Day 1: Bugs #IntPiPoMo

I'm taking part in IntPiPoMo, and this is the first of ten screenshot posts I'm making this month, each one themed around a certain topic. Today's topic is... bugs!

One thing I noticed while compiling these was that the vast majority of them fell into one of two categories: issues with terrain or character display oddities. I don't know if it's a sign of a mature MMO that its bugs tend to be less random or whether it's just that those two types of bugs are most likely to be visually striking enough for me to bother screenshotting them.

From the first category, we have the classic "stuck in falling pose". This one was kind of impressive to me because there wasn't even any obviously problematic terrain around, my character's foot just touched a nearby holo sign or something?

Fortunately SWTOR's /stuck command is good at helping you extract yourself from most situations of this kind, though it does have a cooldown and I've definitely been in positions where it took me several minutes to escape my predicament. I suppose this is the kind of thing no MMO can ever be 100% foolproof against, but it does seem to me that I get stuck in SWTOR's terrain a lot more often than in other games.

Here a guildie appeared to have sunk into the floor visually, though I don't remember whether he was actually stuck too or our game clients were just confused about his position.

Something that has only happened to me very rarely but always amused me to no end is falling through the terrain. Here a leap by my Guardian during a Novare Coast match had somehow resulted in her crashing straight through the ground and disappearing into the aether... hang on, I even have an animated gif of this one somewhere for the full effect:

The final item from the terrain category is visually broken ground:

Here we found a very noticeable gap in the floor of the Huntmaster's room in Nature of Progress. I only saw it on that one day though, I submitted a bug report form for it and the next time I checked it was already gone again.

For the character display oddities category, we have this shot of us fighting the last boss in the Divided We Fall uprising. The issue may not be immediately obvious, but if you look at the enemy targeting window, you can see that Commander Kallin was the invisible man and had no face! And it wasn't just in that window either, we did look at him up close over the course of the fight and he was invisible "in person" too, so to speak.

This one on the other hand may have been an issue with just the targeting window, but I still thought it was funny. Was this Sage too short to reach all the way up to the camera? I'm not sure where exactly this was, but I'm thinking it was probably the Boarding Party flashpoint.

Finally, one bug that was slightly unusual but for which I like the story associated with it: Basically, at the end of the Kaon Under Siege flashpoint you need to have a group conversation with an NPC called Melarra, and as per the way group conversations work, everyone needs to stand within a green circle around the NPC. The problem was that people didn't always see Melarra in the same place - she was supposed to be on a raised platform as visible in the screenshot, but for some players she would appear on ground level, making it impossible to initiate the conversation properly. It wasn't a huge deal as there was a simple workaround that worked almost all the time, which was to have the player who saw her in the wrong place leave the instance and come back in, but considering that you spawn back in quite far away from the conversation location, it always wasted a lot of time.

Well, my guildies once set themselves the target to figure out just what was causing this bug and were soon able to reproduce it reliably: Melarra starts running up to her spot once you reach a certain checkpoint yourself, and if anyone was still on the ground floor at that time, that's when Melarra would spawn on the ground floor for that person too. Basically, it was a lesson in not running ahead and leaving people behind! This bug was fixed in patch 6.3.

IntPiPoMo count: 7

Pugette Hit 70

After seven months of (near) weekly recording of her adventures with random groups in the group finder, Pugette the Commando has hit level 70! Her actual /played time is pretty short though, only 1(!) day and 9 hours, which once again reinforces my impression that flashpoints are actually a pretty good way to level but also that levelling is just super fast in general nowadays.

I got to finish on a nice round number after exactly 30 episodes. Towards the end I decided to ditch the random queueing in favour of choosing some specific destinations, to make sure that I would go out on a bang instead of by blitzing through yet another randomly assigned Hammer Station, and I think it worked out great, with several of the last few episodes being (in my opinion) among the best ones of the whole run. The only thing that could be considered an issue with them is length (if you don't actually like long videos), as two of them ended up taking close to one and a half hours in the end. Either way, without further ado, here's a list of the final six episodes with links:

Episode 25: Racism in Progress in False Emperor - Even though I always had the option to accept in-progress runs ticked, this was the first and only time I actually got into one, with the group already standing at the second boss in False Emperor. My entrance was kind of overshadowed by one of the pugs greeting Pugette (who, unlike me, has dark skin) with a racist term. That was just so confusing, I had no idea how to react. I let it go and moved on and nothing else offensive was said, but it was certainly a strange experience.

Episode 26: Thinking About The Future in Assault on Tython - After having already bested this flashpoint on master mode in an earlier episode, veteran mode felt very easy, and I mostly used the opportunity to do some speculating about the changes coming to the group finder in patch 5.6. I was wrong about pretty much all of it by the way.

Episode 27: Noobing It Up in Blood Hunt - At last, the flashpoint I had been simultaneously dreading and looking forward to since I started this series. All things considered, it didn't go too badly, though we did have the inevitable wipes on Jos and Valk. I also always find this flashpoint to be a bit of a team-building exercise, and our dps Commando in particular had me in stitches at times, which made for a very fun run.

Episode 28: Going Old School in MM Lost Island - I got this one as a random quite often lately, and every time I was surprised by how smoothly it went. This run was not like that. However, it was still fun because people took the wipes in stride and tried hard to do better. When we finally bested the last boss, it sure felt very satisfying.

Episode 29: Reliving Fond Memories in MM Kaon Under Siege - This one was much easier than Lost Island and I mostly used it as an opportunity to reminisce about all the good times I had in this flashpoint and how it provided all kinds of memorable moments for me in the past.

Episode 30: Pug Interrupted in Traitor Among the Chiss - This is the one in which Pugette finally hit 70, and also the first one in which she encountered a type of obstacle she hadn't run into before (I won't spoil what it is). Just prepare to be exposed to some eardrum-bursting laughter at one point...

What's in store for Pugette and the channel next? Well, as for Pugette, I'm planning to keep her "pure" and out of guild runs, limited to what she can achieve in the pug world, but first on the agenda is probably finishing her class story up to the end of Coruscant at least so that she can finally get her ship and make that damn galaxy map icon stop flashing.

As for the channel... to be honest, I don't know! I was pleasantly surprised by how many subs and views I gained while recording this series, especially considering that the original purpose of the channel was just to have a place to upload boss kill videos for my guild and the like. I do think I would like to record a "season two" of pug adventures and I do already have an idea for it as well, but even if I do go ahead with it I won't actually put my plan into action until early next year. You'll just have to content yourself with reading the blog in the meantime. /wink

Day 4: Missions & Conversations #IntPiPoMo

Wondering what the hashtag in the title is all about? Click here. Want to know all the themes that I have used and will be using for my 10 Days of SWTOR Screenshots? You can find the full list here.

My favourite thing about the story on Ziost is actually not the main events but the little sub-plot involving Agent Kovach. I had a whole little post written up about why that is, but for some reason it's been sitting in my draft folder for months... hmm... not sure why! I'll schedule it to go up after this one.

When the Imps take over Corellia, Darth Decimus holds a pretty impressive speech... well, actually I don't remember anything about the speech itself, but this visual from it was certainly nice enough for me to want to take a screenshot.

This screenshot is from an Imperial exploration mission on Alderaan called Bugs and Bombs which I find morbidly funny. Basically some Imps that carried valuable sensors have been killed and cocooned to the Kilik hives, so your mission is to bust them out to retrieve the sensors. However, from a mechanics point of view, the soldiers are still alive inside the cocoons, and when you pop them, the poor Imps fall to their deaths and give you XP as they die. It's so very wrong but I can't help but find it funny every time.

Speaking of funny, look at all these droids falling to their deaths on Makeb! Teehee.

What I imagine going through my Jedi knight's mind in this screenshot: "Nope, nope, nope, nope."

You might be wondering why I'm not featuring more shots from Knights of the Fallen Empire in this post, and in this series in general, considering how much I've praised its cinematic direction. And it does offer some great scenes for screenshots! The problem is that most of them are very obvious, so I've either used them before or they are just incredibly overused all over the web. This scene from Zakuul is a good example. Does it look cool? Hell yeah. Has every single person taken the exact same screenshot of their character standing with Lana and Senya? Probably. So there just isn't that much to show off here.

There is this neat little Imperial side mission on Quesh that has you observing a Republic walker blowing up through a set of binoculars. I really like this little cut scene. Shame I never feel half as cool when I use my own macrobinoculars.

I took so many screenshots of Kaon Under Siege for my Flashpoint Friday post about it, I didn't have room to use even half of them. It took me several runs to get this shot of Major Byzal getting jumped by a rakghoul and I'm quite proud of it... even if the rakghoul's pose mid-air is kind of comical.

IntPiPoMo count: 30

Bioware Answers Some Questions About Flashpoints: An Interview With Michael Backus

A couple of months ago, a strange thought struck me. Star Wars: The Old Republic turns five at the end of this year and I've been maintaining this blog for just as long, but I've never approached anything from the point of view of a real fan site. But really... why not? For all intents and purposes, this is a fan site, and who else is going to ask questions about the nitty gritty details of gameplay or the everyday worries of a loyal player? Since I was still working on my Flashpoint Friday series at the time, I had flashpoints on the mind and decided to put together some questions to pose to Bioware via community manager Eric Musco. And he said this was fine! It took a while until I got my answers, but they did arrive eventually. So, without further ado - my first ever official interview!

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Can you tell us a little about yourself and your role at Bioware? [AKA: Who am I interviewing? I didn't know in advance who this was going to be as I wasn't sure who would be responsible for flashpoints!]

My name is Michael Backus, and I’m the Lead Designer on Star Wars: The Old Republic. I joined the BioWare team over 8 years ago and have spent the majority of my time on SW:TOR. My job really has two main parts: The first is to manage the Design team on SW:TOR. The second is to work with leadership and bring the vision of the game to life at AAA-quality for our players. That means sharing the vision with team members, documenting designs, and working with the team to flesh out the details of designing new features and gameplay.

Currently all flashpoints are set up to be PUG-able through the group finder. Have you considered adding a higher difficulty option that would allow smaller groups of friends to challenge themselves similar to what you experience in hard or nightmare mode operations? Some of us have very fond memories of Lost Island HM at launch. 

We have, but it’s always a balance between making Flashpoints accessible to more players versus building a custom experience to allow for a greater challenge but for a much more limited set of players. That being said, we are always looking at opportunities to deliver higher difficulty to players looking for that increased level of challenge.

At launch, flashpoints seemed to be set up to offer an alternate gear progression route to operations since they dropped the same set pieces, though one tier lower than you could get in raids. For a while there were even plans to have different difficulty tiers of flashpoints (Lost Island!), but all of this was soon scrapped. I can understand that the tiering system would likely have become unwieldy over time, but can you give us some insight into why set pieces were removed from flashpoints? I always thought that they made for great rewards. 

You touched on it a bit in the question. The main idea was to streamline gear progression. Building and maintaining so many different stat combinations and tiers of gear added confusion to the gameplay experience for some players and made it a much more difficult system to grow and maintain. It is much easier to communicate that set pieces come from Operations. Flashpoint gear progression was designed to be a stepping stone into Operations, so reinforcing that opportunity in the gear progression sent a clearer message.

Over time, flashpoints seem to have served a couple of different purposes. For example Hammer Station is a relatively inconsequential story, just something fun to do with your friends. The Foundry or False Emperor on the other hand are important encounters that were clearly meant to feel even more epic by requiring a whole group of people. The newest flashpoints have mainly been used to drive the main narrative forward (Forged Alliances et al.), but with the inclusion of solo modes for many of these, the lines between regular quests and flashpoints have become somewhat blurred. What do you see as the main purpose of flashpoints going forward? 

Going forward we want to expand the appeal by increasing the fun of playing these experiences. Early in the game’s history we leaned-in more on cinematic storytelling in group content, but since we have had such a strong response to the storytelling in Chapters we then looked at the value of making make group content like the Star Fortresses. More dynamic with a focus on the gameplay.

What's the most challenging aspect of creating new flashpoints? Are they very resource-intensive to make? If so, why? 

That’s an interesting question, mainly because what’s the most challenging can also be some of the most fun for us as a development team.

For instance, if we look at creating a new level, the amount of effort is quite large. We come up with a critical path for both the level and the gameplay. Then, we have to have the area blocked out and scripted so we can playtest it and make sure we’re doing something fun. Then, you have the time we spend on building the environment art—we often create new environments so an area has unique features or a different look to it. Then we have our artists work on making the area beautiful, which requires texture, lighting, and propping work. And that’s without getting into the other Art work we do to create a quality experience: New creatures and bosses, their abilities, and any animation or VFX time to make the level come alive.

Although this sounds like a complex process, it is still a lot of fun. I mean, we’re creating something new for the Star Wars™ universe. That means our Writers, Designers, and Artists are working together to come up with something new and fun, while consulting with our partners at LucasFilm to make sure we capture the feel of Star Wars and The Old Republic. So although it can be a long process with a lot of moving parts, it’s very rewarding when we see these areas completed and enjoyed by our players.

Do you have a favourite and least favourite flashpoint? Maybe one you're particularly proud of and one that makes you think "yeah, we thought that was a good idea at the time but we wouldn't do it again"? 

I really enjoy Colicoid War Game because we tried some very interesting things in that Flashpoint. It starts with a shooting gallery then contains some heavy group puzzle elements. In the spirit of ‘it was a good idea at the time’, we’ve found it’s a more difficult Flashpoint to communicate and isn’t terribly PUG friendly since it’s SO different from the others.

One of the main points of contention when pugging flashpoints is the matter of "space-barring"/skipping the cut scenes, as some people really enjoy them while others just want to get to the end as quickly as possible because they've seen it all before. Sometimes people can even get kicked from the group over this. Have you ever considered trying to implement anything to alleviate this conflict of interests?

It’s a difficult balance. We did extensive testing to try and minimize this problem pre-launch. We have a ‘decision timer’ that was tweaked to try and get the balance right, but it’s never perfect. At the same time, in a sense, we pioneered multiplayer dialog in the MMO space, so these were problems that hadn’t really been identified before. I think one thing that’s helped recently is minimizing cutscenes in the middle of Flashpoints such as Star Fortress to try and keep the action moving.

In 4.0 all existing flashpoints were revamped to be tactical. This has been great for levelling as it's easy and fast to get into groups for them now. However, in some places the difficulty still seems a little off for the new paradigm, for example there are no kolto stations around the bonus boss in Maelstrom Prison, and Jos and Valk from Blood Hunt are known pug killers since they have so many abilities that are hard to survive when you're low level. How happy are you with the way this revamp has turned out? Are you still monitoring people's performance in different flashpoints and making adjustments where needed? 

I would say we’re happy with how the revamp turned out. As you mentioned, there’s always additional balance we need to tune and we’re constantly assessing those issues and opportunities. One important thing to mention is how much we value when players report the issues they find, so please keep those reports coming! We definitely want to make these experiences as fun as possible.

Another minor downside of the 4.0 changes is that narrative cohesion is lost for new players since it's not obvious at which point in the levelling process each flashpoint is supposed to take place. Do you have any plans to address this, perhaps by having the group finder interface provide additional information about each flashpoint? 

In general, we want our class stories and world arcs to lead you to these experiences. There are definitely exceptions to this and we agree that’s not ideal. Right now, since this content is found in Group Finder we’re not looking to address this issue. That being said, it’s a great idea to give more information to the player, especially when it gives backstory or context to their experience.

Why were Colicoid War Game and story mode Kaon Under Siege/Lost Island not included in the 4.0 revamp? Are there any plans to make these more accessible/relevant again? 

These were part of the ‘good idea at the time, but’ world. As I said earlier, Colicoid War Game is very difficult to communicate to a new player in a manner that facilitates understanding of what you are supposed to do. It facilitates a bad experience because of how different the mechanics are compared to similar instances. Kaon and Lost Island leaned very far outside of our standard difficulty curve, and there isn’t really a simple fix to bring them more in-line with existing Flashpoints. We felt it was better to avoid funneling players into these experiences.

How come the heroic Star Fortresses weren't included in the group finder on release? Any plans to change this and/or to open them up to a wider range of levels? 

This was an oft-debated topic and we erred on the side of making the experience cleaner for as many players as possible at launch, while acknowledging the solution didn’t solve all possibilities.

We were faced with problems like:

• There are many Star Fortresses—each having their own location and not just being one entity. This means each location would be in Group Finder. If there are now 6+ options instead of 1, players are spread out, potentially impacting queue times for players. 
• We also assumed players would want the ability to go to a specific Star Fortress in order to progress specific content. We were very sensitive of creating a situation where players would have their queue pop and one or more group members didn’t get the Star Fortress location they wanted. This would force those players to leave the group and re-queue, creating a situation that everyone would dislike. 

Ultimately, I can tell you that we’re constantly looking at the situation and if player behavior or demand changes, we’ll revisit this decision and see if there is a better solution. For instance, if players have done their specific planet Star Fortresses and now just want to queue for them together, there may be a strong argument to add them to Group Finder as one entry.

Have you considered how the new flashpoint system will deal with new additions to the game yet? E.g. next time the level cap goes up, will they all just level with it? Would new flashpoints also be accessible from level 15 onwards? 

We’ve absolutely considered this and our goal is to continue to make all our previous gameplay areas relevant each time we increase the level cap. There is still considerable work involved in that process, not to mention testing time, but it’s something we feel is important for our players.

Thanks for taking the time to answer these questions!

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While I didn't necessarily like everything I heard (R.I.P. Colicoid War Game), I certainly enjoyed some of the insights Michael gave into their thought processes here, even if there was still a good dose of "Bioware vagueness"™ in some of the answers. While I made a point of avoiding explicit questions about future content (you know they wouldn't have been able/willing to answer those), I also think he made it quite clear that going forward we can look forward to more content similar to the Star Fortresses in style. And yes, I know there have been rumours spawned by datamined info along those lines as well.

I hope everyone enjoyed this departure from the usual fare here! As usual, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

Flashpoint Friday: Kaon Under Siege

As suggested by reader Pallais, today I'd like to cover the (currently, for less than another week) level 50 flashpoint Kaon Under Siege. It fits in well at this point in the series, as it represents yet another "type" of flashpoint that's different from the ones I already talked about: Kaon is a flashpoint that's available to both factions but still puts a relatively heavy emphasis on story.

General Facts

Kaon Under Siege was the first flashpoint added to the game after launch, in patch 1.1, which was appropriately named "Rise of the Rakghouls". In the galaxy as we knew it at launch, rakghouls were a problem that was strictly limited to Taris, and people had no reason to assume that rakghouls were any more likely to start showing up on other planets than, say, the killiks of Alderaan. (If anything it was less likely, since we know from Vector's companion story that killiks are space-faring at least.) Kaon Under Siege laid the foundation for the rakghoul plague to become a galaxy-wide threat, a storyline on which Bioware based its first one-time world event and which would eventually result in the repeating Rakghoul Resurgence that we now know so well.

Both Republic and Empire players receive a breadcrumb quest on their respective fleet (called "Outbreak in the Tion Hegemony" and "Trouble in the Tion Hegemony" respectively), which leads them to a representative of their faction who gives them a briefing on the situation: Chief Rannos for the Republic and Darth Nurin for the Empire. The Tion Hegemony is introduced as a relatively powerful faction that has remained neutral in the conflict between the Republic and the Empire so far, and both sides are eager to make use of any opportunity to sway it to their side. Such an opportunity seems to have arisen now: Several planets in the Hegemony have been infected with the rakghoul plague, which is causing considerable panic. You are supposed to travel to the planet Kaon, where some survivors - members of the ruling family among them - have openly asked for help.

Darth Nurin, your chest piece looks so weird.

Fights

When it comes to interesting trash mobs, Kaon Under Siege probably takes the number one spot among SWTOR's flashpoints to this day (assuming you do it at the appropriate level; anything can be overpowered after all). You start off by killing a few hostile nobles, but soon run into people who have already been infected by the rakghoul virus, and eventually you meet full-fledged rakghouls and even rakghoul supersoldiers (intelligent rakghouls that wear armour and carry weapons).

The enemies that have been turned but haven't yet turned into generic rakghouls are actually the most dangerous, as there's a selection of "infected so-and-sos" that all have different, highly disruptive abilities. Most (in)famous are probably the infected mercenaries, who will pull someone in with a tow cable and channel a stun on them for a reeeally long time, while slowly doing damage to the player in the process. During Kaon's heyday I suffered many a wipe because of these mercenaries, because if the tank or healer got trapped and wasn't freed in time, the rest of the group would quickly find itself in big trouble.

A typical day on Kaon.

In addition there are infected screamers, which have a massive knockback and can send you flying into the next mob group, as well as bloated plaguebearers who explode on death, doing considerable damage in the process and also flinging people backwards if they are caught in the blast. There is one room towards the end of the flashpoint in particular where three or four groups of mobs are packed very close together, so if people don't put their backs to the wall, someone inevitably gets thrown into another pack, which can then easily lead to a wipe. We used to call it "the room of death". It's telling that in this Dulfy guide from 2012 this room is listed almost as if it was another boss!

Compared to the sheer lethality of the trash, Kaon's bosses feel relatively tame for the most part. The first encounter that drops some loot - you have to fight a small rakghoul swarm - doesn't really seem worthy of being called a boss fight. During the first "proper" encounter, you have to fight off an oncoming horde of rakghouls for several minutes while some explosives are being primed. There's a turret that one party member is supposed to mount and that can be used to add some dps. The first time you do this fight it feels quite novel, but after a few times it can get a bit tedious, especially as there is no way to significantly speed things up even if you're killing everything as soon as it spawns. Also, in a somewhat strange design decision, the rakghouls start swarming the moment anyone mounts the turret, but the encounter doesn't count as started until someone has actually primed the explosives. I'll never forget the time I was in a group where we fought rakghouls for something like ten minutes, wondering why the bomb wasn't going off, until we realised that nobody had actually activated it...

Next up is the Rakghoul Behemoth, a giant mutated rakghoul that likes to knock people about and has to be defeated by making use of the environment. Mainly he has a damage absorption shield that has to be removed every so often by pulling him towards an explosive barrel and blowing it up, however this mechanic has been a bit buggy for a while from my experience, meaning that the shield can stay on even after the Behemoth has started burning, so you only do piddly damage throughout the entire encounter and inevitably run into the enrage. Let's hope that this problem has been fixed before this fight makes a comeback as current content in KotFE. There is also a turret you can activate, and if you pull the boss past it, it will shoot him whenever he's in range. I've always considered this a pretty interesting fight.

The last boss, a trio of rakghoul supersoldiers, is not too difficult to handle. Once again kill order is a concern, though you can approach it multiple ways. Things to consider are that two of the three rakghouls can't be taunted while their commander is alive, while the biggest of the lot likes to pounce on people and will continue to savage them unless you inflict sufficient damage to him to interrupt this process. Also, the first two kills will spawn a wave of small adds each, which can be killed quite easily if your dps remembers to use AoE, however they can be a pain if they manage to swarm your healer.

The instance's bonus boss, a droid, was extremely hard on launch, harder even than anything else in the instance, which was why many people used to skip him (especially since he also didn't really drop anything particularly worthwhile). The tricky bit was that at 66 and 33% health each, he would shield himself and summon three probe droid adds that did considerable AoE damage - too much to have the tank round them all up, but also too much to have anyone else tank them individually, so if you wanted to successfully beat the encounter you had to be able to co-ordinate crowd control perfectly the moment the probes spawned and/or be able to do some very good kiting.

Finally, it's worth mentioning that there's also a second bonus boss that only appears whenever the Rakghoul Resurgence event is live and that has a guaranteed chance to drop a Midnight Rakling.

Story (spoilers)

You land at night and almost as soon as you exit your ship, you are contacted by your local contact, Major Byzal. He reports that some desperate nobles are trying to illegally break the quarantine and have hijacked a shuttle. It crashes almost immediately, and you meet with Major Byzal and his team at the crash site to check for survivors. You find some, but they are already infected! Major Byzal's entire team gets killed in the attack, except for the major himself. He is not happy with the situation and complains to Republic players that they've taken way too long to offer their assistance. Imperials even get accused of being directly responsible for the outbreak of the plague. After he mentions that it all started at the spaceport, he suddenly starts showing symptoms of infection himself. You have the option to kill him instantly or to wait out his inevitable transformation and kill him afterwards. Interestingly, whether you gain light or dark side points for your choice depends on your faction here. For Republic players, letting him live is the light side option and killing him is dark side, while for Imperials it's framed as a light side mercy killing vs. the dark side option of watching him suffer through his transformation.

Comparison of the crucial moment for Republic (top) and Empire (bottom).

You fight your way through the city, which feels like dealing with the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse, as you make your way through eerily abandoned locations like an empty cinema where something is still being screened. Many areas are very dark and you have to pick up little floating lamps to be able to see anything at all. Rakghouls randomly burst out of the ground or drop from the ceiling, forcing you to be on your guard at all times.

Eventually you make it to the spaceport, where you encounter increasingly intelligent and even armed rakghouls. Once you kill the last boss, a pilot comes out of hiding and confesses that the rakghouls arrived on her ship, but she swears that she had no idea what was going on. She traces the whole thing back to a Doctor Lorrick who lives on Ord Mantell, an exiled member of the ruling family's main rival house. This serves as the lead-in for the second flashpoint in this story arc, Lost Island. You have the option of killing the pilot for her involvement in getting Kaon infected with the plague.

Conclusion

Kaon Under Siege is a beautiful example of Bioware's flashpoint team at their best. Unlike some of the earlier flashpoints, Kaon manages to strike a healthy balance between telling a compelling story and retaining replayability. There a couple of cut scenes that are key to advancing the story, but they are not overwhelming. The extremely disruptive trash mobs also make for challenging and interesting gameplay at level.

The whole setup is also extremely atmospheric, and at least at release, the concept of a zombie apocalypse in the Star Wars universe still felt relatively novel. (Knowing the sheer size of the expanded universe, it probably happened somewhere else before, but it certainly felt unusual to me at the time to see "zombies" in a Star Wars setting.) Admittedly the novely has worn off somewhat since the Rakghoul Resurgence has become a recurring event, but it's still fun to see where it all started.

Yet More Rakghoul Shenanigans

I swear, these rakghoul event posts pretty much write themselves. Stuff just keeps happening. I think that's why I've been loving this event so much - not because it gave us another set of dailies similar to ones that have come before, but because it draws people together and encourages them to write their own stories. With everyone fighting for resources, against big monsters or against each other, it's hard not to be faced with interesting decisions and make new discoveries. I think it would be stressful if the game was like that all the time, but just for a week? Awesome.

In terms of Eyeless achievements, I got to tick off the last one by getting a 16-person hardmode run under my belt. Unlike the 8-person version, this one actually felt quite hard too. You still seem to have seemingly endless amounts of time (which we once again needed due to several people dying), but our very well geared tank took quite a beating. As Ernost also observed, after the boss jumps into the air he likes to pound on the tank like nobody's business, and both the tank and the healers better be ready to use some cooldowns at that point. Our own tank died shortly before the boss did, but fortunately we had a spare tank in the raid who could pick him up for the last couple of percentage points.

I also got to kill Shellshock in a pug group. I had only just arrived on Alderaan when I saw the call for a healer go out in general chat, so I thought: why not? He wasn't too hard, though that AoE that regularly removes your vaccine is quite annoying (and expensive, assuming you want to actually do something instead of spending the rest of the fight getting stunned every couple of seconds). We then switched instances to kill him again, but as we were doing so a couple of Imps showed up and several people in our ops group were PvP flagged... so the Imps had no trouble wiping us, especially with the boss stunning the entire group so frequently. Since we outnumbered them, we probably could have rallied and killed them in return, but people hadn't really joined the group to PvP and preferred to leave and do something else.

I ran into the Tunnel Lurker a couple more times. Once I was on my own on my gunslinger and immediately shot him out of some sort of "rare, must tag" kind of reflex, though that just led to me dying very quickly. Another time I saw someone else engaging him and joined in just because I could, even knowing that I wouldn't get anything for the kill. This guy is kind of tough to plan around, since he's strong enough that you need a group but also wanders around a lot, so you can't exactly spawn-camp him with your friends. You kind of need to be lucky and already be in a group when you happen to run into him. Fortunately that's exactly what happened to me and a guildie when we were running around doing dailies while an ops group was forming for another Eyeless run. As soon as I called out on TeamSpeak that the Lurker had spawned, everyone already in the group converged on my location and we killed him quickly and with no problems. We didn't get anything worthwhile from it, but it still felt good to get it done.

Another interesting new kill I got was the "Midnight Rakghoul", a special new mini-boss that has been added to Kaon Under Siege. I love that Bioware added something like that to an older flashpoint. Never let old content go to waste if it fits your current theme, I say! He drops a guaranteed Midnight Rakling apparently, as opposed to the low random chance it always had of dropping in Lost Island HM.

Speaking of guaranteed drops, I'm now up to three Pale Rakling drops from the random plague bearer spawns on Alderaan in House Organa or Thul. Don't evade them if there's an elite in the group, because so far they've always delivered some nice loot for me.

My Marauder was also among the alts I decided to take to Alderaan, and as usual it was a pretty hilariously terrible experience. I had basically only just arrived when I spawned a group of 53 mobs (my level), and as I was in the process of killing them, some level 55 drove by, spawned more mobs and for some reason they all aggroed on me too. I died, so I had to buy more vaccines. I really feel for any lower level characters trying to participate in this.

Then I noticed that I hadn't even trained my level 53 abilities, and when I summoned my Holo Hutt, I realised that I didn't actually have enough money to train. This is what happens when you leave a character on the fleet for months, doing nothing but run diplomacy missions to change her alignment, but don't do anything that could actually earn her money. Oops. After a couple more deaths, I did eventually make it through all the dailies, which gave me enough cash to buy all my training and also dinged me to 54. If you're feeling in a funk on any of your alts and are enjoying the event, it's definitely a good opportunity to earn some XP while doing something slightly different.

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.

Let's start with a death that was not my own, but served as a lesson to me. Noob me was innocently cruising across the dunes of Tatooine at the time, when I suddenly spotted a lone Jedi going up against a world boss... and going splat very quickly. I can only guess that, like so many others, he fell victim to the lure of "clicking on the glowing skull to see what happens". I knew not to follow his example afterwards.

My own first death to a TOR raid boss was to the Rogue Cartel Warbot on Quesh. I'm not even sure how it happened, as he doesn't have any particularly tricky abilities or anything... I guess I was just dumb. I felt suitably humiliated as the fight moved away from me and all over the courtyard while I just continued to lie in a corner feeling stupid. Nobody else died on that fight either.

Oh Soa and your many fall deaths! Though I have to say, considering the harshness of the platform dropping mechanic when you're first learning it, I'm surprised that I haven't seen a lot more people die to it.

There was also this one time when we had just wiped and I was the last one to make it back... and then I took one step down from the ledge at the entrance and managed to fall through the tiny gap between the ledge and the top platform, instantly plummeting to my death again. Everyone was like "Where is Shintar?" and "What happened? Why is she dead again?" while I was laughing tears in front of my computer screen and nearly pissing myself. Just my luck to find a gap that most people hadn't even taken notice of. I did feel a bit bad for making everyone wait while I had to run back in a second time, but the fact that some guildies started referring to anyone falling to their death in stupid places as "doing a Shintar" afterwards absolutely made it worth it.

The boss kills where everyone except one person is dead at the end are always the best ones, aren't they? This was on hard mode.

Finally, this shot shows a run of Kaon Under Siege where we were in the cinema when our Commando suddenly keeled over dead. What happened? "I just stood on this chair and then I was suddenly dead! I didn't do anything else, I swear!" "Which chair?" asked our tank, clearly disbelieving. He jumped around on a couple of them... and suddenly fell over dead as well. The rest of us knew not to mess with the furniture after that! During a different run we also had someone die to a table in a different room. I probably shouldn't enjoy random bugs like that this much, but deadly furniture is just too silly...

Anyway, that's it for this series. I hope people got some enjoyment out of this little glimpse into my everyday play.

I'm usually not a big fan of posts like this...

... especially if the author doesn't post anything but the screenshot and it's their sixth alt anyway. But hey, you only hit the level cap in a new MMO for the first time once, so let's go for it! Ding!

As you can see, I was in the middle of Mortar Volley-ing a group of mobs on Corellia, and Elara was just butting in about some diplomatic mission. Later, please! For the curious, it took me a bit less than seven days of /played time, but to be fair that included quite a bit of "downtime" of me just idling at the fleet, levelling my crew skills and chatting with guildies. You can probably do it faster.

The minutes just before the ding were vaguely amusing, because while I wasn't in any particular rush to reach endgame, I still started to feel a certain suspense about my experience bar creeping closer and closer to the end. My boyfriend and I hadn't managed to stay perfectly in sync, but we were pretty close - only about 10k XP apart, which is more or less one quest hand-in at that level. We kept talking about hopefully dinging at the same time once we completed a certain amount of quests.

Eventually the Republic symbol flashed up over my fellow trooper's head just as we completed a bonus quest, but nothing happened for me. My bar looked as good as full, but upon closer inspection it turned out that I was just 1k experience points off. Killed another group of mobs - nope, still a hundred XP off! Talked to an NPC for a quest... nope, it was one of those that only counts as advancing the quest, not completing it, so no experience! When I finally dinged from killing mobs for the next mission we were on, I felt stupidly relieved - slowest 1k XP ever.

We "celebrated" our newly acquired max level by running Kaon Under Siege, the rakghoul / zombie flashpoint introduced in patch 1.1. It was very atmospheric, if very... different for Star Wars standards. I'm looking forward to the second part.

Though bloody hell, some of the trash was a nightmare. If you see any mobs called mercenaries, watch out! They have tow cables that stun you and the stun doesn't end until they get interrupted! I think during one of our most impressive wipes we pulled a bit too much and basically the entire group ended up caught in tow cable stuns and unable to do anything as we slowly died from the associated damage, since nobody remained free to break anyone else out.

It was all worth it though, as one of the bosses gifted me my very first level 50 purple. To be honest that's not something I expected to see in a normal mode flashpoint, but I'm certainly not complaining - especially considering how many more times I died than anyone else, what with nobody ever noticing the healer getting towed to death.

Up next: completing act three of my class story, doing all the flashpoints I haven't seen yet on normal mode and doing some gearing up for hard modes.