Return of the Gree!

The Gree event is back once again! And I'm actually kind of excited about it this time around.

It's interesting for me to observe how my feelings about this event have changed and still continue to change over time. As a general rule of thumb, I like one-off world events every so often, because they feel special and provide me with a reason to throw myself into the game full force for a limited period of time. Frequently repeating events on the other hand I'm not nearly as fond of. I remember all those seasonal events in WoW and how they were pretty fun the first time around, but eventually there were so many of them and they were all so samey that they became just another token grind to go through once a month or so.

Now with the Gree, I was super excited when they arrived for the first time, because I basically treated the whole thing the same way I had treated the Rakghoul plague and the Grand Acquisition Race before then, which were one-off events at the time. It was exciting and I wanted to experience every aspect of it to the fullest, because who knew when I would get to see anything like it again?

Then the whole thing came back a mere two weeks later and I was decidedly underwhelmed. I still participated in it a bit, but it felt like a bit of a let-down to have all the "specialness" drained from the event within such a short time. By the time it rolled around for the third time (though this was admittedly after a slightly longer break), I didn't really care anymore. I think I did the quest chain for the pet on one of my alts, but mostly the whole thing just passed me by. I had maxed out my reputation with the Gree long ago, bought my Blue Sphere, and everything else I felt pretty "meh" about.

Today on the other hand I was positively hyped to see the Gree make another comeback. Why? Two reasons: timing and some changes. It feels like it's been quite a while since the game's last significant content patch, what with 2.1 having been a pure systems patch and 2.2 having focused on nightmare mode for existing operations (which is a form of additional content in my opinion, but something for the long term that you can't necessarily jump into and do the day it comes out). Just having something different to do again was nice.

For an additional breath of fresh air, the event has now been scaled up to level 55, which doesn't make that much of a difference in terms of gameplay, but it does mean that there are suddenly rewards worth chasing again. Xenoanalyst II drops Arkanian and Underworld gear as well as a new rare mount. The dailies reward basic comms now, which - as silly as it might sound - is actually quite alluring to me, as they are needed to buy crafting recipes and materials, and I don't tend to see much of them during my normal play. It's kind of funny really, because I have elite and ultimate comms coming out of my ears due to running multiple ops every week, but basic commendations require you to do the Makeb dailies or run level 50 hardmode flashpoints at random, neither of which are particularly high on my list of priorities on an average day. (And you can't trade down better comms for lesser ones.) Being able to get them as a reward for a fun little round on Ilum with friends is much better.

The PvP area has also seen a big surge of renewed activity. How so? They added achievements for killing people there. It's pretty funny just how easily some players' buttons are pushed. During one round of dailies today I watched a usually pretty quiet and phlegmatic tank who pretty much never does PvP as far as I'm aware turn into a raging killing machine who leapt at everything that was red. Cause, you know... "need loads of these for the achievement"! In fact, from the looks of it you'll currently need even more than the achievements actually state, because at least the energy orb-related ones seem to be bugged in some way: we killed several people carrying orbs as a group, but not everyone got credit for every kill, and there didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to when it worked and when it didn't.

We also did a fair bit of dying of our own again, which admittedly led to a bit of PvP rage on my part ("Why didn't I have guard there? Have you guys never done this before?!") but otherwise it was all good fun.

As a bonus, the random drops from trash have been upgraded to level 55 as well and sell for a decent amount of credits on the GTN. Worthwhile entertainment all around.