My Experience with the New Lair Boss on the PTS

I wrote at the start of this month that I wasn't sure whether I wanted to try the new lair boss on the PTS or not. Wanting to earn the associated special titles was a point in favour, but my general preference for "going in blind" and being surprised once the content hits the live servers was also a strong argument against it.

In the end an opportunity arose for me to join Swtorista's Team Disco today to have a go at the boss and I decided to take it. (I guess I have Galaxiya to thank for being unable to make it, meaning I could take her spot. Thanks, Galaxiya!) I was glad I did, too, for three reasons:

1. We did get the boss down on both difficulties, earning me the associated titles on the live game.
2. I now know what to expect and have a better idea how to tackle the fight with my guildies once it goes live.
3. It was honestly just good fun, too! The fight had clearly come a long way from that first iteration of the PTS where people couldn't even tell what was supposed to be going on most of the time.
   

Primarily, I was relieved to find that story mode seemed to be at an appropriate difficulty for a story mode, which is to say: easy enough that an inexperienced pick-up group should be able to do it. Several members of our group (including me) had never done the fight before and nobody gave any explanations pre-pull either, but it worked out fine anyway. All the mechanics do fairly low damage, so you can learn as you go and it takes quite a bit of messing up for anyone to take enough damage to die.

If I had to pick anything to criticise here it's that the fight still felt like it took pretty long for a story mode with a group that had quite solid dps output, but that may just have been subjective, and I didn't actually time it. Plus we went in with the standard group setup of two tanks, two healers and four dps - on story mode you could easily swap out a tank and a healer for two more damage dealers to speed things up a bit.

Veteran mode was another pleasant surprise after all the unpleasantness that was my experience with R-4 Anomaly, in the sense that it actually felt like what I'd call a "proper" vet mode, not something bordering on NiM, just trying to please the top 1%. As a healer, there was enough damage going out to give me something to do, but it wasn't so high that I couldn't also throw a few damage abilities into the mix at various points. There was stuff on the floor to dodge, adds and different boss mechanics to watch out for, but at no point did the number of things going on feel overwhelming.

We got the encounter down on what I think was only our third try, though I wouldn't read too much into that as a sign of it being too easy, as several people had worked on it before and could tell the rest of us what to do. The biggest challenge was actually the hard enrage, which kicks in at around the ten minute mark, and was what killed us on our penultimate attempt. We hit it again on the actual kill but managed to get the boss down just before it had the chance to kill us.

I checked to see what feedback others had given on the official forum thread, and winced at several comments along the lines of "I went in with my NiM team, using only one tank and healer, and we thought it was too easy". I just hope the devs don't use that as an excuse to do any last-minute upward-tuning before releasing the patch, because I don't agree that the fight was too easy at all. A vet mode ops boss isn't supposed to be something that's hard for NiM raiders! I did think that some of the suggestions that were given for how to make things harder might actually make for a good master mode version of the encounter later on, if Broadsword ever decides to add that.

However, vet mode struck me as fine as it is. If anything, the fight still seemed quite long and the dps check pretty tight for a group of raiders that aren't at the extreme cutting edge, but I'll assume for now that with more experience and better understanding of the mechanics, groups will be able to improve their damage output and general performance over time, to the point where the enrage timer won't feel quite so challenging anymore.

In general I was pretty happy with everything I saw, and assuming what we experienced is going to be close enough to what will go live in a couple of weeks, I'm actually looking forward to tackling the new boss on the live servers. It will be nice to work on farming materials and schematics for the new augments in a story mode that should be accessible enough to actually do on my guild's social nights, and a vet mode that will pose a bit of a challenge for my regular ops team without making it feel like we're just bashing our heads against a wall.

Master Mode Flashpoint Tips: Infinite Army Prototype

Introduction

It always surprises me when I google something that I think should be fairly well known, just because I want to double-check a specific detail for example, and then it turns out there's actually (next to) no content about that thing out there. In this particular case, said "thing" is the bonus boss of master mode Legacy of the Rakata, a flashpoint that has been in the game for about nine years at the time of writing this. So I thought I'd write a quick guide on how to deal with it myself.

I wouldn't say that this is a particularly hard flashpoint boss, but he's not trivially easy either. It's definitely not the type of fight where you can just wing it and hope for the best - you have to understand the boss's abilities and coordinate with the rest of your group.

The boss in a nutshell

He sits inside a small bunker and you'll want to stay inside said bunker for the entire fight, as leaving it while in combat causes annoying womp rat adds to spawn. However, once a minute he also does a massive channelled AoE called Unstable Barrier that is as big as the bunker and that you can't just stand in.

I think the intended way to deal with this was that you would run out during the AoE and deal with womp rats as needed, however I've never actually seen it done this way as it's actually possible to avoid the AoE damage without leaving the building: by breaking line of sight to the boss and hiding behind the vase highlighted in the screenshot below:

What to do as a tank

Make sure you have your back against one of the bunker walls, as the boss frequently does a knockback in a frontal cone and you don't want to go flying out of the building and cause womp rats to spawn unnecessarily. You'll also want to be facing him away from the rest of the group.

Ideally you'll want to have your back against one of the bunker's side walls, so the rest of your party can stand on the other side, and if someone gets aggro, at least they'll only bounce off the wall there and won't be knocked outside either.

When you see the Unstable Barrier cast, run behind the vase to line of sight the boss, then jump back into the fight once the channel is over.

What to do as a damage dealer

Stand behind the boss so you don't get hit by his knockback. Ideally the tank should position the boss in such a way that you'll still be able to have a wall behind you as well, just in case aggro is unstable and the boss twitches. Note that you'll want to stand directly behind the boss even if you're ranged, as standing at a distance will cause him to constantly yank you back into melee range and interrupt your casts.

When you see the Unstable Barrier cast, run behind the vase to line of sight the boss, then jump back into the fight once it the channel over.

What to do as a healer

Stand directly behind the boss with the rest of the damage dealers to avoid both his knockback and his grapple. Focus on healing the tank as the boss hits quite hard, and everyone else should be nicely grouped up for some splash AoE healing. When you see the Unstable Barrier cast, run behind the vase to line of sight the boss, do some more AoE healing there (the rest of the group should have come with you!), then jump back into the fight once the AoE damage is over.

Note for everyone

Hiding behind the vase and actually breaking line of sight with the boss requires a certain amount of precision. Watch your health bar, and if your health keeps ticking down, you're not in quite the right spot yet.

It's also technically possible to just power through the AoE without hiding at all if your healer is sufficiently overgeared and the group has the right damage reduction cooldowns available. A Gunslinger's Diversion and Scrambling Field are hugely powerful in this fight for example and can negate the majority of an Unstable Barrier's damage to the whole group if deployed at the right time. Various personal damage reduction cooldowns also work. However, I would only advise going with this strategy if the healer is comfortable with it and you have a plan for how to negate Unstable Barrier's damage once every minute for the entirety of the fight.

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.)

The State of Operations in 7.0

I think I've mentioned before that considering the amount of time I spend raiding in SWTOR, I spend relatively little time talking about it on the blog. You might also think that there shouldn't be that much to say about operations at the moment, what with us still not having a release date for the new op, R4-Anomaly.

However, like it or not, with the way SWTOR works, every time the level cap is raised, things get shaken up in the existing operations as well, as everything gets re-tuned and we get to enjoy the process of re-progressing through the content once again. (I'm not being sarcastic here. It's the kind of thing you either like or not.)

For as much as I thought that Onslaught was a very good expansion overall, the state of ops throughout most of it was not great in my opinion. Sure, the new operation on Dxun was sweet, but the older raids suffered from awkward, extremely unforgiving downscaling with no avenues for progress other than to repeat the dance over and over until you were absolutely perfect at it.

My guild did continue to raid in that environment, but it was rough at times - the fact that it took my team something like nine months (with some interruptions) to get Dread Master Styrak down on master mode was a good example of this. That's also why I for one was perfectly happy to start our pre-expansion raid break early once the original launch date for Legacy of the Sith was announced... we didn't seem to have anywhere left to go where it wasn't going to take us many, many months to kill anything anyway.

That said, I'm happy to report that while Bioware showed no signs of relenting on their stance on master mode operations throughout the 6.x patch cycle, they did decide to approach things differently for Legacy of the Sith and actually had someone go through all the group content to level it up to the new cap correctly and to avoid any more forced downscaling shenanigans. As a bonus, whoever did the work on that also took a close look at various minor mechanics in ops that had become somewhat screwy over time and fixed a lot of those too. No more cheesing Writhing Horror's babies with double Shadow tanks, no more hiding behind the pipe on Operations Chief... and the pylons on the way down on Soa now actually have enough health to allow you to do their mechanic properly instead of them just kinda being killed by accident by the first person who Force-leaps down to the next platform.

I can't emphasise enough how enjoyable it's been to actually be able to feel a difference in performance from gearing up again. During 7.0 launch week, we actually wiped to the first boss in 16-man Eternity Vault enraging on us... which I thought was absolutely hilarious.

One thing I always love about a new #SWTOR expansion: wiping on the first boss in EV again. 😆 And I'm not being sarcastic here, that run really was the most fun I've had in EV in a while... actually having to do mechanics and everything! pic.twitter.com/qfyJl1j8lF

— Shintar (@ShintarCommando) February 16, 2022

Now, we had been messing around and several people had gone down early, so were easily able to overcome that on the next try by playing "properly", but it showed that dps checks and following mechanics actually mattered again, and as we all started to improve our item rating under the new gearing system, it was very noticeable that our performance improved too, and that felt good. That's what I like to see in an MMO!

I won't say that it's been an entirely smooth ride, as a lot of what should be relatively straightforward hardmode bosses feel pretty unforgiving right now, especially in terms of dps required, which has been somewhat intimidating to some of our damage dealers in particular I think. There's a general sentiment of "If veteran mode is already this hard, just how hard is master mode going to be?!", coupled with a fear that we won't be able to progress as far this expansion as we did in the last one.

Personally I've tried to assuage people's fears by telling them that I don't expect things to be that bad. My general impression has been that Bioware's trying to play the long game here, and they have explicitly stated that we'll get to upgrade our gear by several more item levels with the release of the new operation. Considering how much of a difference we've already seen from the upgrades from 320 to 330, I expect that the old master modes will become significantly more accessible as we continue to gear up - which again, is how I feel it should work.

Other notable differences to the ops running experience revolve around gear and schedules. I've already talked about how I find the new gearing system quite convoluted, but aside from that, one thing that it unfortunately has in common with Galactic Command is that everything is personal loot - meaning that if you have anyone on your ops team who doesn't have as much time to play or is being held back for other reasons, you're limited in terms of how much you can help them gear up. You can offer to e.g. run flashpoints with them, but ultimately they have to be willing to put in the time themselves so to speak. You can't just craft upgrades for them or let them have your drops. Based on the same dev blog I linked above, this should at least improve with the release of the new operation, assuming that Bioware are still planning to go ahead with their plan to have tradeable gear tokens drop in there at least.

The thing about schedules is that in the past, we've largely been free to decide which content to run in which week at our own leisure, aside from the weekly highlighted hardmode system that was in effect during KotFE. We've also had a bit of a rule of thumb in our guild that we try to avoid having different ops teams work on the same content at the same time, both in order to ward off unhealthy feelings of competition, and to keep people's lockouts free so that teams could help each other out more easily if any group came up short a member one night.

The new featured ops rotation has kind of thrown us for a loop in that regard, because while we can technically still go wherever we want, it's most rewarding for all teams to try and complete whatever the featured weeklies are. Meaning that we can't help but compare performances to a certain degree, and extra care has to be taken whenever you're helping out a team other than your own so you don't get yourself locked out of a raid you're meant to do with your own group later in the week.

So far it's worked out okay, as we have a lot of players with a lot of alts (and free lockouts) at this point. All the officers who lead teams have also known each other for a really long time by now and are therefore doing their best to compare notes to help each other out and keep everyone progressing at a good pace. But it's certainly a change compared to how we used to operate.

Still, the bottom line is that my early impressions of what Bioware have done with operations this expansion are extremely positive, which is a nice thing to be able to say considering a lot of the negativity that has surrounded the expansion launch. I've been having more fun with them than I've had in a long time and I'm looking forward to seeing what R-4 Anomaly has in store for us whenever it comes out.

Eight Years with Dread Master Styrak

Last year I wrote a post with some musings about how the way SWTOR keeps its raids relevant from one expansion to the next makes for a very peculiar experience for long-time players, as we may get to re-progress on the same bosses repeatedly, under different circumstances and with different people.

I've had a lot more time to think about that over the course of the last few months, thanks to Dread Master Styrak, the last boss of the Scum and Villainy operation. Scum was originally added to the game with the Rise of the Hutt Cartel expansion back in April 2013. My first impressions of it were favourable, though I would also note later that the last boss was a bit repetitive. I also remember that the first time said fight was explained to me, I had to ask for repeated confirmation about the Kell Dragon's spine mechanic, because I couldn't quite wrap my head around the idea that there was an ability in the game that you could counter with actual body blocking.

It only took about two months for us to also clear the operation on hard mode - but it was still highly meaningful to me because at the time the then-leadership team had decided that a whole bunch of us weren't really worthy of being part of guild progression and were therefore excluded from their hardmode runs. This initially left us feeling very lost and dejected, but when we eventually rallied and started to get our own hardmode kills (even if they happened a few weeks later), it was all the sweeter for it. I made a video of our first kill, and let's just say that the choice of Spectre General's "Nothin's Gonna Stand in Our Way" for the soundtrack felt appropriate in more than one way.

Scum's nightmare mode was out of our reach for a long time... but then the Shadow of Revan expansion added another five levels to our characters, and back then the operations didn't level with us yet, which suddenly granted significantly less skilled players a shot at some of those achievements as well. We got our own Styrak nightmare kill on the 3rd of July 2015 - I made another video out of that one:

In hindsight I can see just how much and how obviously we benefitted from being five levels higher than the boss - for example we stood in the purple ground circles more than once without taking significant damage, and of course there's the fact that we dispatched no less than half the team to deal with slowing the adds that form the chain, one for each corner - an incredible luxury the way I see it now. Still, there were new mechanics for us to deal with compared to hard mode, and it was still something to be proud of.

After that, Scum became just another operation that we went back to every now and then on story or hard mode. As the average skill level and encounter knowledge in the guild increased, hard mode even became quite doable on social nights when we'd bring along less experienced and skilled players or have people playing on alts. In 2018, I made a silly little video that shows us killing Styrak on 16-man hard veteran mode on such a social night (you can tell because I'm on my Scoundrel and playing dps, what is this I don't even), and in which I poked fun at the fact that Mr Commando and another officer were constantly complaining about our dps being too low and that we were bound to hit the enrage; and then we didn't. (Though the kill was still an extremely close call, with only one person left standing by the time the boss died.)

After the release of Onslaught and after we had cleared the new Dxun operation on both story and hard mode, it was time to go back to digging our teeth into some of the older content again and we found ourselves returning to Scum nightmare master mode once more, especially as some of our newer members had never done it before. With level scaling in place now, it was a lot tougher than we were used to, but fortunately we'd also got a lot better, so we still progressed through it at a steady pace. Until we got to Styrak himself that is, who turned out to be an absolute brick wall.

The boss's health values felt insane, and all the mechanics were now incredibly unforgiving. It took several minutes just to kill his Kell Dragon pet now, before the boss himself would even join the fight, and we'd regularly fail at getting even that done. It just felt like we were in way over our heads, and frustration eventually led us to agree to take a break from Scum for a few months and revisit Gods from the Machine veteran mode instead, another operation where team members were still missing achievements. That was in late summer/early autumn last year.

It was only in January of this year that we felt ready to return to Scum, once again with a couple of changes to the team's roster, and it did feel a little better initially, though progress still only came in baby steps from one week to the next. We finally became somewhat consistent at killing the Kell Dragon, but then ran into the next wall in the form of the chain add mechanic, which requires people to knock back rapidly approaching enemies repeatedly at just the right time or the group wipes. The way we had done it back in 2015 by sending one person into every corner was no longer viable due to the dps requirements, so the whole group just huddled in the middle and people would use their knock-backs whenever the chain came too close.

I was one of the people responsible for this and it was always hit or miss, as the window for the knock-back was extremely small and it was very easy to hit it either too early or too late - either of which would result in a wipe. It's hard for me to put into words how frustrating it is to try to perfect a mechanic like that when your only way to practice is to drag your whole ops team through five to ten minutes of boss fight first, where of course other things can go wrong as well, until you finally get to the bit you need to practice, get it wrong, and everyone dies so you have to start over. And it wasn't just me either: If I got it right, another person assigned to a different place in the knock-back rotation would usually mess up instead, with the same result.

Eventually, both Mr Commando and I were pretty much at the end of our rope with this fight and sat down with the rest of our team to ask them if they seriously wanted to keep bashing their heads against this wall, as it might well take us another few months to kill it. I think we expected them to say no, but surprisingly the majority of them wanted to stick with it regardless.

I started talking to members of our guild's other progression team - who'd successfully beaten this fight - if they had any suggestions for what else we could do to improve our chances. We're not that much worse than they are and it didn't quite seem to make sense that we were struggling so much more. Their advice was pretty unequivocally that we needed to change our group composition (in terms of classes that is, not people), as the knock-backs become a hundred times easier to deal with if you use Sages or Shadows to do them instead of Commandos and Gunslingers, as the former have a much larger range on their ability.

This was a very bitter pill to swallow, as we've always been believers in letting everyone play what they want, and that technically every fight should be possible with a halfway reasonable group composition and not require extreme class stacking. Mr Commando remained adamant that he was never going to play a Shadow tank as he hates them, but I'd always considered my Sage my main alt... so I started bringing her to some progression nights instead - and the difference was like night and day. Where my Commando had struggled to maybe hit a fifty percent success rate on her knock-backs, my Sage did not mess up that mechanic once, ever. It was just that much easier.

Fortunately we had some other team members who were willing and able to switch to alts to pad our group with additional Sages and Shadows... and while things were still a bit rocky as people got used to their new roles, progress was suddenly palpable. Incidentally, our monthly 16-man progression run set its eyes on master mode Styrak as well and got him down a bit over a week ago, showing us all what a successful run could look like. And this week it was finally our turn on 8-man... how could I not return to that Spectre General song?

The kill was a little marred by the dragon bugging out at the end and miraculously ridding itself of 85% of its health within two seconds, but as one of my team's members put it: considering how many times the fight bugged out on us in negative ways (usually adds appearing or abilities firing at seemingly random times), it was about time that a bug did something nice for us. Also, after how much time we spent on practising the fight and how smoothly it went at the end there, I'm fairly confident that we would have got the kill anyway, even if the dragon hadn't bugged out.

It still took an amazing amount of persistence to get there - the kill was a 22-minute fight, and we had to go through the phase with the chain adds no less than twelve times... and to think I thought this part was repetitive on story mode, where you have to do it what, three or four times? That's definitely not a well-designed mechanic at all.

But for all its faults and all the associated pains I've suffered, I have to say that this boss kill will forever be memorable to me now. I'm so proud of my team members for voting to stick with it when I felt like giving up, and for stepping up to play Shadow and Sage alts to improve our odds. I'm also a little proud of myself for stepping out of my comfort zone on the Commando and learning to heal a progression fight on my Sage for a change.

We're looking at revisiting Dread Palace next, but to me the thought of going somewhere other than Scum is almost confusing right now. It feels like we've been there for so long, I'm not sure I remember how to do anything else anymore.

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?

Healing Revan 16-man veteran mode

My guild hit another milestone the other week by defeating Revan in Temple of Sacrifice on 16-person hardmode difficulty. This was easily the most satisfying boss kill for me in a long time, considering how long it took us to get there. We only do 16-man ops for one week once a month, and we'd been working on this particular challenge for three or four months now (I honestly lost track). I was so excited when the achievement finally popped up I even forgot to take a screenshot! I do have a kill video though:

I'm not going to re-hash my general thoughts and opinions of the fight, which I already gave when we beat it on 8-man two years ago and which still apply. However, the larger group size did provide some unique challenges for the healers on the first floor, which I thought I would document here as I couldn't find any written information on the subject myself when we started working on the fight, so maybe this will be helpful to others.

In a nutshell, the big complication is the Essence Corruption debuff. On 8-man, affected damage dealers run out of the group, healers cleanse and gather up all the debuffs, then run into the two puddles to cleanse themselves and you move on. This mechanic already takes some getting used to in the smaller format (not just for the healers, but also for the dps), but 16-man really ramps it up to eleven.

With twice the number of people and the same amount of room, there is less space for people to spread out when they need to be cleansed, and on our earlier tries we often had to wipe it because Corruption got totally out of control in the melee group. The poor guys got yelled at quite a lot and accused of stupidly using self-cleanses, but as it turned out the problem was actually that one of the healers was standing too close to them when doing the cleansing. Healers are contagious too, so you really can't do that - you either have to hug your fellow healers or just stay away from everyone.

The next challenge was cleansing assignments. With two people and eight raiders, we tended to agree on something like "I start top left and you bottom right (of the ops frames)" and it was fairly straightforward, but with double the amount of everything, things got kind of complicated. I watched some kill videos for inspiration and people mostly seemed to be yelling out who they were going to cleanse, so eventually that's what we did too. It felt very chaotic at first, and it does require a certain amount of discipline for the rest of the group to shut up during that phase so none of the calls get missed, but we actually settled into it quite quickly. There tended to be a sort of unspoken hierarchy which meant that the ones with faster reflexes were calling first and then the others took whoever/whatever was left over. Plus everybody knows that every healer has their favourites that they prefer to cleanse before others...

So we got the basic gist of it down quite quickly, but especially at the beginning there were still a lot of mistakes, with people getting cleansed too close to others and causing unnecessary spread. Still, that's not necessarily a reason to wipe it; people just have to keep their cool, focus on the task at hand and continue doing what they're supposed to be doing. Nonetheless I was very proud of the healing team by the time we got the boss down, because there were huge improvements in the smoothness of the process and eventually we rarely had any cleanse go astray at all.

The big question that remained at the end of the phase was how to get rid of the Essence Corruption on the healers, because while there are twice the number of healers on 16-man, there aren't twice as many puddles! There is a third one that spawns near the entrance fairly early on, but it's easy to miss, people frequently stepped into it by accident, and if you don't use it in a timely manner it despawns anyway.

The way we dealt with it in the end was to have one healer cleanse only at the beginning, take the extra puddle relatively early on and then focus only on healing. Then, once HK-47 comes in, the three remaining healers with Corruption finish up the cleanses on the damage dealers while staying at somewhat of a distance from everyone else. Two of them manually cleanse all debuffs from the third (ideally the one with the lowest number of stacks, but we usually decided in advance who it was going to be), and then take the two remaining puddles to clear themselves. Success! For that phase anyway...

The rest of the fight was pretty similar to 8-man to be honest, and the main thing that kept wiping us were the aberrations on the top floor, as usual. For all that though, it felt all the more epic when we finally got it down.

Master Mode Flashpoint Tips: Syndic Zenta

Introduction

It's been a while since I've written one of these! I did however have a few more bosses on my list that I really wanted to cover, and one of them is Syndic Zenta in master mode Traitor Among the Chiss. I've been told by some people that they haven't had that many issues with her, but to me she's been a right pain in the rear on more than one occasion, which I think makes it worthwhile to share what I have learned, for the benefit of others who might be having the same difficulties.

The boss in a nutshell

She starts on the floor, then jumps up onto the walkways above her, changes position a few times, then jumps down again and covers the floor in lightning periodically. There are also a lot of adds, and during the top phase she throws some targeted circles around that you should avoid placing on other players. That really is the gist of it, but once again I'll happily point you towards Vulkk or the old Dulfy guide for more details on the mechanics.

What to do as a tank

At the start of the fight, round up the adds on the ground as best as you can while damage dealers focus on AoEing them down. Once Zenta goes up, follow her (either by leaping or via using one of the available grappling hooks) and position yourself just around the corner from the ramp that leads up onto the walkways. Feel free to taunt and hit the boss occasionally, but she shouldn't really be your main priority at this point as she doesn't actually hit that hard. It's more important that you focus on rounding up the adds as they appear and do your best to keep them from overwhelming your healer (who should be standing near you.)

Once Zenta goes down again you're basically racing against a soft enrage as more and more adds will be spawning in rapidly. Use everything you've got to get their attention while staying alive (AoE taunt, stuns, damage reduction cooldowns etc.) and hope that the dps can kill her in time before you and the healer both get overwhelmed.

What to do as a damage dealer

Start off by killing the adds on the ground, then dps the boss until she goes up. Follow her and continue to focus your damage on her, but keep an eye on the tank and healer, and jump over to them occasionally to mop up the pile of adds that will accumulate on them. When Zenta goes down again, just nuke her from range if you can.

If you're playing a melee class, make sure to wait a few seconds as she will cast her big lightning floor move almost immediately, and you don't want to jump right into it. Then jump down after it and nuke her with all you've got (while also hitting what damage reduction cooldowns you've got available) before the swarms of unending adds overwhelm your tank and healer.

What to do as a healer

At the start, you can hide behind a nearby crate to the left to avoid getting sniped. Once Zenta goes up, stick close to your tank as you will be getting healing aggro on any and all adds that spawn, and you'll rely on the tank picking them up to stay alive. Keep an eye on dps taking damage as well, though it shouldn't be too bad on them. Once Zenta goes down again, leave the damage dealers to their fate and focus on just keeping yourself and the tank alive as best as you can. If you can survive until Zenta's defeated, all remaining adds vanish automatically.

Master Mode Flashpoint Tips: Umbaran Spider Tank

Introduction

I previously wrote about Commander Mokan, whom I consider one of the hardest flashpoint bosses in the game. The thing that makes Mokan hard is understanding the tactics involved - however, once you've internalised all the steps, the actual execution isn't all that tricky aside from the healer having to be capable of a certain degree of multitasking.

Today I'd like to write about a boss that is also one of the hardest flashpoint bosses in the game, but for completely different reasons: the Umbaran Spider Tank at the end of Crisis on Umbara. This one's no puzzle at all (stay out of the fire and kill adds) but the problem lies in the requirements for perfect execution, which are pretty harsh on master mode. Also, unlike Mokan, killing the Umbaran Spider Tank is not optional, meaning that he's driven many a group to despair, and pugs will often drop out as soon as they see that their queueing for a random master mode has landed them in Umbara, even though it only takes 20-30 minutes to complete if you can one-shot everything. The problem is that most groups won't get that experience; instead they'll just wipe a lot and often end up abandoning the whole thing.

I am not above these problems myself, and have only ever had a single what I would call a "perfect kill" of this boss, where we killed it right where it spawns, it was a one-shot and everyone was still alive by the end of the fight. To this day I'm not entirely sure how we did that; I think our dps must have just been awesome that day. More commonly there've been at least a handful of wipes involved, and by the end we're often just as dead as the Spider Tank, with the only difference being that we're allowed to get up again and loot while the tank does not get that luxury.

That was until I was taught the strategy I describe in this post. It's fair to describe it as "cheesy", as it involves fighting the boss in a way that clearly wasn't exactly what the developers had in mind when they designed the encounter, but as it doesn't actually avoid any of the mechanics I don't consider it exploitative. Just like the best way to beat the Purifier Droids in KotET chapter four on veteran/master mode is to leg it into a different building, this fight can be made a lot more manageable by moving the boss and forcing the add spawns into a funnel that makes them a little easier to control. It's no miracle solution to suddenly making the fight easy, but it does take a significant amount of pressure off the group by giving them more wiggle room to handle the adds before they maul the healer.

The boss in a nutshell

Once again I can recommend what both Vulkk and Dulfy have to say about this fight if you want to know the exact details of every ability the boss does, but the short of it is that on top of damaging the tank it does both a painful knockdown and places fire circles on random group members that make it a constant challenge to stay alive. At certain health percentages a wave of adds spawns in, and once the boss gets low on health an unending stream of adds begins, forcing you to burn it quickly. While dps is important, the main challenge of the encounter is simply staying alive, as a particularly unlucky combo of the same person getting stunned and hit by a fire circle can be absolutely devastating to their health bar, and all this happens while the healer will struggle not to get eaten by the adds.

What to do as a tank

After the little cut scene has played, send the rest of your group back down the hill, just around the bend where a bunch of kolto barrels are lying on the ground. Pull the boss and start running down the hill; it will evade at some point. Then repeat this manoeuvrer - this time the boss won't evade but will instead follow you all the way down to the rest of the group.

Try to position the boss so that it's not straight up against the cliff face, so that there's a bit of room to run around it on all sides. Keep it facing away from the rest of the group as much as you can but run out of fire when you must. When adds come down the hill and run past you, you can also hit them with AoE; hopefully the dps should be able to take care of them for the most part though.

What to do as a damage dealer

After the little cut scene has played, run back down the hill to where a bunch of kolto barrels are lying on the ground. Wait for the tank to bring the boss all the way down to you, then start to dps. Try to stay away from each other to avoid more than one person being hit by any ability, and run out of fire circles as quickly as you can. Also try to retain some awareness of where the healer is hiding, so that you break line of sight as little as possible and don't run out of range.

Whenever adds come down the hill, try to resist the urge to run up and get them as soon as they get close - let them come down. By default they will aggro on the healer, and if the healer breaks line of sight properly the adds should bunch up nicely close to them, at the bottom of the hill. At that point you want to charge in and kill them quickly (but still avoid standing on top of other dps or the healer while doing so).

When the boss is at around thirty percent health, mop up any adds that may still be around before continuing to dps (just look at the red dots on the mini map). At about twenty percent an infinite stream of adds will start spawning, so just focus on nuking the boss at that point. With the adds taking some time to run down the hill, you should be able to kill the boss before they reach the group and start causing trouble, so that you then only have to deal with getting rid of them after the boss is already dead.

What to do as a healer

After the little cut scene has played, run back down the hill to where a bunch of kolto barrels are lying on the ground. Try to hide behind one of the "tentacle trees" there, or on the other side of the path. (See the spots marked with a healer marker in the above screenshot.) Move when the boss puts a fire circle on you and if you lose line of sight of group members you need to heal, but try to stay behind one of the trees as much as you can, so that the adds will have a long way to run when they come in. Once they start bunching up near you, the dps should quickly AoE them down.

Note for everyone

One of the reasons to fight by the kolto barrels is that you can pop them for some extra healing if it feels like the healer can't keep up with the damage at any point. Keep in mind that they don't respawn though, so if you use them all up and wipe you don't get them back for the next attempt.

Master Mode Flashpoint Tips: Commander Mokan

Introduction

As mentioned previously, I've been running a lot of master mode flashpoints with guildies over the past couple of weeks, and one of the nice things about this has been achieving true mastery of some of the harder boss fights in them. I've said in the past that I generally like challenging fights, but the problem is that spending all night wiping on a boss just to finally be triumphant in the end is an experience with diminishing returns. Wiping again the second and third time you do the boss, because the fight is still hard, is simply not that fun. However, there does come a point when after doing it a few more times you actually achieve true mastery of the mechanics, and then it becomes fun again when you one-shot those very same tough bosses and can revel in just how pro you are now.

I thought it would be nice to share some of the insights I gained about a few of the tougher flashpoint bosses this way, and I wanted to start with Commander Mokan, more commonly known as the bonus boss in master mode Battle of Rishi. I killed him back in the day when he was new, but it was painful and messy, and while I went on to kill him again after that, the fight remained confusing and frustrating to me all the same.

The problem is that while there are some guides out there such as Dulfy's or Vulkk's, I found that they focus more on explaining what the boss does instead of telling you what you need to do. (I do absolutely recommend them if you want to gain a deeper understanding of how everything works.) For me though, it's all nice and well to know that the tank needs to be cleansed, but just when is the best time for that? And yes, I know that I want exactly four stacks of the green debuff, but something always seems to go wrong no matter how we go about getting them, so what's up with that? Fear not, for I'm going to explain to you exactly what you need to do, and you'll probably be surprised by how straightforward it is once you boil it down to the basics.

The boss in a nutshell

He basically alternates between two phases, which I shall simply call "green phase" and "red phase". During red phase, all he does is stand there and channel an AoE that does massive damage to everyone in the room. During green phase, he alternates between doing two things: cast a conal AoE on the tank (he does this three times), and put down a green circle on a non-tank (this he also does three times). No person will get more than one circle on them during each green phase, unless someone has died and been revived, stealthed out, or the tank lost aggro. If that happens, you're probably about to wipe. The fight always starts with a green phase.

What to do as a tank

Congratulations, you've got the easy job! Just point him away from the rest of the group, hold aggro, and try not to die.

As it's really important that you don't lose aggro at any point, I recommend starting with a "taunt fluff", which is to say that you taunt the boss on pull, use your AoE taunt as soon as the taunt debuff runs out, and then use your single target taunt again as soon as it comes off cooldown. This should generally see you through safely even against the most overzealous damage dealers.

Use available damage reduction cooldowns during the red phase to make things easier on the healer, but make sure not to use anything that purges debuffs on you, as that will cause you to lose all your green stacks and result in death.

What to do as a damage dealer

Make sure to stand on the opposite side of the boss from the tank and spread out during green phase, so that when a green circle hits you, nobody else gets hit at the same time. Also try not to pull aggro. During red phase, stack up on the boss to make healing easier, and use any damage reduction cooldowns you have.

The big challenge for dps during green phase is

Circle Management

If you are the first person to get a green circle thrown at you, stand in it until you have two stacks, then move out. Once the second circle lands on someone else, step into that briefly to get your stacks up to four.

If you are the second person to get a green circle thrown at you, stand in it until you have four stacks, then move out.

If the first two circles have landed on other people and you know that the last one will be on you, step into the second circle to get two stacks from it, then step away. When the third circle lands on you, get another two stacks to get up to four. Then stack up for red phase, which will be imminent.

Rinse and repeat when the boss goes back to green phase, and continue until he's dead.

What to do as a healer

As a healer you undoubtedly have the hardest job in this fight, but it's still not quite as bad as it may seem at first. First off, you have to practice circle management as described above, just like the dps, while also healing people.

You will also have to cleanse the tank, but this is actually really straightforward: just cast cleanse on them twice per green phase (when they first get hit by the green cone, and then again whenever your cleanse is off cooldown). I used to fret about when to cleanse and how often but it's really that simple, as the tank always gets six stacks of the debuff on them throughout the duration of a single green phase, and by removing two you leave them at the desired four.

During red phase, make sure to stack up with everyone else and use all your big AoE heals.

I hope that by following these simple steps, you too will soon be able to one-shot this guy, making him just another stepping stone on your journey through Battle of Rishi.

My 20 Favourite Outtakes Captured on Video

As long time readers will know, I also have a YouTube channel, and I've occasionally linked to videos that I uploaded on there. I started making videos a few months after creating this blog actually, but I never had any great aspirations about being a video content creator or anything like that - most of the time I just enjoy capturing gameplay and boss kills with my guild, so that I can later look back on them with nostalgia and remind myself of all the nice people I've played with over time and what fun we've had.

One "series" I started early on was called "Twin Suns Outtakes". Basically, pretty much as soon as I started recording videos, I also ended up with footage that wasn't necessarily worth making a dedicated video about but that nonetheless tickled me in some way. One of the earliest examples of this was us wiping in embarrassing ways in Karagga's Palace. "Look at us wipe" didn't seem like a good title for a video, but I didn't quite want to throw the footage away either. Thus the outtakes format was born, where I threw together random clips that I wanted to preserve either because they were funny or just because they were tied to some particular memory that was dear to me for some reason.

I usually make a new outtakes video every few months and they always tend to be quite popular with my guildies. Over time there's been a bit of a shift from random footage to general "funny moments" as new capture software allowed me to specifically save recordings of events after the fact, without having to rely on me just happening to turn on video recording at the right time for something interesting to happen.

Anyway, with more time to spend at home I've been on a bit of a nostalgia trip re-watching old videos, and I thought it would be fun to make a top list of some of my favourite SWTOR moments with my guild captured in these videos.

20. Bouncing Jedi Knights Standing Together (early 2013)

Low on the list we start with one of those clips that isn't really funny by itself but mostly just stands for a memory. There was a time when "Smash spec" for Jedi knights and Sith warriors was particularly powerful and lots of people were playing it as the flavour of the month - including some of my guildies on alts. I don't remember who originally came up with the idea, but one day while we were bouncing around smashing things someone started singing the start of "We All Stand Together" from Rupert and the Frog Song on TeamSpeak and it somehow became our theme song, with the lyrics being changed to "we all smash together".

We imagined ourselves having a whole music video of us smashing things to the tune and I even started recording footage, but I soon realised that a) I would have needed a lot of footage to make a good video about it, b) it was actually quite hard to get good shots of us smashing things, and c) who was going to sing the modified lyrics anyway? It wasn't very well thought-out and I quickly had to abandon the idea, but I did preserve its memory in the start of that one outtakes video and it still makes me smile every time I re-watch it.

19. How not to summon the Hateful Entity (March 2014)

This one is a slightly deadpan piece of humour, featuring a full sixteen-man ops group getting together to kill a special boss, the summoner clicking the item to start the summon and... nothing happens?

"Do it again!"

"Says it's on cooldown... for 23 hours."

"So, same time tomorrow?"

(Turns out we could get around it, I think by trading the item to someone else, so we did get our summon after all, but in the moment it was funny.)

18. The bugged ops group (November 2018)

This is just an amusing example of how badly things can get messed up when the operations UI bugs out. What started with an accidental kick from the ops group escalated in confusing ways until our wannabe ops leader suggested I turn off the power to the entire house and start over, which makes me laugh to this day.
 
17. Wiping on Jarg and Sorno (November 2012)

This is actually the clip I mentioned in the introduction, showing us wipe on the second fight in Karagga's Palace on 16-man nightmare mode (back when that was a thing). Having died relatively early and close to the centre of the room, I hid my UI and had a pretty good view of what else was going on. Since I wasn't even recording game sound in those very early videos, I added the cheerful tune of Desmond Dekker's "You can get it if you really want" to falsely instil a sense of hope in the viewer, just to end with a record scratch as the last person in the group dies and the bosses reset.

For the well-initiated there are additional layers of humour as you can watch panicking guildies do silly things, such as a Sentinel temporarily back-pedalling from the boss as if that was going to help in any way, or a Sage healer planting an AoE heal under the boss instead of under any players. Unfortunately I can't link the actual video as another song snippet in it got hit with a copyright claim that caused the whole thing to be blocked worldwide.

16. Learning how to play a Combat Sentinel at 3am in the morning (January 2013)

When you're doing PvP at 3am in the morning, the strangest things can seem funny, such as a guy saying "blade rush" over and over again. 'nuff said. Unfortunately I can't link this one either because it appears that a copyright claim on a song snippet elsewhere in the video resulted in the sound of the entire uploaded version of the video being removed and I don't know how to get it back without re-uploading the entire thing.

15. Grappling Fail on Copero (June 2018)

A guildie you will encounter in these outtakes quite frequently goes by the simple name of Mace. Mace is the longest standing officer after Mr Commando and me and is quite popular with the officer team as he enjoys filling out spreadsheets and is therefore often entrusted with menial and (to the rest of us) tedious tasks such as putting together ops teams and group rotations. He also has a very strong personality that combines boundless enthusiasm and a desire to min-max in bizarre ways with an almost childlike naiveté at times. As such, he is well-known for doing silly things that make the rest of us laugh and for being the patient butt of many jokes - if you do find him funny. His clowning around is a kind of litmus test for whether you'll fit in with the guild's general sense of humour I guess.

Anyway, this particular clip has him somehow fail at using a grappling hook in the Traitor Among the Chiss flashpoint, fall to his death, run back, and then die again from trying to jump across using a Scoundrel ability instead. Meanwhile the rest of us stand on the other side and alternate between laughing and facepalming.

14. I Will Survive Scyva (May 2018)

The last phase on Scyva in Gods from the Machine used to be pretty deadly even on story mode (I think she may have been nerfed a bit since then), to the point that it wasn't unusual to have a majority of the ops group die while only a few survivors remained to finish off the boss. This clip features one such occasion where I was once again enjoying a class A viewing experience from the floor while one tank and the other healer slowly finished off the boss. Gloria Gaynor seemed like an appropriate soundtrack.

13. The Naked Gunslinger (November 2017)

Ever since the introduction of the Outfit Designer decoupled a character's appearance from what they are actually wearing, it's become a problem that people would sometimes swap gear around between characters and then forget what they were actually wearing under their apperance - or more importantly that they weren't actually wearing any gear underneath.

We've had similar situations occur many times since then, but this is the first one I can clearly recall happening in an operation, and the way Ard pointed it out to Mace, coupled with Mace's obvious embarrassment, just had both of us healers in giggling fits.

12. Asterisks (August 2018)

TeamSpeak has an option to have its built-in announcer voice pronounce the name of whoever is entering or leaving a channel - it's not the default but I'm one of the few people in the guild who have this enabled. There is also a setting where you can set a specific pronunciation for your name in case it's quite different from the way the bot would usually pronounce the written version.

One time Mace (of course, who else) somehow messed up the phonetic setting for his name, causing me to be treated to an endless stream of the robot voice pronouncing "asterisk" the moment he came online. I thought it was hilarious.

11. Lost on Ossus (February 2019)

Another prime example of "the kind of thing Mace does" - during one of our first runs of the Hive of the Mountain Queen he exited the instance by accident (?!), got killed right outside because in his hubris he'd set his focus to PvP, and then couldn't even find his way back inside because apparently he'd been summoned before and didn't even know the way? It was just one blow after another; you couldn't make this stuff up if you tried.

10. The Elevator Incident (April 2013)

Now, I'm not too fond of this video in practical terms since I had just changed my recording setup and for some reason the quality of my own voice recording was absolutely abysmal (which is why I felt the need to add the subtitles so people would be able to make out what I was saying at all), but as the incident became the stuff of legends in the guild I just had to include it and rank it quite highly too.

Basically it was my first ever run of the Scum and Villainy operation, and I just remembered someone emphasising emphatically that we'd have to enter an elevator and get down quickly or we'd all die! So of course I ran into the first elevator door I saw opening. Except that wasn't where we were supposed to go nor even the right time; it was just a door that released an add and then closed permanently afterwards. As a bonus, I got myself stuck in there just at the point when I was supposed to click a console to help with the next part of the fight, effectively wiping the group.

"Don't get stuck in the lift" was a catchphrase that followed me around for quite a while after that.

9. Zero Attention Span Imps in Novare Coast (January 2017)

Everyone who's done at least a moderate amount of PvP must be familiar with the type of player that always chases kills over objectives. In fact, if you're the more objective-focused type yourself, it can be particularly fun to beat players like that, as achieving a win against someone who is able to repeatedly kill you feels a bit like a David vs. Goliath kind of situation and makes you feel all clever.

This was the case in this match as well, where me and several guildies came up against a bizarre Imperial premade that literally just rushed around the map to kill everyone at a certain point as a group and capture whatever objective was there, but then immediately left said objective undefended, resulting in an easy win for us even as we repeatedly got steamrolled by the Imperial train as it made the rounds. It was quite a funny situation.

8. Firefrost Yakety Sax (December 2016)

One evening when we couldn't find a tank to do the Firefrost uprising on veteran mode, a guildie suggested that it was quite viable to go in without a tank but using two healers instead, so we did that. It mostly went fine too, until the last boss overwhelmed us with adds... at which point we didn't wipe, but started to humorously kite things in circles, with another guildie even playing Yakety Sax over TeamSpeak for us. Such is guild life.

7. Gods from the Machine trash collection (early 2019)

I've said before that I think Gods from the Machine contains a bit too much trash to make it an enjoyable place to visit frequently, but that said, the first time around the challenges presented by said trash are extremely amusing, especially on hard mode. From guildies screaming as they get swarmed by adds bursting out of the ground to impromptu singing, explosions and people falling off things, this place has it all.

6. Auto-running into Dread Fortress (June 2017)

Mr Commando is an overly cautious tank if anything, so we were very surprised the time he entered master mode Dread Fortress and pulled literally the entire room up to the boss - turns out he had hit auto-run when entering the instance and somehow it had persisted after he loaded in, and as he had been looking elsewhere during the loading screen he didn't immediately notice... it was very bewildering, and there was much death and laughter.

5. Still Standing Against The Operations Chief (May 2018)

The Operations Chief in Scum and Villainy has the funny quirk of the tank being able to take virtually no damage, as his main attack is a long cast called Terminate that can be interrupted by dodging behind a pipe at the last second and then immediately coming back out again.

This worked very much to our advantage when we first did the fight on 16-man master mode and made a right mess of things, with dps and healers dropping like flies left and right, causing the boss to enrage... but our tank just kept on going, avoiding all the hits for what felt like half an eternity and until the few people remaining managed to finish off the boss. Elton John seemed like an appropriate soundtrack.

4. Chasing the Mace (October 2018)

Another little Mace adventure, this one had him bringing an extremely low-level and terribly geared character to an Eternity Vault run. The last boss, Soa, has a mechanic where he summons a ball of lightning that chases you and does damage that is hard to avoid, and it was fun to see Mace fear for his life and worry about dying from a mechanic that was trivial to everyone else in the group.

At first the healers were working frantically to keep him alive after the first orb cost him about 95% of his health, but then it somehow morphed into wanting to see him die instead after he bragged about being too skilled to die and trying to endlessly kite the balls that were chasing him in circles. Eventually people started chasing him with their lightning balls and it all turned into a bit of a comedy show.

3. The Book of Mormon (April 2016)

When our original guild leader decided to quit the game we made a big song and dance about it and had one last social night in his honour. Of course, he had his own idea about song and dance and suddenly started playing songs from The Book of Mormon on TeamSpeak while we bumbled through Karagga's Palace, much to the consternation of everyone else in the channel and even more so those who joined in later. It was a fun evening all around.

2. Commando Healer PvP in 4.0 (September 2016)

Commando healers are considered quite powerful in PvP these days, but I remember very well just how much of a punching bag they were for years before 5.0 and the introduction of Echoing Deterrence in particular. It was so bad that I considered making a whole ironic PvP video about the terribleness of Commandos, but ultimately it was another one of those ideas that kind of fizzled out before I had really recorded enough footage. That said, I had some, and I decided to use it for a section of this outtakes video. Call me self-indulgent for laughing at my own jokes, but watching my character get punted around, stunned, knocked about some more and killed over and over again to the theme tune of Happy Days still makes me laugh today.

1. Imposing martial law to prevent wipes (March 2013)

This is one of those early classics that will forever stick with me, even though most people who were in the operation at the time stopped playing long ago and the humour is pretty crass. We were working on making our way through Explosive Conflict master mode and wiping a lot on the two tanks, and the ride back to make another attempt was very long, repeatedly sparking conversation. In one of those moments when things turn utterly absurd, our Sentinel suggested that we should be able to prevent further wipes by threatening people with physical violence. Typically on the next attempt we had to call it a wipe because that very same Sentinel got stuck in one of the tanks... ending with our Gunslinger asking the priceless question of: "So Dom, which bone are you having broken?"

Apex Vanguard Down!

I mentioned in my last post that my ops team was getting very close to killing the Apex Vanguard (the last boss in the new Dxun operation) on veteran mode, and this past Sunday we finally got him down! Yeah!

I do have to admit that my gut reaction wasn't to cheer and punch fists though, but rather a simple sense of relief. Finally done with this boss!

The main criticism I had of the fight on story mode, namely that it wasn't much more than a long and somewhat boring tank-and-spank for everyone but the person having to do the "battery dance", didn't really hold up in veteran mode: The person doing the battery still has the most responsibility, but there are other important things to do, such as taking care of flare placement, distributing and using stims, and everyone has to be able to react appropriately to the boss's Contagion and Zone Defense abilities.

That said, this boss and I just didn't gel. We weren't off to the best start when I missed the first two weeks or so of progression on him, which meant that on my first couple of nights of actually seeing the fight for myself I felt hopelessly behind... I'm usually not the slowest learner, but with everyone having had a chance to practise all the mechanics for so much longer I kept making what felt like pretty basic mistakes and felt very self-conscious about my lack of familiarity with the fight compared to everyone else.

Worse, I was then assigned a relatively important job, to handle the flares, which common wisdom says should be doable by a single healer. However, every time we tried this, it didn't go well - there were constant arguments about my placement of the flares, and whenever I had to run to pick up more flares we tended to fall seriously behind on healing, which would ultimately lead to deaths and then usually a wipe.

We eventually found that having two ranged dps take turns handling the flares worked much better for us. And I guess there's no shame in adjusting tactics to find whatever works best for your group, but I still couldn't help but feel like we were having to work around my lack of ability.

There was a similar situation when it came to injecting the tank with stims at the very end of the fight, which I got to try properly once, failed, and then things were immediately re-jigged to have the tank take care of the stims themselves.

To be honest I was kind of glad to not have the extra responsibility as I found myself quite taxed just paying attention to everything else, but at the same time I felt like I was being a real drag on the team. I can't even pinpoint what exactly has caused me to struggle so much with the fight, as it's not that hard on the healers if everyone else does their job correctly, but for some reason I just didn't get on with it.

It's not my least favourite fight ever or anything, but definitely my least favourite fight in this operation. Still, I'm glad to be able to say that I've completed them all. Now we just need to kill Huntmaster and Apex on 16-man hardmode (we've already beaten all the bosses before them), and then there are a bunch of WoW-style "complete the fight in a weird way that gives you a handycap" achievements, which I've never been too fond of, but as this sort of "hardmode plus" hasn't really been a thing in SWTOR before, I'm willing to give it a try.

We'll just need to make sure that everyone who wasn't in on the kill last night gets their regular achievement first.