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.

Day 9: Silly #IntPiPoMo

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

I tend to feel ambivalent about silly character names, but seeing these guys in a Voidstar match made me smile, and I've never even played Bioshock. I certainly appreciate a good pun or well-executed theme.

I would say phasewalking loses some of its power when you know exactly just where all the Sages will plant theirs in Ancient Hypergates...

Things going wrong in cut scenes are always funny, but I really loved this party bomb sneaking into this early scene from the Esseles, both because of how utterly inappropriate it is in context but also because of how the Navigator ends up wearing it like some sort of bizarre hat.

This picture is not that silly in itself but it's more about what it represents. One night in EC we were running with some pugs and were waiting for everyone to catch back up after the Minefield, when one of the pugs taught the rest of us how to climb the cliff face on the side of the area. This manoeuvre allows you to skip just... one, two (?) pulls of trash and was therefore a huge waste of time considering how long it took to get everyone up there, but it was also entertaining. As the pug explained: you have time to discover all kinds of things when you're sitting around bored, waiting for people to catch up.

Finally, this is just a screenshot I took of my chat window during our first ever night on Nahut. It just amused me in several different ways, from a certain Scoundrel complaining about actually having to heal, then rolling to his death through a hole in the floor, to my own eventual demise through Spaghettificiation (best boss ability ever).

IntPiPoMo count: 57

Day 8: Memorable Moments: #IntPiPoMo

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

Just like last year, one of the most memorable moments that I screenshotted was a really bad PvP match! It's funny because I do enjoy PvP, but for some reason the most memorable matches are always the bad ones... what I preserved for posterity here was a Voidstar which I mentally filed away under "Imps are quitters". Yes, it was a loss, but this certainly wasn't helped by my side having literally several quitters a minute. You can't actually see the full list in the screenshot, but I noted in the file name that by the end of the match a total of 28 different characters had been part of the team (actual team size: 8). This is what you get when your game doesn't penalise people for deserting.

Whenever my guild runs Explosive Conflict, one of the tanks will call shotgun on the tower, a tradition that was instituted by our original guild leader, who liked that the role of standing in the tower on the third boss fight allowed him to be fairly lazy for several minutes. I think the earliest we've had someone call dibs on the role during a run was before we'd even entered the instance... for all that I'd never actually experienced myself what you do up there until this year, when I got to have a go on my Vanguard (pictured) and later on my Shadow. It's funny because it's really not very hard at all, but if you don't know what you're doing you can still wipe the group in several different ways. I still remember that pug I had a few years ago where we had a dps go up in the end because literally nobody else knew what to do.

This is just a cut scene at the end of KotET chapter two, and the reason it's memorable to me is not because of the story, but because on master mode this is probably the hardest fight in any of the chapters in the entire game, and I felt incredibly accomplished after beating it. At the same time I feel kind of scarred for life though, because the other day I replayed this chapter on story mode on an alt and I still got slightly twitchy the moment I saw these guys, just from the deeply ingrained memories of what a pain they are on the harder difficulties. It's certainly worked to make me remember the GenoHaradan as more fearsome opponents than any Emperor.

And finally, a Conquest moment: Twin Suns Squadron actually conquered a few planets this year and it was always exciting, but what I found noteworthy here was the brief period of time during which we were actually the conquerors of two planets, one on our main guild and one on our Imperial alt guild. For a guild that isn't actually a dedicated Conquest guild and has fewer than 100 active members I think that's pretty damn good.

IntPiPoMo count: 52 - target achieved! (though the series continues until the end of the month)

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.

16-Man Mojo

A few weeks after joining Twin Suns Squadron back in 2012, I did my first 16-man operation with them. At the time, the experience left me feeling quite giddy. Over the years, 16-mans have been an on-again, off-again activity for us, depending on how many members were active at any given time, but they were rarely something for which we set serious progression targets. We were always focused on 8-man, with 16-man being more of a social activity on off-nights, giving people who weren't regular raiders a chance to tag along too.

Recently, this has changed though with the absorption of another guild into TSS, as this guild brought with it another full 8-man team that was regularly running master modes. Add some of our other recent recruits to the mix, and we can now have three different 8-man groups running on a good night - enough to form a competent team to tackle 16-man as well. (And yes, you pretty much need about two dozen people to be able to run 16-man - not just due to availability issues, but because I've found that in any given pool of raiders, there'll always be some who for some reason hate 16-man with a passion and will avoid attending 16-man nights at all costs.)

About a week ago we ventured into Scum and Villainy master mode on 16-man and were quite successful, killing five out of the seven bosses. I'm pretty sure the sixth fight would have been within our reach as well, but it required a bit more co-ordination and it was getting late.

This week we tried our hands on Explosive Conflict master mode and boy, did that not go well! On our first couple of attempts we actually had people dying almost right on the pull, and it wasn't due to medpack issues either (though that sure gave me flashbacks). We did make significant progress over the course of the night however, eventually running into the drouks' enrage, though we didn't get them down. I think some people found it quite frustrating.

For me it was actually quite exciting though. I'm not going to say that some of the sillier wipes didn't annoy me too, but I really relished the opportunity to actually try and push harder content with a larger group again. It's been a long time - nearly eight years in fact. It was in summer 2010 that my old WoW guild got its last 25-man kill (Sindragosa in Icecrown Citadel) before being forced to downsize.

Especially as a healer, the team dynamics are very different in larger group content. When there's only two of you, everyone pretty much does everything, and there's rarely reason to have specific assignments for things. But in content that's designed for a larger number of healers, the damage is tuned differently and more frequently enforces strict roles, for example because the damage on the tank is so heavy that one healer is required to spam heals on him at all times. Being stuck in that role could be considered a bit boring I suppose, but for me it was actually a bit of rush. Especially at the beginning I got nervous more than once when both the tank and myself got low and I still had to keep prioritising the tank and trust my co-healer to provide the heals that I needed. As he's one of our newer members and we're usually on different teams I didn't have as much of a rapport with him, but as the evening progressed, seeing that I could trust him to keep me alive was actually a really good feeling.

I hope that we'll be able to keep this momentum going, with enough people interested in the format to keep showing up. I know it can have its frustrations, with more players to potentially mess up or underperform, but for me it will always hold a special charm as well.

Day 5: NPCs #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.

I had this idea for a post called "my five favourite Nautolan NPCs" or something along those lines at one point, but then I realised that I didn't actually have screenshots of most of them and I was too lazy to go out hunting for the right pictures. One such NPC that I do have a picture of is Leeha Narezz from the Jedi knight story. She seems like a bit of a one-note character at first with her droid obsession, but later it turns out that there was more to her than meets the eye... 

 

Colonel Grezor is another interesting Nautolan, I think the only one of his species we see working for the Empire. You meet him during the introductory mission to Explosive Conflict for Imperials.

Nautolans would totally be my pick for next playable species. Aren't we way overdue for one anyway? I can't believe it's been more than two years since Togruta Day! I still tend to think of them as the new guys...

Oh, Arcann, how far you've come. The other day I stumbled upon an old post of mine where I expressed pure horror at the fact that someone had found my blog while googling whether they could romance Arcann. Why would you even want to? I asked. To be fair, I feel that during the KotFE days this was definitely the sensible question to ask. However, redeemed Arcann is a very different man, and since apparently a large percentage of players decided to redeem him, a romance actually appears to be in the cards now. How times change.

Raid bosses are NPCs too! I've said before that I don't think Gods from the Machine gets enough love, but I've been quite charmed by everything I've seen of it so far, even if we're very much behind schedule in terms of bosses released. I'm looking forward to the next one coming out soon.

I didn't even note down the name of this Twi'lek NPC on Balmorra, but I took a screenshot of her because I really liked her look. Despite of the multitude of different customisations available for the species, I find that a lot of Twi'lek NPCs look incredibly samey - always body type one or two, with cute faces and usually blue, pink or green. So I liked this Balmorran resistance fighter in yellowish tones and sporting one of the bigger body types, like my own Twi'leks. (Fun fact: I rather dislike body type one on Twi'leks. I find that they look awkwardly out of proportion when their lekku are almost as thick as their whole body.)

IntPiPoMo count: 38

Still Operational

I haven't written about operations for a while, even though I still run them at least once a week. The more cynical among my readers might say that there's nothing to talk about because Bioware hasn't released a new operation in over a year and hasn't even hinted at any future plans to do so. However, my ops posts have rarely been about content releases and more about progression anyway. And despite of the general doom-and-glooming going on in regards to ops, my guild continues to be entertained well enough by them. Sure, we've had some old hands hang up their hats not long ago, but we've also had fresh, enthusiastic recruits, so things have evened out. Churn is always a reality for guilds, and we haven't really experienced any more of it than in previous years.

I've mentioned before that I've been kind of surprised by how little I actually seem to mind having to re-learn bosses that we previously downed when they were easier (because we could outlevel them by 5-10 levels). It's just fun to hang out with my guildies, and spending our time re-learning how to beat Thrasher on nightmare mode is as good an excuse to do so as any. What I do miss though is the excitement of a new boss kill, because that's definitely not present in quite the same way anymore. No achievement pop-ups, no useful gear drops for my main, no glowing pride that makes me want to make a video of the boss kill... because I probably made one months or even years ago already.

I think the main thing that keeps us going right now is the sheer wealth of fights we still have to "re-do" or even beat for the first time. 4.0's re-tuning has caused some odd shifts in difficulty as well.

Eternity Vault/Karagga's Palace: Not much news to report here - still the easiest ops by far and very much worth a visit when either one is the featured hardmode of the week and can be farmed for easy 224 loot.

Explosive Conflict: This place was such a pain in the butt on NiM when it was current content, and this experience has largely been re-created in 4.0. However, in one of the aforementioned difficulty shifts, the dps check for Firebrand and Stormcaller has become ridiculously intense now. It used to be that if you could kill Zorn and Toth you were also fine for the tanks in terms of dps, but this is no longer the case. Our guild's second group has beaten the fight, but even they admit that it's incredibly hard and that they've had to rely on "cheese tactics" such as using a Guardian tank's saber reflect for insane extra damage. My own group has sort of shied away from even trying it again because we are usually so far behind on dps that we don't even hit the enrage but rather end up with mechanics overlapping in bad ways before we've even hit the first defensive measures phase.

Terror from Beyond: We've had some goes at the second encounter on NiM and in somewhat of an inverse situation of the above, the Dread Guards don't seem nearly as much of a road block now as they used to be. However, I think we still kind of remember those days all too well and it makes us a bit timid when it comes to investing progression time here. Plus, even if we got them down we'd then have to face Operator next, who is quite a pain on NiM as well.

Scum and Villainy: This op seems considerably easier on NiM than it was in its original incarnation, because I remember back then we couldn't even down the first boss until nearly a year after its release, by which time we were overgearing the place by several tiers. This time however we are actually already up to working on the Cartel Warlords... whenever we can actually get to them in any given week, because killing everything leading up to them - while proven to be within our capabilities - is still far from smooth sailing. I'm not too hopeful for Styrak on NiM though, considering that we sometimes still run into the enrage even on hardmode when people aren't fully on the ball.

Dread Fortress: There's something about second bosses, because once again few of us really seem to have the stomach to work on Draxus - I can't actually comment on his post-4.0 difficulty, but I do remember all too well how much of a pain he used to be at level 55. The way the fight is split into waves that require people to learn a perfect rotation of interrupts while splitting their damage just right is simply super annoying. Having to wipe every time a single person messed up a single interrupt is a special kind of tedium.

Dread Palace: Sadly, this place has been a complete no-go for us as the very first boss hits so hard now that our tanks go squish in the blink of an eye. There was some talk about having them re-gear in a way that's otherwise sub-optimal to increase their endurance but in practice it's just ended up being another fight that we've postponed until a later date.

Ravagers: The two 3.0 operations at least are the one place where we can do "real" progression as I had only got the first two bosses in Ravagers down on hardmode during the Shadow of Revan patch cycle. Torque HM was a genuine progression kill for me in 4.0, but most of my group had already got it before KotFE's release so nobody felt like having a big celebration. Now nobody wants to spend time on Master and Blaster because it's supposed to be oh so hard and will take us forever to learn.

Temple of Sacrifice: In another example of strange re-tuning, the Revanite Commanders, who gave us massive trouble pre-KotFE, were apparently nerfed in some manner so that they are now ridiculously easy compared to the fight's previous difficulty level. We used to wipe and wipe and wipe on these guys... but when we first went to ToS HM after 4.0, we one-shot them, and that with several people in the group who hadn't even attempted the fight before. My one and only piece of genuine progression since 4.0 and it was depressingly anti-climatic. This of course leaves us with nothing but Revan himself in this operation, who is supposed to be the hardest fight in the entire game, so... probably not our best avenue of progression when looking at all the other areas in which we still fall short.

While we are certainly not bored, I'm still hopeful that Bioware will eventually decide to add more operations to the game again - and hopefully do better at making them fun than they did with the last couple, whose enjoyment (for me anyway) suffered a bit due to nonsensical circle mechanics and bad difficulty tuning.

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!

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.

Another Achievement Ticked Off

This Saturday I finally got something that I've been after for a long time: the Avalanche Heavy Tank from EC NiM.

In my opinion it's still one of the cooler mounts in the game, and pretty much perfect for a trooper. Too bad it only gives you a 90% movement increase, but I'm never really in enough of a hurry for that to matter.

I think I've finally got everything I could possibly want from Explosive Conflict: all the achievements (including the "survived" ones), the Praxon mount from Kephess, the tank... well, I suppose I don't have the Praxon variety that drops on hardmode (because why do hardmode when you could do NiM instead and also get a shot at the tank) or the Qyzen Fess customisation. But I don't care nearly as much about any of those as I did about the tank.

Now to wait for Bioware to add some sort of amazing housing drop to Denova when Galactic Strongholds launches, giving us yet another reason to run this over two-year-old operation over and over again...

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.

Pugging Explosive Conflict

Oh, Explosive Conflict, you still make for the best stories.

I was logged in as my Operative when I saw a call go out in general chat that someone was looking for more to do EC hardmode. As I still had the story quest for it in my log and only see pugs for that particular operation form fairly rarely, I jumped at the opportunity to join in. Sure, EC's mechanics are still comparatively unforgiving, but personally I've done that content so many times now, on every possible difficulty, that I felt confident in my ability to maybe even carry a couple of inexperienced people.

As we approached Toth and Zorn, I asked whether anyone needed tactics explained to them or whether everyone had done the fights before. As so often on such occasions, the answer was silence. In hindsight, I think there was only one other person who truly knew the instance, a dps Mercenary who would show his expertise later. Everyone else may have had a vague idea of how the fights worked, possibly from pugging them once before, but they went on to reveal a clear lack of understanding when it came certain fight mechanics.

Anyway, on the first encounter the ops leader instructed people to quickly burn down one of the two Drouks and then kill the other one, never mind the enrage. That made my hair stand on end right there, but due to us being both overlevelled and ridiculously overgeared, we succeeded. From a healing perspective it was pretty annoying though, as the bosses were jumping around willy-nilly (while they were both alive), players and debuffs were all over the place, and we had more than one death. Still, I guess we won, so whatever.

The next fight was the one I was really worried about. I swear, I've got some sort of tank-induced trauma when it comes to that encounter. Just... too many wipes due to people destroying the shield generator on their side, and then everybody denying that it was them. /shudder. Surprisingly, that fight actually went down without a hitch and we one-shot it without any issues (even though the tank on my side got the Double Destruction debuff every time). I think on the other side (from where I was standing) they might have lost their shield generator at one point, as people got very low on health and one person died, but we made it anyway.

I thought that we were doing pretty well at that point and that Colonel Vorgath should be easy in comparison... yeah, right. As it turned out, neither tank knew how to do the part in the tower. Since I've never done it myself, I couldn't really give any advice on it either. Tanks in my guild have always been keen on calling shotgun on the tower, so I figured that it must be easy and certainly not rocket science.

We made a couple of attempts while one of the tanks flailed around up top, but he never seemed to get anything done in time and the rest of the group repeatedly got consumed by flames without even leaving the encounter's starter area. Eventually the dps Merc I mentioned before spoke up and offered to take care of the tower duties instead. He did a great job, and surprisingly the drones' overload ability got interrupted every time too. However, people allowed the explosive droids to wander into the group constantly, which we always survived with just a sliver of health left, and both the tanks decided to randomly wander into non-cleared areas of the minefield at some point, leaving us with nothing but dps and healers alive when we actually got to the boss. We somehow managed to wing it with no tanks, even though all the ranged classes but me insisted on standing right next to the turrets and getting nuked to hell instead of simply outranging them. It's truly marvellous what sufficient amounts of overgearing and overlevelling content can do.

I wasn't sure whether that was going to be good enough for Kephess though. Our first attempt started off alright, but during the Trandoshan add phase, people were AoEing things (including themselves) left and right, to the point that I considered it a miracle that "only" one of them managed to kill themselves. Thank god for dps that is high enough to kill the warrior add quickly I guess. We ended up killing the walker in only two phases, so that Kephess himself came down and roamed around during the droid phase, but somehow we survived that... except for the other healer, who insisted on standing at range and got himself nuked by the droids. We went into the last phase with two people down and a lot of flailing and soon it was a full wipe - but at that point it still seemed doable.

However, as we tried again and again, it turned out that neither of the tanks had any idea how to do the tank swap in the last phase, leading to instant death on their part over and over. We might have been able to wing it to the end if any of the dps other than the Merc had had a clue and dropped aggro at the right time - but that wasn't in the cards either. Eventually the Merc said that he had to go (/sadface).

People were still convinced that we could do it however, so a replacement dps was invited and we went at it again. This time however, we didn't even get the walker down, as the bomb debuff repeatedly went to people who didn't seem to notice it and didn't react to being called out in chat either, meaning that it went to waste. After that wipe, people finally said their goodbyes and left the group. I felt bad for the guy who had only just been called in to replace the Merc, especially since he had been one of the people who had let a bomb go to waste - clearly nobody had filled him in on anything.

Now, I actually don't want to call out anyone in that pug as being terrible players or anything like that. The atmosphere was quite pleasant and people seemed to be open to learning... it just wasn't good enough. If I had to criticise anything it would be the eyesore that was two female Sith warriors with the blonde Barbie haircut and wearing bikinis, looking like clones even though they were from different guilds. It was quite a sobering experience though in terms of how hard EC HM still is, even with five more levels and way better gear than anyone should ever need. I can definitely see why hardly anyone ever pugs this - you definitely need more than two competent people to succeed, and most pugs just won't have the patience to learn and understand all the different mechanics that can wipe your group if tackled the wrong way.

On Nerfs and Nightmare Power

No, not those kinds of nerfs...

GaddockTeeg (JD) of the Unnamed SWTOR Podcast got himself into a bit of a ranting mood this week, both on his show and on Twitter. He really doesn't like one of the upcoming changes in 2.7, and doesn't quite understand why he appears to be almost alone in his outrage. If nothing else, he sure got me thinking on the subject.

It's funny, WoW does raid nerfs and people lose their minds. SWTOR adds a measly title and I haven't seen much outcry except from me.
— GaddockTeeg (@GTeeg) March 10, 2014

In case you didn't know, nightmare mode Dread Fortress is scheduled to release next month, and it's supposed to be just as difficult as previous nightmare modes. However, part of this difficulty will now be rolled into a buff on the bosses called Nightmare Power, which increases their health and damage output. If you manage to kill the last boss while she still has this buff, you'll gain a special title; however at a later point (I think I saw someone say "not by 2.8, later than that") this buff will be removed, making the fights significantly easier in the process. Basically, the hardest content in the game is scheduled to be nerfed, right from the start.

Now, I think that nerfs are never a good thing, because they basically come down to changing the rules of the game after you've given people time to get used to playing under the existing rules and growing to like them. In an ideal world no content would be released until it's perfectly tuned, but since nobody's perfect, there can be understandable reasons to apply nerfs after release. Explosive Conflict story mode was a good example: my guild cleared it and I enjoyed the challenge, but for something that was supposed to be super accessible it was just way overtuned at launch. It wasn't serving its intended purpose; that needed to be changed.

Nerfs also come in different flavours: personally I don't find it too bad if the devs just adjust a boss's health and damage numbers for example, because that doesn't usually change the very nature of the fight too much. Removing or completely trivialising whole mechanics on the other hand is a big no-no in my book (which is why I remain eternally sad about the nerf to the Darth Malgus fight in False Emperor).

Badly done nerfs can indeed induce a lot of outrage. I remember the last time I got really ticked off about a nerf in WoW, which was back in early Cataclysm. Back before there was a Looking For Raid tool, my guild, like so many others, was working its way through normal modes and had downed everything but the last two bosses in the tier. Then a massive nerf hit, which reduced boss health and damage by twenty percent as well as trivialising several of their mechanics. After that nerf, we downed the boss we'd been working on for weeks in two tries and then killed the last one, whom we had never even seen before, the same night. It was a major annoyance, for several reasons:

- The nerfs came with (relatively) short notice.
- They weren't applied to fine-tune the fights' difficulty, they were applied to make them irrelevant as progression and push people into the next tier.
- They affected a huge number of people (basically every raid guild that wasn't doing hard modes already).
- They were badly handled, going by the standards I set above, because they destroyed key fight mechanics on top of blanket health and damage reductions.
- On a personal level, my guild was robbed of the satisfaction of killing a boss we had been working on for weeks, as mechanics we had been practising were simply removed and our previous efforts were rendered completely pointless.

Now, how does this compare to what's happening with Nightmare Power? I think this scenario is very different. First off, we're being told about the eventual nerfing of the content before it's even been released in its original form. That's about as much notice as it's possible to get. We're also being told that it's only going to affect health and damage, and that mechanics will stay intact.

Finally, and I think this is an important point, it will only affect a minuscule amount of people since only a very small part of the player base participates in nightmare modes to begin with. I've seen the number "less than two percent" thrown around. If we assume that the game has about a million players, counting both subscribers and non-subscribers, that's maybe ten thousand people - and I'd also assume that "participation" in this case includes guilds like my own who set foot into NiM and managed to kill only a single boss before hitting a brick wall. I wouldn't be surprised if the number of people that can actually clear a nightmare mode within a reasonable time frame numbered only in the hundreds. Of those, a lot will probably manage to down Brontes in time to get the title anyway (because that's why they are doing nightmare modes in the first place, because they are that good), and what happens afterwards won't matter to them. There'll probably be a couple of guilds who'll get close and just miss out - and I do feel bad for them, but you'll excuse me for not starting a petition on their behalf.

There is another argument that JD has been bringing up a lot, and that's that of prestige. It will diminish those nightmare mode guilds' efforts if the unwashed masses can do an easier version of the same thing later! Now, I know many people who don't like this kind of argument to begin with, but personally I don't disagree. Of course we all want to feel like special snowflakes, and of course it's not fun if something we worked hard for is given to other people more easily.

However, prestige decays naturally over time anyway. Take the Warstalker title that you get for completing EC NiM in under two hours. A year ago, seeing someone with that title was a rare and impressive sight. These days? Meh. While EC NiM is still no pushover, five more levels and several tiers of new gear have made it vastly easier than it used to be, even if the operation never received a formal nerf. Keeping that in mind, the changes they are making with Nightmare Power are a good thing for hardcore raiders that like to show off: because for the first time, they'll get a reward that less skilled players won't also be able to get later.

Of course, all this rambling of mine doesn't answer the key question of why the hardest content in the game needs to be nerfed in the first place. It's supposed to be hard and inaccessible, right? We have story mode so everyone can see the content, and we have hard mode for people who want a bit of a challenge, why even have a nightmare mode if it's just going to get nerfed to be closer to hard mode? To be honest, I completely agree that it's not needed, but I suspect that it's a case of the devs suffering from a bit of vanity in regards to their work. "We thought up all these interesting mechanics and hardly anyone gets to see them! What a waste!" It's a bit of a contradiction in terms really, because the very definition of difficult content is that it's going to be exclusive and not seen by all. I'm not sure why this is suddenly an issue. Either way, I suspect that the introduction of Nightmare Power and its eventual removal are meant to get more people into nightmare modes once the initial race is over, just for the sake of someone doing them and getting to see the new mechanics.

I don't think it's something that's needed, but I also don't see it having much of a negative effect on most people, so I'm happy to wait and see how it plays out in practice.

EDIT: JD put some more of his thoughts on the subject into a blog post of his own.

On Explosive Conflict Trash

Last night we went back into Explosive Conflict once again, for a social 8-person hardmode run and to show some new members the ropes a bit. It had been a while since our last visit: the last time I wrote about it here on the blog was at the end of August of last year when I finally got to clear nightmare mode, and while it's possible that I went back again after that, it can't have been more than once or twice.

I think most of us have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Denova. In many ways it's still a great operation, though I appreciate that Bioware has learned since then how to make fights interesting without necessarily including as many mechanics that punish the whole group if one person makes a mistake (wiping due to someone destroying a shield generator on Firebrand and Stormcaller comes to mind). However, it was current content for pretty much a whole year, what with nightmare mode keeping it relevant until the release of Rise of the Hutt Cartel, and I think by that point most of us had simply had enough of it. As a result going back in there always evokes a contradictory mix of feelings, both nostalgia and "oh no, not this again" at the same time.

Anyway, the reason I'm writing about this is that we were very surprised to find that Bioware had made changes to the trash again since the last time we visited. We knew that the last pull before Zorn and Toth disappeared ages ago - though I'm still not sure why, presumably the fact that it evaded so easily if anyone didn't jump down from the ledge quickly enough caused some issues? However, a lot more had changed this time around. I accidentally pulled the first group of mobs when I tried to climb up the cliffside our "usual" way and was taken by surprise by the fact that the trandoshans had been moved to make this impossible.

On the road to Firebrand and Stormcaller we found that the "sneaky" way along the side had been blocked off by a drouk having been repositioned to sit right next to the wall. On the other hand the trash pull in the water that people always used to circumvent had simply disappeared completely.

Once upon a time... we were new to EC and didn't skip the trash pull in the water. RIP now, water trash group.

The first trash pull after the two tanks was also gone, as was one of the groups in the trenches, and another one had been spread out more so that it became impossible to skip. One of the big groups before Kephess also appeared to have been moved out of the way.

On the one hand I was kind of impressed that Bioware still makes changes to older content, on the other hand I didn't really understand why. There was a theme of making changes to skippable trash there, either by removing it as redundant or making it unskippable, though there were a few pulls among the changed ones where I wasn't aware of them having been skippable before. Maybe they were and I've just never been in a group that knew how to do it. Either way I'm not sure why this mattered enough to anyone at Bioware at this point to mess with it. I don't really mind, I just find it strange. This isn't even endgame anymore, just levelling content, and fairly unrewarding in terms of money to boot. You only really go in there if you want to see the content. Why does it matter is you bypass a trash pull or two? I'd really love to know the reasoning behind this.

Return to EC NiM

This is the kind of post that should really have a victory screenshot to accompany it, but I kind of forgot to take one at the crucial moment. Oops. You'll just have to take my word for it.

You may or may not remember my videos about my guild's progression (or lack thereof) in EC NiM earlier in the year. Last I wrote about the subject, I ended on a rather positive note and was optimistic that we were going to get Kephess down soon. Alas, that never happened. We kind of got stuck on the phase with all the Trandoshan adds, unable to kite them effectively or kill them in a timely manner, and eventually people just lost interest, what with the expansion coming out soon and all. I was a bit disappointed by that, as it would have been nice to be able to say that I had finished all the existing operations content for once, but oh well.

Still, I always wanted to go back and down him at some point, even if it was going to be at level fifty-five and by applying overwhelming force. We actually first tried to do this a couple of weeks ago, but it was just one of those nights. We were seven-manning it and kept wiping due to stupid mistakes on Firebrand and Stormcaller ("What, someone blew up a shield generator again?") so we eventually called it without having achieved much.

This Sunday however the suggestion to go and do EC NiM came up again when we were just one regular player short for progression and had the option of getting a tank from another guild to fill our eighth spot. And this time we rocked the place! We still had a couple of wipes as some people were unfamiliar with certain nightmare mechanics, but we completed the timed run and got lucky with a tank mount drop as well.

Here are my insights on what it's like to run this operation at level fifty-five:

On Toth and Zorn, you still need that medpack at the start, you still need to keep swapping between the bosses (though their jump mechanics can bug out due to dps being that much higher than what the fight was originally designed for), and dpsing Zorn while you have the fearful debuff will still result in some hilariously quick self-annihilation. Other than that, all other sources of damage hurt a lot less now than they used to - the tanks hardly take any damage from the bosses if they are positioned properly, and the stacking mental anguish debuff barely tickles. You should have no trouble with this fight as long as your group knows the basic hardmode tactics, as there is actually a decent margin for error now.

Firebrand and Stormcaller are similar in that you can treat the fight the same way as hardmode now, with no need to worry about having dps switch to the other tank towards the end like we used to do when we did this on NiM at fifty. I also learned from experience (/hangs head in shame) that the bigger health pools at the new level cap allow you to survive a dispel fail on the yellow beam if you are at full health to start with. However, you'll probably still want to switch tanks at incinerate and not blow up the shield generators during the ground phase. Also, do watch out for the exploding add and leave it til last.

Colonel Vorgath is pretty much a walk in the park now if you understand the basic minefield mechanics. After all, this fight was always mainly about keeping your back to the wall and just having the numbers (to kill things in time, to keep the tanks alive through the damage at the end etc.). So as long as you still remember to keep your back to the wall, everything else is fairly easy now.

And then... Kephess! This fight has actually retained a lot of its mechanical complexity, even if the bigger numbers at fifty-five help a lot. Nonetheless you still want to interrupt those droids at the start, get the baradium bombers down in time to blow up the walker, watch your positioning in the transition phases etc. Fortunately the add phase that used to give us so much trouble in the past can now largely be overpowered. You still need to pull the shield-carrying adds away from the trenchcutters, but the tank can now simply hold the trenchcutters in place and dps can AoE them down before the next batch even spawns, which helps a ton.

The droid phase was funny because there was clearly some mechanic that we missed there as stacking up on them as we were used to caused them to erupt into absolutely blinding flashes of white light which made it impossible to see anything and made my PC lag like crazy. They also did some damage which we just healed through, but it just felt like we were doing something wrong. Around this point during one of our earlier attempts we also learned that on nightmare mode, Kephess has a mechanic called "nightmare of the makers" that automatically wipes you if you lose more than one person during an attempt, as he pulls you towards him and starts radiating massive AoE damage that kills you in seconds. Fun! Kephess himself also still hits damn hard and just makes you wonder how anyone ever made it through this fight alive at fifty. I wouldn't say that it's hard to heal at this level, but basically, with tanks and healers in full Underworld gear, we still had to heal the tanks non-stop to make sure they didn't die... which is kind of scary considering he's a level fifty boss that was originally designed to be done by tanks with less than 30k hitpoints.

Anyway, I can heartily recommend going back to EC NiM as an activity for an off-night when you don't have all your best and most geared players at hand but would still like to do something that requires some focus and feels rewarding in a way that breezing through story mode TfB or Scum simply doesn't.

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.