Phew, an exciting week!
I was lucky and a spot opened up in my new guild’s newbie raid, so I got to do Story Mode Terror From Beyond and then Veteran Eternity Vault yesterday. So January 22th 2012 to November 12th 2018 that’s… nearly 6 years and 10 months. Also apparently we really did Nightmare mode back then, according to my achievements – it’s just puzzling that I didn’t have the Veteran 8 man clear achievements (only Normal), but those “Archived” ones show “Master mode”, i.e. old Nightmare mode. It’s weird.
Got some nice drops, so I’m at Item Rating 246 now – the first pieces not from Command Chests. It also was really fun, raiding for the first time since 4.5 years? I guess I stopped with WoW raids in early 2014. Wasn’t particularly challenging, though – the whole team being quite well equipped, everyone except me kinda knowing what to do, and then it was only SM and VM, not really hard – I mean we 7 manned Veteran EV, and one DPS was in tanking gear, that’s why needed 2 tries on the first 2 bosses. I died more than most others, but I wasn’t always in last place (from 3/4 DPS), so I’m really happy with the result. I’m not hooked again and want to RAID RAID RAID again soon, but I’d love to see all the Operations and I guess Veteran would be doable, even if I was capable I’m absolutely not keen on regular Master mode raiding 😛
I just need to read up on my rotations, on stationary fights I was overheating all the time and thus DPS suffered.
Also managed to finish the Conquest on three chars again, for a total contribution of roughly 60k.
All in all the “be in a guild again” is a really cool experience – having people to chat, and it’s low key right now without mandatory attendance and I can do a little to contribute (helping to conquer a planet, just helped someone with a fight in a Veteran chapter) and I’m getting rewards (for the planet conquest) and the opportunity to go on a raid. I guess that sounded a bit exploitative, but I don’t see taking something from anyone – I didn’t join for phat loots, so I see it as a win-win.
PS: I totally went through this post again and replaced “Heroic” with “Veteran” – I hate this change.
- Normal Mode – Story Mode
- Heroic Mode – Veteran Mode
- Nightmare Mode – Master Mode
PPS: Cheers to Archarius of Tulak Hord who wanted to get the “50 people in the Stronghold achievement” and asked in General while promising 5m – and actually handed it out to a long queue of people 🙂
Glad to hear you had fun! Getting involved in a guild opens up all kinds of new avenues, even if you’re only doing it casually. 🙂
I wouldn’t take veteran mode EV as an indication of what other veteran modes are like. It’s by far the easiest one and more in line with most other story modes.
And I, too, hate the new difficulty naming conventions (though “heroic” for raid difficulty is WoW terminology, in SWTOR it used to be just “hard”). Even two years after they were officially changed I still alternate between old and new terms. The worst thing is that it’s not even consistent, because sometimes it’s like you listed here, and other times veteran is what used to be called story mode while master is what used to be hard.
I know about the difficulty, but on the other hand I used my pure leveling rotation, didn’t really come prepared, and we were 7. I do think years of raiding in WoW prepared me enough I would get the hang of it again quickly. For Veteran, that is, not Master. I just don’t think I want to invest the time. I’m not even sure I am happy with this spec or even character, but it doesn’t seem to be so different as e.g. WildStar was. WoW general raiding knowledge applies 100% – including tab targeting problems on bosses that are too big, like Terror. I was literally laughing and facepalming when having it targeted in spite of the raid leader warning us 😛