Pacifism Continued

Last week was Pirate Incursion week again, which meant that it was time for Pacis, my pacifist Jedi, to venture out into the world again, since Dantooine was too hostile for her and the event's quick travel option made it possible for her to go places without losing the option to return home.

I hadn't been particularly diligent doing the two daily quests on Dantooine during peace time... but I had done them often enough to get her up to level 19. Nothing much of interest happened during those routine circuits, except for that one time when so many of the Kath Hounds I tried to cure got mad at me that I didn't even manage to complete the "pet five friendly Kath Hounds" bonus. Talk about some bad luck!

Anyway, with the event on, I decided that her first order of business should be to return to Tython. While I had already fully explored it, Pacis had only been level five when she left, so I wanted to check back to see if I'd be able to do some more quests that didn't require her to fight anything.

I started off by having another poke at my class story and daring to go into the cave to confront Nalen Raloch. I couldn't remember what exactly happened in there, though I had a feeling there would be hostile mobs - but hey, I had stealth now! Indeed, Nalen summoned some flesh raiders who tried to kill me. Sadly they saw right through my stealth, but I just ran past them and out of the phase without coming to any harm. Hurray for cowardice!

I did eventually run into a dead end when I got to the part where you're supposed to defeat some training droids to earn the right to the first hilt. I'll admit: I did hesitate there, wondering if it really counted as an act of aggression to attack a training droid, but in the end I decided that this was a slippery slope and that Pacis should remain a strict non-combatant.

In terms of side missions, I dealt with the two padawans in a secret romance - it will never cease to amaze me how Bioware managed to take a situation where I think most players would naturally gravitate towards wanting to violate the Jedi code to side with the lovers and fill it with nothing but awkward and bone-headed dialogue, to the point where you really just want to turn the two of them in to be rid of them. I persisted and let them go though.

I also helped out the Jedi who wanted to analyse the memory cores of droids from the ruins - I felt a certain pride in that one since the quest said to destroy droids and scan them, but I realised that in actuality just the scanning was enough to update the quest progress. So I just waited near the entrance of the ruins and whenever another player came by and wiped out the guardians by the door on their way through, I had another couple of bodies to scan without having to lift a finger myself.

Another interesting experience was the quest to destroy the vats of flesh raider elixir - another perfectly peaceful mission I figured, until I stood in front of one and got an error message telling me that I was unable to destroy it since I didn't have a weapon equipped. D'oh! So much for vendoring my training blade because I wasn't going to need it...

I didn't want to spend money on a proper new weapon, so I just made a quick trip to my stronghold and got HK's vibroblade out of the bank - not a Shadow's preferred weapon, but using it to fight wasn't the point anyway. It just allowed me to complete the mission.

I would also have liked to help Flingeld lift his rock and to help find the missing Twi'lek boy, but neither of those quests showed up as available to me so I can only guess that they are tied to progression of the class story.

Once I'd run out of things to do on Tython (as far as I could tell) I used the shuttle to go to the fleet (which also answered my question from last time: the ability to use it is tied to level, not story progression). There I did the introductory missions for housing and crew skills. I also picked up bioanalysis, scavenging and slicing. Crafting or running missions didn't seem like a good idea for a character who'll only ever have very limited income.

Continuing to Coruscant, I was pleasantly surprised by the number of side missions I was able to complete there too: repairing network access nodes, retrieving stolen microchips and telling Nik Deleru to shove it. I'm so used to doing all the bonuses to kill x mobs that it actually took me by surprise how many main mission objectives haven't actually required any killing so far.

My only disappointment was that like on Tython, additional missions that I knew to not involve any combat were unavailable to me, presumably due to my lack of class mission progress, such as the one to intercept a parcel, to help out the security officer outside the Dealer's Den cantina, or the Gree quest chain.

As I didn't have that much time to play last week, I didn't progress any further than that before returning to Dantooine. However, the whole adventure did manage to gain Pacis another two levels and makes me feel optimistic about her next excursion: There seem to be a lot more non-combat missions than I remembered.