Hikarinoko Surprises

Hikarinoko is now level 13 and has, of course, chosen the Operative Advanced Class.  (Healing, ftw!!)  On the way there, I've discovered a few things which surprised me, given my experience with the Sith Inquistor.  (I'll go against my habit and give a spoiler alert here for those interested in such things.)

First, after a full evaluation of the Imperial Agent quests on Hutta, minus the one where a spice dealer was asking me for help and one of the Heroic 2's, I have one thing to say: Hutta is fun!  And I found myself actually able to do some good, like saving a child from becoming a "monster" in Sith training (believe me, I understand the issue there . . .)  Or slightly disobeying orders by allowing a man to escape instead of killing him . . . Sorry, he'd been such a nice guy, I couldn't see the point of killing him, when advising him to scram would accomplish the desired ends, no matter how he ended up seeing me, personally.  Of course, when I received this mail from Keeper, I just sort of ignored it and pretended it never arrived.  (I must be better at this than I thought, if all those Watchers at HQ couldn't figure this one out . . . /wink)

And here's the rest of the message . . .

Hmmm?  Who me?

It was kind of sad to have to leave Hutta, where I understood everyone's relatively straightforward motivations, and go to Empire territory, where you have to deal with . . . nonsense . . .  Although it is nice to not have people look at me and start to cower in fear, unlike my poor Inquisitor.

Next, I actually like Kaliyo.  When Keeper first talked about taking her with me, I suggested it might be simpler just to kill her, but since then, we've really hit it off.  (She apparently bears no grudges for that comment.)  About the moment I found her suggesting a way to avoid a bloodbath, I decided there was more depth to this gal than I had first anticipated.  She might brag about her abilities to slice and dice (figuratively speaking, of course), but she apparently still has a soft spot carefully hidden behind all that bravado.  (Besides, we've already decided how to split up any male prospects we meet:  I get the smart ones, and she gets the rich ones.)

I love the recuperate ability for this character!  I have a cute little droid which gives me an information board, on which I can quietly update my status or look up stuff while I'm resting.  Nice, efficient use of time.  (And much more restful than glowing red and pacing . . . I always liked the Consular Meditation, too; it almost made me feel peaceful, just looking at it.)

I find that Keeper is a rather sympathetic character, so far, anyway.  I was touched that he seemed genuinely concerned this promising agent would become disillusioned as she learned more about the work she would be doing.  And it's much nicer to be dealing with him than a Sith who would stab you in the back as soon as look at you, and from whom I had to conceal most of what I was really thinking.  You get the idea he's actually "got your back", so to speak, although I'm not sure yet about Watchers Two or Three.  (I'll be frank:  I don't think Keeper was blinded at all when he sent that mail I referenced above.  I'm sure he knew exactly what happened and was just trying to let me know a) he knew and b) questions might arise.)

"For what it's worth--I tried to shield you from this.  But it seems it was unavoidable."

 And here's what he was trying to shield me from . . .

Yeah . . . the Sith don't mess around.  And this guy is wanting me to work for him!

All in all, so far, so good!  (Now if only I can rearrange my action bars and keybinds to my liking . . . Still working on that one . . .)

Hail to the Healer!

I do not understand why the SWTOR warzone queue would put together a team with no healer.

The other day, I solo-queued for warzones and found myself in a Voidstar run which seemed really, really odd.  The Rebublic started out defending, and I ran back and forth between the doors, checking things out and healing when needed.  But strangely enough, frequently there were no Empire players at all.

Seriously.  Our team would be split between the doors, with nary a red name in sight, filing our nails or checking the calibration of our weapons.  As I hit my Meditation key, I wondered if the Empire was trying very hard.  The round ended with no bombs planted.

In the second round, we plowed our way to victory with almost no opposition.  Again, sometimes I wondered how much effort the Empire team was putting into the warzone, especially because they didn't kill me very often, which almost never happens.

As the victory board flashed up on my screen, the answer became imperatively obvious.  I had done something to the effect of 295k healing during the course of the warzone.  The next highest figure was about 9k and owned by a Jedi Knight.

THE EMPIRE TEAM HAD NO HEALERS!

As a matter of fact, our team only had one--me.

No wonder there had been times with no enemies in sight!  Without a healer, they had been killed quickly and had been stuck waiting for the rez area to allow them back in the warzone.

No wonder they hadn't killed me very often!  When they had tried, I could keep myself alive long enough for our dps to beat them up.  Without a healer of their own, they were helpless against the efforts of our damage-dealers, while I could prop up the members of our team when they took damage in return.

And no wonder we steamrolled them!  Without a healer, all our team had to do was keep chipping away at their health points, while we had some way to recover when they chipped at ours.

When I mentioned this to my husband, he pointed out I could be incorrect in my understanding of the situation.  "They might have had a healer," he said, "but that healer might have been unwilling to heal."  Perhaps so, but I have a hard time thinking a person in possession of a healing ability who is on a team being trounced so badly would sit back and not heal at all.

Warzone queues shouldn't create teams with such a disadvantage.  Each team should be guaranteed at least one person in a healing spec, regardless of the quality of said healer.  Having even one healer on a team can make all the difference between victory and defeat.

Huttball Healing, Part II

Despite what I may have said about healing Huttball, I actually do like the game.  But in case there are any doubters as to the veracity of what I said before, I can offer an example from last night.

My husband and I queued for warzones, just to get our dailies finished.  The first one was Alderaan, and it was a loss.  The second one was the Voidstar, and it was also a loss.  My husband was convinced I lost both of the previous ones for our teams, actually.  He wanted me to watch certain objectives and when I got distracted because something was going to kill me, someone took those objectives.  Ergo, it was my fault.

So when the next warzone queued up and it was Huttball, my bruised ego was actually happy.  You see, in Huttball, there's not much harm I can do, as far as that goes, because there are no objectives to guard.  I run around healing friendly ball carriers, stunning enemy ball carriers, and blasting the enemy off platfoms whever possible.  It was a bonus to meet up with one of our own guildies on our team, which made it even better as we faced off against the Empire.

Even so, we lost, although, as usual, I rocked the healing.  My husband and I regrouped and requeued . . .

It was Huttball again!  This time, however, we were facing Republic players, not Empire.

It didn't take me very long to realize the guildie who had been on our Huttball team the previous iteration was on the opposite team this time.  And she (he? character was female) was killing me.  Literally.

Time and again, I found myself targeted by this guildie.  I think I spent more time up in the rez area than I did on the court.  (Well, ok, not quite that much, but it was a lot.)  And the vast majority of the dozen times I ended up there, I knew it was due in large part to this guildie, who was there every time I felt myself taking damage.

What kind of game pits guildie against guildie?!  (I know . . . Huttball . . . But as it is considered good strategy to kill the healers first, I can hardly blame her for her actions.)

Despite this, it ended up working out for us.  Through a hard-fought battle, both teams managed to score once.  And, as the seconds ticked away, my tank husband found himself in possession of the ball.  My job?  Keep him alive!

For once, everyone nearby left me alone and focused on him, but this was an arrangement with which we were equipped to deal.  Between his special abilities and my healing, he lived to watch the clock run out and the victory board flash across our screens.

In guild chat, our guildie sent this message, "Quinndarius, you won that one!"

"Yes, he did," I typed back.  "I spent a good deal of the time dead."  (It was my not-quite-so-subtle way of saying, "I saw you killing me over and over!")

"Um, about that . . ." she responded.

We all had a good laugh.

"You Want to Turn Yourself In"

Some time back, when my husband and I were leveling our characters at a much lower level, we encountered a quest on Coruscant which I did not want to do.

It wasn't that the quest looked terribly difficult; it didn't.  But I was so tired, I was about to fall over on my keyboard.  All my begging to quit and go sleep had been met with, "But we just need to finish this quest right over here," or, "But if we finish this quest, we won't have to come back to this area," or some such statement.

So when we ran into this quest on our way back "home", I wanted to ignore the poor injured security officer, log off, and go to sleep.  (After all, she would still be standing there, injured, in the morning.)

"Ah, c'mon," my husband insisted.  "We can't just pass by and not help out."  I glared at him between my half-closed eyelids around our back-to-back monitors as he initiated the conversation with the security officer.

It turns out this security officer was supposed to arrest a big wrestler-type-or-something dude who was holed up in the cantina right next to us.  She obviously needed some help.

It was easy to find the guy, as he was the largest person in the room.  In the course of the conversations associated with the quest, the dude told us in no uncertain terms he was not going to allow himself to be arrested.

At that point, there was the opportunity for we, the players, to respond to his statement.  One of my options as a Jedi Consular was to Force Persuade the guy.  (You know, the "old Jedi mind trick".)

I was tired.  I wanted to sleep.  I wanted this quest finished as quickly as possible.  Blinking bleary-eyed at the monitor, I chose Force Persuade.  Amazingly enough, I won the roll.

My husband's jaw dropped as my Consular made a hand gesture and said, "You do not want to fight us.  You want to turn yourself in."  The wrestler agreed and headed out the door.

"I'll have you know," said my husband as we returned to report to the security officer, "you have just severely disappointed Qyzen, Aric, and my character, who all wanted a good fight.  But I guess that's what you get sometimes when you quest with Jedi."

We were asleep in ten minutes.

Lord Vivicar's End

Normally, my husband and I run all our SWTOR quests together.  Not only do we gain social points in the process, but we have the opportunity to see each other's class quests without having to raise a character of that class.

But when the time came for our climactic adventures at the end of Chapter 1, we decided to run those separately.

We knew we could, if we wanted to do so, board each other's ships and help out.  But when we discussed it, we decided it would be more epic if we did these particular quests with only our companions.  (After all, between the two of us and our companions, we routinely succeed at green Heroic 4 quests.  It might take away some of the joy of achievement if we found ourselves rolling over these quests--the culmination of all our class quests to this point.)  We were higher level than many players tend to be when they finish their Chapter 1 adventures, so we figured it would be no big deal, even if our gear was a few steps lower than our levels.  What's more, we did no research beforehand, to experience all the fun of meeting an obstacle without prior knowledge of the challenges.

Accordingly, I set out to defeat Lord Vivicar accompanied only by Qyzen Fess and armed with my lightsaber and the "persists through death" stim I had in my backpack.  My husband sat in a nearby chair to watch the proceedings.

Clearing the hanger upon boarding the ship was not a problem.  Step by step, Qyzen and I worked our way around the room, pulling and defeating groups.  ("You play like a rabbit," my husband said.  "Like you're frightened all the time that something is going to attack you."  Well . . . it might . . .)  Finally, the hanger was cleared, and we were on our way.

Everything went fine until I had to shut off a force field on the way.  It must have set off some kind of alarm, because suddenly, a huge group of mobs ran down the hall, over Qyzen and me, and before I could do much more than try to heal and Force Wave some of them off me, I was dead.

I laughed, shaking my head, then rezzed.  "Ok, seems I've got a gauntlet here," I commented to my husband.  "Not sure how I can handle quite that many mobs at once."

When I returned to look at the situation, however, I found the mobs lined in neat rows, ready for controlled pulling.  "Well," I thought, "Perhaps it was worth dying, if this is what I find afterward."

The first pull went without a hitch, although I was surprised it didn't end up pulling two groups, as they seemed to be very close to each other.  The second pull consisted of one strong droid and a couple more mobs.  I pointed Qyzen toward the strong droid and prepared to hit one of the other mobs.  To my surprise, he walked completely past the row before attacking something which seemed to be in the far distance.  It was the droid.  Although it had been displayed in the second row, it was in reality a couple rows beyond that.  This meant we ended up with three rows' worth of mobs beating the two of us up, which, of course, resulted in another death.

I sighed and made some sort of comment about bugs, then rezzed again.  This time, the droid was showing up in its proper spot, and the rest of the pulls went without a hitch.

Qyzen and I continued our slow progress until the next time a large group of mobs appeared and lined themselves up for neat pulls.  As we rushed out of the room to face them, I found to my horror that Qyzen ran down the hall and around the corner.  "Qyzen!  What are you doing?!"  Sure enough, he ended up pulling everything in the entire zone . . . . which ended up being Death #3.  (I had never been so happy for a preponderance of medical droids.)

I was about to beat my head against my keyboard.  With this many deaths, I would have considered myself something of a failed Sage, except for the fact I recognized much of my trouble was due to bugs of one sort or another, about which I could do little or nothing.  My husband had abandoned me, deciding to go start clearing his own trash, commenting as he went that he'd most likely take much less time than I was on my quest.  (Thanks, Hon . . .)

Qyzen and I rezzed, cleared the remaining trash, and managed to make it to Lord Vivicar's presence without further trouble.  And after the opening conversation with said Lord, we were one-shotted in very short order.

Great.  After all the wiping due to bugs, I was wiping to my main challenge, which as far as I could tell, was working as intended.  I was tired and annoyed, and I wondered if I should just walk away and come back later.  How could I hope to fight something which could one-shot me with an ability about which I knew nothing?

By this point, my husband was watching again, and we realized Vivicar's success had been due entirely to a single attack which had a cast time.  Even if it was an attack which could be dodged, there was no way I could get Qyzen to dodge anything.  Perhaps it could be interrupted.

Yet again, Qyzen and I rezzed and stared at Lord Vivicar.  (Thank goodness my stim was one which lasted two hours and persisted through death . . .)  With a sigh, I sent Qyzen in to start tanking and my husband kept an eye on Lord Vivicar's casting bar.

Yes!!  It was called Force Crush, and it could be interrupted.  At last, there was hope!

Eventually, there came a moment when I lost Qyzen.  Desperately, I kept myself alive while keeping DoTs and some other damage on Vivicar.  It was a very slow process, but if I could keep it up, never missing an interrupt, I knew I would succeed.  The question, as I stared at my Force bar with some concern, was whether or not I could keep it up . . .

As I watched the relative lengths of my and Vivicar's health bars, while also watching out for that Force Crush with the power to one-shot me, it became more iffy.  Finally, my husband pointed to a med pack on my right bar and said, "Hit this."  I did.

To our great amazement, out of nowhere Qyzen showed up with a small amount of health, ready to tank.  I stared at him, wondering what on earth happened, as I let him take the aggro and worked to keep him alive.  Together we defeated Lord Vivicar and proceeded on the course of redemption for Parkanas Tark.

In the calm after the battle, I took a look again at that med pack.  It was not an ordinary med pack; it was a med unit, which would restore health to both the player and the companion.  Somehow, although Qyzen had been defeated, using this med unit had brought him back to life.  (I'm not sure it was supposed to do that, but you know what they say about gift horses.)

All in all, this questing adventure was definitely a memorable experience, made even more so by the bugs encountered along the way.  While I wholeheartedly support tests of skill, especially at pivotal moments along the class story chain, and while I enjoyed the actual encounter with Lord Vivicar, I hope the developers take a minute or three to correct a few of the unintended challenges of this quest.

(Oh, and by the way, my husband's Trooper ran his class story quest with nary a problem.  Made me want to scowl in his general direction . . .)