A Good Start to the Season

You may find it hard to believe after my outrage at how gutted the Esseles and the Black Talon feel without cut scenes, but I've actually had a pretty good start to Galactic Season 9 in spite of that. Patch day was a bit rough, with my game crashing to desktop something like seven times, but once I learned that this was caused by hovering over one specific UI element, I was once again too amazed by just how weird MMO bugs can be sometimes to really be mad about that. (Plus, once I knew what was causing it, it was easy to avoid. They then patched the issue a couple days later.)

The flashpoint theme has actually felt surprisingly invigorating. I've long said that I'm a big fan of flashpoints, but I'm not immune to incentives, and the fact that there's literally been nothing to earn for me in flashpoints for a couple of years now has admittedly discouraged me from running them. I would rarely go for the seasons objectives that required you to run two specific flashpoints because they were just too time-consuming and felt inefficient. The dedicated weekly objective for this season only requiring a single quick veteran mode run makes a world of a difference, and I was genuinely surprised that I actually had fun blitzing through Athiss six times this past week.

My favourite run was the one with my husband on our home server, where he actually bothered to go into one of the side alcoves to use his scavenging to repair the broken combat droid there, something I hadn't done in so long that I'd genuinely forgotten that it was even a thing. One of the guildies in our group then kept casting a heal over time on it to keep it alive, to the point that the temporary pet was actually still alive when we got to the last boss. This is where we learned that the living fire debuff can go on non-player characters! The poor droid didn't manage to survive that one, but it was good for a laugh. 

The other weekly objectives for the first two weeks were pretty good too, with some nice softballs that didn't take too much time to complete on multiple servers while also earning me new achievements.

My personal biggest delight last week though was that there was also an objective to run any random master mode flashpoint, which I did on five out of six servers. (Sadly I couldn't get the queue to pop on Shae Vizla even while queueing as a tank.)

Even better, not a single one of them was Hammer Station, even though I had queued for the full selection. I had the expectation that most people would use the new feature that allows you to exclude a few flashpoints without losing your random bonus to primarily veto long or difficult ones, but maybe there are more fellow Spammer Station haters out there than expected who are actually excluding that one instead.

Either way, the random master mode flashpoints I got put into were Assault on Tython (twice), Battle of Rishi, Lost Island and Crisis on Umbara. The latter must have been nerfed a lot since I last did it, as my group completed it successfully without wiping despite feeling pretty mid in terms of skill. I know there's been some gear inflation since 7.0, but the first two bosses barely even seemed to do any damage, and we pulled the bonus boss by accident with a bunch of trash and still killed that successfully too. Not that I'm complaining!

Battle of Rishi had me busting out my Shadow's tank spec on Satele Shan, which I had actually set up some time ago but then never ended up using. I was very pleased with myself for how I guided the rest of the group through the run after someone expressed that it had been a while and they weren't sure they remembered what to do. Trying to model good tank behaviour!

Lost Island was the most memorable one though, as that was what I got on the Leviathan server while queueing on my Sage as a healer. It quickly became obvious that the tank and one of the damage dealers knew basically nothing about the flashpoint, while the other damage dealer gave the vibes of someone who had done it before and generally knew how to play but couldn't fully remember all the tactics properly. It was pretty funny to read the chat and try to make sense of it, as my knowledge of French is very limited. I think I could generally get the vibe/general topic, but not necessarily what exactly people were trying to say.

Unsurprisingly we wiped something like five times on the second boss as everyone but me kept getting knocked off the platform. I tried to use Google Translate to explain where people needed to stand, but either the translation made no sense or they intentionally decided to ignore me because I sounded too weird, as they didn't appear to listen to my advice. Fortunately they eventually seemingly managed to figure it out on their own and we were victorious. The remaining two bosses after that were comparatively easy, but I still felt like I was carrying pretty hard, healing people through some significant amounts of "standing in bad".

I felt properly giddy after we finished, both excited and relieved that we'd succeeded despite our difficulties, but also a bit amused by how ridiculous the whole experience had felt. The dps who'd given me vibes of having some idea of what to do whispered me afterwards to... I don't know, I'm guessing it was something like "we're queueing again" though it might have meant something completely different; I genuinely had no clue. I just logged off because I'd definitely had enough for that evening.

I'm hoping to see that objective pop up more often though.

Pugette Hit 70

After seven months of (near) weekly recording of her adventures with random groups in the group finder, Pugette the Commando has hit level 70! Her actual /played time is pretty short though, only 1(!) day and 9 hours, which once again reinforces my impression that flashpoints are actually a pretty good way to level but also that levelling is just super fast in general nowadays.

I got to finish on a nice round number after exactly 30 episodes. Towards the end I decided to ditch the random queueing in favour of choosing some specific destinations, to make sure that I would go out on a bang instead of by blitzing through yet another randomly assigned Hammer Station, and I think it worked out great, with several of the last few episodes being (in my opinion) among the best ones of the whole run. The only thing that could be considered an issue with them is length (if you don't actually like long videos), as two of them ended up taking close to one and a half hours in the end. Either way, without further ado, here's a list of the final six episodes with links:

Episode 25: Racism in Progress in False Emperor - Even though I always had the option to accept in-progress runs ticked, this was the first and only time I actually got into one, with the group already standing at the second boss in False Emperor. My entrance was kind of overshadowed by one of the pugs greeting Pugette (who, unlike me, has dark skin) with a racist term. That was just so confusing, I had no idea how to react. I let it go and moved on and nothing else offensive was said, but it was certainly a strange experience.

Episode 26: Thinking About The Future in Assault on Tython - After having already bested this flashpoint on master mode in an earlier episode, veteran mode felt very easy, and I mostly used the opportunity to do some speculating about the changes coming to the group finder in patch 5.6. I was wrong about pretty much all of it by the way.

Episode 27: Noobing It Up in Blood Hunt - At last, the flashpoint I had been simultaneously dreading and looking forward to since I started this series. All things considered, it didn't go too badly, though we did have the inevitable wipes on Jos and Valk. I also always find this flashpoint to be a bit of a team-building exercise, and our dps Commando in particular had me in stitches at times, which made for a very fun run.

Episode 28: Going Old School in MM Lost Island - I got this one as a random quite often lately, and every time I was surprised by how smoothly it went. This run was not like that. However, it was still fun because people took the wipes in stride and tried hard to do better. When we finally bested the last boss, it sure felt very satisfying.

Episode 29: Reliving Fond Memories in MM Kaon Under Siege - This one was much easier than Lost Island and I mostly used it as an opportunity to reminisce about all the good times I had in this flashpoint and how it provided all kinds of memorable moments for me in the past.

Episode 30: Pug Interrupted in Traitor Among the Chiss - This is the one in which Pugette finally hit 70, and also the first one in which she encountered a type of obstacle she hadn't run into before (I won't spoil what it is). Just prepare to be exposed to some eardrum-bursting laughter at one point...

What's in store for Pugette and the channel next? Well, as for Pugette, I'm planning to keep her "pure" and out of guild runs, limited to what she can achieve in the pug world, but first on the agenda is probably finishing her class story up to the end of Coruscant at least so that she can finally get her ship and make that damn galaxy map icon stop flashing.

As for the channel... to be honest, I don't know! I was pleasantly surprised by how many subs and views I gained while recording this series, especially considering that the original purpose of the channel was just to have a place to upload boss kill videos for my guild and the like. I do think I would like to record a "season two" of pug adventures and I do already have an idea for it as well, but even if I do go ahead with it I won't actually put my plan into action until early next year. You'll just have to content yourself with reading the blog in the meantime. /wink

Bioware Answers Some Questions About Flashpoints: An Interview With Michael Backus

A couple of months ago, a strange thought struck me. Star Wars: The Old Republic turns five at the end of this year and I've been maintaining this blog for just as long, but I've never approached anything from the point of view of a real fan site. But really... why not? For all intents and purposes, this is a fan site, and who else is going to ask questions about the nitty gritty details of gameplay or the everyday worries of a loyal player? Since I was still working on my Flashpoint Friday series at the time, I had flashpoints on the mind and decided to put together some questions to pose to Bioware via community manager Eric Musco. And he said this was fine! It took a while until I got my answers, but they did arrive eventually. So, without further ado - my first ever official interview!

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Can you tell us a little about yourself and your role at Bioware? [AKA: Who am I interviewing? I didn't know in advance who this was going to be as I wasn't sure who would be responsible for flashpoints!]

My name is Michael Backus, and I’m the Lead Designer on Star Wars: The Old Republic. I joined the BioWare team over 8 years ago and have spent the majority of my time on SW:TOR. My job really has two main parts: The first is to manage the Design team on SW:TOR. The second is to work with leadership and bring the vision of the game to life at AAA-quality for our players. That means sharing the vision with team members, documenting designs, and working with the team to flesh out the details of designing new features and gameplay.

Currently all flashpoints are set up to be PUG-able through the group finder. Have you considered adding a higher difficulty option that would allow smaller groups of friends to challenge themselves similar to what you experience in hard or nightmare mode operations? Some of us have very fond memories of Lost Island HM at launch. 

We have, but it’s always a balance between making Flashpoints accessible to more players versus building a custom experience to allow for a greater challenge but for a much more limited set of players. That being said, we are always looking at opportunities to deliver higher difficulty to players looking for that increased level of challenge.

At launch, flashpoints seemed to be set up to offer an alternate gear progression route to operations since they dropped the same set pieces, though one tier lower than you could get in raids. For a while there were even plans to have different difficulty tiers of flashpoints (Lost Island!), but all of this was soon scrapped. I can understand that the tiering system would likely have become unwieldy over time, but can you give us some insight into why set pieces were removed from flashpoints? I always thought that they made for great rewards. 

You touched on it a bit in the question. The main idea was to streamline gear progression. Building and maintaining so many different stat combinations and tiers of gear added confusion to the gameplay experience for some players and made it a much more difficult system to grow and maintain. It is much easier to communicate that set pieces come from Operations. Flashpoint gear progression was designed to be a stepping stone into Operations, so reinforcing that opportunity in the gear progression sent a clearer message.

Over time, flashpoints seem to have served a couple of different purposes. For example Hammer Station is a relatively inconsequential story, just something fun to do with your friends. The Foundry or False Emperor on the other hand are important encounters that were clearly meant to feel even more epic by requiring a whole group of people. The newest flashpoints have mainly been used to drive the main narrative forward (Forged Alliances et al.), but with the inclusion of solo modes for many of these, the lines between regular quests and flashpoints have become somewhat blurred. What do you see as the main purpose of flashpoints going forward? 

Going forward we want to expand the appeal by increasing the fun of playing these experiences. Early in the game’s history we leaned-in more on cinematic storytelling in group content, but since we have had such a strong response to the storytelling in Chapters we then looked at the value of making make group content like the Star Fortresses. More dynamic with a focus on the gameplay.

What's the most challenging aspect of creating new flashpoints? Are they very resource-intensive to make? If so, why? 

That’s an interesting question, mainly because what’s the most challenging can also be some of the most fun for us as a development team.

For instance, if we look at creating a new level, the amount of effort is quite large. We come up with a critical path for both the level and the gameplay. Then, we have to have the area blocked out and scripted so we can playtest it and make sure we’re doing something fun. Then, you have the time we spend on building the environment art—we often create new environments so an area has unique features or a different look to it. Then we have our artists work on making the area beautiful, which requires texture, lighting, and propping work. And that’s without getting into the other Art work we do to create a quality experience: New creatures and bosses, their abilities, and any animation or VFX time to make the level come alive.

Although this sounds like a complex process, it is still a lot of fun. I mean, we’re creating something new for the Star Wars™ universe. That means our Writers, Designers, and Artists are working together to come up with something new and fun, while consulting with our partners at LucasFilm to make sure we capture the feel of Star Wars and The Old Republic. So although it can be a long process with a lot of moving parts, it’s very rewarding when we see these areas completed and enjoyed by our players.

Do you have a favourite and least favourite flashpoint? Maybe one you're particularly proud of and one that makes you think "yeah, we thought that was a good idea at the time but we wouldn't do it again"? 

I really enjoy Colicoid War Game because we tried some very interesting things in that Flashpoint. It starts with a shooting gallery then contains some heavy group puzzle elements. In the spirit of ‘it was a good idea at the time’, we’ve found it’s a more difficult Flashpoint to communicate and isn’t terribly PUG friendly since it’s SO different from the others.

One of the main points of contention when pugging flashpoints is the matter of "space-barring"/skipping the cut scenes, as some people really enjoy them while others just want to get to the end as quickly as possible because they've seen it all before. Sometimes people can even get kicked from the group over this. Have you ever considered trying to implement anything to alleviate this conflict of interests?

It’s a difficult balance. We did extensive testing to try and minimize this problem pre-launch. We have a ‘decision timer’ that was tweaked to try and get the balance right, but it’s never perfect. At the same time, in a sense, we pioneered multiplayer dialog in the MMO space, so these were problems that hadn’t really been identified before. I think one thing that’s helped recently is minimizing cutscenes in the middle of Flashpoints such as Star Fortress to try and keep the action moving.

In 4.0 all existing flashpoints were revamped to be tactical. This has been great for levelling as it's easy and fast to get into groups for them now. However, in some places the difficulty still seems a little off for the new paradigm, for example there are no kolto stations around the bonus boss in Maelstrom Prison, and Jos and Valk from Blood Hunt are known pug killers since they have so many abilities that are hard to survive when you're low level. How happy are you with the way this revamp has turned out? Are you still monitoring people's performance in different flashpoints and making adjustments where needed? 

I would say we’re happy with how the revamp turned out. As you mentioned, there’s always additional balance we need to tune and we’re constantly assessing those issues and opportunities. One important thing to mention is how much we value when players report the issues they find, so please keep those reports coming! We definitely want to make these experiences as fun as possible.

Another minor downside of the 4.0 changes is that narrative cohesion is lost for new players since it's not obvious at which point in the levelling process each flashpoint is supposed to take place. Do you have any plans to address this, perhaps by having the group finder interface provide additional information about each flashpoint? 

In general, we want our class stories and world arcs to lead you to these experiences. There are definitely exceptions to this and we agree that’s not ideal. Right now, since this content is found in Group Finder we’re not looking to address this issue. That being said, it’s a great idea to give more information to the player, especially when it gives backstory or context to their experience.

Why were Colicoid War Game and story mode Kaon Under Siege/Lost Island not included in the 4.0 revamp? Are there any plans to make these more accessible/relevant again? 

These were part of the ‘good idea at the time, but’ world. As I said earlier, Colicoid War Game is very difficult to communicate to a new player in a manner that facilitates understanding of what you are supposed to do. It facilitates a bad experience because of how different the mechanics are compared to similar instances. Kaon and Lost Island leaned very far outside of our standard difficulty curve, and there isn’t really a simple fix to bring them more in-line with existing Flashpoints. We felt it was better to avoid funneling players into these experiences.

How come the heroic Star Fortresses weren't included in the group finder on release? Any plans to change this and/or to open them up to a wider range of levels? 

This was an oft-debated topic and we erred on the side of making the experience cleaner for as many players as possible at launch, while acknowledging the solution didn’t solve all possibilities.

We were faced with problems like:

• There are many Star Fortresses—each having their own location and not just being one entity. This means each location would be in Group Finder. If there are now 6+ options instead of 1, players are spread out, potentially impacting queue times for players. 
• We also assumed players would want the ability to go to a specific Star Fortress in order to progress specific content. We were very sensitive of creating a situation where players would have their queue pop and one or more group members didn’t get the Star Fortress location they wanted. This would force those players to leave the group and re-queue, creating a situation that everyone would dislike. 

Ultimately, I can tell you that we’re constantly looking at the situation and if player behavior or demand changes, we’ll revisit this decision and see if there is a better solution. For instance, if players have done their specific planet Star Fortresses and now just want to queue for them together, there may be a strong argument to add them to Group Finder as one entry.

Have you considered how the new flashpoint system will deal with new additions to the game yet? E.g. next time the level cap goes up, will they all just level with it? Would new flashpoints also be accessible from level 15 onwards? 

We’ve absolutely considered this and our goal is to continue to make all our previous gameplay areas relevant each time we increase the level cap. There is still considerable work involved in that process, not to mention testing time, but it’s something we feel is important for our players.

Thanks for taking the time to answer these questions!

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While I didn't necessarily like everything I heard (R.I.P. Colicoid War Game), I certainly enjoyed some of the insights Michael gave into their thought processes here, even if there was still a good dose of "Bioware vagueness"™ in some of the answers. While I made a point of avoiding explicit questions about future content (you know they wouldn't have been able/willing to answer those), I also think he made it quite clear that going forward we can look forward to more content similar to the Star Fortresses in style. And yes, I know there have been rumours spawned by datamined info along those lines as well.

I hope everyone enjoyed this departure from the usual fare here! As usual, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

Flashpoint Friday: Lost Island

It seems strange to be covering this flashpoint so close to the end of this series (only two flashpoints left to cover after this one), especially since it was an early reader request. I think I tripped myself up by wanting to do things in order and starting with Kaon Under Siege, which turned into a mega-post that made me yearn for something shorter and simpler to write about for the next installment... and then one thing just led to another. However, I was bound to get there eventually: It's time to talk about Lost Island.

General Facts

Lost Island was the second flashpoint added to the game after its release, as part of patch 1.2 - called "Legacy" - which was released in April 2012 and also saw the introduction of the legacy system and the group finder, as well as adding a new raid (Explosive Conflict) and a new warzone (Novare Coast). It's crazy to think that even then people were leaving the game in droves, complaining that there was nothing to do.

Lost Island finishes up Outbreak in the Tion Hegemony/Trouble in the Tion Hegemony, the rakghoul story arc that started with patch 1.1's Kaon Under Siege. A new plague of sentient rakghouls has emerged to threaten the galaxy, and by the end of Kaon you have traced it back to a rogue scientist called Dr Lorrick who secretly operates from Ord Mantell. It's time to pay him a visit and get to the root of the problem.

Interestingly, Lost Island has received only limited love in 4.0. Its hardmode has been retuned for levels 50-65, but its story mode remains an old-fashioned level 50 flashpoint that can't be accessed through the group finder, and there also isn't a solo mode.

Fights

Lost Island has achieved somewhat legendary status among players for having been stupidly hard on release, at least on hardmode (though story mode was quite challenging for your average pug as well). I know people that, to this day, will proudly talk about things like having gotten the first Lost Island HM clear on their server (not that this is something that anyone would be able to prove). In my own post about my first run, I mentioned how another group of guildies hadn't even been able to make it past the first boss, and how we also wiped a lot during our own run (though we did complete the instance). At the end I felt the urge to take a screenshot as if we'd defeated an operations boss. I also have a video of a run we did about two months later (unlisted because it's neither very well edited nor interesting, being one of my first attempts at video editing) that shows us still needing no less than six attempts to get past the first boss.

Bioware made no secret out of Lost Island intentionally being harder than any other flashpoints available at the time, rather the opposite. As I mentioned, this was the patch that also introduced the group finder, and in this first incarnation, there were two "tiers" of hardmode flashpoints: the first one consisting of everything else released until then, and the second one consisting of Lost Island alone. It also dropped better gear, with the last boss dropping the coveted Rakata chest piece, which you could otherwise only get from hardmode Soa. It was a concept that was later abandoned without much fuss or any kind of explanation, and since the first year was a tumultuous time for the game in general it's hard to say what prompted the change in direction. All I know is that to this day, whenever I see people complain about content being too easy, they like to wistfully refer to old-school Lost Island as an example of how things should be.

What is is that made Lost Island so hard? Well, the trash was actually not as bad as in Kaon (nothing could top those Infected Mercenaries and Screamers) but it could still throw people for a loop with mechanics like AoE pulls, knockbacks, mobs unexpectedly bursting out of the walls, groups requiring a specific kill order, or extremely powerful healers refusing to let any enemy die. I remember a pull close to the end that used to contain two strong medics (one of which was later removed) who could both make themselves immune to interrupts and would cross-heal the whole trash pack until kingdom come if you didn't use crowd control or focused stuns to burn them down quickly.

The first boss, a sentinel droid, is the one I actually always found the hardest personally, probably because of how many wipes I had on him over the years. There was the Incinerate on the tank that needed to be interrupted or dispelled or it would kill the tank in seconds, that other ability whose name I forget that was also useful to interrupt but not as essential, domes of lightning spawning on group members, adds, fire coming out of the ground, and so on and so forth. Basically, the boss has a lot going on that can potentially kill you, and in those early days his damage output was very high. Most of his abilities remain to this day, however they've been toned down a lot so that none of them hurt nearly as much.

The second boss, the monstrous Project Sav-Rak, is a particular piece of fun with pugs to this day, because he has mechanics that aren't easily nerfed, apart from the dot that deals damage and keeps the healer busy. Otherwise his two key mechanics are that he will jump on top of a pipe and just keep attacking you from afar, until you can force him back down via some co-ordinated button pushing from most group members, and that every so often he will do massive knockback that will send you to your doom in the surrounding lava if you don't stand in the right place. This is fun in so far as pretty much every time you do this in a pug, even if you explain the mechanics beforehand, someone will fall to their death the first time the boss does his knockback and then go: "Oh. I didn't expect it to be like that." It would be sad if it wasn't also funny.

Oh yeah, and there are also two mini bosses which aren't too challenging in terms of mechanics but who both hit like trucks. Even when running this with my guildies last week, I was the last woman standing when Transgenic Sample Seven finally died.

The bonus boss is actually the easiest fight in the entire instance, merely requiring you to not stop moving whenever he smashes the floor and to not cross paths with other people while doing so, but even that can be challenging for some.

Finally we have Doctor Lorrick himself, whom I generally don't recall ever being as challenging as what came before, but who still offers a nice and pretty cinematic fight, throwing poison vials and explosives at you and jumping around the room until he finally succumbs to the virus himself and turns into a seemingly mindlessly roaring rakghoul monstrosity of his own.

Story (spoilers)

You travel to Ord Mantell to locate Doctor Lorrick's secret base, which is once again at least partially situated inside a volcano, demonstrating that the planet has a problem with attracting people who like to build stereotypical super-villain lairs.

As you make your way past innocent wildlife outside and then some guard droids, you encounter the first log entries from Lorrick's assistants (you need to access them all to unlock the bonus boss), who describe him as someone heroically looking for a cure for the rakghoul virus... until it becomes apparent that actually he is doing no such thing but rather refining it for weaponised use. You learn that his assistants tried to stop him once they found out, but the fact that you keep encountering increasingly monstrous and intelligent mutant rakghouls doesn't make the situation look good.

Eventually you find Lorrick in his lab, where he holds a speech about how his modified rakghoul virus is in fact a perfect evolution of humanity and even offers to turn you into a rakghoul too. All his heroic assistants have fallen prey to his machinations, and like a true mad scientist he's even injected himself with the virus, eventually turning into another fearsome monster that you can only put down.

Conclusion

Like Kaon Under Siege, Lost Island is one of Bioware's early masterpieces, combining an atmospheric environment, an interesting story and fun game mechanics into a perfect blend. This is definitely still true today, even after its overall difficulty has been nerfed. Whether that initial high difficulty was even a good idea or not is debatable, but I think it's unlikely that we'll ever see its like again, and as the number of day one veterans still playing the game continues to decline, there'll also be fewer and fewer who will even remember what it was like.

I'm somewhat mystified why Bioware has largely ignored Lost Island during its 4.0 flashpoint revamp. I can sort of see several of the fights being hard to tune for a solo mode, especially considering the Jesus droid's limited AI (you just know Project Sav-Rak would knock him into the lava every time), but I don't really understand what prevented the old story mode from being turned into a tactical.

Theorycrafting And Performance

I'm bad at theorycrafting and theorycrafting is bad at for me. Back in school, maths was always one of those subjects that I never really cared about (even though I was pretty decent at it anyway), and as a result I've pretty much forgotten everything I ever learned about dealing with numbers if it was taught to me after the age of ten. The other month I found an old book of maths exercises from my teenage years, and holy crap, I had no idea what any of it meant. That's one reason for me not to like theorycrafting in MMOs.

The other is that it always seems to go hand in hand with performance pressure. I often say that I'm not a competitive person, but looking at it right now, I don't think that's entirely true. I don't like open competition, and I find it boring and annoying when people brag a lot. But secretly, I do care about everyone's performance. I love seeing that I'm the best at something. I won't mention it, but it's something that's nice to know, and to know that other people know it too, even if we don't talk about it. If I'm not good at something on the other hand, especially in a co-operative game, I'll constantly fret about letting the team down and being a burden on everyone. Can't have that! I suppose that wanting to carry my weight is not a bad thing, but it can create stress too.

The first reason is part of why I always liked playing healers in WoW. Healer theorycraft tended to be a lot "softer" than that of other roles. There were general guidelines along the lines of "crit doesn't really do anything for a holy priest", but other than that it pretty much came down to whatever felt right for you. You could justify focusing on spirit if it gave you better control of your mana pool, even if it didn't give you the biggest heals on the block. It wasn't just about a single measurable figure that you had to chase.

The second reason is why I rather like the way TOR handles damage meters. Since the game doesn't allow addons, there generally aren't any... but there is a built-in combat logging function that can be parsed by an outside application to simulate live meters for yourself if you really want them, or else you can have everyone in your raid upload their logs to a site like Torparse, to analyse events later on. Basically that means that the information is available if you're pushing raid progression and want to know where your group's strengths and weaknesses lie, but 99 percent of the time nobody gives a damn about anyone else's exact numbers as long as things die, because it's not like you can really know what exactly your group members are doing anyway.

I'm not denying that pugs without meters have their disadvantages by the way. For example I'll never forget that Lost Island hardmode run where my group wiped on the second boss about fifty bazillion times, and I couldn't quite place my finger on what was wrong. We were dying to a variety of things even when nobody did anything blatantly stupid, but somehow our progress felt painfully slow. Then we finally had one attempt where everyone survived until the boss enraged... and still had forty percent of his health left. Right, that's what had been off.

That's when we finally called it, because it was obvious that we didn't have the dps. The funny thing was that both of our damage dealers were really nice chaps and didn't want to give up, but I convinced them that we were way too far off. Still, in the end I'd rather be unsuccessful with friendly people occasionally than have to put up with everyone obsessing over meters all the time - and that includes myself. I guess if you're an MMO player you probably don't mind staring at bars of some sort, but it's all too easy to start spending more time staring at meters than paying attention to what's actually happening in the game world around you, and that's kind of sad.

Anyway, where was I going with this again? Right. I'm a pretty agreeable person, and tend to adjust to whoever I'm hanging out with at any given time. BoR very much brought out my more laid back side, and it was fun. But now I'm surrounded by people who talk about swapping out their mods and practising on target dummies and... despite of not being massively inclined towards optimising my character if I don't have to, I can't help being affected. Nobody's exerted any kind of pressure on me (unless you count people smothering me in helpful advice and wanting to give me stuff), and I don't think I've heard anyone moan about my healing yet, but it's there again: that weird feeling that I have to compete. Somehow, with someone. That I have to get better than I am right now, though I'm not sure to what end. (The current TfB HM group is drowning in healers as it is, so it's not like I'm pushing progression or anything.)

I suppose there's nothing wrong with wanting to optimise for the heck of it, but it's quite a drastic gear shift in my play style, and it's giving me a bit of whiplash. One moment I'm thinking, "must find better talents/gear/mods/augments", and the next I'm like: "Screw that 0.1 extra bonus healing, I'll just be over here with my kolto and be happy with being adequate." I'll need to find a balance.

Using the new group finder, day 1

Today was certainly one of the more exciting patch days in TOR. Crafters were going nuts about augment kits, PvPers were itching to try out ranked warzones, and PvE players wanted to make use of the new group finder. While I've spent a lot of time PvPing as of late, I was firmly in the PvE camp today and my priority for the day was to try out the group finder as soon as the servers came up.

I was reminiscing about the release of WoW's dungeon finder last night and was rather amused when I went back to read the first impressions post I originally wrote on the day of its release. Has it really been only two and a half years? In some ways that post reads like something from another world to me now. How little did I know of how radically my dungeon running habits would change in short order... but I'm rambling. I decided to copy the format I used back then, do three flashpoints today and tell you in detail about how they went.

As an aside, general chat really cracked me up upon logging in today. The servers had barely been up for ten minutes and already people were whining that the group finder wasn't working because they hadn't got a group yet. Give people some time to log in, dummy! In-between those complaints, people were posting LFG requests in general chat as usual and getting told to use the new tool instead, which then led back to others complaining again that it didn't work anyway. It was extremely silly.

Flashpoint #1: Maelstrom Prison on my Guardian

My first order of the day was to queue up for Maelstrom Prison in specific on my lowbie knight. The Jedi Prisoner quest line is one that I like to do on all of my Republic characters, but I'd only managed to do Taral V on my knight so far. I made sure to queue up for Maelstrom Prison in specific and was surprised to get a group pop-up instantly. Not working, pfft! I zoned in... and found myself with a little shield icon under my portrait. Tank, what? But I hadn't picked tanking as my preferred role!

Unfortunately however, I apparently hadn't unselected it either... and that leads me to my first minor niggle with the tool: that it has all the roles that your advanced class can perform checked by default. I don't know why anyone thought that this was a sensible idea, especially considering that the game currently doesn't have a dual spec option or anything of the like.

Still, at the end of the day it was a user error, and I felt deeply embarrassed. I apologised profusely to my group mates and offered to leave, unless they wanted me to try tanking in my dps gear and spec. They all just stood there and stared at me in silence. Oh god, please don't give me the silent pug treatment in my very first run already, I thought. "Yes, no, anyone?" is what I actually put in chat, trying to coax some sort of response out of the group. One of them gave me the virtual equivalent of a shrug: "Up to you if you want to try it."

I went into Soresu Form and we gave it a try. And actually... it wasn't too bad! In fact, with all the droids that do knockbacks in Maelstrom Prison, I almost felt like I had an edge in tanking with talents like Unremitting. There were a couple of scary moments on large trash pulls and some boss fights when my health bar took a nose dive, but I mashed my survival cooldowns like crazy and the healer managed to keep me up at all times, something for which I gave him crazy kudos at the end. One of the bosses dropped a shield generator too, so I had at least the most important piece of tanking gear equipped by the end.

In the end what had begun as a huge embarrassment for me turned out to be a really pleasant run. My group mates weren't really very chatty, but I did get the distinct impression that they were simply happy to be there. They had no qualms about telling me that they didn't know how a fight worked and followed my instructions with no problems. At the end there were a lot of smilies and thank yous... and most of all I was happy to be able to say: "see you around".

At the end of the run I discovered that instead of porting me back to where I had been when I took the shuttle (aka teleport) to the flashpoint, we all got dumped outside the instance entrance. I thought this was a very good move though, as many flashpoints have quest hand-ins right outside, which you can easily do with your group this way. Not to mention that in nine out of ten cases being outside the entrance means that you'll end up on the fleet, which really isn't the worst place to be even if you were out and about somewhere else before.

Flashpoint #2: Colicoid War Game on my Operative

Next I wanted to see what things were like on Imperial side, and I had been itching to do Colicoid War Game on my agent anyway. However, I had to discover to my chagrin that for some reason the option to queue for that flashpoint was greyed out for me, even though the character was in the right level range.

Fortunately I managed to guess the reason for this correctly: I had a breadcrumb quest to talk to Darth Malgus (about the Colicoids), and once I completed that the flashpoint suddenly became available. As far as I'm aware Bioware has generally relaxed requirements to do the prerequisite missions for each flashpoint for the group finder, but I can imagine that me sitting on that intermediate step of talking to Malgus was causing an issue.

This time I didn't get an instant queue. After five minutes I got a pop-up, but someone immediately declined and it was cancelled. It took another ten minutes or so for me to get another one, but this time everyone accepted.

You might remember that when I first wrote about the Colicoid War Game, I described it as "both hilarious and horrible" and concluded that it would probably be painful to do in a pug. I did feel like challenging myself today though, and fortunately for me some aspects of the flashpoint appeared to have been nerfed with this patch to make it a bit more pug-friendly. For example the gun turrets now provide a slow but steady stream of heals while you're mounted on them, which honestly made the first section completely trivial. I think you'd have to fail pretty hard to die there now. However, considering that it was never my favourite part of the instance to begin with, I didn't really mind.

The fun part came when we arrived at the forcefield obstacle course. Nobody in my party knew how to do it, but I was happy to explain. Unsurprisingly we spent a lot of time waiting for people to run back after they had been knocked off and died, but at least it got people talking, which I quite enjoyed. In the end it didn't take too long for us to figure it all out, and the fact that Bioware nerfed the respawn timer of the patrolling droids helped too, without having a negative effect on the puzzle part of the section. I was kind of amused when our tank appeared to have gone AFK while manning one of the consoles, and then came back saying that his cat had spilled his tea on his lap.

Again the whole thing ended on a very amicable note and with many "see you around"s.

Flashpoint #3: A random hardmode on my Commando

When I logged back onto Republic side, one of our tanks had just come online and was marvelling at the new group finder interface. I asked whether he wanted to team up with me to try finding a group for a max level flashpoint. He tossed me a group invite and next thing I knew I had the window popping up to tell me that a group was ready. I didn't even click anything! This would become important later. Anyway, not surprised that a tank and healer combo resulted in an instant queue, we accepted the pop-up to find ourselves zoning into... Lost Island. Gulp.

Don't get me wrong, I've successfully completed it more than once by now, but it's not really something that I'd want to pug just yet. We decided to give it a go anyway, however on the first boss we quickly found ourselves running into problems. Our gunslinger (another former Luka Sene player, yay) was doing a pretty good job, but our dps Shadow wasn't exactly performing in a stellar manner. His gear wasn't terrrible but probably not really up to Lost Island HM standards either, and more importantly he didn't really seem to be doing much, spending most of his time standing at range and running away from things instead of damaging the boss. After the third wipe the gunslinger commented that we didn't really seem to have enough dps (in the most generically inoffensive way possible) and the Shadow offered to leave so that we could get someone else. After he did so I sent him a whisper to say thank you and that it wasn't anything against him personally, and he seemed to be in quite a cheerful mood still. This was probably the most amiable parting over low dps that I've ever seen.

We queued up to get a replacement, and as I looked at the group finder window I noticed that I was listed as a provider of both damage and heals. Remember how I said that it's all turned on by default and that I never got to confirm my role when my guildie queued us up? Yeah. I unticked the damage box and hit the update button, but figured that we were probably going to get another dps anyway.

(Insert foreboding music here.)

We got another group member within seconds, a twi'lek Sage. Everyone was like: "Awesome, two ranged dps, that's going to make this fight so much easier!" And we did almost kill the boss before hitting his enrage this time... even though it was with two healers. How sad is it that we didn't even realise that we had two healers until halfway through the fight? Even though it was close, we wiped again and the Sage said that "Shíntar was queued as damage" and that she was out. And true enough, that's when I noticed the little damage icon under my portrait for the first time. I can only guess that the update to my queuing status came too late or didn't work properly. Again I felt very sheepish. I couldn't really tell whether the Sage was angry about what had happened, but her curtness before leaving certainly made me feel guilty.

The rest of us were a bit unsettled and unsure whether the system was working correctly. We reformed the party but weren't able to queue up to continue our run. My guildie and I agreed that we weren't very keen on trying Lost Island again, even if it was a letdown for the gunslinger who seemed really eager. He was right that we had almost got the boss down, but considering that more difficult fights lay ahead and that we hadn't really been looking for that level of challenge when we queued up (user fail on my tanking buddy's part this time), it was probably for the better.

After a brief break we tried again and an instant group pop-up took us to the False Emperor this time, with a dps Guardian and a Sentinel (who was another former Luka Sene player, what luck). It was kind of funny when my guildie took a shortcut early on by jumping down a ledge, I blindly followed him and realised only as I was jumping that we were leaping right over a bottomless chasm. Fortunately I managed not to fall to my death.

"How many times have you done False Emperor?"
"About five to ten times, why?"
"It's just that that jumping shortcut reeks of someone who's done this place way too many times!"

Our dpsers seemed skilled, but we were barely two minutes in when the Guardian started to say "wait" repeatedly and that he had to answer the phone for work. We said that it was no problem, we were just going to continue clearing some more trash. Unfortunately he was still on the phone by the time we arrived at the first boss, though he kept typing out more comments asking us to wait and assuring us that he was trying to make it quick.

"I just hope you're not a doctor," my guildie quipped. "'Yeah, yeah, just give him some of those drugs. I've got a boss to kill!'" The guy laughed and said that he was actually a management consultant. Which was funny because he then continued to give us unnecessary advice about what to do, no matter how many times my guildie said "I know" or was already doing what he was being told to do anyway.

Mr Management Consultant also kept saying "go" a lot, which was kind of ironic considering that he was the one who had kept telling us to "wait" only minutes before. Nooo, not my first gogogo-er already! "Stop saying that please," my guildie told him eventually. Fortunately he obliged... until we got to HK-47 and he did it again, right after giving us another redundant tactics rundown. "Oops, I'm not supposed to say that, right?" "Say it again and I'll slap you! :P" my guildie replied. (I do love him so.)

Basically, the Guardian's attitude was slightly annoying, but not overly so. It helped that my guildie was making some light fun of the situation. In terms of skill we had no problems though and breezed through the whole instance in what was a new record time for me (though it was only my third run of the place I think). The culling of trash mobs that was also mentioned in the patch notes was certainly very noticeable in this flashpoint.

So what's my verdict on the new group finder so far?

At least on the high population servers, it works, even while being limited to server only. I have no idea what dps queues were like though. What with today being patch day, there were presumably also a lot more people trying it out than there would be on a more average day. We'll see how that works out in the long run.

In terms of how it affects player behaviour, I'm not sure what to think. Struggling to get people to communicate and running into my first gogogo-er on day one already is not a good sign, but I'll try to remain hopeful. For what it's worth I had fun today. And unlike on my first day of WoW dungeon finding back in the day, nobody quit at random, threw a strop, tried to kick anyone else or ninjaed anything, which is a good sign.

In terms of technical implementation, I'm impressed by how many different functionalities Bioware managed to roll into a single tool, though I haven't tried queuing for heroics, dailies or story mode operations yet. I just wish they'd make some minor tweaks to it, such as not having all roles selected by default, asking you to confirm your role and what you're queuing for when you're in a group instead of just letting the leader throw everyone in the deep end, and maybe adding some more sounds. I think there's a really quiet noise when the pop-up to inform you that your group is ready first appears, but everything else appeared to be silent, which felt a bit odd to me. I really missed having sound cues for entering the queue or having a new party member join.

I'd love to hear about other people's experiences with the new group finder (and in fact I'll probably be off to the forums now to have a look around for more opinions).

Lost Island HM Notes

Jumping right back into the regular 1.2 content, four of us tackled the new Lost Island flashpoint on hard mode tonight. We felt quite daring, considering that another four guild members had tried it before but hadn't been able to make it past the first proper boss at the time, and at least one of them seemed to be very traumatised by the experience and kept talking about how impossibly hard it was (/cough). To counter this constant doom-saying, our team made a point of walking around with a confident swagger all night and announcing that it was going to be a piece of cake for us. As it often happens with these things, the truth was somewhere in the middle.

We did die quite a lot, especially on the Sentinel Droid. You wouldn't believe how many ways there are to die on this guy! However, since we honestly expected it to be pretty challenging, we weren't deterred by this and just kept plugging away at it until we got him down, and everyone remained in very good spirits throughout.

I do think that attitude is important when tackling this flashpoint. Really, if you just want an easy daily run, do Taral V or something. This is serious progression content for a smaller group size. ("Oh yeah, it's progressing our repair bills alright!") To be honest I would even say that it might be a bit overtuned, considering that our party was in full Columi gear with a couple of Rakata pieces, and we barely scraped by. Considering that the bosses drop Columi, plus a Rakata chest at the end... hrm. Either way, expect to die a lot, laugh about it, pick yourself up and try again. If you can deal with that, it's certainly a very satisfying experience.

Throughout the entire run we used this guide by Dulfy as a source of information, and it was very helpful, but there were a couple of things that weren't in the guide or that weren't entirely clear to us purely from reading about them, so I'd like to share my new-found wisdom on the subject with you.

In regards to the Sentinel Droid, we mostly learned that he does an Incinerate right at the start and that it has a very long range. Why is this relevant? Well, we initially didn't really want to start tanking him in the middle, surrounded by all those grates that might erupt into fire at any moment, but if we tried to pull him backwards he'd just incinerate our tank at crazy range. We had so many silly wipes to mispulls, it was pretty funny actually. You can safely pull him into a corner by using a ranged attack and then immediately line-of-sighting him though.

From a healer's point of view, it's also worth noting that while Dulfy's guide rightly talks about Plasma Arc being less important than Incinerate, that doesn't mean that you should ignore it. (To be fair, the guide does say that it should also be interrupted... but in our heads that kind of translated into "interrupting optional".) We initially had both of our interrupters focusing on Incinerate exclusively, and the damage going around was just mad. When we finally realised that the time between Incinerates was long enough for it to be covered by one interrupter exclusively, we had the other one switch to Plasma Arcs and suddenly healing became about ten times easier.

Our most important revelation came on Project Sav-Rak though, where Dulfy notes that she found it easiest in terms of healing for everyone to stack on her. We tried this and it was a total disaster. "You can tell that this was written by a Sorcerer/Sage", I commented to my guildies, once again jealous of their AoE heals.

First off, in phase one it is notable that the boss has a cleave that places a bleed on people that are hit by it. Since it's important to stack up to not get pushed off the platform by his smash, we initially just hugged up on top of him the entire time... but this resulted in people getting cleaved, bleeding a lot, and taking enough damage that I was actually running low on ammo before we even made it to the more damage-heavy phase. So, a simple change: everyone made sure to keep a little distance and stay behind the boss whenever there wasn't a smash coming up - there is plenty of time to move in when it becomes necessary.

The pillar phase was what really threw us though, because AoE healing in the middle while one person ran to activate the pillars only resulted in massive damage and death. However, it turned out that there was a simple solution to this: me being the only one to stand in the middle, while everyone else ran towards a different pillar each and activated the consoles there all at once (more or less). Single target damage all around and the boss came down again pretty quickly. In hindsight I noticed that this is actually what Dulfy's group did in their video as well, but we hadn't watched it at the time and the text currently describes it differently.

Anyway, like I said it was a really fun and challenging experience. Any readers beaten it yet?