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In the news, there’s the final word on the Ravagers exploit, more detail on what’s coming next week in Game Update 3.1: Conflict on Rishi, and lots more. Then in our discussion we walk through the four hard mode Flashpoints introduced in Game Update 3.0, with a few tips to make them that much easier.

1. Introduction

2. Tip of the week

Congratulations to this week’s winner, CapsSlapshot27! Thanks to Ryenke, Sabo, Tim Rogan and Nightmare for entering.

Here’s the full tip from CapsSlapshot27 for the Underlurker encounter in Temple of Sacrifice:

For those of you that have less experience on fighting Underlurker, here are some easy tips to follow to improve your groups progress on killing him.

-Pop raid buffs when dps jump in initially. This is a 4:50 enrage, but the enrage doesn’t hit as hard as you would expect. If you are lucky, your group can get 2 sets of raid buff on the boss. In addition, if a commando uses his alacrity buff first, then all other raid buffs are popped in the next 10 seconds, all those raid buffs will have a shorter cooldown, due to the increased alacrity.

-An easy way to tell if your group has enough dps is that the boss should be near 80% by the time the first set of adds spawn. If your group is more than 5% off from this target, you should focus on increasing your groups damage output. Wave 1 of adds spawn-80%, Wave 2 of adds spawn-70%, Wave 3 of adds spawn-60%, Wave 4 of adds spawn-50%, Wave 5 of adds spawn-40%, When the 6th set of add spawn, he enrages, boss should be at less than 10% at this point

-When the dps are attacking the adds, have the whole group, minus the main tank, behind the add you are attacking, then when add #1 is down, move behind the next add. This will minimize damage done to the group, and will make aoe heals easier for healers.

-Dps should all be attacking the same add, and know what order they are killing the adds. A recommended strategy for deciding which order to kill the adds is, on the first add wave, kill the adds closest to the entrance, then move towards the back add. When the boss has finished his plus mechanic, which ever add you are closest to, whether it be the closest to entrance, or the closest to exit, should be the dps’s first target and move in a line toward the opposite add.

-Try to have the whole group, minus the main tank stand behind one rock, or 2 rocks close together, and the main tank standing behind a rock on the other side of the room, this will allow people to predict the orientation of the plus mechanic

-Mark the 3 players going to the left (or right) arm. This is so if a player needs to see what side of the boss to go on, they can just look for markers, and immediately recognize “do I go to players with marks above their heads, or do I go to a players without marks above their heads.”

-If your group has a Vanguard as a tank, use riot gas right before he channels rage storm. This make a significant amount of the damage dealt by rage storm miss anyone struggling to get behind a rock

-The tank on the boss should stay away from the adds, as they will take an added amount of damage which will be difficult for the healers. As a vanguard, I stand 10 meters away from the add that the dps will down last, have the boss in between me and the add, and use ion storm (conal attack) as often as possible to do damage to the boss, as well as to the add.

-There will be 5 sets of adds, 5 collapses/rage storms, and 5 pluses that you will have to deal with before the boss enrages. It is recommended to only skip the 5th set of adds but still perform the collapse and plus mechanic for the 5th round.

-If your group is having a bit of trouble dps-ing the boss, the off-tank can switch to a dps, as 2 tanks are not a necessity on this boss. This is not something a group should rely on every week, but this will improve dps a bit if you choose to use this method. Keep in mind on the plus phase, anyone can stand behind the boss, it doesn’t have to be someone with a high threat, as I have experimented and threat levels don’t matter (excluding the maintank). I personally would recommend a dps with heavy armor stand in the back though.

The last tip is more of a “check” this is a recommendation of what your groups stats should be for clearing this boss. Keep in mind you can have lower stats and still clear it, but these are RECOMMENDED numbers
-Tank Mitigation rating 3400 (mitigation rating calculated by shield+absorb+defense)
-No minimum offtank mitigation rating
-Both tanks pulling close to 1400 dps
-Each dps pulling 3500 on dummy
-Healers with gear rating of 9200+ (our guild totals this number as mainstat+power+crit+surge+ alacrity+forcepower or tech power)

Please send your tips to ootinicast@gmail.com by next Wednesday for a chance to win a Taunfawn or M8-R3 droid code, courtesy of BioWare, and an OotiniCast-provided Cartel Market pack from the latest shipment.

3. Holofeed

• Eric Musco (Community Manager) has made his promised post about the actions taken against those who participated in the Ravagers exploit.
• In Ranked PvP Season 4, BioWare will be actively identifying those players who are win trading on a weekly basis, and after a single warning will subsequently apply some harsh consequences. He elaborated on how the process used will avoid false positives.
• Courtney Woods has provided a preliminary schedule for the Community Cantinas planned for 2015. This is subject to change, and should not be considered final until the official post has been made by BioWare.
  • PAX East (Hyatt Grand Regency in Boston on 7 March)
  • Star Wars Celebration (Anaheim) around April 16-19
  • SDCC (San Diego Comic-Con) around July 9-12
  • Gamescom (Cologne, Germany) around August 6-9
  • PAX Prime (Seattle) around August 29-September 1
  • NYCC (New York Comic-Con) around October 8-11
• We now have a page on the official site dedicated to Game Update 3.1: Conflict on Rishi which will be deployed on Tuesday 10 February. Tait Watson has also posted some preliminary patch notes which are subject to change.
• While Tait’s personal crusade to fix Codex and Achievement issues continues, there are higher priority issues that need to be addressed first.
• The guidelines for the Bug Report forum have been updated by Tait, along with a post describing how to write the ideal bug report.

4. Community

We’d like to recommend The Usual Podcast, a new show featuring long-time community stalwart Marshall Carr and his friend Will. It will cover SWTOR, Star Wars in general, and pop culture.

Another new podcast is Casual Core Radio, starring Drew (Geldarion) and Joe Foran. It’s a general gaming show discussing SWTOR and other games (mainly MMOs) that they are playing.

For anyone interested in the SWTOR economy, and extracting credits from it, we highly recommend the new blog swtoreconomics.com. You can follow its author on Twitter using @SWTOREconomics.

Swtorista has created an image gallery (more details about it here) showing a number of secret (generally unknown and/or hard to obtain) pets, which includes notes on how to get them.

Marisi of the progression guild Zorz has created an online non-real-time combat log analysis site called Parsely. You can read all about it here.

5. Force Feedback

It seems that Turg thinks that Sages are particularly popular in PvP at the moment. Can’t really see why:

Chinn’ook and Damon Homer both recommend that you check out the Star Wars-themed Humble Bundle. You’ve got under two weeks to grab it!

Chong has discovered that Cathar eyes glow in the dark:

Courtesy of Reddit user Hahawl, it seems that a new character species has made a surprise appearance on the PTS!

Kuze has a plan for rescuing the now not-to-compelling Contraband Slot Machines:

I believe the issue with the contraband slot machine is using the night life slot machine game design instead of a new one. Bioware should have based the contraband and future slots off of the rewards given. Here is just one example of how I would have implemented the contraband slot machine. The goal with stronghold items (like this one) should be to make things fun, unique, and resourceful to a point, without affecting other aspects of the game.

Here is a quick overview of the current machine play style and rewards. The current machine will only result in 3 options when activated.

1. Loss = Nothing.

2. Normal Reward = Contraband Chip. 

3. Jackpot = Everything else (All three tiers of crafting tokens, all three tiers of reputation items, cartel certificate, and walker mount).

Just by looking at this setup you can clearly see some issues. The functionality of how the slot machine works should have been developed based of the value, level, and number of rewards. After the basic design was completed the win ratios should have been applied. This is the format I will take below. First I will layout the game design and then give my quick opinion of ratios.

My design would have 4 options not 3.

1. Loss = Nothing 

2. Lesser Reward = Contraband Chip, Green reputation item, Green crafting token.

3. Medium reward = Contraband Chip x2, Blue reputation item, Blue crafting token, Pet from that respective shipment.

4. Jackpot = Purple reputation item, Purple crafting token, Certificate, Mount from the respective shipment, Walker mount.

Ratios: I don’t have time at this moment to give specific percentages but I would definitely make the jackpots hits rare and keep the special reward ratios very low.

Given this design Bioware could breakdown the rewards in such a way that the machines would stay useful and fun without disrupting the game play for other people. Having a more diverse reward system keeps things interesting and gives Bioware a little more room for tweaking ratios. A weekly spend limit by account or individual player debuff can be injected if needed to keep normal players, bots, and gold farmers from going overboard.

6. Outro

On the show this week were Chill (@BrandonLStarr, twitch.tv/chillswtor), Teo (@jasonetheridge), Redna (@R3DN4, twitch.tv/r3dn4) and Kuze (@Kuze, YouTube).

Information about our guilds on The Harbinger, Ootini Knights (Republic) and Ootini Rage (Empire), can be found here.

You can email questions and comments about the show to ootinicast@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter via @OotiniCast. Check out our website, ootinicast.com, which has links to our presence on Google+ and Facebook. You can subscribe to us on iTunes, and listen to us on Stitcher and Spreaker. We record the show live every Wednesday at 4:30pm Pacific, goto ootinicast.com/live to find out how to join in!