I logged into SWTOR last night with lightly ambitious plans to work on my bounty hunter (who is now on Dromund Kaas, has a companion, and three speeders to boot). And while I did run one instance with him as a healer — with not one, but TWO heals at my disposal! — my plans got waylaid when my guild invited me to join in on a story-mode Ravagers operation.
Sure, why not? I don’t think I’ve ever done an op in SWTOR before, certainly not this past year due to the free-to-play restriction. But now I’m part of that special sub club. I had no illusions that I was going to add a great amount of DPS to the team (I’m only just geared enough for an entry-point to hard modes and operations), but I guess a little is better than nothing.
It’s always weird when you step into an instance where everyone else knows the fights intimately and you’re just struggling to figure out what the heck is going on. While everyone was kindly explaining over Mumble what to do, it still made me feel like a little child who was being babysat: “No, Timmy, don’t eat worms. Don’t stand in the fire, either.” But we had good healers and I didn’t die, so at least it wasn’t as embarassing as it could’ve been.
The one cool thing about raids is that the devs tend to put some really cool visuals into them. I rather enjoyed this romp around the backwoods (so to speak) of Rishi. The fights weren’t too tough — story mode and all — but I’ve been having some problems with this computer that it’s struggling to handle everything that’s going on. I even reduced my graphics to medium, but still most of the fights were stuttery, slide show affairs that further cemented the feeling of being semi-useless.
Although considering that I haven’t really played my operative in a good while, I was pleased that my combat rotation came back to me rather fast.
I think my guild liked me being there simply to show off what they had seen a hundred times before. Everyone had a good laugh about a couple of cutscenes where suddenly your character is surrounded by a team that’s made up of complete strangers, including Fat Jedi and Astronaut Dude. Where did they come from? Where do they go? It’s all a mystery.
In the end we were victorious and I came away with a small pile of loot upgrades, including two new implants, a couple of headpieces, and more. I followed up the operation by heading back to Yavin-4 and farming slicing nodes for a while. Another nice benefit of being a subscriber is no more 350K credit cap; now I can get as rich as I want. I’m rounding on a million credits now, although I don’t have any specific purchase in mind. Everyone’s saving up for the Yavin stronghold, which might be interesting to buy.
Bio Break 
Syp in an operation? Has hell frozen over? ^^
I LOLed at your commentary about the complete group of strangers… I honestly don’t know what’s up with that either. In the early operations you would only ever see the rest of the group from a distance in cut scenes, or from an odd angle that only showed their boots or something like that. I just assumed that the game was actually rendering the other player characters! The first time they showed them up close I was like WTF…