Some promises are hard to keep

Remember my last post saying that I wasn’t going to be able to see Akylios dead? I lied.

My guild was previously close to getting Akylios down, and our previous attempt was 30-something percent. Earlier this week, a patched was rolled by nerfing Akylios significantly, and we managed to down him after one serious attempt (previous attempts were stymied by lots of people disconnecting).

I'm not going to be able to see him go down

I’m no casual player. When I embark on a new game, I sink my hours into it, and strive to be the best at what I do. Perhaps I’ve not always achieved that, but I’ve tried at the very least, and I daresay I’ve been better than the average player.

At some point during my haze of virtual world activities, I must have grown up. I’m now a second year university student (also known as college, for you yanks and rebels). I realized that I haven’t done quite as well as I ought to have. I’ve internship coming up soon, which means I’ve to buck the hell up and get myself together. Neither have I achieved what I wanted to do in life.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m going to take a hiatus from MMORPGs, and to refocus on the more immediate stuff in life that I have to tend to. I’m not quitting gaming, and in fact, I’m going to play Alan Wake this weekend when it gets released for the PC. Gaming is a huge part of me, and that’s never going away. I’m just going to spend less time of it, and make it less of a priority. Unfortunately, that means strict raiding schedules are out.

In a sentence, I’m relegating myself to the seats of casuals.

Karagga, with a hat that was probably stolen from Otto von Bismarck.

It’s been a hectic week for me since the last weekend, but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been able to get any gaming done. I did manage to log into SWTOR once and completed the Karagga’s Palace raid instance. I’ve mentioned before that BioWare loves puzzles, and KP is no exception. In one of the fights, you have to constantly solve a puzzle which fires an incinerator positioned above the boss, removing it’s damage reduction buff. Fellow computer science students would be pleased to know that the puzzle is a classic problem taught in class — it’s a three piece Tower of Hanoi problem.

Other than that one SWTOR raid, and my raid obligations in Rift, which I’ve ended up being late for on a number of occasions, I hadn’t had a chance to play anything on my own free will. Now is the time where I’m gravitating towards the middle of my semester and my workload is piling up. I find myself wanting to put Rift raiding on a hiatus, and just using the free time to relax, or play a game that isn’t an MMORPG. I’ve having no fun rushing from one thing to another, and raiding has become a chore in itself.

I need a vacation.

That's how I look right now, emotionally and mentally.

Rant: The above screenshot took way too much effort and too long to capture. Curse you Hollywood, and your draconian DRM on blu-ray discs.

However, unlike most bloggers, who choose to lay the blame on the lack of a dungeon finder, I find it to be the consequence of the game’s tiny group size of 4 players.

My first experience playing MMORPGs was with Lineage 2. Each group can hold up to 9 players. There was no dungeon finder. My next game was Everquest 2, which had a group size of 6 players. Next was Rift, with a group size of 5 players. Along came SWTOR, with a maximum of 4 players to a group.

The problem of decreasing group size has been noted by We Fly Spitfires, and it is exacerbated by SWTOR’s even smaller than usual group size.

SWTOR follows the classic holy trinity class system, which means that for any group to function, two spots are immediately occupied by a tank and a healer. That leaves two open spots to play around with. Not much room for a variety of party setups.

It doesn’t take a genius to realize that in every MMORPG, there is a huge disparity between players playing tank/healers, and players playing dps. This is why the LFD tool in WoW offers incentives for people to queue up as an under represented class. It’s the same with SWTOR.

I’m in a guild that’s fairly sized, so grouping shouldn’t be an issue for me, right? Turns out it isn’t the case. With a small group size, one of these problems can occur.

1. There’s more than four people looking for group.

   This one’s pretty obvious. You can argue that regardless of group size, this problem can always happens, but you run into it a lot more with a tiny group size.

   In Lineage 2, you could start a group with perhaps 5 and kill just fine, and if more members come on, you can just add them in.

2. There’s two tanks and one healer, or two healers and one tank looking for group. Or some other combination involving a line up of redundant or less than optimal classes.

   Due to SWTOR’s small group size, there’s no room for flexibility. You must take one tank, one healer and two dps. Otherwise you risk running against enraged timers and not being able to kill a boss.

3. A combination of the above two.

   Either way, someone has to be left out, and the remainder usually do not have the right classes to start a new group.

As you can see, there’s an underlying systematic problem with the grouping mechanism, which goes deeper than just the lack of a dungeon finder. And while a dungeon finder might ease the process of finding a group, it won’t solve the issue of disparity between the strict class requirements of a group and the classes players choose the play. While you might be able to quest instead of sitting around the fleet waiting for a group, queue lengths are going to be extremely long if you choose to play anything but a tank or healer.

The A Team

The Bounty Hunter quest series came to a conclusion in true Star Wars fashion – cinematic.

The pace of the story dulled a little in the middle, and in fact, the class quest got pushed to the back of my mind while I continued on the story arc on Voss and Corellia. But towards the end, the pace picked up dramatically. Calreth was no longer just working on yet another contract. The last few targets were all personal, and they all fell like dominoes, cut down by the blaster fire of a vengeful man. A Jedi Master fell, and so did a Sith Lord. They crossed paths with me on Nar Shaddaa and killed my fellow Mandalorians, and this is what they get.

When a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do something about it. It doesn't make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you're supposed to do something about it. And it happens we're in the bounty hunting business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed, it's bad business to let the killer get away with it, bad all around, bad for every bounty hunter everywhere.

Okay, Spade in the The Maltese Falcon was talking about detectives, not bounty hunters, but it really boils down to the same point.

You know the old adage that a picture speaks a thousand words? I’ve taken it a step further and compiled all the the glorious highlights into a video.

That, gentlemen, is 30,034,000 words saved.

I was a little disappointed that I didn’t get a title at the conclusion of my class quest, unlike the Sith classes who were granted with the title of ‘Darth’. They could’ve at least given me something like simple like ‘Bounty Hunter Calreth’, or even ‘Freelancer Calreth’ to signify that I’ve finished my class quest, but nope, I’ve nothing to show for it.

If you watched the above video, you’d notice that certain dialog choices have a huge affection gain or hit on some companions. There’s no pleasing all of them. I’ve never bothered using or raising my affection with Skadge since he’s my least favorite companion (hell, I even wrote a hate post about him), the affection hit ended up putting my affection with him into the negatives. Yes, it is possible for your companions to dislike you, and it even shows up in the crew window as a broken heart. However, I don’t know if there’s any downsides to having a companion dislike you. It really doesn’t matter as I can pump him with companion gifts eventually to bring him up to max affection.

Suck it up, bro

Now that I’ve been hovering around end game for about a week, content after level 50 does seem to be a bit sparse. BioWare has stated before that their endgame goal is not so much as for a person to hit level 50 within the first week, and then sit at level cap for the rest of their lives, but rather making alts and experiencing the story from a different perspective. This explains the legacy system, which when live, is intended more to benefit alternate characters rather than augment the abilities of a level capped player. I’m generally a one character person in MMOs, so I don’t know how well that’s going to work for me.

I’ve talked about my favorite part of SWTOR questing being the letters you receive sometime after an event has taken place. To tell this week’s story, I present a collection of letters received over the course of my adventures.

Yes, I have an unhealthy obsession with Mako.

Normal flashpoints have no lockout timers.

Hard mode flashpoints can be done once per day. A new day starts, and the lockouts reset at 7am EST / 4am PST / 8pm Singapore time / 11pm Melbourne time each day.

Operations lockout timings can be view in your log. 8 and 16 man operations do not share lockout timers.

Is this when the real game begins?

I managed to hit level 50 just before the weekend, and promptly ran my first heroic mode flashpoint after that. I asked in guild whether which was most appropriate for a fresh new level 50, and was directed to The Black Talon.

Other than bosses having and enraged timer, there’s hardly any changes. The mobs are obviously up-scaled to level 50, but the boss mechanics remains the same. However, due to SWTOR’s small group size of 4 members, and a rather strict enrage timer, there isn’t a lot of room for individuals to make mistakes. Simply put, you can’t carry someone through.

Shortly after, I landed myself in a HM foundry group. Likewise, there’s not much differences. However, unlike on normal mode where you can just about live through most attacks, interrupts on Revan is essential, otherwise the tank takes massive damage and will most likely die.

To round off the day, I ran, and cleared the 8-man raid instance of Eternity Vault with my guild. Although it wasn’t very hard, it remained sufficiently challenging for most of us first-timers. We hit a bit of a snag when it came to the pylons, but thanks to this guide, we were able to solve it after a few wipes. Initially, we though we had to solve each row on both sides simultaneously, which led to us being swamped by mobs as the spawns are timed and we had some overhead with synchronizing both groups. We were over-thinking the problem. You just have to solve it as fast as possible, that’s all. No synchronizing required.

Soa, the last boss in Eternity Vault, was who we spent most of our time on.

Soa, the final boss in Eternal Vault

Soa can be described as having 3 phases, which also means 2 transitory phases, one at 75% and another at 25% if my memory serves me right. The phases themselves are easy. The first one is a straight fight, the second one involves avoiding lightning balls and getting people who have been imprisoned in mind traps out, and the last one involves the tank pulling Soa under this thing which stuns and makes him vulnerable to damage. The phases themselves aren’t too had, it’s the transition between them that’s difficult.

Remember the scene where Yoda fought Palpatine in the third episode, and Palpatine was basically hurling down discs at Yoda?

Yoda and Palpatine plays air hockey

That’s pretty much what happens during the transition phase for Soa. During each transition phase, Soa hurls the statues around the room at the group, destroying the ground around him, and you have to jump between floating pieces in mid air until you get to the ground on the next level. As the raid hops from piece to piece, you’ll have to destroy the power crystals on them.

Soa hurling statues at the group

Bottom up view of the encounter room. You can clearly see the multiple levels of it.

We managed to get him low a couple of times, but we had lost people during the transition phase, and lacking certain dps and healer classes, we couldn’t get him down before he enraged. We were still optimistic despite the late hours for the Aussies in the raid, and after a few more practice rounds, the whole raid managed to reach the bottom floor without losing anyone.

We win!

Being level 50 opens up a whole new section of the game, including the obligatory dailies and weeklies which I’ve been working on. As a result, my solo questing has been put on hold, and I’ve made no progress since where I last stopped on Voss.