Another One for the Books: Scum Speed Run

Back in June I wrote about successfully completing the Dread Palace timed run achievement with my guildies. Our next destination after that ended up being Scum and Villainy, which also has a timed run achievement... but I initially hardly dared to hope that we might be capable of accomplishing that, mostly because of the last boss. I still remembered from when we worked on the Styrak fight during Onslaught, how we literally spent months wiping on him, and how even the final kill - satisfying as it was - took us over 20 minutes, something I found difficult to mentally reconcile with the idea of a speed run.

However, things went better than I'd expected as we started working our way through the ops without the timer. I didn't actually keep track, but I think I would've been able to count the number of attempts it took us to kill Styrak on my fingers if I'd wanted to. Clearly what had held us back those years ago had truly just been the bad group composition above all else, and going in with the knowledge that we needed certain combat styles and preparing accordingly turned that into a complete non-issue.

A guildie who's a much better player than me encouraged me: "You've done the DP timed run, and that's much harder! This should be very doable." And indeed, where in Dread Palace you only have one hour to beat five encounters, in Scum you have two hours to defeat seven of them. Everyone agreed that it was both a realistic and a worthy goal to pursue.

Nonetheless, progression still wasn't all as smooth as that. Most fights in Scum master mode are much easier than in Dread Palace, and I'd say at least four of the fights became more or less guaranteed one-shots pretty quickly. Thrasher, the third boss, could sometimes be a random road block if something was even slightly off with the group, as there's a lot of damage thrown at random targets, requiring strong burst healing, people to use their cooldowns correctly, and dps to be very responsive to the add spawns.

The worst fight by far though were the Cartel Warlords, primarily because Sunder, the boss that needs kiting, has been suffering from terrible desync for years, meaning that he'd often appear on the other side of the room from where he actually was, which is not a good thing when you have to stay away from him or else risk being one-shot. It could be very hit and miss whether our tank could kite him long enough without anything going horribly wrong. And that's without even mentioning that it can be very easy to already wipe in the first phase, when the pressure on the healers is the highest and there are once again a lot of randomly targeted damage abilities going around that could cause someone to fall over if they just so happened to be hit by a lot of things in a row.

Styrak himself turned out to be a comparatively mild obstacle, with the biggest problem being just how long the fight still was. With better dps we could now take him down in less than twenty minutes, but that's still pretty long for a boss fight, and a single wipe at a late stage of the encounter could be massively costly in terms of time.

Once again progression was very much not linear, with us getting hard stuck on Thrasher one week, then breezing through all bosses until Styrak the next, just to keep wiping to silly mistakes; followed by us getting stuck on Cartel Warlords again on the next run.

That said, this Wednesday the stars finally aligned: we one-shot Thrasher, and got Cartel Warlords down on the third attempt. It was a pretty epic victory too, with only one person still alive to deliver the final killing blow to the last warlord. And Styrak was once again super-smooth, with us finishing the speed run achievement with plenty of time left on the clock.

Even better: the next evening we did it again, for the one member of the team who still needed the achievement and hadn't been there the previous night. This time we one-shot both Thrasher and Cartel Warlords and only had a silly wipe in Oasis City that was completely my fault. However, we did lose some time to real life interruptions, and then wiped on Styrak four times. Fortunately, fifth time was the charm and we got him down mere minutes before the timer was about to run out.

I'm happy that I got the achievement (as well as the character title on both my main and main healing alt) but above all, I just feel extremely proud of how well the team got together to make this happen. I hardly want to think about how long this streak of good luck can possibly last because good times like these never last forever.

Fun fact: Even though this operation is over ten years old at this point, I was surprised to find that there are still certain mechanics for which it's hard to find hard data about how they work. The specific example that made us scratch our heads was the knockback add on Styrak. There seemed to be agreement that the healers needed to stand out and it would jump to them, but even though we made sure to do that, it would still leap into the melee group sometimes. Someone suggested having a third person stand out, a ranged dps - still no difference. The best we could work out eventually was that a Watchman Sentinel's group healing could cause the add to mistake them for a healer and leap to them, because the moment our own Sentinel changed to a different spec for this fight, the random leaps into melee stopped happening.

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.

Slow Mode Legacy of the Rakata

My guild hits the large Conquest yield target with ease nowadays, even during the most quiet of times, but our smaller Imperial alt guild isn't so lucky, meaning that sometimes, it falls on me and other loyal members to actively grind out the missing points on Sunday or Monday evening to get us over the collective finish line.

Last Monday was one of those days, and after doing some dailies and completing the PvP weekly, I noticed that I was on four out of five for the "Socialite II" objective. I decided that completing it by doing a flashpoint would be a good way of hitting my personal target on one more alt, and consulted my spreadsheet to decide whom to take out for a spin. I eventually settled on my Powertech tank and queued up specifically for Legacy of the Rakata, since she had the Forged Alliances story mission for that one.

Being a tank, queueing for master mode resulted in an instant pop (even though it was quite late) and I loaded in to find myself grouped with a Mercenary, a Sorceror and a Scoundrel healer. "I just did this one five minutes ago," opined the Sorc. I replied with "Sorry, I actually queued for this one in specific" and earned the text equivalent of a "grinning squinting face" in reply.

We got on our way and I noticed on the very first trash pull that things were taking quite long to die. Some of the trash groups in this flashpoint have an elite healer in them, and while I interrupted him as much as I could, it felt like we could barely out-dps the heals that were getting through. On the next pull, I actually ended up loading up Starparse, something I rarely do in flashpoints, to see whether I was just imagining things or whether the numbers were going to back me up. It showed both damage dealers barely breaking 10k dps on an AoE pull, and me even overtaking one of them temporarily. Not just my imagination then.

I didn't say anything to the rest of the group of course, because I consider that kind of thing quite rude. We simply continued on, just very slowly as it were. The first boss in Legacy of the Rakata always takes pretty long to die, even with a good dps group, so with this one it took absolute ages. I didn't look at the clock, but I had a lot of time for random musings while tanking the rancor with my back against the wall.

I wonder if this guy has an enrage... if he does, we're sure to find out!
I wonder if there are people who would quit over this or try to kick someone... based on the tales guildies tell about their pug experiences sometimes, players certainly get removed from groups for less.
If he didn't keep knocking me out of position every so often, forcing me to refocus, I could have read a book by now.

As it turns out, Warchief Rehkta and his Savage War Beast do not have an enrage, and eventually they died. We moved on once again. I was definitely feeling a bit bored by the (lack of) speed by then, as it was late and I had hoped for a relatively quick run, but at the same time it wasn't the worst tanking practice to rotate through every single one of my defensive cooldowns on every pull. I had noted that the healer was the worst geared member of the group, with an item rating of only 318, but they held their own pretty well.

"Wanna do the bonus boss?", the Sorc asked. God no, went my brain, but what I actually typed into chat was: "Sure, if people want to do it I don't mind." We had skipped so much trash however that we hadn't unlocked him yet by the time we moved past his little bunker, so we just had to proceed towards the second boss, Commander Rand.

I was always under the impression that this guy's add phases were tied to his health percentage, but in this run I learned that there's also a timer, so if you're too slow he'll go into another add phase even if you haven't got him that low yet. I think he was only at about half health by the time we got the third round of adds, but as it turns out, he doesn't bother to summon additional waves after the third one either way. The more you know...!

We'd made it all the way to the last trash pull before the final boss when the bonus objective completed to unlock the bonus boss. Just forget about it, I told myself, nobody will want to go back anyway... but I'd said that I was willing to do it! I had to at least ask one more time, in case people were too shy to make any requests of the tank. (Tanks have so much authority, I tell you.)

"Did you want to go back to do the bonus boss then?" I typed into chat. The Sorc expressed enthusiastic assent and immediately turned around. I remained where I was and looked at the other two. They didn't reply but eventually turned around to follow the Sorc as well. That was that then.

Back at the Infinite Army Prototype's little bunker, we engaged in a brief tactics discussion to ensure we were all on the same page in regards to breaking line of sight behind one of the pots whenever he did his big AoE. Staying in and healing through it was obviously out of the question, but I wanted to make sure that everyone knew and agreed on what to do.

Then I pulled... and it didn't go well. As expected, damage was massive (the fight is tougher on the healer than on anyone else in the party) and we died fairly quickly, I think it was shortly after the first AoE phase.

After we'd revived and while we were running back, I said that I was willing to try again, but that there was no shame in not being able to do this boss, considering how much damage he did and that our healer was the least geared member of our party. "Nah, we can do this!" the Sorc replied. The healer just said that they were going to try their best.

And on the second try... we killed it! Much to my surprise. It was messy (we got multiple womp rats, and the Merc further reduced their damage due to constantly running away and getting yanked in again, even after both the Sorc and I typed out in chat that it was best to just stand behind the boss as one doesn't get pulled from there), and it did take what felt like forever - over seven minutes according to the combat log, during which we took 11 million damage. Turns out this guy doesn't have an enrage either, so just not dying was enough to eventually get there. I congratulated everyone on a job well done and then we proceeded to the last boss.

I'll admit that Arkous and Darok were another fight that I was a little worried about due to their damage output, and my health bar did indeed behave like a yo-yo for most of the first phase, even as I desperately cycled through all my cooldowns. With my guildies we always used to kill Darok first due to the fact that he has a random aggro table and can't be taunted, but I noticed that this group focused on Arkous instead. I didn't complain though, seeing how I was struggling to not die while tanking him, and I thought of how the Sorc had said at the beginning that they'd completed this same flashpoint earlier, so they kind of had to know what they're doing?

Indeed, after Arkous' death, things seemed to get significantly easier for a while, and I realised why - Darok decided to focus on Jakarro at first, and with a friendly NPC soaking up much of his damage output, our healer had an easier time keeping the rest of the group topped up. Unfortunately the good times eventually came to an end when Darok changed his mind and had a go at our healer instead - who kept themselves alive for admirably long, but eventually succumbed to his onslaught. Fortunately the boss was already pretty low by that point, so that the rest of us were able to finish him off before he could get us down too.

And that was that! I was pretty shocked when I looked at the time and nearly one and a half hours had passed. For a flashpoint run with only a single, quick wipe, that's incredibly long - by my standards anyway. However, we'd all stuck together and made it through in the end, which was the most important thing. And I guess the reason I felt compelled to write about this run was that it was also a reminder to myself to not get too hung up on things like dps when it doesn't really matter, as it was ultimately a good run and in fact I learned a lot too.

Force Imbalance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The State of Operations in 7.0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Shintar (@ShintarCommando) February 16, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No News Is Good News (from the PTS)?

The PTS for Legacy of the Sith continues to quietly chug along. When I was playing there with guildies recently, one of them commented that there were very few people online, and I replied that that's pretty normal. There's usually a big rush on opening day as everyone logs on to check whether there's anything particularly interesting to see, but since there rarely is, they log off again and don't come back. Even the few who do end up doing genuine testing will usually only play that content for a little while and then go back to doing something else. The PTS just isn't a place to hang out.

That said, I'm surprised by how many hours I've spent there already this time around, especially considering that unlike for Onslaught, Bioware hasn't offered up any rewards for participation. According to Steam I've spent more than ten hours on the PTS so far.

Last night me and six of my guildies ran Terror from Beyond master mode on the PTS with an all-inquisitor group because scaling isn't in yet and we wanted to see what it would be like to be ten levels above the content. The answer is, we managed to one-shot everything up to Terror himself and probably could have got the timer achievement (something many of us have never managed on live) but then we wiped a couple of times on Terror and people didn't feel like pushing on as it was getting late. It was still a fun time. I played as Lightning dps, something I don't think I've ever done in master mode content; I pretty much always heal on the harder stuff.

Previously we'd also tested the new inquisitor skill trees by running the flashpoints added in Onslaught on master mode, using copied level 75 characters. I tanked Objective Meridian and healed Spirit of Vengeance and Secrets of the Enclave. The bonus boss in the latter absolutely wiped the floor with us repeatedly for some reason; it did so much damage (though we did get it down eventually). We did a run on live afterwards just to compare the experience because I was kind of starting to doubt my healing abilities, and there the boss didn't even do the ability that was causing us so much trouble, so that we took almost zero damage... it was very odd.

In terms of how the class changes felt, I can only reiterate what I said in my last post about the PTS - compared to the initial hubbub, they really don't feel like that big a deal. (Though my main class still hasn't been added to the PTS - typical that they'd save the best for last - so I guess I'll reserve judgement until I see that.)

Assassin tank didn't really feel very different at all. At level 70 they make you choose between your knockback, that cone-based AoE they added in Onslaught and that no-one ever used anyway, and Whirlwind, none of which really matter to a tank in PvE. I guess in PvP people might have to decide whether they get more use out of the knockback or the extra CC. Passives are mostly centred around increasing your AoE damage/threat or some new interactions with taunt, which I found hard to judge in terms of their usefulness.

Sorc had more changes going on, but still the overall rotation felt largely the same. The only thing that bugged me at level 75 was that the utility to move while casting Innervate and other key abilities isn't unlocked until 80 now, so I was constantly interrupting myself by moving at the wrong time. Here the proposed choices at 70 are between your friendly pull, Volt Rush and immunity bubble, which is a bit more tricksy. The pull is super situational but where it is useful it's extremely useful - yet, can you really justify choosing it over the bubble? I'm kind of hoping they still change that one.

The changes to passives I found very hard to judge once again. A guildie was playing Madness and cackling about Shock finishing all your dots at once or something like that, which does sound pretty OP, but I didn't see anything as exciting in Lightning or Corruption. Not everything seemed to work properly either... as a healer one option was supposed to allow me to follow up a Dark Infusion with another instant cast but that never seemed to trigger, and as Lightning there were multiple effects that looked like they were meant to be passives but actually gave me another button to press on my bar that didn't really seem to work properly either... it's a bit hard to form strong opinions based on that.

In general I'm surprised by how much I've enjoyed these test runs on the PTS with my guildies though. Stuff like running an unscaled operation offers a different view on content that hasn't been available in the live game for years. And as far as the class changes go, it does kind of feel like the goal of the pruning is simply to make sure you don't need more than two full action bars for your combat abilities and I'm OK with that. That's still plenty of buttons to press.

Eight Years with Dread Master Styrak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Cartel Warlords and Other Multi-Boss Fights

Last month we got our first 6.x kill of the Cartel Warlords in Scum and Villainy on master mode, and like Dash'roode it got me thinking about how times have changed, as we actually used a different strategy this time around than last time.

When you have a boss fight that features more than one non-trivial enemy, it basically always comes down to one of two ways of beating it: either they all have to die at or around the same time (maybe because they have the ability to revive each other, or death of one causes the other to enrage and go berserk on the raid), or you kill them one after the other. If the fight favours or even requires the latter, you then have the question of which order to kill the bosses in, and your answer to that question can make the fight subtly or drastically different.

The earliest I remember contemplating this concept was back in WoW during the Assembly of Iron in Ulduar - there was one kill order that was generally accepted as the easiest, but there were also achievements for leaving different bosses until last to incentivise at least trying the other ways as well.

SWTOR has no such achievements that I'm aware of (maybe there's one for the Mutant Trandoshans in one of the harder difficulties of Dxun now), but a fight like the Cartel Warlords can still pose interesting challenges. Your four opponents are:

Captain Horic, a human trooper that does a random spray attack with his assault cannon and throws corrosive grenades

Vilus Garr, a Devaronian that likes to jump around the room and yanks people about

Tu'chuk, a dual-wielding, fast-hitting Whiphid with a knockback

Sunder, a slow but extremely hard-hitting Gen'dai that likes to periodically change aggro based on proximity (meaning he has to be kited but the tank has to take care not to get so far away from him that other members of the raid are actually closer to him than the tank)

The bosses that remain alive as others die also become stronger or gain additional abilities as the fight goes on. For example Vilus Garr gains a stun and stab attack, and Sunder starts rooting the person trying to kite him.

When I first encountered the fight on story mode, the kill order I was taught was Horic -> Vilus -> Tu'chuk -> Sunder. Story mode has never been rocket science, and it makes sense to kill the two untankable guys that attack people at random first, because even if Tu'chuck and Sunder get stronger in the process, they are being taken care of by dedicated tanks that can deal with the increased damage output.

On hardmode, I was taught to go for Sunder before Tu'chuk because the former was supposedly really painful to deal with if you left him to last, while Tu'chuck was more easily controllable even as his damage output increased. That seemed to work out okay as well.

Imagine my surprise when I did the fight on nightmare and learned that now our order of business was going to be Horic -> Tu'chuk -> Sunder -> Vilus. As it turns out, Vilus is a royal pain in the rear when left until last, because once all the other warlords are down, he basically stuns and stabs his targets until they are dead - he literally doesn't stop otherwise, unless you can get away from him by using a stunbreaker or getting pulled by a Sage for example.

We also learned that his stabbing wasn't entirely random though but rather somewhat based on proximity, so the result was that we had a Shadow tank following him around, trying to get stabbed, hoping to survive as long as possible with use of cooldowns and being spam-healed, and if it became too much they could stealth out and start over. Dps and healers had to use stun breakers to get the hell away if they got caught. It was crazy and different, but eventually it worked.

So when we returned to the warlords on master mode this time around, I expected to be dealing with the same thing again... but nope, the meta had changed once again. Now we were going for Horic -> Vilus -> Tu'chuk -> Sunder, just like on story mode back in the day. If Sunder is left until last on master mode, he starts casting an ability called "The End" every thirty seconds that one-shots even a tank with cooldowns up - but! There are some abilities that make it possible to avoid being hit by it altogether, so in a somewhat bizarre turn of events, getting to the last phase now meant that dps and healers just huddled in the middle of the room pewing the boss while our two Guardian tanks played ping pong with him, alternating between using their Saber Reflect and Blade Blitzes. It was weird and different and fun!

I have to hand it to Bioware's encounter designers that they managed to design a fight that is so versatile in the number of approaches it supports. At this point the only thing I haven't seen is what happens if you leave Horic for last... I wonder if I can convince a story mode group to give it a try one of these days?

It's a shame there haven't really been any other multi-boss fights that work quite as well. The Dread Council in DP gives you some wiggle room in terms of who you want to dps down first, but their abilities don't change so it's only really a matter of who you find easiest to deal with for the longest period of time. And I've literally never seen the Dread Guards in TFB tackled in any other order than Heirad -> Ciphas -> Kel'sara, which seems to indicate to me that other kill orders aren't really viable, but I do sort of wonder now, having never even tried. There could be whole unknown mechanics hiding there for all I know... another project to pitch on one of our next social nights I guess!

What A Difference Six Years Make

One of the interesting consequences of SWTOR re-levelling its endgame content every time the level cap is raised is that you get to progress through all of it anew every time this happens. This is of course not as exciting as doing it the first time around (in fact, some people might find it actively frustrating to potentially have their progression reset every so often), but neither is it a case of everything being automatically on farm because you've done it before. There can be weird difficulty swings as a result of rescaling, classes get at least changed a little every expansion (to various effects), and since level cap increases are usually years apart, most guilds will likely experience significant turnover in their roster during that time, meaning that you may end up going in with a very different team compared to last time as well.

The bottom line is that "re-progressing" through content you've done before is a funny experience. I was thinking about this as we went back into Scum and Villainy master mode for the first time since Onslaught's launch the other night. I have a video of us killing the first boss in there back in 2014 - when we were five levels above the content (before Bioware introduced level scaling) and yet it was still a struggle. Still, it felt pretty epic when we got the boss down, and I'm still fond of that video to this day. (Also, Sting.)



This time around we were at level, and victims of stat normalisation to boot, but it still only took us a couple of tries to get him down. There were no great cheers on TeamSpeak, but I still thought it would be fun to effectively "re-create" that first kill video for comparison. It's interesting to note the differences.



Visuals

The first thing that struck me was just how different the two videos look due to the degree of zoom. I'd forgotten just how closely zoomed in I used to play before working on the Revan fight forced me to increase my view distance as one of the fight's mechanics was impossible to deal with otherwise.

Seeing the fight from a greater distance makes it look quite different - for example you get a much better view of the other players' actions (in fact Mr Commando used watching the video as an opportunity to moan about all the things the damage dealers had done wrong in his eyes), and during the movement phases the sand traps are much more obvious.

That said, I kind of like the "feel" of the closer view much better. While it's very chaotic and at times hard to make out what's happening, there's something very visceral about the camera being trapped under the shield just like the player, the boss being in your face and Xuvva wings frantically flapping around the edges.

Tactics

Despite of the high dps check, we were running with the standard group setup of two tanks and two healers back in 2014. I don't know if we'd even considered anything else. This time around we had Mr Commando solo-tank it, even if that meant that damage dealers were occasionally getting smacked in the face - but it was very much needed, considering that even with the extra damage dealer the dps requirements were much harder to meet than back in 2014.

It was also interesting to see me getting lost in the desert in the 2014 video, a mechanic that was later changed so that it wouldn't affect healers anymore (alongside some other mechanics in the operation, such as Styrak's nightmare). I'm actually kind of sad about this because I thought that it was a very immersive and fun mechanic, and since I almost always heal in ops I never get to see it anymore. I can sort of understand why they made that change for story mode, but I kind of wish they'd kept healers on the target list for the harder difficulties, especially considering that the incoming damage was clearly tuned to be survivable with a single healer for periods of time.

People

The 2014 run was a collaboration between my guild and another guild that we were friendly with at the time (many of them actually went on to join Twin Suns Squadron later). I can't really remember why we didn't go in with a full guild group... it could be that this was during a bit of a slump where we were struggling to regularly make the numbers, but I genuinely can't remember. Either way, about half the group in the video no longer plays the game.

On the plus side, the other half of the group is still playing game six years later, which doesn't strike me as that bad! There's me and Mr Commando of course, but Ard (who was tanking in 2014 but played his dps Commando just for this boss in the 2020 vid) is also still running with us after all this time, which makes me happy. He is an incredibly loyal soul but also kind of mysterious because even though he's been with us for so long I pretty much know nothing about his real life other than that he lives in Spain. Online friendships... anyway, the fourth person, my co-healer from the 2014 video, no longer does progression content but still hangs out with us socially, so I consider that a win as well.

In short, a lot of things have changed since 2014, but a decent number have not. Considering the online world's perpetual malleability I'm pretty happy with this degree of stability.

My 20 Favourite Outtakes Captured on Video

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

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

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

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

20. Bouncing Jedi Knights Standing Together (early 2013)

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

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

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

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

"Do it again!"

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

"So, same time tomorrow?"

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

18. The bugged ops group (November 2018)

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

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

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

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

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

15. Grappling Fail on Copero (June 2018)

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

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

14. I Will Survive Scyva (May 2018)

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

13. The Naked Gunslinger (November 2017)

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

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

12. Asterisks (August 2018)

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

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

11. Lost on Ossus (February 2019)

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

10. The Elevator Incident (April 2013)

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

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

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

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

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

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

8. Firefrost Yakety Sax (December 2016)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Chasing the Mace (October 2018)

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

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

3. The Book of Mormon (April 2016)

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

2. Commando Healer PvP in 4.0 (September 2016)

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

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

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

The Veteran's Edge Controversy

Gosh, it's been a long time since I got to write about a genuine controversy surrounding SWTOR's raiding. I mean, I talk about running operations and the challenges involved in that often enough, but it's not usually something that has the community up in arms. In fact, the last time I remember talking about anything even remotely similar was when the subject of Nightmare Power was brought up six years ago.

Looking back at that post, Nightmare Power was ultimately a well-communicated change aimed at throwing the bleeding edge raiders a bone while at the same time making nightmare mode raiding just a little bit more accessible - basically the complete opposite of what's happening right now.

But let's start at the beginning, with an executive summary of the situation for anyone who might be interested in the subject but isn't up to date with what's happening in the SWTOR raid community (I wouldn't blame you).

Back in Knights of the Fallen Empire, when the game introduced level-scaling, all operations were scaled up to be endgame content. This meant that you could run the very first raid that was added to the game back in 2011 for rewards in pretty much the same way you could run the newest one. Like it or not, that's what we got. When the level cap was raised by another five levels with Knights of the Eternal Throne, all endgame content was once again scaled up by another five levels as well.

With Onslaught though, the developers talked about wanting to come up with a different solution going forward, because apparently this constant re-scaling is a lot of work. On the Onslaught PTS, they tried scaling each operation down to its original level at first (so that Eternity Vault was level 50, Scum & Villainy level 55, Temple of Sacrifice level 60 etc.), the idea being that they could then stay there forever regardless of further level cap increases, but apparently that didn't work so well. So what happened instead was that all the old content stayed at its previous level cap of 70, and players are scaled down to that from the new level cap of 75, which felt very much like the devs were just running out of time before the expansion's launch and needed to do something.

The main problem with that has been that downscaling in SWTOR puts a cap on most of your primary stats such as endurance, mastery etc., meaning that downscaled content is essentially set to a fixed difficulty that is largely unaffected by gear. (You can still increase some secondary stats like crit, but that doesn't make that much of a difference.) I'm sure some people love the idea of that, but this is still an MMORPG, and making your character stronger by acquiring better gear is a big part of that - if you're looking for an experience where all players are equal all the time, there are plenty of other genres that provide. Also, fixed difficulty unaffected by gear means that if your guild gets stuck on a boss it's basically game over for you, cause people will only be able to "get better" to a limited degree and without being able to improve your gear there's nothing else you can do.

So, in what felt like a band-aid on top of a band-aid, Bioware introduced a buff called "Veteran's Edge" to downscaled endgame content, which basically increases all your stats once you're past a certain item level and goes up to 30 stacks if you're fully geared in the highest level currently in the game, at which point you're buffed to the point of essentially being vastly overgeared compared to what the content was originally designed for.

This has meant that in terms of survival and dps requirements, even the formerly hardest content in the game has been easier for the past four months than it was before... though that's all relative, and I think anyone claiming that it was easy in absolute terms must live in a very peculiar bubble.

You would think that this shouldn't be a big deal, considering the game as a whole has generally decreased in difficulty over the past few years, that it mostly affected very old content, and that this basically just made something that was previously only done by maybe two percent of players now accessible to (made-up number) four percent.

However.

Something happened - and we can only speculate about the reasoning, but the common theory is that people from a couple of hardcore guilds prompted this change by abusing their direct channel to certain devs established during things like play-testing - and Bioware decided to remove Veteran's Edge from master mode operations in patch 6.1. Without any sort of prior communication, warning or even mentioning it in the patch notes. Even community manager Eric Musco was initially confused when questioned about it and had to check with the devs first before confirming that it was actually intended and not a bug.

This means that any guild that had previously been progressing through a nightmare mode operation of some sort was in for a rude awakening on patch day. My own ops group had been working on the last boss in Terror from Beyond before the reset - yet after the patch we struggled to kill the first boss. While we did kill her in the end, we also decided that the change was so inane that we'd rather go and do something else for a while. Specifically, Ravagers and Temple of Sacrifice with their "hardmares" still offer a similar level of challenge in terms of gameplay, but with the Veteran's Edge buff intact.

This is actually a really old screenshot of hardmode, dated January 2013. But our experience on master mode the other night was very similar.

Now, whatever level of difficulty you think is "right" for any given content is always going to be up for debate, as it's clearly deeply personal for a lot of players. I have previously written about the challenge of not being bored to tears by combat in the levelling game these days for example. However, I hate it when people argue about the subject with their sole argument basically being that people who prefer a different difficulty are clearly morally degenerate in some way (either lazy and entitled or cruel and elitist, take your pick).

Here are some facts about this particular player nerf though:

- Players are used to difficulty resets in existing content at the start of a new expansion, but not in patches between expansions. This came completely out of the blue, wasn't communicated at all and has been seriously disruptive for many guilds working on this content.

- Bioware has gone on record saying that they find it a challenge to encourage players to transition from one type of content (difficulty) to another as the gaps between them are often too big. How does it help to increase the difficulty between veteran and master mode even further?

- Progression content where better gear doesn't help you at all goes against a core tenet of MMORPGs.

I do hope that Bioware will reconsider their decision in regards to Veteran's Edge for master modes. There are a variety of paths that they could go down to amend the situation while still keeping the super hardcore raiders sweet:

- Level everything up to 75 after all. I'm sure it would take some work, but regardless of what the final difficulty for master mode ended up being in such a scenario, it would feel cleaner and fairer as we'll at least know where we are in terms of gear and can e.g. try rejigging some stats instead of being stuck at an arbitrary ceiling.

- Turn Veteran's Edge back on, but make it a toggle and give people who complete the content without it a special title or something.

- Turn it back on but only let it stack to fifteen or something. Admittedly that would be a pretty weak solution, but probably the easiest to implement.

Ultimately I don't really want to argue about the exact difficulty level the content should be set at; that's definitely up to Bioware to decide, though I won't deny that personally the fights felt more fun to me with Veteran's Edge than without. But I don't think they should go around making such massive changes four months into an expansion. If instead of nerfing player power by 20% they'd stealthily nerfed bosses' health and damage output by 20%, it wouldn't have been as much of an issue for me personally but I still would have agreed that this kind of thing is a bad move to make at a time like this and and in that manner.