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.

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.

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.

Half-time

Today I uploaded Pugging with Shintar season 2 episode 10, which means that I'm halfway done with season two, hurrah! I've determined that I'll need/want it to run for exactly twenty episodes, since there are ten different operations for me to cover, and with my intended schedule alternating between operations and uprisings, that'll make for a total of twenty videos. With two uprisings per episode I will have completed all of them on story mode after the next episode, so for the remaining four installments meant to feature uprisings I'll switch to pugging randoms on veteran mode. Should be fun!

Unfortunately as a whole, this season hasn't been as much fun for me as the previous one. I've mentioned before that recording the operations pugs has felt more like "work" than anything I've done before, and as I've progressed I've noticed that it's my self-imposed rule of wanting to do them "in order" more than anything else that's causing me issues. I've always said that the best way to have fun pugging is to be flexible and jump into whatever content people are willing to run at any given time. Unfortunately I need specific operations for this series, and I need them at specific times too, since I only really have time to record an ops pug during weekends. It's getting a bit frustrating to be honest!

I've made a note for myself to not just fixate on the featured group finder operation in the future, but to also see what gives Conquest points in any given week, as those ops might be in higher demand as well. I'm hopeful that the next few will be easier to find groups for (as I said in the video, people aren't super fond of running that one operation that has more bosses than any of the others). Of course the biggest challenge will be Gods from the Machine, but at least I won't have to deal with that one until the very end.

What also hasn't helped is that my viewers seem less interested in this second season than they have been in the first. It might seem silly to worry about viewer numbers when I'm far from wanting to make a career out of making videos and am used to low view counts to begin with, but it's still noticeable and a bit disappointing to see less engagement on these newer episodes than there was on the older ones when they came out. I don't know if the episode length is off-putting, or maybe people just aren't as interested in the content? I'm guessing that season one was a bit more "relatable" in so far as most SWTOR players would have had an Esseles pug at some point (for example), so they have a frame of reference while watching someone else run it, but I'm guessing that not as many people have done operations or uprisings, and that might be why they aren't as interested. Anyway, I can only make guesses about that. If you're someone who's been following the series and has an opinion on this, feel free to share in the comments!

Anyway, these are the episodes I released since the last summary post (only four since the ops episodes in particular took some time to get right, as explained above):

S2E7: Tanking All The Adds in Uprisings - This one was a good demonstration of how the endless waves of adds that you get in many uprisings can get unpleasant for a healer (thus the title).

S2E8: Cheerful Wiping in Terror From Beyond - With TFB being my second favourite operation, I was really happy to pug this one, even if there was a slight hiccup in the middle. I also ended up in another guild's partial guild run again, this one led by an unexpectedly friendly and not at all evil Decepticon.

S2E9: Pleasant Uprising Surprises - This was probably the most fun uprising episode so far, with people interested in getting achievements in both of my runs. Even if I didn't need the achievements myself anymore and therefore gained nothing from them, it made for a nice break from the usual routine.

S2E10: Enjoying the Sights in Scum & Villainy - Scum was a bit annoying to find a group for, but I already talked about that in the main post above. The group itself was once again very pleasant.

Terror From Beyond Master Mode Musings

This past Sunday was a big day for my guild ops team (we are back to having two separate progression teams and I'm still getting used to everything we do not automatically equalling "the guild" anymore): We defeated the Terror From Beyond on master mode for the first time.

Now, strictly speaking I got the achievement for doing this more than three years ago already, back when you could out-level the older operations to a certain degree and overpower them that way, before they were all level-synced. In fact, I remember a TFB run with some people who were taking such delight in how overpowered they were that they decided to ignore all the Terror's mechanics in the second phase of the fight and just plinked away at it despite of its large damage resistance until it entered the final phase of the encounter... and somehow, it worked.

Sort of an achievement, dated February 2015, with us overpowering the Terror by five levels.

However, this Sunday was our first time actually beating it at level, and boy, did it take us a long time. I didn't make a note of the exact date when we first started attempting the fight, but I do have some video footage that goes back as far as October. Now, we didn't literally spend nine months wiping on the boss - there were many weeks when we didn't even attempt it at all for one reason or another, such as not having enough people online, or not having a good team composition, or just plain old tiredness. However, we never seriously switched to a different progression target in all that time, so even without constant wiping on the same boss, nine months are a very long time to feel like you've basically hit a progression brick wall.

In hindsight I think the biggest challenges for us were simply the fight's length (this fight was the reason I changed my video recording software from allowing me to save the last ten minutes of gameplay to saving the last fifteen minutes - because I realised ten minutes wouldn't be enough to capture the whole fight), and how many opportunities it gives you to die. It's not that there are any mechanics that are super tricky to execute correctly, but your mind wandering at a bad time during the fifteen minute duration of the fight could be enough to wipe the group already. We actually suffered far more deaths early in the fight than in the later phases, I think at least partially because people started to zone out from all the repetition, which just led to even more mistakes.

So the final kill was super exciting to me, and as I often do I made a video out of it. Even at nearly twice the original speed it's still over seven minutes long, because that's just the kind of fight it is.



I actually really appreciated the way it ended up challenging me. While I've always liked TFB as an operation, the final fight was never really one of my favourites because as a healer the second phase in particular is actually pretty boring. There is all this exciting stuff going on with people jumping around between platforms, but as a healer you simply don't have to.

While working on this encounter however, we soon realised that the dps check was extremely high and even with all of our damage dealers trying their hardest, we were still a little off, which led to one of our members concocting a plan to get the second tank and one of the healers involved in adding more damage to make up the difference. As my usual co-healer is a Sage and it's a bit easier to add dps as a Commando due to the way the class manages its resources, I was soon instructed to run with the dps and hit tentacles in phase two as well (which you can see in the video).

This was actually quite confusing to me initially as despite of all my years of playing this game I've very rarely done anything but heal in operations, and certainly not on the harder difficulties. On our first tries involving this new strategy I made pretty much all the newbie mistakes I'd seen damage dealers make over the years, such as getting slammed to death by a tentacle, accidentally jumping on a tank platform, or simply falling to my death at random after running off a platform at a bad angle. To my credit though, at least I didn't do any of those things more than once. In the final attempt I was playing it quite cautiously, opting out of dpsing a few times when I felt that a bit of extra healing was more important at the time, but in the end my contribution still made enough of a difference for us to get the kill.

The whole thing did make me a bit philosophical as well though, because again: nine months. I'm actually kind of surprised we didn't end up losing more people during that time simply because they gave up hope / ran out of motivation. In a way this record-length expansion cycle is both a blessing and a curse: On the one hand it gives us extra time to work on bosses we never had a chance to down while they were current because there was always another level cap increase coming that changed up the game again. On the other hand... we spend ridiculous amounts of time banging our heads against the same bosses without going anywhere. Raiding is often considered a bit of a wacky pastime by many, but right now it feels even more insane to me than usual (even if I still enjoy it).

Victory At Last, Again

Back in September 2014 I wrote a post called "Victory at last" in which I talked about finally killing the Dread Guards in Terror From Beyond on nightmare mode. Long story short, I had spent a lot of time wiping on them and it felt very satisfying to get them down at last, even if we had to overgear the fight by several tiers to get there.

After the 4.0 reset we didn't even make a proper attempt at the fight again, but since 5.0 we've been feeling more ambitious. And last night, we got it down!



And yes, it was yet another level of satisfying to beat the encounter at the intended gear level this time. Sure, it's probably a bit easier now than it was, not just because re-tuning is never perfect, but also because we have some extra abilities now that we didn't have three years ago. (For example I wouldn't have been able to simply ignore Doom with a cooldown like you can see me do in the video back then.)

But still, it felt so good. We had spent several full nights wiping on the fight beforehand, making very slow gradual progress at eliminating those small yet deadly mistakes that kept causing us to wipe, from random deaths in the lightning phase to messed up taunts to green circle shenanigans. The first time we actually hit the enrage, I felt that we could definitely do this. And then we did! The excited squealing you could hear on TeamSpeak is a testament to how excited everyone else got about downing the encounter too. That's raiding at its best in my opinion.

Still Operational

I haven't written about operations for a while, even though I still run them at least once a week. The more cynical among my readers might say that there's nothing to talk about because Bioware hasn't released a new operation in over a year and hasn't even hinted at any future plans to do so. However, my ops posts have rarely been about content releases and more about progression anyway. And despite of the general doom-and-glooming going on in regards to ops, my guild continues to be entertained well enough by them. Sure, we've had some old hands hang up their hats not long ago, but we've also had fresh, enthusiastic recruits, so things have evened out. Churn is always a reality for guilds, and we haven't really experienced any more of it than in previous years.

I've mentioned before that I've been kind of surprised by how little I actually seem to mind having to re-learn bosses that we previously downed when they were easier (because we could outlevel them by 5-10 levels). It's just fun to hang out with my guildies, and spending our time re-learning how to beat Thrasher on nightmare mode is as good an excuse to do so as any. What I do miss though is the excitement of a new boss kill, because that's definitely not present in quite the same way anymore. No achievement pop-ups, no useful gear drops for my main, no glowing pride that makes me want to make a video of the boss kill... because I probably made one months or even years ago already.

I think the main thing that keeps us going right now is the sheer wealth of fights we still have to "re-do" or even beat for the first time. 4.0's re-tuning has caused some odd shifts in difficulty as well.

Eternity Vault/Karagga's Palace: Not much news to report here - still the easiest ops by far and very much worth a visit when either one is the featured hardmode of the week and can be farmed for easy 224 loot.

Explosive Conflict: This place was such a pain in the butt on NiM when it was current content, and this experience has largely been re-created in 4.0. However, in one of the aforementioned difficulty shifts, the dps check for Firebrand and Stormcaller has become ridiculously intense now. It used to be that if you could kill Zorn and Toth you were also fine for the tanks in terms of dps, but this is no longer the case. Our guild's second group has beaten the fight, but even they admit that it's incredibly hard and that they've had to rely on "cheese tactics" such as using a Guardian tank's saber reflect for insane extra damage. My own group has sort of shied away from even trying it again because we are usually so far behind on dps that we don't even hit the enrage but rather end up with mechanics overlapping in bad ways before we've even hit the first defensive measures phase.

Terror from Beyond: We've had some goes at the second encounter on NiM and in somewhat of an inverse situation of the above, the Dread Guards don't seem nearly as much of a road block now as they used to be. However, I think we still kind of remember those days all too well and it makes us a bit timid when it comes to investing progression time here. Plus, even if we got them down we'd then have to face Operator next, who is quite a pain on NiM as well.

Scum and Villainy: This op seems considerably easier on NiM than it was in its original incarnation, because I remember back then we couldn't even down the first boss until nearly a year after its release, by which time we were overgearing the place by several tiers. This time however we are actually already up to working on the Cartel Warlords... whenever we can actually get to them in any given week, because killing everything leading up to them - while proven to be within our capabilities - is still far from smooth sailing. I'm not too hopeful for Styrak on NiM though, considering that we sometimes still run into the enrage even on hardmode when people aren't fully on the ball.

Dread Fortress: There's something about second bosses, because once again few of us really seem to have the stomach to work on Draxus - I can't actually comment on his post-4.0 difficulty, but I do remember all too well how much of a pain he used to be at level 55. The way the fight is split into waves that require people to learn a perfect rotation of interrupts while splitting their damage just right is simply super annoying. Having to wipe every time a single person messed up a single interrupt is a special kind of tedium.

Dread Palace: Sadly, this place has been a complete no-go for us as the very first boss hits so hard now that our tanks go squish in the blink of an eye. There was some talk about having them re-gear in a way that's otherwise sub-optimal to increase their endurance but in practice it's just ended up being another fight that we've postponed until a later date.

Ravagers: The two 3.0 operations at least are the one place where we can do "real" progression as I had only got the first two bosses in Ravagers down on hardmode during the Shadow of Revan patch cycle. Torque HM was a genuine progression kill for me in 4.0, but most of my group had already got it before KotFE's release so nobody felt like having a big celebration. Now nobody wants to spend time on Master and Blaster because it's supposed to be oh so hard and will take us forever to learn.

Temple of Sacrifice: In another example of strange re-tuning, the Revanite Commanders, who gave us massive trouble pre-KotFE, were apparently nerfed in some manner so that they are now ridiculously easy compared to the fight's previous difficulty level. We used to wipe and wipe and wipe on these guys... but when we first went to ToS HM after 4.0, we one-shot them, and that with several people in the group who hadn't even attempted the fight before. My one and only piece of genuine progression since 4.0 and it was depressingly anti-climatic. This of course leaves us with nothing but Revan himself in this operation, who is supposed to be the hardest fight in the entire game, so... probably not our best avenue of progression when looking at all the other areas in which we still fall short.

While we are certainly not bored, I'm still hopeful that Bioware will eventually decide to add more operations to the game again - and hopefully do better at making them fun than they did with the last couple, whose enjoyment (for me anyway) suffered a bit due to nonsensical circle mechanics and bad difficulty tuning.

When Old Raids Are New Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coffee Tomorrow!

Am I excited?

Definitely, though my excitement is somewhat tempered by a sense of... uncertainty.

Back when I was playing Warcraft, Blizzard's attitude in regards to expansions largely seemed to be: "it's a whole new game now". You got a new continent full of stuff and then you largely stayed there, rarely even looking back at the old content unless you wanted to roll an alt and start from scratch.

Before Rise of the Hutt Cartel came out I was wondering whether Bioware would end up doing something similar, but that turned out to not be the case. Sure, we got a new planet with some new quests, but once that was done it was back to hanging out on the fleet, running new hardmode versions of existing flashpoints and doing dailies on Ilum, only they were easier now because we were five levels higher. It was still the same game as before, only with some new stuff in it.

So when Shadow of Revan came out, I was a bit less excited, but also less worried. There was new content to look forward to, but I was fairly confident that the overall feel of the game wouldn't change too much (even if I wasn't keen on the sound of disciplines).

This time... I don't know. They are making bigger changes than ever before, but this is still Bioware, and they are eager to keep their old content relevant (see all the changes to the flashpoint and operations systems). Basically, I'm simultaneously excited about the possibility of change and hopeful that there won't actually be too much of it because I love the game as it is. Feelings are complicated.

Am I ready?

Sort of. Ready enough in any case!

The one thing I can proudly say is that I got the Makeb staged weekly achievement for both factions done. The first time I did it, it felt extremely tedious, but as I got the hang of things the experience became a lot smoother and faster. According to my achievement panel I had already done almost all the missions at least once and was just missing the connecting achievements, but as I re-ran them I had literally no memory of having done some of them before. Digging for hidden smuggler treasure as an Imperial, really? Some of them were also a bit obtuse, with instructions that were too vague or quest markers that were in the wrong place, forcing me to seek the help of the internet to be able to complete them. It was also a bit weird/annoying how much they differed in length, with some just requiring you to click on a couple of items that were close together and others asking you to depopulate half a mesa.

What impressed me was just how good a recycling job the Makeb bonus series actually was and that I never really noticed it before, because pretty much every mission from the staged weekly sends you to a mesa where the other faction had part of its main storyline and then gives you a task that reuses the same assets. For example the Imperial heroic [Stage 1] [Heroic 2+] False History from the bonus series is completely identical to the regular Republic heroic [Heroic 2+] For the Record in terms of location and mechanics, it's just the story background that's different. I'm curious to see what things will look like after the revamp.

As far as the operation achievements on my proposed bucket list went, I didn't do too great (+13% completion on TFB, +4% on DF, +8% on DP). I've recently cut down on my raiding for work-related reasons, bringing it down to just one night a week, which meant that I didn't end up with a lot of opportunities to work on those missing achievements. I suppose I could have tried harder, but I didn't really care that much. The most notable ops achievement I did get down in time was the one to survive TFB NiM (complete it without dying), and that was a horrible cheese-fest if I'm honest: If you reset the phase, you lose credit for the timed run but the game treats it like a fresh instance in which you haven't died yet, so you can basically keep working on the survival achievement by simply resetting the phase after every death/wipe. You'll just have to clear the respawned trash every time, and nothing makes you want to not mess up on Kephess again like having to do that over and over again...

As far as getting my alts expansion-ready by completing their existing story quests goes, I got my Sage ready for KotFE by doing Ziost with her (my main had already done everything), and I did make some progress on other characters so that even if they are not ready to hop into the expansion content just yet, they'll at least have less left to do in the future. Most notably I finally completed Makeb on my Guardian, and I finished Corellia, the consular class story and Ilum on my Shadow. To be honest, I suspect that I won't be itching to redo the expansion content on multiple alts right away - not if the way I handled Ziost is any indication anyway. I fully expect to level several alts to 65 through old content or things like flashpoints and PvP, and then they'll get to the Coffee content whenever I actually feel like it. Which brings us to the question of:

What am I going to do?

I wasn't tempted to take Tuesday off because there'll be maintenance and patching, and knowing how these things go the game will be barely playable initially. As I'll have only a few hours of playtime over the course of the week, I expect that completing the new story chapters on my main will keep me busy for several days at least.

Other than that I'm looking forward to playing around with level sync. Maybe I can convince my guildies to raid the world boss on Coruscant or something like that. At some point (though not immediately), I'll ask my pet tank to get back to one of our lowbie levelling duos and see how level sync changes the game for us. Since we tend to play in a very completionist way, we've always spent a lot of time doing quests that had already gone grey for us. If this won't happen anymore, if things will continue giving us XP no matter how far ahead we are of the planet, I could even see us hitting level 65 on Hoth or something silly like that. I'm looking forward to finding out.

Finally, there will be crafting changes to sort out, companions to dress and flashpoints and operations to explore in their new, level-scaled format. I shouldn't get bored any time soon.

Day 9: Silly

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

After the grousing of the last two posts, let's look at some very random and silly things!

Here I was working on the Seeker Droid quest chain on Balmorra, when a dread-seeded Bormu of all things burst out of the ground. I was like... really? That thing was hiding under that small mound of earth? As if Bormus aren't ridiculous enough as they are.

(On a side note, it feels like every time I work on this quest, I'll either find the seed within my first three searches, or I'll spend ten minutes or more running in circles without finding anything. There seems to be no in-between. Has anyone else noticed this?)

In Terror from Beyond, if you take the speeder after killing the first boss but before you've cleared the trash leading to the second boss, it will drop you right in the middle of the first trash pull. (I don't know whoever thought that was a good idea... or maybe that someone just enjoys playing practical jokes on raiders.) I'm sure you can imagine this leading to all kinds of fun whenever people take the speeder at the wrong time. However, one time when this happened to me, the speeder dumped me in the middle of the trash mobs as expected - yet they just didn't aggro. I had fun striking poses while they ignored me.

Fun fact: while cut scenes filter out any players that aren't grouped with you, they don't filter out NPCs, so you can end up with funny shots like this one, which shows my Scoundrel having an important conversation while a crowd-controlled Sith is asleep while standing up right next to her.

If you're the cautious type like me, you may not know this, but like the Lich King in WoW's Icecrown Citadel, Revan in Temple of Sacrifice doesn't actually aggro until you start the fight by attacking him. This makes for some amusing screenshot opportunities.

Day 4: Missions & Conversations

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

The cut scenes inside operations are a strange thing. Even while making them, Bioware has to be aware that operations are made with repetition in mind and that therefore these probably see a lot more space-barring than any other cut scenes in the game. And yet... I'm still glad that they are there and add something that other games don't have (as far as I know). Space-bar through certain cinematics often enough however, and you may even forget what they were all about.

When I took my Marauder alt to TFB one day, I actually watched the cut scene you get when the Terror is unleashed, because it's so rare that this character gets to go to any operations and I wanted to savour the moment. And as I did so, I couldn't help but think: "Damn, that still looks cool."

I really love the Imperial intro to Kuat Drive Yards. (The Republic one is OK, but not really remarkable other than that it featured the game's first Bothan NPC.) Bioware is better than most game developers when it comes to providing screen time for more than one sex/race/sexual orientation/whatever, but that doesn't mean that they are perfect and never fall back on clichés. As such I found it quite refreshing that the assault on Kuat Drive Yards on Empire side is led by two women whose sex nobody makes a big deal out of, who are very focused on business and who work well together. Much love for Admiral Ranken and Lord Krovos.

The end of the Legacy of the Rakata flashpoint felt pretty damn amazing to me the first time I played through it. (Considering the name of the expansion, I feel that it's not a spoiler anymore to mention that Revan plays a major part.) The final cut scene was very well orchestrated to make the big reveal feel satisfying, with the music swelling at the right moments and everything. Every time I do this flashpoint now I can't help but feel a little sad that new players won't get to have the same experience anymore, even if nobody bugs them to skip the cut scenes. Bioware had done such a great job building suspense during the staggered release of the Forged Alliances story arc... but now that Revan the cat is out of the bag it would be pretty hard to get a similar experience, considering that the very name of the expansion gives it all away. Sometimes you really just had to be there.

Bioware: letting me walk away from explosions with my character having a smile on her face since at least 2011.

I'm not a huge fan of the Blood Hunt flashpoint (and I still haven't done either of the two Rishi flashpoints on hardmode) but that doesn't prevent me from admitting that it has some very cool cut scenes towards the end when you meet up with Shae Vizla. Of course, her retractable floor and random lava flows are so showy and over the top that you can't help but wonder what could possibly have possessed her to build a compound like that - I just can't see any use for most of it other than "wanting to look cool".

Adventures in Old Content

After the release of 3.0, when it turned out that Bioware had forgotten to adjust the commendation drops for certain types of content to the new level cap (meaning that old flashpoints and operations actually gave better rewards initially than the new ones), people asked me repeatedly if I wanted to join for some classic ops runs to min-max my commendation rewards, but I pretty much always said no at first. After more than a year of having nothing to work on but Dread Fortress and Palace, the last thing I wanted to do as soon as we got some new content was go back there! And how long have Terror from Beyond and Scum and Villainy been in the game now? No, thanks.

Of course, two months later the shine of the new operations is starting to wear off and I feel ready to mix things up with a run of classic content again every now and then. It's been interesting.

One of my main concerns in regards to the 3.0 combat changes had been how they would affect ops encounters that relied on interrupts and dispels to have very specific (shorter) cooldowns. As it turns out, Bioware applied a simple if not very elegant band-aid to at least some fights (I only noticed it in Dread Fortress and Palace, though that doesn't necessarily mean that it wasn't present elsewhere). What happens is that as soon as you start the encounter, you'll receive a buff called "Classic Encounter" which resets your dispel cooldown to what it used to be for the duration of the fight.

It works well enough and was probably a lot easier to implement than going back and adjusting the fights to the new cooldowns, but it's a bit clunky as the buff doesn't appear until you pull - so you may very well be scratching your head just before the fight (like I did), wondering how you're supposed to deal with the required dispels. Also, as far as we could tell it doesn't affect interrupt cooldowns, even though the shorter cooldown on those also used to be pretty crucial to some fights.

On the Raptus fight in Dread Palace we also ran into a bug that was supposed to have been fixed in a recent patch, namely that the healing challenge is acting wonky and the NPC you're supposed to heal pretty much dies in the blink of an eye, making the challenge impossible to pass. You can still complete the encounter afterwards (at least on hardmode, which is what we did), but it sure felt odd to encounter new bugs in old content.

The thing that I found the most striking though was that all the hardmodes we did for the various classic ops weeklies were still pretty hard, even at level sixty. As seasoned veterans of the fights we generally made it through them without too much trouble, but it someone messed up too badly it still resulted in a wipe.

I couldn't help but think that this doesn't make for a great environment for casual players interested in operations at the moment. Several fights in the new story modes are hard enough to be pug killers, yet it seems that people can't even go back and steamroll the old content for a couple of easy comms. This is quite a contrast to 2.0, when both TFB and Scum were pretty accessible on story mode, and by which point Eternity Vault and Karagga's Palace could easily be pugged even on the highest difficulties. (Explosive Conflict not so much, but that wasn't as much of an issue simply because there were other options.) I'll admit that it's been a while since I last pugged an operation myself, but at least from the outside the pug scene for operations looks pretty dire at the moment.

My 10th Level 55

Back in March I wrote a post called "Levelling My 10th Alt", in which I mused on how to keep the levelling process fresh when you've already done it more than a couple of times, and wondered which of my alts was going to be the next one to hit the level cap. As happens to me quite frequently in this game, I got distracted by max-level activities soon afterwards, and for the next six months, none of my alts really went anywhere. I think my Vanguard still hasn't finished her class story on Balmorra.

My Shadow actually hit 50 back in April but my pet tank and I felt little drive to continue levelling our consular duo for some reason and only got back to it very sporadically. This weekend however, we finally got there: while we're only at the end of Voss in terms of story progression, we went to Corellia to do some heroics for this week's conquest event, and those provided us with the last bit of XP we needed to hit 55.

I'm oddly happy to have reached the nice, round milestone of having ten characters at the level cap, and specifically to finally have a tank on Republic side. (Not to mention that Shadow/Assassin was the only advanced class I hadn't played to the cap in either of its incarnations yet.) While I levelled my Powertech in tanking spec last year, we don't run endgame content in our Imperial alt guild that often these days. I think I tanked Dread Fortress on story mode twice, Scum and Villainy once and that was it.

Based on my experiences back in WoW and in general, tanking isn't exactly my calling, but I can do a decent enough job at it with a bit of practice, and especially when it comes to alt runs tanks are often something that we're short on.

I'm also a very lazy raider to be honest, in so far as I tend to only really pay attention to the parts of each fight that are actually relevant to my role. Seeing how I'm playing a healer the vast majority of the time, with a healer main and two healer alts at 55, this means that I don't have much of  a clue about a lot of important fight mechanics. I vividly remember the first time I came along to Terror from Beyond as dps and just how much of a surprise I was in for during the second phase of the Terror fight. You mean I have to do something other than stand on a single platform most of the time and cast the occasional heal?!

While I've had a chance to do pretty much all operations as dps at least on the easier difficulties by now, tanking is still a great unknown to me when it comes to endgame. I think I'll quite enjoy getting a chance to finally unravel those old familiar fights from the one point of view from which I haven't seen them before.

(While my Guardian is one of my oldest alts, I've just never felt like speccing her for tanking. I'm not sure why; it just doesn't feel right for her.)

Victory at last

This Sunday my guild finally killed the Dread Guards in Terror from Beyond on nightmare mode. A couple of people had done it before, but for me and the majority of the group it was the first time. This finally ends a personal vendetta of mine that has lasted for more than a year.

You see, this fight was progression for us back in July last year. We spent the better part of two months wiping on it without really getting anywhere close to defeating the encounter. When Oricon came out, we were happy to move on to the two Dread operations. We did come back to TfB NiM a few times, and did better every time the more we overgeared it, but we still couldn't quite beat those bloody Dread Guards. Therefore finally achieving victory, even if it happened about a year too late, still meant a lot to me.

These guys were still no slouches either. We mostly did okay on the first two phases, where we had previous struggled with a lack of both healing and dps, something that was relatively easy to overcome with better gear. But the third phase was still manic, as there are just too many things going on at the same time: red circles, adds, Kel'sara's yellow beam, Force Leech... can't pay attention to everything at once! When we finally got the kill, half the group was already dead - and that while wearing gear that's six to twelve item levels higher than the stuff that drops in there.

I can definitely see why the hardcore raiders loved this tier - and why less than two percent of the game's population actually played it. Maybe that number is up to three percent now, who knows. Either way: haaard.

I like the little "+100 prestige" pop-up there... I didn't even notice that while playing.

I realise that once again I haven't actually written about my group's ops progression in a while. I think the last post on the subject was this one back in June, which consisted of me moaning about how the removal of the Nightmare Power buff didn't really seem to make us that much better at killing Draxus.

We did get over that hump eventually and then got up to 4/5 relatively quickly... but since then things have stalled somewhat to be honest. While we can kill the first four bosses in Dread Fortress on nightmare now, it's not always a perfectly smooth experience, usually leaving us with a limited amount of time for attempts on Brontes. We've also had many weeks when important group members couldn't make it and we had to make alternate arrangements, without even getting to the last boss. We never even tried to kill anything in Dread Palace nightmare with the Nightmare Power buff active. We gave Bestia a shot shortly after the buff was removed, but even then the fight still seemed hard enough that it didn't feel worth it to shift our progression from Fortress to Palace.

I think I'm probably not the only one who's just a bit tired of these bosses at this point - not of the game in general and not even of running operations, just of the Dread Masters. We've been fighting them for a whole year now, and even with the various levels of difficulty the experience was bound to become stale eventually. Part of me is actually glad when we can't do progression on Oricon some nights and have to entertain ourselves elsewhere for the evening, like we did in TfB on Sunday. Sure, I've done TfB way too many times as well by now, but at least not every week for the past year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There needs to be a rhythm to the damage patterns.

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

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

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

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

There should be things to do other than heal.

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

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

Dispels should be handled with care.

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

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

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

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

Dreadful and Hateful Entity

Today was an interesting day for me in SWTOR, as we set out with an allied guild to kill both the Dreadful and the Hateful Entity. We defeated the first one with ease, and came nowhere near killing the second, despite of several hours of trying.

If you've going "Dreadful/Hateful Entity, what?", you're probably not alone, as these are "secret" bosses that were shrouded in mystery for quite a long time (by MMO standards) and even now relatively little information is available about them compared to most operations bosses. Personally I never expected to get a close-up look at either, so this (somewhat unexpected) afternoon event with an allied guild that is more progressed than my own worked out nicely for me.

It all starts with Dreadtooth, the world boss in Section X. He drops an item called Dreadful Essence, which you can throw right back at him when he respawns to buff him up, stacking up to ten times. There are achievements for killing him at different buff levels, as he grows more powerful and gains extra mechanics. At level fifty it used to take a full raid group of 24 to kill him when fully powered up, though now it can be done with less. At ten stacks, he also drops a so-called Dreadful Amulet, which can be used in the cave between the first and second boss in TFB HM (16-man only) to summon the Dreadful Entity. It has an ability called "Dread Touch", which will insta-kill anyone who doesn't wear a special mask that is also dropped by Dreadtooth (at all power levels). If you manage to kill the Dreadful Entity, it then drops an item called Dreadful Orb, which in turn can be used to summon the Hateful Entity in the cave between the second and third boss in Scum NiM (again, 16-man only).

Our group started the afternoon in Section X, killing Dreadtooth over and over again to collect masks for people who didn't have one yet and to gather more Dreadful Essences to buff the boss and get a couple of Dreadful Amulets. (I'll admit that it wasn't entirely clear to me why we needed to do this as we already had at least one amulet and you only need one to actually summon the Dreadful Entity.) This got pretty boring quickly if I'm honest, simply because of Dreadtooth's half hour respawn timer, which is just short enough that you can't really go off and do much else (we did a round of dailies once, but that only took so long), but long enough that it's boring to sit around and wait. I was glad when we finally moved on to TFB.

The Dreadful Entity fight felt surprisingly easy, though I suspect that this may be down to the fact that it was originally designed for level fifty and hasn't scaled up very well. It wasn't fantastically interesting either. The entity is basically just a floating ball of lightning with bits swirling around it (like the thing you loot after having defeated the Terror from Beyond) that needs kiting around since it periodically leaves lightning circles on the floor. It also bounces people around a lot. We got it down on the first try. It also didn't drop anything other than the Dreadful Orb, which I found kind of disappointing, though we all earned the "Dread Slayer" title for killing it.

Then we moved on to Scum NiM, where we didn't do nearly as well. I think our best attempt saw us getting the Hateful Entity to 40-odd percent before its hard enrage killed everyone. I wasn't surprised, considering that in our guild we haven't even managed to kill any of the normal bosses in Scum NiM so far. Why would we fare any better against a bonus boss? The Hateful Entity definitely felt a lot harder as well - it looks just like its Dreadful counterpart, only with a red tint, and also drops lightning on the floor, but it felt - to me at least - that it bounced people around a lot more often, which made it very hard to cast anything. It also casts death marks that will insta-kill people if not dispelled, like Dread Master Tyrans does on the council fight at the end of Dread Palace, so you have to keep an eye on that as well.

The ops leader kept us "practising" for a long time even though we weren't making any progress and it eventually got very tiring, but it was still an interesting experience. I feel less ashamed about us doing so badly after having had a bit of a read around on the subject and finding out that even though it's been six months since the Hateful Entity's world first kill, even now the number of guilds that have killed it on most servers is very small. It's just that tough.

I think that both the entity fights are pretty interesting experiments on the part of Bioware. They strike me as a nod to super hardcore raiders (the kind for whom even most NiM fights are too easy), with all the trappings of a more old school raid experience: from discovering the "secret" way of gaining access to the boss to having to farm up resistance gear for the whole raid (the masks). At the same time Bioware kept the amount of assets used to create this experience to a minimum: the bosses just use an existing model with no animations, don't really have any particularly interesting mechanics and don't give any particularly great rewards (just a title, and apparently the Hateful Entity drops masks with an alternate model, using that of the Dread Masters instead of the Dread Guard look of the Dreadtooth mask). They are just hard bosses, requiring good dps, healing, positioning and co-ordination. Their sole appeal lies in the fact that their mere existence is a challenge to progression raiders: Can you beat me?

I wonder if we'll see a continuation of this entity thing, or something similar with a different theme, in the next tier of operations, or whether Bioware has decided that even with the limited investment in terms of art assets etc. it wasn't worth the effort since too few people ever saw those fights.