Star Wars: The Old Republic is now entering the last phase of 7.1 testing on the PTS, which means that you can now test the R-4 Anomaly Operation with its final boss, Lady Dominique. This phase of testing also opens up the Manaan Daily Area.
If you want to take on Lady Dominique on story mode, you'll be able to copy a level 80 character to the PTS, head to the gear vendor and gear up for the challenge. Since Lady Dominique is the fourth and final boss, the team acknowledges that they have tried to tune her mechanics in new ways that could hopefully surprise players. In development, they figured out some of the challenges of going in this direction. According to producer Eric Musco:
“One focus in particular was how the encounter communicates to the player in terms of readability of the boss mechanics. Our VFX team did some new work throughout the Operation, so we’re looking forward to what you all think about these improvements as you go through R-4 on PTS.”
If you’ve done the rest of this new Operation on the PTS, there should be some flow from each encounter, but it’s an important acknowledgement that deciding to go with all new mechanics comes with the issue of making sure they are readable and players can follow along to create a workable strategy. Of course, this means that opening up the full Operation for playtesting gives good opportunities for feedback to be sure the final form serves.
This PTS update also opens up the Manaan Daily Area, which features several areas, and perhaps more importantly, a range of available missions similar to other Daily Areas. There are six regular missions and 3 heroic missions, 2 at heroic 2 + and 1 heroic 4. In general, this daily area is now open for you to see the new environment in Manaan and take on some quests.
For more, see the announcement at Star Wars: The Old Republic
