Master's Enigma Prepares Us for the Big Finale

I'm way behind in terms of reviewing SWTOR's most recent story update "Master's Engima", which came out in 7.8.1. In fact, 7.9 and Legacy of the Sith's finale are only mere days away! That said, I've been putting extra effort in these past couple of days to get this review out just under the wire, before there's even newer story to think about. As usual with these posts, expect full spoilers and stop reading if you want to avoid them.

"Master's Engima" starts us off with a view of Sa'har and Ri'kan in a shuttle, with Sa'har being back to being Ri'kan's prisoner. I've got to admit I groaned a bit at seeing these two again. I don't mind the Kateen siblings as characters, but their dynamic has definitely become a big stagnant. You'd think that after the big showdown where Sa'har openly turned against Ri'kan and the Hidden Chain, she'd be done with constantly begging him for forgiveness, but no, we're back to her usual MO of being meek and apologetic.

Fortunately however, we don't spend too much time on this before returning to Odessen, where our character gets notified by Lana that she urgently needs to meet with you about something. While you make your way over, you get another call, this one from either Tau or Rivix (depending on your faction, obviously) who warn you that your faction's leadership is about to descend onto Odessen to moan at you about recent developments. Even if you've been fully cooperative and open about everything with them, they are not keen on the whole business with your former ally Shae helping Malgus escape.

You do still catch up with Lana first, who tells you that the urgent business is another message from Jadus, this time telling you to go to a specific set of coordinates, with no additional information (because of course). You barely have time to think about this before your faction's leadership arrives.

They are not doing things by half either: On Republic side the Supreme Chancellor herself is there, accompanied by Admiral Rava, Master Sal-Deron, Tau, Arn, and a whole host of Republic troops. For Imperials, it's the Empress or Emperor, accompanied by Darths Krovos, Xarion and Rivix as well as Major Anri and a matching set of Imperial soldiers.

Unhappy faces as far as the eye can see, regardless of your faction. 

A confrontation ensues regardless of how helpful and nice you've been in the past, though I've heard reports that this bit feels satisfyingly more justified if you've been playing as a saboteur (I haven't had a chance to verify that one for myself yet). You get to make a whole number of important-feeling choices here, even if I think they have limited impact on the immediate story outcome. It just feels good that you get to take a stand! You can decide to tell your visitors about Jadus or not (at several opportunities) and can acquiesce to various requests or be argumentative. I can imagine some players disliking the fact that their faction leadership treats them so badly here, especially if they've been loyalists, but I absolutely loved this part. Yes to political drama in my Star Wars! Inject it right into my veins!

Critically, there's a further incident when Master Sal-Deron or Darth Krovos touch Darth Nul's holocron and get thrown across the room, which leads to you being accused of tampering with it and the Supreme Chancellor/Empress/Emperor ordering you to stay cooped up on Odessen until further notice. Obviously not great considering you were just about to follow that Jadus lead!

Tau or Rivix have the same thought and suggest that you sneak out and follow the lead anyway. (They justify it by saying that clearly someone up top, whether it's Admiral Rava, Darth Xarion or whoever, has been scheming and is baselessly turning leadership against you.) Lana is on board (as is Theron, if he's around) and concocts a plan to sneak you out through some secret passages originally utilised by Theron during his traitor days. Arn or Anri overhear and aren't exactly opposed, but both stop you briefly before you leave, expressing concern about the dangers of defying your faction and running off by yourself like that.

This next bit has you sneaking out next to Tau or Rivix while dressed up as a Republic or Imperial soldier and OMG, this part felt like it was literally made for me. I mean, objectively it wasn't that exciting in terms of gameplay, just a bit of RP slow walking through the base in disguise, but the Republic trooper disguise looked a lot like the sort of armour my trooper actually wore around level 30 or so and it was extremely nostalgic. The game seemed to acknowledge this experience with my trooper even commenting that "this takes me back". Republic trooper nostalgia overload!

You successfully sneak out and escape on a shuttle with Tau or Rivix, and you have Darth Nul's holocron with you whether you wanted it or not. (Whether to try and take it with you is one of those earlier decisions, but even if you say that no, you're happy to leave it with the Jedi or Sith, Tau or Rivix just steal it themselves. Sal-Deron and Krovos' security must suck!)

You travel to the coordinates specified by Jadus and find an odd derelict spaceship which is later revealed to be the "Enigma", formerly property of Darth Nul. You meet Jadus holding court there, posing in front of a throne and everything.

He's also traded his lobotomised cyborg followers from the base game for much cooler looking Sith troopers. In fact, it occurred to me that they look a bit like that Sith from the Disorder trailer who fights Sa'har and Master Orr before getting killed by Darth Malgus. Coincidence or extremely deep call-back? You decide!

When you quiz Jadus about what exactly he wants this time, he says that he wants to stop Malgus from using Darth Nul's machine (which Heta has already largely rebuilt, damn it) because it would just cause chaos and he wants to bring order to the galaxy. My real life reaction to this was "are you for real, bro" because wasn't Jadus' whole thing in the agent story that he also wanted to sow chaos and fear? I guess he might have changed his angle since then; I just would've liked to be able to comment on that as an agent at least. Either way, he wants you to unlock the full power of Darth Nul's holocron for him instead - fortunately what I thought as the only logical answer to that was available as a conversation option in this dialogue: that if the goal is to stop Malgus from using the machine, and the machine won't work without the holocron, surely not unlocking it and just keeping it away from everyone is the way to go?

To that he retorts that you haven't been very good at holding on to it recently, and your companion points out that you're perhaps not in the best position to pick a fight right now, considering how outnumbered you are. (We didn't fully think this one through, did we?) So you either agree to proceed into the depths of the ship to play around with whatever Nul left behind there to power up the holocron, or you briefly turn against Jadus and get to mow down some of his lackeys in a cool cut scene before he makes you pass out with the Force, causing you to reawaken deeper inside the ship either way.

What follows is a (to me) pretty interesting exploration/puzzle section. You investigate two biomes within the spaceship: The biome of balance is a pretty idyllic pastoral environment (it even has a nice fake blue sky box), while the biome of ferocity is an icky swamp filled with predators. Each one is guarded by a holographic remnant of Darth Nul, with the twist being that she split off different aspects of herself (one hologram is evil Sithy Nul, while the other still calls itself Master Ranaiah) and put each one in charge of the biome that doesn't align with that aspect's values.

In other words, you have evil Sithy Nul working on the balanced biome and being annoyed that the animals in it don't fight each other enough, and Jedi-minded Master Raniah locking up all the animals in the ferocity biome because she doesn't like them fighting and eating each other, causing them to quietly waste away in their pens instead. Your mission in each biome (and what makes up at least half of the gameplay in this update) is to talk to the Nul fragment holograms, figure out what's going on by reading some research notes, and then take actions to restore each biome to its originally intended state. Like I said, I found this quite interesting and I thought it did a good job of showing just how much of a mad scientist Darth Nul was. (Splitting off parts of your personality and then giving them tasks that are going to drive them nuts just to see what'll happen is pretty crazy.)

Once you've restored both biomes to a working state, the guardian holograms are satisfied and upload themselves to the Engima's mainframe. You proceed further into the bowels of the ship yourself, just to find the two holograms fighting and siccing their minions on each other inside. In an attempt to stop the chaos, you plug Darth Nul's holocron into a convenient nearby socket, and after some waiting and fighting off random minions (this bit was unfortunately buggy and confusing on launch) peace is restored and the two holograms are united into a single "personality matrix" representing Darth Nul.

She tells you once again about the machine and its purpose, and that she'd be able to help whoever has it to fine-tune its workings. She also reveals that its location is crucial to reaching as many Force sensitives across the galaxy as possible, and that if Elom is no longer available, the next best option would be the moon Khar Shian, which meant nothing to me personally but apparently has a lot of existing Old Republic lore attached to it. (Ted talks a bit about that in the most recent episode of the State of the Old Republic podcast.) So now you know where you'll find Heta, Shae and Malgus!

Naturally this is the time for a sudden and inevitable betrayal (if you agreed to work with Jadus at least), as he shows up to collect the holocron and leave you in the dust. The burns he delivers to an agent in particular are pretty harsh! However, there's a twist: he's not the only one that's betraying you, as Tau/Rivix are turning against you as well, trap you in a forcefield and hand the holocron over to Jadus willingly.

I guess Rivix being a turncoat shouldn't have been entirely surprising, considering he's always come across as kind of smarmy, though that doesn't mean that a betrayal at this particular moment was obvious. I actually played through the story on my Republic main first, however, and Tau's backstabbing was truly shocking to me and felt like it came completely out of left field. Fortunately she has a believable (if still frustrating) justification in that she's desperate to save Sa'har and thinks this is the way to make it happen. Naturally she's wrong about that though: Jadus doesn't give a shit and Force-lightnings her to... death? I literally went "nooo" at my screen, as I hated to see it, even with Tau just having betrayed me. It does turn out though that she's not actually dead, as Jadus and his minions decide to drag her not entirely lifeless body away with them - presumably he still has some sort of plan for her.

Meanwhile he leaves you behind in the forcefield trap, which is something that would seem foolish for a lot of villains but is totally in character for Jadus, who's more like a cat playing with a mouse. Why kill you outright when there's more fun to be had?

You actually manage to break out of the forcefield using sheer willpower and immediately pursue Jadus, though you get slowed down further, as nightmares of betrayers and former allies turned enemies invade your mind and force you to fight them.  

You reach Jadus' shuttle just as he's about to take off, and I'm not gonna lie, if it had been down to me I would've taken the L at that point and simply retreated to fight another day, but my character turned out to be a lot more persistent than me and pulled a rocket launcher out of nowhere in one final attempt to manually shoot the shuttle down. Shintar the trooper is even more of a badass than I thought! (As a Jedi or Sith you get to pull at the shuttle with the Force, which I guess is a little less crazy.) The attempt fails however, and you end up falling down and dangling off a piece of metal at the bottom of the ship like Luke under Cloud City at the end of Empire Strikes Back.

Fortunately you have allies that never listen to your instructions to stay behind, so either Arn or Anri show up with a shuttle to rescue you. Lana radios you from Odessen to let you know that your escape has been discovered and things are not good with the faction leaders, but you have another priority now: to go to Khar Shian. 

We conclude with a final look at what some of our antagonists have been up to in the meantime: Jadus attempts to make a deal with unknown terms with Heta Kol, Ri'kan attempts to get back into Heta's good graces by delivering Sa'har and gets threatened with a knife for his efforts (honestly, seeing her be as sick of his crap as I felt was very satisfying), and Malgus and Shae, too, have just found out that their next destination is Khar Shian by crushing a few more Hidden Chain soldiers. It's show time, baby! 

I know I've remained more positive about this storyline than a lot of (at least the loudest parts of) the player base, but I absolutely loved this update. I have criticised it in the past when it felt like an installment didn't really move the story forward much, but ever since Desperate Defiance we are definitely going somewhere, and Master's Engima continued this trend.

This particular story installment also really managed to hit me in the feels in so many places: the callback to being a simple trooper, the political drama, Jadus' machinations (you can tell that he'll use you and turn against you, but he does it in such a manner that it still burns) and the sudden betrayal by your companion. So many great moments!

I'm excited to see how it'll all wrap up in a week or so.

SWTOR Does Currencies Well

The other week I saw this post on the World of Warcraft subreddit complaining about how the new expansion, which has been out for less than three months, already has people collecting over 20 different currencies. I thought this was a valid sentiment, but I'm not here to complain about WoW - instead thinking about the subject actually made me appreciate how well Star Wars: The Old Republic has been handling currencies over the years.

Doing a quick count of my in-game currencies, leaving out credits and Cartel Coins, I counted 35 of them. If that makes you go "that's still a lot, and more than 20", let me highlight that the above post was about new currencies introduced over the course of two months. In the context of SWTOR, I'm counting overall currencies, in a game that is approaching its 15th birthday. That's fewer than three currencies introduced per year! Though that's of course just a made-up average and not really how any of this works.

 

From my point of view, there have been two keys to SWTOR's good handling of currencies over the years:

1. They have not been afraid to remove currencies after some time when they became obsolete. (This is something WoW could learn from I think.)
2. Whenever a currency does get removed, the conversion of anything you've got left is simple and painless (usually it just turns into credits). This has never been a problem in WoW as far as I'm aware, but I had some nightmarish experiences related to the subject in Neverwinter, where they'd usually make you manually trade the old currency for a new one at an obscure vendor, you'd end up with a small leftover number clogging up your currency tab forever anyway, and worst case there'd be some kind of trap where you'd end up being misled into being wasteful.

Going back to the first point though, SWTOR has probably removed more currencies from the game than it has left right now. Back at launch, every planet had its own planetary commendation for example (Coruscant commendation, Taris commendation, Nar Shaddaa commendation etc.) which could be traded in on the fleet for level-appropriate gear pieces. To be honest, this never worked great, because even if you spent enough time on the planet to accumulate enough commendations to buy a piece of gear, it was probably already a bit low level for you by the time you had enough to buy it. Later they were all converted to a single currency simply called "planetary commendation", which worked better, but eventually they got rid of that too - the vendors that used to take them still exist, but now simply sell you their gear for credits. Wasn't that hard, was it?

That's not to say that I don't think there isn't still some room for improvement. Wait, was that a triple negative just now? I think there are things that can still be improved is what I meant to say. I'm not convinced Bessi needed five new currencies for example. There are also some old currencies that I think are pretty unnecessary and were never very useful to begin with, such as Eternal Championship Trophies and Ziost Memory Holographs, because they are so extremely limited both in how you earn them and in what you can use them for. I do get that it might not be worth going back to change them now, however.

Still, overall SWTOR has done a great job at keeping currency bloat in check, so that the number of them in the currency tab shouldn't be as overwhelming as it is in other MMOs of a similar age. 

The Dantooine Crash Site Five Months Later

It's been more than five months since the Jannimak crash-landed on Dantooine and I wrote about how I thought it was bold of Broadsword to experiment with a new form of endgame, though I also saw the potential for problems with the way certain mechanics worked. I wanted to take some time to look back at how things have panned out for me in practice, because not everything has gone as expected, at least for me personally. I obviously can't speak for everyone.

Firstly, I've not been as persistently engrossed by the crash site as I expected, and I think it's the first in-game reputation grind they've added that I didn't max out in close to the minimum amount of time required. At the time of me writing this, my reputation rank on Darth Malgus is still only Hero (the 4th out of 6 in total).

Usually, with a new daily area, Mr Commando and I would do the weekly mission there every week and max out our reputation in short order. He's not into SWTOR anymore to the degree that I am, but that's the kind of thing he still logs in for. However, Mr Commando didn't like the crash site on Dantooine at all. I did briefly mention our abysmal run through the area together in my original post, and he basically told me he never wanted to go back there again. Countless deaths to overtuned encounters aside, he just didn't like the whole gameplay of it one bit I think.

There was one week when there was a seasons objective to do 15 Dantooine encounters, and since I figured that this is something that should be pretty fun to do as a group, I co-opted the latter half of my guild's social night for it. Even that turned out to be a bit of a mixed bag though. It's true that having a dozen people in an ops group made every encounter pretty quick to do, but it was also like herding cats, as people's experience levels ranged from "had been grinding the rep to the max every week" to "had never stepped foot in the area before" and it was challenging to keep everyone working together. The newbies needed guidance on where to go and what to do for each step of the introductory quest chain, while the more experienced players constantly wanted to wander off somewhere else for reasons such as "oh, I see that one encounter is up over there, I still need that one for the achievement so I'll just pop over there quickly". In the end, people said it had been fun, but I felt exhausted and didn't really want to go back to do it like that again.

So I've mostly been on my own in terms of working with GSI (the other one), and I kind of found that it didn't gel very well with the way I usually play. For example, long-time readers of the blog will know that I'm very motivated/guided by Conquest. When I decide to play a character in a given week, I usually want to play them enough to earn 100k conquest points and not much more, and then I switch to an alt. And for a conquest player... Dantooine is kind of meh!

You get a small amount of points for each encounter you do, but you could complete that objective faster and more easily on pretty much any other planet. Aside from that you get a good chunk of points for advancing the reputation from each encounter completed, but that's only once per day. At the same time, the place lacks many sources of easy points that you'd find pretty much everywhere else: there's no "complete missions" objective, nothing for killing enemies, and no harvesting nodes to gather (except for a few enemies that can be bioanalysed or scavenged).

So from a Conquest point of view, the best thing to do is basically to go and do one encounter per day for the rep and leave it at that. Even that can be awkward to do because due to the limited quick travel options available, just getting to the encounter can take longer than the encounter itself sometimes, meaning I haven't always bothered.

Lest you might think that this means I haven't actually spent that much time on Dantooine, there is an aspect to this that I haven't gone into yet: As mentioned above there was a seasons objective in the first week of this season to do 15 crash site encounters, and a couple of weeks ago there was another one to do 25. And I've actually gone and done those on all servers, racking up over 250 encounters completed in those two weeks alone.

(If that makes you go "Shintar, how that does gel with you saying that you haven't been that enthused about the game and that you've been finding the current Galactic Season too grindy?", I never claimed to be an entirely logical actor. Yes, doing all those dynamic encounters was grindy as heck too, but it just happened to be something I wanted to do at the time.)

Doing this gave me a very different perspective on the zone. Firstly, it's definitely more fun and feels more "worthwhile" when you're doing more than one encounter at a time. The most entertaining thing is probably when you manage to get a "train" going with other players that just surges from one encounter to the next, dispatching each one quickly and efficiently. However, that's not something you even get a chance to experience everywhere, because which server you're on makes a huge difference.

While interest in the crash site has generally dropped off since its launch, you can still go there on Star Forge for example, and on this biggest of all servers it'll be bustling at pretty much every time of day. If you ever find yourself going to Dantooine there and it seems a tad quiet, it's usually because the game actually spun up a second PvE instance and that one doesn't have as many players in it.

Compare this to somewhere like Shae Vizla, the tiny APAC server, and it's like night and day. On Shae Vizla it was rare that I'd even run into a single other player most times. On the plus side, this taught me a lot about various encounters, because when they fly by really fast it can sometimes be hard to tell what's happening. When you're the only person doing anything on the other hand, you get to see every single stage properly and actually have to learn what to do because there's nobody else there to hold your hand or help you out. I learned to solo certain tough encounters via use of crowd control and kiting, but I'm still convinced that there are some that just aren't doable alone. There were several times I found the glacial biome stuck on the "Cryonest Matron" transition encounter for example because that one's just too overwhelming and with no groups around that area was basically dead and could no longer be played.

There was exactly one time I managed to get it down, when I think I happened to be on at around APAC prime time on a weekend and there were at least a few other people in the zone. When glacial went into transition, we all converged there and managed to take it down with the whole five of us or however many we were (not a huge number).

The other servers were all in-between. Darth Malgus and Satele Shan always felt reasonably busy. Tulak Hord had some good times and some bad times, and Leviathan was also very quiet but not quite as bad as Shae Vizla. So I don't think this area (and any similar ones Broadsword decides to create in the future) does the game any favours in terms of the perception that certain servers are dead or dying.

Another aspect of the Datooine experience that hasn't worked out quite the way I'd hoped have been the reputation rewards. It was my understanding that as you went up in levels, you'd unlock counters to the various hazards that would make all three biomes less painful to traverse on all your alts. However, this turned out to not be the case, as access to the console that gives the various immunity buffs is actually locked behind completing the intro quest chain at least up to the point where you get sent to the core on every single character.

As someone who's done encounters on Dantooine on something like twenty different alts, this meant that each and every one of them had to do at least ten encounters without any of the buffs, which in practice has meant that I've only been able to use the reputation rewards very rarely, and the vast majority of my time has been spent on foot, suffering from debuffs, regardless of my reputation rank. Needless to say, this has sucked. Fortunately this is something the devs have said they will actually rectify in the next patch, so we'll see how much that improves my experience.

Regardless of that though, the rep rewards I've actually had a chance to try have all felt kind of half-baked to be honest. Like the fact that the immunity console only lets you apply one buff at a time when the way the whole zone works encourages you to hop between different biomes every twenty to thirty minutes, meaning you have to constantly switch buffs and pay for a new one or stay in the same area way longer than makes sense.

Same thing with the weird taxi pass, only with that one the problem is the other way round: the taxi pass allows you to hop back and forth between different biomes more quickly - for half an hour. But I just said that the game encourages you to switch every twenty to thirty minutes (whenever an area transitions basically), so you buy the taxi pass to use it... once? Twice at max? All these different pieces just don't fit together in a way that makes sense to me, so I've been largely ignoring them even when I did have access. Which again, is kind of disappointing.

Finally, there's the NiM-level core boss at the end of the quest chain, for which you need to have pushed all three biomes to level three to unlock access to it for two hours at a time. People were sceptical about that setup from the beginning, but I was more sanguine about it. Truth is, it hasn't really worked out for me either, though not in exactly the way I expected.

Getting the core to be aligned isn't that much of a problem at least on Darth Malgus, as it does happen reasonably often, but the timing can be a random and that is a problem for a group of middle aged raiders with average jobs and families that usually carve out a specific time slot to do progression content with their team. Without wanting to sound judgemental, I get the impression that most of the people who have successfully tackled the core are not limited by such constraints, for example because they stream as part of their day job. This also aligns with the fact that the only time I've seen the core myself (not killed it) was when I was helping out Swtorista and friends on one of her streams.

On Darth Malgus, I've grouped up with random guildies who just happened to be online a couple of times and went inside to have a look, but we didn't even make it past any of the mini bosses. They really are super hard and you can't really expect to take them down with any old group. The buffs are supposed to help, but you'd really need the whole group to have them, and I clearly underestimated how many of the people I run ops with just don't engage with casual content like a rep grind at all. So you've got all these hurdles of needing people to be able to be online at the right time, they need to be sufficiently skilled, and they need to have had an interest in grinding the rep, and that's just too many obstacles. I'm not personally upset about this because I don't feel like I'm missing much, but it does feel a bit like a design failure to have this content that will only ever be seen by a miniscule part of the player base, not just because it's hard but because it also has these additional hurdles to access on top of the difficulty. 

A couple of months ago I filled out a dev survey about Dantooine and I did put a lot of what I said above in the answers to the questions there. One question that stood out to me was that they asked whether I thought that Broadsword should invest in making more planets/zones like the Dantooine crash site, and my answer was "not exactly like this, no" because I think it has too many issues that the devs are unlikely to want to go back and address. (I was actually very surprised when they announced on stream that they were going back to change things like the intro quest chain being mandatory on every single character.) I still think the idea of dynamic encounters as endgame has potential, and as I said, the basic gameplay of running around with a group of people to do encounters can be very fun. I just feel like on Dantooine, the puzzle has too many pieces that don't fit well together and prevent the experience from being as fun as it maybe could be.

Legacy Level 50 on All Servers

I said at the start of the year that it was going to happen this season, and it has indeed happened: I'm now legacy level 50 on all servers. The truly amazing thing is that I actually managed to capture the moment it happened on both Tulak Hord and Leviathan, when I'd previously failed to do so on my four other legacies. 

Tulak Hord was the first across the finish line, about three weeks ago. The big ding happened after I completed a round of CZ-198 dailies.

Leviathan was about one legacy level behind, so it made sense that it didn't tick over until this week. In this case it happened at the end of a random master mode flashpoint I'd queued for because it was a seasons objective. I got into a Battle of Rishi run that was very smooth and quick.

As hinted at before, I think my next goal for the other servers will be to get one of every class levelled and through the class story. Not something I expect to achieve any time soon or on any predictable timeline really, but I'm just talking about it as a vague thing to strive towards over time. As it stands, I need to create a bunch more alts first as I don't even have one of every class on every server yet. I'm not missing that many though, and I already created a few new alts this week to start making some progress towards this new goal.

Happy Star Wars Day!

May the 4th be with you! Today actually happens to be a real holiday in the UK as well, so I'm enjoying a long weekend.

If you like promotions and free stuff, SWTOR has you covered as usual with double XP, freebies for simply logging in, a 50% off collections sale and discounts on various Cartel Market items. I myself picked up the Shadow Sentry armour set this time (aka sexy Twi'lek lady from Star Wars: Visions season 3), a set that I'd kinda liked but not enough to buy it at full price. At 40% off it was an easy purchase, however.

My inquisitor on Shae Vizla is still grumpy even in a great outfit though. Life on Korriban be like that.

Tangentially related, do you remember how close to three years ago I bought myself a posable Darth Malgus figure when it came out? I won't blame you if you don't, but the point is that I said at the time that I now needed Hasbro to bring out a Satele as well so they could do battle in my living room. It took them three years, but it's finally happening! Later today, a Satele Shan figure from the same series is meant to go on pre-order.

As a bonus that almost feels like it was specifically added for me, there's a new Old Republic trooper design as well that wears the classic armour set sported by the guards on the fleet and which my own trooper also wore as part of her original levelling journey. Must have!

With all that and knowing that 8.0 is coming at the end of the year, I feel like I'm eating well right now as a SWTOR fan.

Edit: I almost forgot, the official Star Wars website even had a header image that included Malgus, Lana and Senya on their gaming deals post. How's that for rare recognition?

We'll Be Going to Ryloth in 8.0!

Yesterday was dev stream day once again - I'm usually awaiting these with baited breath, but as alluded to in my last post, I actually feel like I'm a bit behind story-wise right now, so my reaction this time was more something along the lines of, "What, it's already that time again?"

That's not to say that I didn't still enjoy the stream. We got a bit more of a preview of 7.9's story update, which is expected to go live at the end of May. As expected, it will feature the big showdown of all the different factions that's been building up to for a long time now. We'll even get to play as some of those other characters to mix things up - they had a preview of someone running around as Lana and a short clip of someone fighting as Malgus. We'll see how that goes! The HK-55 bonus chapter came out almost ten years ago now, and then they never did anything with the idea of playing as another character ever again. I enjoyed it at the time, but on replays it got a bit tedious, though I'm not sure whether that had anything to do with the mechanics or was just due to the chapter format itself. Either way, playing as all these other characters should at the very least be novel.

They were also talking a bit about 7.9.1 already, which they justified by saying that there won't be a dedicated stream for that patch. To be fair though, we already knew that it'll be the start of Galactic Season 11 and that it'll be more or less the same as Galactic Season 10, only with Fen Zeil and Amity instead of Altuur and PH4-LNX. About the only piece of real news was that the DvL bosses won't be returning for that season... yay, I guess?

In technical news, we were once again reassured that the DirectX 12 work is still continuing and that they are hoping to have an alpha for people to test later in the year. There was also an article on the official site about a month ago that talked a bit about the nitty gritty of the work involved in this, which I thought was quite interesting. I hadn't realised that in many ways this update seemingly requires them to rebuild the game's visuals from the ground up.

However, by far the most exciting part of the stream (to me anyway) was the additional information about 8.0. We still know only broad strokes, but honestly, at this point every morsel of information is exciting to me:

• The level cap will indeed increase by five levels (to 85) like in previous expansions.
• The new planet will be Ryloth, the home world of the Twi'leks, and it will come with dynamic encounters.
• There'll be a new operation with three bosses that will launch with story and veteran mode.
• The way we gear up will change again, but they want it to be an evolution of the current system, not a complete do-over like we've had in previous expansions, and it should be more organic to figure out in game, without necessarily needing a guide.
• There'll be new abilities and changes to class balance.
• The story will take a new direction but won't be completely disconnected from what's going on right now, which is why they can't go into it until we've had a chance to play through 7.9.

Ryloth as seen in season 1 of Clone Wars. 

They expect to have an 8.0 PTS up in summer, where we'll get to test a lot of the new stuff, and there'll be more reveals to come. The list of new features above is not exhaustive - as established in the last dev stream, they just don't want to spill all the beans at once.

The Ryloth reveal personally excited me the most (as you can tell from this post's title), I guess because for once it's a planet I actually already know, from the Clone Wars TV show. I'm not sure it'll end up being the most visually interesting - it's kind of rocky, so they might be able to re-use some assets from Ruhnuk - but it's the home world of the Twi'leks and I love Twi'leks, so that's a win by itself.

I still don't know how soon I'll manage to get more characters fully caught up to where I want them to be. Being excited doesn't change the fact that I've got a lot going on right now, but the news are definitely encouraging to me personally. For more details on what else was said on the stream, feel free to peruse one of the links below:

• VOD on Twich or YouTube
• Written summary on the official website
• Swtorista
• Today in TOR
• Vulkk

Treading Water

I feel like that's what I'm currently doing in SWTOR, which is why things have been a bit quiet on this blog. I wanted to reflect a bit on why that is.

Primarily, there are two things going on: The first is simply that I'm spending less time in SWTOR in general, just because there are other things I'd rather be doing at the moment. People who also follow my WoW blog will have seen that I've still been active there for example.

I hate comparing those two MMOs because they do very different things on a very different scale and appeal to me in different ways, but it's hard to deny that WoW simply has a lot on offer right now, and if you like at least some of the new content they're currently releasing (which I do), there are plenty of reasons to log in.

Comparatively, I'm in a bit of a lull with SWTOR. Galactic Season 10 is going on of course, but as I already hinted at in a previous post, I've been less enthused by that than I expected. Every week I look at the available objectives and every week there's little that excites me (unless the master mode flashpoint objective is up). Mostly I've been running a lot of dailies, which is not one of my favourite activities and can be quite dull and time-consuming across multiple servers.

I've been really surprised by just how much this season's objective structure has been bothering me. I think it's because I'd kind of settled into a pattern of progressing the season - on the other servers in particular - in a way that wasn't necessarily optimal but allowed me to advance unrelated personal goals at the same time.

To give an example of what I'm talking about, if there were weekly objectives to do fifteen missions as a smuggler, kill one hundred mobs with a healer companion and do fifteen dynamic encounters, the "optimal" way to tackle this in the least amount of time would've been to do fifteen dynamic encounters as a smuggler with a healer companion. However, I still had the freedom to go, "nah, I don't feel like doing DEs this week" and just progress a smuggler character's class story instead. That choice was slower and I'd only get two out of the three objectives done, but it was more enjoyable to me that way.

The strict focus on Altuur and PH4-LNX this season really locks me into doing activities that work with those two (as I already bemoaned in the post linked above), and there just aren't as many options, which is simply a bit of a drain on me. I've repeatedly found myself wondering whether I really want to keep at this on multiple servers, but then I look at my progress and see that I'm already past the halfway mark everywhere and surely I can just hang in there a little longer... not wanting to break a streak can be one hell of a drug.

The sad irony is that I actually thought that Master's Enigma, the last story update, was really great and I still haven't written a post about it because I've only played through it once. I've got a draft which I meant to finish after playing through it another two or three times, but... seasons objectives need doing now! 

I thought a patch with both a story update and a new season launching at the same time would be a cool thing, but in practice it's kind of stopped me from enjoying the story as fully as I would've liked, as I have only so many hours a week I want to devote to SWTOR and the FOMO aspect of Galactic Seasons has led me to prioritise that over replaying the story, even if it's less fun, which is just a weird situation to be in.

I expect that I'll push through at my current pace until the end of the season, but whenever GS11 comes around I'll need to have a long, hard think about whether I want to continue bothering with it beyond my home server. 

A Week on Oricon

One of last week's weekly seasons objectives was "Seat of the Hutts Daily Sweeps", which requires you to either do the Oricon weekly twice or the Ossus weekly once. I've always thought this was a strange equivalence because since 7.0 the Ossus weekly takes less than ten minutes to complete (depending on your choice of dailies you don't even have to fight any mobs for it), while a single run of Oricon can require slogging through a full 100 mobs or so if you don't have stealth or someone else happened to come through just before you to clear things out already. And then you're asking me to do the one that's already longer twice?

I guess the one thing that Oricon has going for it is that it's more accessible since you unlock access to the area earlier in the story. On my secondary legacies on the other servers I didn't used to have access to Ossus, so I did some Oricon runs for seasons there in the past - though less so recently, precisely because of how tedious the whole affair tended to be. Since the release of the Bessi venture made daily access fully account-wide (meaning it applies cross-server), I could've just gone to Ossus to make my life easier, but I still feel a bit bad about "skipping ahead", even if it's just to do dailies.

This week I happened to have a few days off around Easter, so I thought why not take a few alts through Oricon since I have a bit of time? Only a couple of them had done the story before, so by the end of the week I had taken four new characters through the storyline, two on Republic side and two of my Imperials. I didn't do this all at once but staggered progress over the course of several days, and it occurred to me that I probably hadn't spent this many hours on Oricon since it first came out and I was farming reputation on all my original (then) max-level alts.

I did feel like the craziness was rubbing off on me a bit after a few days, but overall it wasn't a bad experience. Lord Hargrev's voice acting still holds up as top notch over a decade later, and I always love the bit where he goes: "Knives! They can't even resist carving one another like roasts!" Though it's distracting nowadays how much his assistant sounds exactly like Lana, not just because it's the same voice actress but also because she uses the exact same kind of voice/tone that would later become Lana's.

Being able to combine the storyline with the dailies and weekly these days is a peculiar experience that I already talked about about one and a half years ago, when I first went through Oricon that way on my Shae Vizla main. Back then I did find it a bit frustrating how all the missions tended to bug out one way or another since they had clearly never been designed to be done at the same time - this wasn't something that was impossible to overcome, but it still required me to backtrack and redo things several times.

Since I already knew what to expect this time, I was able to take some notes on the best way to circumvent the bugs tied to each mission, and I thought I might share my learnings here as well, even if it's an extremely niche topic.

[DAILY] Fallen Forces

For this one, the objectives for the story and daily quest are exactly the same and there are no issues, both progress at the same time. 

[DAILY] False Paradise

For this one, unfortunately there seems to be no way to avoid doing the phased bit twice. The story mission requires you to loot ten bioenergy enhancers while the daily requires only five. The problem is that interacting with the quest items will only progress one mission while still locking you out of progressing the other one if they were both at the same step. So the best way I found of doing this was to loot five items for the daily, use them, and then go ahead and do the phased bit for the daily mission. After exiting, any spare bioenergy enhancers you may have already collected towards the other quest will have been deleted from your inventory so you'll need to collect a full ten again, but at least you'll be able to do so straight away without resetting anything.

[DAILY] Dread Engines

Funnily enough, this quest is the exact opposite of the above. You need to destroy three/five terraforming devices, but if you enter the phased bit while one mission is done with that step and the other one isn't, both of them will bug out. Bad! Instead you have to make sure to destroy the full five terraforming devices for the story mission before entering the cave. You should then be able to progress both the daily and the story at the same time inside. 

[DAILY] The Tower’s Core

This one is probably the trickiest one to get right. The first thing to note is that when you enter the control room at the top of the tower, only the daily mission will update to the next step, so you'll want to instantly head back out of the phase and walk back in a second time, which will then cause the story mission to update as well. Inside you can disable the defences and fight Commander Zaoron for both missions at the same time with no issues. When finishing up, it's important to click the cube for the daily mission first, then interact with the panel for the story mission. If you click the panel first, you won't be able to pick up the holocron for the daily afterwards and a reset will be required.

Another thing that's worth mentioning here is that both missions require you to pick up the same unique quest item at the end, which the game doesn't allow, so what will happen once you complete the story conversation is that you'll get a pop-up saying that your inventory was full and that you got an item in the mail. Exit the phase to complete the daily (which will remove the associated item from your inventory), then pick the holocron out of the mailbox back at base before handing in the story mission. Important: You won't be able to hand in the story mission without it! In one of my earlier attempts I made the mistake of just deleting the item in the mail, thinking it was a glitch that I had been mailed a second copy. However, if you don't have this in your mission inventory, you won't be able to start the follow-up story conversation! When this happened to me, I had to reset the story mission and redo the whole tower part a second time. Don't be me. 

[HEROIC 2+] Preemptive Strike 

This is another mission that simply progresses for both story and daily mission at the same time. Phew. 

First Impressions of Galactic Season 10

I know we're already two weeks into the season, but I'm behind in terms of blog posts I want to write because with everything going on in SWTOR and the new WoW expansion (which I'm also playing), there's just way too much to do in the limited free time I have. I'm reminded of that comic where a guy looks at a pillar made of blocks representing his life, bemoaning that he doesn't have enough time for video games in his schedule, until he considers replacing the sleep slot in the last panel.

The comic in question. The "Owlturd" site no longer seems to exist, but I can still credit "Shen Comix".

Galactic Seasons are often particularly bad for this because no matter how much I tell myself that - even with my cross-server ambitions - I don't need to go quite so hard to achieve my goals and that there's plenty of time, it's still easy for me to get caught up in doing just one more objective because it was already halfway done anyway, and before I know it it's 1 a.m. and I curse myself for not being a more sensible adult.

Anyway, that is my way of saying that I jumped into the new season with gusto but almost immediately regretted it a bit and had to remind myself to step on the brakes a little. It's fun but I'm over forty now! I do need my sleep!

While I said that I didn't mind this season being a combined re-run of Seasons 1 and 3, I've got to admit it does feel a bit weird and bad to constantly claim rewards just to delete them (because I already have the Mythran armour set unlocked in collections and really don't need another copy of its belt right now).

My own crazy tendencies aside, I'm also a little worried after two weeks that this season may end up feeling somewhat grindier than previous ones. When it was said during the livestream that the "themed activities" for this season would basically be objectives to kill mobs and earn Conquest points with Altuur and PH4-LNX, I didn't think too much of it, but after two weeks of seeing these objectives in action I'm not so sure I like them.

They're not "hard" exactly - but they are a lot more demanding and restrictive than the objectives they replaced. Take the "earn 200k conquest points" weekly for example. In a regular season, I would often complete this automatically on the first or second day of the week without even really trying, just by playing the game in the way I enjoy. But earning those same Conquest points with one specific companion out is an entirely different kettle of fish.

Any group content that dismisses your companion is out: flashpoints, operations, PvP, GSF, world bosses. (Occasionally the points seem to get attributed even if your companion was forcefully dismissed, but this seems to be very inconsistent and is probably not intended.) Story content also either requires or at the very least encourages you to have a specific companion along that is not Altuur or PH4-LNX - this is also an obstacle to the "get kills with this companion out" objective.

So the only really viable things to do are to... do grindy open world solo content like heroics or dynamic encounters, probably my least favourite way of getting anything seasons-related done. Oof.

Mind you, even there you're not 100% safe. The most heart-wrenching experience I had in that regard was in week one when I was on 14 out of 15 dynamic encounters completed when I got a flashpoint pop. When I came out of the flashpoint, another dynamic encounter was active right on top of me and I was immediately in combat again. It completed and... I realised that my companion hadn't automatically been re-summoned when I came out of the flashpoint, meaning that the resulting 85k Conquest points were completely wasted as far as seasonal progress goes.

So I don't love that part. We'll see how I get on with it as the weeks progress. I did enjoy that the "do a master mode flashpoint" objective from the last season stuck around, and I had a bunch of very entertaining pugs that week. The integration of the Dantooine Crash Site into the weekly objectives was also welcome, and seeing a dozen Altuurs zerg every encounter that week was certainly amusing. I'm just wrinkling my nose a bit as I'm looking ahead at the next couple of weeks, as I fear there'll be a lot more dailies in my future.

Oh, and let's not forget that Broadsword brought the DvL bosses back yet again. Funny how they didn't mention that during the dev livestream, huh? I'm guessing they knew it wasn't going to be a popular decision and it was simply the easiest option to copy and paste that meta one more time. I've killed these buggers three times over at this point, so this will be my fourth time on Darth Malgus, not counting additional duplicate kills and the fact that I've also done some on other servers. Just ugh.

Gates Crashed

I bet you're expecting me to post about the patch! I will at some point of course, but not today. Today I want to talk about something else that happened this week.

Back in December I wrote about how I finally defeated my nemesis Dread Master Brontes (master mode) during my progression team's last operation of the year. I was sure that after three months of working on that kill, everyone would be dying to spend time anywhere other than Dread Fortress in the new year, but when I polled them over the holidays about what we should be doing next, the surprising result was that pretty much everyone wanted to go back to DF and beat up Brontes some more.

So we did that, and started earning Wings of the Architect for everyone. I'll forever feel slightly conflicted about that mount, because while it's a very cool and unique model, it doesn't fit my trooper main at all. It just used to be very prestigious to have for its rarity, though I guess it's less prestigious now, after my whole team acquired it.

As we got close to everyone having the mount and being able to kill Brontes more reliably (I hesitate to say that we had her "on farm", considering that we still wiped on her a lot as well), we started working on the achievement for the timed run. After shaking off some rust on the earlier bosses (we'd usually been able to use a lockout for our Brontes kill, so we'd skipped the first four bosses for several weeks) and after Mr Commando got very mad at our dps for being unable to remember their Draxus assignments, we got somewhat better at that too.

The timer for Dread Fortress isn't as tight as the one for Dread Palace, but things on Brontes can just go wrong so easily, and even if you have a clean run up to her room, you only have up to a maximum of three or so good attempts at her before the timer expires. Yesterday we'd had our best run at it up to then, with a pretty smooth clear of the first four bosses and enough time for those three full tries on Brontes herself - and they were all pretty decent as well, but alas, it just wasn't meant to be. One was a wipe at 0.8%. We even gave it a few more goes after the timer had expired, but that evening we just couldn't get her down.

When it came to the question of what we should do tonight, whether we should go back to trying to just kill Brontes or re-attempt the timed run on alts, I was initially in favour of the latter. But then I came home late from work, one of our dps players dropped out on short notice, and Mr Commando reminded me that his co-tank for the evening had actually never successfully killed Brontes with us. He soon had me convinced that it was probably better to go directly back to Brontes after all and just try to get a first kill with the less experienced co-tank.

However, the rest of our team had other ideas. They really wanted to try the full run again! So we gave in and started from scratch again. I felt pretty confident that we weren't going to be successful, so I wasn't too worried, but apparently that more relaxed approach was magic. We breezed through the first few bosses and then... killed Brontes on our very first attempt! With the co-tank who'd never killed her with us before! We just had such an insane amount of luck with the orbs, we could hardly believe it (though I also cursed a little for getting the title on my alt instead of my main).

After the extremely rocky experiences I had with raiding in early Legacy of the Sith, I didn't expect to finish the expansion on such a high. Now we just need to do it again so I can get the title on my main and so the members of our team who weren't there tonight can get the achievement too.