GS9 Flashpointing, Week 3

I wasn't planning to keep a diary of my weekly activities this season - and I guess I'm still not really keeping one, at least not one that involves the level of detail with which I kept Galactic Season diaries in Season 1 and Season 6 - but I do find the weekly flashpoint objectives interesting enough that I keep wanting to take some notes on them.

In general, the third week of Galactic Season 9 was another really pleasant one with multiple easy objectives, to the point that I ended up going 7 out of 7 on all servers. You know it's an easy one when you set yourself a goal to reach a certain objective by the end of the week and end up ticking off several others by accident before you even get there! That's the kind of week it was.

The dynamic encounter planet of the week was Ilum. It's the planet I've ranked as the least fun in terms of dynamic encounters so far, but the reason I did so was that I think many encounters have a high mob density that tends to get in the way of whatever the actual objective is. In a week like this one, where there were plenty of people on Ilum every day, this wasn't nearly as bad as mobs were constantly getting cleared out left and right. Turns out even the rather tedious Fall of Fort Tonvarr can be fun with a sufficiently large crowd of people around.

The featured veteran mode flashpoint of the week was Mandalorian Raiders, which is another relatively easy one. I wonder if all the featured flashpoints will be softballs or whether the devs will make us "graduate" to some of the trickier ones as the season progresses.

Anyway, nothing too noteworthy happened in any of my runs of this particular flashpoint this week, except that in one run where we had particularly high dps (it was a group with multiple level 80s if I recall correctly) the last boss was burned down so quickly that he completely forgot to do any mechanics, just stood there and didn't move until he died. The only downside of this was that this also seemed to bug out his on-screen position, as none of us were able to loot him, always getting the "you can't reach that" error message.

I still remember when at least parts of this flashpoint could be quite deadly, such as if you pushed the last boss himself too quickly and got too many turret adds, but in the one group where this happened it was no problem to survive the turret fire anyway.

Also, the dog trash used to hit so hard, I remember on master mode we'd have to rotate stuns to make sure the tank would survive. I will say though that in runs with lower-level characters, I did notice that ahead of some pulls with multiple dogs, people often suddenly step on the brakes, clearly waiting for someone else to go first and get pounced on (I tended to volunteer).

The more exciting thing were once again the master mode flashpoints though, even if I got a pretty tame selection this week.

On Leviathan I got Hammer Station at last! I'm happy that it took until week three for it to show up in my randoms. Also, we actually killed all the trash to the first boss properly instead of trying to run like headless chickens, which is something I appreciated.

On Tulak Hord I got into a Maelstrom Prison and nearly died on the first pull when I got all the healer aggro just as a guildie was asking me something, but other than that it was smooth. And yes, a guildie was actually online in the largely inactive guild I joined! They asked me to invite an alt of theirs into the guild, so I had them invite two of mine in return after the flashpoint, so I can at last reap a few more Conquest rewards on this server. (Now, if only I knew what to do with my Imps...)

On Star Forge, I did several flashpoints on Swtorista's stream, and we got Nathema Conspiracy and Legacy of the Rakata. In the former, we actually did no skips, and we all agreed that the last boss used to be way harder somehow. In the latter, we wiped once on the bonus boss, oops! But it was all good fun.

On Satele Shan, I once again used my magic tank powers to get an instant pop for a pug. The power is addictive! This time I got into Red Reaper, a flashpoint I hadn't done in ages. A dps Powertech was constantly running ahead, which annoyed me a bit because if you're on a class that can tank and you want to always be the first to charge in, just queue as tank, damn it! These sorts of damage dealers are my least favourite to tank for. Though this one did stop just short of actually trying to pull for me. Fortunately I did still end up remembering all the pulls and skips so I managed to keep up reasonably well. I was really just having tank ego problems here: I got an instant pop and had a smooth run where nobody died, but one of the dps was playing in a manner that was slightly annoying to me, woe is me.

On Darth Malgus, we managed to field two groups for master mode flashpoints after our social ops run on Saturday, which was something I was very happy to see as I've always felt that flashpoints are a great social activity. My group got the Esseles, which I didn't have any particularly strong feelings about at this point, but Mr Commando groaned as it was the third time he'd had to run the Esseles in three weeks. I will note that I think for master modes the cut scene skip is fine by the way, because these were always meant to be a gear grind above anything else.

I'm curious to see what exciting places the group finder will take me next week!

Flashpoints: Why Are We Here?

I've been having fun with the new season so far and will probably talk about that at some point, but the removal of cut scenes and group conversations from the group finder continues to weigh heavily on my mind. While my initial reaction was skewing towards slightly negative, I was telling myself that this is probably one of those cases where I'm just a weird outlier for liking something (group conversations in pug flashpoints) that many people don't like, and that I'll see the benefits of this change soon enough. I still remember when the Czerka flashpoints first came out back in 2013, I was actually somewhat disappointed at first that they were so streamlined without any interactive cut scenes, but I got over that pretty quickly.

One of the seasons objectives this week was to run either the Black Talon or the Esseles on veteran mode via the group finder, and with me doing Galactic Seasons on all servers I had plenty of opportunity to see the new change in action. For the most part, the experience was... fine. I'm not going to pretend that I would have had so much more fun if I'd gotten the full cut scene experience six times instead of the new fade to black thing. Primarily, it was all just kind of weird, with a lot of running back and forth with no discernible purpose when you don't actually have the story cut scenes to tell you what is happening.

There was one run that really annoyed me though. I got into an Esseles on a level 80 healer, and the other three members of the group were a level 80 dps, a level 10 and a level 14. I don't know if the two lowbies were new players or just alts, but either way they were subject to certain limitations at their low level, such as slower speed and lacking strong AoE abilities or defensives. Yet the level 80 was constantly mounting up and driving ahead, aggroing absolutely everything to pull it into a corner at the end, while the rest of us slowly jogged after them on foot. (I would've been able to keep up more but I felt it was my duty to protect the lowbies, who would've died several times if I hadn't healed them.)

The 80 repeatedly told them off for fighting things and said they should just mount up as well. I got the impression that at least one of them got a bit flustered by that and tried to overcompensate by mounting up and rushing ahead even of the level 80 at one point, just to then be told off because not everyone had made it up the elevator yet when we were put into combat as a result of that (which was technically correct but also must've been confusing in terms of mixed messages).

I got really annoyed with that level 80's attitude but didn't say anything because frankly I was quite busy just keeping up with their constant running myself, as well as just keeping everyone else alive. I simply did what I could to support the lowbies, such as when one of them veered off towards the bonus boss while the 80 was just trying to go straight to the end. I just kept hoping that neither of the little guys were genuinely new players because if I had been a newbie in that situation, I would have been so put off from running flashpoints ever again.

Now, to be clear, all of this technically has nothing to do with the cut scene change, because people could act like that while the group conversations were still a thing. However, at least the cut scenes would put the brakes on things a little bit. They were a reminder that this flashpoint wasn't designed to be rushed like that. And I feel that the removal of the cut scenes does the opposite now, vindicating people like that level 80 in the sense that yes, the devs agree with you that flashpoints are something to get over and done with as quickly as possible. I feel like my opinion was validated by a thread on the SWTOR subreddit posted this week about how this kind of behaviour seemed to be worse than ever since the patch. In a comment thread there, someone who commented that "games are meant to be fun" also received the reply: "It's a season objective. Literally not meant to be fun. Just a way to progress."

I just kept thinking to myself: What are we doing here? Why are we optimising content for people who don't like it? And I realised that I'm worried about SWTOR flashpoints going down the way of World of Warcraft dungeons.

WoW was my first MMO as well as my introduction to doing group content with random players, and I loved it. The first time I did the Deadmines? Amazing. I got yelled at for ninja-looting a chest because I didn't know any better, but I apologised, learned from it and we moved on. For about three or four years, dungeons were easily one of my favourite things to do in the game. However, somewhere along the line, things changed. Blizzard wanted players to run dungeons in greater numbers and more often, so they became increasingly incentivised for endless replay, and people's attitudes changed accordingly.

I still play WoW almost twenty years later, but I rarely do dungeons in its modern incarnation now. Every now and then some reward will lure me into queueing up for a pug dungeon again, just for me to instantly be reminded of why I no longer find them fun. Everything is just an insane rush to the end to pick up the reward and it's a casual or new player's absolute nightmare.

When I started playing SWTOR, I instantly fell in love with the game's flashpoints too. The Esseles and Black Talon are absolutely amazing experiences that have no real equivalent in other games when you play through them in a group for the first time and as intended (which is to say, actually paying attention to the story and listening to the group conversations). They are also clearly not intended to be re-run on a daily basis. Sure, they can be fun to re-play every now and then, to see what different conversation choices do and so on, but it's clearly not something you're supposed to do all the time. The game won't stop you from running it multiple times a day if you want to, but I think it's fair to say that you were effectively "doing it wrong" in that case and couldn't really complain if it wasn't super fun. The idea with SWTOR flashpoints was that they were still meant to be a bit of an adventure every time you entered one, something you can only really consume in moderation.

With this change... I don't really know anymore. I can even defend the removal of cut scenes as a temporary measure for the Galactic Season, mostly because it benefits me personally, but people like me, who do Galactic Seasons on every server, can hardly make up a significant chunk of the player base. Clearly the intent is to get more players into flashpoints that haven't done them before, but I'm not sure this whole exercise is going to show them anything appealing enough to want to come back. Endless running along corridors with no rhyme or reason about what is going on? What's appealing about that?

I also saw someone comment somewhere that Final Fantasy XIV used to have a similar problem with new players having a bad experience in the group finder due to issues with cut scene skipping, and Square Enix's solution to that was to make the cut scenes unskippable for everyone and increase the reward payout to make sure veterans were being suitably compensated for the fact that the run was taking longer to accommodate the newbies. Now, I don't play FFXIV myself, so I can't tell you how well that worked out for everyone, but I think it shows that "whelp, we've got to cater to the people who are in a hurry" is not an inevitability. SWTOR and FF have a lot in common in terms of their focus on story, so it's actually kind of odd to me now to see the SWTOR devs choose speed-running over story in this instance.

At this point, after thinking about it some more, I feel like instead of removing cut scenes all over the place they should've gone back and reconsidered what flashpoints are all about and why people are funnelled into them the way they are. Why do people ask to skip cut scenes? Because they're in a flashpoint they don't really want to be in. Why are they in this flashpoint? Because we give extra rewards for queueing for a random flashpoint. Why do we give rewards for that? So people who want to run specific flashpoints can get groups for them. But why would people run the Esseles in a group these days when there is a solo mode available anyway? Maybe the devs should've just taken it out of the group finder like they did Kuat and Colicoid War Games. Leaving it in but taking out everything that actually made it unique and insteresting just feels like extremely muddled game design to me. It just doesn't make sense in my head.

Pugging on Tulak Hord

It's been a while since I had a good pug tale to tell! However, as part of my efforts to work my way through Galactic Season 2 on servers other than Darth Malgus, I've also found myself running some veteran flashpoints there. I was curious whether there were going to be noticeable differences in "pug culture" among servers, but so far I haven't really noticed anything particularly remarkable... except for the fact that both of the veteran flashpoint runs I've had on the German server Tulak Hord have been weird AF.

First my levelling Commando healer got into an Esseles with three level 80s, two of whom were in a guild together. I can't say that I loved getting that particular flashpoint as my random at that point in time, but whatever. I expected everyone to start space-barring immediately, but the first conversation lasted suspiciously long... I was starting to wonder whether people on this server were just generally in the habit of watching the cut scenes when someone asked to skip after all and I was like: "Ahh, of course!"

The request was met with a sort of partial compliance, as conversations seemed to pass noticeably faster but still took a while, as if someone was watching at least a few lines play out every time. In general, everyone's behaviour just seemed ever so slightly odd. Aside from the initial greetings, only a few words were said in chat that made absolutely no sense to me and which made me wonder whether someone was drunk or I was missing some important context (such as the guildies talking to each other in guild chat).

At points there was some erratic running around as if people didn't know where to go or really wanted to have a closer look at the scenery. I suppose it could've been some people's first time, though I'd consider it slightly unusual for a group of 80s to have never done the Esseles. At one point the guy who wasn't in the guild with the others initiated a vote kick on one of the other two without providing a reason. I voted no and it failed due to insufficient votes (I didn't think the other guy was going to vote to kick his guildie either).

We made it through the instance without any real issues, but the slightly off-kilter behaviour made me glad to be out of there. I figured that it was just a weird group as you just get them sometimes on any server and that hopefully my next run on Tulak Hord was going to be better.

Spoiler: It was not!

This time I got into Mandalorian Raiders with a group of levellers: a Guardian tank in his 20s, an Operative in his 30s and a Vanguard in his 50s. The Guardian and Vanguard were in the same guild. I saw the group makeup and instantly realised that a group of levellers was going to make things slower and more challenging, but at the same time we had both a tank and a healer (me) so it should still be relatively easy, right?

It immediately became apparent that the two guildies didn't really know where to go, though the Operative seemingly did and tried to lead the way. On our way to the first boss the two guildies ran off into random side rooms on two occasions that I didn't even remember existed, and we could only just prevent them from doubling back entirely. I was already noticing that dps seemed low and that I was getting aggro on a fair number of mobs but I didn't think too much of it yet.

That changed when we got to Braxx the Bloodhound and not only did I end up tanking him for most of the fight, the fight also took forever. As I was running in circles clicking the kolto stations and bemoaning my life choices to Mr Commando (who told me that I only had myself to blame), I started looking a bit more closely at what my group mates were doing and noticed that the Guardian had a permanently filled focus bar - he wasn't using any abilities other than his basic attack! I also found myself wondering whether the boss was going to hit some sort of enrage eventually because of how long we were taking, but the answer seemed to be no. He eventually died after more than seven minutes - longer than many ops boss fights.

On the next few trash pulls I noticed that the Operative's energy bar was also barely moving, and that he spent his entire time shooting from range with his basic attack (for those not in the know, Operative is a melee class).

On the enemy boarding party encounter I ended up tanking most of the mobs yet again, and by the time only two of them were left alive I got sick of it and started kiting them around one of the containers in the room to reduce my damage taken. Fortunately it wasn't that high anyway, but I didn't see why I should just stand there and let them smack me in the face just because nobody else was doing anything resembling tanking. Sure, it meant that the others had to run in circles behind me too, but it's not as if they didn't have the option to actually take aggro...

Between the second and third boss there is this one section where you cross a bridge and on it there are two patrolling droids as well as several adds that can spawn in depending on where you enter combat. I watched with some horror as my clueless protegés pulled absolutely everything and then the two guildies jumped or fell off the bridge onto the level below as well. I just stood there and healed myself while the Operative did some meagre dps from range. Eventually the other two, who had survived the fall on low health, managed to run back up and rejoin us. I thought it was a minor miracle that we didn't wipe, though the Operative got downed towards the end.

And so it just continued for the rest of the run. Another memorable moment was when we went down the big lift and I found myself wondering whether I could perhaps make things easier for myself by crowd-controlling one of the three silver mobs at the bottom... but nope, as if the rest of the group had read my mind, they fanned out perfectly to each engage one enemy on their own and duel it to death in the slowest way possible.

I guess one good thing about terrible damage dealers is that them not knowing the tactics for the last boss didn't wipe us, because while the two guildies did attack the boss initially, their damage was worthless and they did listen to the instruction to focus on the turrets eventually, so that we did not trigger any premature jumps.

When we finished I felt both relieved and oddly giddy that we had actually made it through somehow. I'm not sure that group would've made it very far without a healer (aka me) or at least an otherwise very strong and competent player carrying them through, but we'd succeeded, even if it had been an extremely slow and in parts quite painful journey.

I just hope that pugs on Tulak Hord aren't always like this...

Group Finding in 6.0 (hey, the Esseles is hard again)

One thing that changed with 6.0 but wasn't mentioned in the patch notes and hasn't been documented anywhere else as far as I can tell is that Bioware made some pretty impactful changes to the group finder. I wasn't aware of a lot of them myself until commenter Diana pointed out in comment that she'd noticed that her selection of available flashpoints had been greatly limited on her low-level character compared to what it used to be.

To quickly recap the setup that we had since 4.0 when Bioware first introduced flashpoint scaling: From level 10-14 you only had access to the Esseles / Black Talon, but then at level 15 all other flashpoints available through the group finder would open up on veteran mode. At 50 you'd also gain access to all master modes (minus a couple of the newer ones that had minimum gear requirements) as well as to all story mode operations.

This setup always had its pros and cons. I levelled a Mercenary purely through flashpoints shortly after 4.0 dropped to test the waters and documented her journey here on the blog. It was mostly good fun, but there were definitely some kinks: New players could be totally lost in story flashpoints that told a tale meant to happen later in the game, and lowbies in general struggled in certain places that had originally been designed for characters with a bunch of cooldowns available and equipped with a full set of utilities; bolster or no bolster.

Hearing that this had changed now, I was immediately intrigued and decided that it was probably time to level another character through flashpoint running, if for no other reason than to be able to jot down which flashpoint unlocks at which level now. In fact, this was the main reason I created Nautalie the Shadow besides wanting to check out Nautolans.

While levelling her through Tython I made good use of her stealth to throttle my XP gains when needed to make sure that I wasn't going to be too high level by the time I left the planet. In the end I was about three quarters through level ten by the time I queued up for the Esseles, which is still the only option available to characters of level 10-14.

Somewhat to my disappointment, I had to wait more than half an hour for a pop. If I had actually played instead of standing around on the fleet during that time, I probably would have outlevelled the flashpoint's range before I got a group! I did a /who and there were more than enough characters in the right level range, but if they were doing the Esseles at all most of them seemed to prefer the solo version.

On the plus side, when I finally did get a group everyone in it was pretty chill and happy to watch the cut scenes. After previous negative experiences I was hitting space bar right away to be on the safe side, but quickly noticed that other people weren't doing the same - so I asked if they wanted to watch and we had at least one self-professed newbie who had never been before, and the others didn't mind.

The only hump we ran into at the beginning was that except for the group leader none of us could enter the instance. Even while trying to walk directly through the door I kept getting an error that the group leader had selected a different difficulty setting than the rest of us. I can only suspect that they had picked up the solo mode before queueing, though I'm not sure why the game would even allow you to queue for veteran mode then. By passing leadership to me and resetting the phase, three of us were able to enter, but now the unlucky previous group leader was unable to join us, even after he had abandoned all his quests to make sure nothing was conflicting, so he eventually just left. I did feel kind of bad for him. We did make a start with the three of us plus Qyzen and eventually got a new fourth while fighting Lieutenant Isric.

One thing that was very noticeable was that the whole flashpoint felt much harder than I remembered it. Now, part of that may have been due to us having no healer, but I also noticed that the instance now scales to 70, when pre-6.0 it scaled down to its original level (I forgot, something between 10 and 15). Bolster is good and all, but a level 10-14 party scaled up to 70 is still pretty weaksauce, meaning that we had to pause and regen after every other pull, and every fight involving a gold mob turned into a proper life-or-death battle. I even died on Ironfist, after having already used two of the three kolto stations and being unable to find the third one in my low-health panic. This level of difficulty was unexpected, but actually kind of enjoyable to me personally.

Other things I noticed were that veteran flashpoints apparently now also give the "Beginner's Luck" buff, which also appears to have been added to all story mode operations with 6.0. It's basically the mechanic from the Izax fight that allows you to use your revive every thirty seconds instead of every five minutes, now applied to all group content that is supposed to be easy. Can't say I mind the idea, though it obviously wasn't relevant to us in the low teens as nobody had a combat revive yet anyway.

I was also very surprised to get tech fragments and phat grade 11 crafting loot... at level 10, in the Esseles! I mean, the number of fragments was pretty low, and currently it seems like you aren't actually able to open the crafting bags until level 75... that could turn into an inventory problem quickly. But it was still nice to get some loot that is actually relevant to endgame and my legacy.

Over the next few weeks, I'm planning to document my levelling progress in the same format I used for my Mercenary back in 2015, so prepare yourselves for some more tales of pugs. As mentioned earlier, I'll also be keeping a log of just when each flashpoint unlocks now and am planning to post that in an easy-to-read format once I've hit max-level.

Group Decision Making

I've sung the praises of the group conversation system in the past, and I stand by everything I've said about it. It just makes for a fantastic experience when playing through story content with friends... even in content that you've all done many times before. I was reminded of this while doing a master mode Esseles with three of my guildies (Cal, Mace and Ori) last night.

Naturally, all of us having been there dozens of times before and aiming for quick weekly completion, we hit those space bars to get through all the conversations as fast as possible... but that didn't prevent us from talking on voice chat about what was going on story-wise. The funniest of these chats happened when we entered the engineering deck.

Brief context for any readers who might not know/remember: The situation is that you are on a ship that's been boarded and you are under pressure to quickly get to the bridge to reclaim it. The bridge is locked however, and you've come to engineering to find a way to open it up. You are given two options: A reactor reset, which will achieve the desired result instantly, but also flushes a group of engineers that are trapped behind a force field right in front of you out into space (dark side). Or you can shut down the secondary conduits, which means that nobody has to die, but you have to take an extra two to three minutes to run to the conduits and kill the mobs around them (light side).

Does the gravity of the situation allow for you to take the extra time to choose the "safe" option? The NPC that's accompanying you, Ambassador Asara, doesn't think so and wants to sacrifice the engineers right then and there, but it's up to you to make the final decision.

As soon as we entered, the following conversation ensued on TeamSpeak:

Ori: Ah yes I know, we have to throw them out or Mace is just not going to do anything.
Mace: [laughs]
Cal: I was about to say: check alignments, people.
Me: You sound like someone speaking from experience.
Mace: For some reason light side tends to win a lot here!
Cal: Because who can bear to watch those engineers be flushed out into space every single bloody time?
Me: It's horrible!
Ori: Mace, take a bathroom break.
Everyone: [laughs]
Cal: What are you trying to say here?
Mace: Well, they need help getting out. So I help them get out.
Cal: Oh dear. Well, let's see what happens here.
[All except Mace make their choice on the crucial conversation option.]
Me: The suspense is killing me.
Cal: Roll, Mace, roll!
[He times out and one of us light-siders wins the roll to save the engineers.]
Me: He can't even make up his mind! Or he already went on the bathroom break.
[He times out on the next conversation choice as well.]
Me: Oh come on, making us wait through this is just cruel.
Mace: [laughs] That wasn't my intention, sorry...
Cal: Oh dear.

After that the three of us proceeded to shut down the conduits while Mace chilled with Asara for the next few of minutes, in silent protest of us choosing the goodie-two-shoes option that adds extra minutes of run time to the flashpoint. We all thought this was hilarious.

I have actually had similar - if slightly more subdued - banter about conversation choices in pugs sometimes, but generally speaking, the group finder's "press the button and go", expecting-to-be-in-and-out-in-30-minutes culture is unfortunately very much at odds with this sort of system. For that reason I can completely understand why Bioware has chosen not to include conversations in the newer flashpoints... but at times I do wonder what else we could have had if the game hadn't gone down the route of designing flashpoints primarily for quick and endless repetition by pugs.

Day 9: Silly #IntPiPoMo

My 10 themed days of SWTOR screenshots in celebration of International Picture Posting Month continue. If you want to see a list of all the themes I'm using, you can find it here.

I tend to feel ambivalent about silly character names, but seeing these guys in a Voidstar match made me smile, and I've never even played Bioshock. I certainly appreciate a good pun or well-executed theme.

I would say phasewalking loses some of its power when you know exactly just where all the Sages will plant theirs in Ancient Hypergates...

Things going wrong in cut scenes are always funny, but I really loved this party bomb sneaking into this early scene from the Esseles, both because of how utterly inappropriate it is in context but also because of how the Navigator ends up wearing it like some sort of bizarre hat.

This picture is not that silly in itself but it's more about what it represents. One night in EC we were running with some pugs and were waiting for everyone to catch back up after the Minefield, when one of the pugs taught the rest of us how to climb the cliff face on the side of the area. This manoeuvre allows you to skip just... one, two (?) pulls of trash and was therefore a huge waste of time considering how long it took to get everyone up there, but it was also entertaining. As the pug explained: you have time to discover all kinds of things when you're sitting around bored, waiting for people to catch up.

Finally, this is just a screenshot I took of my chat window during our first ever night on Nahut. It just amused me in several different ways, from a certain Scoundrel complaining about actually having to heal, then rolling to his death through a hole in the floor, to my own eventual demise through Spaghettificiation (best boss ability ever).

IntPiPoMo count: 57

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.

Pugging with Shintar, Episode 1

During the past few months, I've frequently found myself thinking back to my flashpoint levelling series. It was just such a fun thing to work on, and I've really been longing to return to the subject somehow; I just didn't want to simply do the whole thing again in exactly the same way. How could I change things up though?

One of my pug runs from back then that has stuck with me to this day was the manic Mandalorian Raiders run where I found myself wishing that I had recorded the first boss fight on video. Just describing it in writing didn't quite seem to do it justice. But hm, recording my pug runs...

There would have to be some commentary to make it entertaining, but I never really got into the whole "let's play" thing. Then again, I have made great strides in the past couple of months in terms of being more comfortable with speaking in front of an audience and not hating listening to the sound of my own voice too much, thanks to things like my invitation to Corellian Run Radio and recording that Dread Master story video.

So after a bit of umming and ahhing I finally decided to go ahead with it: level another character purely through flashpoints, but this time record every run and add commentary to the video. After last weekend, I'm happy to present "Pugging with Shintar, Episode 1":



As I also explain at the start of the video, the aim of the series is both to entertain but also to maybe inform players who are curious yet anxious about making the jump into random groups of what they can reasonably expect. I think there is something to be said for seeing that in detail, and I couldn't find much material about pugging in SWTOR when I did a cursory search for it.

Some things I already learned:

- While it's sensible to record gameplay and commentary separately, one must not forget to then also hit the "start recording" button in two different applications! (I did at first.)

- At the same time, syncing up the video and the separately recorded audio commentary is trickier than I thought. I originally thought that I'd done a pretty good job at it, but at the very end there is this bit where I rapidly train some new skills while calling them out and that shows that I was ever so slightly off.

- While I made an effort to enunciate things clearly at the start, there were later parts where I slipped into "quietly mumbling to myself" mode, making some parts a bit hard to understand.

- Cut scenes are tricky. I fully expected to skip them all, but then of course my pug had to throw me for a loop by being happy to watch them, which made the video quite a bit longer than I had planned. I considered cutting part of them out, but then felt that this would leave the experience feeling a bit disjointed, more so than chopping a couple of trash fights where nothing interesting was said or done. At least it shouldn't be an issue in upcoming runs as none of the later flashpoints have as much as dialogue as the Esseles.

If videos are not your thing, don't worry, this project shouldn't affect my writing. Since I'm also somewhat reliant on both having free time as well as some peace and quiet in the living room, I don't expect to get more than one episode out every two weeks or so. But if you do have any feedback, I'd be happy to hear it!

Flashpoint Friday: The Black Talon

For this series, I tend to either pick a specific flashpoint and run it, to make sure I remember everything correctly, or I decide to write about a flashpoint that I just happened to run that week for some other reason. With my flashpoint levelling experiment I've been all over the place, making it hard to focus on any single instance, so I decided to just go for the first one I visited this week: The Black Talon.

Iconic: Captain Orzik and Lieutenant Sylas

General Facts

The Black Talon is the Imperial equivalent of the The Esseles: the optional flashpoint you encounter just after you've finished your starter planet and are about to move on to Dromund Kaas. Both were tacticals before tactical flashpoints were even a thing, and somewhat surprisingly they've undergone nearly no changes with 4.0 - unlike all the other flashpoints, these are still limited to levels 10-15 on the group finder, probably because Bioware was keenly aware of how strongly their stories are tied to you being low-level and new. This means that you get scaled to level 10 instead of up to 65 when you enter. They did however also add a solo mode version for both factions' flashpoints that you can do whenever you like. I tried the one for the Black Talon and having a GSI droid by my side felt like complete overkill, considering that these flashpoints were already easily soloable for a skilled player before 4.0.

Story (spoilers)

Like the Esseles, the Black Talon is all about the story.

Shortly after you've boarded the Black Talon to travel to Dromund Kaas, you're greeted by the ship's second in command, Lieutenant Sylas, who points out that "your" droid is waiting for you with a message in the nearby conference room. You go to investigate and meet NR-02, an innocent enough looking protocol droid, who soon identifies himself as being programmed for much more unpleasant tasks. (I'm sure I wasn't the only one who had to look up "calumniation" in the dictionary.) He gets you in touch with Grand Moff Kilran, who wants the Black Talon to intercept the Republic ship Brentaal Star and kill or capture an Imperial traitor on it who is only known as "the General" throughout the entire story. The Black Talon is uniquely positioned to achieve this, but its captain has refused to obey Kilran's orders, which is why the Moff wants you to usurp command and get the job done yourself.

You have to fight your way to the bridge and kill some Imperials on the way. Captain Orzik puts up a brave face as you arrive and threaten him, justifying his decision by saying that what Kilran demands is simply impossible. You have the option to merely relieve him of command or kill him.

Having assumed command one way or the other, you chase down and engage the Brentaal Star, and it spits out some pods in defense. If you let Orzik live, he'll identify them as a threat and have them shot down, which leads to you being boarded by a regular boarding party instead. Once you defeat the Republic boarders, Orzik presents you with a small chest of extra goodies which he had his crew put together, since you're all working together now after all.

If you killed Orzik however, the much less experienced Lieutenant Sylas, now effectively Captain, will tell the crew to ignore the pods, causing the ship to get swarmed by a bunch of sabotage droids. You then have to go and fight those off instead.

Once you've repelled the attack, you fly over to board the Brentaal Star and fight your way inside to kill or capture the general, dispatching of a Mon Calamari war veteran and a Jedi padawan in the process. Eventually you find the General, who is a squat, elderly cyborg and already wounded. He babbles about what terrible plans both factions have already made to prepare for war, a dialogue which is fun to come back to as a max level player as you actually know what he's talking about by then. You have the option of taking him prisoner or outright killing him. Then you return to the Black Talon.

"I had nothing to do with any of this, honest!"

If you left Captain Orzik alive, everything is well and everyone is pleased. If you killed him however, the crew has panicked in your absence and ended up shooting each other, so that the bridge is littered with nothing but corpses. Or that's what NR-02 says happened anyway... considering his earlier declaration of being programmed for manslaughter and calumniation, you may have to take that with a grain of salt. Grand Moff Kilran is happy either way and you can either continue to Dromund Kaas or return to the fleet. (NR-02 assures you that he can pilot the ship even with everyone else dead.)

Fights

You fight mostly Republic soliders and droids, but also some Imperial ones, when you take over the ship at the start. The lesson here is that the Empire does not value the lives of its subjects very highly. NR-02 even comments: "If you are concerned about the loss of life, I assure you - the deaths of all injured crew members will be strategically insignificant."

Like on the Esseles, the boss encounters are all very basic and geared towards players who are new to the game, though I think the ones on the Black Talon are less interesting overall than their Republic counterparts. (I admit that my Republic bias might be playing into this however.) Only Commander Ghulil, the Mon Cal war veteran, is really worth noting because he teaches players not to stand in fire (quite literally, as he drops probes that spit fire).

Like the Esseles with its encounter with Sith apprentice Vokk, the Black Talon tries to make a big deal out of you meeting (what's supposed to be) your first Jedi in the form of Yadira Ban, even if she's only a padawan, but she just doesn't come across as very threatening - maybe because she's a pink twi'lek with a squeaky voice? She has one noteworthy ability where she pulls you in and then does some damage if you don't run away from her quickly enough, but it's only really dangerous on hardmode.

Yadira Ban - just not that threatening.

Speaking of hardmode, while I haven't run the Black Talon on hard since 4.0, it's interesting to note that at level 50 it used to be known for having by far the easiest hardmode of all flashpoints, to the point where you didn't even need a full group to do it. This is an interesting contrast to its Republic equivalent, which originally had one of the hardest of all hardmodes.

Conclusion

I could write a lot of the same stuff here that I said about the Esseles: that it's an amazing narrative experience the first time but can get tedious when you have to re-run it for endgame rewards. However, instead I'd like to focus on the differences between the Black Talon and the Esseles.

Both serve to introduce you to your faction's storyline in a way, and they really highlight the differences between the two factions. While both flashpoints are about a small ship getting into big trouble, their stories are almost complete opposites in other ways. Where the Esseles is operating in pure self-defense, trying to fight off an Imperial attack, the Black Talon is on the offense, hunting down a traitor. On Republic side the main characters of your faction that you interact with are a shrewd diplomat, a somewhat cowardly officer and a fearless security chief. On Imperial side on the other hand you deal with a ruthless droid, a bloodthirsty Moff and an Imperial crew who desperately want to do the right thing but are incredibly frightened by the power plays going on, which is really a pretty good summary of what Imperial life is like! The only thing missing is a capricious Sith bossing everyone around, but effectively the player gets the chance to play that role if they choose to play a Sith character.

It's also worth noting that in terms of narrative and gameplay, the Black Talon has far fewer twists and turns than the Esseles, but manages to make your choices feel quite a bit more meaningful. The singular choice of whether you let Captain Orzik live or not decides not only which boss encounter you will face at the start (either the boarders or the lead sabotage droid) but also the fate of the entire Black Talon's crew. Whether to kill or spare the captain was actually a part of Bioware's early marketing for the game, supposed to highlight the importance of choices. They even gave out badges after demos where people got to try out the Black Talon so they could announce their choice to the world - too bad that kind of thing didn't carry over into more content.

Flashpoint Friday: The Esseles

I have decided to make this series a bi-weekly feature (in the meaning of "once every two weeks", that is - what a confusing word). With my posting frequency that means that posts like this will come up quite often compared to "regular" ones, but who's to say that I can't spend a large chunk of time talking about flashpoints? It's still on topic.

After talking about an Imperial-only flashpoint two weeks ago, I thought I would cover a Republic-only flashpoint next. I decided to go for The Esseles (pronounced "ess-EL-ees", except for that one random line in the middle of the flashpoint where they suddenly call it "ESS-el-es" for no reason).

General Facts

The Esseles is the very first flashpoint that Republic players will encounter, meant to be completed immediately after you've left your starting planet, though it's optional. You're told to proceed from the fleet to your faction's capital, and you can either go there directly or embark on an adventure on the way by taking the Republic transport Esseles. The Empire's equivalent is The Black Talon.

When you're a new player and you do this flashpoint for the first time, it seems absolutely amazing compared to the way dungeons work in other games. There are so many NPC conversations, and there's so much story! You get to make choices, and they influence what happens (not dramatically, but still)! It could be a complete paradigm shift for MMOs! Shortly after SWTOR's launch I nominated the Esseles for the Piggie Awards 2011 and it won! Anyone remember those?

Then you do the other flashpoints in the game, and they are all more or less like your typical MMO dungeon: kill some bosses, get some loot.

If you then make it to endgame, where at level fifty the Esseles was one of the hardmodes you had to run to gear up, you may even have ended up hating it, because while you just wanted to get it done to get your reward, there were all those conversations to go through that you'd heard a trillion times before. Tensions were heightened even more if you were grouped with someone who actually wanted to watch it all again instead of space-barring. This is another thing that I expect to make a comeback with Knights of the Fallen Empire's new flashpoint scaling.

Story (spoilers)

I feel that with how important story is in this flashpoint, I need to talk about that first:
 
It was just supposed to be a routine ride to Coruscant. But a blue Twi'lek in the lounge of the passenger transport Esseles warns you that it looks like Imperials are on the ship's tail. Officially the Republic and the Empire are still supposed to be at peace, but of course the moment you say that, the ship comes under fire. The captain dies in the initial attack (you kind of wonder why, considering his body lies in the middle of a wide expanse of open space) and you make it to the bridge in time to see first officer Haken struggle to not panic.

A certain Moff Kilran demands that you hand over an individual that has been working against the Empire and that his spies tell him is aboard your ship. You repel the Imperials' first attempt to board the Esseles and find out that the blue Twi'lek from earlier is who they are after. Her name is Asara and she is a Republic ambassador trying to get Imperial worlds to secede from the Empire.

As it turns out, while you were busy holding off one group of Imperials, another managed to get to the bridge and has taken over. You detour via engineering to find out how to unlock the bridge. The engineers there are trapped behind a forcefield and it is brought up that there is a way to open the bridge that would also vent the compartment they are in. Asara urges you to sacrifice the engineers for the greater good and you can go along with it or find another, slightly longer way to get to the bridge without getting the engineers killed.

Once there, you defeat the last Imperial boarders and hatch a plan to board your attackers instead to deactivate the tractor beam that holds the Esseles in place. Asara is supposed to accompany your assault team. Once she's out of earshot, first officer Haken suggests that you leave her behind at the end of the mission to give the Imperials what they want and discourage them from giving chase again.

You board the enemy ship, disable the tractor beam and even fight a Sith apprentice on the way. Before leaving, you have the option to tell Asara to stay (she won't fight you) or tell her about the plot against her without going through with it. You return to the Esseles and the ship makes a successful escape. First officer Haken is either pleased with the outcome if you left Asara behind, embarrassed if you took her back with you but didn't tell her about the plot, or in trouble if she's with you and does know. You either return to the fleet or continue to Coruscant.

Fights

The Esseles is all about fighting off Imperials (plus some Mandalorians), and most of them are not particularly impressive, even though they used to hit very hard in the level fifty version. (We'll see how that works with the new scaling.) I think the low difficulty is down to the Esseles' low-level version having been designed to be the first tactical flashpoint - before tactical flashpoints were an actual thing - as it was intended to be doable by people who didn't even have their advanced class yet, so that tanking and healing abilites might literally be unavailable.

The bosses are all very straightforward, but I guess that is appropriate for an instance that may well be many players' first experience with group content in the game. Lieutenant Isric, who leads the first boarding party, teaches players about frontal cones and add spawns. Ironfist summons adds and fires missiles. Then there's that droid that does a knockback - which may not sound like much at first but can easily get a newbie killed, since the fight takes place above a typical Star Wars chasm with no safety rails. (There's also a proper "chasm boss" later, where you have to jump down a shaft and can die if you don't make sure to bounce off some pipes on the way.)

The bonus boss, another droid, is at least interesting in so far as he's the only boss I can think of that actually requires two players to be activated, as doing so requires two consoles at opposite ends of the room to be clicked at the same time. Annoying for soloers, but kind of neat as a group experience. (Wonder if they'll change that in Knights of the Fallen Empire?)

This bonus boss is also the only boss I'm aware of that had his mechanics completely turned on their proverbial head at one point. At launch he would occasionally go through a phase where you had to run away from him because he would do a lot of damage to everyone in melee, too much to heal through it really. But then at some point Bioware decided to completely reverse this mechanic, so now being in melee is safe and range has to come close instead whenever he enters his dangerous phase or take lots of damage at a distance. [/fun fact]

The last boss, Sith apprentice Vokk, basically teaches players that standing in purple circles is bad. A very important lesson. However, he also just feels cool because he receives a lot of build-up and the game makes a big deal out of the fact that you're meeting a Sith for the first time - unlike later content, where both Sith and Jedi quickly turn into just another type of cannon fodder.

Conclusion

In my opinion every player should play through the Esseles at least once, ideally with a friend. You may or may not like the story it tells, but it's worth seeing for no other reason than that its delivery is really unique in the MMO space. It's not just the various choices, but this flashpoint also shows the group conversation system at its best. The Esseles is the only place I know of where group conversation options can actually play off each other a little - e.g. when you meet the Sith at the end and a Jedi in the party starts talking to him about how the dark side is evil, a smuggler can reply with a disparaging comment about force users and their crazy beliefs. (If she wins the roll, that is.) It's the closest thing to a true multiplayer RPG that I've ever heard of.

Unfortunately producing content like this either turned out to be too costly, whether in terms of time or money, or Bioware realised early on that it wasn't going to mesh with the WoW-like dungeon grinder they were in the process of building, which is why all the other flashpoints that followed are so much more like traditional MMO dungeons.

Even as I re-ran the flashpoint for this article to take some more screenshots - at level twelve where you might meet some players genuinely new to the game, so that you would expect people to be considerate of that - I ended up with other players shouting in caps lock about how everyone needs to skip the cut scenes and even initiating vote kicks when some of us didn't hit space bar, which of course completely ruins the experience. I suppose that the solo mode coming in KotFE will address this... but at the same time soloers will miss out on some of the Esseles' unique charm, which just can't be recreated without other people there.

Level 50 Flashpoint Nerfs

Another thing I spent a lot of time on during the last couple of double experience weekends was running level fifty flashpoints, mostly on hard mode, but some of them on story mode as well. It got me thinking about how some of them have already been nerfed over time, even though the game is only one and a half years old.

As a general rule, I'm not completely against gradual nerfing of content, as long as it's not done as a kneejerk reaction to people struggling on day one, when everyone is undergeared and has no clue what to do, and as long as it's done in a thoughtful manner, by reducing requirements only where it's most needed instead of applying blanket hitpoint and damage reductions.

The flashpoints where I found the nerfs the most noticeable myself are:

The Esseles (hard)

I cannot swear for sure whether Ironfirst's head shot has been nerfed, but I recall wiping a lot to him whenever we failed to interrupt it during our earliest visits. However, this is something that we simply might have outgeared over time.

One boss that has definitely been changed however is Vokk and his lightning storm. It used to be that it hit so quickly after the warning circle appeared on the ground that it was basically impossible to accelerate out of it in time if you happened to be standing still at the moment it appeared, especially since more than one tick from the lightning meant that you were dead. Due to this, the only way to avoid it reliably used to be to basically keep moving throughout the entire fight and only stop every so often right after he had just cast lightning storm (since you were then safe in the knowledge that he wouldn't immediately cast it again).

This has been changed to give people time to actually move out of the purple circle before damage starts ticking, even if they are stationary at the moment when it appears. It still hurts a lot though. This is actually a nerf that I approve of. The mechanic hasn't been trivialised, but it feels less twitchy now, and classes that can't operate as well on the move aren't at as much of a disadvantage as they used to be.

Maelstrom Prison (hard)

This flashpoint contains one of my least favourite nerfs in the game, and that's the one applied to Colonel Daksh and his optical implants. It used to be that you absolutely had to avoid his eye lasers, as more than one hit from them meant that you were dead. A tank could maybe survive two, but that was it. Kiting him around the boxes off to the side wasn't massively challenging by itself, but while the tank was on the run he was at risk of losing aggro and having the boss suddenly turn and nuke someone else. Line of sight issues for the rest of the group were also a consideration. I had many a wipe on this guy back in the day.

Now, I can understand why this encounter was nerfed, but I really don't like the manner in which it was done, which was basically to reduce the eye laser damage by such a high amount that it's become completely trivial. Any class can pretty much just stand there and tank the boss throughout the entire thing now, as long as they continue to receive heals. Pointless! I think there would have been other ways to make this fight easier, for example by increasing the boss's cast times, without making his unique mechanic completely irrelevant.

False Emperor (either)

The first thing that always strikes me when I do this flashpoint is how much of the trash has been removed since launch. To be fair, there was a lot of it, probably more than in most other flashpoints, and it's not as if any of it was particularly challenging... but it's still a bit strange how empty the place is now, especially when you spend long stretches of the instance running through abandoned corridors on what's supposed to be a space station bustling with activity.

The thing that really makes me sad every time I run this flashpoint though is what they have done to Malgus himself; I think it was only done in 2.0. Considering that he's a key NPC, his fight was designed to be one of the more epic small group encounters in the game. Most notably he became invulnerable towards the end of the fight, and the only way to finish him off was to make him fall to his doom down a nearby chasm via use of knockbacks, in a moment that's very reminiscent of the Emperor's death in Return of the Jedi. For classes that didn't have a knockback ability, grenades with a similar effect were available at the door.

Now, this could be another tricky encounter, and again it's one where I had a fair number of wipes in the day. Malgus becomes very hard to move once he gets low on health due to his chain-casting of uninterruptable force lightning. All the while there is also the risk of him casting his "unlimited power" insta-wipe ability which needs interrupting, or him using a knockback on someone who's poorly positioned and sending them to their doom. To successfully knock him off, you also needed to apply two knockbacks in a row, as he resisted if you only used a single one. This obviously required some coordination.

Again, I can kind of see why Bioware decided to nerf this encounter, especially considering that level fifty flashpoints aren't endgame anymore. There were just too many things that could go wrong and cause a wipe. However, I was still sad to see that the way they decided to go about it was to completely remove the need to knock Malgus off the bridge. He simply never goes invulnerable, so you just continue shooting or stabbing him until he falls over. The grenades are still there, but completely redundant. It feels extremely anticlimactic, considering how big a part he plays in the story beforehand and that the rest of the fight isn't really that challenging. Again, I can't help but feel that there would have been different ways to make the fight more accessible without completely draining all the flavour from it, for example by making Malgus easier to move and only requiring a single knockback.

Which nerfs have other people noticed?

Referring A Friend

A good friend from WoW has been interested in trying out The Old Republic for a while, but unfortunately his old computer wasn't up for it when the game first launched. I was delighted when he e-mailed me the other day to let me know that he had finally upgraded his PC and was ready to give it a whirl.

I was simply happy about the prospect of having him around, but a guildie pointed out that I might as well make use of Bioware's refer a friend feature, especially as they are finally implementing a reward for successful referrals.

As it turned out, using the system was quite hard in our particular case. First off, there is currently a bug that will prevent you from referring a friend if they already have an account with EA and ticked the box to not receive any "promotional" material. So I had to get my friend to untick that... except that he couldn't log into his account(s) because he couldn't remember making them! Resetting the password didn't really seem to work either. After a lot of digging through old e-mails he found that one of the accounts associated with his e-mail addresses was actually an old Ultima Online account and managed to access it again, so I could finally send him the referral mail. Soon another gaudy speeder shall be mine! To be honest I think my friend should be the one to get something though, considering the hassle he had to go through to be referred. Bioware really shouldn't make it this hard for people to play their game.

Once he got into the game though, we had a very good time. He rolled up a trooper and did Ord Mantell on his own, just to team up with a gunslinger alt of mine on the fleet. We ran the Esseles together and then spent the entirety of Friday evening questing on Coruscant. It really can't be overstated how great this game is for small group play, as the design manages to hit that sweet spot where it's perfectly possible to solo and have an enjoyable experience, but playing with a friend is simply so much better.

The group conversations make for some of the best fun ("God, there that goodie-two-shoes goes offering our services for free again... why can I never win those rolls?!"), and being able to duo most of the heroics is great too. We felt really challenged when we tackled our first four-man heroic with no healer and wiped several times on the last guy. Eventually we went back out to gain another level and wait for our cooldowns to come back up, and when we came back to it later we just about managed it with my tanking companion surviving with only a sliver of health left.

It was also interesting to see some of the small quality of life changes that Bioware made to the lower levels. They might have been announced in the patch notes somewhere, but I have to admit that I never read the whole lot... most notably all the final stage bosses for the bonus quests on Coruscant are now summoned by clicking on something, which was a nice change from endlessly having to wait around for respawns like I sometimes had to do during previous playthroughs.

The only thing I didn't like was discovering that all the security chests on the Esseles had disappeared, which gave me unpleasant flashbacks to when WoW removed all of its dungeon chests. However, at the moment the jury is still out on whether this was actually an intentional change or whether it is some kind of bug.

How hardmode Esseles kicked my butt - and I kicked back

There's been some interesting discussion about the difficulty of hardmode flashpoints in SWTOR as of late. I'd like to add my own impressions to the mix, though I'll also state up front that I'm not laying claim to any objectivity.

As isn't unusual in many guilds, we've had players progress at a very mixed pace. Some people had already run dozens of hardmodes before others even hit the level cap. That's how these things go. Being one of the somewhat slower players myself, I was slightly worried about setting foot into a hardmode flashpoint for the first time, because I didn't want to be the weakest link and make a fool out of myself in front of more experienced players if possible.

As a result I was delighted when a tanking guildie whispered me last week to ask whether I wanted to do HM Esseles and we ended up with full party of "hardmode noobs". We didn't really have a clue what to expect, but since we were all in the same boat there was no real performance pressure either. Why the Esseles by the way? "I've heard Esseles is the easiest hardmode and the best one to start with for new players."

I'll give you a moment to recover from laughing. If you're not laughing, it's probably because you're not aware that the Esseles is actually considered one of the hardest flashpoints currently in the game. But at the time we didn't know that either.

So we ventured forth happily, learned that trash was easy but still hit considerably harder than on normal mode, and then wiped to the first boss within a matter of seconds. Oops? In hindsight, the fight isn't even particularly complex or anything, but as it turns out there are still a lot of things that you can mess up if you don't know any better.

- The boss absolutely has to be turned away from the group at all times. I know this is a standard boss fight trope, but there are also enough fights where it doesn't really matter so I can't blame anyone for not doing it automatically. It does matter here however, because otherwise the boss's frontal cone AoE will shave off half your party's health in one hit. Ouch.

-The adds that he spawns at regular intervals also vexed us for several attempts. At first they just ran past the tank and mauled me. Another time I used my AoE knockback to get them off me, but then they were so spread out that our damage dealers couldn't kill them in time. Another time the tank chased after them and the boss ended up turning around... and I refer you to the previous point.

-Finally we had agreed for the tank to keep the boss right where he spawns and do his main AoE move every time an add wave spawned. Now we had our dps unleashing their own AoE too quickly, so the adds turned around and hit our scoundrel all at once - splat.

Eventually we managed to get everything right, with the boss standing in the right place, adds getting picked up and nobody pulling aggro. We hit the enrage timer but still managed to kill him, and much cheering was to be heard on Mumble.

Then we moved on to the next boss, Ironfist... and seemed to stand no chance at all. We must have had another dozen attempts or so on him, but we made very little progress and eventually it became late and people had to stop for the night. The problem was mainly that he needed a lot of interrupting, while at the same time having a bit of a habit of knocking people down and away (and thus out of melee range) - not to mention that our group contained two Commandos, the only advanced class without an interrupt. Woe. The only thing we knew for sure at the end of the night was that we really wanted to kill First Officer Haken for yelling "Get us out of here!" non-stop every time we arrived on the bridge.

Still, there were no signs of annoyance or bitterness as we parted ways for the night. At worst our tank seemed a bit confused by the difficulty, considering what he had heard about the Esseles being easy. None of us really had a problem with it though, and everyone agreed that failure was expected the first time and that we'd eventually come back and kick Ironfist's butt.

The other night a group for the Esseles formed up in guild again, not consisting of the same four people, but it did include both me and the aforementioned scoundrel. We had both received a couple of gear upgrades since the last time though, and were quite looking forward to getting our revenge.

The first boss went down really quickly. Ironfist made everyone a little nervous since nobody had made it past him before apparently, but he too died on the first attempt - though he enraged at the very end and two of us were hugging the floor by the time he died.

The bonus boss was a complete pushover. The third one was a bit harsh on our two melee dps since as far as I could tell there was no way to tell when exactly he was going to activate his red aura of death (one of them died to it too), but he still went down without too much difficulty.

The fourth boss was the only one that wiped us once, as there were too many incidents of people not moving out of the purple lightning in time and the damage became too much. We quickly identified the problem though, namely that the damage started ticking pretty much a second after the purple circles appeared on the floor, so if you were waiting for them to appear before moving, it would inevitably be too late. On the next attempt we kept running in circles non-stop like a bunch of loonies (not a happy situation to be in for a Commando healer, let me tell you that), only pausing briefly every now and then just after he had placed his circles and people hardly took any damage at all unless they were targeted by his sabre throw attack. He enraged, but our tank hit his cooldowns and managed to tank him for another ten seconds or so, which was enough to get him down. Flashpoint completed! This was certainly a very satisfying experience, and I now feel confident in my ability to tackle all the remaining hardmodes that I haven't seen yet.

So for me personally, the difficulty of hardmode flashpoints is pretty much just right, and while I know that that's very subjective, I do wonder how much of the annoyance I've seen in comments on the subject actually comes from misguided expectations. This isn't current day WoW, where heroics are just a low stepping stone for raids. This is basically Burning Crusade endgame version 2.0, and that means that hardmode flashpoints are an alternative to raiding, not a precursor. They do drop the same quality of loot as normal mode raids as well.

Of course not all raid bosses and hardmode flashpoints are made equal, and again that's very much a reflection of WoW's Burning Crusade endgame, where getting a drop off Attumen in Karazhan was a lot easier than getting anyone to kill Kargath Bladefist in heroic Shattered Halls. However, I don't actually see that as a bad thing - it means that players are able to choose their own difficulty, depending on whether they feel up to a challenge today or just want to tackle something relatively easy. It also means that large group content isn't the only thing to do at endgame, as you can make progress both in terms of gear and skill with your smaller group of friends as well. Last night for example we didn't have enough people to run an operation, so we just did some hardmodes instead and still got equally valuable gear upgrades.

I guess the biggest problem with this system is simply that it's not exactly very transparent. Many people coming over from WoW might simply be put off by the initial shock of small group content being this challenging, even if they are perfectly capable of handling it if they work on it. And of course making the most of the variable difficulty relies heavily on people looking for information from third parties to find out which bosses are easier and which ones are harder, and that information might turn out to be wrong as well as my little anecdote at the beginning shows. It's certainly very counter-intuitive for the Esseles, the first and easiest flashpoint that players encounter in the game, to have one of the toughest hardmodes.

Early Flashpoint Impressions

Back in WoW, small group instances used to be one of my favourite pastimes in the game for years - until the dungeon finder slowly sucked the fun out of them for me, that is. Unsurprisingly, SWTOR's more old-fashioned flashpoints make me very happy, and I've run all of them up to my current level at least once, some of them multiple times. It's been an interesting ride so far.

Difficulty-wise they seem to hit a pretty sweet spot for me. Trash is mostly very easy, but there are patrols to watch out for, mobs of different strengths to consider, and sometimes enemies surprise you by entering the scene unexpectedly. Personally I feel that this creates a nice atmosphere where most of the dungeon is fairly laid back, but not mindlessly boring, as you still have to watch where you're going and what you're pulling. The bosses tend to be a bit harder, and I've had quite a few deaths and even wipes at the hands of some of them. They all have a couple of mechanics each that you have to pay attention to and that can't be safely ignored, but there is some margin for error so the fights don't exactly feel twitchy either.

Interestingly enough, I've already had two runs where our group failed to complete the flashpoint because we simply couldn't get past a certain encounter. This felt a bit strange and surprising to me initially, as I haven't experienced anything like it since my party found it impossible to kill the last boss in Grim Batol when we ran our very first heroic five-man after WoW's Cataclysm launch. In SWOTR, the two offenders that had us running into a brick wall were Athiss and Taral V. On Athiss, we just couldn't get past what was I believe the last trash pull before the final boss, which contained two elites that both had AoE attacks and were wearing our group down faster than I could heal it up again. Since we were on the lower end of the level range for the place, nobody in the party had their long-duration crowd control abilities yet either. On Taral V, we first died a few times to the bonus boss before giving up on him, and then failed to kill the last boss too as he wiped us out within seconds every time he hit his low-health enrage (which was promptly patched out two days later, which is telling). In both cases we came back with another level or two under our belts and completed the whole thing easily. At the end of the day, the initial failure wasn't actually that terrible, as it just spurred us on to come back and get revenge together, not to mention that it provided some unforgettable memories to bond over.

Another thing that I found noteworthy was that most flashpoints seem to reward both explorers as well as people who've honed their crew skills. The former was particularly evident for me on Taral V, where the way through the instance is fairly straightforward, but there are plenty of hidden nooks and platforms that contain bonus objectives and chests. Both times I've been in there, our group had fun clearing out as much of the place as we could, and one time we even found a purple item in a chest. The runs took a lot longer than strictly necessary, but the whole experience felt very rewarding and fun.

As far as crew skills go, there seem to be a lot of little bits and pieces in many flashpoints that provide you with small bonuses if you take the time to notice them. On Athiss for example you can go into a side room and use scavenging to repair a broken droid, which will then follow you around and act as a combat pet for a bit. On Hammer Station, you can use crew skills to drill a hole through a wall to create a shortcut to the first boss. None of it is even remotely necessary, but it's a little something that feels fun. I was reminded of how I used to be grateful for someone who could pick locks in WoW's Shattered Halls so that we didn't have to go through the local sewer to get to the first boss. Sometimes it's the little things that make all the difference.

Finally, I found it notable that there's a huge stylistic difference between flashpoints. The first one you get access to on either side (The Esseles / The Black Talon) feels very creative and exciting. Lots of moving around, multiple conversations with NPCs, multiple light/dark side decisions that really make you feel like you're influencing the story. I found it to be quite different from what I usually expect to find inside an instance, but in a good way.

However, after that the next couple of flashpoints honestly felt like a bit of a disappointment. Hammer Station, Athiss, Mandalorian Raiders, Cademimu... there's nothing wrong with them, but they don't utilise SWTOR's unique selling points nearly as well and feel a lot more like classic dungeon crawls. Yes, there is a bit of voice work, and at some point there's usually a light/dark side choice for you to make, but it tends to feel a bit tacked on. Hey, there's a room full of innocents over there, want to save them or kill them? At their heart, these four instances can easily be summed up as "go kill some bad guys and then kill their boss", detailed story be damned. Still, this is only a problem when you compare it to what came before. Truth be told, I'm perfectly happy to do a classic dungeon crawl with some friends. I mentioned our fun little adventures in Cademimu before.

Interestingly, just as I was going to accept that the Esseles and the Black Talon were obviously outliers, the game threw Taral V and the Maelstrom Prison at me, two separate flashpoints that are part of one continuous story. They are not quite as interactive as the Esseles, but the story is considerably more involved, and at the end of the Maelstrom Prison we were rewarded with a hugely satisfying boss fight and a massive lore revelation (which might not actually mean much to Republic players without much prior knowledge, but fortunately for me I had just played through Dromund Kaas on Empire side, which had conveniently provided me with some context for events).

At first I was a bit bewildered by the way some flashpoints are so story-heavy while others aren't, but after doing some research on it, I think I understand the reasons for it. Basically, the difference seems to come down to whether a flashpoint is faction-specific or the same for both sides. I remember listening to a developer interview where the guy confessed that originally, they had intended to make all content shared between the factions to save development time, but the resulting stories were pretty dumb because you can't really make a very compelling quest that both Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader would find equally engaging (as the dev put it). So maybe those flashpoints are leftovers from early development, or the developers simply decided that they could afford to have at least a couple of group instances with a comparatively weak story, especially considering that they would be repeatable content at endgame, at which point the story fades into the background anyway.

All in all, I've enjoyed myself enough that I'm definitely looking forward to exploring the flashpoints that I haven't seen yet, and so far there hasn't been one that I wouldn't be happy to rerun.