SWTOR 5.10.1 PTS Refresh: The Geonosian Queen Lair Is Nearly Ready

BioWare announced the release of SWTOR 5.10.1 to the Public Test Server (PTS), which includes the new lair boss on Ossus. Meanwhile a small hotfix is being patched to the live servers on January 15, fixing some of the issues left-over from the 5.10 Update back in December!

SWTOR 5.10.1 Refresh from January 11th

The Mutated Geonosian Queen lair boss was added to PTS just before the Christmas Holiday. It was quite unfinished and unpolished. The raid features a single boss encounter, available in both 8-man and 16-man in Story and Veteran difficulties.

The refresh of PTS from Friday, January 11th, updated the encounter a bit, but not quite to the point, where it’s all ready for publish yet. The next refresh is expected to “nail most everything down” as SWTOR Operations Designer Matt Pucevich said on the SWTOR forums.

Having played through Ossus Dailies and visiting various new and old vendors, you might be wondering where your Main Hand and Off-Hand tokens are! They were not released with 5.10. The Lair Boss will reward them to you. Unless the studio changes their plans for some reason before the release of 5.10.1.

Below you will find the patch notes for this PTS Update.

Ossus

• Slightly adjusted the art at the phase entrance to the Hive of the Mountain Queen lair (the area behind the phase gate is now a hallway corner, as opposed to the creepy plane of nothingness that was eating the phase gate VFX).

Mutated Geonosian Hive

General

• Falling into the chasm within the hive will now properly trigger a fade to black fall death (and helpfully deposit your body at the entrance, as is tradition).
• Some Geonosians have been embiggened and embeefened!
  • Geonosian Viscounts and Grenadiers are now Elite (gold star), up from Strong (silver star).
  • Caustic Drones outside the Queen’s chamber are now Strong (silver star), up from Standard (no star).
• Elite Guards (the big sword bugs not in the queen’s room) are now immune to knockbacks. Royal Guards (the big sword bugs in the Queen’s room) are still vulnerable to knockbacks.
• Futzed around a bit with the Geonosian Grenadier’s ability timings.

Mutated Geonosian Queen

The encounter itself seems to be in a decent spot, if maybe a tad on the short side of things. I’m sticking to my original plan of seeing how this encounter players at 252 instead of 248 with the first refresh. We’ll take a closer look at things (and the difficulty feedback you all have provided) for the next refresh.

There’s still going to be some VFX weirdness with things like the Growth Hormone projectile trails, etc., as our FX people are just now circling back to do their polish pass. As a note, I agree with the general sentiment that the egg states need to be more visually noticeable, and we’ll explore some ways to make them pop a bit more, without overwhelming the screen with everything that’s going on (which is a major concern for this encounter).

All Modes

• The Mutated Geonosian Queen will now properly block resurrection/zone in while engaged.
• Added an activation animation + FX for Save the Queen! that scales based on the radius stack.
• Reduced Save the Queen’s channel time by 0.4s, and added that to the post-channel GCD so that the new visuals have time to play comfortably (2.0s+1.0s -> 1.6s+1.4s). The ability still occupies the Queen for a total of 3.0s, so this won’t mechanically change the encounter.
• Phase Walk is dispelled upon jumping into the Queen’s room.

Veteran

• The Mutated Geonosian Queen encounter has been rescaled from 248 to 252 for funzies (yay PTS)! Let’s see how this plays.
• The Queen’s enrage cast (Royal Indignation) now actually enrages the queen in Veteran mode (instead of doing nothing).
• [VETERAN 16]Fixed an issue where the Queen’s Mass Pheromonic Blast was dealing double the intended damage, which was kind of funny, in a way…

SWTOR PTS: How to Create and Boost a Character

Print

Quick guide to help you create a new character, boost it to 70 and gear it up for testing on the SWTOR PTS.

Instructions

1. Create a new Character.
2. On your origin world, near where your character starts, you should find a "Level Booster" terminal, and an "Odessen Teleporter" terminal.
3. Click on the "Level Booster" terminal to set your character to level 70, and receive 500,000 credits (you can continue clicking the Level Booster terminal repeatedly to receive an additional 500,000 credits per click).
4. When you have as many credits as you'd like, click the "Odessen Teleporter" terminal to be moved to the Odessen landing area.
5. Gear your character with the various PTS vendors located at the Odessen Landing. The following vendors are available in this first refresh:

• Tier 4 Artifact Gear (248)
• Tier 4 Artifact Components (248 Mods / Enhancements / Crystals / Barrels / Hilts)
• Tier 5 Artifact Gear (258)
• Tier 5 Artifact Components (258 Mods / Enhancements / Crystals / Barrels / Hilts)
• Augments (228/236/240) and Kits (Mk10)

This is it. Walk into the phase gate at the end of the Lightbridge to Nowhere at the Odessen Landing to enter the New Operation Testing Instance

Notes

Keep in mind, to be able to access the Public Test Server, you need to first install it (basically installing the game a second time on your drive. You also need an active subscription to the game. The PTS is not available to F2P or Preferred players currently.

SWTOR 5.10b HOTFIX

Leaving PTS aside, tomorrow, on January 15th, the SWTOR dev team has a small hotfix patch ready for you. This update will happen during a six hours long maintenance from 12 to 18 GMT. The reason for the extended down-time is back-end upgrades the studio is finishing to their hardware.

Below are the patch notes that community Manager Eric Musco listed on the forums:

Details:
DATE: 15 January 2019
TIME: 4:00AM – 10:00AM PST (1200 – 1800 GMT)
VERSION: 5.10b

• Granny has been found! Various decorations will now show their correct appearance instead of the text “Missing Granny”.
• Galactic headhunters have been successful in restoring a number of male head options which were not showing up as intended.
• Thanks to the work of Alliance diplomats, Darth Hexid’s bitter grudge against Paxton Rall has been partially alleviated; Players who acquire Paxton Rall will no longer see Darth Hexid become unsummonable. Note: Players who are already in this state will be resolved in 5.10.1.
• To prevent exploitive behavior, the treasure chest has been removed from Ood Bnar’s Cave in the Ancient Ruins on Ossus.
• Corrected an issue where in rare circumstances players would score every time they picked up the Huttball.

It’s pointless to mention that these are far from the only issues in SWTOR at the moment. The developers are aware, as Musco says in his post:

We know there are still some key issues that have not yet been resolved following 5.10. Just a couple of examples are set bonuses not stacking properly and Companions in odd states following 5.10. These issues are scheduled to be resolved in 5.10.1 in February.