Tulak Hord Talk

After eight seasons and almost four years of playing on multiple servers, I'm pretty well settled in everywhere, with a growing roster of alts on each server and most of my characters in stable guilds. The one server where I was still feeling a bit "unsafe" though was Tulak Hord, mainly because I hadn't really found a guild that truly covered all my needs and made me feel like it was going to stick around.

You may recall from this post last year that after more than two years of staying in a two-person guild, my attempt to find something a bit more suitable for someone interested in playing alts and doing Conquest led me to a guild that turned out to run an old-fashioned guild website that nobody actually used. I was a bit put out by that but stuck around.

Over time, things got more quiet in said guild. I never actually got to know my guildies really, but I was under the impression that there had been a core group of people that did operations together, and it looked like that had eventually fallen apart. The guild wasn't strictly dead, but going by the numbers on the weekly Conquest board, it at one point looked like I was one of a maximum of five people that were still playing.

I had almost resigned myself to potentially inheriting the guild eventually once the last of the other players stopped logging in, but after several months of this state of relative inactivity, I noticed that things started picking up again, not because the gang was back together, but because the person that the GM title had defaulted to had seemingly decided to go on a recruiting spree. Which was fine by me, but I didn't give it too much thought either.

Tonight though, something funny happened. I was just doing a few more quests on an alt (on Tulak Hord, obviously) to finish off one last weekly seasons objective when someone said "hey Shin" in guild chat. I said hi back but didn't pay it any further mind as I hadn't really had a lot of interaction with anyone in the guild.

I continued to focus on my questing, until the same person said something along the lines of "I'll just go back to DM now" and I swear for a moment my brain was short circuiting. Why was someone speaking English in guild chat on Tulak Hord? And why were they telling me about going back to Darth Malgus? What server was I on again? What the heck was even going on?

I opened the guild panel and looked at the only other person online. Their legacy name didn't sound familiar, but the character name vaguely rang a bell. It sounded kind of like one of my guildies from Darth Malgus, the one who'd inspired me to try doing Galactic Seasons on multiple servers in the first place.

"Xen?!" I typed incredulously, and with my mind still spinning. How could he be here? Had I ever gotten him invited into this guild? No, even I couldn't be that forgetful, surely? What was happening?

He proceeded to tell me that he'd been invited the other day via a random recruitment message, after his last guild on Tulak Hord had kicked him for inactivity. I mean, what are the freaking odds? I just thought that was absolutely wild. Tulak Hord isn't the biggest server, but it's still got a good number of guilds, and the one we are now both in is relatively small, so that was some crazy serendipity alright. 

On an unrelated note, another thing that bothered me about playing on Tulak Hord until recently was that this guild didn't have an Imperial counterpart, so my Imperial alts were still homeless and lost in space. I'd done a bit of research about where I could take them but hadn't come up with anything enticing enough for me to make the effort of actively applying.

Well, the other night I was just about to log off on my Sith inquisitor when someone offered me a random invite to their guild. I checked that the guild name wasn't anything offensive or utterly ridiculous and accepted. So now I'm a pirate on Imp side, and my characters have the guild rank "fish food". We'll see where that goes! 

7.6 Dev Stream Reactions

After watching the big Warcraft Direct stream yesterday, it was quite a contrast to spend time on SWTOR's 7.6 dev stream tonight. Smaller studio, fewer viewers, but also a much more relaxed atmosphere and lots of laughs. I was immediately overcome with an urge to make a bunch of gifs of the interactions between Eric Musco and Papa Keith, intending to post them on Bluesky, but it couldn't cope with me uploading any images at the time (I later learned it wasn't just me), so I'll be inserting them into this blog post instead, even if that may seem a bit random!

As usual, if you want the full rundown of every little detail, I recommend watching the recording of the stream yourself or reading a detailed summary elsewhere - Kal already has one up here for example. Over here I'm more choosy with what I talk about and won't mention everything, but I'll add some commentary to make it more interesting. Let's get on with it!

Topical and time-sensitive things first: There's a new Twitch drop for the next 14 days, an Ilum poster deco with a purple border. Handily livestream viewers were able to earn it right away simply by watching the stream as it only requires one hour of watch time. There'll also be another Twitch drop, a purple Vulptilla mount, once 7.6 launches. We weren't given an exact date for that, but from what they did say on the stream it sounds like it will be early December.

Also, effective immediately, there's a big 50% off sale on dyes going on! The interesting thing related to this was that they mentioned that they're planning to make changes to how dyes work soon... I'm sure I'm not the only one whose mind immediately jumped to the notion of making them unlockable in Collections, something I've seen people request more than once. I don't think that will happen though - dye sales have got to be too much of a money-maker for that - but I'm still curious to hear what they've got in mind once the time comes.

We got some info about the 7.6 story, and I tend to not go into too much detail about story previews in these posts, but I did want to note that Imperials will finally get to see Major Anri again, almost three years after Manaan, and that the story is supposedly going to be structured a bit differently, consisting of four threads you can advance in any order, about Shae Vizla, Darth Malgus, the Hidden Chain and Darth Nul's holocron respectively. I'm curious to see how that'll pan out - it could mean more content, but I've got to admit that personally I'm a little worried that "you can do them in any order" means that each "thread" will contain a lot of exposition/cut-scene watching and fewer interesting choices - but we'll see.

Unfortunately after all that talk about how interesting the new story is going to be, we won't actually get to see it at 7.6's release, because while the patch itself will still land as planned, they had to delay the story update part of it because they "currently don't have all the elements [they] need to complete this story", which I've seen people interpret as having to do with the voice actors' strike, though I don't know whether that's just speculation or backed by anything that was said elsewhere.

There was some talk about dynamic encounters and the new lair boss, but I won't go into that here as I already covered those topics in my post about the PTS from last week. They just confirmed that dynamic encounters will only exist on Hoth and Tatooine at launch, with the possible exception of Hidden Chain invasions, which might also happen on other planets from the sounds of it.

The new lair boss is also going to drop crafting materials for new augments, something that people had already caught on to some time ago but that hadn't been officially announced. These new augments will be better than the current gold augments. I guess this will offer a sort of gear progression without further raising overall item rating, though it does make me wonder whether the next gear reset perhaps isn't as far away as I thought.

There was some talk about new Cartel Market items, which I usually don't go into here either, but there was one thing that piqued my interest: there'll be a new decoration bundle called the Remote Outpost Bundle, and it'll come with a small amount of story/gameplay attached from the sounds of it. I was immediately reminded of the encrypted datacubes from back in the day and how people were not happy with those, though I guess a big part of that was that they came from inside Cartel packs, while this will be a direct purchase. I'll make sure to get it when it comes out and will let you know whether it's worth the money or not.

In terms of gameplay, there'll be a new UI feature called comlink to interact with terminals and characters in a more organic way without having to always resort to KOTOR-style cut scenes. They emphasised that this isn't meant to replace cinematics and proper conversations but should simply serve as another option for interactions where appropriate. The example they showed was of someone using a terminal and being given a prompt to enter a password, where in the current system that would bring up the KOTOR-style black bars and mute dialogue options like "enter code" or "walk away". They explained that they could also see this working for characters "texting" you.

PvP Season 7 will still start with the launch of 7.6 and bring an end to 8-man premades, as they'll once again be limited to four people max, and the devs are also disabling the old level 75 set bonuses in PvP to reduce the power of twinks. Not what I personally consider PvP's biggest problems right now, but better than nothing. What did stand out to me was that one of the new season rewards is actually going to be a proper emote instead of the previous "text-only" one, which might actually be something to look forward to for me.

As the stream was getting close to wrapping up, Eric and Keith dropped a few more surprises on us at the end. First off, we'll get a new mount as a free subscriber reward that introduces something new: the ability to have your (humanoid) companion ride in a sidecar beside you and a non-combat pet in the luggage rack. The preview looked hilarious and made me laugh out loud. I'm not sure how much I'll use it but it'll be fun for a little while if nothing else. Plus I appreciate that they decided to make it a sub reward instead of a Cartel Market item. There'll also be two new mounts from dynamic encounter-related achievements that won't show your companion but will include your active mini pet.

Next they announced that they'll do a character name purge for the first time in a long time. If you're a subscriber, all your characters are safe, but if not, you'll want to log into any toons that haven't been logged into since January 1st of this year, else they will be flagged for a rename. I wonder if that'll give me a chance to claim Shintar without the funny i on Tulak Hord, the one server where I don't currently own the name... they also mentioned that they'll try to remember to do this a bit more often in the future to not have all these names taken up by inactive characters.

Finally, a big surprise at the very end: they're working on more art modernisation for planetary environments, but also for player characters. Musco immediately assured everyone that their number one priority was to not change the overall feel of the characters. The examples they showed looked really good, with just more detail on the facial textures and more gloss on the eyes. (When I tried to explain this to Mr Commando afterwards, he said that talking about shiny hair and eyes made me sound like I was trying to sell him a dog!)

All in all, a fun stream with lots of news and some interesting things to look forward to, though the story update being delayed with no clear ETA was a bit of a bummer. What was your favourite part of this stream?

Savanna Vorantikus Returns!

Did you ever hear the tragedy of Savanna Vorantikus? OK, it wasn't really a tragedy, more of a comedy.

You see, SWTOR's Cartel Market has a daily flash sale, where an item will be half price for 24 hours only. Usually it's something that's not super popular, but the reduced price can make it a good deal regardless.

Last year, on the 30th of September, the featured CM item of the day was a mount called Savanna Vorantikus: only 750 Cartel Coins instead of the usual 1500! Sure, whatever. The next day, it changed to the Swamp Rancor, another mount.

However, on the 2nd of October, the Savanna Vorantikus was back. How odd! They don't usually discount the same item twice in such quick succession. Oh well.

The next four days featured an assortment of different items as you'd expect: two weapons, an armour set and a speeder. But on the 7th of October, the Savanna Vorantikus returned yet again. And then again the next day. And then again the day after. And then the next two days after that.

People on the forums, on reddit and on other social media went nuts. What was going on? Just how many of these beasts did they have to get rid of? I mean, it was pretty obvious that something was bugged, or perhaps the person that usually populates the flash sale schedule had unexpectedly taken sick, but those were boring explanations. It was much more fun to meme.

As someone who doesn't usually pay that much attention to the Cartel Market, I didn't immediately notice the repetition, but let's just say that by the fifth day, so many people were talking about it, it was hard to miss. Just as I was starting to think that I should really buy one for myself just to get in on the silly fun, they finally fixed the schedule. The flash sale still "hiccuped" a little as it repeated the exact same four items that had been featured in early October plus the Swamp Rancor, but it didn't revert to the Vorantikus after that, so we were out of the woods. And I always kind of regretted missing out! I even checked the GTN at some point but ultimately decided against buying it from there.

Needless to say, when I saw the Savanna Vorantikus on sale again today, I pounced on the opportunity to get my own. At last, I am in on the joke! Now the question is just whether that will be it or whether the Savanna Vorantikus will once again make a return tomorrow or the day after...

Fall-down, Stand-up Comedy

I know I haven't sounded very happy about raiding recently. To remind everyone (including myself) of why I still love it, let me tell you a little story.

On Saturday some of my guildies and I did Nature of Progress story mode on Imp side. Dxun actually received heavy nerfs in 7.0, and then it was nerfed again in 7.1, something I unapologetically love. I always thought it was a fun operation, but the difficulty could make it a bit of a chore to run casually. Nowadays you can underman it, bring both inexperienced players and alts, mess up in silly ways and still muddle through somehow, which is how I like it.

So we were doing 16-man with ten people, and we had just made a pig's ear out of the Mutant Trandoshans fight, finishing off the last of them with only two people left standing. When we continued to Huntmaster, somehow our tank died nearly instantly. I used my combat revive on him and one of the other healers got all apologetic for not healing him fast enough.

However, when he did get up and we definitely made sure to heal him, his health still kept bouncing up and down like a yo-yo, prompting the same healer who had just apologised to say: "OK, either [the boss] does insane damage or someone is not wearing tank gear".

It was only at this point that I took a closer look at the numbers on my unit frames and noticed that our tank's maximum health was oddly low - less than 300k when everyone else had nearly 400k. I quickly inspected him mid-combat and it was as I suspected - half his gear had hit zero durability. Just as I shared this with the group, he died again, and one of our damage dealers commented: "I was wondering why I got the tutorial for disabled or destroyed items..."

Our tank expressed some confusion as according to him he hadn't seen the usual indicators for broken gear on his UI. Around this time, Huntmaster did his move of retreating to the lake. Someone asked whether we still had a combat res available, and I opined that it wasn't worth resing our tank again since you can't repair in combat so he was going to be useless anyway, but someone else had already done it.

Even better though, one of the other dps had managed to plop down a Revan statue (a utility item that serves as a vendor) and our tank quickly clicked on it while he was briefly out of combat after the revive. So even as I kept repeating that you can't repair in combat, he smugly replied: "Oh yes I can, now I did it!" And just like that, he was back in the fight and fully repaired. "Oh wow, he has so much health now," commented the other healer, and we all had a good laugh.

Unluckily for our tank, he died again less than two minutes later because Shelleigh ate him, but that's all part of the fun. I just thought the whole sequence of events was pretty amazing, both that we managed to be oblivious to the fact that our tank was half-naked throughout the entire trash leading up to Huntmaster, as well as that people somehow managed to get him up and repaired mid-fight and on the fly, when I hadn't thought that to even be possible.

Day 10: Death

It seems appropriate to finish off my 10 days of SWTOR screenshots series close to the end of the year, and end with the theme of death - which sounds a lot gloomier than it is, really. In MMOs, death is rarely much more than a temporary setback, and personally at least I often find it quite comical as well, which is reflected in some of these screenshots.

First off for example, we have this shot of a master mode Tyrans wipe in progress. Being dead on the floor always provides interesting opportunities for taking screenshots from a different perspective, but this was an unusual angle even for that situation. Plus I caught my co-healer stepping on me, which was an amusing bonus.

A different kind of death humour is illustrated by this shot of my Imperial agent dead on Ossus. I've long had a soft spot for humour derived from deadly verticality (one of the very first posts on this blog was about that subject), and elevators that go faster than should be physically possible are a classic that never gets old for me. So I was very pleased to find that the Imperial base on Ossus is also fitted with one of these, meaning that if you step on the lift at the top just as it starts its descent, you'll be taking one looong step down, which inevitably ends in having to call for a med probe.

This is an older shot from the PTS but pictures something that can happen on the live servers as well - a Sage or Sorcerer dying in their "immunity bubble" pose - because you did hit that button and should have been immune to damage, but the game decided that you should die anyway. Damn it!

Speaking of things looking not quite right, in this screenshot I found it striking how after Titan 6's death, the targeting circle for his body was quite some distance away from his targeting circle on the ground where we picked up the loot.

Seguing into dead bodies and loot, I'm perpetually baffled by Bioware's relationship with loot crates these days. Back in the day you always looted the boss's dead body itself, or you got a mysterious box if the body was inaccessible for some reason - which did make sense with some boss fights, such as Revan mysteriously disappearing at the end of the Foundry, or Darth Malgus in False Emperor needing to be pushed off a ledge in the fight's original iteration. But at some point... things got confusing.

As pictured above, you've been able to off Malgus the regular way for some time now, but you still don't loot him directly. That could be brushed off as a remnant of how the fight used to work, but it happens in newer flashpoints as well. I think it's the second boss in Spirit of Vengeance where you end up with a dead body (even though you technically don't kill the guy lore-wise), a copy of him that's still alive, and a box falling from the sky at the end of the fight. It's very strange.

Circling back to strange views of death, here's the view from the floor during Revan's core phase in Temple of Sacrifice... I get why the bodies are put off to the side like that, but I don't know why all those people died seemingly mid-air in strange jumping poses...

To, uh, another year of lots of virtual death?!

Day 9: Silly

IntPiPoMo may be over for this year, but my 10 days of SWTOR screenshots aren't finished, and I'm still planning to complete that project. The theme for day nine was "silly".

On the subject of players doing silly things, I present you this shot of one of our tanks "standing guard" at the exit of Fabricator's room in Karagga's Palace, with the markers behind him also meant to delineate a border that people shouldn't cross (yet). If you've ever had someone run ahead into that room too early, I don't need to explain to you why that is. (The boring explanation for everyone else is that it contains a trash pull for which you really want everyone to go in together and be focused or it can quickly spiral out of control.)

A different kind of silly screenshot is of in-game cut scenes where I managed to capture the animation at such a peculiar moment that the result looks weird more than anything. Above you can see my Mercenary about to sock an Alderaanian noble for example... which is funny in itself I guess, but the shot also looks kind of bizarre, like she's actually about to fall over drunk or something.

Or how about my Sniper performing this "heroic" leap on Iokath?

I guess this scene is meant to be at least slightly silly, but I still love the way Darth Malora is just kind of flying past these Imperials here.

Another intentionally funny scene that took me quite a few tries to capture correctly was this moment from Secrets of the Enclave, when Malgus' medical droid comes rolling out of the dead boss's mouth... I did the flashpoint on Republic side first and remember wondering at the time why the mob model had such a big mouth...

The Nature of Progress operation is another great example of (relatively) recent content laced with wonderful humour. I adore this conversation so much.

Reading tooltips pays off in there as well. Such as this one when a Trandoshan Medic manages to inject someone on trash...

The 12 Best Ways to Die on Gods Trash

I haven't actually been to Gods from the Machine in a few weeks, but I was going through some video footage that I recorded there the other day, which in turn gave me the idea for this post. I've said before that I think that due to the way the bosses were originally released, Gods has a bit too much trash for comfort, however at the same time it's quite interesting and even entertaining, especially when you encounter it for the first time on one of the higher difficulties.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that there are a lot of really amusing ways to die on these mobs, which was what ultimately inspired me to make this list. Without further ado, my 12 favourite ways to die in Gods from the Machine without any involvement from the actual gods, sorted from bottom to top!

12. Falling off a walkway on your way to Tyth

I don't think any of the trash mobs on the way to Tyth do knockbacks (unless they do on master mode, which would be funny), but some of them are positioned on somewhat precarious walkways and put a lot of fire down, so it's not completely out there to accidentally hurl yourself off the edge while trying to dodge out of something else. Or maybe you were just bored of wiping on Tyth on a higher difficulty one day and carelessly put on auto-run while getting back to the boss, just to find yourself running off an edge that way.

11. Blown up by mines

Cloaked mines are introduced on the way to Nahut and stick around to surprise you on later trash as well. They are mostly what you'd expect - you find them and they go boom - but the knockback component of the explosion can sometimes lead to additional hilarity depending on whether you set any of them off near a ledge somewhere...

10. Scyvan Swarmer attack

These lovely little lads are part of the many trash mobs on the way to Scyva and - living up to their name - like to swarm people. Gods help you if you unexpectedly get aggro on a lot of these and aren't a tank - your healers will pretty much need lightning reflexes to even stand a chance at saving you. What's more likely is that said healers will simply blink and then wonder why you're dead.

9. Scyvan Swarmer explosion

Even if you manage to successfully deal with the Swarmers' initial aggro, they like to jump around and explode on death, leading to crazy scurrying around on part of the raid as everyone tries to get out of their red circles in time. Good times.

8. Extermination Droid dot

On the way to Nahut you'll run into Extermination Droids that like to stab people and leave a nasty, stacking damage-over-time effect on their targets. If you allow this to stack too high, your healers won't be able to keep up - though even with lower stacks it can be kind of funny when you manage to kill the droids and then someone still keels over dead from the remaining dot ticks after you're out of combat just because nobody noticed that the person was still in danger.

7. Cruel Extermination droids

What else would you expect from stealthed stabby droids with a name like this but a one-shot kill ability? Not only do you need to find them in their stealthy hiding places, you then also need to keep them interrupted or stunned until dead or they'll kill someone. I always feel kind of proud when we manage to kill these without anyone getting ganked by their one-shot ability, but it doesn't happen often, since a single missed interrupt is literally all it takes.

6. Your shield carrier dies

The trip to Scyva leads across light bridges over a body of water while sniper droids try to pick you off, and the only way to protect the group is to have on person carry a shield. The shield can be passed around, but if it's dropped accidentally, such as by the carrier walking off an edge, there's no way to recover it, and there's nothing like that feeling of helplessly waiting for death because your shield carrier did something silly before you managed to reach your destination

5. Izax trash beam

Just when you think you've seen it all, you walk through one of those purple beams you need to redirect to open up the way to Izax and it zaps you dead. Seriously though, why wouldn't a giant purple laser of all things not be deadly in a place where pretty much everything else is?

4. Interrupting a Vindictive Plasma droid

With all the emphasis on needing to interrupt things, Bioware thought it would be fun to mess with our heads by putting in one trash mob on which interrupting is actually very bad, the Vindictive Plasma droid - interrupt its heat beam and it'll respond with a violent explosion that'll likely one-shot most people in its current melee range. Never gets old! I may or may not be saying this because I always stand at range myself.

3. Sniped into the water

I talked about the helplessness of losing your shield carrier on the way to Scyva, but there's also the option to plain old mess up yourself by not being under the shield when you're supposed to be. I have some guildies that actively enjoy tempting fate by dodging in and out of its protective field... watching them go flying whenever a sniper decides to focus on them at just the right time is never not satisfying.

2. Falling to your death on the way to Nahut

I mentioned falling off walkways on the way to Tyth, and there are more opportunities to do so later, but I do think there's this specific jump on the way to Nahut that deserves its own entry as you have to jump down a hole at one point but need to slow your fall via some ledges around its edges so as not to fall too far too quickly. Of course someone always gets it wrong and ends up landing with a satisfying splat right at the feet of their guildies. Every time.

1. Splatted by a door

Finally, the ultimate amusing way to die on Gods trash is... at the entrance to the mini-boss guarding the shortcut to Scyva. It's a shame that there's rarely reason to do it anymore... but anyway, the room is protected by a sort of airlock that requires opening one door first, and then closing it behind you while opening the next one. The thing is, both doors go up/down instantly and forcefully, meaning that anyone standing in the wrong place at the time when someone activates the airlock by clicking goes splat instantly (with a very crunchy sound effect as well). Some people may have been known to try and get others killed that way intentionally just because it's so funny...

If you've been to Gods from the Machine yourself, do you agree with this list? How many of these ways to die have you experienced yourself?

Video Stuff

I've been feeling quite inspired on the video front recently, so I thought I'd make a blog post to plug my most recent creations. If you're already subscribed to my YouTube channel, you can pretty much ignore this! As I've mentioned previously, I'm primarily a blogger, not a YouTuber, so creating and promoting videos is not exactly a focus for me, but that doesn't mean that I don't want anyone to see it when I do make one.

First off we have "Getting Physical as a Juggernaut", which was one of those rare videos that were a completely spontaneous idea. Basically I had spent an afternoon doing PvP in the midbie bracket on my Juggernaut Cheriza while also being on a bit of a Dua Lipa trip and listening to Physical on repeat, and it occurred to me that leaping at and smashing into people was a valid interpretation of the phrase "getting physical"... so I edited it all together into a sort of love child between a PvP montage and a music video. It doesn't show me being particularly awesome at PvP or anything like that, it's just a bit of fun.



Another way in which I felt like getting creative recently was that for the first time in literal years I decided to make not one, but two cinematic raid videos - which is to say I went into a 16-man story mode operation and recorded the proceedings from first person view and with all UI elements hidden, just to edit the best footage together to an epic soundtrack. I do think the results are the best two videos of this type I've done so far (we did both Ravagers and Temple of Sacrifice in one evening):





As an aside, I decided to use two Two Steps From Hell songs as the soundtrack, which led to me reading up about them, and I didn't even know that they were specifically composing their creations to be used in film and video game trailers! That certainly explains why they work so well for this kind of content.

I also made a "behind the scenes" video which shows my guildies talking about silly things while epic battles were being fought on screen, plus some, let's say... less epic proceedings that I couldn't use in the main videos for obvious reasons.

Finally, I've talked about my outtakes videos before, and with this whole pandemic thing I've been spending more time with my guildies than any sane person should, resulting in lots of recordings of ridiculous conversations and silly deaths, and me putting up another compilation of this footage pretty much once a month.

Now, the primary target audience for these are my guildies and I'm sure to an outsider a lot of things simply wouldn't make sense, but I have had feedback from a few people not in my guild that they found these quite amusing as well, so I thought I'd mention them. If the humour's not your cup of tea that's completely understandable - but if you do like having a peek into the silly goings-on in a social raiding guild, here is your chance (be aware that there's some swearing, dirty jokes and stuff):

• February-April
• April/May
• May/June

Friendly Takeover

I've previously mentioned that my guild has an Imperial alt guild, but we've never advertised this much because it isn't really a full-fledged sister guild or anything like that. We're firmly rooted on Republic side for the most part, and the Imperial guild has only really served as alt storage for characters created on the opposite faction to see all the different class stories.

Initially, it was under the same leadership as our main guild too, which is to say it was led by our old guild leader and then Mr Commando once he took over. However, Mr Commando soon became absolutely terrible at remembering to log into his Imperial alts, so that after thirty days of inactivity on that faction the mantle of Imperial guild leadership would automatically get handed over to the next officer/player(?) to log in, which was usually me. I would then point this out to him, and he would log in just so that I could hand leadership back to him... and then immediately forget about the whole thing again, just for the whole process to see a rinse and repeat a month later.

After a few times of going through this whole shebang, I eventually reached a point where I decided that I was tired of it. If Mr Commando couldn't be bothered to lead the Imperial guild, I'd just do it myself! It's not as if it actually mattered who held the rank, considering that we weren't really doing anything with it. So the next time I inherited guild leadership, I tweaked some of the ranks, renaming the GM rank to "Empress" and giving Mr Commando a special rank that I initially called "Empress' Pet" or something like that, however as he wasn't very amused by the latter I quickly got rid of that again. In the end, there were some jokes about me trying to seize power/staging a hostile takeover, but as I said it didn't really make a difference to anything so we soon moved on.

An Empress arises.

When the Conquest changes about two years ago suddenly made it possible to get something out of Conquest without being competitive, I decided to trial going for a small yield target on Imp side. That went really well, and even better, it didn't remain a one-time thing. I got buy-in from a guildie that was always amassing a lot of points by crafting that he would help to "top off" our Imperial score towards the end of the week if needed, so going for the small yield every week actually became a regular thing. I don't think we hit it every time, but it did feel like it encouraged a bit more activity. If nothing else the steadily increasing Conquest score showed people that there was some activity on Imp side, even if the number of active characters was low and they were mostly being played asynchronously.

Another officer and I also started to organise small events on Imp side a bit more frequently, and I began investing into slowly but surely expanding our Imperial guild ship. As Conquest was made easier over time, we even found ourselves able to shoot for medium yield with increasing frequency. And with the most recent Conquest craziness, I decided that we might as well invade the large yield planet and we did indeed hit our new target after only four days. We also unlocked the last room on the Imperial guild ship that same week.

Chuffed with our performance and in a slightly jokey mood, I decided to set the guild message of the day to: "The Empress is pleased with your hard work on Conquest and smiles upon you benevolently." It barely took five minutes for someone to notice and pipe up about it on Discord... and then things escalated from there, as people apparently hadn't really noticed my chosen GM rank until then and started jokingly addressing me as Empress in guild chat (and sometimes even on voice).

It still makes me break into giggles every time, especially when it comes from particularly deadpan guildies whom I wouldn't usually expect to take part in such silliness. On a personal level it's also a happy reminder of how far the Imperial alt guild has come under my "leadership" though, and all joking aside, I am pretty pleased with that.

Virtual Guild Meet-up

Over the years I've met a fair number of people in real life that I first met online - I guess nowadays that isn't so strange anymore, but fifteen years ago the notion of me meeting "strange internet people" was definitely still something that made my family very uncomfortable!

Having been in my current guild for about eight years, I've met a few of my guildies in real life as well; and some other guildies that I haven't met in person have at least met each other - but a bigger guild meet-up never really seemed realistic, considering how spread out we are across Europe. You may well be intrigued by the idea of meeting some of your guildies face-to-face, but are you curious enough to pay for a plane ticket just for that? Probably not!

Watching many big real world events get cancelled or move to the virtual space in the current climate gave me food for thought though: why not have a virtual guild meet-up? Yes, in a way we're already doing this every night by playing together, but I was thinking of something different, using webcams and just saying hi to the people behind the avatars. I proposed the idea to the other officers, we did a little test with Google Meet (most of us already knew what the others looked like anyway), and the idea was given the green light. And thus, we organised Twin Suns Squadron's first ever virtual guild meet-up last night.

I was ridiculously hyped in advance as I always love being able to put a face to a name, and we ended up with about twenty people joining (though some couldn't stay for very long), which I considered a very good turn-out. Several had cobbled together elaborate setups involving more than one computer, or a PC and a phone, in order to be able to both play and show us their faces at the same time, which I thought was oddly sweet. Also, while most of the attendees were what I'd like to call "the usual suspects", as in people who attend other guild events all the time, a few more quiet players that aren't usually around much worked up the courage to show up as well, which felt quite gratifying.

I had pencilled in about half an hour for getting things sorted / saying hello to everyone, which worked out quite well as people trickled in slowly and there were some technical challenges. For example we hadn't realised that Google Meet would mute people by default once the meeting exceeded a certain size, so people kept coming in auto-muted without noticing, and there was always some confusion until they realised what was happening and found the button to un-mute themselves.

Another "issue" was that some people displayed their real names instead of their nicknames, which combined with the auto-muting led to some confusion about who was who - I had counted on being able to recognise people's voices from TeamSpeak at least! So we had chats like: "Hey, um... Ian? You're on mute so we can't hear you... also, who are you? Lol..." Then he found his un-mute button, said one word and I immediately went: "Oh, it's Ten!"

Once things had settled down somewhat, we decided to do a social ops run as usual on a Friday night, but with the video call open instead of everyone sitting on TeamSpeak like we normally would. We did the Dxun operation on 16-man story mode, and especially initially I was struggling a bit to keep my eyes on the health bars as I kept looking over at the webcams instead! It was fun to see people react to things visually as well, from smiles to facepalms (though several guildies seemed to have what I called "resting ops face", which resulted in them giving everyone very blank stares a lot of the time). At one point one of my co-healers started plucking away at his guitar while one of the officers was trying to give instructions. It was all very silly.

There was a bit of tension towards the end of the op as we had several wipes on Huntmaster (that guy is always a bastard), one of the healers had several DCs and so on, but even that was interesting in a way. For example someone commented that Mr Commando didn't look nearly as angry as he sounded when he was telling people off for standing in bad stuff. I do always tell people not to worry too much about his yelling and that his bark is a lot worse than his bite, but I guess it really helped for them to see for themselves!

Anyway, we did end up clearing the operation in good time (after a couple of people had consumed several "wiping beers" on screen) and it felt like the conclusion of a very successful evening. Several people have already told me that they'd like to have another night like that, and it made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

My 20 Favourite Outtakes Captured on Video

As long time readers will know, I also have a YouTube channel, and I've occasionally linked to videos that I uploaded on there. I started making videos a few months after creating this blog actually, but I never had any great aspirations about being a video content creator or anything like that - most of the time I just enjoy capturing gameplay and boss kills with my guild, so that I can later look back on them with nostalgia and remind myself of all the nice people I've played with over time and what fun we've had.

One "series" I started early on was called "Twin Suns Outtakes". Basically, pretty much as soon as I started recording videos, I also ended up with footage that wasn't necessarily worth making a dedicated video about but that nonetheless tickled me in some way. One of the earliest examples of this was us wiping in embarrassing ways in Karagga's Palace. "Look at us wipe" didn't seem like a good title for a video, but I didn't quite want to throw the footage away either. Thus the outtakes format was born, where I threw together random clips that I wanted to preserve either because they were funny or just because they were tied to some particular memory that was dear to me for some reason.

I usually make a new outtakes video every few months and they always tend to be quite popular with my guildies. Over time there's been a bit of a shift from random footage to general "funny moments" as new capture software allowed me to specifically save recordings of events after the fact, without having to rely on me just happening to turn on video recording at the right time for something interesting to happen.

Anyway, with more time to spend at home I've been on a bit of a nostalgia trip re-watching old videos, and I thought it would be fun to make a top list of some of my favourite SWTOR moments with my guild captured in these videos.

20. Bouncing Jedi Knights Standing Together (early 2013)

Low on the list we start with one of those clips that isn't really funny by itself but mostly just stands for a memory. There was a time when "Smash spec" for Jedi knights and Sith warriors was particularly powerful and lots of people were playing it as the flavour of the month - including some of my guildies on alts. I don't remember who originally came up with the idea, but one day while we were bouncing around smashing things someone started singing the start of "We All Stand Together" from Rupert and the Frog Song on TeamSpeak and it somehow became our theme song, with the lyrics being changed to "we all smash together".

We imagined ourselves having a whole music video of us smashing things to the tune and I even started recording footage, but I soon realised that a) I would have needed a lot of footage to make a good video about it, b) it was actually quite hard to get good shots of us smashing things, and c) who was going to sing the modified lyrics anyway? It wasn't very well thought-out and I quickly had to abandon the idea, but I did preserve its memory in the start of that one outtakes video and it still makes me smile every time I re-watch it.

19. How not to summon the Hateful Entity (March 2014)

This one is a slightly deadpan piece of humour, featuring a full sixteen-man ops group getting together to kill a special boss, the summoner clicking the item to start the summon and... nothing happens?

"Do it again!"

"Says it's on cooldown... for 23 hours."

"So, same time tomorrow?"

(Turns out we could get around it, I think by trading the item to someone else, so we did get our summon after all, but in the moment it was funny.)

18. The bugged ops group (November 2018)

This is just an amusing example of how badly things can get messed up when the operations UI bugs out. What started with an accidental kick from the ops group escalated in confusing ways until our wannabe ops leader suggested I turn off the power to the entire house and start over, which makes me laugh to this day.
 
17. Wiping on Jarg and Sorno (November 2012)

This is actually the clip I mentioned in the introduction, showing us wipe on the second fight in Karagga's Palace on 16-man nightmare mode (back when that was a thing). Having died relatively early and close to the centre of the room, I hid my UI and had a pretty good view of what else was going on. Since I wasn't even recording game sound in those very early videos, I added the cheerful tune of Desmond Dekker's "You can get it if you really want" to falsely instil a sense of hope in the viewer, just to end with a record scratch as the last person in the group dies and the bosses reset.

For the well-initiated there are additional layers of humour as you can watch panicking guildies do silly things, such as a Sentinel temporarily back-pedalling from the boss as if that was going to help in any way, or a Sage healer planting an AoE heal under the boss instead of under any players. Unfortunately I can't link the actual video as another song snippet in it got hit with a copyright claim that caused the whole thing to be blocked worldwide.

16. Learning how to play a Combat Sentinel at 3am in the morning (January 2013)

When you're doing PvP at 3am in the morning, the strangest things can seem funny, such as a guy saying "blade rush" over and over again. 'nuff said. Unfortunately I can't link this one either because it appears that a copyright claim on a song snippet elsewhere in the video resulted in the sound of the entire uploaded version of the video being removed and I don't know how to get it back without re-uploading the entire thing.

15. Grappling Fail on Copero (June 2018)

A guildie you will encounter in these outtakes quite frequently goes by the simple name of Mace. Mace is the longest standing officer after Mr Commando and me and is quite popular with the officer team as he enjoys filling out spreadsheets and is therefore often entrusted with menial and (to the rest of us) tedious tasks such as putting together ops teams and group rotations. He also has a very strong personality that combines boundless enthusiasm and a desire to min-max in bizarre ways with an almost childlike naiveté at times. As such, he is well-known for doing silly things that make the rest of us laugh and for being the patient butt of many jokes - if you do find him funny. His clowning around is a kind of litmus test for whether you'll fit in with the guild's general sense of humour I guess.

Anyway, this particular clip has him somehow fail at using a grappling hook in the Traitor Among the Chiss flashpoint, fall to his death, run back, and then die again from trying to jump across using a Scoundrel ability instead. Meanwhile the rest of us stand on the other side and alternate between laughing and facepalming.

14. I Will Survive Scyva (May 2018)

The last phase on Scyva in Gods from the Machine used to be pretty deadly even on story mode (I think she may have been nerfed a bit since then), to the point that it wasn't unusual to have a majority of the ops group die while only a few survivors remained to finish off the boss. This clip features one such occasion where I was once again enjoying a class A viewing experience from the floor while one tank and the other healer slowly finished off the boss. Gloria Gaynor seemed like an appropriate soundtrack.

13. The Naked Gunslinger (November 2017)

Ever since the introduction of the Outfit Designer decoupled a character's appearance from what they are actually wearing, it's become a problem that people would sometimes swap gear around between characters and then forget what they were actually wearing under their apperance - or more importantly that they weren't actually wearing any gear underneath.

We've had similar situations occur many times since then, but this is the first one I can clearly recall happening in an operation, and the way Ard pointed it out to Mace, coupled with Mace's obvious embarrassment, just had both of us healers in giggling fits.

12. Asterisks (August 2018)

TeamSpeak has an option to have its built-in announcer voice pronounce the name of whoever is entering or leaving a channel - it's not the default but I'm one of the few people in the guild who have this enabled. There is also a setting where you can set a specific pronunciation for your name in case it's quite different from the way the bot would usually pronounce the written version.

One time Mace (of course, who else) somehow messed up the phonetic setting for his name, causing me to be treated to an endless stream of the robot voice pronouncing "asterisk" the moment he came online. I thought it was hilarious.

11. Lost on Ossus (February 2019)

Another prime example of "the kind of thing Mace does" - during one of our first runs of the Hive of the Mountain Queen he exited the instance by accident (?!), got killed right outside because in his hubris he'd set his focus to PvP, and then couldn't even find his way back inside because apparently he'd been summoned before and didn't even know the way? It was just one blow after another; you couldn't make this stuff up if you tried.

10. The Elevator Incident (April 2013)

Now, I'm not too fond of this video in practical terms since I had just changed my recording setup and for some reason the quality of my own voice recording was absolutely abysmal (which is why I felt the need to add the subtitles so people would be able to make out what I was saying at all), but as the incident became the stuff of legends in the guild I just had to include it and rank it quite highly too.

Basically it was my first ever run of the Scum and Villainy operation, and I just remembered someone emphasising emphatically that we'd have to enter an elevator and get down quickly or we'd all die! So of course I ran into the first elevator door I saw opening. Except that wasn't where we were supposed to go nor even the right time; it was just a door that released an add and then closed permanently afterwards. As a bonus, I got myself stuck in there just at the point when I was supposed to click a console to help with the next part of the fight, effectively wiping the group.

"Don't get stuck in the lift" was a catchphrase that followed me around for quite a while after that.

9. Zero Attention Span Imps in Novare Coast (January 2017)

Everyone who's done at least a moderate amount of PvP must be familiar with the type of player that always chases kills over objectives. In fact, if you're the more objective-focused type yourself, it can be particularly fun to beat players like that, as achieving a win against someone who is able to repeatedly kill you feels a bit like a David vs. Goliath kind of situation and makes you feel all clever.

This was the case in this match as well, where me and several guildies came up against a bizarre Imperial premade that literally just rushed around the map to kill everyone at a certain point as a group and capture whatever objective was there, but then immediately left said objective undefended, resulting in an easy win for us even as we repeatedly got steamrolled by the Imperial train as it made the rounds. It was quite a funny situation.

8. Firefrost Yakety Sax (December 2016)

One evening when we couldn't find a tank to do the Firefrost uprising on veteran mode, a guildie suggested that it was quite viable to go in without a tank but using two healers instead, so we did that. It mostly went fine too, until the last boss overwhelmed us with adds... at which point we didn't wipe, but started to humorously kite things in circles, with another guildie even playing Yakety Sax over TeamSpeak for us. Such is guild life.

7. Gods from the Machine trash collection (early 2019)

I've said before that I think Gods from the Machine contains a bit too much trash to make it an enjoyable place to visit frequently, but that said, the first time around the challenges presented by said trash are extremely amusing, especially on hard mode. From guildies screaming as they get swarmed by adds bursting out of the ground to impromptu singing, explosions and people falling off things, this place has it all.

6. Auto-running into Dread Fortress (June 2017)

Mr Commando is an overly cautious tank if anything, so we were very surprised the time he entered master mode Dread Fortress and pulled literally the entire room up to the boss - turns out he had hit auto-run when entering the instance and somehow it had persisted after he loaded in, and as he had been looking elsewhere during the loading screen he didn't immediately notice... it was very bewildering, and there was much death and laughter.

5. Still Standing Against The Operations Chief (May 2018)

The Operations Chief in Scum and Villainy has the funny quirk of the tank being able to take virtually no damage, as his main attack is a long cast called Terminate that can be interrupted by dodging behind a pipe at the last second and then immediately coming back out again.

This worked very much to our advantage when we first did the fight on 16-man master mode and made a right mess of things, with dps and healers dropping like flies left and right, causing the boss to enrage... but our tank just kept on going, avoiding all the hits for what felt like half an eternity and until the few people remaining managed to finish off the boss. Elton John seemed like an appropriate soundtrack.

4. Chasing the Mace (October 2018)

Another little Mace adventure, this one had him bringing an extremely low-level and terribly geared character to an Eternity Vault run. The last boss, Soa, has a mechanic where he summons a ball of lightning that chases you and does damage that is hard to avoid, and it was fun to see Mace fear for his life and worry about dying from a mechanic that was trivial to everyone else in the group.

At first the healers were working frantically to keep him alive after the first orb cost him about 95% of his health, but then it somehow morphed into wanting to see him die instead after he bragged about being too skilled to die and trying to endlessly kite the balls that were chasing him in circles. Eventually people started chasing him with their lightning balls and it all turned into a bit of a comedy show.

3. The Book of Mormon (April 2016)

When our original guild leader decided to quit the game we made a big song and dance about it and had one last social night in his honour. Of course, he had his own idea about song and dance and suddenly started playing songs from The Book of Mormon on TeamSpeak while we bumbled through Karagga's Palace, much to the consternation of everyone else in the channel and even more so those who joined in later. It was a fun evening all around.

2. Commando Healer PvP in 4.0 (September 2016)

Commando healers are considered quite powerful in PvP these days, but I remember very well just how much of a punching bag they were for years before 5.0 and the introduction of Echoing Deterrence in particular. It was so bad that I considered making a whole ironic PvP video about the terribleness of Commandos, but ultimately it was another one of those ideas that kind of fizzled out before I had really recorded enough footage. That said, I had some, and I decided to use it for a section of this outtakes video. Call me self-indulgent for laughing at my own jokes, but watching my character get punted around, stunned, knocked about some more and killed over and over again to the theme tune of Happy Days still makes me laugh today.

1. Imposing martial law to prevent wipes (March 2013)

This is one of those early classics that will forever stick with me, even though most people who were in the operation at the time stopped playing long ago and the humour is pretty crass. We were working on making our way through Explosive Conflict master mode and wiping a lot on the two tanks, and the ride back to make another attempt was very long, repeatedly sparking conversation. In one of those moments when things turn utterly absurd, our Sentinel suggested that we should be able to prevent further wipes by threatening people with physical violence. Typically on the next attempt we had to call it a wipe because that very same Sentinel got stuck in one of the tanks... ending with our Gunslinger asking the priceless question of: "So Dom, which bone are you having broken?"

Early Onslaught Impressions (No Spoilers)

Whew, the first couple of days of the new expansion have been a bit of a whirlwind! So far I've played through the story once on Republic side (on my Commando) and once on Imperial side (on my Marauder), did the new Republic dailies once, killed the first few bosses of the new operation on story mode, and spent a couple of hours sifting through several hundred screenshots that I took during my story playthroughs.

To quickly sum up my first impressions of the story in a spoiler-free manner: It didn't grab me quite as much as Jedi Under Siege did, but I freaking loved Ossus, so that was an incredibly high bar to clear. That said, if you asked me to rate Onslaught in comparison to all the previous story expansions so far, I'd say it's the best one we've had to date.

I honestly felt a little lukewarm about the start on Onderon - the planet is smaller than I had hoped (definitely no Yavin or Ossus) and the story beats didn't quite resonate with me - but by Mek-Sha I was warming up to it. The hollowed-out asteroid was kind of the opposite of Onderon in terms of my expectations, as I thought it was going to be small and I've traditionally not been super fond of what you could call underworld environments. But then it ended up feeling much bigger than I anticipated (I can't tell you how it compares in terms of actual square mileage, but all the traversing between platforms and in three dimensions certainly made it feel bigger) and the story developments made me go: "Yeah! That's what I'm here for!"

The thing with having played a game like this for several years is that you can't quite appreciate some things the way a new player can, as you just can't feel the same sense of awe and wonder at the sight of new things (as everything new is usually at least similar to something you've seen before). However, being a veteran of many years does give you an eye for certain details and nuances that the uninitiated won't notice and that you can only recognise with years of experience.

With that said, I could tell that a lot of love has gone into the Onslaught story. (If anyone from Bioware is reading this: thanks, guys and gals!) There are so many little moments that make you smile, chuckle, or just go "o-ho!" as they reference past events, and the cast of characters - both new and returning - is huge.

I've always felt that SWTOR's two biggest strengths in terms of story are the personalised class story that makes the player feel invested in the game, and the huge cast of supporting characters - all with their own backgrounds, interests and influences - that can push the story into fascinating new directions at any moment. That is also what made KotFE and KotET fall flat for so many people: that our characters seemingly forgot about everything that had come before, including loved ones and spouses, and that we were supposed to care about nothing but Valkorion's family and the Eternal Empire now, just us vs. them. (Now that I think about it, the Alliance vs. Zakuul story was actually a more simplistic black and white version of the galaxy than Republic vs. Empire has ever been in SWTOR.)

Onslaught is chock-full of callbacks to our characters' pasts (where appropriate) and the amount of old non-player characters that have been pulled back into service (again, absolutely appropriately) is staggering. As a long-time player, that just feels so good. As a non-spoilery example, at one point my Marauder was asked to see the Dark Council and quipped in response (I'm paraphrasing from memory): "Are you sure they really want to see me? Last time I did that, I ended up killing one of them." That's no line for an Outlander or generic Commander, that's pure Sith warrior right there.

A couple of months ago I wrote a post about how MMOs are actually kind of similar to long-running book series: the audiences for both love to immerse themselves in a huge world that seems to go on forever, happily memorising countless numbers of different events, protagonists and their motivations. The Onslaught story fully caters to that invested long-term audience that will welcome every reference and in-joke enthusiastically. I don't think that necessarily makes it unenjoyable for more casual players, but let's just say that if you only play a single character for example you'll be missing a lot of Onslaught's more subtle context.

Anyway, my "quick" story summary turned into seven paragraphs - what else is there to say so far? Unfortunately in terms of questing as a group, Onslaught has been a bit of a step back from Ossus again, and I'm not sure why. On Ossus they had this weird system going that allowed you to go into the same phase, have the conversation parts be personal to you and then do any fighting as a team while progressing the story simultaneously. This time we're back to regular old personal phases everywhere, and for me and Mr Commando they even bugged out a couple of times, with one of us finding themselves forced into spectator mode in the other one's phase and being unable to create their own phase without first leaving the group. At this point I feel a bit like I'm the last person left on earth who cares about levelling and questing in SWTOR as a group, but I'll just keep banging that drum anyway.

In general there are a fair number of bugs again. No show-stoppers so far - as far as I'm aware - but what I'd call the usual array of minor annoyances, such as crafting nodes spawning in the ground, creatures and droids whose bodies should be salvageable not being flagged as such, the Mek-Sha world boss giving neither achievement credit nor any loot, and one of the daily quests on Republic side that requires you to pick up items from the ground being almost impossible to complete. There's a definitive pattern to these bugs, and from the way Bioware designs their weeklies and such it's almost as if they expect at least one quest to be broken at this point (since they never ask you to complete absolutely everything to get the main reward). I do wish it didn't have to be like that, but I also understand that bug fixes for anything that isn't a major feature get treated as low priority from a business point of view all too easily.

My dislike for the new item tooltips and item modification UI from the PTS has made it to live too. I also noticed that you don't need to hit "apply" when swapping mods around anymore as it commits them automatically! I'll have to be extra careful now, because I'm totally the kind of person who used to accidentally overwrite better mods with worse ones until I noticed just in time to avoid hitting apply...

I'm also hopelessly confused by the new colour codings for armour. Maybe one of my readers can enlighten me? Basically "orange" as a colour for moddable items seems to be gone, so now items of any colour can exist in moddable and unmoddable versions. I'm totally lost what decides the colour of the shell though, as my old oranges have sometimes turned blue and sometimes gold. Why? Who knows! Makes it much harder to not accidentally vendor stuff you want to keep in my opinion, as you now have to double-check even every bloody green...

The one thing I really like is the new legacy-wide materials tab, which freed up something like three of my legacy cargo bays (though I'm sure I'll find something else to fill them up with soon enough). Again, there are just some minor issues with it that I wish they'd fix, such as it not remembering whether you closed any of the sub-categories and simply defaulting to having all of them fully expanded whenever it refreshes.

I also really dislike not getting any feedback when I gather now: The way it used to be (and still is when you gather a slicing node for example) is that you'd get a small notification on screen and in your event log of what you just picked up. Stuff going straight into the materials tab doesn't make a peep though, so I had no idea what I was harvesting on Onderon all day until I sat down at the end of the evening and checked which of the biochem mats in my materials storage I only had in small numbers (and which were therefore bound to be the new ones).

Finally, let me finish with a couple of random, non-spoilery screenshots:

I suffered my first death of the expansion from sheer stupidity: coming to the edge of a waterfall on Onderon I went "whee" and leapt right off the edge... to my death of course. (The screenshot shows Mr Commando reviving me after the fact.) That's what I get for having got excited about diving underwater in WoW Classic in the past month - letting my subconscious forget that in SWTOR every body of water is but a knee-deep puddle.

One previously unannounced feature of Onslaught: exciting new ladder-climbing gameplay! Unfortunately the reception hasn't been too great so far: mostly I see confused Republic players complain about being unable to reach that one spot in their story mission where they're supposed to climb a ladder because they don't seem to realise that this is what they're supposed to be doing. On Imp side I found a ladder to climb a roof in the open world but I tried to use it three times and every time my character got to the top and the getting-off-the-ladder animation played, she fell straight down to the ground. Baby steps...

One of the more amusing bugs to me was that in my Marauder's version of the story, Theron Shan is dead, but this didn't prevent him from making an appearance as an invisible ghost to talk about... partying?