, I realised that I never commented on the piece of news which came out of Gamescom and announced the "real" goodbye to NiMs: Bioware stating that they won't bother creating nightmare modes for any new operations going forward. I didn't really see anyone else talk about it either. Not even a quick scan of the Dulfy comments on that post revealed any outrage about it. I guess it's because that comment only served to confirm what a lot of us had already been expecting for a while. (Except for a certain guildie of mine, who was convinced that despite of the difficulty of ToS and Ravagers hardmode, it would be no trouble for Bioware at all to add another difficulty on top of it. We told him that he was nuts.)

If operations take up too many development resources relative to how many people play them, taking out the top difficulty makes the most sense. Progression raiders can't even complain about that right now because ToS and Ravagers hardmode were already more difficult than some previous nightmare modes anyway, so it's not as if players weren't being challenged. It was the middle-of-the-road guilds that ended up with the short end of the stick this tier, facing a wacky progression curve that made it hard to stay motivated. We will see if Bioware addresses this whenever they release their next new operation. Either way, nightmare mode going away was a surprise to very few of us.

The latest bit of news - which is what I actually meant to refer to in the post title - is about something slightly different however. As a reminder, Bioware said that in Knights of the Fallen Empire, all operations currently in the game will be endgame content again, on all existing difficulty levels. Except, well... Eric Musco came out with a post last week that stated something that a lot of us already knew, which is that Eternity Vault and Karagga's Palace NiM don't really measure up to nightmare modes that were released later, since Bioware's first attempts at nightmare modes included no new mechanics, just bigger numbers on everything.

"With the changes we are making in Fallen Empire, all Operations will now be at max level, this means the differences between Hard and Nightmare EV and KP, just don’t stack up against the difficulty differences found in other Operations," he continued. Awesome, I thought - does that mean they'll be updating these to include some new mechanics? Nope. Instead they'll simply remove them so that all the remaining nightmare modes will be at least roughly on par.

That wasn't what I would have hoped for, but I can hardly claim to be upset either. Of course it helps that I've had three and a half years to run this content over and over again, so that I maxed out all my Eternity Vault and Karagga's Palace achievements ages ago. But to anyone who might be worried about missing out: Well, first off you still have the chance to run these now, as they only require a small group by now and are ridiculously easy with players being ten levels higher. But more importantly, Musco speaks the truth. EV and KP NiM are really exactly the same as on story and hard, only with higher numbers. No actual "content" is being removed here. If you've never been, feel free to watch this 2013 video of mine summarising a guild run of both KP and EV NiM (warning: some foul language):



The lesson here is: 1) People in my guild are silly. 2) There really isn't anything in there that you won't still also be able to see on the lower difficulties.

The other piece of news that Musco shared with us is that major changes are coming to conquests. Several events will have their personal targets lowered (though not Total Galactic War), but most importantly, crafting will be turned into a one-time bonus. My gut reaction is that this is a great change, even if I'm not sure if my small guild will ever be able to make it onto the scoreboard again with no crafting. My days of finishing a Total Galactic War with six characters having hit their target are certainly over.

But really, it was not a very exciting way of playing. Being able to accumulate oodles of points for a minimal time investment was just way overpowered. Now you'll have to actually play to hit your target, always. I've heard people say that this will make it even harder for small guilds to achieve a place on the scoreboard, but I'm not so sure about that. What it really does is cut down on the advantages of having lots of alts and being rich, and I see no reason to assume that people with those attributes are more likely to be in a small guild than in a large one. Big guilds have also had people crafting for silly amounts of points. And well, when it comes down to having more active players, bigger guilds have always had an advantage. Either way, I'm curious to see what sort of scores we'll actually see on the conquest board after this change. I'm pretty sure that the times of guilds finishing with ten million points or more are over.

Even if I think that the proposed changes sound good for the game overall, I doubt that they will really do much to alleviate my own conquest fatigue. With no new incentives I don't think that I will suddenly start working on my personal target with more gusto again, but I've heard that in KotFE one of the rewards will be rare crafting materials that you won't be able to get any other way, which would certainly be exciting. Personally I also think that they should look into adding more repeatable PvE objectives. But mostly I'm just happy to see that they are still paying attention to conquests and trying to improve them, even if activities like this are not going to be their main focus in the upcoming expansion.

Red Circles Are Overrated

While it's probably going to be a while until we see a new operation, I've been doing some thinking on the subject anyway. Specifically, I've been wondering why I've felt somewhat dissatisfied with the latest crop of operations. The awkward difficulty curve has certainly played into it, but it's not the only reason.

One thing that came to mind was the over-abundance of random circle mechanics. Back in WoW, the raider's mantra was not to stand in the fire, and pretty much since launch, SWTOR's equivalent of this has been "don't stand in the circles". Usually said circles are red, but sometimes they come in purple, orange and yellow as well.

However, when I think back to the early days of the game, said circles weren't actually nearly as common then as they are now. Mainly they seemed to represent enlarged enemy target markers, for example if someone was targeting you with an orbital strike or you were being pelted by some sort of missile barrage. Eternity Vault - still my favourite operation in the game - is actually surprisingly short on circle mechanics with the exception of the first boss, who is a droid and the circles mostly work in the way I just described.

But other bosses don't have them, even where you might expect it. When Gharj goes into a frenzy for example, things get painful in melee but you don't know just how far you have to step back to avoid taking damage as there is no clear indicator. And a big part of why Soa's last phase has always been so hard to tank is that there was no easy way to see where the pylons are going to land. You always had to twist your camera around to look up while also trying to manoeuvre the boss in the right direction and not stand in the wrong place yourself.

Looking back, it feels like the red circles really took off with the release of Explosive Conflict, which is where they started to serve as clear range indicators for abilities that still also had other visual cues, such as the rocks bursting out of the ground on Zorn and Toth or Kephess' big jump. In hindsight this was probably the best of both worlds, giving the player a good idea of what was supposed to be happening from an immersive point of view as well as giving them the means to more easily understand and deal with the encounter's mechanics.

Starting with Shadow of Revan however, it seems to me that circles and other target markers have started to simply become shorthand for "insert a mechanic here". The most egregious example of this that comes to mind is the Underlurker in Temple of Sacrifice. Just how does spreading out in a perfect cross around him protect us from taking damage from his ground smash? Hiding behind the fallen rocks to avoid his rage storm makes sense, but this doesn't. The mechanic's only purpose seems to be to make people step in and out of a ground marker.

Or how about the Colossal Monolith on Ziost? The entire fight is about running in and out of circles, but what does any of it mean?! There is some on-screen text about the monolith exposing power sources and trying to draw energy from the rifts, but none of that really serves as an explanation for why people have to run into certain coloured circles and then into more circles of the same colour and somehow this interrupts the boss's channel. It all just feels incredibly "gamey".

It may be funny to criticise operations of all things for what boils down to a lack of immersion, but to me at least that's something that does matter. The boss doesn't need to have a deep back story or anything like that, but at the very least I should gain some sort of understanding of what moves he has that make him dangerous and why. "Circles appear on the ground and they are bad for you" just doesn't quite cut it.

What makes for a good boss fight from a healer's PoV?

The other week Healing SWTOR wrote a list of their "top 5 SWTOR bosses to heal", and when I commented on it (because originally they forgot to actually add a fifth one to the list) they asked me about my own favourites. I couldn't think of an answer right then but decided to give it some more thought.

As it turns out, I found it really difficult to come up with a ranked list of bosses. Most of the time when I enjoy a fight, it's not for any reason related to how it feels to heal in particular; it's enjoyable in any role. Likewise, whenever I find an encounter annoying, it's usually not just because of what it does to the healers. Exceptions exist but they are rare. One example I can think of is the Terror from Beyond, which is a brilliantly engaging fight from a dps point of view (in my opinion) but boring as all hell to heal, because a lot of the time there just isn't anything to do for the healers.

Still, it did get me thinking about the general subject of what makes an encounter fun from a healer's perspective. In the end I came up with the following criteria for myself:

It mustn't require too much or too little healing.

Now this is obviously very subjective depending on skill, as one person's "too much" might be another player's "just right". I do think there are some fights that really stand out as hitting either extreme though.

Olok the Shadow in Scum and Villainy, to me, is an example of a fight with almost non-existent healing requirements. Now, that fight has other problems, most importantly that it's just too long and uneventful in general, but it's particularly bad from a healer's point of view because a lot of the time you just feel redundant. Both the upstairs and the last phase cause very little damage and you'll probably spend a lot of time just standing around and adding lacklustre dps out of sheer boredom.

It's a bit harder to qualify when the incoming damage during a fight becomes too much, but I remember the Dread Guards on nightmare indeed feeling like a nightmare to me, because even if I spammed heals like crazy until I was out of ammo, it never seemed to be quite enough, and I just became more and more stressed out with every attempt.

There needs to be a rhythm to the damage patterns.

Healing in SWTOR is a very rhythmical activity from a mechanical point of view, simply because of the way resource management works, and good encounter design takes advantage of that: for example by including times where you have to heal extra hard, burn cooldowns and so on, as well as times where damage is lighter so that you can recover a bit if you overextended your resources previously.

Dread Master Brontes is a good example of a fight with a great rhythm. It starts out easy with some damage on the tanks and tentacle dodging, then things ramp up a little once the failed clones spawn. While dps down the droid adds, the healers can recover a bit if needed or help by adding a little bit of extra damage, but from then on things just keep getting crazier until the fight ends in a mad climax of people being bounced around every which way and taking lots of damage in the process. When you get her down at the end of that, it feels like a great achievement.

It doesn't always have to be that complex either. To use an older and simpler example, take the first boss in Eternity Vault: he alternates between phases of doing light damage and phases of doing lots of damage throughout the fight pretty much until the very end.

Bonethrasher in Karagga's Palace on the other hand is an example of a fight with a fairly poor sense of rhythm, since it's more or less the same from start to finish and he attacks people completely at random.

There should be things to do other than heal.

As much as I love healing, whack-a-mole and all, if I don't have to pay attention to anything else it gets boring pretty quickly, and circles on the ground only provide a limited amount of distraction in the long run. There should be something else that I have to pay attention to at least at some point to the fight: maybe we all have to change position together, maybe I have to add a bit of dps during a burst phase, or maybe a button needs pushing at a specific moment. Just... something.

Prime examples of this: Soa with his platform jumping and Operator IX with all the colour-related mechanics.

Dispels should be handled with care.

Now this is something that's only become a bugbear of mine quite recently. I always thought SWTOR took a reasonable enough approach to dispelling since it had cooldowns on dispels from launch, making it clear that they weren't something intended to be spammed. And then... they gave us fights like Nefra in Dread Fortress, who puts a DoT on the whole raid something like once every thirty seconds. If you have a group where nobody but the healers can dispel (which I often do) you end up hitting it pretty much on cooldown, as well as hating all your dpsers for having rolled classes that can't cleanse at least themselves.

There are other ways to make dispels annoying too, such as on the Dread Council. Tyrans only casts his death marks about once a minute, but on hardmode they need to be dispelled asap or the afflicted person dies. Now, having an unforgivable mechanic like that isn't necessarily bad, but just like on Nefra, requiring more dispels than you are guaranteed to have dispellers can cause group make-up to increase pressure on the healers dramatically. On that particular fight it's also an issue that you're supposed to dispel things in a predetermined order (if you are limited to two dispellers) because it can be really hard to tell some debuffs apart, even if you increase the icon size to its absolute maximum on the UI. Making me feel like I'm fighting the UI instead of the boss is never fun.

Compare this to, for example, the person who needs to stay on the ground on Firebrand and Stormcaller in EC NiM. At level fifty, not dispelling the debuff there led to guaranteed death as well, but you only needed one person to take care of it (which could be done by any healer with no issues), and the bright yellow beam gave an obvious visual cue even without having to squint at debuff icons.

Basically: if there are dispels to be made, they shouldn't be so numerous as to require your healers to hit their dispel more often than some of their heals, and if there are any dispel-or-die mechanics, they should be obvious from a UI perspective and again, not so numerous as to punish groups with fewer dispels.

Levelling Through Old Endgame Content

When Rise of the Hutt Cartel was first announced, I was a bit worried about what would happen to the old level fifty flashpoints and operations. Previous endgame content becoming obsolete is not a new thing for theme park MMOs, but it didn't look like Bioware was introducing enough new stuff to replace it.

A bit less than a month into the expansion, I'm actually quite happy with how they handled the transition. While you could argue that the endgame options at 55 are a bit sparse in some areas (*cough*flashpoints*cough*), I do like how they've kept the level fifty content relevant.

I've mentioned before that the gear curve from the previous level cap to Makeb and beyond is fairly smooth. The quest rewards are decent enough upgrades if your gear isn't the greatest, but wearing the previous top tier of gear I didn't have to replace anything until I got into the new hardmode flashpoints. Meanwhile the old level fifty flashpoints and operations have been retuned to drop what was previously the top tier of loot even on the easier difficulties - meaning that they actually offer a viable alternate gearing path to 55. The experience gains from this content are surprisingly good as well.

Rolling in XP in EV on my Sorcerer

Running the old hardmode flashpoints on my still-level-50 alts I find it amusing how there is suddenly value in killing extra trash and doing the often neglected bonus bosses again - after all it all adds up to experience gains, right?

I've also joined my guildies for "Imperial alt operations" two weeks in a row now, and it's been great fun. Pre-RotHC we'd pretty much stopped running EV, KP and EC on story mode months ago, but the chance to level some long neglected level fifty alts and gear them up in the process has suddenly brought them back onto the table.

It's a very social way of levelling as well, and an excellent group content training ground for alts that you don't usually play very much. Tonight I unexpectedly found myself raiding KP and EC on my Marauder, whom I hadn't really played in months and even then I was never very good at playing her to begin with. (Melee dps is about as diametrically opposed to healing as it gets in my opinion.) My performance was laughably poor in parts (it took me until about two thirds through KP to spot Vicious Throw on my bar and go "oh right, I should be using that, shouldn't I"), but since I knew the basic tactics and the content is pretty forgiving these days it wasn't a major issue. While I'll never be a star among melee dps, I felt that after those two hours or so of running operations I had already improved quite a bit compared to where I started out that evening. I was also almost level 52.

As a bonus, I finally got to see the operations story content from Imperial side, something that I never did before the expansion. Handing in the EC story quest in particular was a major aha moment, considering that I'd been wondering for months what exactly the Dread Masters' deal was and seeing how it's not explained anywhere else in the game as far as I'm aware.

My favourite operation

With 2.0 and early access coming next week, it feels a bit like the SWTOR community is holding its breath right now. (Or maybe that's just me, still waiting on my new gaming PC. Any day now...) All the fan sites seem to be talking about is RotHC this, expansion that, and I feel like I have to approach every article with a lot of caution and at least one eye closed because I want to avoid accidental story spoilers.

Meanwhile I've been doing something completely different and have been looking back. With everything changing very soon, what have I enjoyed the most about the game so far? The official SWTOR Twitter account occasionally asks questions like "What's your favourite operation/flashpoint/class/companion?" and while there is a certain challenge in answering these in 140 characters or less, I often find myself wanting to talk about the subject some more. So today, let's talk about my favourite operation in the game so far.

About six months ago, lonomonkey asked people about what they thought made a good raid, and my own criteria basically came down to four points:

1. Interesting environment that feels like a real location, full of story and flavour, so that you find yourself pausing to look around.
2. Variety of interesting and original boss mechanics.
3. Appropriate difficulty, taking into account the raid's place in the game as a whole.
4. Having a good team of people with whom to share the experience. This last one is largely out of the developers' hands however.

Based on the first three of these criteria (since the fourth one is really kind of situational), my personal favourite operation in SWTOR is... /drumroll

... Eternity Vault!

Before I talk about it in depth, a quick note about why none of the others are my favourites:

Karagga's Palace is a very solid operation with some interesting boss mechanics (o Fabricator...) and certainly feels like a real place... just not a very interesting one. I mean, how many Hutt palaces do we raid while levelling up? They all kind of look the same. Also, the difficulty curve within the op itself was a little out of whack, considering that Karagga was a complete pushover by the time you'd mastered the fourth boss's Towers of Hanoi.

Explosive Conflict is pretty much in the same boat: very solid, lots of challenging new mechanics... it just lacks a certain "oomph". It's basically a warzone on a planet with a lot of trees. Pretty the first time you go in, but it doesn't have enough points of interest to really make you want to linger on repeat visits. Also, like KP, EC suffered from a distorted difficulty curve, with story mode being considerably overtuned on release, and Toth and Zorn being annoyingly fiddly for a first encounter. (Hands up if you've ever had multiple wipes on these guys - whatever the difficulty setting - and then breezed through the next two fights with no issues...)

Terror From Beyond is a tough one and easily rates as my second favourite, with its beautiful yet alien environment and incredibly varied boss mechanics. Really, the only thing for which I have to detract points is that Terror is a very annoyingly paced fight (phase one is just a huge stretch of nothing much happening really) and that from a healer's point of view it's possibly the most boring and tedious boss to heal in the entire game. Ten minutes of healing the tank while occasionally taking a step backwards or forwards do not make for very compelling gameplay!

Anyway, onwards to my love for Eternity Vault...

The environments in this operation are just stunning and could hardly be more varied if they tried. You start in this massive snowstorm, then you enter this enormous vault... then there are caves with lava, bits of jungle, more chambers of the vault - it could seem silly and random in another context, but since the operation takes place on a planet that does indeed have a natural environment like that, it just works.

The fights aren't exactly anything to write home about in terms of challenge, but I feel that this fits for an "introductory" operation. The Annihilation Droid is pretty much a tank and spank these days, but I still remember when we were all newly dinged and had to hide behind a pillar whenever he did his AoE... except then we were short on dps, so in the end we had the dps Commandos stay out to keep hitting him while the healers kept them alive from behind the pillar - it was pretty simplistic in some ways, but we were all still getting to grips with how things worked in SWTOR as a whole, so it was exciting anyway.

Then there's Gharj with his sinking islands and all the perils of being surrounded by lava, then the Ancient Pylons for which people wrote phone apps just so that they could figure out the puzzle more quickly before actually starting the fight. (I actually had a hand-written piece of paper with the symbol order originally... I felt so outclassed when a guildie just downloaded that app one night.) The Infernal Council as a built-in dps meter before the final fight still strikes me as a stroke of brilliance. And then of course Soa himself.

I'm always surprised by how many people seem to hate Soa. I even recall reading a dev interview somewhere at some point, where they were talking about how Soa taught them a lot about what not to do on a boss fight because players hated him so much. I'm just like... wha? I get it, he was extremely buggy for a long time and that annoyed me too, but that wasn't exactly part of the design, was it?

Disregarding the bugs for a minute, Soa was a considerable step up in difficulty compared to the previous fights - as it should be for the final boss of an instance in my opinion, he had great voice acting ("They come, marching..."), and last but not least the best approach to utilising all three dimensions in a boss fight that I've ever seen in an MMO.

The third dimension is one of those things... other game genres use it all the time, but if you're not into 3D platformers or similar titles, then you might feel a bit lost when it comes to moving in three dimensions in an MMO. I remember WoW had a couple of fights that forced you to fly, but somehow the end result was always a lot of awkward floating around and tapping of keys as you were trying to figure out in which direction you were just that little bit off target (Malygos, Valithria Dreamwalker, Al'Akir).

I thought it was interesting how the SWTOR devs approached the matter from a different angle. People are not used to their characters just floating around in space, so allow them to keep their feet on the ground and make them move through the third dimension the "natural" way - by falling. If the only way is up down, there's no confusion about which way to go. Also, allow the players to focus on their movement during that phase without having other mechanics that will distract or kill them if they can't instantly figure out which way to go next.

I'm not at all great at navigating in 3D in video games, but on Soa I loved the thrill of the falling floors and having to focus on where to go next, and still do every time I get to go back to that fight. The way you move from one "floor" to the next just gives the whole thing a sense of physical progression that I have yet to encounter in any other boss fight (as most of the time you start out in an enclosed area and stay within that same area for the entire time).

What's your favourite operation (boss fight) and why?

Day 10: Death

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

Let's start with a death that was not my own, but served as a lesson to me. Noob me was innocently cruising across the dunes of Tatooine at the time, when I suddenly spotted a lone Jedi going up against a world boss... and going splat very quickly. I can only guess that, like so many others, he fell victim to the lure of "clicking on the glowing skull to see what happens". I knew not to follow his example afterwards.

My own first death to a TOR raid boss was to the Rogue Cartel Warbot on Quesh. I'm not even sure how it happened, as he doesn't have any particularly tricky abilities or anything... I guess I was just dumb. I felt suitably humiliated as the fight moved away from me and all over the courtyard while I just continued to lie in a corner feeling stupid. Nobody else died on that fight either.

Oh Soa and your many fall deaths! Though I have to say, considering the harshness of the platform dropping mechanic when you're first learning it, I'm surprised that I haven't seen a lot more people die to it.

There was also this one time when we had just wiped and I was the last one to make it back... and then I took one step down from the ledge at the entrance and managed to fall through the tiny gap between the ledge and the top platform, instantly plummeting to my death again. Everyone was like "Where is Shintar?" and "What happened? Why is she dead again?" while I was laughing tears in front of my computer screen and nearly pissing myself. Just my luck to find a gap that most people hadn't even taken notice of. I did feel a bit bad for making everyone wait while I had to run back in a second time, but the fact that some guildies started referring to anyone falling to their death in stupid places as "doing a Shintar" afterwards absolutely made it worth it.

The boss kills where everyone except one person is dead at the end are always the best ones, aren't they? This was on hard mode.

Finally, this shot shows a run of Kaon Under Siege where we were in the cinema when our Commando suddenly keeled over dead. What happened? "I just stood on this chair and then I was suddenly dead! I didn't do anything else, I swear!" "Which chair?" asked our tank, clearly disbelieving. He jumped around on a couple of them... and suddenly fell over dead as well. The rest of us knew not to mess with the furniture after that! During a different run we also had someone die to a table in a different room. I probably shouldn't enjoy random bugs like that this much, but deadly furniture is just too silly...

Anyway, that's it for this series. I hope people got some enjoyment out of this little glimpse into my everyday play.

Doing Eternity Vault through the group finder

I wrote about my experiences using the group finder to run flashpoints about a week ago. I've been in a couple more runs since then and they've all been pleasant experiences, with no exceptions. However, I was still curious how well the new tool would work for operations.

A couple of guildies queued up for a random operation a couple of days ago, but got bored and went off to do something else after a while when a raid failed to materialise. To be fair, the group at the time consisted of four damage dealers and a healer, meaning that it lacked another healer and two tanks. Looking for the most sought-after roles only was never going to yield quick results.

On Sunday we tried again, this time with a full flashpoint group, so that the tool would only have to match us with another group like ours and we'd be golden. We got an ops group instantly!

The tl;dr version is that it was fun and not dissimilar to the EV pug that I participated in before the server transfers and introduction of the group finder. People asked to have the loot rules clarified in advance to avoid accidental ninja-ing and were no less courteous just because the group had been formed automatically. As an aside, I'm not sure why Bioware got rid of the old loot system for story mode; you'd think that would be perfect for group finder pugs now...

The group finder blessed us with four players of extremely varying experience: The second healer was a Sage who had clearly done it all before and was both competent and friendly. The dps Guardian we got had no experience with EV whatsoever, but he was very enthusiastic, chatty and followed instructions well. He also told us that he thought that my guildies and I were great people, unlike certain others who had apparently ridiculed him for his gear and called him a noob. Bless him.

The second damage dealer, a gunslinger, was slightly undergeared as he was mostly wearing greens, but he seemed to know which buttons to push. I took note of the fact that he deployed his damage reduction shield at appropriate times. He was also very quiet however (though he did respond to instructions and so on), and a bit slow when it came to things like target switching. The most curious thing about him was that he always responded to ready checks with "1". We couldn't figure out where that came from, but shrugged it off as a funny quirk.

The undisputed star of the show however was our pug tank, to whom I shall refer as "Checkers" in this post (not his actual character name). He was slightly undergeared, but more importantly totally clueless about operations and many other things. We knew that we were in for a ride when immediately upon group formation, he asked how to get to the operation and we had to actually tell him to press the "travel now" button.

When he died on the first boss, he released and somehow managed to get lost.

"How do I get back in?"
"Erm, there should be a purple portal right next to where you respawned, don't you see it?"
"Nope lol."

In the end I had to go back out and fetch him, as he had wandered off into the middle of the Gav Daragon somewhere.

On the second boss he showed us that he knew that tanking was about having aggro, as he insisted on taunting Gharj off the main tank over and over again, resulting in people having to dive for cover whenever the boss suddenly ran over to the ranged group. Checkers also tried to heroically tank all the adds on a sinking island, but a rescue managed to get him to safety before he could die this time.

As we approached the Ancient Pylons, multiple people demanded in chat that nobody should push any buttons, using ALL CAPS for emphasis. Can you guess what Checkers did as soon as he got the chance? If your answer was "push the button", you'd be correct. Fortunately we muddled though the fight successfully, even if our party got overwhelmed by ackleys at the end (after completing).

On the Council we immediately had people placing bets that Checkers wouldn't be able to kill his mob, but he surprised us all by pulling it off (repeatedly as it turned out) and surviving with just a sliver of health left. We did fail the fight however as our gunslinger couldn't kill his opponent - in fact he barely managed to shave off half the guy's health before the timer ran out, and no, he didn't have the debuff. After another failed attempt we had our overgeared guild tank swap targets with him and after that we managed to complete the encounter.

As we were starting to explain the Soa fight, Checkers suddenly left the group and went offline. We were sad. I admit that we had been having a bit of a laugh about his antics on Mumble, but we also thought that he was adorable in his own way and I had been happy to answer all his questions. He had also given no indication of being unhappy with the run; in fact he had said that he was loving it. A guildie quipped that maybe Checkers' mum had pulled the plug on him, but considering that he did come across as pretty young and disappeared at exactly ten o'clock, that joke might not have been too far off the truth.

Anyway, we requeued for another tank but there wasn't anyone in the queue. Our ops leader suggested that the dps Guardian should change his role to tank on the tool so that it would pull another dps in, seeing how Soa only really requires one tank anyway. Unfortunately the group finder wouldn't let us requeue for replacements at all after that however. I strongly suspect that something went screwy, considering that our gunslinger suddenly had a healer icon next to his name as well.

Since we couldn't get an eighth now as the group finder doesn't allow manual invites for automatically formed parties, we ended up seven-manning Soa - wiped a few times but got him down in the end and everyone was happy. We gave the remaining puggers the address of our guild website just in case they were interested - I don't expect any of them to pop in, but I do hope that we'll be able to use the group finder as a recruitment tool in the long run.