Thoughts on Dxun Master Mode and NiMs in General

Nature of Progress (or Dxun for short) was released with the Onslaught expansion in 2019 and received a master mode with patch 6.1.2 in June 2020. I really liked this operation when it came out, barring some minor criticisms such as story mode still being a bit overtuned at launch in my opinion. Veteran mode was also good fun, even if a lot of community guide-writing had died out during the "Knights of" years and we essentially had to go in blind at first. I just found the last boss to be a bit of a drag.

When master mode came out however, my attitude was mostly one of "no, thank you", as I figured it was going to be way too hard for me and my team to make much progress. (Worth noting that some people in my guild felt differently, did go in and did manage to kill a few bosses.)

Recently the subject of visiting the place came up again though, and it seemed like maybe the time was right for it now, considering that patch 7.1 applied heavy nerfs to all difficulties of Dxun last year.

I'm happy to say that I've seen some success! On 8-man my team managed to kill the first boss so far, and during our most recent 16-man week we made it up to the Mutant Trandoshans on master mode.

And honestly, it's been pretty fun so far! I may be biased because a lot of the challenge of these fights lies in the tanking, meaning that I haven't been too stressed as a healer so far (for a change), but I've generally been pretty impressed by the inventiveness of some of the new mechanics introduced for the higher difficulty.

Stare at Red long enough between wipes and she'll start to look cute...

What kind of came as a shock to me though was how little documentation there is of Dxun master mode. When we first decided to go there, I thought I'd start by googling a guide to the first boss to get a basic breakdown of the mechanical differences and was shocked to find that there were no results on any of the well-known fan sites. Literally the only thing I could find was this reddit post linking to a YouTube playlist of the author killing all the bosses on master mode with her team and providing a bit of narration about what was happening. I left a grateful comment on her video about Red, while also expressing astonishment that a three-year-old YouTube video appears to literally be the only guide to this content on the entire internet.

I then found myself wondering whether there were any guides for Gods from the Machine master mode, which is even older, having been added to the game in patch 5.10 in November 2018 almost five years ago now, and which - with current tuning - is considered to be the hardest operation in the entire game. And what do you know, there are no written guides for this one either. Just like with Dxun I found exactly one reddit post with a narrated YouTube playlist of the kills and that's it.

It just blows my mind that in all that time nobody bothered to create a proper guide for these. As mentioned earlier, there was definitely a period of time during the "Knights of" expansions when operations were considered officially abandoned and this was reflected in fewer active players dedicating themselves to that content. While progressing Gods and Dxun veteran mode, my guild had to rely a lot on word of mouth from more experienced players because there just weren't any publicly available guides when they first came out. But things got better again! I may not have been too pleased with R-4 Anomaly personally, but multiple sites had guides for both difficulties up within weeks, so the current lack of interest just seems to be limited to master modes.

I suppose you could argue that a difficulty mode designed for only a small number of players will always have fewer people talking about it, which is of course true, but I honestly thought there was still more interest in it than this. Especially as there was a bit of a storm in a teacup a few months ago when it was confirmed that a master mode for R-4 was no longer on the dev team's road map. From how much wailing and gnashing of teeth I saw on that subject I thought that clearly there was still a community that cared a lot about this content, even if there weren't that many of them. However, the lack of positive or explanatory content about NiMs released in the last five years seems to serve as evidence to the contrary, which honestly strikes me as a bit of a shame.

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.

Force Imbalance

Back in March I wrote a post on here in which I basically gave Bioware a thumbs-up for the way they handled operations in Legacy of the Sith, mainly for the fact that they actually took the time to properly scale them up to the new level cap this time - unlike in Onslaught. I also noted that the content felt incredibly tough at first, but that it seemed obvious that the plan for the long haul was for things to get easier as we geared up, and I was fine with that.

One and a half months later, I feel like I have to qualify that statement a bit. I was fine with the "plan" as it was originally advertised to us, which included the new operation coming out a month or two after Legacy of the Sith's launch and providing us both with new bosses to learn and access to gear upgrades that would allow us to take our power level in the legacy operations up a notch.

Unfortunately, the reality is that LotS has now been out for almost three months and we haven't had any word about as much as a potential release date for 7.1. Raiders have had plenty of time to gear up to the current item level cap of 330, which has certainly helped with making content a bit easier, but truth be told, a lot of operations are still incredibly hard.

Last week my regular team decided to venture into Gods from the Machine on veteran mode, a difficulty setting that we'd cleared with relative ease during the 6.x patch cycle. This time around, we spent hours wiping on just the first boss. When we eventually got him down, one of our tanks commented that the fight had felt a bit like the way it was when it was first released, back when Bioware wasn't planning to ever add a master mode for Gods and intentionally made it quite a bit harder than other veteran modes.

I checked the public logs on Parsely after that and was shocked to find that not a single log for Izax (the last boss of the op) on veteran mode had been uploaded since 7.0. For Scyva, the boss just before him, there was exactly one recorded kill. Now, this doesn't mean that nobody has cleared Gods from the Machine on veteran mode since Legacy of the Sith came out - they might have done it and not uploaded a log after all - but it does point towards the number of raiders capable of doing this content being vanishingly small. And this is the "medium" difficulty for this operation we're talking about!

Now, you could argue that Gods is perhaps a cherry-picked example, as other operations are not as bad on veteran mode and instead have people running into a difficulty wall a couple of bosses into master mode. But regardless of where exactly it happens, it can still be kind of demotivating to come up against these massive number checks that make some of these fights harder than they've been in years. Again, I was totally fine with this being a temporary state of affairs, but the longer we have to wait for Bioware to release the new operation and its new gear tier, the more we run the risk of some people just throwing in the towel out of frustration. Because it's one thing to re-progress old content at the launch of a new expansion, and another to have that same old content actually get considerably harder.

All of this isn't helped by issues of class balance. It's a topic I actually really dislike because I find number crunching quite boring, and I usually don't play at the sort of level where small imbalances make that much of a difference. The problem is that Bioware made major changes to all the classes with LotS, which was pretty much always going to result in worse balance at launch than we've had in a long time - and when you combine this with the highly unforgiving content tuning, more players than ever are going to find themselves in a situation where their preferred class might not be able to do the harder content at all.

Good luck doing some fights without a Scoundrel/Operative healer for example, who can put out nearly twice the AoE healing of a Commando or Sage due to a new, extremely overpowered utility they've been given. The situation is similar for damage dealers - again, Parsely provides some interesting stats here if you look at their numbers for Nefra NiM for example, who functions almost like a target dummy and shows dps Vanguards/Powertechs being able to do nearly twice the damage of Gunnery Commandos. It doesn't really matter on Nefra, but it's not hard to see how on fights with tighter dps checks (of which there are plenty now), you'll have issues if you have people who play classes that do significantly less damage than others.

I know that this isn't really a pressing matter in the sense that it only affects a very small portion of the player base - after all, only a certain percentage of subscribers do operations at all, and an even smaller slice of that group does the harder content. However, Bioware has already decided to commit some resources to ops players this expansion by taking the time to re-tune the legacy operations and giving us a completely new raid (eventually...) - I just don't want them to stumble so close to the finish line by frustrating and losing their audience.

(And on a completely selfish note, as an officer in a long-running guild, I want my loyal ops teams to thrive and have fun, and we're definitely at risk of having certain people run out of patience.)

Shintar's Galactic Seasons Diary, Week 5

Day 1:

For the first time since the start of the Season, neither of my weeklies involved PvP, as they were for flashpoints and operations. Ops were good again as I was planning to run Gods from the Machine with the guild on Friday, and as for the flashpoints... well, looking at the flashpoint list for the week I decided that I was going to do it this time, also because it was the fifth time in a row that I got the flashpoint weekly and I'd never actually done it. Yes, re-rolling it to GSF or warzones would have been more convenient for sure as I was bound to do those things for dailiy POs anyway, but I was craving some variety.

However, dailies first. One of them was to kill 75 enemies in unknown or wild space, meaning Ilum, CZ-198 or Iokath. I decided to go for kills on Ilum via a character that was on the Ilum storyline anyway, and was surprised to find that I only had one, my dps Sage. I seem to remember that there was a time when loads of my alts had yet to do Ilum... I guess I burned through them all back when Conquest actually required some work and questing on Ilum was a frequently reoccurring objective.

The other daily was a warzone again, which I played on my lowbie Merc. I was glad to see some map variety once again, as I got put into Yavin Ruins for the first time in ages. My team won - somewhat to my surprise, considering that they were not very responsive to my calls for help and multiple people were off to skirmish at the third turret when we already owned two, but I guess we just overpowered the enemy so much that it didn't matter.

For the flashpoints I decided to pick characters that had story missions tied to one of the flashpoints from the selection, so I started by queueing my original Sorc for Legacy of the Rakata. I got into a group with two stealthers, which allowed us to skip a few extra pulls, but nobody was obnoxious if we did end up pulling something after all. The other non-stealther, a bounty hunter, got stuck in the terrain at one point and I had to rescue him, but other than that it was a pretty nice and smooth run. I ended up involuntarily tanking the last boss and rotating through the kolto stations to keep myself alive, as we were a full dps team.

I then decided to go on another run, this time to Directive 7 on my DvL Commando. I did have slight regrets when I was reminded of all the annoying skips that many pugs insist on in this flashpoint as I got myself stuck inside a wall while running along one of the pipes. After I'd untangled myself with /stuck, I went and just killed the lone weak mob that we had so painstakingly avoided.

On Bulwark I ended up tanking once again, and actually died - much to my embarrassment - as I was surprised by how much damage I took and didn't click on a kolto station quickly enough. I felt a little sheepish for about a minute, but then the rest of the group actually wiped (!). After that, the rest of the run went okay, and the only other noteworthy thing that happened was that we tried to skip the boss with the two turrets near the end but someone aggroed him anyway, which made our main skipper quite annoyed, based on their "wtf" and "omg" comments in party chat.

After that I decided to leave the third flashpoint for another day. It felt strange to realise that I hadn't actually done a veteran mode flashpoint in many months and how everything felt slightly unfamiliar.

Day 2:

I logged on quite late in the evening, hoping for something quick, so when I saw the insectoid killing objective, I immediately re-rolled it and got CZ-198 dailies instead. The other PO was a warzone, which was fine.

I played another PvP match on my lowbie Merc and got into a Huttball, which my team won 6-0. Our opponents were dead set on killing, with me being a favoured target due to my low-ish level, but I can't say I'm upset about being killed if it leaves my team unimpeded to win more easily!

For the dailies I picked up my DvL Assassin, wanting to minimise mob killing since that wasn't part of the objective. Despite the late hour, there was a veritable crowd in the CZ-198 landing zone when I arrived, so I immediately switched to the PvP instance. I was surprised to see two people by the shuttle there as well, but once I went into the actual quest area I didn't see another soul during my entire round, which was pretty much what I had hoped for.

Day 3:

Another late night, I logged on to find more CZ-198 dailies and insectoid killing. I re-rolled the insects again and got generic mob killing instead... perfect combo, yes!

This time I took my Sniper to do the dailies and stayed in the PvE instance, since I suck at PvPing as Sniper. It was busy despite the late hour, but there were still enough mobs to go around. Only the champion droid for the heroic took some time to secure a tag on. Finishing the quests and my kills ended up lining up quite nicely.

Day 4:

This time I logged on earlier in the evening to get my daily objectives done before ops time. I had to do a GSF match, which popped almost instantly, and the match ended up being pretty close but ultimately a loss, sadly. The most interesting thing about it was the guy on my team who kept trying to give pretty detailed instructions, like "They have three slicer ships, get the slicers!" and I was just kind of baffled that he apparently expected the rest of us to actually know and understand what he was asking of us.

I also got CZ-198 dailies for the third day in row and briefly considered re-rolling them but then was like "nah". They are after all really fast and easy. This time I went on my Operative on Imp side and again switched to the PvP instance the moment I arrived and saw how busy it was. Unfortunately there were other Imps in the PvP instance as well... but I had the sense to not try to fight them over the droid crates (where I encountered them) but instead move on to the next area and complete the quests there first, including the heroic. That worked out well as the other floor was pretty quiet and by the time the others arrived, I was ready to go back and quickly finish off the crate quest.

Story mode Gods from the Machine with the guild was smooth and fairly unremarkable. In conversation I came up with the idea of maybe creating a YouTube video called "The Gods from the Machine story explained", which would then just be me saying: "Don't worry, it's not just you; it simply doesn't make any sense."

Finally I decided to finish off the evening by doing my last flashpoint for the other weekly. I decided to go for Czerka Corporate Labs on my DvL Juggernaut. I was actually kind of slow to notice that the Czerka flashpoints were on the list too; to be honest if I'd seen that earlier I probably would have done Core Meltdown instead of D7, but oh well. You live and learn. This run was super fast and smooth, with people who clearly all knew what they were doing. On our way to the second boss someone even said "remember not to pull the second boss until everyone's in the room" - that right there is a sign of someone who's pugged that place a lot. At the end someone commented that we had been so fast, it had probably been even more efficient than a Hammer Station run. Damning praise, but I'll take it!

Day 5:

Got generic mob killing and insecticide as my objectives again. Re-rolled the insects and ended up with CZ-198 dailies for the fourth day in a row. Could be worse I guess... (I said that last bit out loud, to which Mr Commando replied from across the table: "Yes, you could be doing this instead!" He was doing an archaeology quest in WoW.)

I hopped onto CZ and into the PvP instance on my dps Powertech, and actually encountered an enemy player for the first time! They were fighting the champion droid when I saw them and I briefly thought about attacking but then decided not to and disappeared around a corner instead. A couple minutes later I went for the droid myself, and as soon as I was done, what I suspect was the same person suddenly attacked me instead and killed me (I was in combat, not expecting it, and am not that great at death match PvP anyway). I suppose it was a small mercy that they at least waited until I was done with the droid too or just didn't see me any earlier. As it was, that death was barely a bump in the road and I quickly resumed my questing, to finish both the weekly mission and my two objectives a few minutes later.

Day 6:

Generic mob killing and insectoids AGAIN. I re-rolled the latter and got CZ-198 AGAIN. My guildies were complaining about GSF and Iokath dailies - how I wished I could have gotten some of those instead! Still, not the worst thing on the world, so I went to that little moon yet again, this time on the Sorc on which I had done Legacy of the Rakata on day one, since she still needed some Conquest points.

Once again I opted for the PvP instance, though it was surprisingly busy, at least with other Imps. I didn't see another Republic character until I spotted a guildie on one of their Republic alts, so I jumped him and killed him (admittedly with another random Imp joining in). We were both on voice chat so I also teased him about it there. However, he managed to revive quickly and then killed me in return, so fair play. We had a good laugh about it.

Day 7:

Generic mob killing again, but at least this time it was paired with doing a warzone. I decided to return to Ilum with my dps Sage and continued the storyline some more. As much fun as it is to give Lord Loyat a dressing-down, it did occur to me that I might have done that particular storyline a bit too many times (especially compared to other planetary arcs).

The warzone was once again done by my lowbie Merc - can I still say lowbie now that she's level 40? - and I got into an arena. I got a little excited to see that I wasn't the lowest level in the match when I noticed that there was also a level 18 Vanguard on my team. However, when I tried to seize up the opposition, I noticed that the only person whose level I could see was a level 60+ Sage... the other three were all stealth dps. I'm sure I don't need to elaborate on how that went, but at least it got the objective done quickly.

Week 5 thoughts:

We've now completed the last of the five weeks that were posted on Bioware's blog about Seasons - which means that after the reset we'll be back to week one and its focus on core worlds. Hopefully the worst bugs will be fixed by now, and if you ever found yourself annoyed in previous weeks by having made bad re-roll decisions based on that week's objectives, you'll get another chance at those.

I've definitely fallen into a routine of doing the warzone and PvP objectives every day, ops for the weekly if I get it, and always re-rolling insectoid killing. Dailies, heroics and generic mob killing are usually fine for me too but get tiresome if they repeat too many days in a row - then again, I've had to learn from experience that re-rolling them risks making things even worse.

I really wish there was a daily objective for flashpoints of some kind - it could be any difficulty to satisfy both soloers and socialisers - just to mix things up a bit I guess.

The 12 Best Ways to Die on Gods Trash

I haven't actually been to Gods from the Machine in a few weeks, but I was going through some video footage that I recorded there the other day, which in turn gave me the idea for this post. I've said before that I think that due to the way the bosses were originally released, Gods has a bit too much trash for comfort, however at the same time it's quite interesting and even entertaining, especially when you encounter it for the first time on one of the higher difficulties.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that there are a lot of really amusing ways to die on these mobs, which was what ultimately inspired me to make this list. Without further ado, my 12 favourite ways to die in Gods from the Machine without any involvement from the actual gods, sorted from bottom to top!

12. Falling off a walkway on your way to Tyth

I don't think any of the trash mobs on the way to Tyth do knockbacks (unless they do on master mode, which would be funny), but some of them are positioned on somewhat precarious walkways and put a lot of fire down, so it's not completely out there to accidentally hurl yourself off the edge while trying to dodge out of something else. Or maybe you were just bored of wiping on Tyth on a higher difficulty one day and carelessly put on auto-run while getting back to the boss, just to find yourself running off an edge that way.

11. Blown up by mines

Cloaked mines are introduced on the way to Nahut and stick around to surprise you on later trash as well. They are mostly what you'd expect - you find them and they go boom - but the knockback component of the explosion can sometimes lead to additional hilarity depending on whether you set any of them off near a ledge somewhere...

10. Scyvan Swarmer attack

These lovely little lads are part of the many trash mobs on the way to Scyva and - living up to their name - like to swarm people. Gods help you if you unexpectedly get aggro on a lot of these and aren't a tank - your healers will pretty much need lightning reflexes to even stand a chance at saving you. What's more likely is that said healers will simply blink and then wonder why you're dead.

9. Scyvan Swarmer explosion

Even if you manage to successfully deal with the Swarmers' initial aggro, they like to jump around and explode on death, leading to crazy scurrying around on part of the raid as everyone tries to get out of their red circles in time. Good times.

8. Extermination Droid dot

On the way to Nahut you'll run into Extermination Droids that like to stab people and leave a nasty, stacking damage-over-time effect on their targets. If you allow this to stack too high, your healers won't be able to keep up - though even with lower stacks it can be kind of funny when you manage to kill the droids and then someone still keels over dead from the remaining dot ticks after you're out of combat just because nobody noticed that the person was still in danger.

7. Cruel Extermination droids

What else would you expect from stealthed stabby droids with a name like this but a one-shot kill ability? Not only do you need to find them in their stealthy hiding places, you then also need to keep them interrupted or stunned until dead or they'll kill someone. I always feel kind of proud when we manage to kill these without anyone getting ganked by their one-shot ability, but it doesn't happen often, since a single missed interrupt is literally all it takes.

6. Your shield carrier dies

The trip to Scyva leads across light bridges over a body of water while sniper droids try to pick you off, and the only way to protect the group is to have on person carry a shield. The shield can be passed around, but if it's dropped accidentally, such as by the carrier walking off an edge, there's no way to recover it, and there's nothing like that feeling of helplessly waiting for death because your shield carrier did something silly before you managed to reach your destination

5. Izax trash beam

Just when you think you've seen it all, you walk through one of those purple beams you need to redirect to open up the way to Izax and it zaps you dead. Seriously though, why wouldn't a giant purple laser of all things not be deadly in a place where pretty much everything else is?

4. Interrupting a Vindictive Plasma droid

With all the emphasis on needing to interrupt things, Bioware thought it would be fun to mess with our heads by putting in one trash mob on which interrupting is actually very bad, the Vindictive Plasma droid - interrupt its heat beam and it'll respond with a violent explosion that'll likely one-shot most people in its current melee range. Never gets old! I may or may not be saying this because I always stand at range myself.

3. Sniped into the water

I talked about the helplessness of losing your shield carrier on the way to Scyva, but there's also the option to plain old mess up yourself by not being under the shield when you're supposed to be. I have some guildies that actively enjoy tempting fate by dodging in and out of its protective field... watching them go flying whenever a sniper decides to focus on them at just the right time is never not satisfying.

2. Falling to your death on the way to Nahut

I mentioned falling off walkways on the way to Tyth, and there are more opportunities to do so later, but I do think there's this specific jump on the way to Nahut that deserves its own entry as you have to jump down a hole at one point but need to slow your fall via some ledges around its edges so as not to fall too far too quickly. Of course someone always gets it wrong and ends up landing with a satisfying splat right at the feet of their guildies. Every time.

1. Splatted by a door

Finally, the ultimate amusing way to die on Gods trash is... at the entrance to the mini-boss guarding the shortcut to Scyva. It's a shame that there's rarely reason to do it anymore... but anyway, the room is protected by a sort of airlock that requires opening one door first, and then closing it behind you while opening the next one. The thing is, both doors go up/down instantly and forcefully, meaning that anyone standing in the wrong place at the time when someone activates the airlock by clicking goes splat instantly (with a very crunchy sound effect as well). Some people may have been known to try and get others killed that way intentionally just because it's so funny...

If you've been to Gods from the Machine yourself, do you agree with this list? How many of these ways to die have you experienced yourself?

The Nameplate Dilemma

I think that on a basic level, a good user interface is crucial to an immersive MMO experience. I'm not talking about details like the size and exact positioning of your action bars here, but about the very way you interact with the world. It seems to me that there's always a balance to be struck between immersion and convenience: Pushing a button to instantly teleport from anywhere to anywhere else is certainly convenient, but it also means that there's no real sense of place. On the other hand, running around a beautiful landscape with no understanding of where to go or how to interact with anything will soon leave players feeling lost. The trick is in finding the sweet spot in the middle.

I've been thinking about all of this recently because of nameplates. You see, the default setting in World of Warcraft when I first started playing that was to show nameplates for friendly players and nothing else. It being my first MMORPG, I of course didn't know any different, but even once I became aware of my options, that setup still made sense to me. I get that characters having their name float above their head isn't in any way "realistic", but it enables the player to recognise familiar faces out in the wild, something that their character should reasonably be able to do in-universe as well, but that could be hard from a player point of view when all you see is a generic character model in the distance.

Eventually I learned that there could also be a benefit to turning on nameplates for friendly NPCs when doing the quest for master first aid in WoW, which is basically a slow whack-a-mole that requires you to click on a number of injured NPCs in the right order based on their names, but the actual character models all look the same. If you have to click on each one first to see what they are called, it's nigh-impossible to get right within the allocated time. If they all have their names floating above their heads at all times, it's trivial. So I got into the habit of turning that setting on for that specific quest and then immediately turning it off again.

I've been following the same model in SWTOR since the beginning, but just like Revan forced me to re-evaluate my view distance, bosses sometimes have a way of favouring one UI setting over another. We've been running veteran mode Gods from the Machine again recently, to teach some newer players the ropes, and the first phase of the Scyva fight involves dealing with a number of small adds with relatively little health, at least some of which need to die in the right place and at the right time. When I was first learning the fight myself I found that part to be a bit of a struggle, but then I noticed on someone else's kill video that they had enemy nameplates turned on, so I followed their example and voilà: instantly it became so much easier to keep track of all the little adds in the room and what health each one was on.

Back then I still stuck to my guns and turned enemy nameplates back off after the fight, but this time around I keep forgetting and it's been making me thoughtful. When tanking a flashpoint it's so much easier to keep track of all targets when they have their names and health floating over their heads, plus you can make much more decisive switches based on health levels.

Just cruising around the galaxy has felt very different too. Out in the wild, I can see even smaller mobs from miles away and it's much easier to circumvent them. I've long had a reputation for being oblivious to my surroundings and frequently pulling adds by accident, but now I'm wondering whether I've simply been made to feel like a buffoon because the people I've been playing with all had enemy name plates turned on at all times. It's not hard to avoid those!

As a result, I'm kind of torn. Part of me just wants to go back to the way it was already, to a landscape unmarred by floating names everywhere. It's so much more beautiful! However, the difference in convenience has also been very noticeable, and I fear that I may well end up missing it, especially in group content. Of course there's nothing stopping me from simply switching my settings around every so often, but still... it's given me food for thought.

Gods Unleashed

The first four bosses in Gods from the Machine each drop an item called "[boss name] control module". First-timers to the operation inevitably ask what it is, and the answer is usually something along the lines of: "It allows you to temporarily turn into the boss on Iokath; nothing special."

Now that I think about it, it's actually pretty weird how utterly unexcited we've always been about these drops. Being able to turn into a boss (and one that's considered a god, no less) should be freaking cool! I guess the problem is that it only works on Iokath, and people don't like Iokath. I mean, personally the dailies have grown on me over time, but then I've also been told that I have some masochistic tendencies. What good is a cool transformation if the only time you can use it is to do content you don't particularly enjoy, in a place you don't like? Yeah.

And yet... I've kept all five of my control modules in my bag ever since I won each of them, and every now and then I've looked at them longingly, telling myself that I'll get to use them one day.

Well, the other day I decided that it was time to make this happen. Sure, just turning into one of the gods and then doing dailies on Iokath would probably be pretty boring, but anything can be fun if you turn it into a guild event! So that's what I did, especially since I was sure that other people had unused control modules sitting in their bags and banks as well.

Unfortunately we ran into practical limitations very quickly. I had envisioned us marching across Iokath as a whole army of gods from the machine, but as it turns out the game will only allow one copy of each god to be active at any given time, meaning that a lot of people only got to scurry along as our "adds" at the gods' feet as it were. Even worse, our plan to at least let people take turns was foiled as well, as the consoles in the control room kept indicating that the gods were still "on cooldown" even after the original lot had expired, without providing any details about just how long said cooldown was. We just had to call it at that point as there seemed to be zero documentation about this online either and we didn't fancy waiting around indefinitely.

That said, we managed to have a pretty good time while it lasted. I got to pick Scyva because it was my birthday, and others were quick to claim the other gods. There was a certain humour in the fact that the most mellow of our officers, who wouldn't hurt a fly in real life (no really, he's a strict vegan), turned into Tyth, the god of rage. And one of our tanks had way too much fun slipping into the skin of Nahut and using the tank-killing move to which he'd fallen victim way too many times on other people instead.

Vehicle mechanics in SWTOR tend to be kind of clunky and these were too, but the sheer fact that the gods lived up to their names, with massive health pools and the same overpowered abilities that they also use in the boss fights, was enough to make playing them fun.

We started off by paying a visit to the Colossal droid, who was still taller than we were even in our transformed states, but he died easily enough. Then we had the idea of invading the Imperial base, where absolute carnage ensued. I hadn't gone into this with PvP in mind but we just so happened to be in the PvP instance when we started, and a few guildies decided out of their own volition to change sides and put up a bit of resistance.

Mind you, they mostly ended up being ganked a lot, but they didn't seem to mind too much and had fun getting the occasional kill among our non-transformed followers. We as gods may have been pretty unassailable by a small handful of players, but with base defenses going off all around us non-stop, the place was still dangerous for those who had followed us on their regular characters. No non-guildies were harmed in the process by the way, as the PvP instance was pretty empty, and the one Imp who briefly showed up (very sensibly) did a straight 180 the moment he saw the mayhem happening in his base.

I uploaded a video recording of the event here if you want to get a better idea of what it was like; it's about half an hour long. It was definitely fun and I'd happily do something like this again - though maybe next time we should aim for a slightly fairer fight and have a few more people (and maybe even some of the gods) on the defending side.

Raiding With Little Guidance

For the longest time, the #1 online resource to consult about raiding in SWTOR used to be Dulfy's website. From what I can surmise, she was a dedicated progression raider herself and would usually play through all the new content on the PTS, where she took screenshots and notes so that she could have a detailed guide ready and published the moment the content actually hit live.

However, in the latter half of 2017 she suddenly seemed to lose interest in operations, and after the first two encounters in Gods from the Machine the guides just stopped, which posed a bit of a challenge for raiders who were used to having them as a reference. I mentioned this when talking about my own guild's Gods progression at the time.

We eventually bumbled our way through via a mix of obscure written sources (our main reference for hardmode Scyva was from a Google doc written by a person with a French-sounding name) and orally related instructions from friends and guildies who had already managed to get their kill via some other means.

Cue the release of Onslaught! Dulfy seems to have given up guide-writing for MMOs entirely earlier in the year (not just raid guides), and while other fan sites like Vulkk and MMO Bits have picked up the slack in a lot of areas, raiders still feel a bit underserved to me in terms of helpful content. Xam Xam has actually started posting guides for the first few bosses of the new operation recently, but for my guild at least these still came kind of late, as we're up to the last boss on veteran mode now.

It's interesting because it's one thing to go into story mode "blind" for a bit of fun, but we never had any intentions to do hardmode progression "blindly" too. The first two encounters were easy enough to figure out on the go, but by the third one we were running into some trouble.

Fortunately it was word of mouth that saved us once again, as an acquaintance from another guild was able to give us a crucial tip that managed to turn things around. Still, we are back to running two progression teams at the moment and it's been interesting to see how each one's been doing things slightly differently, simply because there's no single source telling us what to do along every step of the way, so each group just experiments with certain things until they find a way that works best for them.

It's a different raiding experience than what I've been used to for a long time, but still fun. It gives you that odd feeling of being on the very edge of progression, among the first people to figure out how these fights work (though we're obviously not). And the operation itself has remained good fun so far; to me it really feels like Bioware hit about the right difficulty for a hardmode this time around.

We also keep discovering little bits and pieces that make us laugh, from new hardmode-only mechanics to little things that we just managed to miss previously. Did you know that in the room with the turrets before the Huntmaster, you can avoid being shot at by simply RP-walking past them? The AI wasn't kidding when she said that they were activated by motion sensors...

Now we just have to deal with the last boss, which like on story mode, is the one thing I'm not so sure I like. On story mode I criticised the sheer length of the fight as well as the imbalance in terms of what each group member has to do, while veteran mode seems to be extremely unforgiving in terms of group composition, which has most of my team gearing up some alts now because our usual mix of classes and specs is simply not viable. We shall see how that goes!

Looking Back on Three Years of KotET

Seeing how we only have six days left until the release of Onslaught, it's about time I wrote the post looking back on the current expansion that I've been meaning to write for a while. It's not exactly a tradition, but nothing about Knights of the Eternal Throne has been traditional!

In fact, it probably featured the biggest period of upheaval for the game since its launch year and the free-to-play transition, at least from a player perspective. Business-wise, I'm sure the first year was a much bigger deal, what with the many unmet expectations and resulting lay-offs. But from a player point of view, it wasn't actually such a bad time, considering the sheer amount of content that was being released.

Knights of the Eternal Throne on the other hand was a bit of a mess from the beginning. The story was solid, but it was originally meant to go on for much longer and was quickly cut short (for whatever reasons).

After the heavy single-player focus of KotFE, there seemed to be some renewed interest in releasing group content, but initially only in the form of uprisings, which were a bit awkward. I really wanted to like them, but ultimately I was not at all inspired to repeat them unless I was going for an achievement or something. I couldn't quite put my finger on why they just didn't grab me for the longest time, until a commenter described them as flashpoints with the interesting bosses taken out and more of the sort of trash pulls put in that everyone always wants to skip.

And of course there was Galactic Command. Not going to re-hash that story yet again! Let's just say that it was quite a disaster at launch; it was probably the period of time in which I was the most unsatisfied with SWTOR gameplay-wise that I've ever been, and it made several good people I knew leave the game for good. Boo!

The first couple of months after launch mostly seemed to be dedicated to damage control. We will be getting back to Republic vs. Empire, honest! And you'll get a new operation too, even if it's only one boss at a time!

The release of Iokath in April 2017 was true to this change in direction, but felt somewhat clumsily done. Yes, we were getting back to Republic vs. Empire, but the plot felt like it had been written with a single destination in mind and little concern for whether it made sense how we got there. Iokath also featured our first new daily area in years, yet it was awkward to navigate and initially released with several dailies actually costing you money instead of awarding it (yes, really).

In May, Keith Kanneg becoming the game's new Producer gave many of us new hope for improvements. And ultimately, I think he has been good for the game, but it's been a very slow process. I'm a bit hesitant to speculate ever since I read John Staats' WoW Diary - in which he proclaims that player speculation about what's going on inside video game development is pretty much always wrong, no matter how well thought-out - but what it felt like from the outside above all else was like Keith had to completely clean house and revamp a lot of things, which took up a lot of dev time that could otherwise have been used to create new content.

After he took charge, we basically got a slow trickle of new content alternating with systems updates: the second Gods from the Machine encounter was released a full three months after the first, then a month later we got a new flashpoint with some story, then another three months passed until a big round of server merges, and so on.

It took almost a full year for all five bosses in Gods from the Machine to be put live, and the traitor story arc, consisting of three bits of story tied to an equal number of new flashpoints, took a full nine months from start to finish. It wasn't bad content, it was just coming out so, so... slowly.

The traitor story arc did also mark an interesting turning point from my point of view though. While the first chapter, Crisis on Umbara, continued in a similarly awkward vein to Iokath, part two was a marked improvement, and part three was all-around enjoyable again. It was also an interesting time to be playing and engaging with the community, as there was a lot of discussion about what to make of the traitor's actions, which was the kind of thing you only get to experience right at the release of such new story content.

After that we had to deal with another relative drought of content for several months, until Bioware revealed that a new, bigger piece of content was coming in December, which would eventually be followed by a whole expansion. It's kind of weird to think that this was a year ago now and said expansion is only launching now.

Three years is a long time for any MMO to go without an expansion, but it has been even more so in SWTOR's case, which was pumping them out mere months apart before that (even if they were smaller in scope than what many other MMOs call expansions). It kind of felt like Bioware just completely lost the plot for a little while after KotET's launch, with everything a bit of a mess and no clear plan in terms of how to proceed.

I don't have a citation at hand, but I even remember Keith saying at one point that he wasn't that keen on expansions and preferred smaller content updates himself, which may have contributed to no moves being made towards working on another big content drop for a long time. I'm glad that the cries for a new expansion eventually won out though, even if it took a while. I'm looking forward to playing it in a few days!

As for what comes after... who knows? I remain eternally optimistic that things are maybe back on track now and the next big update won't take three years, but I honestly don't know. It's a persistent rumour that the team working on SWTOR is much smaller than those working on comparable MMOs, which would obviously limit their resources if true. But I take heart from how passionate they seem to be and that - raw quantity of output aside - I've felt that they've been taking steps in the right direction for the past two years, both in terms of story and in terms of how they interact with the community. For me, Jedi Under Siege has easily been the most enjoyable addition to the game in years. Ultimately, those are things that matter more to me than the sheer frequency of new patches.

Let The Dragons Hit The Floor

Last week my guild achieved something that had long seemed impossible to me... We killed Izax the Destroyer (the last boss in Gods from the Machine) on veteran mode! The reason this seemed like an unattainable goal for a long time was that veteran mode was just that hard - we struggled to even get the first boss down reliably, and as a result progress on the second encounter was glacially slow. Esne and Aivela were added to the game mid-2017 and we still hadn't gotten them down on veteran mode a year later! Not that we spent all that time actually trying, but still...

The nerfs that accompanied the release of Gods master mode with 5.10 were an absolute godsend for us. Not only did we finally get the sisters down, but we then managed to progress through the Nahut and Scyva fights at a good pace as well. After that we suffered a temporary setback mostly due to some people leaving and us having to reshuffle teams, but this last week we finally polished off the operation in full by knocking out Izax as well.

That mysterious last phase that only exists in veteran mode was a total letdown by the way! I hadn't researched it in advance and was pretty stunned to find out that it's basically just Izax sitting there and your group having to nuke him down before he kills you (a straightforward dps race). Not that this can't still feel exciting... in our case three out of eight people were dead so we didn't have much dps left and only got him down just as he was casting the ability to annihilate us all. (You can see a video recording of the fight here if you like.)

Onwards to master mode next? Hell no! Considering how much we already struggled with the un-nerfed veteran mode, Gods master mode clearly wasn't made for the likes of us, not now or maybe ever. Not to mention that there are some old bosses that we still haven't killed yet (at level or ever, such as Dread Master Brontes on master mode) so there's still plenty of (relatively) easier content left for us to tackle first.

Still, having finally conquered the game's newest operation (which is already more than a year old at this point) on two difficulties makes me want to look back at what I liked and didn't like about it:

+ Interesting boss fights: Generally speaking I liked all the fights in Gods from the Machine. They are all interesting, featuring a number of fun and novel mechanics. My favourite boss is probably Nahut, simply because everything about him - from concept to execution - is so cool and the fight is relatively easy to learn too. I like that most of the time where more involved mechanics come into play, it's usually good enough to have one or two people learn how to deal with them, while less skilled players or those who are simply new to the fight can focus on just fulfilling their basic tasks. It's a good design philosophy that I remember seeing discussed in other contexts before and I still agree that it's probably the best way to design a raid boss.

Requiring everyone to be equally good and to not make any mistakes throughout the entire fight is just asking too much from your average raid group. This is also the reason why Esne and Aivela are my least favourite encounter in the operation, as they come closest to reaching that level of being demanding, what with the whole ops group having to change colours back and forth throughout the entire "wipers" phase. (That said, I still enjoyed that fight despite of that flaw. Nothing in Gods ever filled me with active dread the way fights like Draxus in Dread Fortress did.)

+ Great trash: I'm overdue for making another one of my "outtakes" videos in which I compile funny moments I captured with my guildies, and just based on what's accumulated in my videos folder, about half of it is going to be about Gods from the Machine trash. Especially on hard mode, it's just incredibly entertaining! There are those droids that cause a huge explosion if you interrupt them, the stealth mines, the weeny adds that like to swarm you... it's just entertainment for days. Sometimes it even teaches you something about what lies ahead, such as how to work the tethers that you pick up during the Izax fight.

- Too much, too long: While I think that the trash is fun mechanically, even I have to concede that there's just a bit too much of it, especially between Nahut and Scyva. I think this is a side effect of the way the operation was released: With each boss making their debut one at a time, I guess it would have felt weird to not release each one with their own dedicated trash packs and mechanics. And it was fine when completing the operation for the weekly quest only required you to kill the first few bosses, but now that you're always clearing the whole thing, it honestly feels like a bit of a drag.

The length of the boss fights themselves also contributes to this, as with the exception of Tyth each fight takes about ten minutes, with Izax taking a full fifteen. I guess the logic here was similar to what gave us all that trash, that the devs wanted to make sure that each fight would feel "meaty" enough when released on its own, but it just makes the operation as a whole feel incredibly long, even when you know all the fights and are proceeding through the whole thing at a steady clip. I'm okay with the very last boss of an operation (and only that one) taking ten minutes to kill, but it shouldn't be the normal duration of a boss fight.

- Tuning: I think the nerfs they eventually made to veteran mode were great, but how many guilds who were in a similar position to mine were even still trying at that point? I also still don't know what they actually changed about story mode because I don't think I've gone back in there since 5.10. The common opinion to avoid pugging it doesn't seem to have changed so far. And that's just not how it should be in my opinion.

Story mode should be easily puggable. Releasing Gods with "hardmare" tuning was a mistake in my book, as it made the operation a hugely off-putting experience for everyone trying it on their "usual" difficulty. Even if later nerfs have helped to bring things more in line, Gods has a bad reputation as a destination for more casual players now and will probably maintain it for some time to come, which is a real shame because as I said there are some fun fights in there.

We'll see if Bioware has learned any lessons from this and if we'll see them put those into action any time soon (new operation coming with the next big content release maybe)? My guild is ready at least.

Meme thing I made when we first killed Izax on story mode.

2018 Predictions vs. Reality

At the end of last year I let my fellow gaming bloggers lure me into trying to make some predictions about the upcoming year for the first time. I figured that my guesses were all super boring and more or less guaranteed to come true. I'm surprised by how wrong I was! Let's review the predictions I made about what was going to happen to SWTOR in 2018 one by one.

1. I expect that we'll get an expansion announcement once the current storyline has been wrapped up, and that the three flashpoints that comprise it will tie into the new expansion in the same way Forged Alliances tied into Shadow of Revan. The expansion's theme will be related to the Heralds of Zildrog and have a name that is designed to sound vaguely like the title of an existing Star Wars movie, such as "The Serpent Awakens". The actual release will be set to happen only a couple of months after the announcement, since Bioware never milks these things for hype, and will happen in early autumn at the very latest but probably earlier. The expac will feature another five levels of story content but no new operations.

My first and biggest prediction was the one I was sure was pretty much a given, at least the part about us getting an expansion, and I was completely off, as we're actually no wiser about 6.0 than we were a year ago. My proposed theme, which was the most "daring" part of the prediction I suppose, also turned out to be moot as they actually ended up wrapping up the entire Zildrog arc in the Nathema Conspiracy flashpoint. I honestly thought at the time that there was going to be much more to it.
 
2. Speaking of operations, the last boss for Gods from the Machine won't be released until June or so, making it the most drawn-out content release EVAH! In hindsight, all the fights will be excellent, but nobody will care because people lost interest months ago. Master mode will continue to fail to materialise or at the very least get delayed even more. If it does ever see the light of day, it will come with a hefty nerf to all of veteran mode. (Note that I'm not saying that this is what I want to happen, just what I expect to happen based on past observations.)

While it did ultimately take ages until we were able to run Gods from the Machine in its entirety, they were relatively quick with getting Izax out the door and got him live by March. I also think that I was wrong about nobody caring about Gods by the time it was completed, though we seem to continue to exist in this weird information hole where we don't have a single reliable source for guides for boss fights anymore and we're all kind of winging it. The other day my guild figured out that some of the common advice about what you're supposed to be doing on the Ossus droid world boss for example is actually the opposite of what you should be doing, so yeah...

I will give myself points for the master mode prediction though, because while it has come out now, it did take many months and was even supposed to have been cancelled for a while. I don't think the nerf to veteran mode has been as substantial as I would have liked, but it did happen despite of Bioware initially not wanting to do any nerfing at all.

3. Either with the expansion's release or somewhere around it, Bioware will reveal some major change or new feature that will leave everyone going "What the hell?" - not necessarily because it's a bad idea (though it might be), but because it seems utterly random and feels like something that nobody ever asked for. (Again, not saying I want this to happen, just speaking from experience...)

Again, we didn't even get an expansion, but even if we leave that aside I don't think they did anything super weird this year either. In actuality I thought that all their content additions and systems changes were fairly safe and predictable. I suppose the whole masterwork gear thing added with Ossus is slightly strange in that "did anyone ask for this" kind of way, but I suspect it's meant to be a response to people wanting crafting to be more relevant again as well as moving even further away from Galactic Command, both of which are things that people have expressed a desire for.

4. One thing that will definitely be changed is conquest. That's not much of a prediction, considering that Keith himself has officially said so! However, I will add that I expect them to add a lot of new activities as ways to earn conquest points, and more importantly, the system will be revamped in some way that allows smaller guilds to get more out of it than they currently do.

I suppose you could argue about what qualifies as "a lot" but they certainly did add a whole bunch of new conquest objectives. And the new system is definitely much more rewarding for smaller and medium-sized guilds. As I acknowledged at the time though, this was a bit of a non-prediction.

5. Story-wise, the Eternal Alliance will either be disbanded or become irrelevant in some way, finally returning us to the story of Republic vs. Empire. Now this one I might actually be hoping for...

Even this was kind of wrong, as the Alliance has been neither disbanded nor become irrelevant. Its importance has been greatly diminished, but it does remain a relevant player on the galactic gaming board, even if the focus is moving back Republic vs. Empire now.

Now, while this was pretty fun to review, despite (or maybe even because) of all the ways in which I was wrong, I don't think I'll be repeating this whole prediction thing this year. I did actually start a draft post trying to write down some guesses and ideas for things we might see in 2019, but to be honest I couldn't think of much to say beyond "we'll get an expansion in 2019, for real this time". I better not be wrong about this one a second time!

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 6: Environments #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.

Let's start the environments theme with this shot of Pugette cruising around Taris while waiting in the group finder queue. I always think of Taris as an ugly and unwelcoming place, but when I looked up that day it struck me as strangely beautiful despite of the devastation.

Similar thoughts went through my head here, as my Sage was meditating in Section X while waiting for everyone to get dready to pull Dreadtooth. I never actually realised that the big cannon that you're sent to sabotage in the heroic mission actually looms above the area quite so majestically.

Here's my Guardian regenerating some health on Copero. I noted in one of my initial posts about the Traitor Among the Chiss flashpoint that it was stunningly beautiful, and so far the effect hasn't lessened yet whenever I rerun it. It boggles the mind a bit that they made the Umbaran freight train into a stronghold but nothing on this world... I guess the Chiss aren't very welcoming to strangers.

SWTOR's environmental designers really do get to shine in all areas if they are only allowed to design something other than spaceship interiors or barren wastelands. Here we have the trash run between Nahut and Scyva in Gods from the Machine. The screenshot doesn't really do it justice, but the area is vast and has a certain eerie beauty to it. It's just kind of hard to take a break to really appreciate it and find good screenshot angles when you're also supposed to keep people alive at the same time... maybe one of these days I should go back into a cleared out version of the instance and just do a tour of the area to get a better look at it.

Speaking of taking a moment to appreciate the landscape in unusual places, here's my Sentinel admiring the view during the pre-match timer in Novare Coast.

With the addition of the Battle over Iokath map, even GSF got its chance to look pretty! Easily my favourite of all the death match maps (and not just for its looks).

Finally, a screencap I took of my Commando main harvesting some crystals in her stronghold. Ever since I upgraded my PC two years ago, crystals have turned from just another resource to harvest into pretty good-looking environmental props, so this scene filled with them struck me as strangely beautiful.

IntPiPoMo count: 39