Behind the Scenes - Episode 1

I've been so busy lately doing theorycrafting and optimal gear rations - answering questions and keeping the site maintained that I just haven't had time to write about the daily stuff that goes on being a tank in SWTOR.  It isn't all hard work and guide writing, there is a lot of fun to be had.

Actually, if I wasn't having fun, I wouldn't be playing - it's really that simple.  People ask if I'm going to play GW2, or D3 or whatever is coming out and I always have the same answer - I'm still having fun with SWTOR, so I don't need to do something else.  (Really I don't have time to do anything else, there's so much to do!)

Anyway, this will be my first installment on the stuff that I don't necessarily save to write guides about, but what I do on a regular basis to just enjoy playing the game.

Naked dance party while waiting to fight Kephess

No Trinity run would be complete without a naked dance party at some stage while waiting for everyone to catch up either from wiping or coming back from AFK.  I take full blame for this, I started it as a joke to tease our Guild leader and it spread from there.  Adenus dove right in after only small prompting from me.  Mentu has recently joined us as well.  My evil plan is to win everyone over and have a huge naked dance party waiting just inside Firebrand's door for Ariana one day.

The above picture was from one of our various EC runs.  You'll see Adenus on the left, Mentu in the middle with his Kephess hat, and me on the right - no, my helmet never comes off - one day Tanno super glued it on as a prank and it's stuck ever sense.

Julia's hat - you'll never get it!

Similarly no KP run would be complete without teasing Julia about Karagga wearing his hat.  For those of you that don't know, Karagga drops the hat seen in the above picture - but the drop percentage is so low that almost no one has one.  It is therefore one of the few sought after cosmetic enhancements in the game.

My theory is that if someone in the group has a hat it will never drop.  Someone recently told me that someone got two of them, so I'm probably wrong and the percentage is just obscenely low.  In my own experience.  The first time I've run KP with a fresh group the hat has dropped, and then has never dropped again.

A real dance party with all the trimmings

Can you tell we like to have dance parties?  Here we are with the dance screen and the party time disco ball going.  I think someone dropped a holo dancer in the back as well.  This is what happens when you leave a bunch of MMO players in a closed in space for a long period of time with nothing else to do.

3 cap NC for the win!

The weekend wouldn't be complete without some PvP on my Guardian.  One of the things that I have the most fun with is jumping on him for a few warzone matches.  Nothing like finishing off Novarre Coast than with a 3 cap to win it 100 - 0 and max out on medals.  


I've recently started to pvp more and more since that has something tangible for me to work toward.  I'm trying to make out my Guardian with WH gear, which as you know takes forever unless you're running in a ranked group.  Unfortunately after my first experience with ranked we haven't gone back - I'm not sure if that's because no one is interested, or everyone has gotten really busy lately.  There used to be tons of people on all the time, now ... not so much.  Maybe it's a summer thing?


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For the rest of the time that I don't take screenshots I'm usually:
- Running dailys on multiple characters  
- Sending out my companions on crafting missions.  
- Collecting mats for my biochem character so I can outfit myself in stims and adrenals for the next scheduled raid time
- Levelling an alt
- REing stuff for augment kits to finish augmenting my 4 gear sets.
- Doing group finder for BH coms

Oh! Speaking of group finder.  Last night I hooked up with some Trinity guys and we played Flashpoint Roulette (get a group together and queue for the group finder HM FPs).  We ended up with Maelstrom Prison.  Which is a pretty quick FP in general.

I said something about it not taking long, Adenus said something about one of the groups he ran with recently doing a speed run where the tank was crazy and just didn't stop.  He said something silly like they were done in 18 minutes.  I was tanking at the time and asked him if that was as challenge.  He smiley faced me, so I said "accepted" ... and so began our MP speed run.

I burned through trash, tanked stuff on the run, pulled, twisted and bounced stuff around to make sure it was killing me while I was basically ignoring it and running to the next objective.  I was on my shadow so I had tons of utility for a run like this - sprint, pull, aoe snap aggro, stealth and CC.

There were a few places we accidentally pulled stuff cause I was too far ahead of the group.  Other places I could have skipped more stuff if I'd been more active with my out of combat CC.  We didn't skip any bosses and pretty much burned a path straight from start to finish.

The official time was 18 minutes 50 seconds.  Adenus went back to his combat logs to get our start and end times.  He also said that his estimate must have been way off because we were tons faster than the group he'd mentioned previously.  After a bit of discussion we theorized that it would be possible to finish MP in about 15 minutes.  In the future all FPs will be done in a similar manner.