I've been feeling quite inspired on the video front recently, so I thought I'd make a blog post to plug my most recent creations. If you're already subscribed to my YouTube channel, you can pretty much ignore this! As I've mentioned previously, I'm primarily a blogger, not a YouTuber, so creating and promoting videos is not exactly a focus for me, but that doesn't mean that I don't want anyone to see it when I do make one.
First off we have "Getting Physical as a Juggernaut", which was one of those rare videos that were a completely spontaneous idea. Basically I had spent an afternoon doing PvP in the midbie bracket on my Juggernaut Cheriza while also being on a bit of a Dua Lipa trip and listening to Physical on repeat, and it occurred to me that leaping at and smashing into people was a valid interpretation of the phrase "getting physical"... so I edited it all together into a sort of love child between a PvP montage and a music video. It doesn't show me being particularly awesome at PvP or anything like that, it's just a bit of fun.
Another way in which I felt like getting creative recently was that for the first time in literal years I decided to make not one, but two cinematic raid videos - which is to say I went into a 16-man story mode operation and recorded the proceedings from first person view and with all UI elements hidden, just to edit the best footage together to an epic soundtrack. I do think the results are the best two videos of this type I've done so far (we did both Ravagers and Temple of Sacrifice in one evening):
As an aside, I decided to use two Two Steps From Hell songs as the soundtrack, which led to me reading up about them, and I didn't even know that they were specifically composing their creations to be used in film and video game trailers! That certainly explains why they work so well for this kind of content.
I also made a "behind the scenes" video which shows my guildies talking about silly things while epic battles were being fought on screen, plus some, let's say... less epic proceedings that I couldn't use in the main videos for obvious reasons.
Finally, I've talked about my outtakes videos before, and with this whole pandemic thing I've been spending more time with my guildies than any sane person should, resulting in lots of recordings of ridiculous conversations and silly deaths, and me putting up another compilation of this footage pretty much once a month.
Now, the primary target audience for these are my guildies and I'm sure to an outsider a lot of things simply wouldn't make sense, but I have had feedback from a few people not in my guild that they found these quite amusing as well, so I thought I'd mention them. If the humour's not your cup of tea that's completely understandable - but if you do like having a peek into the silly goings-on in a social raiding guild, here is your chance (be aware that there's some swearing, dirty jokes and stuff):
Showing posts with label the ravagers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the ravagers. Show all posts
14/06/2020
18/05/2019
Mastering Blasting
Today on "boss kills that I've been chasing for so long that I was starting to doubt they were ever going to happen", let's talk about Master and Blaster veteran mode.
Similar to Revan, we didn't even get to really work on this dynamic duo pre-KotFE because Bulo and Torque were enough of a stumbling block as it were. (We did end up killing both of those during the 3.x cycle, but it took a while.) As they became smoother kills post-KotFE, we kept coming back to Master and Blaster every now and then to try and kill them too.
You can see evidence of this in my #IntPiPoMo posts to some extent: I featured shots of us wiping to them both in 2016 and in 2017, and both years I also included pictures of people chilling between said wipes.
I don't recall us ever getting very far though... ultimately we always ended up abandoning the fight again and changing focus to work on something else because people were sick of the encounter.
The thing that stuck with me above anything else from those times is that most of us felt that the fight was frustratingly random. It's a very "dance-y" encounter with a heavy reliance on correct positioning, but there isn't a simple guide you can follow. There are a whole bunch of things you have to dodge at the same time, and they don't always line up in the same way.
- Blaster has a giant cone-shaped knockback that everyone but the tanks needs to stay out of, and even they need to be careful to always face the boss in the right direction when they are about to get hit by it or otherwise they'll go flying to their deaths.
- Master has a spinny move that engulfs him in flames, which forces the tank that has him to kite for a bit, and again, everyone else has to make sure to stay out of his way when that happens.
- Throughout the entire fight, mortars keep landing on the platform, covering a large chunk of the floor in giant orange circles that everyone has to stay out of.
- A couple of times throughout the fight, an ability that's aptly called "Rain of Pain" will be triggered which additionally covers most of the platform in a big red stripe that will most likely kill you if you get caught in it.
- And to top if off, players will periodically have grenades attached to them, which eventually explode for a bit of damage and knock you down... more importantly though, if two players with grenades get too close to each other, they explode for more damage and get sent flying.
I'm sure you can see how all of this together could pose a challenge. Taken on its own, none of the mechanics are hard: Don't step in the orange circles. Don't stand on a red stripe. Don't stand too close to other people. However, add it all together and there'll be moments where you're trying to dodge out of the red, but the "safe" area is mostly taken up by an orange circle instead, and there are two others right in front of you and you know that if you run into them you'll just blow up and die... and so on and so forth.
As I said, we mostly used to complain about how random it all was. With so much going on at once, sometimes things just come together in a bad way and then there's nothing you can do, right? Stupid RNG. And then we'd try again, and wipe just the same the next time.
This time though, it felt to me like our approach was different... or maybe it's just me who was seeing things differently. But as we got closer and closer to the kill, it was less of a "hell yeah" feeling for me, and more like Neo suddenly realising that he can see the Matrix. It wasn't all random. In fact, it was all very predictable - you just had to allow yourself to accept that and to realise that there were strict rules for dealing with all the different permutations. When mortars land over there, I move here. When they land over here, I stand exactly there, where there's a small spot that is always safe. And so on and so forth.
It was pretty magical to be honest. It felt less like we were beating the fight, and more like we were transcending it - seeing all the patterns and knowing just how to react to every single one of them.
For the experts among my readers, this does indeed mean that we were doing the fight "the hard way". Some time ago, a group of my guildies led by someone very experienced with the operation beat the fight with what I consider a somewhat cheesy tactic that requires a Guardian tank to use certain utilities and abilities to solo-tank the boss and eliminate a lot of the movement requirements for the rest of the group.
We tried that, but the onus of performing the cheesy Guardian magic fell on Mr Commando and he was not happy with it. Having never done it before, he kept making mistakes and wiping us... over and over, while the rest of us literally just stood there and watched him, because this particular tactic didn't require us to do anything else. It was... a bit awkward, and didn't really feel like what raiding should be about. We ended up abandoning that plan in order to go back to working on the fight as a team - making equal contributions and getting equal chances to mess up (and boy did we make use of those). Just one of those little things that I love about my guildies. We do things our own way.
Coratanni was a massive letdown afterwards by the way! We briefly read up on what we needed to do and then killed her and Ruugar on the second try, with most of us not even fully understanding what was going on with some of the mechanics. But so it goes.
Similar to Revan, we didn't even get to really work on this dynamic duo pre-KotFE because Bulo and Torque were enough of a stumbling block as it were. (We did end up killing both of those during the 3.x cycle, but it took a while.) As they became smoother kills post-KotFE, we kept coming back to Master and Blaster every now and then to try and kill them too.
You can see evidence of this in my #IntPiPoMo posts to some extent: I featured shots of us wiping to them both in 2016 and in 2017, and both years I also included pictures of people chilling between said wipes.
This picture still brings back fond memories every time.
I don't recall us ever getting very far though... ultimately we always ended up abandoning the fight again and changing focus to work on something else because people were sick of the encounter.
The thing that stuck with me above anything else from those times is that most of us felt that the fight was frustratingly random. It's a very "dance-y" encounter with a heavy reliance on correct positioning, but there isn't a simple guide you can follow. There are a whole bunch of things you have to dodge at the same time, and they don't always line up in the same way.
- Blaster has a giant cone-shaped knockback that everyone but the tanks needs to stay out of, and even they need to be careful to always face the boss in the right direction when they are about to get hit by it or otherwise they'll go flying to their deaths.
- Master has a spinny move that engulfs him in flames, which forces the tank that has him to kite for a bit, and again, everyone else has to make sure to stay out of his way when that happens.
- Throughout the entire fight, mortars keep landing on the platform, covering a large chunk of the floor in giant orange circles that everyone has to stay out of.
- A couple of times throughout the fight, an ability that's aptly called "Rain of Pain" will be triggered which additionally covers most of the platform in a big red stripe that will most likely kill you if you get caught in it.
- And to top if off, players will periodically have grenades attached to them, which eventually explode for a bit of damage and knock you down... more importantly though, if two players with grenades get too close to each other, they explode for more damage and get sent flying.
I'm sure you can see how all of this together could pose a challenge. Taken on its own, none of the mechanics are hard: Don't step in the orange circles. Don't stand on a red stripe. Don't stand too close to other people. However, add it all together and there'll be moments where you're trying to dodge out of the red, but the "safe" area is mostly taken up by an orange circle instead, and there are two others right in front of you and you know that if you run into them you'll just blow up and die... and so on and so forth.
As I said, we mostly used to complain about how random it all was. With so much going on at once, sometimes things just come together in a bad way and then there's nothing you can do, right? Stupid RNG. And then we'd try again, and wipe just the same the next time.
This time though, it felt to me like our approach was different... or maybe it's just me who was seeing things differently. But as we got closer and closer to the kill, it was less of a "hell yeah" feeling for me, and more like Neo suddenly realising that he can see the Matrix. It wasn't all random. In fact, it was all very predictable - you just had to allow yourself to accept that and to realise that there were strict rules for dealing with all the different permutations. When mortars land over there, I move here. When they land over here, I stand exactly there, where there's a small spot that is always safe. And so on and so forth.
It was pretty magical to be honest. It felt less like we were beating the fight, and more like we were transcending it - seeing all the patterns and knowing just how to react to every single one of them.
For the experts among my readers, this does indeed mean that we were doing the fight "the hard way". Some time ago, a group of my guildies led by someone very experienced with the operation beat the fight with what I consider a somewhat cheesy tactic that requires a Guardian tank to use certain utilities and abilities to solo-tank the boss and eliminate a lot of the movement requirements for the rest of the group.
We tried that, but the onus of performing the cheesy Guardian magic fell on Mr Commando and he was not happy with it. Having never done it before, he kept making mistakes and wiping us... over and over, while the rest of us literally just stood there and watched him, because this particular tactic didn't require us to do anything else. It was... a bit awkward, and didn't really feel like what raiding should be about. We ended up abandoning that plan in order to go back to working on the fight as a team - making equal contributions and getting equal chances to mess up (and boy did we make use of those). Just one of those little things that I love about my guildies. We do things our own way.
Coratanni was a massive letdown afterwards by the way! We briefly read up on what we needed to do and then killed her and Ruugar on the second try, with most of us not even fully understanding what was going on with some of the mechanics. But so it goes.
30/11/2017
Day 10: Death #IntPiPoMo
Wondering what the hashtag in the title is all about? Click here.
Want to know all the themes that I have used for my
10 Days of SWTOR Screenshots? You can find the full list here.
Time for my last IntPiPoMo post! Don't worry, thoughts on the new patch will follow next month - which starts tomorrow!
For a change of pace, I thought I'd start the death-themed post not with one of my own deaths, but instead with that of an NPC. Bioware sure allowed the player characters to run amok during KotET, letting us kill people left and right if we wanted to do so!
I already posted pictures of my guild wiping on hardmode Master and Blaster last year. The more things change, the more they stay the same. I just liked how we remained on fire here even after death, because clearly we weren't dead enough yet.
I saved this screenshot because I liked how my character managed to look somewhat dejected even in death. Damn that bonus boss in master mode Crisis on Umbara...
This one I liked because generally when you fall to your death on Esne and Aivela, you just die instantly without actually reaching the floor, so I was amused and surprised when I actually did hit rock bottom for a change and got to have a look around the scenery there for a bit.
A regular wipe on Esne and Aivela looks more like this instead. Still haven't killed them on veteran mode, but we also decided to give these two a break for a while some time ago. We'll get them eventually.
Final IntPiPoMo count: 77
Time for my last IntPiPoMo post! Don't worry, thoughts on the new patch will follow next month - which starts tomorrow!
For a change of pace, I thought I'd start the death-themed post not with one of my own deaths, but instead with that of an NPC. Bioware sure allowed the player characters to run amok during KotET, letting us kill people left and right if we wanted to do so!
I already posted pictures of my guild wiping on hardmode Master and Blaster last year. The more things change, the more they stay the same. I just liked how we remained on fire here even after death, because clearly we weren't dead enough yet.
I saved this screenshot because I liked how my character managed to look somewhat dejected even in death. Damn that bonus boss in master mode Crisis on Umbara...
This one I liked because generally when you fall to your death on Esne and Aivela, you just die instantly without actually reaching the floor, so I was amused and surprised when I actually did hit rock bottom for a change and got to have a look around the scenery there for a bit.
A regular wipe on Esne and Aivela looks more like this instead. Still haven't killed them on veteran mode, but we also decided to give these two a break for a while some time ago. We'll get them eventually.
Final IntPiPoMo count: 77
14/12/2016
Control Alt Escape
I feel a bit bad that all my recent posts have been about Galactic Command this, CXP that, especially since the overall tone of said posts has been rather unhappy. While I'm not afraid to offer criticism when I feel that things aren't done well, I do prefer to try to maintain a positive tone overall. I wouldn't be playing the game if I didn't still enjoy it!
The problem with Galactic Command is that it's hard to escape from if you're not happy with it. The very thing Bioware seems to have taken so much pride in - that it's tied into almost every aspect of the game, save maybe for roleplaying and on-rails space combat - makes it very hard to ignore the system if you spend time playing a max-level character at all, even if it frustrates you.
I was thinking about writing up a diary of my second week of Galactic Command, similar to the format of my post about week one, but this turned out to be unnecessary for the simple reason that the entirety of my second week of Galactic Command could easily be summed up in a single sentence: I earned 28 more Command ranks/crates, claimed a couple of schematics because I enjoy collecting them for my alts' crew skills, and destroyed everything else. Apparently I really was incredibly lucky to get six useful pieces out of my first week's 38 crates, and this luck has now run out. People have been talking about the difficulty of getting "that last piece you're missing", but here I spent a whole week grinding, still wearing level 65 gear in eight of my fourteen gear slots, and couldn't get a single upgrade for any of them. I think at one point I disintegrated four copies of the same green assault cannon in a row. I almost feel sad for whoever at Bioware thought this up. Did they really think people would be happy to be rewarded with a box that contains a green worse than their gear from the previous expansion, a reputation trophy for a faction they maxed out three years ago, a pair of orange bracers and a companion gift? I don't even know.
I've talked about how being in a guild that raids results in a certain amount of social pressure to do as much as you can to upgrade your gear at a solid pace, but the past week has actually worked against that somewhat because it showed me that while time spent on an alt might feel "wasted" in terms of progression, time spent on your main can end up feeling wasted just as well under this new system. So I finally gave in and decided to devote some time to an alt to get away from that darned CXP bar.
I decided to focus on my Marauder first to see a different side of Knights of the Eternal Throne, but as I've previously done on similar occasions, I felt the urge to "clear out" her quest log a bit first, which in this case meant doing the last couple of Alliance alerts she hadn't done yet. One of these was the one for Qyzen Fess, which actually had me grinding "Worthy Jagannath Targets" for the first time, as I'd only recruited him via the world boss kills previously. It wasn't actually as bad as I had feared, especially when I found this useful guide on Reddit. The locations listed there weren't nearly as overfarmed as the ones recommended by Dulfy, probably because it's harder to actually read written words than to look at a picture of a map and go to where the dot is.
While traversing the plains of Hoth, I also queued for a story mode operation through the group finder and ended up in a Ravagers pug. I was a bit hesitant since a previous unsuccessful run that had failed on Master and Blaster was still vividly on my mind. I needn't have worried about that though, because this time we couldn't even kill the first boss - she enraged with twenty percent of her health left. I suspect that pugging story modes will remain painful for a while yet. After that wipe I as well as some other people bowed out politely - no point in "working on it" when already the first boss is clearly so far out of the group's reach.
Finally, I also replayed the HK bonus chapter for the first time - even though I had enjoyed it the first time, I had somehow never quite gotten around to replaying it. Like his dark mistress, this version of HK took all the "evil" choices, and by the end I felt like a true monster, having actually killed off a certain incredibly cheerful character...
None of these things were amazingly rewarding - heck, the attempt at the operation only earned me a repair bill and I suppose some knowledge about the current pugging scene on TRE. But it was still such a relief to feel in full control of what I was going to get for my efforts again.
One can only hope that Bioware will come around about Galactic Command sooner rather than later. Loving to play alts is one thing, but when I feel that I need them to "escape" from my main, that's a very bad sign.
The problem with Galactic Command is that it's hard to escape from if you're not happy with it. The very thing Bioware seems to have taken so much pride in - that it's tied into almost every aspect of the game, save maybe for roleplaying and on-rails space combat - makes it very hard to ignore the system if you spend time playing a max-level character at all, even if it frustrates you.
I was thinking about writing up a diary of my second week of Galactic Command, similar to the format of my post about week one, but this turned out to be unnecessary for the simple reason that the entirety of my second week of Galactic Command could easily be summed up in a single sentence: I earned 28 more Command ranks/crates, claimed a couple of schematics because I enjoy collecting them for my alts' crew skills, and destroyed everything else. Apparently I really was incredibly lucky to get six useful pieces out of my first week's 38 crates, and this luck has now run out. People have been talking about the difficulty of getting "that last piece you're missing", but here I spent a whole week grinding, still wearing level 65 gear in eight of my fourteen gear slots, and couldn't get a single upgrade for any of them. I think at one point I disintegrated four copies of the same green assault cannon in a row. I almost feel sad for whoever at Bioware thought this up. Did they really think people would be happy to be rewarded with a box that contains a green worse than their gear from the previous expansion, a reputation trophy for a faction they maxed out three years ago, a pair of orange bracers and a companion gift? I don't even know.
I've talked about how being in a guild that raids results in a certain amount of social pressure to do as much as you can to upgrade your gear at a solid pace, but the past week has actually worked against that somewhat because it showed me that while time spent on an alt might feel "wasted" in terms of progression, time spent on your main can end up feeling wasted just as well under this new system. So I finally gave in and decided to devote some time to an alt to get away from that darned CXP bar.
I decided to focus on my Marauder first to see a different side of Knights of the Eternal Throne, but as I've previously done on similar occasions, I felt the urge to "clear out" her quest log a bit first, which in this case meant doing the last couple of Alliance alerts she hadn't done yet. One of these was the one for Qyzen Fess, which actually had me grinding "Worthy Jagannath Targets" for the first time, as I'd only recruited him via the world boss kills previously. It wasn't actually as bad as I had feared, especially when I found this useful guide on Reddit. The locations listed there weren't nearly as overfarmed as the ones recommended by Dulfy, probably because it's harder to actually read written words than to look at a picture of a map and go to where the dot is.
While traversing the plains of Hoth, I also queued for a story mode operation through the group finder and ended up in a Ravagers pug. I was a bit hesitant since a previous unsuccessful run that had failed on Master and Blaster was still vividly on my mind. I needn't have worried about that though, because this time we couldn't even kill the first boss - she enraged with twenty percent of her health left. I suspect that pugging story modes will remain painful for a while yet. After that wipe I as well as some other people bowed out politely - no point in "working on it" when already the first boss is clearly so far out of the group's reach.
Finally, I also replayed the HK bonus chapter for the first time - even though I had enjoyed it the first time, I had somehow never quite gotten around to replaying it. Like his dark mistress, this version of HK took all the "evil" choices, and by the end I felt like a true monster, having actually killed off a certain incredibly cheerful character...
None of these things were amazingly rewarding - heck, the attempt at the operation only earned me a repair bill and I suppose some knowledge about the current pugging scene on TRE. But it was still such a relief to feel in full control of what I was going to get for my efforts again.
One can only hope that Bioware will come around about Galactic Command sooner rather than later. Loving to play alts is one thing, but when I feel that I need them to "escape" from my main, that's a very bad sign.
21/06/2016
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.
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.
14/09/2015
In the News: Saying Goodbye to NiMs, Major Conquest Changes Coming
While I was trying to come up with a title for this post and eventually settled on putting "saying goodbye to NiMs" in there, I realised that I never commented on the piece of news which came out of Gamescom and announced the "real" goodbye to NiMs: Bioware stating that they won't bother creating nightmare modes for any new operations going forward. I didn't really see anyone else talk about it either. Not even a quick scan of the Dulfy comments on that post revealed any outrage about it. I guess it's because that comment only served to confirm what a lot of us had already been expecting for a while. (Except for a certain guildie of mine, who was convinced that despite of the difficulty of ToS and Ravagers hardmode, it would be no trouble for Bioware at all to add another difficulty on top of it. We told him that he was nuts.)
If operations take up too many development resources relative to how many people play them, taking out the top difficulty makes the most sense. Progression raiders can't even complain about that right now because ToS and Ravagers hardmode were already more difficult than some previous nightmare modes anyway, so it's not as if players weren't being challenged. It was the middle-of-the-road guilds that ended up with the short end of the stick this tier, facing a wacky progression curve that made it hard to stay motivated. We will see if Bioware addresses this whenever they release their next new operation. Either way, nightmare mode going away was a surprise to very few of us.
The latest bit of news - which is what I actually meant to refer to in the post title - is about something slightly different however. As a reminder, Bioware said that in Knights of the Fallen Empire, all operations currently in the game will be endgame content again, on all existing difficulty levels. Except, well... Eric Musco came out with a post last week that stated something that a lot of us already knew, which is that Eternity Vault and Karagga's Palace NiM don't really measure up to nightmare modes that were released later, since Bioware's first attempts at nightmare modes included no new mechanics, just bigger numbers on everything.
"With the changes we are making in Fallen Empire, all Operations will now be at max level, this means the differences between Hard and Nightmare EV and KP, just don’t stack up against the difficulty differences found in other Operations," he continued. Awesome, I thought - does that mean they'll be updating these to include some new mechanics? Nope. Instead they'll simply remove them so that all the remaining nightmare modes will be at least roughly on par.
That wasn't what I would have hoped for, but I can hardly claim to be upset either. Of course it helps that I've had three and a half years to run this content over and over again, so that I maxed out all my Eternity Vault and Karagga's Palace achievements ages ago. But to anyone who might be worried about missing out: Well, first off you still have the chance to run these now, as they only require a small group by now and are ridiculously easy with players being ten levels higher. But more importantly, Musco speaks the truth. EV and KP NiM are really exactly the same as on story and hard, only with higher numbers. No actual "content" is being removed here. If you've never been, feel free to watch this 2013 video of mine summarising a guild run of both KP and EV NiM (warning: some foul language):
The lesson here is: 1) People in my guild are silly. 2) There really isn't anything in there that you won't still also be able to see on the lower difficulties.
The other piece of news that Musco shared with us is that major changes are coming to conquests. Several events will have their personal targets lowered (though not Total Galactic War), but most importantly, crafting will be turned into a one-time bonus. My gut reaction is that this is a great change, even if I'm not sure if my small guild will ever be able to make it onto the scoreboard again with no crafting. My days of finishing a Total Galactic War with six characters having hit their target are certainly over.
But really, it was not a very exciting way of playing. Being able to accumulate oodles of points for a minimal time investment was just way overpowered. Now you'll have to actually play to hit your target, always. I've heard people say that this will make it even harder for small guilds to achieve a place on the scoreboard, but I'm not so sure about that. What it really does is cut down on the advantages of having lots of alts and being rich, and I see no reason to assume that people with those attributes are more likely to be in a small guild than in a large one. Big guilds have also had people crafting for silly amounts of points. And well, when it comes down to having more active players, bigger guilds have always had an advantage. Either way, I'm curious to see what sort of scores we'll actually see on the conquest board after this change. I'm pretty sure that the times of guilds finishing with ten million points or more are over.
Even if I think that the proposed changes sound good for the game overall, I doubt that they will really do much to alleviate my own conquest fatigue. With no new incentives I don't think that I will suddenly start working on my personal target with more gusto again, but I've heard that in KotFE one of the rewards will be rare crafting materials that you won't be able to get any other way, which would certainly be exciting. Personally I also think that they should look into adding more repeatable PvE objectives. But mostly I'm just happy to see that they are still paying attention to conquests and trying to improve them, even if activities like this are not going to be their main focus in the upcoming expansion.
If operations take up too many development resources relative to how many people play them, taking out the top difficulty makes the most sense. Progression raiders can't even complain about that right now because ToS and Ravagers hardmode were already more difficult than some previous nightmare modes anyway, so it's not as if players weren't being challenged. It was the middle-of-the-road guilds that ended up with the short end of the stick this tier, facing a wacky progression curve that made it hard to stay motivated. We will see if Bioware addresses this whenever they release their next new operation. Either way, nightmare mode going away was a surprise to very few of us.
The latest bit of news - which is what I actually meant to refer to in the post title - is about something slightly different however. As a reminder, Bioware said that in Knights of the Fallen Empire, all operations currently in the game will be endgame content again, on all existing difficulty levels. Except, well... Eric Musco came out with a post last week that stated something that a lot of us already knew, which is that Eternity Vault and Karagga's Palace NiM don't really measure up to nightmare modes that were released later, since Bioware's first attempts at nightmare modes included no new mechanics, just bigger numbers on everything.
"With the changes we are making in Fallen Empire, all Operations will now be at max level, this means the differences between Hard and Nightmare EV and KP, just don’t stack up against the difficulty differences found in other Operations," he continued. Awesome, I thought - does that mean they'll be updating these to include some new mechanics? Nope. Instead they'll simply remove them so that all the remaining nightmare modes will be at least roughly on par.
That wasn't what I would have hoped for, but I can hardly claim to be upset either. Of course it helps that I've had three and a half years to run this content over and over again, so that I maxed out all my Eternity Vault and Karagga's Palace achievements ages ago. But to anyone who might be worried about missing out: Well, first off you still have the chance to run these now, as they only require a small group by now and are ridiculously easy with players being ten levels higher. But more importantly, Musco speaks the truth. EV and KP NiM are really exactly the same as on story and hard, only with higher numbers. No actual "content" is being removed here. If you've never been, feel free to watch this 2013 video of mine summarising a guild run of both KP and EV NiM (warning: some foul language):
The lesson here is: 1) People in my guild are silly. 2) There really isn't anything in there that you won't still also be able to see on the lower difficulties.
The other piece of news that Musco shared with us is that major changes are coming to conquests. Several events will have their personal targets lowered (though not Total Galactic War), but most importantly, crafting will be turned into a one-time bonus. My gut reaction is that this is a great change, even if I'm not sure if my small guild will ever be able to make it onto the scoreboard again with no crafting. My days of finishing a Total Galactic War with six characters having hit their target are certainly over.
But really, it was not a very exciting way of playing. Being able to accumulate oodles of points for a minimal time investment was just way overpowered. Now you'll have to actually play to hit your target, always. I've heard people say that this will make it even harder for small guilds to achieve a place on the scoreboard, but I'm not so sure about that. What it really does is cut down on the advantages of having lots of alts and being rich, and I see no reason to assume that people with those attributes are more likely to be in a small guild than in a large one. Big guilds have also had people crafting for silly amounts of points. And well, when it comes down to having more active players, bigger guilds have always had an advantage. Either way, I'm curious to see what sort of scores we'll actually see on the conquest board after this change. I'm pretty sure that the times of guilds finishing with ten million points or more are over.
Even if I think that the proposed changes sound good for the game overall, I doubt that they will really do much to alleviate my own conquest fatigue. With no new incentives I don't think that I will suddenly start working on my personal target with more gusto again, but I've heard that in KotFE one of the rewards will be rare crafting materials that you won't be able to get any other way, which would certainly be exciting. Personally I also think that they should look into adding more repeatable PvE objectives. But mostly I'm just happy to see that they are still paying attention to conquests and trying to improve them, even if activities like this are not going to be their main focus in the upcoming expansion.
21/06/2015
Back to Old Haunts
I'm still very excited about Knights of the Fallen Empire, but I feel that at the moment, too much about it is still unknown. Speculation like me commenting about the possibility of faction barriers disappearing in my last post can end up being refuted the very next day. The devs have promised that they will give us more information on all aspects of the new expansion over the course of the next couple of weeks/months, so I guess I'll wait until that time to comment on the more important changes.
Meanwhile, it's been almost two months since I expressed some dissatisfaction about the current difficulty level of operations. As is sod's law, we got a new boss kill two days after I made that post, but since then things have been stalling again. Our attempts on the Revanite Commanders always fall apart in the last phase. On Torque we haven't had as much time to practice since he was bugged for a while so that his flame vents were invisible, but he feels like a very tough fight too. I think there's still a chance that we might get either of those two fights down before the expansion, but it's not guaranteed. Either way, the fights after that are guaranteed to be road blocks for us, as they are known to cause even players who are much more skilled than us considerable difficulties.
The release of the Monolith boss on Ziost didn't offer much of distraction either. On normal mode he doesn't drop anything we can use, and on hard mode he's just as hard, if not harder, than the bosses we are struggling with right now (if you are following the mechanics as intended). There's been talk about how you could ignore the mechanics and brute-force your way through the fight with an extra healer, but I've heard people say that this has finally been patched out now... either way it's not a particularly appealing progression path either.
I've really been struggling to stay motivated and maintain my operations attendance, especially with the way Bioware has been keeping quiet about when we can expect new group content to dig our teeth into. At least we know now that things will be shaken up in October, even if we don't know what Bioware's exact plans for operations are in the expansion.
Fortunately my guildies and I seem to have found a way to distract ourselves while still keeping busy within the game, and that's by going back to old operations and knocking out achievements that we haven't got yet. We're not the only ones who have chosen to go down this path either. Pre 3.0, we were 4/5 in Dread Fortress NiM and hadn't killed anything in Dread Palace NiM. We've gone back there a few times since then and killed Bestia, Tyrans, and made some very good progress on Brontes. After how sluggish things have been in "proper" progression, it's been great fun to make so much more tangible progress again in such a short time, even if it's on old content.
It's been fun too - the fight mechanics are far from negligible even now, but considerably less deadly, thanks to our increased health pools. Combine this with dps requirements which are much easier to reach with our higher level gear, and you get a fun learning experience for all. I found Dread Master Tyrans to be a particularly fun fight, since you can now mess it up in a lot of (often amusing) ways before wiping the group: unintentionally falling down, removing the wrong tile, placing fires all over the place etc. It was good for quite a few laughs.
Meanwhile, it's been almost two months since I expressed some dissatisfaction about the current difficulty level of operations. As is sod's law, we got a new boss kill two days after I made that post, but since then things have been stalling again. Our attempts on the Revanite Commanders always fall apart in the last phase. On Torque we haven't had as much time to practice since he was bugged for a while so that his flame vents were invisible, but he feels like a very tough fight too. I think there's still a chance that we might get either of those two fights down before the expansion, but it's not guaranteed. Either way, the fights after that are guaranteed to be road blocks for us, as they are known to cause even players who are much more skilled than us considerable difficulties.
The release of the Monolith boss on Ziost didn't offer much of distraction either. On normal mode he doesn't drop anything we can use, and on hard mode he's just as hard, if not harder, than the bosses we are struggling with right now (if you are following the mechanics as intended). There's been talk about how you could ignore the mechanics and brute-force your way through the fight with an extra healer, but I've heard people say that this has finally been patched out now... either way it's not a particularly appealing progression path either.
I've really been struggling to stay motivated and maintain my operations attendance, especially with the way Bioware has been keeping quiet about when we can expect new group content to dig our teeth into. At least we know now that things will be shaken up in October, even if we don't know what Bioware's exact plans for operations are in the expansion.
Fortunately my guildies and I seem to have found a way to distract ourselves while still keeping busy within the game, and that's by going back to old operations and knocking out achievements that we haven't got yet. We're not the only ones who have chosen to go down this path either. Pre 3.0, we were 4/5 in Dread Fortress NiM and hadn't killed anything in Dread Palace NiM. We've gone back there a few times since then and killed Bestia, Tyrans, and made some very good progress on Brontes. After how sluggish things have been in "proper" progression, it's been great fun to make so much more tangible progress again in such a short time, even if it's on old content.
It's been fun too - the fight mechanics are far from negligible even now, but considerably less deadly, thanks to our increased health pools. Combine this with dps requirements which are much easier to reach with our higher level gear, and you get a fun learning experience for all. I found Dread Master Tyrans to be a particularly fun fight, since you can now mess it up in a lot of (often amusing) ways before wiping the group: unintentionally falling down, removing the wrong tile, placing fires all over the place etc. It was good for quite a few laughs.
Not even sure how we did that...
How are other guilds dealing with stalling progression and having little information about what's to come?
24/04/2015
State of Operations
I'm mostly logging in for operations at the moment, and that's okay. What's not okay, or at least not great, is that ops have been nothing but a struggle for weeks and it's really starting to get people down. I blame the difficulty.
Now, before you tell me that I need to learn to play, let me explain a bit. For most of the time that I've been with my guild, I've thought of it as a hardmode guild. Just based on experience, hardmode operations are where we spend most of our time making smooth progress while still being challenged. Story modes are easy for us. Nightmare mode is the kind of content we'll stick our noses in once we've cleared hardmode, and while we'll manage to kill a couple of bosses, it takes us very long and I don't think we've ever finished a NiM operation before the next raid tier was released and allowed us to overgear the content.
I think it's okay to acknowledge these limitations. The vast majority of the player base has them. Unless you're in a small number of top guilds, you're always going to run up against a progression wall eventually where the difficulty of the content is increasingly too high to overcome for the combined skill level of you and your guildies. It's a normal part of engaging in this kind of endgame. It is however also a risk, because if people run into a wall for too long, they get frustrated and stop logging in.
From Bioware's point of view, the trick is therefore to combine the inclusion of challenging content with giving people the ability to progress for as long as possible without hitting a wall. Tiered difficulty levels are a great way of achieving this, because it adds several different steps for people to climb and therefore stretches things out. Ideally, you then release a whole new operation before people have had time to get frustrated with whatever difficulty mode they can't beat.
Ravagers and Temple of Sacrifice have been very unforgiving in that regard. I've said from the start that I feel that their story modes are too harsh in parts and are likely to turn casual raiders off the whole thing before they even have a chance to get started. HealingSWTOR also asked back in February whether the operations are too hard and included the hardmodes in his question. Many experienced raiders have noted that the hardmodes for Ravagers and Temple of Sacrifice are more on par with the difficulty of nightmare mode in previous tiers. So when you have a (slightly too diffcult for what it's supposed to be) story mode, immediately followed by what's effectively a nightmare mode, where does that leave a hardmode guild? Not in a happy place.
For comparison, I've looked at what I posted about Dread Fortress and Palace back when they were current content - we had to put up with them for over a year after all. From what I can tell, it took my ops group a little less than six months to clear both operations on hardmode. That means that on average, we killed a new boss every two to three weeks. To me, that's pretty good in the sense that it's neither so fast that things feel too easy, nor so slow that frustration starts to build up. But then we moved on to nightmare, and things started to slow down. Nefra was comparatively easy, but Draxus took us something like two months to get down, and even as we managed to tick off a couple more boss kills, we couldn't always get them down consistently, which made it all the harder to actually get any time on later bosses that we were supposed to progress on. In hindsight I'm pretty amazed that we managed to keep ourselves busy with nightmare modes for more than half a year under those circumstances, without going completely bonkers or having people rage-quit en masse. That level of difficulty just isn't our forte and we simply spent way too much time wiping and not achieving anything for it to be a lot of fun.
And now? Well, we cleared the story modes in the first week and got HM Sparky and Malaphar down quickly. That was back in December. For the last four months however we've been struggling with what comes after. We have got both Bulo and Sword Squadron down, however it's still incredibly hard to repeat those kills, to the point where we haven't really had a chance to really work on the third boss in either operation.
This shouldn't be the state of things less than five months after the launch of two new operations. It really makes me miss hardmodes that are more tuned to our skill level. I don't begrudge the NiM raiders their fun, but at the moment I can't help but feel a little left out in terms of endgame content that suits my abilities. I really, really can't wait for the next operation, and I very much hope that Bioware will reconsider their tuning for that one.
Now, before you tell me that I need to learn to play, let me explain a bit. For most of the time that I've been with my guild, I've thought of it as a hardmode guild. Just based on experience, hardmode operations are where we spend most of our time making smooth progress while still being challenged. Story modes are easy for us. Nightmare mode is the kind of content we'll stick our noses in once we've cleared hardmode, and while we'll manage to kill a couple of bosses, it takes us very long and I don't think we've ever finished a NiM operation before the next raid tier was released and allowed us to overgear the content.
I think it's okay to acknowledge these limitations. The vast majority of the player base has them. Unless you're in a small number of top guilds, you're always going to run up against a progression wall eventually where the difficulty of the content is increasingly too high to overcome for the combined skill level of you and your guildies. It's a normal part of engaging in this kind of endgame. It is however also a risk, because if people run into a wall for too long, they get frustrated and stop logging in.
As it turns out, Sparky was the easy part...
From Bioware's point of view, the trick is therefore to combine the inclusion of challenging content with giving people the ability to progress for as long as possible without hitting a wall. Tiered difficulty levels are a great way of achieving this, because it adds several different steps for people to climb and therefore stretches things out. Ideally, you then release a whole new operation before people have had time to get frustrated with whatever difficulty mode they can't beat.
Ravagers and Temple of Sacrifice have been very unforgiving in that regard. I've said from the start that I feel that their story modes are too harsh in parts and are likely to turn casual raiders off the whole thing before they even have a chance to get started. HealingSWTOR also asked back in February whether the operations are too hard and included the hardmodes in his question. Many experienced raiders have noted that the hardmodes for Ravagers and Temple of Sacrifice are more on par with the difficulty of nightmare mode in previous tiers. So when you have a (slightly too diffcult for what it's supposed to be) story mode, immediately followed by what's effectively a nightmare mode, where does that leave a hardmode guild? Not in a happy place.
For comparison, I've looked at what I posted about Dread Fortress and Palace back when they were current content - we had to put up with them for over a year after all. From what I can tell, it took my ops group a little less than six months to clear both operations on hardmode. That means that on average, we killed a new boss every two to three weeks. To me, that's pretty good in the sense that it's neither so fast that things feel too easy, nor so slow that frustration starts to build up. But then we moved on to nightmare, and things started to slow down. Nefra was comparatively easy, but Draxus took us something like two months to get down, and even as we managed to tick off a couple more boss kills, we couldn't always get them down consistently, which made it all the harder to actually get any time on later bosses that we were supposed to progress on. In hindsight I'm pretty amazed that we managed to keep ourselves busy with nightmare modes for more than half a year under those circumstances, without going completely bonkers or having people rage-quit en masse. That level of difficulty just isn't our forte and we simply spent way too much time wiping and not achieving anything for it to be a lot of fun.
And now? Well, we cleared the story modes in the first week and got HM Sparky and Malaphar down quickly. That was back in December. For the last four months however we've been struggling with what comes after. We have got both Bulo and Sword Squadron down, however it's still incredibly hard to repeat those kills, to the point where we haven't really had a chance to really work on the third boss in either operation.
You can do it! Or can you?
09/12/2014
New Ops: Good Stuff, Needs Some Work
I've always loved what Bioware does with operations. Their newest ones are solid additions to the lot, but I have to admit that for once my first impression was immediately marred by a couple of things that I found worth criticising.
We knew that 3.0 would add two new operations to the game. It kind of went without saying that at least one of them would feature Revan in some way, but if the other one didn't... what could it possibly be about to rival Revan in importance? Apparently the answer is: random pirates.
The Ravagers
The intro mission and entrance to this operation are located in a corner of the slums under Rishi, hidden away so well that I completely missed them during my first tour of the planet.
The intro basically consists of a gruff pirate walking up to you to complain about how his second-in-command backstabbed him, and you offer to help him if he will do some work for the Republic in turn (or for the Empire I presume, depending on how you roll). This felt slightly weird to me. We've never had an operation before that wasn't about something at least moderately threatening to the galaxy as a whole, be it ancient Rakata force users, scheming Hutts or servants of the Dread Masters. I suppose I can't blame the devs for making us face a lesser threat for a change but... seriously, random pirates? That barely would have been enough to justify a flashpoint in the past!
In terms of gameplay, Ravagers is what I would call a cinematic operation in the style of Scum and Villainy, meaning that you get the feeling that you're not just moving between bosses but actually advancing the story along each step of the way. For example you end up hijacking the enemy captain's ship over the course of the operation. Mostly this is well done, except for the ending, where a sudden twist occurs that is only really conveyed via a brief voice-over in the middle of the last boss fight and which is easy to miss. This has the potential to cause a little confusion over what just happened.
Temple of Sacrifice
This is the "Revan operation" and has a more traditional "lair feel" to it, aka: "go in and kill various minions that stand in your way until you get to the big bad at the end". This isn't a bad thing and it's done well enough, even if I feel that the more cinematic style is better at playing towards Bioware's strengths.
The final encounter has a pretty epic feel to it without being overly difficult. Having to move in three dimensions reminded me of Soa (whom I personally loved), even if you're going up rather than down this time. (And beware the stair boss!)
Overall I liked both operations and they seemed solid in terms of story. Some bugs diminished the experience, but we didn't encounter anything game-breaking. The last bosses of both ops have been reported to sometimes drop no loot, which my guild experienced first-hand in Temple of Sacrifice. There were also little niggles that made the experience feel a little unpolished, such as being unable to bioanalyse the animal mobs in Ravagers, or Temple of Sacrifice dropping the same decoration item as Ravagers. (Revanites should not have their pockets full of Rishi dancer holograms. Just saying.)
My biggest gripe however is something completely different: the difficulty. Don't get me wrong, my guild managed to clear both ops in the first week, but there were a couple of bosses that gave us considerable difficulties. 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. Every pug has "that guy" who stands in red circles all the time... and usually it's okay because even if "that guy" dies, the rest of the group can complete the encounter with a couple of people down. Mechanics such as the Underlurker's "cross", where a single person standing in the wrong spot can pretty much wipe the group, are absolute anathema to pugs. Mark my words, Bioware will have to nerf some of these fights soon. I'm just surprised that this is something that didn't occur to them any earlier. It's pretty much Explosive Conflict all over again. I guess two years are enough time to actually forget about lessons that they should have learned before? Though at least this time around it's only a couple of bosses that are overtuned, not the whole operation.
On a more personal note, I have to admit that I'm also a little worried about the way Bioware seems to be interpreting "challenge" this expansion in general. They seem to have increased everyone's mobility purely so that we can spend more time running out of red circles. I don't mind running out of red circles... but I'm not a twitch gamer, and when an encounter requires me to dodge red circles, blue circles, orange circles and white circles all at the same time, I'm likely to feel stressed rather than challenged. (Hello there, Sword Squad. And again, this is story mode.) At least the hardcore progression guilds should have a good time I guess.
We knew that 3.0 would add two new operations to the game. It kind of went without saying that at least one of them would feature Revan in some way, but if the other one didn't... what could it possibly be about to rival Revan in importance? Apparently the answer is: random pirates.
The Ravagers
The intro mission and entrance to this operation are located in a corner of the slums under Rishi, hidden away so well that I completely missed them during my first tour of the planet.
The intro basically consists of a gruff pirate walking up to you to complain about how his second-in-command backstabbed him, and you offer to help him if he will do some work for the Republic in turn (or for the Empire I presume, depending on how you roll). This felt slightly weird to me. We've never had an operation before that wasn't about something at least moderately threatening to the galaxy as a whole, be it ancient Rakata force users, scheming Hutts or servants of the Dread Masters. I suppose I can't blame the devs for making us face a lesser threat for a change but... seriously, random pirates? That barely would have been enough to justify a flashpoint in the past!
In terms of gameplay, Ravagers is what I would call a cinematic operation in the style of Scum and Villainy, meaning that you get the feeling that you're not just moving between bosses but actually advancing the story along each step of the way. For example you end up hijacking the enemy captain's ship over the course of the operation. Mostly this is well done, except for the ending, where a sudden twist occurs that is only really conveyed via a brief voice-over in the middle of the last boss fight and which is easy to miss. This has the potential to cause a little confusion over what just happened.
Temple of Sacrifice
This is the "Revan operation" and has a more traditional "lair feel" to it, aka: "go in and kill various minions that stand in your way until you get to the big bad at the end". This isn't a bad thing and it's done well enough, even if I feel that the more cinematic style is better at playing towards Bioware's strengths.
The final encounter has a pretty epic feel to it without being overly difficult. Having to move in three dimensions reminded me of Soa (whom I personally loved), even if you're going up rather than down this time. (And beware the stair boss!)
Overall I liked both operations and they seemed solid in terms of story. Some bugs diminished the experience, but we didn't encounter anything game-breaking. The last bosses of both ops have been reported to sometimes drop no loot, which my guild experienced first-hand in Temple of Sacrifice. There were also little niggles that made the experience feel a little unpolished, such as being unable to bioanalyse the animal mobs in Ravagers, or Temple of Sacrifice dropping the same decoration item as Ravagers. (Revanites should not have their pockets full of Rishi dancer holograms. Just saying.)
My biggest gripe however is something completely different: the difficulty. Don't get me wrong, my guild managed to clear both ops in the first week, but there were a couple of bosses that gave us considerable difficulties. 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. Every pug has "that guy" who stands in red circles all the time... and usually it's okay because even if "that guy" dies, the rest of the group can complete the encounter with a couple of people down. Mechanics such as the Underlurker's "cross", where a single person standing in the wrong spot can pretty much wipe the group, are absolute anathema to pugs. Mark my words, Bioware will have to nerf some of these fights soon. I'm just surprised that this is something that didn't occur to them any earlier. It's pretty much Explosive Conflict all over again. I guess two years are enough time to actually forget about lessons that they should have learned before? Though at least this time around it's only a couple of bosses that are overtuned, not the whole operation.
On a more personal note, I have to admit that I'm also a little worried about the way Bioware seems to be interpreting "challenge" this expansion in general. They seem to have increased everyone's mobility purely so that we can spend more time running out of red circles. I don't mind running out of red circles... but I'm not a twitch gamer, and when an encounter requires me to dodge red circles, blue circles, orange circles and white circles all at the same time, I'm likely to feel stressed rather than challenged. (Hello there, Sword Squad. And again, this is story mode.) At least the hardcore progression guilds should have a good time I guess.
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