A Nemesis Defeated

This wasn't the post I was planning on publishing today, but I'm just too giddy not to share it immediately.

Dread Master Brontes is the operations boss about whom I've probably written the most on this blog. Back in 2019 I detailed my history with her in this post, explaining how my group mates and I had been defeated by her nightmare mode incarnation over and over again.

A little over two years ago, I finally ended up beating her on 16-person master mode of all things, and noted at the time: "I just hope I don't need to wait another ten years to tick the box for the 8-man achievement."

Aaand... *insert drumroll here* tonight it finally happened!

Unfortunately there won't be a kill video this time, as my video recording software did not cooperate.

We generally seemed to be a bit cursed all evening. First Mr Commando randomly wrenched his back (he does have chronic back problems that rear their head every so often, but usually not randomly while he's just sitting at his desk), which required a time-out so he could stretch a bit and take some painkillers. Then the friendly guildie who'd offered to fill in for one of our regulars who was absent started having internet connection problems, which led to a couple of wipes and warranted various restarts on his end.

I was in this weird head space where I simultaneously really, really wanted the kill and felt that it was absolutely within our reach (I finally understood how every single part of the fight worked and had the impression that everyone else did too) and at the same time felt weirdly zen about not getting it, almost certain that we'd continue to fail somehow and finish another year without having bested this boss (after all, it had happened several times before, and all the random mishaps described above did not fill me with confidence).

However, in the end, we persisted and were victorious! I'm still a bit bummed that I didn't get a recording (there was some excited shouting for sure) but as I said to my guildies, I'd rather get the kill without recording it than have my recording work all evening and then have nothing to show for it but more wipes. I'm not sure yet what we'll attempt to tackle next, but I don't need to worry about making a decision on that yet anyway, as this was our last progression night of the year and we won't be back at it until January.

Take That, Brontes!

Dread Master Brontes and I have a long history. I'm not going to talk too much about that right now, because I already wrote a whole post about it back in 2019 and for the most part, what I said back then still applies - if you want to know the details, just go back and read it. The tl;dr version for our purposes today is that in the almost ten years since the release of Dread Fortress, I've never been able to kill the last boss in it on nightmare/master mode, despite spending a fair amount of time trying.

Not much changed since 2019... though I think we never even attempted the fight during the Onslaught patch cycle, as word on the street was that the boss's tuning was so out of whack that she was basically the hardest boss in the game at that point. Legacy of the Sith's operations tuning has had plenty of issues of its own, but Brontes' difficulty sounded like it had been dialled back down to more "normal" levels again, so we've been visiting her occasionally.

Specifically, my guild does 16-man progression one week a month, and last week we actually managed to clear Dread Fortress for the first time! One of Brontes' remaining orbs exploded just after she died and took out the remainders of our raid group, so you could technically call it a draw, but it still counted. Here's the kill video, consisting of footage from both myself and another officer who was playing a dps Vanguard:

It certainly felt like quite a milestone to finally get her down after all this time, though at the same time it feels a bit weird to think that the 8-man kill still eludes me. 16-man might be ever so slightly easier in terms of gameplay, especially as a healer, but then getting a 16-man progression group together in this game is much harder than finding an 8-man team, so it's kind of a wash in terms of overall effort I suppose.

At least the additional time spent on progressing the fight has taught me that it wasn't my healing that was at fault in the past, as I now understand a lot better what happens in the last phase (in the 2019 post I admitted that I found it hard to tell what was going wrong in our attempts). Basically it's almost always the tanks' fault - no shade intended, as they do have the hardest job in that part of the fight if not in the whole fight in general. It's just that everyone else is so busy with their own priorities towards the end, there isn't much time to keep an eye on everything the tanks are doing. And then one mess-up pretty much just results in the whole group getting obliterated without anyone being able to tell in the moment what exactly just happened.

I just hope I don't need to wait another ten years to tick the box for the 8-man achievement.

A History of Story Mode Ops Difficulty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dread Master Brontes Wins Again

Progression raiding in SWTOR is a weird thing these days, and not just because a lot of outsiders are likely to go "SWTOR has raids?!" when you bring up the subject.

In a game like WoW, new raid tiers come out all the time, and every time a new one is added, the old one becomes obsolete, which fuels a frantic race to get through the new content before it reaches the end of its shelf life.

In SWTOR, there's only a very small minority interested in seeing who'll be the first to get the kill of a new operations boss on a higher difficulty - plus as it stands, we've only had a single new operation in the last five years anyway, so it's not exactly as if there's been a lot to get excited about.

For most players, what matters is that ever since 4.0 Bioware has continually scaled all operations content upwards so that Eternity Vault from back in 2011 is still as relevant as endgame in 2019 as the more recently released Gods from the Machine.

This means that if you're not good enough to actually clear all the operations on all difficulties, you can basically keep progressing on them forever... which is exactly what my guild has been doing. The 5.x cycle has been particularly good for us because the boss's values remained stable for so long and we got access to some pretty overpowered gear pretty quickly. I got to tell quite a few tales of successful boss killing on this blog in the past year.

We still haven't killed everything though, and that's not even counting the most recent release, master mode Gods from the Machine. It's slightly awkward to think about, because if we're being honest with ourselves, it basically means that we're not very good. Some of these fights have been out for more than five years and we still haven't killed them? Come on!

A more charitable interpretation would be that we are very persistent and have taken our time getting better at the game. Most of us struggled with simple hard modes when they first came out, to the point that nightmare difficulty felt like something we'd be unlikely to ever reach in the future - yet here we are.

One boss I was really hoping to get down before 6.0 resets everything again was Dread Master Brontes on master mode, mostly because I have personal beef with her at this point. I vividly recall wiping to her in the run-up to 4.0, back when we were actually five levels higher than the boss and still found the fight too hard. I don't remember all the details, but I do recall thinking that I was sure that we were going to get her down before 4.0 hit because to me it felt like we were close. That didn't happen though.

August 2015

That was over four years ago now, and I really wanted to get her down this time. While we have to fight her at level now, we all got a lot better at the game in the meantime. And yet... this past Sunday was our last night attempting her as people voted to have a few weeks break before the expansion, something I can't exactly blame them for. I'm also not sure we would have been able to get her down even if we had tried for another three weeks, because unlike my fuzzy memories from 2015, it hasn't really felt to me like we've come even close to killing her this time around.

We are pretty good at making it to the last phase by now, but as soon as we're there it feels like everything falls apart in seconds, and the problem is that unlike with Revan for example, it's kind of hard to tell what exactly happened. There isn't a single mechanic that will kill you instantly, but there are a lot of things that can do a lot of damage, so it can be hard to tell what exactly killed any individual at a certain point, whether it was just too much unavoidable damage adding up and not enough healing, or whether someone or even multiple someones made a mistake that caused just too much extra damage at the wrong moment.

September 2019

There was a time when this sort of thing would have upset me a lot more than it does now (and I have the awkwardly ranty blog posts to prove it), but fortunately I have too many other things going on these days to get too hung up on a single boss kill. Plus we'll always get to try again after the expansion's release I guess.

From the way things look right now, there's even a chance that my prediction that things would become harder again in 6.0 might actually turn out to be wrong! I based this on the way things played out during the transition from 4.0 to 5.0, but as we know from the PTS now, Bioware is actually planning to scale us down to the old operations going forward, making Brontes (and us when we go to fight her) level 55 again instead of 75.

If scaling was perfect that probably wouldn't make much of a difference, but as it stands, downscaled high-level characters in SWTOR tend to be a bit on the overpowered side, and early PTS reports indicated that this effect applied in full force in the newly downscaled operations. So for all we know we might be able to waltz in there in 6.0 and one-shot her. It's unlikely, but... I'm happy to wait and see how things pan out.

Day 10: Death #IntPiPoMo

It's the last day of November, the last day of International Picture Posting Month, and the last day of my 10 days of SWTOR screenshots. As usual, I close the series on the theme of death, even though we're officially not really dying in game, only getting defeated every so often.

SWTOR does not have good relationship with the third dimension when it comes to death. This is very apparent from the way the whole instance can bug out on you on Soa if you die anywhere except on the bottom floor, but it also shows itself in other places where you can die while being in the air.

On Dread Master Raptus in Dread Fortress for example, you can get thrown high into the air if you have aggro, and if you die from that you usually can't be revived because your body will appear to be somewhere completely different on your screen than where it shows for everyone else, and the latter location is usually somewhere unreachable to boot. In the above screenshot you can see me looking down at a guildie whose corpse is floating in mid-air standing up, all while she was probably assuring us that her body was right there by the door.

This shows me (and a bunch of others) having died to the Rogue Cartel Warbot on Quesh during a world boss run. This isn't anything special per se, but it amused me that this is exactly the same way I suffered my first ever death to a raid boss back in 2012. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I've mentioned before that as an endgame player, basically most of your deaths occur during operations or PvP. I kind of used to appreciate how lying dead on the floor during a boss fight would sometimes actually give you a particularly good angle for a screenshot, but more recently I've become kind of blasé about that. Too much focus on progression I guess, with not enough thought put into simply admiring the sights. Here's one of the rare occasions when I remembered my roots however and took a moment to admire the machine core in Temple of Sacrifice while waiting for my guildies to finish wiping. (Though we did get Revan down in the end! Not on this try though.)

Your regularly scheduled posting will resume next week - I expect that there will still be a lot to talk about in December though, what with my usual year in review thoughts and the upcoming release of 5.10.

IntPiPoMo count: 60

Still Operational

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Old Raids Are New Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

 

Not even sure how we did that...

How are other guilds dealing with stalling progression and having little information about what's to come?

Day 10: Death

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

Strictly speaking you never "die" in The Old Republic, because it wouldn't make sense lore-wise. You only get "defeated" - but "I'm dead" is just so much easier to say.

Last time I went through this challenge, I was still relatively new to the game and I was still constantly discovering new and interesting ways to die. After more than three years of playing however... well, not so much anymore. My alts rarely die while levelling unless my companion decides to charge off and overpull, or something respawns on my head at a very inconvenient moment, and neither is generally very interesting (just annoying). So when it comes to looking at interesting ways of dying, operations are the way to go these days, because that and PvP are the only places where you're expected to die frequently, regardless of your skill.

For example, if a boss or an add has a particularly powerful knockback, your body can end up landing in strange places. Pictured: me staring at one of my guildies on his Sniper alt, who had somehow managed to die above Draxus' gate in Dread Fortress.

 

A line that you'll often hear in operations is: "Slash stuck, everyone!" The /stuck command, which moves you if you get physically stuck on an obstacle somewhere in the world, has the nice side effect of killing you if you're in combat at the time. This has led to it seeing lots of use in operations to get people to "die up quickly" when it becomes obvious that a fight is going to be a lost cause and it's better to start over.

Some time ago a visual bug was introduced which causes your character to not fall over when you /stuck - on your screen at least. You still die and fall down on everyone else's monitors. This can lead to some strange images, like this one of my trooper seemingly "defiantly" standing up to a roaring Thrasher, even though I was already dead at the time.

While wiping quickly is good form for regular raiders, sometimes trying to stay alive for as long as possible is just too hard to resist, just to see if you can. This is particularly fun on a Sage, since their Force Barrier (which grants complete immunity to all effects for its duration) allows them to survive for a little while even when things have gone majorly pear-shaped, so you can briefly enjoy the illusion of being extremely powerful... until the bubble runs out.

When you're dead and know that you won't receive a combat res, that's a great time to take screenshots, especially if other people are slow to type /stuck (or the group is genuinely still trying to down the boss). From a vantage point on the floor, any boss looks even more imposing than usual, and you can capture all kinds of heroic last stands... or the moment just before a missile is about to kill your fellow healer.

I hope you all enjoyed (or at least didn't mind) this series. The posts for it were a lot easier and faster to write than many of my usual, (trying to be) more thoughtful ones, and I thought that it also provided a good opportunity to talk about random gameplay observations that usually wouldn't warrant a post of their own.

Adventures in Old Content

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Victory at last

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nightmare Mode Light?

2.8 saw the release of nightmare mode Dread Palace and the removal of the Nightmare Power buff in Dread Fortress. The way I see it, the whole point of the latter has been to re-purpose nightmare mode as content for "hardmode guilds", who can mostly clear hardmode (and have therefore probably run out of content by now) but generally find nightmare mode too challenging. The underlying assumption is that the "real" nightmare mode guilds are done with the content by now anyway.

I was very curious about how that would work out in practice. My previous experience with raid nerfs (in MMOs in general) was that they made fights we'd been working on until then seem way too easy all of a sudden, making the final kill a rather disappointing one in the process.

In SWTOR, we were still working on Draxus when 2.8 came out. We had made some progress, but it was usually around the phase where dps have to first go under a shield where they can't be healed that things fell apart. I was curious to see how much of a difference the nerf would make.

Our first ops night after the patch came around, and we threw ourselves against Draxus as before. As a healer I thought the reduction in damage was very noticeable and definitely made it easier to keep everyone alive. What I didn't notice as someone who never pays much attention to boss health was that Bioware had actually left the bosses' health values untouched after all. One member of my group joked that we must have suffered from some sort of placebo effect, because even though dps had been an issue before and the dps requirements of the fight hadn't actually been changed, we finally got the boss down that night. It still felt far from easy however, and we were quite proud.

So my first instinct was to say: great job, Bioware, this nerf is right on target.

However, when we went back in this week, we just couldn't repeat the previous week's feat. It was just wipe after wipe after wipe once again. We were back to making the same mistakes as before, as well as struggling with dps on some occasions. The boss's reduced damage output was certainly still helpful, and even while messing up we generally made it through more phases than we usually survived pre-nerf. Yet at the same time... it didn't feel that much different from before, spending all evening wiping on the same boss, and I couldn't help but wonder if we would still be having these issues if Bioware had stuck with their original plan of reducing the bosses' health as well.

As it stands, I'm still undecided as for what to think of these nerfs. It must be hard to find the right balance between making the fights completely trivial for the target audience and changing them so little that it doesn't really make a difference to people. I'm hoping that this week was just "one of those nights" and that we'll be back to actually making some progress next time. Because otherwise Bioware might as well not have bothered with the whole Nightmare Power mechanic from my point of view.

I wonder how other guilds of a similar progression level are experiencing this.

An Evening of Pugs

I log in on my main first, sending the minions out on some crew skill tasks, and pick up the freshly reset Galactic Starfighter weekly and daily. My first queue pop puts me into a deathmatch already in progress, and the enemy team is already 27 points ahead. Oy vey. I hop into my gunship and shoot what I can, but I only manage to earn two medals before it's all over.

My next match is almost the complete opposite. As the teams start to fill up for a game of domination, I can tell right away that we're probably going to win, and easily at that. There are no less than seven people on my team who have five ships in their line-up - and while a greater selection of ships doesn't exactly make you more powerful, it's generally a sign of a player who's really into GSF and knows how to play. The enemy team only has a couple of strong players like that, but several "two-shippers", who are often inexperienced free-to-players. Unsurprisingly, we end up holding all three satellites for most of the match; only at the very end do they manage to wrest one away from us by throwing their whole team at it and earn a couple of pity points that way.

With the daily done, I log onto my Sage for a bit of PvP, as I remembered that I got most of a random warzone weekly done on her last week but forgot to actually complete it. My first match is a same-faction Civil War, and our opponents are strangely... absent for most of it. Are they short a player or two? I never see more than three people attacking a node at once. They seem to have a couple of stealthers who keep trying to cap when they think that nobody's looking, but we interrupt them every time and as soon as that happens they run away and re-stealth. An easy win, but kind of boring due to our opponents' apparent disinterest in actually engaging in combat.

Next I get put into a Tatooine arena match. I'm healing three dps vs. a team of four dps. Should be doable if we can outlive them, but I'm a bit concerned by the fact that my team consists entirely of consulars. Light armour is not that great for surviving burst. At one point it's down to two of our dps vs. two of theirs, but both of my team mates die without killing a single enemy. The second round is much the same. I'm a bit frustrated because I feel like I should have been able to do more, but as I'm lying dead on the floor there isn't a single cooldown on my bars that I haven't used. I give my MVP vote to the Shadow on my team who did the most damage and try not to think too much about it.

I queue up for one more match to complete my daily and weekly and get into a Voidstar. Though not my favourite warzone, this game is fun. We start out defending and manage to hold them at the very first door for the entire duration of the round, even though it's not easy and we have to do a lot of running back and forth. On the attacking round, one of our stealthers manages to plant almost instantly, making for a nice, quick win.

Since I have a bit more time to kill, I check general chat on the fleet to see what operations pugs are running that evening. There are a couple, but nothing that I feel I need on any of my alts. ("Need" usually meaning that I have some sort of non-repeatable quest for it.) I log over to my Imperial agent to check what things are like on the other side tonight, and end up joining what's supposed to be a full run of Dread Fortress.

We're off to a bit of a strange start when Nefra turns away from the tanks the moment they pull her and runs over to one-shot me. Err, healing aggro from my heal over time? I laugh it off and everything after that goes very smoothly. Even at the end of the Corruptor Zero fight, everyone is still alive. Brontes should be no problem with a group like that, right? Wrong. As soon as the lightning fingers spawn, they wipe out half the group, including - much to my shame - me. I could've sworn there was nobody behind me, except of course there was that one guy, and of course he of all people had to spawn a finger. Bah! One healer quits without a word, but everyone else is good to go again. We should be fine with three healers, as long as we don't noob it up like that again. Yet again, the lightning fingers spawn and people die - slightly fewer this time, but one of them is the main tank, and since the off-tank doesn't have the presence of mind to pick up Brontes when she reappears, she blasts lightning all over the group and wipes us out anyway. Suddenly everyone "has to go", including the guy who initially put the group together, and within a minute it's all fallen apart.

I'm always disappointed when that happens, even more so as it means that I don't get to complete the story quest that was my main reason for joining the run. However, I did get the Dread Fortess weekly quest done and won three drops of varying usefulness, so I guess I can't complain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There needs to be a rhythm to the damage patterns.

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

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

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

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

There should be things to do other than heal.

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

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

Dispels should be handled with care.

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

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

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

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

Nightmare Operations - Operations Nightmares

It's been a while since I've written about my PvE endgame progress. Two months ago I noted that we finally killed Brontes on hardmode and predicted that we should be able to get the Council too before 2.7 released. I was right. In fact, as soon as we got the Council down once, we were able to repeat that kill pretty consistently in the weeks afterwards, while Brontes is still giving us trouble on our farming runs. I just don't know what it is about that fight.

We also went back to give Scum NiM another go and actually got the first boss down. We also had some decent tries on Titan 6 that night but messed up too many times to really get anywhere. I still can't believe how hard those 2.2 nightmare modes are, even now! Just... mad props to the people who cleared this when it was current content.

Ever since the release of nightmare mode for Dread Fortress, we've been working on that. We got Nefra down on our first night - she's comparatively easy, as you just need two people to learn a new trick for nightmare mode and everyone else can basically continue playing as if it was hardmode. Since then, we've been working on Draxus.

Oh that Draxus.

He's one of the trickier bosses on any difficulty really, due to the consecutive add waves requiring different people to do different things, but on nightmare all this basically gets tuned up to eleven. The most glaring example is that using an interrupt locks you out of interrupting anything again for the duration of that wave, so you have to set up whole rotations including tanks and healers. It's pretty nuts.

We've been making some progress, but it's slow. I hope that we don't end up with another Dread Guard situation. (We spent over two months trying and failing to kill these on NiM, until the release of Oricon "saved" us by giving us something else to run. I still haven't got that kill.) Especially since it looks like the next new operation is still going to be more than a few months away.

Then again, we might actually benefit from what they are doing with Nightmare Power this time around, as they've announced that the buff will already be removed in 2.8. While fights like Draxus are very much about execution, having less health to burn through and taking less damage would still work to provide a bit of a buffer to make unforgiving mechanics a bit more forgiving, maybe allowing the raid to recover from a mistake that would previously have been a wipe. We'll see.

All I can say is once again that I'm quite in awe of the people who clear this content with ease. I listen to people like Mae from TOROCast and her slightly exasperated complaining about how these new nightmare modes are way too easy because it took her guild only two days to clear them (or however many days it was, a small number in any case) and my mind just boggles.

I believe that all the people in my ops group are good players - they know how to gear, how to play, how to execute tactics... but we all make mistakes. And that seems normal to me, whoever doesn't make the occasional mistake? Miss an interrupt, taunt the wrong thing, stand in the wrong place at the wrong time? Well, on fights like Draxus NiM, every one of those mistakes will wipe the group, even if it was just one person getting one small thing wrong. I guess true NiM raiders don't make mistakes, or at least it must be extremely rare.

The Pug Bug

So, two things kind of happened in the last couple of weeks. First, I found myself giving some attention to my Imperial max-level alts as my guild has been doing some Imperial alt operations for the first time in ages, and I was kind of shocked by just how badly some of them were geared. I shouldn't have been surprised, considering that I haven't done much with them other than level them to the cap and run a couple of flashpoints, but it was still a jarring contrast to how well-geared even my lesser played Republic alts are. So I decided to give them a bit more love in the near future, if nothing else just by sending some spare gear over from Republic side, or checking whether they had some quests left to do that would give decent rewards.

The other thing that happened is that I've been levelling my little Vanguard, and since I intentionally left her un-guilded for now, I've actually been reading general chat on her. On all my other characters I have it hidden away in a separate tab not necessarily because it's terrible, but because I'm paranoid about missing guild chat or personal messages if they have to share a space with the never-ending flow of random chatter that is general chat on the fleet. By actually paying attention to general for a change, I found myself surprised by just how many operations pugs people were putting together at all times of day, both for old and new content.

These two observations coalesced in my brain to form the following thought: why not take some of my lesser played alts to an ops pug when I have the time? I may not be as skilled on the ones I don't play as often, but I'm not terrible either and I know all the tactics. It would be an opportunity to finally complete some of the ops story quests that certain characters have had in their logs pretty much for as long as I can remember, as well as a chance at some gear upgrades from boss drops. How bad could it be?

Well, actually it turned out to be awesome. The very first pug I jumped into, 16-man TFB on my dps Guardian, was led by someone who was both friendly as well as extremely competent. They made it clear from the start that it wasn't a problem if anyone needed fight explanations, but as it happened we had a full group of people who already knew the instance. We breezed through the place in little more than an hour, and the ops leader only had to give the occasional pointer where special roles needed to be assigned (such as who should click the consoles on Operator).

Since then I also joined a KP hardmode run on my Gunslinger and knocked out Dread Fortress on three different alts that hadn't done it yet. I won't claim that it was a perfect experience - there were a couple of slightly annoying people, and there was that one time we had a really silly wipe on the first trash pull in DF - but on the whole it's been very good. Groups fill up quickly and with the exception of some people who are looking to fill the last few spots in their hardmode runs, I've never seen anyone ask about achievements, gear or even spec. You just whisper your role and if it's something the group still needs, the invite comes flying. Despite of this complete lack of vetting, I have yet to see anyone join who was dramatically undergeared or incompetent. Sure, you'll always get someone who dies to silly things, but story mode is tuned to forgive the occasional blunder, and most people seem to know what to do. I suspect this is the side of pugging that is rarely talked about: that it's not just for the new and clueless, but also serves as a playground for people like me who are on their fifth alt and are confident in being able to do the job. (And from the looks of it there are a lot of us.)

Behaviour-wise, people tend to be quiet and focused on the job, but overall the atmosphere is pleasant. I haven't seen any blatant rudeness or ninja-looting so far. It seems that the social checks and balances are in place - nobody wants to make themselves or their guild look bad in front of people that they might rely on again for the next pug. And of course it helps that there are no add-ons like damage meters for people to needlessly scrutinise other players' performance. Every member of the group is just another helpful addition.

I suspect that there will be a lot more pugging like that in my future - it's surprisingly quick and quite rewarding. (Even if you don't win any rolls, you get a fair amount of commendations and some of the one-time quests give good rewards too: yay for Arkanian relics from the DF story mission!) I even made a little spreadsheet (don't judge me) to note down which of my alts still have quests to do in which operation. If you've been thinking about stepping into an operations pug yourself, it seems to me that now is a great time.

On Nerfs and Nightmare Power

No, not those kinds of nerfs...

GaddockTeeg (JD) of the Unnamed SWTOR Podcast got himself into a bit of a ranting mood this week, both on his show and on Twitter. He really doesn't like one of the upcoming changes in 2.7, and doesn't quite understand why he appears to be almost alone in his outrage. If nothing else, he sure got me thinking on the subject.

It's funny, WoW does raid nerfs and people lose their minds. SWTOR adds a measly title and I haven't seen much outcry except from me.
— GaddockTeeg (@GTeeg) March 10, 2014

In case you didn't know, nightmare mode Dread Fortress is scheduled to release next month, and it's supposed to be just as difficult as previous nightmare modes. However, part of this difficulty will now be rolled into a buff on the bosses called Nightmare Power, which increases their health and damage output. If you manage to kill the last boss while she still has this buff, you'll gain a special title; however at a later point (I think I saw someone say "not by 2.8, later than that") this buff will be removed, making the fights significantly easier in the process. Basically, the hardest content in the game is scheduled to be nerfed, right from the start.

Now, I think that nerfs are never a good thing, because they basically come down to changing the rules of the game after you've given people time to get used to playing under the existing rules and growing to like them. In an ideal world no content would be released until it's perfectly tuned, but since nobody's perfect, there can be understandable reasons to apply nerfs after release. Explosive Conflict story mode was a good example: my guild cleared it and I enjoyed the challenge, but for something that was supposed to be super accessible it was just way overtuned at launch. It wasn't serving its intended purpose; that needed to be changed.

Nerfs also come in different flavours: personally I don't find it too bad if the devs just adjust a boss's health and damage numbers for example, because that doesn't usually change the very nature of the fight too much. Removing or completely trivialising whole mechanics on the other hand is a big no-no in my book (which is why I remain eternally sad about the nerf to the Darth Malgus fight in False Emperor).

Badly done nerfs can indeed induce a lot of outrage. I remember the last time I got really ticked off about a nerf in WoW, which was back in early Cataclysm. Back before there was a Looking For Raid tool, my guild, like so many others, was working its way through normal modes and had downed everything but the last two bosses in the tier. Then a massive nerf hit, which reduced boss health and damage by twenty percent as well as trivialising several of their mechanics. After that nerf, we downed the boss we'd been working on for weeks in two tries and then killed the last one, whom we had never even seen before, the same night. It was a major annoyance, for several reasons:

- The nerfs came with (relatively) short notice.
- They weren't applied to fine-tune the fights' difficulty, they were applied to make them irrelevant as progression and push people into the next tier.
- They affected a huge number of people (basically every raid guild that wasn't doing hard modes already).
- They were badly handled, going by the standards I set above, because they destroyed key fight mechanics on top of blanket health and damage reductions.
- On a personal level, my guild was robbed of the satisfaction of killing a boss we had been working on for weeks, as mechanics we had been practising were simply removed and our previous efforts were rendered completely pointless.

Now, how does this compare to what's happening with Nightmare Power? I think this scenario is very different. First off, we're being told about the eventual nerfing of the content before it's even been released in its original form. That's about as much notice as it's possible to get. We're also being told that it's only going to affect health and damage, and that mechanics will stay intact.

Finally, and I think this is an important point, it will only affect a minuscule amount of people since only a very small part of the player base participates in nightmare modes to begin with. I've seen the number "less than two percent" thrown around. If we assume that the game has about a million players, counting both subscribers and non-subscribers, that's maybe ten thousand people - and I'd also assume that "participation" in this case includes guilds like my own who set foot into NiM and managed to kill only a single boss before hitting a brick wall. I wouldn't be surprised if the number of people that can actually clear a nightmare mode within a reasonable time frame numbered only in the hundreds. Of those, a lot will probably manage to down Brontes in time to get the title anyway (because that's why they are doing nightmare modes in the first place, because they are that good), and what happens afterwards won't matter to them. There'll probably be a couple of guilds who'll get close and just miss out - and I do feel bad for them, but you'll excuse me for not starting a petition on their behalf.

There is another argument that JD has been bringing up a lot, and that's that of prestige. It will diminish those nightmare mode guilds' efforts if the unwashed masses can do an easier version of the same thing later! Now, I know many people who don't like this kind of argument to begin with, but personally I don't disagree. Of course we all want to feel like special snowflakes, and of course it's not fun if something we worked hard for is given to other people more easily.

However, prestige decays naturally over time anyway. Take the Warstalker title that you get for completing EC NiM in under two hours. A year ago, seeing someone with that title was a rare and impressive sight. These days? Meh. While EC NiM is still no pushover, five more levels and several tiers of new gear have made it vastly easier than it used to be, even if the operation never received a formal nerf. Keeping that in mind, the changes they are making with Nightmare Power are a good thing for hardcore raiders that like to show off: because for the first time, they'll get a reward that less skilled players won't also be able to get later.

Of course, all this rambling of mine doesn't answer the key question of why the hardest content in the game needs to be nerfed in the first place. It's supposed to be hard and inaccessible, right? We have story mode so everyone can see the content, and we have hard mode for people who want a bit of a challenge, why even have a nightmare mode if it's just going to get nerfed to be closer to hard mode? To be honest, I completely agree that it's not needed, but I suspect that it's a case of the devs suffering from a bit of vanity in regards to their work. "We thought up all these interesting mechanics and hardly anyone gets to see them! What a waste!" It's a bit of a contradiction in terms really, because the very definition of difficult content is that it's going to be exclusive and not seen by all. I'm not sure why this is suddenly an issue. Either way, I suspect that the introduction of Nightmare Power and its eventual removal are meant to get more people into nightmare modes once the initial race is over, just for the sake of someone doing them and getting to see the new mechanics.

I don't think it's something that's needed, but I also don't see it having much of a negative effect on most people, so I'm happy to wait and see how it plays out in practice.

EDIT: JD put some more of his thoughts on the subject into a blog post of his own.