10 Moments in SWTOR's History for Which You Had to Be There

Star Wars: The Old Republic is primarily know for its developer-crafted stories, but any player who's engaged with the social side of the game for any length of time knows that there are also community-driven stories and dramas, and moments when you simply had to be there to know what made them so exciting, even if some of the related content is still available in the game today. As someone who's been a subscriber since early access and never stopped playing, I thought it would be fun to share some of the most interesting moments I remember with my readers, especially with newer ones who may not have been playing as long.

Note: If you've never played through some of the expansion storylines, some of the later items on this list will contain story spoilers.

The /getdown bug

Going chronologically, let's start with a story with which I amused my guildies one night. Back when the game launched, you could apparently do dance emotes in combat, and someone quickly discovered that doing /getdown would suddenly prevent opponents from attacking. This was actually picked up by several gaming news sites at the time, both because SWTOR was the newest hotness in town and because the mere idea of enemies being stunned into inaction by your dancing skills was a very funny thing to write headlines about.

I never saw this bug in action myself, but I did come across this comic on social media at the time which made me laugh so much that I saved it:

Click to enlarge and read properly. I wish I could credit the original artist (Minicrit?) with a link, but alas, RIP Google Plus.

The big PvP debacle on original Ilum

Another thing that made headlines around launch was the planet Ilum and the PvP taking place there. You see, the western ice shelf where the Gree visit nowadays used to be a dedicated PvP area. This brief video by Force Gaming should give you an idea of how it was supposed to work. It was released about two weeks after launch, and the video notes that at the time, people were just flipping objectives and not much PvP was going on. This was "fixed" with a patch... that in turn broke the area in a whole bunch of other ways. The result were crazy AoE fests that the game's engine couldn't deal with very well, which caused people to gain valour way too fast, even as they were just dying over and over in the mayhem. It was just chaos and caused endless complaints.

Once again, this is something I didn't actually get to experience directly, as I took my time levelling and didn't get to Ilum until about three months later, by which time all the craziness had already died down. In January 2013, I actually wrote a post called "The strangeness of Ilum a year later", but in those first weeks after launch, it was seemingly all people would talk about on forums and news sites, about how this newly launched MMO clearly didn't know how to deal with PvP and was therefore already failing horribly.

The original Rakghoul event

The recurring Rakghoul Resurgence event is probably old hat to most of you at this point - just another world event that comes around every so often and which has been around for what feels like forever. The very first Rakghoul event in April 2012 though... that was something else. The activities it came with weren't really any more exciting than what we have in the repeating event, but the vibe was very different and unique, mainly because we had no idea it was coming.

The game was still very new at the time, had a lot going on and we were getting patches and updates about more patches all the time... but this came as a complete surprise, and the experience of everyone being confused about what was going on and slowly figuring things out over the course of the first day was unique and exciting in a way that I think is hard to convey nowadays. You can read the blog post I wrote about it at the time to get an idea though. (I also wrote two follow-ups.)

Ultimately the fact that it was a time-limited one-off was also one of the biggest criticisms Bioware received, which is why they eventually swapped to making new events recurring. The Rakghouls would eventually join the rotation in early 2014.

The Grand Acquisitions Race

The Grand Acquisitions Race (sometimes also referred to as "the Chevin event") was SWTOR's second one-time world event, and a lot less exciting than the original Rakghoul incursion on Tatooine. One reason for this was that we actually knew that it was coming, even if we didn't know the details. The second reason however was that it was simply a lot less exciting in terms of activities, as all there was to do was a time-gated puzzle quest chain and farming currency crates on Nar Shaddaa. I have to chuckle a bit when I occasionally see people say that this event should be brought back. People didn't even care about it that much when the game was still in its heyday and a limited-time world event was something exciting! Still, I guess my point is you had to be there to know just how underwhelming it really was.

The return of Revan

I think this one might be a bit hard to parse for anyone who started playing after 2014. We all know Revan is in the game, right? There's a whole expansion called "Shadow of Revan", no? Well, for a moment, try to imagine that there wasn't. Revan is in the game, but only in this weird side quest that you'll only see if you like doing group content, and he's a prisoner one moment and a genocidal maniac the next, and if you blink you'll miss him dying as well. Also note that you had to have levelled through and done group content on both factions to be able to make sense of this brief cameo, something which fans of the original KotOR were not at all happy about.

Then it's 2014 - we've been level 55 for a bit over a year, got several new daily areas and raids, everything's kind of chugging along nicely if you're not dying for your character's personal story to be continued... and then we start getting a new series of flashpoints that's being promoted as a new story arc called "Forged Alliances". That Theron guy is kinda cute, but aside from that it's all a bit mysterious. Who are these new troublemakers in the shadows? The answer came in September, in a post in which I felt the need to give a spoiler warning.

Whoa, Revan is back? Revan is alive? Is it really him though? And then a whole expansion with his name! It was exciting times for a while, showing once again that Revan's name still attracted the crowds. I think reception of the expansion storyline was ultimately a bit mixed - it gave the character a better send-off than the base game had for sure, but it was still a bit awkward in the eyes of some.

The launch of Knights of the Fallen Empire

Did you realise that we're less than a month away from the KotFE expansion turning ten years old? I'm sure I'm not the only long-time player who still thinks of everything pre-KotFE as the good old days, and everything that came after it as "the new stuff". It is after all a fact that it changed the game in bigger ways than perhaps anything that came afterwards, with the introduction of features like level sync or its complete overhaul of the companion system.

Still, I'm not even talking about all of that. What made KotFE's launch a "you had to be there" moment was just how absolutely insane the hype was. A new CGI trailer for the first time since launch! Accidental leaks with announcements that could be interpreted in multiple possible ways! General Star Wars hype as we were all looking forward to the sequel trilogy! (Oops.) Absolute mayhem!

And when it came out, people (including me) did indeed love it! Mainstream gaming sites were like "hey, this game still exists and is good"! It felt like we were all set for a big SWTOR renaissance... except it all fizzled out within a couple of months. People thought the story was neat, but they didn't want to hang around to wait for one new chapter per month. They felt there wasn't enough to do at endgame. And those of us who did stick around quickly found out how tedious the new story was to play through on alts, never mind the plot going in directions that became more and more aggravating. For the second time in its life, SWTOR had released (something) with a lot of hype and then failed to live up to it.

Galactic Command

For anyone who might not know, Galactic Command was a new gearing/endgame progression system introduced with the Knights of the Eternal Throne expansion, and in its original iteration, it was the worst system of its kind that I've personally ever seen. To add insult to injury, people (including me) were telling them from the moment it was announced that it was a bad idea, but the devs were all "nah, it'll work and be fun, you'll see".

It didn't and it wasn't. For me, the early days of Galactic Command were one of my all-time low points with the game. Fortunately the devs scrambled to fix it immediately after launch, but it took about six months to get it into what could be described as an "acceptable" state and many players held a grudge long after. It's another one of those things that in hindsight makes you wonder what could've been sooo bad about it, but if you were there, you know.

Theron's betrayal

I did say there were spoilers in here, didn't I? I think looking at the game's storylines as a whole, the Fractured Alliances story (consisting of the three flashpoints Crisis on Umbara, Traitor Among the Chiss and The Nathema Conspiracy) is probably not among many people's favourites. The writing definitely felt like it had dug itself into a bit of a hole with Knights of the Eternal Throne, and it wasn't clear how it was going to get out of it.

I actually think that Fractured Alliances ultimately succeeded in what it set out to do, but it's fair to say that it was a bumpy ride. One thing I really did enjoy about it though was the community interactions it created. Theron's betrayal in Crisis on Umbara was not well-received for a variety of reasons, but it was interesting to watch the conversation around it evolve as more people started to believe that the whole thing was just a ruse. In hindsight, there are some hints towards this from the beginning, but they were easy to overlook at first.

People just didn't want their love interest to betray them, and there was even a hashtag called #believeintheron making the rounds on Twitter. I remember seeing screenshots of people assembling on Odessen with all their Therons out and forming a heart-shape or something. I just thought that was very cool, and actually kind of made me more invested in the final outcome than the story itself would have been able to do on its own.

Darth Malgus' return

Back in 2017, I wrote a post called "11 NPCs That Died Before Their Time" and Darth Malgus was second on my list. I just couldn't believe that they put him in all the cinematic trailers and then simply had him get killed off in one of the first endgame flashpoints! I'm not sure I was aware at the time that there was a supposedly deleted scene from the KotFE trailer that showed Malgus being delivered to Valkorion, frozen in a block of carbonite. Even if I was, it seemed obvious at the time that they'd deleted it for a reason and for all intents and purposes, Malgus was still considered dead.

When he really did come back with the Ossus update at the end of 2018, I absolutely loved it. It was a really well-presented surprise, and while I don't think it was as big as the return of Revan, for me personally it was actually more meaningful than that had been. It's hard to think that it's already been seven years since then - at this point it feels like it should be obvious to everyone playing the game in any capacity at all that Darth Malgus is alive. However, that moment when we first found out was definitely special. (Cue some comment about how he's unfortunately outstayed his welcome since then.)

Move to Broadsword

Two years ago, when IGN leaked the news that Star Wars: The Old Republic was going to be transferred from Bioware to some largely unknown studio called Broadsword Entertainment, all hell broke loose in the community for a few weeks. I think dedicated SWTOR players are quite used to endless doom-saying about the game and are well-practised at ignoring it by this point, but this sounded serious, and it was not at all clear what the consequences were going to be.

To me it was probably more worrying than even the original free-to-play announcement had been, and I found myself seeking solace in spending a lot more time than usual talking to fellow content creators. I also felt compelled to try and do my own part by practising something vaguely resembling journalism, which meant assembling information from different sources and trying to put it into context for people. In hindsight it seems almost silly how much we worried, considering how little changed from a player perspective after the studio transition, but at the time it was big news.

Runner-ups:

I could've tried to come up with even more stories, but I thought that 10 was a good number to stop at. Nonetheless, here are three more events that I considered mentioning but decided against because they were mostly negative but also ultimately not that interesting to talk about in detail in my opinion:

• The original free-to-play transition
• The Legacy of the Sith expansion launch
• The whole character texture update drama

Which of all of these events were you personally around for? Do you agree with my characterisation of how things went down? Are there any other major events in the game's history that you would've included on this list?

A Good Start to the Season

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Mysterious Mushrooms of Blood Hunt

Back in November I ran the Blood Hunt flashpoint with some guildies and when we got into the area for the raptor challenge I stopped dead in my tracks. The floor was suddenly covered with small purple mushrooms! It was very startling and different from how I remembered that part of the compound looking previously, but I didn't think too much about it - I figured it was either the result of some sort of graphical update that had been part of the expansion or maybe related to my graphic settings getting changed when I had recently upgraded my PC.

However, having been back to the place quite a few times since then, things have only gotten stranger, because the mushrooms aren't always there. Sometimes the ground is as bare as it used to be; other times there are different kinds of mushrooms. It's not consistent within the same run either: it's quite possible for one person in a group to see mushrooms while the others don't.

(This does make for great joke material, mind you. "Seeing mushrooms, eh? You sure you haven't ingested any recently?")

What strange bug could cause such a thing? Or is some dev maybe having fun by intentionally messing with players' heads? I wouldn't put it past them!

That said, I do kind of wish things would always be consistent for the entire group at least. For example I learned recently that there can be inconsistencies with sound too: I've done the Crisis on Umbara flashpoint two dozen times by now, but it was only the other night that the two bosses that make up the first encounter suddenly started spouting voice lines at me. Up until then they had always been silent for me! A guildie said that he sometimes hears them and other times he doesn't. Just more strangeness.

Master Mode Flashpoint Tips: Umbaran Spider Tank

Introduction

I previously wrote about Commander Mokan, whom I consider one of the hardest flashpoint bosses in the game. The thing that makes Mokan hard is understanding the tactics involved - however, once you've internalised all the steps, the actual execution isn't all that tricky aside from the healer having to be capable of a certain degree of multitasking.

Today I'd like to write about a boss that is also one of the hardest flashpoint bosses in the game, but for completely different reasons: the Umbaran Spider Tank at the end of Crisis on Umbara. This one's no puzzle at all (stay out of the fire and kill adds) but the problem lies in the requirements for perfect execution, which are pretty harsh on master mode. Also, unlike Mokan, killing the Umbaran Spider Tank is not optional, meaning that he's driven many a group to despair, and pugs will often drop out as soon as they see that their queueing for a random master mode has landed them in Umbara, even though it only takes 20-30 minutes to complete if you can one-shot everything. The problem is that most groups won't get that experience; instead they'll just wipe a lot and often end up abandoning the whole thing.

I am not above these problems myself, and have only ever had a single what I would call a "perfect kill" of this boss, where we killed it right where it spawns, it was a one-shot and everyone was still alive by the end of the fight. To this day I'm not entirely sure how we did that; I think our dps must have just been awesome that day. More commonly there've been at least a handful of wipes involved, and by the end we're often just as dead as the Spider Tank, with the only difference being that we're allowed to get up again and loot while the tank does not get that luxury.

That was until I was taught the strategy I describe in this post. It's fair to describe it as "cheesy", as it involves fighting the boss in a way that clearly wasn't exactly what the developers had in mind when they designed the encounter, but as it doesn't actually avoid any of the mechanics I don't consider it exploitative. Just like the best way to beat the Purifier Droids in KotET chapter four on veteran/master mode is to leg it into a different building, this fight can be made a lot more manageable by moving the boss and forcing the add spawns into a funnel that makes them a little easier to control. It's no miracle solution to suddenly making the fight easy, but it does take a significant amount of pressure off the group by giving them more wiggle room to handle the adds before they maul the healer.

The boss in a nutshell

Once again I can recommend what both Vulkk and Dulfy have to say about this fight if you want to know the exact details of every ability the boss does, but the short of it is that on top of damaging the tank it does both a painful knockdown and places fire circles on random group members that make it a constant challenge to stay alive. At certain health percentages a wave of adds spawns in, and once the boss gets low on health an unending stream of adds begins, forcing you to burn it quickly. While dps is important, the main challenge of the encounter is simply staying alive, as a particularly unlucky combo of the same person getting stunned and hit by a fire circle can be absolutely devastating to their health bar, and all this happens while the healer will struggle not to get eaten by the adds.

What to do as a tank

After the little cut scene has played, send the rest of your group back down the hill, just around the bend where a bunch of kolto barrels are lying on the ground. Pull the boss and start running down the hill; it will evade at some point. Then repeat this manoeuvrer - this time the boss won't evade but will instead follow you all the way down to the rest of the group.

Try to position the boss so that it's not straight up against the cliff face, so that there's a bit of room to run around it on all sides. Keep it facing away from the rest of the group as much as you can but run out of fire when you must. When adds come down the hill and run past you, you can also hit them with AoE; hopefully the dps should be able to take care of them for the most part though.

What to do as a damage dealer

After the little cut scene has played, run back down the hill to where a bunch of kolto barrels are lying on the ground. Wait for the tank to bring the boss all the way down to you, then start to dps. Try to stay away from each other to avoid more than one person being hit by any ability, and run out of fire circles as quickly as you can. Also try to retain some awareness of where the healer is hiding, so that you break line of sight as little as possible and don't run out of range.

Whenever adds come down the hill, try to resist the urge to run up and get them as soon as they get close - let them come down. By default they will aggro on the healer, and if the healer breaks line of sight properly the adds should bunch up nicely close to them, at the bottom of the hill. At that point you want to charge in and kill them quickly (but still avoid standing on top of other dps or the healer while doing so).

When the boss is at around thirty percent health, mop up any adds that may still be around before continuing to dps (just look at the red dots on the mini map). At about twenty percent an infinite stream of adds will start spawning, so just focus on nuking the boss at that point. With the adds taking some time to run down the hill, you should be able to kill the boss before they reach the group and start causing trouble, so that you then only have to deal with getting rid of them after the boss is already dead.

What to do as a healer

After the little cut scene has played, run back down the hill to where a bunch of kolto barrels are lying on the ground. Try to hide behind one of the "tentacle trees" there, or on the other side of the path. (See the spots marked with a healer marker in the above screenshot.) Move when the boss puts a fire circle on you and if you lose line of sight of group members you need to heal, but try to stay behind one of the trees as much as you can, so that the adds will have a long way to run when they come in. Once they start bunching up near you, the dps should quickly AoE them down.

Note for everyone

One of the reasons to fight by the kolto barrels is that you can pop them for some extra healing if it feels like the healer can't keep up with the damage at any point. Keep in mind that they don't respawn though, so if you use them all up and wipe you don't get them back for the next attempt.

Reviewing Objective Meridian

When I talked about the part of Onslaught's story that takes place on Corellia, I said that the Objective Meridian flashpoint probably deserved a post of its own... this is that post.

Functionally, it works the same as the previous three flashpoints we got over the last couple of years (Crisis on Umbara, A Traitor Among the Chiss and Nathema Conspiracy): there is a single-player story mode that you're meant to play through while making your way through the main storyline and which has all the cut scenes and dialogue. Then there are repeatable solo, veteran and master modes that are virtually devoid of cinematics and more about having fun with the combat and pursuing rewards.

However, this is already where the commonalities between Objective Meridian and those other flashpoints end. In fact, in every other aspect they are pretty much opposites.

The three flashpoints forming the traitor storyline wowed us with beautiful new environments, with each new one more stunning than the last. Story mode aside, they were also fiendishly hard however. (Nathema Conspiracy slightly less so, but still.) I didn't view this difficulty as a bad thing exactly; instead I found the challenge interesting - but after beating every difficulty once or twice, I started to dislike having any of them pop up as my random of the day in the group finder, as it always meant having to work so much harder than in most other flashpoints.

By contrast, Objective Meridian is visually quite dull. I'm biased in that I never liked Corellia's environments much, and this is just more of the same. The trash feels old-school as well, with wide and open spaces in which groups of enemies stand around neatly spaced out so that you can actually just run past a fair number of them without even engaging. I did enjoy the story very much, but in terms of flashpoint visuals and mechanics I wasn't at all impressed on my first run.

On the other hand though... it's really fun to re-run! I'm actually happy when it pops up in the random group finder because I know it won't be too long or difficult (though like Dxun when compared to other operations, it currently seems to award less loot than the older flashpoints for some reason). The fights aren't boring - Malgus and Tau in particular are quite well done in my opinion - and you may well find yourself wiping a couple of times the first time around while figuring out the mechanics, but once you understand what's going on the tactics are straightforward enough to execute without pushing you to your absolute limits.

Speaking of fight mechanics, another thing that was a pleasant surprise for me is that while the flashpoint's layout and progression are the same for both factions, the bosses actually have different mechanics for each side. I had expected it to be more like Assault on Tython/Korriban Incursion, where you essentially deal with the same content only with a different skin. But no, here every boss actually has their own unique mechanics (and Imp side actually seems more of a pain to me than Rep side, but maybe that's because I've only done the former on master mode once and am therefore less familiar with it).

Tl;dr version: My first impression of Objective Meridian wasn't great, but it's really grown on me with each subsequent run. On the other hand I got both Crisis on Umbara and Traitor Among the Chiss as my random master mode several times over the past couple of weeks (once we even got Copero twice in a row!) and as pretty as they are, it always elicits groans. It's really made me think about the comparative value of dazzling the player with a great first impression but being tedious to repeat vs. the other way round.

Looking Back on Three Years of KotET

Seeing how we only have six days left until the release of Onslaught, it's about time I wrote the post looking back on the current expansion that I've been meaning to write for a while. It's not exactly a tradition, but nothing about Knights of the Eternal Throne has been traditional!

In fact, it probably featured the biggest period of upheaval for the game since its launch year and the free-to-play transition, at least from a player perspective. Business-wise, I'm sure the first year was a much bigger deal, what with the many unmet expectations and resulting lay-offs. But from a player point of view, it wasn't actually such a bad time, considering the sheer amount of content that was being released.

Knights of the Eternal Throne on the other hand was a bit of a mess from the beginning. The story was solid, but it was originally meant to go on for much longer and was quickly cut short (for whatever reasons).

After the heavy single-player focus of KotFE, there seemed to be some renewed interest in releasing group content, but initially only in the form of uprisings, which were a bit awkward. I really wanted to like them, but ultimately I was not at all inspired to repeat them unless I was going for an achievement or something. I couldn't quite put my finger on why they just didn't grab me for the longest time, until a commenter described them as flashpoints with the interesting bosses taken out and more of the sort of trash pulls put in that everyone always wants to skip.

And of course there was Galactic Command. Not going to re-hash that story yet again! Let's just say that it was quite a disaster at launch; it was probably the period of time in which I was the most unsatisfied with SWTOR gameplay-wise that I've ever been, and it made several good people I knew leave the game for good. Boo!

The first couple of months after launch mostly seemed to be dedicated to damage control. We will be getting back to Republic vs. Empire, honest! And you'll get a new operation too, even if it's only one boss at a time!

The release of Iokath in April 2017 was true to this change in direction, but felt somewhat clumsily done. Yes, we were getting back to Republic vs. Empire, but the plot felt like it had been written with a single destination in mind and little concern for whether it made sense how we got there. Iokath also featured our first new daily area in years, yet it was awkward to navigate and initially released with several dailies actually costing you money instead of awarding it (yes, really).

In May, Keith Kanneg becoming the game's new Producer gave many of us new hope for improvements. And ultimately, I think he has been good for the game, but it's been a very slow process. I'm a bit hesitant to speculate ever since I read John Staats' WoW Diary - in which he proclaims that player speculation about what's going on inside video game development is pretty much always wrong, no matter how well thought-out - but what it felt like from the outside above all else was like Keith had to completely clean house and revamp a lot of things, which took up a lot of dev time that could otherwise have been used to create new content.

After he took charge, we basically got a slow trickle of new content alternating with systems updates: the second Gods from the Machine encounter was released a full three months after the first, then a month later we got a new flashpoint with some story, then another three months passed until a big round of server merges, and so on.

It took almost a full year for all five bosses in Gods from the Machine to be put live, and the traitor story arc, consisting of three bits of story tied to an equal number of new flashpoints, took a full nine months from start to finish. It wasn't bad content, it was just coming out so, so... slowly.

The traitor story arc did also mark an interesting turning point from my point of view though. While the first chapter, Crisis on Umbara, continued in a similarly awkward vein to Iokath, part two was a marked improvement, and part three was all-around enjoyable again. It was also an interesting time to be playing and engaging with the community, as there was a lot of discussion about what to make of the traitor's actions, which was the kind of thing you only get to experience right at the release of such new story content.

After that we had to deal with another relative drought of content for several months, until Bioware revealed that a new, bigger piece of content was coming in December, which would eventually be followed by a whole expansion. It's kind of weird to think that this was a year ago now and said expansion is only launching now.

Three years is a long time for any MMO to go without an expansion, but it has been even more so in SWTOR's case, which was pumping them out mere months apart before that (even if they were smaller in scope than what many other MMOs call expansions). It kind of felt like Bioware just completely lost the plot for a little while after KotET's launch, with everything a bit of a mess and no clear plan in terms of how to proceed.

I don't have a citation at hand, but I even remember Keith saying at one point that he wasn't that keen on expansions and preferred smaller content updates himself, which may have contributed to no moves being made towards working on another big content drop for a long time. I'm glad that the cries for a new expansion eventually won out though, even if it took a while. I'm looking forward to playing it in a few days!

As for what comes after... who knows? I remain eternally optimistic that things are maybe back on track now and the next big update won't take three years, but I honestly don't know. It's a persistent rumour that the team working on SWTOR is much smaller than those working on comparable MMOs, which would obviously limit their resources if true. But I take heart from how passionate they seem to be and that - raw quantity of output aside - I've felt that they've been taking steps in the right direction for the past two years, both in terms of story and in terms of how they interact with the community. For me, Jedi Under Siege has easily been the most enjoyable addition to the game in years. Ultimately, those are things that matter more to me than the sheer frequency of new patches.

The Nathema Conspiracy - Mechanics

After players got confused by the way the one-time story mode was handled for Crisis on Umbara, and then got even more confused by yet another implementation of how to handle it for Traitor Among the Chiss, Nathema Conspiracy saw a return of the Umbara model where the one-time solo mode is baked into the story mission, and while you're on that you just can't enter any of the other difficulty modes: deal with it. I remain unconvinced that this is the best way to handle it, but it is what it is.

How's gameplay on Nathema otherwise? Quite pleasant really. Unlike another reviewer I was kind of surprised by how little trash there was. I won't go so far as to say there was too little, but it seemed to me like the space had originally been designed for more. It made me picture the designers initially coming up with a much denser and longer flashpoint, but after the negative feedback they received about the trash on Copero, they decided to just take 50-60% of their planned trash pulls out, leaving a lot of empty space behind. That's my theory anyway.

The mobs have a variety of abilities and at least on hardmode some of them have one hell of a knockback, which is amusing to watch as a healer to say the least. Another interesting mechanic on all difficulty modes is that some of the zealots seem to have a stupidly powerful heal over time - though I haven't actually seen a cast for it, which kind of takes out the fun of actually being able to do something about it, with the net result being that the mobs just take longer to kill. Likewise many of the other trash abilities, while they create all kinds of colourful geometric shapes on the floor, ultimately don't do enough to be truly disruptive and don't really give you the opportunity for intelligent counter-play. Maybe I was expecting too much - fun trash like in Kaon Under Siege or Lost Island has always been the exception rather than the rule. I guess I just can't help but note that the trash both on Copero and on Nathema comes very close to being interesting to deal with but then just misses the mark.

The boss fights are all pretty solid. The first fight is very simplistic, somewhat reminiscent of the Vrblther in Czerka Core Meltdown only without the adds, but that's fine. Since the consoles that you "pop" to increase your damage output on the boss are limited in number and don't respawn, you can strategise a bit when it comes to deciding when to use them.

The bonus boss encounter with the two Hands of Zildrog is a bit boring, as it's mostly a tank and spank with a few circles on the floor. I'm also still not sure if there's even any difference between the two bosses. At first I thought they cast different abilities, but then I swear I saw the second one start using the same abilities as the first one after the first one had died...

What's good is that like in Umbara and Copero, the bonus encounter is accessible without having to do a lengthy quest chain, so that each group can decide on the spot whether to do the fight or not. There is a bonus mission to find seven "Treasures of Valkorian" (which reveal that someone at Bioware doesn't know how to spell Valkorion's name), which is decent fun as the chests are all just hidden enough to make you look around a bit but don't require you to clear every inch of the flashpoint of trash, unlike on Copero. The odd thing is just that it literally rewards nothing: no CXP, no regular XP, no credits, not even a one-time codex entry. I can't decide whether that was an oversight or is a sign of Bioware kind of throwing in the towel on bonuses, thinking something along the lines of: "You know what, it doesn't seem to matter what sorts of rewards we put on bonuses, the majority will always want to skip them. Let's just add a few shiny things to click on for people who enjoy that kind of thing [such as me], but if they can't get their group members to go along with it, at least nobody misses out on any rewards."

Up next is the Giant Kitten Ancient Guardian Droid, who is an interesting amalgamation of a Kell dragon skeleton and a droid skin. His main mechanic is a spinning move that does AoE damage similar to Dread Master Styrak's pet in Scum and Villainy, however instead of hiding behind the tank you're supposed to hide behind some probes that you first have to damage but not kill. I have somewhat mixed feelings about this. On the one hand I think it's cool to see them repurpose what was previously a raid-only mechanic for smaller group content, but on the other hand it's kind of unintuitive. In solo mode you can pretty much ignore the mechanic and just heal through it, but in veteran and up it suddenly kills you and you might not even know why. Also, "damage this but don't kill it" is a mechanic that's always hard to execute for pugs. Maybe the hiding part could have been implemented in a way that makes it more obvious what to do.

In the final room you have two boss fights: first Gemini 16, then Vinn Atrius and Zildrog together. I really liked that Gemini 16 splits into multiple copies in a way that's reminiscent of the Gemini Captain fight in KotFE chapter 15; it makes for a nice bit of consistency (even if it's quite a painful mechanic to deal with as a healer, as all the split adds will instantly aggro on you). She also does a powerful damage beam that you can just move out of on solo mode but need to line of sight on higher difficulties to avoid the damage - again something that might take some trial and error for pugs.

Fun fact: When I did the flashpoint on veteran mode for my pugging series, I said that I expected the last boss to be relatively easy... and then we wiped on him. I still think that nothing he does is inherently difficult to deal with, but he does stack a lot of mechanics on top of each other: circles to avoid, a knockback you have to be careful with in order not to fall to your death, a beam that connects two players who then have to stay close together or else they'll heal the boss, and adds that reduce everyone's hitpoints for the duration of the fight. My pug ended up healing the boss a lot due to not quite understanding the beam mechanic right away, but what actually did us in were the adds, which I had completely forgotten about since they hadn't been an issue for me on solo or hard mode. However, left to do their thing unimpeded on veteran mode, they ended up reducing our hitpoints so much that we were barely at 10% of our normal health by the end and a bog-standard attack could one-shot us. Fun times.

All in all, the Nathema Conspiracy backs a great story up with very solid mechanics, yet I couldn't help but feel like something was missing. I think above everything else I felt a bit let down by just how easy the flashpoint felt on master mode in particular when compared to Umbara and Copero. It's not that everything has to be super hard, but to have the climax of the story of all things be a relative cakewalk felt a little underwhelming to me.

It did make me muse about difficulty in general though and how I too am sometimes guilty of saying that I want one thing but then acting counter to my own words. I like the idea of really tough fights such as in hardmode Umbara, and I certainly feel highly accomplished whenever I beat them, but I don't exactly go out to repeat them often. The last time we got MM Umbara as a random, my guildies sighed a lot, and we didn't end up finishing because we just couldn't get a handle on the last boss's endless add waves (not to mention the countless wipes we had on the way). I've even heard people talk about taking gear off just to make sure they don't fulfil the minimum gear requirement and can safely queue for a random hardmode without getting one of the new flashpoints. And I can't claim that I've been actively seeking them out myself, or that I don't relate to the frustration experienced when every single boss causes multiple wipes even though we know the basic mechanics.

I guess what I'm saying is that a part of me wanted master mode Nathema Conspiracy to be harder... but at the same time there's a part of me that is glad that it isn't. I'm not sure how both of them could be satisfied at the same time.

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

Day 7: Team #IntPiPoMo

Want to know what the hashtag is all about? Read all about International Picture Posting Month here. Want to see the full list of themes I'm following while posting screenshots throughout the month? You can find it here.

As always with this theme, I have to start with my pet tank. I like how this shot makes it look like my character is gazing up at him adoringly. I already bemoaned last year that his interest in the game had been waning and that he was only really logging in for operations most of the time, yet another year's gone by and here we are still. I'm not letting him get away!

Funnily enough, playing relatively little doesn't stop my pet tank from spending money on the game. I'm always baffled when he suddenly whips out a mount from the newest hypercrate. I absolutely fell in love with the Mighty Kath Hound when I first saw him on one and decided to buy one for myself on the GTN. So we've been riding matching mounts for most of the past year.

I'm so glad they included some of these group cut scenes in Crisis on Umbara, even if they sadly don't have any dialogue. Love all the exaggerated faces our characters make in them!

When my guildies and I aren't running new flashpoints, we're still goofing off in operations several times a week. I realised the other day that last month it's actually been five years since I joined my guild. Would you believe it?

This selection of screenshots kind of makes it look like I only play with my pet tank and my guild nowadays, but that's not true. However, I've been taking fewer screenshots of my random groups since I started recording videos about them (because it feels a bit redundant) and my community collaborations in the past year were all of the non-photogenic kind (being a guest on not one, but two podcasts!). Still, food for thought, hmm...

IntPiPoMo count: 56 - that's the target of 50 hit once again, but I got three more days of themed screenshots to go!

Pugette's Journey Is Nearing Its End

Pugette, my Commando alt who's levelling through flashpoints and whose adventures I've been recording on video, has reached level 64 today, so she only has only six more levels to go! I expect that my next post about this series will be my last one. I will probably have some more things to say about the project as a whole at that point, but for now, here is once again a summary of the last six weeks/episodes:

Episode 19: Getting Nostalgic in Directive 7 - As I continue to queue for both master modes and a diminishing number of veteran modes, I mostly keep getting instant queue pops for the former but every now and then also still for the latter. This run was part of the second category. Directive 7 is one of those places that always makes me super nostalgic for the game's early days because I associate so many funny stories with it, some of which I shared in the video. The way the run progressed also gave me reason to detour into some adventures I used to have during my time pugging in WoW.

Episode 20: Testing the Puggability of Crisis on Umbara - I was so excited to get the new flashpoint as my random! I had only done it with guildies before and therefore had zero idea what it would be like with a pug. My main impression at the start was that there was a lot of damage flying around and I couldn't imagine doing it without a healer. But when we got to the bonus boss, things got really interesting... I won't spoil the rest!

Episode 21: Unexpected Developments in MM Czerka Core Meltdown - This flashpoint defied my expectations because I remembered the desert boss being very hard to heal while having no issues whatsoever with the jungle boss. Apparently this has been reversed at some point! Also, a 15-minute wait for a new tank after our first one abandoned us led to some interesting experimentation with companion tanking.

Episode 22: Killing ALL THE THINGS in Taral V - At last, Pugette was able to advance her Jedi Prisoner quest line through Taral V, veteran mode this time. I was endlessly amused by the fact that after I explained at the start (and in previous videos) that most people just want to skip most of the trash in this instance, I of course ended up in a group that actually wanted to do both bonuses. The group's zeal for killing absolutely everything was actually pretty comical.

Episode 23: Getting chatted up outside MM Depths of Manaan - Just as I started recording this episode, I got whispers from some random person who started with some innocuous but pointless questions, causing me to predict that he was going to ask if I was a real girl next... and he promptly obliged, allowing me to nicely capture the awkwardness that comes with playing a female character online at times on screen. The instance itself went very well, especially considering that it's one of the tougher master modes. In fact my team seemed to engage in a game of one-upmanship with achievements, trying to convince each other that they were the one who knew the flashpoint best.

Episode 24: Inconsiderate Tanking in MM Esseles - This was a fairly uneventful run, except that our tank seemed to think that "tanking" means constantly charging ahead to solo things and ignoring what's going on with the rest of the group. Fortunately it wasn't much of an issue considering the low difficulty of the flashpoint, and at first I even laughed about it, but after a while it did get a bit annoying.

Crisis on Umbara - The Story

While my last post took a non-spoilery look at the nature of the new flashpoint, this one is going to be about the story, which means spoiler time! If you haven't played through Umbara yet and don't want to know what happens in advance, you'll want to skip this one. You have been warned.

So... that was quite a twist, huh? Except... I felt nothing, which was a bit of a surprise in itself. I suppose the problem is that I had been kind of spoiled about the identity of the traitor, which greatly diminished the impact of the big revelation of course. I kicked up a bit of a conversation about this on Twitter:

Something to consider: "I'm totally not spoiling, but I was SO SHOCKED by who did it" is kind of a spoiler too...

— Shintar (@ShintarCommando) August 13, 2017

I don't think I follow anyone on there who would deliberately spoil things for others, but several people had made some "totally not spoilers" reaction comments once the identity of the traitor had been datamined, which pretty much gave it away anyway in context. The fact that everyone was "so shocked" meant that it had to be someone unexpected, someone so close to the Outlander that we would have expected them to be above suspicion. The fact that many people were not just surprised but actually upset meant that it had to be a love interest, someone whose betrayal hurt their feelings, which pretty much narrowed it down to Lana or Theron. Finally, it was mostly ladies who seemed to be upset by the new developments... so Theron then, eh? All I could think of when he suddenly pulled his blaster on us on Umbara was: "As I thought, then." I guess there is some advantage to me rarely bothering with the romances in this game; at least it saves me from being upset by stuff like this.

Of course, the problem remains that as a light-side player, the whole development simply doesn't make sense. Some of the things Theron says, such as that he doesn't like what the Alliance has become, are understandable, but his actions are not. Going to such extreme measures in this context just feels totally out of character. But even if you don't agree with this assessment and find his actions believable, it's still galling to be told that you're being betrayed because of the Alliance, considering that you haven't really had a chance to make a difference. Lana and Theron are the whole reason the Alliance even exists; it's an organisation of their making. Scrapping the Eternal Fleet and the Eternal Throne wasn't an option at the end of KotET, though I'm sure many players would have taken it quite happily. So we're being betrayed for story developments that we didn't have a chance to avoid. Bleh.

For a dark side character, the basic betrayal at least has some logic to it. You are quite a tyrant, and Theron not liking that is believable. I've often wondered why Theron and Lana stick with you if you consistently make decisions that they disapprove of. It's just a shame that it only works for about half the player base. That said, this version still manages to include some ridiculousness: As a Force user for example you get the option to Force-choke Theron the moment he betrays you... but then you let him down again for a moment to hear his explanation... and then never do anything again while he walks away. I'm usually not easily annoyed by characters doing something stupid/sub-optimal because people don't always make perfect decisions. However, your character forgetting about their Force powers mere seconds after they last used them was just too weird.

Other than that, there are some more supremely bizarre bits of dialogue in places. My favourite was the former Cipher Nine complaining about how spies like Theron are always scum. Um, what? Remember who's talking here! The message you broadcast to the galaxy at the end had me squirming as well, in both of its iterations. My trooper, who was still seeking reconciliation, was offering Theron a bunch of Eternal Fleet ships to command. I wouldn't expect that kind of thing to interest him, and my character would never even think of making such an offer! Who wrote this stuff? On the dark side, I didn't like my Sith warrior - who has a history of taking her vendettas highly personally - simply offering a bounty on his head. No, I wouldn't want some bounty hunter to kill him, I want to get my revenge myself! Just argh.

Now, the game has always had the occasional moments where your character said things that you didn't really expect/like, mostly because the short paraphrase in the dialogue selection menu didn't really hit the mark and the actual dialogue line came across quite differently. But this is getting out of hand - they are putting way too many words in our characters' mouths and it's getting highly uncomfortable. They need to bring back some more granular dialogue choices - even if they don't have any effect on the outcome! I'd just feel a lot better being given the choice of not saying anything sometimes instead of the weird things that the writers put into the Outlander's mouth in places.

Either way, the big question is where the story is going to go from here. My own first thought was: Hopefully we won't be chasing Theron for the next couple of patches. Yes, his betrayal was very personal, but I'd rather not waste resources on just chasing one guy. He was at his most dangerous while he was sabotaging things from the inside, but now he's just another enemy of the Alliance who's "somewhere out there".

Of course, this is where I saw people suggest that it might all be one giant ruse anyway. Theron has played dangerous games before - wouldn't it make total sense for him to try and infiltrate this mysterious order by faking a betrayal? Of course he wouldn't be able to tell you or it wouldn't be convincing. Double agent Theron Shan! I actually think that would be pretty cool and I was kind of amused by some of the reactions I saw to the suggestion...

Other MMOs: Here are some evil guys. You need to kill them! Don't ask why they are evil though, they just are. Or maybe this one guy was good at first, but then he was corrupted by some evil entity. Yeah.

Bioware: So one of your most trusted advisors finds out about this dangerous secret society that is a threat to you and the galaxy and decides to infiltrate them by faking that he's betraying you, but you don't know that so you really think that your love interest broke your heart! Quite a twist, huh?

Fans: Sigh, what is it with Bioware always going for the most boring and overused clichés...

Only in the Bioware community...

Personally I would be cool with that theory turning out to be true, though at the same time it would be a bit of a shame if I had another "twist" ruined for me simply by being able to guess what it was going to be in this case. Still, at least this direction would make more sense for a light-sided Outlander than Theron actually betraying you for flimsy reasons. For a dark-sided Outlander though, I would love it if the betrayal was real, because it's deserved for them. Maybe Theron wasn't planning to really turn on you but then decided to change sides for real after seeing your reaction. That would certainly return some semblance of choices mattering to this plot.

Crisis on Umbara - Mechanics

Yesterday was a big day: After two days of delays we finally got the patch that 1) continued the storyline from Iokath and 2) blessed us with the first new "proper" flashpoint (not counting the Star Fortresses) in more than two and a half years. As someone who is both into the story and a bit of a flashpoint fan (in case you hadn't noticed from all the posts I've written about them in the past), this was an exciting event indeed.

I'll leave the discussion of the story developments for another post though and start with talking about the flashpoint from a mostly mechanical point of view, without actually touching on the story. So you can read on without worrying about spoilers!

First off, Crisis on Umbara comes with four different settings, because having three of them with sometimes misleading names wasn't confusing enough yet. The new addition is a non-repeatable solo mode which actually advances the storyline, while all the other versions don't.

I have to admit that I have very mixed feelings about this. On the one hand it's a pretty ingenious way of both avoiding "space bar anxiety" during long cut scenes in pug groups and of saving innocent newbies from accidentally spoiling themselves. Only the non-repeatable solo version has the full story - in all the repeatable modes, the cut scenes are heavily trimmed down to the point of not featuring any dialogue, and instead of encountering the actual traitor, you run into a mysterious masked figure that runs away. This means that if you happen to run the flashpoint before actually reaching the point in the story where it is set, it doesn't reveal anything about the plot - and once you do the actual story instance, you'll be in for one hell of a surprise.

Also, I was kind of pleased to see that the non-repeatable solo mode at least - not sure about the repeatable version - opted to simply make the mobs relatively easy to kill instead of saddling you with that blasted Jesus droid and having you face off against hitpoint sponges. One of my biggest criticisms of past solo modes has been that letting the droid (slowly) do all the work for you simply isn't very fun.

What are the downsides? Well, for me personally the fact that the actual story-advancing version of the flashpoint is another solo instance is a bit of a bummer. I understand the necessity since it looks like your choices might affect future events once again, but the original announcement of the story continuing in a flashpoint had given me hope that I might actually be able to play through it with my pet tank. No such luck, at least not on the first run. My wait for the return of actual story content that can be done in a group continues.

Finally there's simply the fact that having yet another "version" of the flashpoint is just confusing, good intentions or not. Just the other day I ran into a guy on reddit who was confused and frustrated by being unable to solo Hammer Station, as he thought it was basically just another bit of story. And in fairness, it's not like terms like "veteran mode" really tell the uninitiated that this requires a group... I'm starting to fear that all MMOs are inevitably doomed to become more and more confusing with age, but that doesn't mean that we actively have to try to add to this confusion. The bottom line is that I'm undecided on whether this "four modes" setup is a good thing or not.

On to the flashpoint itself: As I said I won't talk about the story, but I will use some vague terms to talk about things like bosses and environments. The reactions to Umbara's looks that I've seen so far have been a bit subdued, with people citing the differences in the way the planet looks compared to in the Clone Wars series as the main reason for their discontent. Without this frame of reference, I simply found it gorgeous. I love how strange and alien it looks with its dark skies and alien glowy tentacles growing out of the ground. It's unlike anything else we've seen in SWTOR so far, and the closest zone it reminds me of is actually World of Warcraft's Zangarmarsh, though that's a lot wetter. The flashpoint also features several new mob skins (not completely new models, but I guess that would be asking a bit much), which had me quite excited.

I was also pleased that it really felt like a "proper" flashpoint, even if it's relatively short. Maybe I'll make that the subject of another post some time: What actually defines a good flashpoint? I just know that this one had all the ingredients: story progression, traversing of different environments, as well as all kinds of little bits and pieces that you can take or leave but which make the whole thing more engaging. For example in the first part there are some traps on the floor that spawn additional turrets, and there is an item you can pick up to disable said traps. I completely missed this on my first playthrough and simply tried to walk around them. However, there is also an achievement for actually triggering X amount of traps and simply killing the turrets. Your choice.

A bit further in, there are some neutral mobs which won't attack you out of their own volition, but again, there is an achievement to go out of your way and kill them anyway. I even found some flowers growing on the ground, a first for any flashpoint - if there are actual archaeology nodes too (I haven't had a chance to check yet), I'll take that as evidence that someone at Bioware totally does read my blog. There is also a bonus boss that is cunningly hidden in a corner, with no mission pointing the way towards it - in fact, I managed to completely miss it during my first solo playthrough.

Now, what sorts of obstacles does Umbara force you to overcome? Well, first there's that train that has been the big advertising point from the start. This part of the flashpoint made me think that the designers must have been inspired by "The Last Train to Cairo" from Secret World, which I got to play recently and which is a very fun mission that - surprise, surprise - has you boarding a train and fighting your way to the front both by running along on top of train cars and by smashing through them and fighting baddies. Admittedly the Umbara Express feels like a pale imitation in comparison, but the train also isn't quite as vital to the flashpoint as we were initially led to believe, and a good chunk of it actually has you back on the ground.

The actual boss encounters were all reasonably interesting and challenging. Well, on veteran mode we smashed through them without any real difficulty, but that's to be expected with an overgeared guild group. I'll have to run it in a low-level pug soon just to see what that's like! On master mode things hit pretty hard though, which definitely goes some way towards explaining why they wanted the minimum gear requirement for group finder groups. The second boss (third if you count the bonus boss) in particular hit like a truck, especially once he hit his enrage at about 15%. We were mostly fine before that, but at that point he always quickly wrecked the group and we had two literal 1% wipes before finally defeating him, and even that kill didn't go down without deaths on our team.

The final boss is similarly tricky but in a slightly different way, as his "enrage" consists of faster and faster add spawns that quickly overwhelm you. Again it took us several tries to get him down, and even then our group was wiped out by the adds afterwards. This led to the meanest encounter of the flashpoint of course - a bug which caused us to get released back at the start, with no way to get back to the boss's corpse. I bet there was a rare decoration or something among all the loot we missed out on. Hopefully Bioware will fix that soon.

As first gameplay impressions go, Crisis on Umbara has managed to make a good one. Of course I will likely run it many, many more times over the coming weeks and months, and we'll see whether that positivity will last or whether unexpected annoyances will rear their head after sufficient repetition. For now though, I'm one happy flashpoint lover.