Remember that post I made last week about finding moderation in MMO gaming? About resisting the temptation to “keep up with the joneses” outside of my adult lifestyle and being responsible? Yeah, so.. between 1pm on Saturday and 4:30pm on Sunday, I went from level 46.5 to 50 in SWTOR.

To be fair, it was actually an entirely planned gaming binge. Last weekend was an oasis of spare time, and the next few weeks look pretty busy. I wanted to get to 50 and be done with it. Also, I know from experience that when you don’t have much time it’s a lot easier to maintain a level-capped character than to level one.

Long story short, a pot of coffee and two energy drinks later I hit 50 after losing a game of Huttball, which seemed strangely appropriate. The best method of power-levelling I found was running the daily Heroic-4 and Heroic-2 quests on Corellia. Of particular note for fellow Imps is the quest Prison Busting, which has an associated bonus quest to kill 60 elite inmates. Grab three friends and knock it out — this area alone accounted for half of my level 59 XP bar.

Because my guild is both awesome and insane, literally 10 minutes after hitting 50 I found myself inside Eternity Vault. It was my first time there, of course, although most of the raid had been there before. A quick rundown of impressions by boss:

First Boss Guy – Not very difficult to heal. This fight involves getting out of line of sight of a missle barrage ability and not standing in things that really look like you shouldn’t stand in them. I actually got to use Recuperative Nanotech/Kolto Cloud in a way that was useful for the first time ever! Talent point validated! (Sigh.)

Lava Guy – This is exactly the kind of fight I love to do: there’s environmental awareness and moving, but not in a “you turned 2 degrees too much to the left so everyone dies now” way. Running, jumping, a few add waves to keep it interesting. This was a good time.

Pylon Boss – I was a little worried when we split the raid into two even groups, leaving me the sole healer for my team, but it turned out okay. For this boss, from what I can tell, we all just kill things like usual while two people do all the tricky puzzle bits. The mobs hit hard, so be prepared to laugh and battle rez (yes! me! with a BR!) if a DPS pulls aggro. I have no idea what the puzzle guys were doing, but it worked!

Individual Boss – You know, the idea for this boss is really simple but unusual. Basically everyone gets a mob and has to kill it. Tanks get the ones with the lowest HP, healers the next highest, and then of course DPS get the toughest. Someone starts the fight, your dude comes to life, and you have to kill it before he enrages and kills everyone. You cannot heal anyone else or assist them with their dude in any way. Go! Me and my awesome 10-minutes-old gear wiped the raid the first time, much to everyone’s amusement, but on the second attempt both I and my target died at the same moment and we won. (Note to self: Remember fighting Leo in SSC? Get some Accuracy trinkets or something, noob.)

Soa, the talky boss – A pretty epic fight! We did not kill this dude, but we will. There’s giant falling stairs you have to hope down and balls of lightning that follow you around and a “mind trap” with a dude you have to kill and occasionally tthe boss will whirl you around the room. It’s totally chaotic but not unreasonably so, and as a bonus you occasionally get to see your guildies jump to their deaths. I’m curious what Bioware had in mind when they designed this fight: are you supposed to run it until you remember where each piece falls so you can take the most efficient route down, or just wing it?

All in all, I’m actually pretty impressed with the encounter design in Eternity Vault. It was pretty easy at Normal difficulty (definitely designed with pugs in mind), and the mechanics themseves were familar but presented in new ways. Perhaps it’s just because the game is young, but there was no crazy boss crap for crazy’s sake, which is kind of the direction I think raiding is going in WoW.

So 90 minutes after hitting level cap I had killed 4 of the 5 bosses in Eternity Vault, earned two huge upgrades (hat and boots), and gained a bunch of weird new currencies from raid and PvP.

Then I went to bed. :)

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Quick reminder that RIFT is trying to set a World Record today for Most In-Game Weddings in 24 Hours. I don’t have much time to visit Telara right now, but I will definitely be logging on later and marrying Accolade off to a friend! Trion is a nice company that tries hard, and they allowed same sex marriages in their game right off the bat (hi Bioware why won’t you let me love Kaliyo) so I will definitely participate and hope y’all to do so as well. Here are someone’s RIFT wedding photos if you need a little help to get in the marrying mood.

One of the more popular search terms people have used lately to find this blog is “how to throw huttball”. It’s a legit concern — I know I certainly found the mechanics of throwing to be confusing at first, and there’s no good way to practice it outside of clutch situations. Clearly the needs of the people must not be ignored, and so I present:

How to Throw the Huttball

1. Put the “Throw the Huttball” skill (icon pictured above) in an easily-reached location or keybind it to something handy. It’s always stored in the first tab of your Abilities Menu (by default, hotkey “p”).
2. Obtain the Huttball.
3. Point in the direction you wish to throw and stop moving.
4. Left click the “Throw the Huttball” skill or hit your keybinding. Your cursor will become a dark grey symbol like this (yay, Microsoft Paint!):



5. Find the person you wish to throw to, and place your cursor over the ground at their feet. If you’ve picked a valid target the cursor symbol will gain a yellow glow. (If not, you may be too far away or not aiming properly.)
6. All set? Click the left mouse button and watch your ball soar through the air.

That’s it! I assure you that after a practice throw or three you will stop worrying about panicking and not throwing the huttball and can start worrying about being permastunned and not throwing the huttball.

While I still dawdle around in my leveling, a number of my guildies have powered on through to 50 with the bulk of them hitting the magic number some time last weekend. (As I say snottily to anyone who points out my being merely level 41, “Look, guilds don’t run themselves.” In truth I just really like hopping around my spaceship, crafting and chatting.) On Sunday evening we had 8 level-capped folks online and looking for action, which means it was time to try out an Operation, otherwise known as a raid. I was not able to attend, obviously, but I did listen to them on Mumble and chat about their experiences after, so below is a brief summary of their findings.

How hard is normal mode raiding? We had 8 Cats in Eternity Vault, ranging from two weeks to two days of level-capped gear farming. About half of the folks had raided together before in WoW, and only 7 were on Mumble due to technical difficulties. I think 5 members of the group were different flavors of Inquisitor, which is a little suboptimal. The group killed the first boss and had about 4 attempts on the second one in two hours on Sunday. In another two hours on Monday, they killed the second and third bosses and got in a few attempts on the fourth one. My non-participant conclusion is that degree of difficulty in normal modes is just about perfect for a group of new 50s. Not too easy, not too hard, and a little practice went a long way.

How fun is normal mode raiding? Again, keep in mind that I’ve had limited feedback, but it was generally quite positive. The second boss in particular seemed to be a big hit with people. Listening to the fights, I heard references to mechanics that I was very familiar with from WoW raiding, such as waves of adds at certain health percentages, tank switches, and having to move around to avoid lava. My impression is that boss fights in SWTOR are not hugely different from boss fights in WoW or RIFT, which is pretty much what I expected. There DID seem to be a lot of trash that was a pain to clear, and it was respawned the next day even after their boss was dead.

How buggy is normal mode raiding? Kinda buggy! Occasionally when someone reset a boss by leashing it or using their Vanish-like ability, it would be completely bugged out on the next pull. (Not using mechanics, using them at unusual intervals.) The best bug was, I believe, caused by simply zoning in to Eternity Vault when often at least one raid member would just instantly drop dead. This was amusing at first for the team but quickly drove them crazy with repair bills and just losing time to people running back in.

How profitable is normal mode raiding? My take is VERY. First, the loot system is kind of confusing at first but cool in application. Every member of the team gets a container of some sort when a raid boss dies. Inside that container can be a token for a class-appropriate piece of gear, or commendations which you can eventually use to purchase gear. It kind of sounded like Christmas on Mumble every time a boss died as people opened their “presents”. Technically, I think, this isn’t a whole lot different than when a boss died in WoW and only dropped 2 pieces of gear, but the random bag idea seemed to be more fun for everyone.

The gear itself made my jaw drop. As a relatively new level 50 character, the upgrades are huge. Our slightly undergeared offtank said he literally gained 1000 hit points from upgrading his hat from a boss drop. That may have been a slightly exuberant exaggeration, but everyone was pretty awed by the upgrades.

I reserve my final opinion until I can see it all first hand, of course, but the initial impression is that normal mode raids are right on target!

For the first week of SWTOR all I heard about was how much everyone hated Huttball. It was hardly surprising: Huttball introduces some new concepts to the instanced PvP genre, and it was a little scary and foreign to us WoW/RIFT players. (A battleground/warzone with its own skill button? WAT.) Now a few weeks later it seems like people are warming up to Huttball because, hey, it introduces some new concepts to the instanced PvP genre.

Huttball emphasizes teamwork more than any other PvP map that I have played in an MMO. One can just go in and blithly fight other players, but your game is going to end in two minutes when the other team has 6 goals to your 0. Of course I can’t actually sum up how to win in Huttball in a mere two steps, but after playing a billion games this weekend I think there are two things that if applied will enable your team to win a lot more.

Step One: HUTTS DON’T HAVE FEET

No wait, that’s not it.

Step One: THROW THE BALL

The vast majority of touchdowns in football (yes, real Earth football) are done by very slowly moving the ball up the field using shorter passes. On rare occasions someone will get the ball and have the run of their life, zooming past the other team’s defenses and scoring a goal, then doing a little dance. You frequently see the latter event happen at the end of a football movie, mostly because that kind of touchdown is exciting and heroic and inspiring and almost never happens in real life.

This lesson can be applied to Huttball. When you pick up that ball or it is passed to you, you are suddenly going to have your moment to shine. It’s a movie and you are the quarterback who came from humble beginnings and through adversity learned the true meaning of teamwork/family/Christmas and now you will just heroically run this ball across half the map to the goal zo– oh wait, an Operative stunned you and then a couple of Inqs showed up and now you are dead on the ramp.

Sadly, we are not all movie heros or famous football players. The chances of you getting that miracle running goal are pretty small, so pass the dang ball. (Put the “Throw the Huttball” ability on your hotbars before starting!)

Step Two: BE SOMEWHERE TO CATCH THE BALL

It takes two to tango and to successfully pass a huttball. As discussed above the most common method of moving a football across a field is small passes. This means that at the start of a neutral ball or if you are helping defend the ball carrier, you want to be in front of the carrier and in their line of sight. If you are ranged, get up high and make yourself available for passes. If your ball carrier is in sight of the goal line, go stand behind it so they can pass it to you and score immediately.

Of course this step needs to be taken in moderation — it doesn’t help to be waiting at the goal line for a pass when your ball is possessed by the enemy team and halfway across the field. But when you do have possession, good passes will absolutely dominate the game. Keep that ball moving to your goal line! I’ve seen teams of low levels beat teams of all 50s with smart huttball handling.

I’ve been having a great time with PvP and Huttball, and I can’t wait to get to level 50 and put together a guild team. See you on the playing field!

I haven’t written much this week despite playing a lot because … I haven’t been sure what to say. 90% of my game time this last week has been in SWTOR, and I suspect that pattern will be maintained at least through the holidays. However, as someone who tried to not be too spoiled on the game before it launched and who hasn’t gotten past level 20 yet, I don’t really feel qualified to say anything about the game beyond “It’s fun!”.

So, um, if you were wondering.. SWTOR is fun.

I suppose I could add some value to this post by giving a few newbie tips I’ve picked up.