SWTOR has bugs.  Shocking, I know…  Today it’s time to set my fan boy hat to the side and delve into the dark side.  The fact of the matter is that SWTOR has been bungling up some pretty basic things about MMO’s.  And while there are other peripheral issues that need to be addressed as well (such as the terrible GTN), today’s focus is exploits and bugs.

Want to know more about Ops bugs, PTR issues, and the ever borked Ilum?  Click on “Continue Reading”.  Or else…

Now this is some awesome stuff. SWTOR’s raids have three different difficulties to them, the easiest being Normal Mode. We were contacted by Agent Smith of Midnight Reveries whose guild took on 8-Man Eternity Vault normal mode with only four people. It’s quite a feat. We got him to share with us his story of what went on and how they did it.

Keep reading after the break for his story.

So you’re ready for operations in SW:TOR?  Eternity Vault is generally the first operation the average player experiences in the game.  It’s got some fun encounters with a few unique characteristics and mechanics to learn. The 8 man version on normal difficulty is tuned for pretty fresh 50′s.  Gear is not really a huge factor to defeat this version.  It’s more to learn the mechanics of the encounters and to get players geared for later, more difficult, operations.  All the bosses have enrage timers, so efficiency is very important.

Check out the FORCE Junkies Ancient Pylons Puzzle tool that help you and your raid to efficiently and quickly defeat this encounter. Follow this Link for the full page.

Midway through the Eternity Vault operation you are going to come across a lush jungle. That lush jungle is blocked at one end by a blast door with a chest in front of it.

Multiple animals roam around the jungle waiting to devour the unlucky operation that is not on their toes. Once you clear your way down to the middle you will see a path north and south and a pylon there. You must unlock these pylons in order to proceed past these doors for your last two encounters of this operation.
You will split up into two teams, you will take one north and one south, as you most likely already guessed. You will have to solve these independently of each other.

There are 3 blocks from left to right, and 4 of those rows from bottom to top. You will have two consoles at the bottom of the pylons to control which way to turn the center wheel. This wheel will go full circle back to the color it started but once it does match the two outside blocks it will automatically stop and you will then be able to solve the next row. It goes from bottom to top.

The German guild, Gaming Insight, has a few videos of their test runs on the first two bosses in Eternity Vault. Above is an attempt on the boss named Gharj (in German in any case), a big beast in a lava pit. It looks like SWTOR’s first raid might mirror a portion of WOW’s Molten Core. Below the cut you can see their attempt on the 1st boss.

The Eternity Vault, a remnant of a once powerful empire, is believed to house ‘The Infernal One,’ an ancient and deadly evil that poses a risk to the entire galaxy.

Spoiler Alert: This article is an analysis of the first boss fight of the Eternity Vault that was shown at New York Comic Con. If you want to avoid spoilers of end-game content, you may want to skip out on this.

With New York Comic Con coming to a close, we have ourselves plenty of exciting information (and new teasers) about The Old Republic. Today I’d like to talk about the walkthrough video for the first boss fight of the Eternity Vault, narrated by Dallas Dickinson. Not only is this a fantastic sneak peek into what we can expect from end-game content, but it can also give us valuable insight into how Bioware approaches raid design. If you haven’t already, check out the video above or on Bioware’s new Operations page.

G4TV interviews James Ohlen where he describes Hutball and Operations.

Like the demonstration at Gamescom, SWTOR had a demonstration, with a twist, of Eternity Vault, SWTOR’s first disclosed “Operation” which is a 8 or 16 man dungeon or raid. The twist was that they picked out a number of players, at random, from the audience to play the game in front of everyone.

The difficulty of this encounter was set at easy-mode and the players almost defeated it. For many this was probably the first time they got their hands on the game. We think they would of defeated the encounter if the one guy didn’t release!

From the SWTOR Panel in PAX 2011, we got a quick preview of some other scenes within the Eternity Vault.