Keeping the blog alive with idealchooser.com

Today isn't about SWTOR gameplay for a change, it's more about myself, the author of this blog and the blog future in general. If you've been following my blog, you know I've been pretty consistent in working on it. I was very proud to see the interest which really fueled my motivation to keep posting. In 1 month, since the blog was created, I got over 600 page views, that means over 600 times people either found an article and checked it out or found it interesting enough to keep coming back for more articles.

I know it's not a huge number compared to other sites, but personally I find it really encouraging that this many people got a glimpse of my work and even more so, the fact many of them kept coming back and subscribed to my feed.

When I'm not writing this blog I'm working on a shopping comparison and alerts site idealchooser.com. It's still very new and growing and I improve it every day, this is my full time job.

As you can imagine, keeping up the blog takes a lot of my time and every minute spent on it, is a minute less I have to work on my site and lately I'm finding myself constantly having to make the decision if I should invest more at the blog, or at the site.

I came up with a possible solution that I hope will work out. First of all, this is it, letting my blog readers know about idealchooser.com. I'm hoping it will make you curious to check it out. I really think the site is great for finding online deals, by gathering data from a huge amount of merchants, you can find many offers for anything you are looking for, helping you grab the best possible deal available. In addition the price drop alert option is a very nice way to be aware of price drops as soon as they happen.

If a small number of my blog visitors will check out this site and even a small number of these will make idealchooser.com a place they check out when they are looking to buy something online, this will make my time investment at the blog totally worth it.

So if you want to help me keep this blog running, please check out idealchooser.com, if you are willing to click the "like" button at the site, that's even better. I hope you will find it useful and this blog will end up giving idealchooser.com additional exposure.

Meanwhile, I also added a small, not annoying ad at the blog page, this will be the only advertising method from now on.

Thank you very much for reading this, I hope you like my blog so far and will also find idealchooser.com useful. I will be back to my usual SWTOR posts almost every week day as usual.

Endgame Eternity Vault encounters

I found the encounters in EV to be really interesting. The bosses are very different and unique and the fights make sure each participant of the group knows what he's doing. I'm going to discuss the bosses, this isn't meant as a complete walkthrough of EV, but more to point out what I think about the different encounters, my personal likes and dislikes and the main things to expect both as a participant and as a group trying to progress through EV.

I'll number the bosses and not name them, in case people want to go fresh and not know what to expect.

1st boss: This is a very straight forward encounter, the mechanics are simple, get out of bad things and use line of sight periodically to avoid a big damage of a special ability. It seems to be aimed to give people a sense of accomplishment by making sure the first encounter isn't too hard. You have to do enough DPS to take down the boss before enrage, but it's very possible. Basically any group that can clear an HM FP can also take down the first boss. Our group managed to take him down on the first try.

Operation review Eternity Vault what to expect

My guild had the first try at Operations Saturday night, we went to Eternity Vault. 1 of the 2 current operations and considered by some to be the easier one. I'll describe my experience running there as well as my observations on what to expect from your first OP.

We cleared the entire place in close to 3.5 hours. The pace was pretty relaxing, with occasional 5 minute breaks and discussions of strategy and plans. I would consider our entire group experienced and very capable, but that's just an opinion, I'm sure there are top guilds who would consider us a bunch of casuals while others, very casual players, who would consider us really hardcore. So I'll go into a bit more details about us, to give others better idea what to expect based on your own group experience and abilities.

7/8 of us ran about 10 HM before and had about 1/2 Epic (purple from HM, dailies and Tionese vendor) and half leveling gear, we could generally clear an HM with 0 or 1 unlucky wipe. About 2 nights before, 4 of us ran The False Emperor for the first time and wiped twice, once on HK and another on the last boss, who I won't name to avoid spoilers. The 8th person was less experienced, with only 2-3 HM runs and mostly leveling gear. Still he was a capable DPS who could do his job well. I guess this can give a general idea on how capable my group was, so readers can compare their own experience and know better what to expect.