Thoughts on Dxun Master Mode and NiMs in General

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fall-down, Stand-up Comedy

I know I haven't sounded very happy about raiding recently. To remind everyone (including myself) of why I still love it, let me tell you a little story.

On Saturday some of my guildies and I did Nature of Progress story mode on Imp side. Dxun actually received heavy nerfs in 7.0, and then it was nerfed again in 7.1, something I unapologetically love. I always thought it was a fun operation, but the difficulty could make it a bit of a chore to run casually. Nowadays you can underman it, bring both inexperienced players and alts, mess up in silly ways and still muddle through somehow, which is how I like it.

So we were doing 16-man with ten people, and we had just made a pig's ear out of the Mutant Trandoshans fight, finishing off the last of them with only two people left standing. When we continued to Huntmaster, somehow our tank died nearly instantly. I used my combat revive on him and one of the other healers got all apologetic for not healing him fast enough.

However, when he did get up and we definitely made sure to heal him, his health still kept bouncing up and down like a yo-yo, prompting the same healer who had just apologised to say: "OK, either [the boss] does insane damage or someone is not wearing tank gear".

It was only at this point that I took a closer look at the numbers on my unit frames and noticed that our tank's maximum health was oddly low - less than 300k when everyone else had nearly 400k. I quickly inspected him mid-combat and it was as I suspected - half his gear had hit zero durability. Just as I shared this with the group, he died again, and one of our damage dealers commented: "I was wondering why I got the tutorial for disabled or destroyed items..."

Our tank expressed some confusion as according to him he hadn't seen the usual indicators for broken gear on his UI. Around this time, Huntmaster did his move of retreating to the lake. Someone asked whether we still had a combat res available, and I opined that it wasn't worth resing our tank again since you can't repair in combat so he was going to be useless anyway, but someone else had already done it.

Even better though, one of the other dps had managed to plop down a Revan statue (a utility item that serves as a vendor) and our tank quickly clicked on it while he was briefly out of combat after the revive. So even as I kept repeating that you can't repair in combat, he smugly replied: "Oh yes I can, now I did it!" And just like that, he was back in the fight and fully repaired. "Oh wow, he has so much health now," commented the other healer, and we all had a good laugh.

Unluckily for our tank, he died again less than two minutes later because Shelleigh ate him, but that's all part of the fun. I just thought the whole sequence of events was pretty amazing, both that we managed to be oblivious to the fact that our tank was half-naked throughout the entire trash leading up to Huntmaster, as well as that people somehow managed to get him up and repaired mid-fight and on the fly, when I hadn't thought that to even be possible.

A History of Story Mode Ops Difficulty

One of the downsides of playing the same MMO for a really, really long time is that you're likely to see certain bad ideas get repeated after a while. I'm guessing this happens because by a certain point you've probably been playing longer than some devs have been working on the game, so that they don't have the same context and experiences with the whole of the game's history as you do.

If you're a content creator like me, you also have the "bonus" of having receipts, meaning you can refer back to old blog posts and go "yep, this was already a bad idea back in 2012, and we said so at the time too". This might sound like it should be satisfying, but in practice it's honestly just deflating to constantly have to repeat yourself and wrestle with the same issues over and over again.

The specific subject that has made me think about this in the past two weeks is the difficulty of story mode operations. When SWTOR came out back in 2011, many people burned through the available raid content really quickly, complaining that it was both too easy and that there was too little of it. This was not my own experience, since I took my time levelling and didn't step foot into an operation until February 2012. And when I did, I loved it. We didn't kill Soa on our first night because everything was so new to us, but even then I noted that he was "still not too bad" and two weeks later I reported that my guild had cleared both EV and KP on story mode.

Explosive Conflict released in April, and I didn't write about clearing it on story mode until the beginning of June, noting that "story mode feels considerably overtuned". For people who weren't around back then this might sound a bit weird if you only know the operation in its current iteration, but back then, a lot of the mechanics that now only exist in veteran and master mode were also part of story mode, plus the gear requirements were pretty tight. Still, I didn't mind too much at the time and I had fun. It was a different time, and we were all still figuring things out - including Bioware. (I'll just say that my complaint from that post that "with 1.3 not containing any new raid content, PvE endgame will be a bit dry for the next couple of months" seems hilariously quaint in hindsight.)

My first experience with Terror from Beyond was a bit messy since it came out around the time that my first guild fell apart, meaning that my first visit there was a semi-pug and we only got two bosses down, but even then I noted, "the people who had told me that Terror from Beyond was a return to easier story modes were not wrong."

When I got to run Scum and Villainy for the first time in April 2013, I once again loved it. We only killed five out of the seven bosses during my first night, but that seemed to be down to the unusual length of the ops more than anything else.

When the two Oricon operations were released in October 2013, my first runs of them, into which we mostly went blind to allow ourselves to be surprised, were amazingly fun. I wrote about my first trip to story mode Dread Fortress (which we cleared in one evening) in this post and commemorated my first trip to Dread Palace with a short video called "Dread Palace in less than 100 seconds" which mostly involves a lot of giggling and squealing and finishes with one of my guildies going "best op ever".

It was as if Bioware was incapable of creating an operation that I didn't love at first sight - until the Shadow of Revan expansion that is. My post about Ravagers and Temple of Sacrifice was called "New Ops: Good Stuff, Needs Some Work" and primarily for one reason: the difficulty. "Sword Squad and the Underlurker in Temple of Sacrifice were probably the worst in terms of requiring both a high damage output as well as flawless coordination. These are not bad things... for a hardmode. But for story mode, which is meant to be the easy way of seeing the content, easy enough that you can do it in a moderately competent pug, this is an absolute killer."

I also still recall my first night in Temple of Sacrifice very vividly, because I still remembered the fun we'd had clearing the Dread ops for the first time and started recording our run initially... However, after several wipes on Sword Squadron I turned the recording off because fun levels were plummeting through the floor and I didn't really want to create any lasting negative memories of that night (as it turns out, that didn't entirely work). Underlurker was eventually nerfed, and significantly at that, though Sword Squadron can remain a bit of a pain in terms of damage output.

This is when the dark times of no new group content additions for several years began, and I later wondered whether it was a coincidence that this came about after these two operations. When we finally got our first new operations boss in the form of Tyth in April 2017, I noted while looking back: "I still think less of Ravagers and Temple of Sacrifice to this day due to their awful initial tuning, which hasn't actually been adjusted all that much even now, not to mention their propensity for pointless red circle syndrome. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if those two operations were at least partially to blame for Bioware's decision to not add any more of that type of content for a long time - raids that unfriendly towards both casual players and mid-level guilds can't have boasted particularly high participation numbers."

As for Tyth himself though, I was once again in love, and why? "When I first went in with my guildies to kill him on story mode, he absolutely melted. [...] "That was way too easy," I heard some guildies mutter, but I was wide-eyed with delight. That's exactly how story mode should be to an over-geared, organised and well-practiced group, or else it will be a killer to pugs. In fact, I'm sure there are pug groups wiping on him even now. And that's okay, because this game isn't about always succeeding at everything on the first attempt. But he should be well within reach of even casual players sticking their noses into a story mode for the first time, and that's how it should be."

The piecemeal releases of later bosses in the same operation had me a bit more sceptical in terms of their difficulty tuning, but Izax was pretty cool. I particularly gave Bioware credit for managing to create a fight that was both very involved but still casual-friendly by employing a little trick: "My favourite part of Bioware trying to make this ridiculously long and initially somewhat complicated fight more casual-friendly without neutering the basic mechanics is that while the encounter is active, the cooldown of all combat resurrections - which is usually five minutes - is reduced to thirty seconds. What this means is that the devs could allow certain mechanics to kill people without frustrating the whole group by enforcing a wipe. As long as you still have control of the fight overall and your healers/res-capable damage dealers are on the ball, you can allow people to fall over and get them up again a ridiculous amount of times. The death still teaches a lesson, leaving the victim with another repair bill and probably feeling slightly sheepish, but things keep rolling and remain fun for the group as a whole." Sadly this mechanic broke at some point and has remained unfixed for years as far as I'm aware, which has made the fight considerably less casual-friendly in later patches.

With the release of Onslaught we got the Nature of Progress operation, for which I had a lot of praise again, though there were a few criticisms too... one of them once again - surprise, surprise - the story mode tuning: "Story mode is no Gods of the Machine for sure (thankfully!), but fights like the two gauntlet bosses still require an amount of co-ordination that I wouldn't expect to find in your average pug. This strikes me as a shame as it once again means that the content will remain inaccessible to many more casual players even on what's supposed to be the easiest difficulty, which is particularly sad considering what a fun operation this is."

There is a very clear theme in all of this: I like my story mode operations to be easy. I think the name story mode more than implies that it should be easy, with its primary purpose being to allow people to see the story. It's okay to have some mechanics that can kill people, and there's nothing wrong with some wiping while you're still figuring out basic mechanics and/or if you're in a pug, but a co-ordinated group of guildies on voice chat should surely be able to breeze through without any major issues and while having a good laugh.

I understand there are incentives for devs to make even story mode somewhat more difficult, for example to prevent people from rushing through the content too quickly, or because it's much easier to sell people on the idea of nerfing something that's initially too hard than the other way round. Though honestly, I've never ever felt bad about an operation supposedly being too easy on story mode. Easy is fun and inclusive and allows for a bit of silliness.

Also, first impressions are important, and if an operation gets a bad reputation early on, it can put people off for a looong time. Ravagers and Temple of Sacrifice aren't viewed as particularly tough after some nerfs and almost eight years after their introduction, but Gods and Dxun are still places that people avoid due to them feeling like too much of a hassle even on story mode. Dxun story mode was actually nerfed pretty considerably with the launch of 7.0, but it took months until people even started to notice because they just reflexively didn't even want to spend as much time there.

Why am I telling you all this? Because by this point, ten days after 7.1, I would have expected to give a brief summary post of what the new operation "R-4 Anomaly" is like, but my regular ops team - used to raiding veteran and master modes - still hasn't been able to kill the last boss on story mode after five nights. We obviously get the mechanics by this point, but we just can't meet the dps check and get overwhelmed by adds at the end. As the fight takes about ten minutes, it's particularly "fun" to go through all that over and over again, just to then wipe with the boss at 0.3% health. It simply overshadows everything else I might have had to say about this new operation.

I'm sure we'll get there eventually, even if it's by sheer luck, but either way it hasn't been something I would call a fun experience. Plus for me it's extra frustrating that I've basically been telling Bioware to not make freaking story mode ops so hard for a freaking decade, and yet here they are doing it again, worse than ever. I just don't understand.

Day 9: Silly

IntPiPoMo may be over for this year, but my 10 days of SWTOR screenshots aren't finished, and I'm still planning to complete that project. The theme for day nine was "silly".

On the subject of players doing silly things, I present you this shot of one of our tanks "standing guard" at the exit of Fabricator's room in Karagga's Palace, with the markers behind him also meant to delineate a border that people shouldn't cross (yet). If you've ever had someone run ahead into that room too early, I don't need to explain to you why that is. (The boring explanation for everyone else is that it contains a trash pull for which you really want everyone to go in together and be focused or it can quickly spiral out of control.)

A different kind of silly screenshot is of in-game cut scenes where I managed to capture the animation at such a peculiar moment that the result looks weird more than anything. Above you can see my Mercenary about to sock an Alderaanian noble for example... which is funny in itself I guess, but the shot also looks kind of bizarre, like she's actually about to fall over drunk or something.

Or how about my Sniper performing this "heroic" leap on Iokath?

I guess this scene is meant to be at least slightly silly, but I still love the way Darth Malora is just kind of flying past these Imperials here.

Another intentionally funny scene that took me quite a few tries to capture correctly was this moment from Secrets of the Enclave, when Malgus' medical droid comes rolling out of the dead boss's mouth... I did the flashpoint on Republic side first and remember wondering at the time why the mob model had such a big mouth...

The Nature of Progress operation is another great example of (relatively) recent content laced with wonderful humour. I adore this conversation so much.

Reading tooltips pays off in there as well. Such as this one when a Trandoshan Medic manages to inject someone on trash...

Onslaught in Review

As I said previously, we still don't have a launch date for Legacy of the Sith, but it can't be far off now, and I don't expect us to get another major content update before then, so I thought it would be interesting to look back on how Onslaught has gone as a whole. I wasn't sure what conclusion I'd come to when I first started writing this, but honestly, now that I've added it all up, this has been a pretty ace expansion.

Features

After Bioware tried (and failed) to reinvent the wheel for the last two expansions (with the single player focus in KotFE and Galactic Command in KotET), it was nice to see them refocus on simply adding features that players had actually been asking for in one form or another.

• Nautolans as a new playable species: They ended up looking a bit more... weird than most people expected I suppose, but I still think they were a good addition. Based on forum polls and the like, Nautolans were easily the most requested species that wasn't available yet - so much so that after this, I'm not actually sure what playable species they could add next. Sure, there are lots to choose from and you can find people suggesting pretty much all of them on the forums somewhere, but I haven't seen anything else have the same kind of consistent demand as Togruta and Nautolan had before they were added.
  

• Spoils of War: Gearing was a mess towards the end of KotET and needed a revamp desperately. I think the new Spoils of War system worked out well overall! It's not perfect, but what ever is? I'd say its biggest flaws are that a lot of set bonuses and Tacticals they introduced were pretty useless so that there ultimately weren't that many viable choices to make about what to get, and that drop rates for both types of items were pretty poop, meaning that most of the time, you were better off just saving fragments to buy from a vendor, even when all you were doing was gambling at Kai's. Still, overall the ease of gearing up in terms of item levels was amazing, and everything being bound to legacy so that you could gear all your alts in one fell sweep has been super neat.

• Material storage: I liked how they never even advertised this as a feature; it was just suddenly there and amazing, freeing up tons of space in cargo and legacy bays across the land. This is the kind of quality of life improvement we all love to see. Separate but related, they also added all those event currencies to the legacy currency tab.
  

Story

I didn't love the Onslaught base story quite as much as Jedi Under Siege, but it was still excellent overall, making use of the game's large pre-established cast and adding all kinds of great little touches to remind players of their class identity. Over the course of the expansion, we then got three more story installments:

• Echoes of Oblivion: This was a pure love letter to the game and its community, taking all kinds of loose ends that had been left dangling in an unsatisfying manner and tying them into a neat little bow.
  

• Spirit of Vengeance: Probably the least interesting of Onslaught's updates, it still introduced Rass Ordo as a likeable new character and laid the seeds for what's hopefully going to be an interesting arc about the Mandalorians facing off against an intriguing new villain.
  

• Secrets of the Enclave: The expansion's second piece of story that was actually different for both factions (after the Onslaught base story), this again featured a plethora of interesting character moments, even if it didn't advance the plot very much.

If I were to criticise anything, I guess you could point out that there is no clear theme to all of these to tie Onslaught together: a bit of Darth Malgus here, some Mandalorian stuff here. Then again, this is pretty in line with how things used to be in SWTOR's "good old days": After all, Rise of the Hutt Cartel was only really about Hutts for a very short time; all the content added after its launch centred on organisations like Czerka or the Dread Masters.

"MMO Stuff"

It seems to me that after the early years of most content additions being standard MMO content and the wild swing in the opposite direction with KotFE & KotET's story chapters at the expense of all else, Bioware has finally settled into a nice balance between continuously adding engaging story installments while also consistently churning out repeatable content to keep dedicated players busy in the gaps in-between.

• Two new planets: Onderon and Mek-Sha were both smaller than I would have hoped, but they were fully fleshed-out planets with datacrons and everything. The Onderon daily circuit is decent fun. Unfortunately Mek-Sha felt a bit half-baked with its somewhat random selection of side missions in different places, some content being quite buggy initially and none of it ever really becoming very rewarding.

• One new operation: Nature of Progress (or Dxun as most people call it) is a brilliant op in terms of story and undoubtedly the funniest piece of group content Bioware ever released. The fights are mostly good fun as well, except for the last boss, whom I find kind of tedious mechanically to be honest.

• Three new flashpoints: Objective Meridian, Spirit of Vengeance and Secrets of the Enclave. I stand by what I said about Objective Meridian seeming a bit dull at first blush but being interesting to replay. The last boss(es) can be infuriating but in a good way (to me anyway). Spirit of Vengeance was a bit meh - some neat little Easter egg achievements couldn't make up for the fact that it consists of too much boring trash and the environment isn't exactly thrilling to look at either. Secrets of the Enclave is probably my favourite of the three, meaning it's fairly fast-paced, features decent boss fights and includes some beautiful environments to feast your eyes on.
  

• Two new world events and more: We got the Ultimate Swoop Rally on Dantooine and the Feast of Prosperity as a seasonal event in autumn. I liked both of these as creative non-combat additions. I found that swooping gets quite boring quickly if you do it for too long but it is something different. I also enjoyed the little mini-games coming with the Feast and the way it livened up the world boss pugging scene - I'm quite looking forward to doing that again this year actually. Finally, we also got the Alderaan stronghold and Galactic Seasons for what it's worth.
  

Summary

I know people always complain about wanting more from Bioware - and it's not like I'd object to being given more! - but honestly, looking back at all this, it strikes me as a pretty decent tally for a two-year long expansion that came free with the subscription. Especially considering that for a lot of that time, Covid was interfering with the devs' working patterns as well.

I like that there's a clear effort to balance single player story content with MMO features and additions now, and most of it was really good quality as well, with just a couple of not-so-great items on the list but nothing completely awful or boring. If Legacy of the Sith can deliver in a similar way, I'll be one happy camper.

All about the Codebreaker Title and Shortcut!

I'm not usually someone to write guides, but sometimes I'll come upon a fairly obscure piece of information that seemingly nobody else has posted on the internet yet, and that can be kind of fun to lay out for others. This is one of those occasions, somewhat randomly inspired by my ops group being back in Dxun and me suddenly finding myself wondering whether the Codebreaker shortcut is widely known, as I never saw anyone really talk about it... it's just something that we discovered organically.

A quick Google search for "swtor codebreaker shortcut" just got me the message "It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search", and trying "swtor codebreaker title" resulted in links to a few pages that replicated the codex entry for the title but nothing else. Hopefully this blog post will soon answer anyone's questions on the subject!

The first step to getting the Codebreaker title is to complete the Dxun Cipher achievement. I'm not going to go into detail about how to get this one, because there are already some good guides out there how to get that. Here is one of them. As you can see it requires you to have beaten the first three encounters in the Nature of Progress operation.

After killing the Mutant Trandoshans (boss number four, but it doesn't have to be in the same run as getting the achievement!), on your way to the Huntmaster, you have to pass through this room on the second floor of the main facility where you get ambushed by a trash pull. As you enter, on the left is the door leading to the stairs (yellow arrow), while on the right is the door to the tram/elevator leading to the spaceport and executive lounge (green arrow).

If you don't have the Cipher achievement, trying to use the lift before you've cleared the trash to Huntmaster won't work, as you'll be locked out. If you do have the achievement however, you can go up to the spaceport right away! And this is what grants you the title. Just be aware that if you do this on your own and you don't have stealth, you'll also die, as the tram spits you out right in the middle of a big trash pull.

However, if enough other people in your group have the achievement, you can all click the button simultaneously and go up together. (Timing is important here though, because the ride becomes unusable the moment the first person gets into combat.) Once the trash group at the top exit is dead, the lift becomes usable for everyone as normal. This is a nice way of skipping the stairs, which - while absolutely hilarious the first time - can get a bit old after a while I suppose.

That Other Patch Notes Post

I said in my last post that there were random parts of the patch notes for 6.1.2 that I wanted to comment on before the issues with the welcome window distracted me... I decided that I'm still going to make that post, and this is it. Note that I'm not reproducing the patch notes in full - if you're looking for the full notes, you can find them posted here on Vulkk or here on MMO Bits.

Nar Shaddaa Nightlife - The Nightlife event returns with new Missions and rewards! Get your credits ready for July 14th - August 11th.

At last, maybe I'll finally get to spend those casino chips that I forgot to use last year! Then again, it's only a month - requiring me to remember to spend my chips within such a short time frame is asking quite a lot, you know...

The following set bonus has been added to the game at level 75, available for all Guardians:
Fulminating Defense
(2) +2% Endurance
(4) Challenging Call gets two charges.
(6) Enure increases Elemental and Internal damage reduction by 75% for 3 seconds.
Source: The Nature of Progress Operation on Master Mode difficulty, and a small chance from Unidentified items on the Spoils of War vendors.

That four-piece set bonus looks mighty sweet for flashpoint tanking... but of course the main source of this is Dxun master mode, which I'm unlikely to ever clear. I do wish there was more of a connection between where you get certain sets and what they're good for - then again, having no clue what the encounters look like in Dxun master mode, maybe having two stacks of your AoE taunt is really vital in there.

The following set bonus has been added to the game at level 75, available for all Sages:
Undying Protector
(2) +2% Mastery
(4) Activating Force Barrier heals all allies around you.
(6) Activating Force Barrier puts a barrier on nearby allies, absorbing damage for up to 8 seconds and granting them an additional 25% elemental damage reduction while active.
Source: The Nature of Progress Operation on Master Mode difficulty, and a small chance from Unidentified items on the Spoils of War vendors.

This is a very odd-sounding set bonus to me, in that I could imagine it being quite useful in a small number of specific fights where you can already use Force Barrier in a calculated manner instead of as an emergency cooldown (such as Dread Guards in TFB). Or it could be useful in PvP as well, where you use Force Barrier more than anywhere else after all. I wonder how useful that set bonus will be in master mode Dxun...

The following set bonus has been added to the game at level 75, available for all Shadows:
Ballast Point
(2) +2% Endurance
(4) Deflection grants Ballistic immunity for 6 seconds, giving you immunity to movement impairing effects, knockdowns, and physics.
(6) Increases Elemental, Internal, Kinetic and Energy damage reduction by 3%.
Source: The Nature of Progress Operation on Master Mode difficulty, and a small chance from Unidentified items on the Spoils of War vendors.

Did Shadows really need another way of making themselves immune to things? (Insert PvP-inspired sigh here.) Again, this sounds more like something that would be useful in PvP more than anywhere else.

The following set bonus has been added to the game at level 75, available for all Gunslingers:
Ballistic Concentration
(2) +2% Mastery
(4) When you deploy Scrambling Field, each group member within it grants a stack of Ballistic Concentration, increasing your energy regeneration rate by 1 for 20 seconds. Max 8 stacks.
(6) Each stack of Ballistic Concentration also increases the damage you deal by 5%.
Source: The Nature of Progress Operation on Master Mode difficulty, and a small chance from Unidentified items on the Spoils of War vendors.

This set continues a trend Bioware started in 6.0 of giving defensive cooldowns a damage-increasing effect. Personally I find these a bit annoying because they kind of encourage you to make these defensives part of your dps rotation instead of saving them for when you might actually need them to survive, but this particular example is one case I don't mind too much if it actually encourages Gunslingers to use their domes more often. (In my experience they rarely do unless you actively yell at them to do it.) Then again, once again this would only apply to Gunslingers doing Dxun master mode anyway (so nobody that I play with on a regular basis).

The following set bonus has been added to the game at level 75, available for all Commandos:
Rapid Response
(2) +2% Mastery
(4) Activating a healing ability has a 15% chance to cause your next Medical Probe to be critical.
(6) Healing an ally with Medical Probe applies a buff to them for 10 seconds. Each enemy defeated by this ally increases your healing by a 2%, stacking up to 5 times.
Source: The Nature of Progress Operation on Master Mode difficulty, and a small chance from Unidentified items on the Spoils of War vendors.

I don't know how good this is numbers-wise, I just know that there's already another set called Rapid Response (and it's still there, unchanged - I checked), which is unnecessarily confusing if you ask me.

The Rocket Fuel Vapors tactical item has been redesigned:
Kolto Pods heal for an additional 5% and last a second longer, gaining an extra tick of healing.
The HP-5 Dart Device tactical item has been redesigned and renamed to SC-4 Treatment Scanner:
Successive Treatment heals for an additional 5% and generates Supercharge stacks while channeled, up to 4 stacks for a completed channel.

The Running Rapid Restoration tactical item has been redesigned and renamed to Running Restoration:
Increases the healing output of Advanced Medical Probe by 15% and allows it to be activated while moving.

This just highlights again that I'm not a fan of Bioware redesigning what Tacticals and set bonuses do after the fact. I freaking loved the old Rocket Fuel Vapors and it significantly changed my rotation... now that they changed it I feel I need to re-learn how to best do AoE healing all over again. Plus the new functionality just sounds incredibly boring and lacklustre, even if I'm not yet sure how it works out numbers-wise.

Running Rapid Restoration was my Tactical of choice in more single target focused fights, but they changed it so that the "cast while moving" now only works on a different ability with a cooldown. Also a nerf if you ask me.

Finally, the HP-5 Dart Device was complete rubbish and people basically binned it all the time if they got it, but now it sounds like it might actually be somewhat decent? Made me glad that I had left one lying around in my legacy bank, but at the same time "make sure to save one of every Tactical and set bonus item just in case Bioware ever decides to make it good" frankly doesn't sound like the greatest system to me (and very casual-unfriendly).

The Unidentified Boxes from the Spoils of War Vendor now grant the correct Set Bonuses based on the player’s Class.

I had a guildie report that he got things like gear for knights when shopping there on his trooper... while funny, it wasn't very productive.

Corrected an issue where the entire Rapid Response Set was available from the Unidentified Helmet Box.

So they do know that there's already another Rapid Response set! Come on, Bioware!

If a character is at the weekly or global cap for a reputation, reputation items will no longer be auto-consumed. Instead, they will be granted as normal items that can be used later or vendored.

Yes! I was not a fan of the tokens just not being granted if you're already at the reputation cap, so I'm pleased to see this.

The Plasma Emitters in the Iokath Daily Mission “Systems Go” have been fixed. They will now appear in an inactive state, allowing players to complete the Mission.

I only ran into this bug fairly recently - I thought I was just having bad luck with someone else already having used all the emitters and them being super slow to respawn. Glad they fixed that.

Players who choose to flirt with Elara Dorne in the “Squared Away” Mission no longer find themselves on top of a table in the cantina when the scene ends.

I have no idea what this is about but it sounds hilarious. Must have been quite a racy flirt to end with you waking up on top of a cantina table afterwards!

Corrected an issue where the Conquest timer showed too many digits in the seconds section.

Haven't seen that in a while, but when I did it was rather funny to see that a Conquest event had exactly 12.93882374842792932692736 seconds left to go.

The “Makeb: Defeat Enemies 2” Conquest Objective now properly appears in the Objectives list after players complete the “Makeb: Defeat Enemies 1” Conquest Objective.

Oh! I was wondering why there was only one for Makeb!

Increased the requirement of planetary Mission Complete Conquest Objectives to require 2 Mission completions (up from 1).

That... seems fair. It should cause my class missions to advance a little faster too.

Conquest Objective point Decreases:
Credits for Junk – Daily Repeatable, decrease from 2000 to 1750
Amp Reroll – Daily Repeatable, decrease from 2000 to 1750
Take a Taxi – Daily Repeatable, decrease from 2000 to 1750
Harvesting Pinnacle – Weekly Repeatable, decrease from 9750 to 5800
Utility Point – Daily Repeatable, decrease 2000 to 1750

Again, that seems quite fair. I don't mind having these objectives, but they probably shouldn't be quite so lucrative compared to others that require actual gameplay.

New Conquest Objectives:
Play PvP 2 – Daily Repeatable, 2000 points
Play PvP 3 – Daily Repeatable, 3000 points
Win Arenas 2 – Daily Repeatable, 3000 points
Win Arenas 3 – Daily Repeatable, 4000 points

More objectives for PvP = win.

Reduced the amount of lower rating items players can receive from Ranked and Unranked Warzone Lockboxes while at an overall item rating of 306.

Finally! That only took them... what, eight months? I hope nobody's tried to actually gear up via PvP in that time, because it basically didn't work.

Players are able to modify their Utility Point selections and swap out pieces of equipment (which includes Tactical items) while waiting in the queue for a Warzone or Arena.

Yes! Another good change, as the fact that this was locked the moment you entered the queue used to drive many of my guildies who change their utilities a lot to distraction whenever we did PvP as a group.

All in all, lots of good/interesting stuff in there. There's already another patch queued up for tomorrow, but that one's only small and simply meant to fix a few bugs. More importantly, we'll see the start of the new swoop racing event! I'm sure I'll have things to say about that.

Virtual Guild Meet-up

Over the years I've met a fair number of people in real life that I first met online - I guess nowadays that isn't so strange anymore, but fifteen years ago the notion of me meeting "strange internet people" was definitely still something that made my family very uncomfortable!

Having been in my current guild for about eight years, I've met a few of my guildies in real life as well; and some other guildies that I haven't met in person have at least met each other - but a bigger guild meet-up never really seemed realistic, considering how spread out we are across Europe. You may well be intrigued by the idea of meeting some of your guildies face-to-face, but are you curious enough to pay for a plane ticket just for that? Probably not!

Watching many big real world events get cancelled or move to the virtual space in the current climate gave me food for thought though: why not have a virtual guild meet-up? Yes, in a way we're already doing this every night by playing together, but I was thinking of something different, using webcams and just saying hi to the people behind the avatars. I proposed the idea to the other officers, we did a little test with Google Meet (most of us already knew what the others looked like anyway), and the idea was given the green light. And thus, we organised Twin Suns Squadron's first ever virtual guild meet-up last night.

I was ridiculously hyped in advance as I always love being able to put a face to a name, and we ended up with about twenty people joining (though some couldn't stay for very long), which I considered a very good turn-out. Several had cobbled together elaborate setups involving more than one computer, or a PC and a phone, in order to be able to both play and show us their faces at the same time, which I thought was oddly sweet. Also, while most of the attendees were what I'd like to call "the usual suspects", as in people who attend other guild events all the time, a few more quiet players that aren't usually around much worked up the courage to show up as well, which felt quite gratifying.

I had pencilled in about half an hour for getting things sorted / saying hello to everyone, which worked out quite well as people trickled in slowly and there were some technical challenges. For example we hadn't realised that Google Meet would mute people by default once the meeting exceeded a certain size, so people kept coming in auto-muted without noticing, and there was always some confusion until they realised what was happening and found the button to un-mute themselves.

Another "issue" was that some people displayed their real names instead of their nicknames, which combined with the auto-muting led to some confusion about who was who - I had counted on being able to recognise people's voices from TeamSpeak at least! So we had chats like: "Hey, um... Ian? You're on mute so we can't hear you... also, who are you? Lol..." Then he found his un-mute button, said one word and I immediately went: "Oh, it's Ten!"

Once things had settled down somewhat, we decided to do a social ops run as usual on a Friday night, but with the video call open instead of everyone sitting on TeamSpeak like we normally would. We did the Dxun operation on 16-man story mode, and especially initially I was struggling a bit to keep my eyes on the health bars as I kept looking over at the webcams instead! It was fun to see people react to things visually as well, from smiles to facepalms (though several guildies seemed to have what I called "resting ops face", which resulted in them giving everyone very blank stares a lot of the time). At one point one of my co-healers started plucking away at his guitar while one of the officers was trying to give instructions. It was all very silly.

There was a bit of tension towards the end of the op as we had several wipes on Huntmaster (that guy is always a bastard), one of the healers had several DCs and so on, but even that was interesting in a way. For example someone commented that Mr Commando didn't look nearly as angry as he sounded when he was telling people off for standing in bad stuff. I do always tell people not to worry too much about his yelling and that his bark is a lot worse than his bite, but I guess it really helped for them to see for themselves!

Anyway, we did end up clearing the operation in good time (after a couple of people had consumed several "wiping beers" on screen) and it felt like the conclusion of a very successful evening. Several people have already told me that they'd like to have another night like that, and it made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Apex Vanguard Down!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Months of Onslaught

I realised today that as of yesterday, a full three months have passed since Onslaught's launch. Time flies when you're having fun!

My initial excitement has of course tapered off a bit, but I'm still happily chugging along, as the game feels like it's in a pretty good place right now.

First off, the expansion has really managed to reinvigorate my interest in endgame of all kinds. Working on the new operation has been a blast, and my guild has been able to run two full progression teams to focus on it. The other team actually managed to kill the Apex Vanguard (the last boss) on veteran mode last week, but my own team isn't far off either - just yesterday we had a zero percent wipe (/cries).

While there'll still be things left to do after he falls, I really like the thought of soon being able to say that we cleared the new operation in both difficulties. It's not something I've ever been able to say so shortly after the release of a new raid.

The Conquest rebalancing also revived my interest in that part of the game, and my guild managed to conquer both Mek-Sha and Taris in the last month, which was fun and exciting.

My excitement about gear has tapered off a lot since I earned full 306, simply because the set bonus I want seems ridiculously hard to acquire - it's not available from the regular vendors and I don't think I've seen a single piece drop in the operation it's supposed to be dropping from after three months of running it nearly every week. So I just keep spending tech fragments on sets for alts whenever I get close to the cap and that works alright for me.

Despite of my initial criticisms I did the Onderon dailies for quite a while, even after I'd maxed out the reputation, mostly because running them was something that Mr Commando was happy to do too, so it gave us another in-game activity to do together. Once he lost interest I mostly did as well, though I've been back a couple of times mainly to combine doing them with a round of gathering. The way Bioware has balanced gathering skills this time around, hours of running missions don't yield nearly as much profit as simply picking flowers while doing a round of dailies on Onderon.

The repeatable content on Mek-Sha has been oddly disappointing though. I only found one of the heroics really fun to repeat, as the other one required an odd amount of running around that made the heroic quick travel option feel almost pointless. Then later they added a third one which seemed like it was supposed to give you some fun options to support different factions and unlock achievements, but it was buggy as all hell on launch and gave no real reward, which caused Mr Commando to dismiss it after one run and we haven't been back since then.

Bioware also added a terminal with supposedly rotating dailies in patch 6.0.2, but I also only visited that one once. It gave me a mission to pick some fruit on Dantooine but sent Mr Commando off to Nar Shaddaa. The fruit-picking was cute enough, but being sent off to different planets at random obviously didn't make it a good choice for something to do as a team. I should probably revisit it anyway though...

To get back to gathering for a second, crew skills in general launched in a pretty messed-up state (which is honestly why I didn't bother to look into them too much initially), mostly with even the simplest crafts being ridiculously expensive in terms of materials. A patch has improved the situation somewhat since then, but it's still incredibly slow. I only got the achievement for getting all crew skills to level 700 the other day, and am slowly chipping away at trying to research this or that schematic, without too much commitment.

All of that aside, there is of course always more story content to go through. I've "only" completed Onslaught on six characters and I have so many more alts parked at various points, from their class story to KotET. And I do enjoy logging into different ones to play a bit here and there, but as much as I want to see different outcomes on a cerebral level, when it comes to deciding how I'm going to spend my one hour of playtime in the evening - or however much I happen to have - I all too often end up doing something else instead. But it's okay, fortunately that content isn't going anywhere, so I'll just keep chilling and chipping away at it as time allows and depending on my mood.

Raiding With Little Guidance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teenage Mutant Ninja Kephesses

The new operation that came with Onslaught is SWTOR's first multi-boss raid to be released in full since late 2014. In the intervening years we got Gods from the Machine, which was released over the course of more or less a full year, one boss at a time. While I do like Gods, I think it did suffer somewhat from this piecemeal approach, at the very least in the narrative department, as no other operation is so confusing and confused in terms of what's actually going on beyond us taking out some big baddies one at a time.

With the Dxun operation - which does have a proper name, incidentally... I think it's Nature of Progress? However, nobody actually calls it that, and even the one-time story mission just tells you to "complete the Dxun operation". With the Dxun operation, Bioware's team shows us once again what they're capable of when they actually get to put a whole operation together in one go, and it's great.

They originally said that they were going for something similar to Ravagers, and I wrinkled my nose a bit since that's not one of my favourite operations, but I can see why they made that comparison. It also reminds me a bit of Scum and Villainy though, in the sense that there is a clear narrative progression from one boss to the next and you're not just entering some random lair full of monsters.

What really stands out though is how utterly hilarious it is. The basic story is that Czerka Interstellar - totally different from Czerka, honest - lost control of their research facility on Onderon's moon after an incursion by Trandoshans, and as usual this upsetting of the status quo has revealed that they've been up to all kinds of shenanigans.

During your journey to reclaim the facility you get constant running commentary from your "assistants" from Czerka, who are radioing you instructions about how to get past various obstacles, and their dialogue is laugh-out-loud hilarious. "The most important device in the entire facility routinely catches fire?!" became quote-worthy to me pretty much instantly. (It's over the top, but if you've ever worked in a certain kind of office, it may also sound scarily familiar...)

Now this is isn't entirely without issues, as I saw @DrSWTOR highlight on Twitter during PTS testing...

This actually happened to my group on Dxun last week. Very true. While we can experience and understand multiple strains of stimuli (think driving while in a conversation) each added layer causes loss of awareness until nothing is being experienced at cognitive capacity. https://t.co/JEVHyVZveZ

— Dr. Daniel Kaufmann (@DrSWTOR) October 2, 2019

As I said in response to him then, I very much had an issue with this in Ravagers back in the day, where a big story twist happens in the middle of the final fight which I completely missed the first time around, leading to me being quite confused. I don't think it's as much of a problem in Dxun though, as the dialogue there consists more of jokes and tips about how to beat the fight, so if you miss some the first time around it's okay if you simply catch them next time (and the opportunity to catch jokes you missed before can in fact increase replayability).

The boss fights offer a nice variety of new mechanics compared to previous operations, without anything feeling completely strange and out of left field. For example the very first boss is somewhat reminiscent of the Enhanced Vrblther from Czerka Core Meltdown, in that you have to drag her around and pop little plants near her, though in Dxun their purpose is to reduce damage on you rather than to increase damage done to the boss. You also have a much larger area to move around in.

The second and third fight are gauntlet type encounters that force you to fight your way through a stream of unending adds, something that isn't exactly new and innovative for the genre but hasn't really been featured in SWTOR before.

The fourth fight was a source of much hilarity for my guild. We went into story mode completely blind, wanting to figure things out on the go. When we saw two mutant Trandoshans in colourful body armour standing in an underground lab, someone quipped that we only needed two more and we'd have our own set of ninja turtles, and what do you know, shortly after the pull two more of the reptiles joined in and it was a hoot. Even better was the actual lightbulb moment when we finally figured out what we were supposed to do to beat the fight. I managed to catch that one and the kill that followed on video.



It might not be as funny to others watching after the fact (maybe it was one of those things for which you just had to be there), but for us it was a right laugh. The end of the video also shows us running into a bit where the devs clearly decided to troll us raiders a little by making us climb a huge staircase that debuffed our characters with fatigue, causing us to go more and more slowly over time. We joked that on hardmode it would have holes and on nightmare they would be invisible (a reference to the infamous bridge on Darvannis).

There was one more encounter featuring some interesting mechanics and a little surprise that I won't spoil here for anyone who hasn't seen the fight. The final boss is the only thing I'm not so sure about, mostly because he took us more than ten minutes to kill even on story mode, which struck me as a little insane (then again, maybe we are still doing something wrong). It's also a slightly odd fight in that there is very little to do for most members of the ops group, except for the tank repositioning the boss every so often, and one guy having the unenviable task of running around the room activating various doodads at the right time to counter certain of the boss's abilities. I don't usually mind if a fight has a special job that you can give to one of your "star players" who then carries the rest of the group a bit, but in this case the contrast between what that one person has to do and what everyone else has to do is very stark, plus as I mentioned the fight just goes on a bit too long for my liking.

This does sort of segue into the aspects of the operation that are less good, of which I don't have many right now, but they are still worth mentioning:

First off, the new system of story mode lockouts resetting every day was a major pain in the butt during the first week as our blind approach meant that we weren't clearing the whole ops in a single night but had to start over from scratch every evening.

Also, the last boss launched with a bug that made him unkillable for anyone but a handful of world first teams as one of the doodads intended to counter his abilities wasn't working. That bug has since been fixed, but it was still annoying for the operation to launch in an unclearable state, even more so after we had (re-)cleared everything else three nights in a row just to get to the last boss... and then find him bugged.

Finally, effort vs. reward for doing the operation don't feel very well balanced right now. Each boss drops something like two pieces of gear, compared to the dozens you can get from a single flashpoint run, and I don't recall seeing a single set piece or tactical drop yet, despite of certain items being advertised as having a higher chance of dropping in this operation. I mean, we're still going to run it for the challenge and for fun, but it would be nice to get a little bit more reward out of it.

I'm also once again somewhat unsure about the difficulty tuning. Story mode is no Gods of the Machine for sure (thankfully!), but fights like the two gauntlet bosses still require an amount of co-ordination that I wouldn't expect to find in your average pug. This strikes me as a shame as it once again means that the content will remain inaccessible to many more casual players even on what's supposed to be the easiest difficulty, which is particularly sad considering what a fun operation this is.

Hardmode seems good fun as well so far, as after two nights we've beaten the first two encounters and made some progress on the third. This does feel more in line with the sort of hardmodes we used to get in the game's earlier operations rather than the "hardmare" that we've been treated to in more recent years (and which I personally tended to find rather off-putting).

Anyway, it's nice to see Bioware throw SWTOR's raiders a bone again, and such a tasty one at that. It's not a game about raiding, but for at least a percentage of us raiding is still one of our favourite pastimes between story updates and it's good to see ops players get some love again after the long and dry years of KotFE and early KotET.