SWTOR: A new home

We've done it, we've found a guild! And it seems to be a damn nice one, too. We dismissed the thought of a raiding kin because we're also raiding in Lord of the Rings Online and don't want to commit to four days a week, and then we talked to an old friend and he just invited us to his, that included some other old acquaintances of us as well. They raid a bit, but also are a social guild, so it seemed perfect for us. What happened then, was not really what I anticipated...

Guild chat, along the lines of:

Member 1: Hmm, only 7 on for the raid tonight.

Member 2: I rather go watch the football finale, to be honest.

Member 1: Tiger and Rav, would you like to come?

Me: Erm, are you serious? You do realize that we kinda dinged level 50 yesterday, right? Like, literally.

Member 1: We've never serious.

Me: Just saying, inviting us will result in certain death.

Member 1: Sounds good, you're in.

So there we went, with our amazingly crap gear (I was wearing level 41 homemade implants and other horrors), to our first Operation ever. And apparently that was...

Eternity vault 

in Story mode, and I was supposed the heal the buggers. Which was actually good, because I've never DPS'ed before and my gear, though crap, is totally focused on alacrity (= diminished inductions). It was sort of scary, though, to be responsible of keeping people alive right away.

This Balrog-like fiery boss ("Gharj") could've known it wasn't going to end well when he saw himself confronted with this wood of lightsabers. This was pretty fun, jumping around a bit, healing everyone back up when we were together. He didn't live long.

This was Storymode, but I must admit that I'm not really sure why we had to fight this giant Rakata ("Soa"). Either way, we did. Note how I'm still wearing the boring brown Corellia sage robe here.

This one was actually a bit tricky and luckily the other healer knew where to jump and when to take a short pause and heal everyone up with Salvation. I was trying to be a good healing bot and follow the orders, and luckily we made this one too.

But this was not all, no, apparently they thought we didn't die enough, so we had to try harder at a place called:

Karagga's Palace  

Also known as the place of the "Hutt with the Hat". Apparently you can win that ridiculous hat that the fat brown Hutt on the picture below is wearing.

Did you notice my awesome, rose-ring parakeet coloured new robe? I was trying to pass at stuff that dropped in Eternity Vault, but it didn't really work (it probably all was crap to them and the other healer already got everything) and they gave me two pieces of the Columni set, which gave me a set bonus and was like hundred times better than what I was wearing. These guys are far too nice for me.

I love the picture above, showing the first boss of Karagga's Palace. I can't recall exactly what he did, but we apparently beat him, because we ended up...

...dead here, at the third boss ("Something Crusher"), where you can see the tragic happening. We were eaten alive! Only once, though, after that we made it.

Experience

This night was... So. Much. Fun. It was incredibly nice of my guildmates to take two rookies like us with them and we had so many laughs on Mumble (the voice program they use, it's much like Ventrilo). It was all very overwhelming to me. I hadn't expected that the Operations would feel all that new to me. In Lord of the Rings Online I always have a good sense of what's going on, even if I have never done the fight before. Now I realize that five years of playing Lord of the Rings Online has just made me very accustomed to recognizing mechanics in that game, and I'll have to develop the same reflexes in Star Wars. Still, it would have been a totally different story if I would never ever have raided at all.

For healing I'll need some more experience to get the hang of it. For many fights it seems to boil down to if you need to save your big AoE heal ("Salvation") for a certain spot or not, and that wasn't always very clear. I might have been a bit too hesitant with it because of that at certain times. However, the few wipes we had were more due to tanking at the wrong spot and that sort of thing than due to lack of healing, I think (hope). Of course, now I've said this, the other healer of the group is probably going to come to me and will say he had a terrible workload because of me sucking, hehe. Nah, I think there is hope here.

Now I just feel really humbled at all the kindness offered to me tonight and want to stick around and do something nice to them back in the future. We stopped the raid because it was getting late, but we went on with a small group doing other things, of which I will tell in later posts. I ended up going to bed at 3 am with a very happy feeling.