Pugging with Shintar is back!

When I finished up my Pugging with Shintar series last year, I already knew that I wanted to do a "season two" but I also felt that I needed a break and didn't want to get started on it until early 2018. That then got delayed first by me wanting to create a best-of video of season one, and then me getting stuck with a cold that I seemed to be unable to fully shake for several weeks. (Degree of illness aside, coughing and sniffling a lot does not make for the best recording voice.)

However, I'm finally feeling better, so when I found myself with a few hours of unallocated free time this weekend, I set out to get started at last. My plan for season two is to do some endgame pugging, so I started episode one with an operation:



As you'd probably expect, the episode ended up being pretty long even with more than half of the original recording edited out, but I guess that's the sort of video you can put on and watch on the side while doing dailies or whatever. (And I even put in the effort of making a custom thumbnail this time!)

Stay tuned to the YouTube channel for more (though I don't expect to create weekly episodes in this new format; pugging operations is too time-intensive for me to be able to reliably devote time to it every single weekend).

When Old Raids Are New Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There needs to be a rhythm to the damage patterns.

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

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

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

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

There should be things to do other than heal.

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

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

Dispels should be handled with care.

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

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

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

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

My favourite operation

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

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

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

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

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

... Eternity Vault!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guild Changes

About three weeks ago I posted about running Terror from Beyond for the first time, and about how I wasn't sure how my guild was going to proceed from there, seeing how we only had a handful of people left who were interested in running operations. Shortly afterwards I had to be AFK for a bit more than a week, and when I returned I came back to a message from one among that last handful, telling me that he had left BoR to raid with another guild.

I wasn't surprised, but I was a little miffed... at least initially. It didn't seem fair that other people were taking "the easy way out" and leaving me in the lurch while I was still agonising over how to keep things running in the guild. However, then I realised that in essence, I was suffering from an issue of my own making. I wasn't a veteran member or a high-ranking officer; I was only as responsible as I wanted to be. (Stubborn has a very topical post on that subject up today. At least I'm not the only one who has problems like that.) So I finally got over myself, admitted that I didn't really want to lead, and that maybe it was best for those of us who still wanted to raid to simply join other guilds. Nobody got mad, and the slightly resigned responses basically came down to: "Yeah, I guess you're right." We were still going to be friends. Phew.

Now my only problem remained that I knew nothing about how to find a good guild to raid with. I've been playing MMOs for six years and have been guilded for 99% of that time, but every single time I joined a guild it was because existing friends invited me along for the ride. I had no idea how to find a guild for a specific purpose. Fortunately I knew a couple of friendly people through random PvP (yay for the community-building effect of same-server warzones), so I started probing one of them about his guild. How often did they raid and on what level? I didn't even think to ask about their raid schedule or any other details like that. They were active and the couple of people I knew were friendly enough; that was going to be enough for me. I applied on their forums, got accepted, joined the guild - and done!

I've now been a member of Twin Suns Squadron for about a week and it's still a bit weird not to know anyone that well. I'm finding that I'm unusually shy because I don't want to commit any kind of social faux pas or make a fool out of myself while I'm still getting a feel for the general tone of the guild. Nonetheless, things have been going well so far.

I signed up for their more casual raid night, they had a space for me, and I got to participate in a nightmare mode run of Karagga's Palace, even though I'd previously only completed it on hard mode. Getting a new title on my first raid ("The Unyielding") sure felt rewarding. It also made for an interesting change of pace to be playing in a more progression-oriented environment again, as I suddenly felt acutely aware of how little attention I had paid to my PvE gear in the past few months (missing augments etc.). I must have felt pretty flustered about that, seeing how I managed to make it through the entire raid without noticing that my push-to-talk key wasn't working. ("Oh well, I'm the new person, of course they are ignoring me!") The absurdity of that thought made me laugh afterwards.

The op itself wasn't without entertainment value either. My favourite moment was when we were at Karagga, and the following conversation took place (paraphrased):

Tank: "Okay, so I'm going to tank him clockwise around the room."
[Fight starts.]
Someone else: "Dude, you said you were going clockwise."
Tank: "Yes?"
Someone else: "Well, you're not! You're going counter-clockwise."
Tank: "Eh, give me a break, it's been ages since I looked at one of those old-fashioned clocks!"
[We bork it up and wipe. As we line up for the next attempt...]
Tank: "Okay, so apparently I'm going to tank him counter-clockwise..."

And tonight I finally got to see Terror from Beyond story mode in its entirety. I'd forgotten how much fun operations can be when you're excited to see new content and don't have to worry about anything but your own performance. I'm really looking forward to seeing where things will go for me from here.

Explosive Conflict Completed

This past Wednesday my guild cleared Explosive Content on normal mode for the first time. After we spent all of Sunday night wiping to Kephess over and over again, often missing out on killing him by just a smidgeon of health, it felt well-earned when we got him down on what was only our second attempt on Wednesday.

I have to stand by what I said in my early impressions of the operation, specifically that story mode feels considerably overtuned. Again this isn't really a personal complaint as I enjoyed the challenge level that we came up against, but we were already mostly Rakata geared when we started. I just can't see any raid group going straight from Eternity Vault and Karagga's Palace story mode to EC and having any success there. I think this is definitely a case where Bioware either needs to nerf the content to bring it in line with story mode progression, or they need to redefine what exactly the progression curve is supposed to be. However, requiring clears of the previous hard mode to get into the newest story mode strikes me as sort of defeating the point of having a story mode (that is to say, a decidedly accessible one) in the first place.

I suppose for now I can only recommend that if you are in a guild that is struggling with normal mode EC, try going back and getting some Rakata drops from hard mode EV and KP first. (You don't necessarily have to clear the entire place on hard.) I know it's called hard mode, but with the current design EV and KP don't really require any more skill on hard than on normal, only more gear - which is what you should have accumulated naturally after successfully clearing both on normal mode first.

Minor story spoiler ahead I suppose: at the end of EC's one-time operation quest, you briefly get to meet the same bad guys that indirectly caused Karagga to go rogue through their expansion into Hutt space. I wonder if the next operation will feature them as bosses, whether they are going to be built up as a threat any further by causing some more trouble from a distance first, or whether it will be about something completely different.

I really like how Bioware seems to be tying it all together, even if all those little connections might be slightly wasted on people. I mean, after playing all these different characters week after week (remember, the game encourages alting), who can remember every little detail of every quest? I had actually completely forgotten about the connection to the ending of Karagga's Palace myself, but then I got to do the one-time KP quest on my Sage on Friday and had an aha moment when I was reminded of how it all fit together. Really, it's all interconnected so well that you probably don't just have to play all the different classes to 50 to get the full story, ideally you would then have to do some of the first ones you did all over again, just to take note of all the things you missed the first time.

Another fun note about the baddies at the end of EC was the fact that when they first appeared, I had the following conversation with my boyfriend:

Him: "Uh, I know those guys."
Me: "Oh? How so?"
Him: "I was the one who set them free. On my Sith."
Me: "That's what you get when you let people play Empire alts..."

Just more evidence of the interconnectedness.

I suppose it's just a shame that the 1.2 operation didn't last us longer than a month on normal mode, even with a very limited number of nights devoted to working on it. With 1.3 not containing any new raid content, PvE endgame will be a bit dry for the next couple of months.

On the plus side though, I expect the group finder to invigorate interest in flashpoints and the first operation tier, so it will be a good time to get some alts geared up. And well, in terms of progression my guild still has nightmare EV and KP left, as well as EC hard obviously, which is supposed to be very tough. It's not the same as getting a new story, but chasing after Campaign gear should tide us over for at least a couple of months.

We might even be able to get some 16-man raids going, though I'm not holding my breath for that. It's kind of funny, because from what I can tell the game currently offers zero incentive for going for the larger group size... but there is this other guild on our server that seems to be really keen on teaming up with us to do 16-mans anyway. I suppose we're just that awesome. And well, if we do get the people together for it... I guess there is little harm in at least giving it a go.

Day 1: Bugs

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

Bugs in raids are rarely fun, because often they prevent you from killing bosses even if you are capable, or they make you jump through unnecessary hoops just to be able to re-attempt the fight (such as resetting the whole instance and clearing the trash again - I'm looking at you, HM Fabricator and pre-1.2 HM Ancient Pylons).

However, every now and then you do get a laugh out of one, such as in this case, where a trash mob in Karagga's Palace somehow became immune to damaging abilities but was also perma-stunned at the same time - so he just stood there, twitching helplessly and keeping us in combat. We eventually managed to resolve the issue by punting him off a nearby elevator shaft where he died from the fall damage, which we thought was most amusing. As an aside, I'm not sure my guild leader is supposed to be nothing but a floating double-bladed lightsaber either.

On Corellia you meet an alien race called the Drall (as Republic anyway), or as I refer to them, "the guinea pig men". On my consular I got to go into a library that was full of them, but they didn't all look entirely well. I mean, I see a leg, but everything else looks kind of... inside out?

This one might've been a graphics glitch more than a bug, but I still found it most unsettling: my twi'lek's lekku disappeared while questing in the Black Hole! And no, that didn't just make her look like a normal person with green skin... it was just wrong.

Enjoying Endgame

One thing that has taken me somewhat by surprise is just how much I'm enjoying the endgame in The Old Republic. I mean, I was really looking forward to the game, but even so I thought that I would spend most of my time levelling alts in order to enjoy the different class stories, the roleplaying and the voice acting. However, as it stands, my alts' progress keeps stalling because I'm having too much fun on my main, which is certainly not the worst problem in the world to have, but still... surprising.

Operations are ridiculously fun. And to think that I believed that I was burnt out on raiding for good... This week my guild managed to clear both raids on normal mode for the first time and it was simply a blast for everyone involved.

Getting Soa down felt like a true achievement and a great team effort all around, not to mention that there was something quite amusing about people shouting directions left and right in order to convey where to move the boss in the final phase. My favourite was probably: "No, it's coming down over there where Shintar's standing. In fact, Shintar, move!"

In Karagga's Palace my boyfriend and I were working like a well-oiled machine as our group's dedicated console operating team on the puzzle boss, and when Karagga himself died, he sent our smuggler into a bit of a frenzy by dropping his hat on him. Indeed, no raid group should be without one of these.

I liked this post by Calli on Dude, Where's My Bantha? on the subject of SWTOR operations. Even though he plays in a much more hardcore guild, I can't help but echo his feelings when he says: "About halfway through I felt something I’d not felt raiding since Karazhan and Ulduar in World of Warcraft. Is that… am I… yes I do believe that’s fun."

However, even on nights when we don't have any operations scheduled, I just keep getting sucked into things. It starts innocently enough as I just log onto my main to check my mail, send companions on missions and so on, and then I think: Hm, I could run a few warzones to try and get the PvP daily done - it's not that much effort, is it? This line of thinking rarely works out because I seem to end up losing a lot more games than I'm winning, but I'm still enjoying it because the gameplay is fun and people are generally in good spirits even when things aren't going in the Republic's favour.

Next thing I know a guildie is asking whether anyone wants to join for dailies. I rarely bother on my own because it tends to be a bit tedious, but in a group they are good fun. Pretty much as soon as we have four people online, someone will then ask whether anyone wants to do a hardmode flashpoint and off we go. There goes the rest of my evening and my alts remain unplayed once again.

I never quite understood Syl's frequently expressed dislike for alts, and I'm still convinced that I will get around to levelling more of them eventually, but I do have to admit that there's something very enjoyable about simply wanting to play your main all the time because there's so much to do and it's a lot of fun. For a game that's so heavily focused on offering replay value on different characters, SWTOR is certainly doing a good job at keeping me occupied with other things.