PvP: Queues, Rewards & Healer Power

I originally planned to name this post "PvP Ponderings", but a quick search on the blog revealed that I already made a post with that exact same title back in 2012. That post was mostly about how unexpectedly enjoyable SWTOR's PvP had turned out to be for me (and others).

The last time I really spoke about PvP on the blog was back at the start of PvP Season 5 in March. My lofty ambitions to progress through the PvP season track on more than one server didn't really end up going anywhere, since Galactic Season 6 ended up eating most of my time soon afterwards and had no overlap with PvP at all for its first five weeks. As a result, I only completed the PvP season on Darth Malgus this time... though I did get all the achievements again, and was actually fully done (even with the medals achievement) a couple of weeks before the end of the season. I think most of that was due to the crazy Total Galactic War we had in April, as I did something like nine PvP weeklies during that week, which obviously gave me a major leg up in terms of achievement progress early on.

At the time of me writing this, we're already into the fourth week of PvP Season 6... and while I'm having fun, I'm honestly also a little concerned. I've previously written about how my experiences PvPing on different servers have heightened my awareness of how different these places can be in terms of activity levels and queue times, and to be honest I've always viewed the Darth Malgus server as a good place to be in that regards. Sure, pops might be marginally quicker on Star Forge, but at that point you're just splitting hairs.

However, this season so far, things have felt different somehow. Like during the last two seasons, I'm trying to get my arena credits done in the lowbie bracket, but I don't remember having to wait quite so long between matches before. I know the lowbie bracket isn't the most active, and I haven't exactly pulled out a stop watch while sitting in the queue, but fifteen to twenty minutes between arena matches seems quite normal now even during prime time, which means that if (like me) you lose a bunch of those matches, it can take up to two hours to just get the daily "play arenas" mission done, which means that completing a whole arena weekly (which basically requires four dailies worth of play) is turning into a considerable time investment. I'm thinking about switching to the midbie bracket this week just to see if that's any better. Still, I probably wouldn't even have commented on this if I hadn't noticed my queue times at max-level increasing as well. I remember when I used to boast about unranked PvP pops being near-instant on my server, while now it can sometimes take ten minutes to get into a warzone even at level 80 during prime time.

I'm trying to tell myself that it's not a big deal, or even that I'm just imagining these queue times being longer than they used to be, but I can't help but worry. Back in 2017, shortly before the last big set of server merges, I wrote a post called "The Curse of Queues", in which I pondered the way automated queueing systems shape our gameplay expectations and how the more of them you add to your MMO, the bigger your population needs to be to appear somewhat lively. Accordingly, when the devs decided to split the unranked queue into warzones and arenas, I was a little worried about what that might mean for wait times, since you'd now need more players queueing to keep both modes active at the same time. I didn't notice any negative effects immediately - but now I wonder whether the consequences of this split might be starting to catch up with reality.

My first thought once I considered the subject of queues "drying up" was something along the lines of: Okay, for whatever reason not enough people are queueing for PvP. Could the devs offer some incentives to make more people join in? However, the more I thought about it, the more I realised that unranked PvP has probably never offered more rewards than it does now. I don't remember the details of all the PvP gearing systems throughout the years, but it was basically always a matter of completing daily and weekly missions to work towards some gear upgrades and that was mostly it. Oh, and you'd gain valour ranks for titles I guess. But otherwise, people just kind of had to PvP for fun, because there wasn't much else in it.

Nowadays on the other hand, we still have all that other stuff, plus seasons rewarding things like cosmetic armours and stronghold decorations. Shouldn't PvP be more popular than ever? Then I remembered that there's this thing called the Overjustification Effect (I had to look up the exact name), which basically means that things that we find inherently enjoyable become less so once we start doing them for extrinsic rewards. And then I wondered whether there isn't some of that at play here, especially as the requirements in terms of when and how to play (in order to earn those rewards) are much more stringent now than they used to be.

What I mean by that is that before 7.0, to earn rewards from PvP, you just had to pick up the daily and weekly mission from the PvP terminal, press the queue button, and that was it. Progress might be faster or slower depending on your win-loss ratio, but you could always take a break and pick up where you left off at a later point without losing anything.

Since the devs changed it so that dailies and weeklies reset every day/week, you need to keep playing to get them done within the specified time frame or lose all your progress. I used to hop around between alts a lot more, playing a warzone here or there as different roles or specs, but nowadays I'm much more focused on sticking with the same small number of characters, because else I can't complete my weeklies, which would mean progress towards tech fragments and seasonal achievements going to waste.

I also no longer get warzones and arenas served at random, with both giving me equal credit towards my goals, but I need to queue for them separately, and complete a certain number of matches in both modes if I want to get full rewards - all within the week of course. It's kind of strangely demanding, and I actually noticed that it makes me more cranky when I have a losing streak. Obviously I never liked losing all the time, but at least in the past I could decide to take a break and come back later. Nowadays though there's always that feeling of, "Grr, I need to complete this today, why can't I get one bloody win? I don't have all evening for this!" I've definitely noticed that the matches during which I'm most relaxed and enjoying myself the most are those with the lowest "reward stakes", for example when my weekly is already at 15/16 and I literally just need to complete one more match regardless of outcome.

I can obviously only speak for myself, but the requirements for progress really do feel quite different from a casual PvPers point of view compared to how it used to be, and I wouldn't be surprised if that affected more people's enjoyment.

Of course, when it comes to PvP, everyone tends to have their own pet issue that they think is ruining it at any given point - usually certain classes being over- or under-powered - but I honestly feel like I don't have enough knowledge about that area of the game to have strong opinions on the current state of class balance. I'd argue that things have never been perfectly balanced though and that the game has weathered all kinds of "flavours of the month" throughout the years.

One thing that was interesting to me on that subject though was when I watched a PvPer's "react" video the other day and he mentioned that he thought healers were actually kind of weak right now, since a good dps could easily beat a good healer one on one. This made my ears perk up because I did mention at the end of Season 4 that I had found myself surprised by how much more I enjoyed dpsing in PvP nowadays when healing had been my passion for over a decade. I didn't think to blame anything systematic for that; I figured it was just me, but now it seems likely that those two things are related, because that feeling of powerlessness has definitely contributed to me being turned off healing in PvP for the past year or so.

It's weird because I can't off the top of my head remember another era of the game when healers in general were quite so weak in PvP (as opposed to one specific class being over- or underpowered). More often the complaint has been that they are too powerful, and that this made matches tedious when it's too hard to kill anyone. With that in mind, I funnily enough can't even claim that the current situation has necessarily been bad for the quality of matches as a whole - it definitely seems to be that, going in as a dps, I see far fewer of those "slug fests" where people just hammer each other in a big pile around an objective forever without anyone actually going down. Ball carriers in Huttball actually need to be fast or good at passing now; you can't just brute force your way through a wall of enemies with some heals behind you. And those are not bad things! So I wouldn't blame the weakness of healers for a decline in interest in PvP, even if it has affected my personal enjoyment somewhat. It's just another interesting thing that I've observed.

This has turned out to be quite rambly, but these are just some of the things that have been going through my mind in regards to PvP lately. What are your personal experiences with this game mode recently? Do you think I'm completely wrong about declining participation and that queues are fine? I'm happy to hear other points of view.

Master Mode Flashpoint Tips: Infinite Army Prototype

Introduction

It always surprises me when I google something that I think should be fairly well known, just because I want to double-check a specific detail for example, and then it turns out there's actually (next to) no content about that thing out there. In this particular case, said "thing" is the bonus boss of master mode Legacy of the Rakata, a flashpoint that has been in the game for about nine years at the time of writing this. So I thought I'd write a quick guide on how to deal with it myself.

I wouldn't say that this is a particularly hard flashpoint boss, but he's not trivially easy either. It's definitely not the type of fight where you can just wing it and hope for the best - you have to understand the boss's abilities and coordinate with the rest of your group.

The boss in a nutshell

He sits inside a small bunker and you'll want to stay inside said bunker for the entire fight, as leaving it while in combat causes annoying womp rat adds to spawn. However, once a minute he also does a massive channelled AoE called Unstable Barrier that is as big as the bunker and that you can't just stand in.

I think the intended way to deal with this was that you would run out during the AoE and deal with womp rats as needed, however I've never actually seen it done this way as it's actually possible to avoid the AoE damage without leaving the building: by breaking line of sight to the boss and hiding behind the vase highlighted in the screenshot below:

What to do as a tank

Make sure you have your back against one of the bunker walls, as the boss frequently does a knockback in a frontal cone and you don't want to go flying out of the building and cause womp rats to spawn unnecessarily. You'll also want to be facing him away from the rest of the group.

Ideally you'll want to have your back against one of the bunker's side walls, so the rest of your party can stand on the other side, and if someone gets aggro, at least they'll only bounce off the wall there and won't be knocked outside either.

When you see the Unstable Barrier cast, run behind the vase to line of sight the boss, then jump back into the fight once the channel is over.

What to do as a damage dealer

Stand behind the boss so you don't get hit by his knockback. Ideally the tank should position the boss in such a way that you'll still be able to have a wall behind you as well, just in case aggro is unstable and the boss twitches. Note that you'll want to stand directly behind the boss even if you're ranged, as standing at a distance will cause him to constantly yank you back into melee range and interrupt your casts.

When you see the Unstable Barrier cast, run behind the vase to line of sight the boss, then jump back into the fight once it the channel over.

What to do as a healer

Stand directly behind the boss with the rest of the damage dealers to avoid both his knockback and his grapple. Focus on healing the tank as the boss hits quite hard, and everyone else should be nicely grouped up for some splash AoE healing. When you see the Unstable Barrier cast, run behind the vase to line of sight the boss, do some more AoE healing there (the rest of the group should have come with you!), then jump back into the fight once the AoE damage is over.

Note for everyone

Hiding behind the vase and actually breaking line of sight with the boss requires a certain amount of precision. Watch your health bar, and if your health keeps ticking down, you're not in quite the right spot yet.

It's also technically possible to just power through the AoE without hiding at all if your healer is sufficiently overgeared and the group has the right damage reduction cooldowns available. A Gunslinger's Diversion and Scrambling Field are hugely powerful in this fight for example and can negate the majority of an Unstable Barrier's damage to the whole group if deployed at the right time. Various personal damage reduction cooldowns also work. However, I would only advise going with this strategy if the healer is comfortable with it and you have a plan for how to negate Unstable Barrier's damage once every minute for the entirety of the fight.

My Dps Is Bad and I Can't Look Away

Last autumn I wrote a post on my WoW blog called "The Toxicity of Damage Meters", in which I laid out why the general WoW community's obsession with measuring everything, all the time, is very off-putting to me. In that post, I cited SWTOR as an example of how to do damage meters right, since SWTOR's more restrictive personal logging gave you access to all the (in my opinion) legitimate uses for meters such as wanting to increase your personal performance or having a shared log in a progression team to better understand damage patterns in difficult content, without any of the downsides such as other players constantly judging everyone around them by their numbers - because you couldn't know anyone's else's numbers unless that person explicitly joined a shared group log with you.

Naturally, not long after I wrote that post, I found out that with the Legacy of the Sith expansion, SWTOR was going to get rid of the personal logging system it had used for a decade, and was instead going to replace it with a system where everyone can see everything, just like in WoW.

Naturally.

My first reaction to this news was very negative, and I was low-key kind of hoping against all reason that Bioware might end up changing their mind at the last minute, but they didn't. Legacy of the Sith is here, and now you can see everyone and anyone's numbers, whether they want you to or not.

Now, the good news is that SWTOR hasn't changed into WoW overnight. Some of that might simply be lack of general awareness about the change to combat logging, considering that it's still early days, but I think that even as this knowledge becomes more widespread, the SWTOR community as a whole isn't really in danger of changing into a bunch of people obsessed with parses. There have always been many similarities between the two games, but there are also important differences that continue to affect the way people behave.

For example group finding and PvP are not cross-server, so if you're a jerk to someone, there might be consequences. Or how about the fact that SWTOR doesn't allow addons? StarParse, the tool most commonly used to turn the combat log into a more readable format, is more of a "companion app", so it's not automatically there every time you log in - I'm sure I'm not the only person who uses it but doesn't actually think about firing it up unless I'm about to enter an operation... which makes it harder for the average person to think about numbers all the time. Not to mention that I think most SWTOR players just aren't as fussed about numbers as players of other MMOs, what with the game's heavy focus on story. I have seen some negative comments about low dps on the forums and in general chat though - places that are rarely friendly at the best of times, mind you, but at least they didn't have that particular stick to wield against their fellow players in the past.

Anyway, this post isn't about anyone behaving badly towards anyone else over what they saw on a damage meter. It's about the impact this change has had on me personally and the way I see myself in the game.

My focus in SWTOR has been on playing healers from day one. I levelled my very first character with my boyfriend at the time, so I specced into Combat Medic as soon as I unlocked my first talent point and never looked back. While I also played and levelled other roles later, healer has always remained my identity, and the only role I played in progression content. I looked at healing meters there to see how well me and my co-healers were sharing the burden, because I didn't want to feel like I was making things difficult for anyone else, but I was always quite content with what I saw.

On the rare occasion when I took a damage dealer to a casual ops run, I usually left StarParse off, even if others were trying to coax people into joining the group log for the "fun" of competition. I knew perfectly well that my dps wasn't great, but I didn't really need to know the details, and I didn't want to opt into serving as a prop for other people to feel better about themselves, or be made to feel like I was making the experience worse for others with my low numbers.

(As an aside, a long time ago, during the early days of the game, I did log myself on the training dummy and tried to improve my performance as a Gunslinger and dps Guardian at one point. When the numbers on the Guardian weren't great, I asked some guildies for advice who enjoyed parsing, and got a response along the lines of "wow, those numbers really are bad, lol" but no actual tips for how to improve. That forever put me off letting others see my dps numbers ever again.)

However, with the combat log change, it was time to face the music. I mean, sure, I technically could've continued to not look at my numbers, but now others would be able to see them anyway, and I figured if that was the case I'd at least like to know what they were seeing, so that I'd know the appropriate amount of shame to feel (or whether I was secretly not so bad after all... who knows?!)

Since healers are always in demand, I still ended up in the healer role for most of our casual ops runs, until we suddenly had too many healers for an Eternity Vault the other week and someone asked me whether I was okay to go dps. I said sure, since I had actually set up a Telekinetics loadout for my Sage healer anyway that I used for questing.

Of course, doing dailies and fighting an operations boss are very different things. I was suddenly very aware of the fact that my legendary implants were both for healing, that I didn't have a dps Tactical, and not even enough accuracy to be effective at fighting an ops boss. I also wasn't entirely sure what my rotation was supposed to be and basically just had a quick glimpse at a guide on my second monitor hoping to reassure myself of the very, very basics, but knowing full well that I wasn't going to suddenly execute a 24-button rotation perfectly.

In the end, the EV run went perfectly fine, but seeing my numbers was pretty painful. We ran with five damage dealers and I was in last place by quite a margin. And while I knew that I had a number of factors working against me, I had really been trying to do the rotation right, so I still felt quite bad.

Which then left me wondering what to do about it, with two basic paths open to me: either don't join ops as dps anymore, or get better at it. The second would normally be more appealing to me, as I do like a bit of a challenge like that, but the thing is... reading dps guides for any class in SWTOR makes me feel so old.

You see, I actually started my raiding career back in WoW as a damage dealer - but that was fifteen years ago during the original Burning Crusade, when many classes could literally do their max dps rotation by simply pressing a single button over and over again, and my shadow priest was considered very sophisticated with her priority system that involved no less than five (!) different abilities. I remember practising the hell out of even that.

Yet when I look at many dps guides for SWTOR, the rotations never seem to involve less than several dozen steps. I'd have to practice for weeks to get good at any of them, and that's assuming I'd be able to get the hang of them at all. I just don't think I have the will or energy for that kind of stuff anymore, especially when it's just to make myself feel better about my numbers on the rare occasion when someone asks me to dps in EV.

Maybe I just need to learn to be more Zen about the knowledge of just how bad I am at dps, but let's just say that this is easier said than done.

More Adventures on the LotS PTS

I never actually wrote a follow-up to my confused post about day one of the Legacy of the Sith PTS, but that doesn't mean that nothing's been happening. Bioware did provide some more information and context for what they were trying to achieve with what was on display there soon after, but to be honest none of it really changed my opinion from "I'm not really sure about this, but I guess I'll wait and see".  The rather confusing initial implementation of the new system on the PTS - which required you to wade through several forum threads to have even the faintest idea of what's going on - didn't exactly help either.

Plus as previously mentioned, the first advanced class/combat style to be tested was Guardian, which I play only casually, so combined with all the other limitations I didn't feel like I could really give any good feedback on that one. After that they tested Sentinels, which I know even less about, as Sentinel/Marauder is probably my least favourite advanced class in the game right now and I play it very little.

However, this past week they added Sniper and Operative, and while I'm not big on Snipers and Gunslingers either, Operative/Scoundrel is something I do play somewhat more frequently, at least in the healer role, so I thought it might be worth checking out.

One thing that was immediately helpful was that they added a very rough work-in-progress UI, which just makes it so much easier to understand what's happening. I wrote in my last post that it felt like they were trying to return to skill trees of a sort, but the new visuals make it clearer that it's more of a merge of the current specialisation "line" and the utility system. So you'll still get a lot of abilities that are tied to your spec as you level up, predetermined like it is now, but then at certain levels, instead of getting a utility point, you may be given a choice of three abilities or passives that modify existing abilities tied to your spec, e.g. as a healing Operative one of my early options was to choose between three passives that added special effects to existing heals. Somehow just seeing it like that made the whole thing immediately less intimidating to me.

In terms of pruning, Operatives didn't seem to have been hit too badly from my point of view. There was a bit of early panic when Sleep Dart was missing from the initial PTS build, which immediately sent everyone's minds racing about the implications of a potential end to crowd control from stealth (no more stealth caps in PvP?!), but that turned out to just have been an error and they added it back in almost immediately. As a healer, all of my heals were still there, and the only thing I noticed being conspicuously absent was the class's raid buff.

Where abilities had been turned into choices, forcing you to pick one out of three, this mostly seemed to be directed at perhaps nerfing the class a bit in PvP by making people choose between things like having more stuns or extra survivability. I don't really have a good read on the details, but that doesn't seem too bad a concept... though the hard stun becoming an elective does make me wonder about PvP balance a bit, even as someone who's more of a PvE person. Every single class having a hard stun on the same cooldown was one of those things the original devs decided to include as an easy balance move... and I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad thing to move away from that, as being stunned in PvP isn't exactly fun, but I can see changing that baseline having a major effect on overall class balance.

With that in mind, I originally wanted to have a bit of a go at seeing how this new setup worked in PvP, but whenever I was on the PTS there weren't enough people queueing. So I went to do a couple of level 75 veteran flashpoints with my guildies instead (since level scaling still isn't implemented the way it is on live). First we did Objective Meridian, in which I healed and it was... actually kinda challening! We even wiped once or twice, and defeating Tau took absolutely forever (which wasn't helped by the fact that only two of us were still standing by the end). This didn't seem down to any weakness of the classes though; more a result of us having none of our usual legacy buffs and all playing characters/roles that we weren't necessarily 100% familiar with. For example one of the new utilities I picked was actually a major buff to one of my heals but then I completely forgot to use it appropriately to take advantage of that.

After that we went into Spirit of Vengeance, and as one of my guildies wanted to try his hand at Operative healing too, I respecced to Concealment - a spec I've actually never played on live, though I did play its Republic equivalent (Scrapper Scoundrel) for a bit when I took my Scoundrel through KotET on master mode. Even with everything being stabby knife moves instead of punches it quickly came back to me how there's a certain rhythm to that spec in terms of building Tactical Advantage and spending it, and I actually found it quite fun, even if I couldn't really tell whether/how it was changed from live. Oh, and we wiped on this flashpoint too, so it wasn't just my healing earlier! But still, it was good fun.

My main takeaway from this round of visiting the PTS is that I'm feeling much more optimistic about what I'm seeing. A big part of my initially rather negative reaction was due to the way the ability changes seemed to have come completely out of the blue, but having a better understanding of what's happening and why certainly makes it all look a lot more palatable and like less of a big deal than it felt like initially.

Healing Revan 16-man veteran mode

My guild hit another milestone the other week by defeating Revan in Temple of Sacrifice on 16-person hardmode difficulty. This was easily the most satisfying boss kill for me in a long time, considering how long it took us to get there. We only do 16-man ops for one week once a month, and we'd been working on this particular challenge for three or four months now (I honestly lost track). I was so excited when the achievement finally popped up I even forgot to take a screenshot! I do have a kill video though:

I'm not going to re-hash my general thoughts and opinions of the fight, which I already gave when we beat it on 8-man two years ago and which still apply. However, the larger group size did provide some unique challenges for the healers on the first floor, which I thought I would document here as I couldn't find any written information on the subject myself when we started working on the fight, so maybe this will be helpful to others.

In a nutshell, the big complication is the Essence Corruption debuff. On 8-man, affected damage dealers run out of the group, healers cleanse and gather up all the debuffs, then run into the two puddles to cleanse themselves and you move on. This mechanic already takes some getting used to in the smaller format (not just for the healers, but also for the dps), but 16-man really ramps it up to eleven.

With twice the number of people and the same amount of room, there is less space for people to spread out when they need to be cleansed, and on our earlier tries we often had to wipe it because Corruption got totally out of control in the melee group. The poor guys got yelled at quite a lot and accused of stupidly using self-cleanses, but as it turned out the problem was actually that one of the healers was standing too close to them when doing the cleansing. Healers are contagious too, so you really can't do that - you either have to hug your fellow healers or just stay away from everyone.

The next challenge was cleansing assignments. With two people and eight raiders, we tended to agree on something like "I start top left and you bottom right (of the ops frames)" and it was fairly straightforward, but with double the amount of everything, things got kind of complicated. I watched some kill videos for inspiration and people mostly seemed to be yelling out who they were going to cleanse, so eventually that's what we did too. It felt very chaotic at first, and it does require a certain amount of discipline for the rest of the group to shut up during that phase so none of the calls get missed, but we actually settled into it quite quickly. There tended to be a sort of unspoken hierarchy which meant that the ones with faster reflexes were calling first and then the others took whoever/whatever was left over. Plus everybody knows that every healer has their favourites that they prefer to cleanse before others...

So we got the basic gist of it down quite quickly, but especially at the beginning there were still a lot of mistakes, with people getting cleansed too close to others and causing unnecessary spread. Still, that's not necessarily a reason to wipe it; people just have to keep their cool, focus on the task at hand and continue doing what they're supposed to be doing. Nonetheless I was very proud of the healing team by the time we got the boss down, because there were huge improvements in the smoothness of the process and eventually we rarely had any cleanse go astray at all.

The big question that remained at the end of the phase was how to get rid of the Essence Corruption on the healers, because while there are twice the number of healers on 16-man, there aren't twice as many puddles! There is a third one that spawns near the entrance fairly early on, but it's easy to miss, people frequently stepped into it by accident, and if you don't use it in a timely manner it despawns anyway.

The way we dealt with it in the end was to have one healer cleanse only at the beginning, take the extra puddle relatively early on and then focus only on healing. Then, once HK-47 comes in, the three remaining healers with Corruption finish up the cleanses on the damage dealers while staying at somewhat of a distance from everyone else. Two of them manually cleanse all debuffs from the third (ideally the one with the lowest number of stacks, but we usually decided in advance who it was going to be), and then take the two remaining puddles to clear themselves. Success! For that phase anyway...

The rest of the fight was pretty similar to 8-man to be honest, and the main thing that kept wiping us were the aberrations on the top floor, as usual. For all that though, it felt all the more epic when we finally got it down.

Master Mode Flashpoint Tips: Syndic Zenta

Introduction

It's been a while since I've written one of these! I did however have a few more bosses on my list that I really wanted to cover, and one of them is Syndic Zenta in master mode Traitor Among the Chiss. I've been told by some people that they haven't had that many issues with her, but to me she's been a right pain in the rear on more than one occasion, which I think makes it worthwhile to share what I have learned, for the benefit of others who might be having the same difficulties.

The boss in a nutshell

She starts on the floor, then jumps up onto the walkways above her, changes position a few times, then jumps down again and covers the floor in lightning periodically. There are also a lot of adds, and during the top phase she throws some targeted circles around that you should avoid placing on other players. That really is the gist of it, but once again I'll happily point you towards Vulkk or the old Dulfy guide for more details on the mechanics.

What to do as a tank

At the start of the fight, round up the adds on the ground as best as you can while damage dealers focus on AoEing them down. Once Zenta goes up, follow her (either by leaping or via using one of the available grappling hooks) and position yourself just around the corner from the ramp that leads up onto the walkways. Feel free to taunt and hit the boss occasionally, but she shouldn't really be your main priority at this point as she doesn't actually hit that hard. It's more important that you focus on rounding up the adds as they appear and do your best to keep them from overwhelming your healer (who should be standing near you.)

Once Zenta goes down again you're basically racing against a soft enrage as more and more adds will be spawning in rapidly. Use everything you've got to get their attention while staying alive (AoE taunt, stuns, damage reduction cooldowns etc.) and hope that the dps can kill her in time before you and the healer both get overwhelmed.

What to do as a damage dealer

Start off by killing the adds on the ground, then dps the boss until she goes up. Follow her and continue to focus your damage on her, but keep an eye on the tank and healer, and jump over to them occasionally to mop up the pile of adds that will accumulate on them. When Zenta goes down again, just nuke her from range if you can.

If you're playing a melee class, make sure to wait a few seconds as she will cast her big lightning floor move almost immediately, and you don't want to jump right into it. Then jump down after it and nuke her with all you've got (while also hitting what damage reduction cooldowns you've got available) before the swarms of unending adds overwhelm your tank and healer.

What to do as a healer

At the start, you can hide behind a nearby crate to the left to avoid getting sniped. Once Zenta goes up, stick close to your tank as you will be getting healing aggro on any and all adds that spawn, and you'll rely on the tank picking them up to stay alive. Keep an eye on dps taking damage as well, though it shouldn't be too bad on them. Once Zenta goes down again, leave the damage dealers to their fate and focus on just keeping yourself and the tank alive as best as you can. If you can survive until Zenta's defeated, all remaining adds vanish automatically.

Master Mode Flashpoint Tips: Umbaran Spider Tank

Introduction

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

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

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

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

The boss in a nutshell

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

What to do as a tank

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

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

What to do as a damage dealer

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

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

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

What to do as a healer

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

Note for everyone

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

Master Mode Flashpoint Tips: Commander Mokan

Introduction

As mentioned previously, I've been running a lot of master mode flashpoints with guildies over the past couple of weeks, and one of the nice things about this has been achieving true mastery of some of the harder boss fights in them. I've said in the past that I generally like challenging fights, but the problem is that spending all night wiping on a boss just to finally be triumphant in the end is an experience with diminishing returns. Wiping again the second and third time you do the boss, because the fight is still hard, is simply not that fun. However, there does come a point when after doing it a few more times you actually achieve true mastery of the mechanics, and then it becomes fun again when you one-shot those very same tough bosses and can revel in just how pro you are now.

I thought it would be nice to share some of the insights I gained about a few of the tougher flashpoint bosses this way, and I wanted to start with Commander Mokan, more commonly known as the bonus boss in master mode Battle of Rishi. I killed him back in the day when he was new, but it was painful and messy, and while I went on to kill him again after that, the fight remained confusing and frustrating to me all the same.

The problem is that while there are some guides out there such as Dulfy's or Vulkk's, I found that they focus more on explaining what the boss does instead of telling you what you need to do. (I do absolutely recommend them if you want to gain a deeper understanding of how everything works.) For me though, it's all nice and well to know that the tank needs to be cleansed, but just when is the best time for that? And yes, I know that I want exactly four stacks of the green debuff, but something always seems to go wrong no matter how we go about getting them, so what's up with that? Fear not, for I'm going to explain to you exactly what you need to do, and you'll probably be surprised by how straightforward it is once you boil it down to the basics.

The boss in a nutshell

He basically alternates between two phases, which I shall simply call "green phase" and "red phase". During red phase, all he does is stand there and channel an AoE that does massive damage to everyone in the room. During green phase, he alternates between doing two things: cast a conal AoE on the tank (he does this three times), and put down a green circle on a non-tank (this he also does three times). No person will get more than one circle on them during each green phase, unless someone has died and been revived, stealthed out, or the tank lost aggro. If that happens, you're probably about to wipe. The fight always starts with a green phase.

What to do as a tank

Congratulations, you've got the easy job! Just point him away from the rest of the group, hold aggro, and try not to die.

As it's really important that you don't lose aggro at any point, I recommend starting with a "taunt fluff", which is to say that you taunt the boss on pull, use your AoE taunt as soon as the taunt debuff runs out, and then use your single target taunt again as soon as it comes off cooldown. This should generally see you through safely even against the most overzealous damage dealers.

Use available damage reduction cooldowns during the red phase to make things easier on the healer, but make sure not to use anything that purges debuffs on you, as that will cause you to lose all your green stacks and result in death.

What to do as a damage dealer

Make sure to stand on the opposite side of the boss from the tank and spread out during green phase, so that when a green circle hits you, nobody else gets hit at the same time. Also try not to pull aggro. During red phase, stack up on the boss to make healing easier, and use any damage reduction cooldowns you have.

The big challenge for dps during green phase is

Circle Management

If you are the first person to get a green circle thrown at you, stand in it until you have two stacks, then move out. Once the second circle lands on someone else, step into that briefly to get your stacks up to four.

If you are the second person to get a green circle thrown at you, stand in it until you have four stacks, then move out.

If the first two circles have landed on other people and you know that the last one will be on you, step into the second circle to get two stacks from it, then step away. When the third circle lands on you, get another two stacks to get up to four. Then stack up for red phase, which will be imminent.

Rinse and repeat when the boss goes back to green phase, and continue until he's dead.

What to do as a healer

As a healer you undoubtedly have the hardest job in this fight, but it's still not quite as bad as it may seem at first. First off, you have to practice circle management as described above, just like the dps, while also healing people.

You will also have to cleanse the tank, but this is actually really straightforward: just cast cleanse on them twice per green phase (when they first get hit by the green cone, and then again whenever your cleanse is off cooldown). I used to fret about when to cleanse and how often but it's really that simple, as the tank always gets six stacks of the debuff on them throughout the duration of a single green phase, and by removing two you leave them at the desired four.

During red phase, make sure to stack up with everyone else and use all your big AoE heals.

I hope that by following these simple steps, you too will soon be able to one-shot this guy, making him just another stepping stone on your journey through Battle of Rishi.

Alderaan Places

I join an Alderaan Civil War in progress on my Mercenary alt. I don't know why she's the one who ends up having all these adventures as of late; it's not as if I play her particularly often. Just weird luck, I guess.

Anyway, the match has already started, but hasn't been going for long yet, as only one turret has been capped and both scores are still high. I run towards mid the Command Center (!) which is usually where most of the action is and where I can be of most use as a healer.

While we fight, the second side turret gets captured - by the same team, and I notice for the first time that said team is not mine. Not a good start, but at least we should be able to get mid with those odds and then we can take it from there, right?

Nope. We fight, I hit every cooldown I have, but eventually I go down while being nuked by four different opponents.

Seeing that everyone else around me was also already dead or dying and that mid is lost, I head for snow the Generator (?), where I can see some of my team members fighting and it looks like we might stand a better chance of winning. However, I've barely jumped off the landing platform when out of nowhere I have three enemies on me again, and of course all my defensives are still on cooldown. Why are they even here? I'm nowhere near an objective! I die much more quickly this time while the enemy team captures their third turret and the helpful announcer voice calls out that "an enemy is unbeatable". It's gonna be one of those games, isn't it?

Since I'm not interested in throwing myself into the maw of the exact same enemy gang a third time, I try mid again, where the crowd appears to have thinned out a bit. I support the lone Juggernaught there and come agonisingly close to capturing the turret not once, but twice, but enemy reinforcements arrive just in time to prevent it and kill me yet again. At least someone on my team manages to capture grass the Crash Site (?) in the meantime.

I return to mid once more, because after the carnage I was just subjected to it suddenly seems suspiciously empty... but another attempt at the turret gets interrupted by some pebbles coming at me from behind a pillar, and when I see what I've come to think of as "the kill squad" coming around a corner again, I don't think twice and make a run for it towards snow - which my team just managed to capture.

So now we own two turrets... but we're way behind, with our ship on less than 200 health while the enemy's still has more than 500 points left. "Too late, it's all over," a dejected team mate announces in ops chat. "We need three to win and that won't happen." Another agrees, and to be honest so do I... so I decide to attempt to regain at least a bit of my dignity by standing guard at snow.

This time I'm not alone though, and soon several enemies come over from mid to skirmish. They aren't quite so hot when it's not three or four vs. one though. With four of us vs. four of them we manage to at least hold our ground.

"Your ship is nearly lost. Turn the tide, Shadow Squad! Take back the artillery!" the second announcer chimes in as our ship ticks down to less than one hundred health points, when someone... captures... mid?

I take a moment to type "lol" into chat. I don't really dare to hope, but just having made that comeback, even if only briefly, feels worthwhile on its own. I continue to run in circles and heal people... but now I can't take my eyes off the score indicator. The enemy ship's health is ticking down quickly with three turrets firing at it, and it's already almost down to 200. If we can only hold that third turret for another minute, then we'd be back to winning with two!

Eventually I notice the attackers starting to peel off to run towards mid, and I follow to continue the fight there. Ultimately only one of our defenders remains at snow, and she eventually gets killed, losing the node and asking in chat why everybody abandoned her. But by that point the enemy ship is on less than 40 points while ours still has more than 80. Thirty seconds later the warzone is ours.

"That was pretty awesome!" I type in chat.
"Very surprised," concedes the Generator's last defender, who was also the person who'd declared the match a certain loss a few minutes earlier.
"That's a lesson for ya, never give up!" adds the Juggernaut with whom I was fighting at mid earlier, adding a happy smiley face for emphasis.
"Yee-haw us," agrees the second person who had expressed doubt in chat earlier.

I know I've said it before, but this is why you shouldn't quit just because things look bad for your team: If you leave as soon as it looks like a loss, you'll never get to experience those awesome moments when your team unexpectedly manages to turn things around.

KotFE Chapters 1, 2 & 3 Master Mode

With over a year having passed since I completed KotFE on veteran mode and four months since I finished KotET on master mode, I've been overdue for ticking that last achievement off the list: KotFE master mode. To be honest, the main thing that was holding me back was indecision in regards to which character to take into it.

My Sage was an obvious choice. As my main alt she's the character I know how to play best after my main, and she's really overdue for getting KotFE and beyond done from a story point of view as well. I had originally planned to take her through it as my second character after my main, but then kept putting it off due to worries about another light side playthrough not resulting in enough variety and all of the consular companions except Qyzen remaining missing. With Iresso having returned recently and Zenith at least on the radar, there's definitely some incentive there to finally get started in order to see their return stories. On the other hand... Sages are kind of lacking in damage reduction cooldowns, and just how many times do I want to heal things to death anyway?

It was mainly the latter which made me consider my Gunslinger as an alternative choice. Taking a damage dealer with great survival cooldowns through the content just seemed much more appealing from a mechanics point of view. Then again, I already have a smuggler all caught up with the current storyline; could I really justify taking another through when I hadn't completed KotFE/KotET on all base classes yet?

Sentiment and story eventually won out over gameplay considerations, and so Golu began her journey into KotFE. I was immediately treated to some cringe-worthy cut scenes as the bug that causes certain armour sets to display their Imperial look on Republic side apparently still isn't fixed yet.

Anyway, as was my experience with veteran mode, so far KotFE's master mode hasn't been nearly as bad as KotET's, which is why I figured I could summarise the first three chapters in a single post.

I knew chapter one couldn't be that hard since I remembered that there had been a time when people had made a point of speed-running it for CXP, to the point where Bioware felt the need to nerf its rewards. I died a couple of times to some of the skytrooper mini bosses since my damage output was low and I misjudged what to interrupt sometimes, but that was a simple learning experience. Only the last boss seemed to pose a little bit of a challenge, but even he was relatively easy to defeat with a bit of pillar-humping.



Chapter two was a similar experience, which was again not unexpected, as that too had had a reputation for making a good CXP farm for a while. The trash hit less hard as well. I had to laugh though when one of the mini bosses that are based on your class literally one-shot me when I failed to interrupt one of his casts.

The one thing I was curious about was the Monolith fight at the end, because somewhat contrary to the former I had also heard reports of this fight being quite hard. I ended up one-shotting him myself, but it was very slow and involved my character running in circles and healing herself for ten minutes. Afterwards I googled the fight to figure out what I had been missing and apparently you can climb on a rock in a certain spot where he can't hit you and easily beat him that way. Oh well, my way feels more legit to me even if it took longer!



The biggest and very unexpected road block I ran into so far came in the form of the Ground Assault Walker mini boss in chapter three that blocks your way just before you cross that bridge on your way to the droid factory. This is where the Sage's lack of damage reduction cooldowns really hurt me for the first time, because I couldn't survive more than a couple of hits from the walker and the small, fenced-in area wasn't really suited to kiting or breaking line of sight either.

I started by giving Lana some gifts to raise her measly influence rank from one to at least fifteen, but after that seemed to make no noticeable difference I decided that clearly the solution was instead to burn down the walker myself before it could kill me. So I did something I'd never done before: I respecced my Sage to dps, and funnily enough, just like in KotET chapter one, totally clueless dps was the way to victory over skilled healing. Even though I neither knew how to play Telekinetics nor had any accuracy on my gear, I one-shot the boss on my next attempt (though the adds got me afterwards... but it didn't matter because the boss was dead). I expect that this will be something that I'll have to repeat in future chapters.

Terror From Beyond Master Mode Musings

This past Sunday was a big day for my guild ops team (we are back to having two separate progression teams and I'm still getting used to everything we do not automatically equalling "the guild" anymore): We defeated the Terror From Beyond on master mode for the first time.

Now, strictly speaking I got the achievement for doing this more than three years ago already, back when you could out-level the older operations to a certain degree and overpower them that way, before they were all level-synced. In fact, I remember a TFB run with some people who were taking such delight in how overpowered they were that they decided to ignore all the Terror's mechanics in the second phase of the fight and just plinked away at it despite of its large damage resistance until it entered the final phase of the encounter... and somehow, it worked.

Sort of an achievement, dated February 2015, with us overpowering the Terror by five levels.

However, this Sunday was our first time actually beating it at level, and boy, did it take us a long time. I didn't make a note of the exact date when we first started attempting the fight, but I do have some video footage that goes back as far as October. Now, we didn't literally spend nine months wiping on the boss - there were many weeks when we didn't even attempt it at all for one reason or another, such as not having enough people online, or not having a good team composition, or just plain old tiredness. However, we never seriously switched to a different progression target in all that time, so even without constant wiping on the same boss, nine months are a very long time to feel like you've basically hit a progression brick wall.

In hindsight I think the biggest challenges for us were simply the fight's length (this fight was the reason I changed my video recording software from allowing me to save the last ten minutes of gameplay to saving the last fifteen minutes - because I realised ten minutes wouldn't be enough to capture the whole fight), and how many opportunities it gives you to die. It's not that there are any mechanics that are super tricky to execute correctly, but your mind wandering at a bad time during the fifteen minute duration of the fight could be enough to wipe the group already. We actually suffered far more deaths early in the fight than in the later phases, I think at least partially because people started to zone out from all the repetition, which just led to even more mistakes.

So the final kill was super exciting to me, and as I often do I made a video out of it. Even at nearly twice the original speed it's still over seven minutes long, because that's just the kind of fight it is.



I actually really appreciated the way it ended up challenging me. While I've always liked TFB as an operation, the final fight was never really one of my favourites because as a healer the second phase in particular is actually pretty boring. There is all this exciting stuff going on with people jumping around between platforms, but as a healer you simply don't have to.

While working on this encounter however, we soon realised that the dps check was extremely high and even with all of our damage dealers trying their hardest, we were still a little off, which led to one of our members concocting a plan to get the second tank and one of the healers involved in adding more damage to make up the difference. As my usual co-healer is a Sage and it's a bit easier to add dps as a Commando due to the way the class manages its resources, I was soon instructed to run with the dps and hit tentacles in phase two as well (which you can see in the video).

This was actually quite confusing to me initially as despite of all my years of playing this game I've very rarely done anything but heal in operations, and certainly not on the harder difficulties. On our first tries involving this new strategy I made pretty much all the newbie mistakes I'd seen damage dealers make over the years, such as getting slammed to death by a tentacle, accidentally jumping on a tank platform, or simply falling to my death at random after running off a platform at a bad angle. To my credit though, at least I didn't do any of those things more than once. In the final attempt I was playing it quite cautiously, opting out of dpsing a few times when I felt that a bit of extra healing was more important at the time, but in the end my contribution still made enough of a difference for us to get the kill.

The whole thing did make me a bit philosophical as well though, because again: nine months. I'm actually kind of surprised we didn't end up losing more people during that time simply because they gave up hope / ran out of motivation. In a way this record-length expansion cycle is both a blessing and a curse: On the one hand it gives us extra time to work on bosses we never had a chance to down while they were current because there was always another level cap increase coming that changed up the game again. On the other hand... we spend ridiculous amounts of time banging our heads against the same bosses without going anywhere. Raiding is often considered a bit of a wacky pastime by many, but right now it feels even more insane to me than usual (even if I still enjoy it).

Testing Success!

In my last post I talked about wanting to do some PvP on the PTS but being unable to do so because the testing session was scheduled to start at a bad time for Europeans. What else can I say but that Bioware immediately responded (not literally, I'm sure they were planning to do it anyway) by announcing that another session would be taking place on Saturday at a time that was morning for them, but afternoon for me and therefore a great time to join in.

Cal and I jumped in shortly before the scheduled start time and had a surprisingly good time. Actual testing "work" aside, I've got to say that it was really refreshing to play with people who were all there because they love the game and genuinely enjoy PvPing, without any of the less pleasant individuals you can get in regular warzones at times, such as those who are only there for the CXP and are just waiting to give up and AFK in a corner as soon as things don't go their way, or players who just don't have a clue what's going on. Not that I think there's anything wrong with being new... but I can't deny that it was fun to see whole teams focused on the objectives for once. I can't recall the last time I played a Huttball match on live where literally everyone was going after the ball with as much zeal as people did on the PTS.

The cross-faction queuing seemed to work well enough to guarantee fast pops even with a limited pool of players to draw from, which was nice, despite of my scepticism about the feature. Based on experiences with other games, I just worry that cross-faction queuing might be one of those things that won't immediately turn many people off, but that might get blamed for causing the game to lose some of its flavour later on. Anyway, as of now the only obvious downsides were some wonky assets, such as scoreboards in a clashing mix of colours or both teams in Alderaan Civil War starting from an unholy amalgamation of both the Republic and the Imperial ship.

As for how the actual match-making was working... it was honestly hard to tell! As I said, most matches were pretty fun and balanced, but was that because of the new matchmaking or because the type of people that bother with going on the PTS to PvP all have pretty similar skill levels? Role matching didn't seem to be quite there yet, with many of the 8v8 matches sporting 3-4 healers per side, though Eric has since confirmed that this looks to just be a side effect of the over-abundance of healers on the PTS, as they've decided to not enforce the originally planned "hard cap" of two tanks or healers per team for now (which I am fine with). We'll have to see how that works out on live though.

Between matches we also had another poke around the Rishi stronghold. Even though I don't expect the custom arena to see much use, it was kind of fun to mess around with. There were still some things going on with it that left me unsure whether they were bugs or features, such as someone flagged as Frogdog and someone flagged as Rotworm being able to group up, or people who get knocked off the edge popping right back up to where they fell off instead of dying or being sent back to the starting area at least.

Cal also showed off the new healing dummies to me, and while I was utterly unimpressed by the original announcement of their inclusion as I don't care about dummy parsing, I have to admit I thought it was pretty cute and creative that you could add extra probe droid dummies to simulate healing a whole party or ops group. Maybe I'll give that a try once it goes live after all...

KotET Chapter 6 Master Mode

So, to start with, a fun little story: While playing through these higher difficulty chapters I've pretty much always only ever played one chapter at a time. I sometimes did several in a day, but always with at least a short break in-between, so that to get back into the story I would end up re-selecting the difficulty I wanted to play on and starting the selected chapter from the chapter launcher.

Except when my Scoundrel reached "The Dragon's Maw", I went "yay, my favourite chapter" and decided to play through it immediately after completing chapter five, without interruption. The first half of the chapter obviously stays the same regardless of difficulty, but once it came to combat I was surprised by how easy everything was. Then I completed the chapter and no achievement popped up. Bug?

It was only later and through some experimentation that I learned that if you have your "preferred difficulty" set to something other than what you are playing right now, transitioning from one chapter to the next will automatically change the difficulty to what you have set as preferred instead of continuing on the same setting you chose when launching. So since I had never bothered to change my preferred difficulty from story to master, I had just accidentally played through the whole thing in story mode without even realising it. D'oh!

I was kind of paranoid that replaying the chapter right away, before actually having completed the story, might lead to something getting messed up so I decided to get caught up on this missed master mode chapter on an alt.

First I tried on my Marauder, who's already completed the whole story. However, after going through the whole puzzle section yet again I immediately hit a dead end in the very first fight, the one in the rancor pit. I honestly have no idea how you're supposed to do this as a melee class. If I didn't start the fight with a strong damage reduction cooldown, I would literally get one-shot while leaping into the fight. I would die in mid-air before even hitting the ground at the rancor's feet; it was ridiculous. I made a few half-hearted attempts at kiting, but with a minimal number of ranged attacks I just did too little damage and couldn't keep aggro off my companion, by which point everything would always go pear-shaped pretty quickly. In the end I decided that it was probably a better use of my time to redo the puzzle a third time, but this time on a different character.

I ended up doing so on my Sorcerer, who I'm also taking through KotET right now so that she can see Andronikos' return, and soon to come Ashara's. As a ranged class, the encounter was relatively straightforward: You just stay as far away as possible the entire time, while kiting "Junior" around the edges of the pit and interrupting his attempts to "get snacks" as much as possible. Oh, and definitely do the Bergola bonus so you don't have to fight the doggies and they help you instead.



A guildie commented to me that he got stuck on this fight even as a ranged class because his interrupt cooldown is too long and the rancor kept eating Indo Zal. To this I have two solutions: First off, Junior is susceptible to stuns, so you should be able to replace at least one interrupt with a hard stun if required. Just as importantly though, as far as I could tell the rancor seems to like going for whichever prisoner is the closest "snack" and there is no punishment for letting a couple of them die, so just make sure while kiting him around to also keep him as far away from Indo as you can.

The other big fight of the chapter is Arcann, or as was the case for me here, the Horizon Guard Forces with a reformed Arcann by my side. This fight was interesting because there is actually a lot going on. For all I know most of the mechanics might exist in story mode as well, but I never really took the time to notice because on story mode my strategy basically consisted of pressing all of Arcann's special abilities once and watching the enemies fall over dead in seconds, before I could even realise what was going on. Master mode is not that easy.

In fact, my first realisation was that it really made me wish that SWTOR allowed you to have more than one focus target, because I found it very hard to keep an eye on what the Horizon Guard Captain and Arcann were doing at the same time, but you kind of have to. I actually had more wipes on this fight due to Arcann dying than to my own character going down.

In the end, what helped me to victory was understanding both Arcann's and the Captain's abilities, as well as a bit of luck I guess. After so many wipes with no visible progress I was in fact close to giving up for the night when I suddenly got the kill without being conscious of doing anything different compared to my previous attempts, though rewatching my own recording has given me a bit of an idea.



What you need to know about the Guard Captain is this: He starts the fight with a shield on that makes him immune to absolutely everything. The only way to get rid of this shield is to use the first of Arcann's abilities, called "Guard Break" on him, which will remove the shield and make him vulnerable to damage, stuns etc. However, he can recast this shield (though the cast can be interrupted), at which point you will have to use Guard Break again to be able to start damaging him again. In general, the Guard Captain casts way too much crap for you to be able to interrupt all of it, and to be honest I couldn't tell you for certain which casts are better or worse to interrupt. Suddenly being unable to damage him because he re-shielded is annoying, but so is being swarmed by hordes of summoned skytroopers or extra Horizon Guards. Seriously, everything this guy does just sucks!

Keeping Arcann alive can be tricky even as a healer (as I was) and even though he has a load of health, simply because there is so much damage going out. The key ability to watch out for is his third one, the Attuned Reflection Barrier. While this is up, he's not only immune to damage but also reflects all damage done to him! Awesome! That he can't move while this is up is such a minor drawback that it's hardly even worth mentioning. Issues you're more likely to have are that Arcann starts melting the moment the barrier goes down (as you can't have it up all the time) or that all the reflected damage in the world does you no good if the aggro is actually not on Arcann but instead on you or your companion.

Now, as I mentioned I was actually kind of surprised when I finally did beat the fight, so I don't have a perfect strategy to give you, but here are a few things I noticed and that seemed to help:

- Using Arcann's AoE taunt (Commanding Roar) followed by the reflective barrier is a good way to start, but they are on different cooldowns and things can get confusing after that. Try to resist hitting the taunt if reflective barrier is still on cooldown, even if you're being bugged by adds, as all of them going on an unshielded Arcann can lead to a quick and sudden death.

- Keep an eye on the Guard Captain, and if he does get his immunity shield back up, don't miss this! Immediately tell Arcann to use Guard Break on him again.

- Don't worry too much about the adds. Ideally they should burn themselves down on the reflective barrier, or you can deal with them after the Captain is dead. He is your primary target however; never forget that. Since I was relying on Theron to dps, I also had to tell him to re-focus on the Captain once his shield went down, otherwise our favourite former SIS agent has a habit of getting distracted by trying to shoot adds.

- You want to go for a quick burn here, as the more time passes, the more awkward casts the Captain will get off. I actually invested in about thirty levels of companion influence for Theron as well here to get his dps up a bit. My biggest surprise on rewatching my own successful attempt was that the Guard Captain went down in less than sixty seconds. It sure felt longer than that with how much was going on at the time, but if it had actually taken any longer, I probably wouldn't have succeeded.

KotET Chapters 3, 4 & 5 Master Mode

I decided that none of these needed a whole blog post of their own, so I might as well lump them all together.

Chapter three is probably the easiest and fastest chapter of the lot. It doesn't even feature a boss fight! Sure, there's Vaylin at the end, but she doesn't really count since you don't even need to win the fight to progress - like in the fight against Valkorion in KotFE chapter 12, your character's health dipping low enough works just as well to trigger the next cut scene - and as a bonus, with you being on the losing side, Valkorion's interruption actually makes narrative sense too.

The only somewhat aggravating thing about this chapter are the patrols in the corridors, especially the stealthed ones. On my Scoundrel I just skipped most of them, but I gave the chapter another run-through on my Marauder right afterwards and some of those pulls were quite aggravating, though somewhat surprisingly the one that annoyed me the most was actually the lone Knight of Zakuul that jumps around like a particularly hard-hitting bouncy ball. The best advice I can give to avoid frustration here is to simply take each pull as seriously as a minor boss and not be afraid of blowing all your cooldowns to get through each one. They'll come back up again quickly enough anyway, and otherwise you'll just be wasting that time getting downed and having to repair.

Chapter four is similar, with lots of trash and no real boss fights; there are just slightly more mobs. They feature fewer annoying mechanics, but some of the pulls are painful simply because they are quite large, and several ridiculously hard-hitting mobs shooting you all at once can end badly on occasion.

The only tricky thing is the fight near the end to defend your temporary base against the swarming purifier droids, but I already talked about that in my veteran mode post, plus that's the one veteran fight for which I had already uploaded a video too. Still, I decided to add the Scoundrel's point of view as well, just for the heck of it, even though I applied the same basic tactic to beat it. I actually found it a bit easier to just heal myself and dodge the red circles while my little companion army took care of killing things. Any fight where you're dealing with a lot of mobs but have several NPCs by your side seems to be quite well-suited to playing through it as a healer actually.



Chapter five starts off with some more annoyingly large trash pulls, but was otherwise also surprisingly unremarkable. I was wondering whether the fight to subdue the colossal droid would be challenging in some way but I just killed the things that were powering it and the boss never even seemed to land any attacks.

The fight where you control the droid yourself was still fun; the increased incoming damage just meant that I had to hit the ability to shield and repair pretty much on cooldown, but it still felt easily doable.

Now, Aries looked like he might actually present some challenge if you're a melee character, since he won't laser barrage himself on master mode, but as someone with range it was actually shockingly boring. I learned on my first (failed) attempt that trying to melee him was not a good idea as he then suddenly started hitting fairly hard. On my second attempt I stupidly ran off one of the sides and fell to my death. But the third attempt was super easy, just very slow and boring, as I simply ran circles around him, forever avoiding his laser barrage, and very slowly dpsing him down. The only times things got a little hairy was during the intermission phases (but even those weren't too bad) and when I suddenly lost aggro to Vette and he downed her within seconds. However, even that didn't even really matter that much because I could just res her and continue my little run-around.



I can already tell that chapter six is going to be more interesting, however...