Kephess has bad breath...

Operation: 16-man Hard Mode Explosive Conflict

Character: Level 55 Sentinel (DPS)

I was the PuG in this group. It was 14-members from the same guild, and myself and another DPS were the two odd-men-out.

It was an interesting run all around.

I was actually directed by the Ops leader when we were waiting to start Firebrand/Stormcaller to "tone down my side conversation" on their Ventrilo server... I was absolutely not a talkative one that night, as the members of their guild were having some pretty racy inside conversation that I wasn't really a party to, but oh well... I figured I was there to smack things with my twin lightbats, not make friends.

It's not that I don't like you, it's just that the sound of your voice makes me want to kill myself.

They had quite the interesting strategy for Firebrand/Stormcaller actually... They assigned two healers, to run around about 40 meters in front of Firebrand to kite missiles/spikes. They did nothing but kite. No healing, no helping with dps. Nothing. JUST kited missiles/spikes. It still took several attempts to drop the tanks, because people kept killing the shield generators. (UGH!!!)

Anyway.... The pinnacle of this operation, was when we got to Kephess at the end. Our dps was good, and we were having to stop dps'ing the walker during the second bomber phase so we wouldn't kill him before the polarity droid phase. So the dps wasn't a problem, nor was handling the different mechanics. The problem.... (which made us wipe FIVE times) was that after Kephess was hitting 60% and casting his debuff on the tank, requiring a swap.... the tank that was debuffed (and both tanks were doing this) were NOT running to drop their Giant Purple Circles of Doom away from the group. They just let the room fill up with them, until there was nowhere left to stand.

This didn't happen once, or twice, or even three times.... It happened EVERY time we pulled. And it took a total of five attempts to finally drop him, and when he did finally die, there were only 2 people left alive. Myself, and the other pug DPS. (Thank God for Guarded By the Force... hehe)

The guild running it were good sports about it. One of their healers won the Praxon Bloodline speeder from Kephess, and immediately opened up a trade window with me, and gave me the speeder, and whispered "Hey, thanks for sticking it out with us. Really appreciate it."

That gesture, made the whole thing worth it.

Oh yeah.... this story is much much better, with a screenshot:

(Character/Guild Names have been removed to protect the Innocent and the Guilty.)

This is NOT how to drop the circles....