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.

Delayed 7.8.1 Dev Livestream Reaction

Soo... there was a dev livestream over a week ago now! I did actually watch it live on my second monitor at the time, while doing an operation with my guildies, and I remember thinking "I've got to get back to this and write a post about it maybe tomorrow or on Friday" - and then things got a bit crazy.

I still wanted to jot down some thoughts on it though, even if it's belated. We know now that the patch will already drop this Tuesday, so I figured I've got to get in there before it'll be no longer relevant.

As had already been mentioned previously, the patch will be called Master's Enigma, and based on the little preview they showed without getting too spoilery, it looks like we're not yet done with Darth Nul's legacy, as she didn't just have that sanctum on Elom but apparently also a starship somewhere. We'll see how that goes!

As an aside, people always complain about there being too much time between story updates, but I've got to admit that this one time they've sped it up I'm actually sitting here thinking "wow, another story update so soon". I've only played through Galactic Threads on a few characters so far, so it feels like I've still got lots of catching up to do. Is it just me?

Anyway, the stream obviously covered a bunch of different topics related to the patch as usual, such as Spring Abundance returning with a new pet reward, the date nights with Kira and Torian, and the newest Cartel Market additions. As usual, I won't go into all of that here. There's a written summary on the official website, and Swtorista, Today in TOR and Vulkk all have their own posts as well. For me, there are just two subjects I really wanted to comment on:

Galactic Season 10 & 11

Keith informed us in his end-of-year Producer's Letter that "[the next] season will work a little differently than previous seasons" and as someone who's a bit of a connoisseur of seasons at this point, I was very curious to find out what that meant.

I'd had some conversations with friends in which we speculated about different possibilities and "bringing back old rewards" was one of those, so finding out that Season 10 will - in terms of rewards - be a mash-up of Seasons 1 and 3 with just a few new rewards added was not exactly a shock. (Season 11 will do the same thing with Season 2 and 4.)

It's not something that's personally exciting to me as someone who already completed all those seasons the first time around, but at the same time I'm actually surprisingly sanguine about it. I could easily imagine others who already have all those rewards being bitter about it ("Not only do they use seasons to recycle old content, now the seasons themselves are recycled too!" - something like that) but personally I actually really don't mind.

I know that I'm in a pretty hardcore minority, and I've seen my fair share of comments and questions from newer players who were interested in one of the companions or armour sets from earlier seasons and were disappointed that there was no way to get them anymore, so I understand that there was demand to bring them back. I'm happy those people get their chance now! Also, I didn't start doing seasons on the other servers until Season 2 (and the Shae Vizla server obviously didn't even exist until Season 5), so I'll have some fun earning some of the older rewards for a second time over there. (Technically I have all of it already unlocked in collections, but this is more fun.)

Also, there was some talk about 8.0 being in development alongside everything else that's happening, so it seemed reasonable to me to infer that putting a little less resource into the next two seasons will free up a bit of extra time for more focus on 8.0, which seems fair enough to me.

Speaking of 8.0...

We still don't know a lot more about what 8.0 will contain, but Eric and Keith dedicated a whole segment of the stream to talking about what their plans for it are in terms of releasing more information over time, which I thought was extremely interesting.

First off, they don't want to tell us too much just yet because the Legacy of the Sith story has two more patches to go and they want to give it a chance to play out in full without spoiling anything or even taking too much attention away from it, which I think is very fair and fits with the devs' commitment to treating the game's story as the most important thing, which is one of the main things I love about SWTOR.

However, they also said that they are planning to release more information in bits and pieces over time, to introduce new features and let us test them on the PTS as they reach a playable state, and I thought that was an interesting and novel approach. Usually expansion announcements are these big, attention-grabbing info dumps, so to know that an expansion is coming without much else, and that additional information will be released piecemeal over the course of a whole year is quite different. It's also a relatively long time to know about it in advance, as traditionally, SWTOR expansions have tended to be announced only two to four months before their launch date.

I'm very curious to see how this will play out in terms of expectations and hype, because on a purely theoretical level, I can think of ways in which this could go either very well or very badly. I'm hoping for the best outcome of course - just saying. Either way, I really appreciate the devs' attempt at being transparent about what's coming, when so much of Legacy of the Sith has been living from one patch to the next, without the slightest clue of what was going to be happening in six months.

One thing Keith and Eric did say about 8.0's content (it was even on the slides) was that they were planning to "create new content, gameplay, and systems that appeal to group, solo, and story players" and that they are aiming to "celebrate the breadth and depth of SWTOR to power new content and systems", which I understood to mean that they won't just be plopping a new planet and five more levels on top of what we have now, but that at least some of the new stuff will be integrated into existing planets and systems, perhaps similarly to how dynamic encounters added something new to do on classic planets. One Keith quote in particular that stood out to me was: "We're going back to old content and do something with it so it feels like new content." Could it be that they'll finally do something with flashpoints again? No, I mustn't daydream too much about specific things I'd like to see, because it's almost never what we expect. Regardless, I look forward to the journey of finding out.

Total Galactic War: A Challenge over Taris

If it seemed like I fell off the face of the earth about a week ago and you were maybe wondering why I wasn't posting about recent events about which I should surely have something to say, such as last week's dev livestream or the new WoW expansion, it's because it was Total Galactic War in SWTOR again, and it ended up being another very intense one. I don't mean for these things to swallow up my entire free time, but sometimes it just happens!

As the last TGW had occurred only about a month ago, I wasn't exactly itching for a particularly tough or involved competition, but unfortunately it doesn't matter how much care I take in selecting an invasion target and avoiding the mega guilds, it seems to be becoming a trend that some relatively unknown guild likes to muscle in on our territory, and it's always one that is both very determined to win while also not really knowing what they signed themselves up for. (Twin Suns Squadron has won every single planet it invaded during Total Galactic War since at least 2022. We're not easy prey for newcomers.)

I had chosen for us to invade Taris since a couple of our members still needed the achievement for that one, and it's often one of the easier options as it's split by faction, meaning we'd only have to go up against other Republic guilds, with any Imperial competitors completely out of the picture. On top of that, the guild that was in the lead when we invaded didn't have a very high score, nor did they look particularly threatening.

Trouble on the horizon (or scoreboard) 

However, we'd barely claimed our spot when another contender appeared, a guild called "Sequels are trash". Now, I'm not going to lie: that guild name immediately made me want to beat them more than our average opponents. While I'm no fan of the sequel trilogy myself, I'm very wary of people who make disliking a certain piece of media their primary flag to fly online. (That said, it was amusing to me how whenever I wanted to check what they were up to during the event, I had to type "/who trash" and their guild name gave me an excuse to refer to them as "Trashies" when discussing the competition with my guildies.)

Initially, I thought that beating them should be easy enough. They were not a known entity in the Conquest scene, and the only achievement they had to their name was conquering Balmorra in the previous TGW, but with a relatively low score and against no real competition. So my guildies and I didn't really fret too much about it for the first couple of days. We made a point of taking part in some dedicated activities to earn Conquest points like we always do, but without too much pressure.

When my ops team didn't have a good group for master mode Dread Fortress on Wednesday for example, we decided to do MM Explosive Conflict instead "for the Conquest points". While we did complete it, we made quite a mess of it and it took us all evening to clear, which meant that it didn't really make for a very effective method of Conquest point acquisition. However, we weren't really worried yet at this point, as our competition didn't seem super organised yet either, even if they were initially ahead of us in terms of points. Like us, they visibly had some people working on Conquest but no large-scale efforts were in progress whenever we checked.

However, as we ramped up our efforts in order to catch up to and overtake them, so did they in order to stay in first place, seemingly always just a little bit ahead of us, no matter how hard we tried. When we did more uprisings for points, they also started doing more uprisings, and they always had just a few more people online - not so many that they were unbeatable, but just enough to always stay that little bit ahead.

By Saturday morning I decided to post a call to action on Discord, asking more guildies to take part in our Conquest shenanigans, as clearly more numbers were needed. That same evening, we decided to go rampaging across the galaxy as a group to mass-generate points. (I explained this concept before.) We thought that this was going to be a sure-fire way to overtake the Trashies, but lo and behold, two hours after we started, they suddenly had twenty people online rampaging across the galaxy too. We couldn't help but wonder what was going on in that guild, for them to be able to spontaneously get so many people online to grind points late on a Saturday evening (since the rampage clearly seemed to be a response to our own). Did none of them have anything else going on in their lives? Either way we had at least briefly overtaken them by this point, though somehow they always seemed to be able to pull another million out of thin air at the end of the day.

A strange proposition

Things took a strange turn on Sunday evening. We had just set out to start rampaging again when a member of the guild brought to our attention that someone from the Trashies with whom he had sometimes interacted in PvP and pugs had messaged him about Total Galactic War. Specifically, the person had asked whether we were saving our Personal Conquest Requisitions for the end, as he had heard from someone else that we had "cheated" our way to victory that way in the past. (I bet that was someone from Ace of Saints!) Specifically, he stated that if we were planning to do that again, they might as well give up now and not waste their time.

We were on voice chat when we were told about this and weren't quite sure what to make of it - it sounded almost too good to be true! Sure, we'd enjoyed the competition well enough until then, but we hadn't really intended for it to be quite so tough this time around, so being handed a win a few days in advance certainly seemed appealing, though there were also concerns that it might be some kind of trick or trap.

Either way, we advised our guildie that it was okay to answer honestly and confirm that yes, this was usually our MO during Total Galactic War. He also hinted that we'd made up pretty big discrepancies via the use of PQRs in the past, without giving away any exact numbers or what we had in store this time. For a brief while we were very cheerful at the idea that we'd practically won already.

However, not long afterwards, the Trashies once again formed up to start rampaging again too. I'm still not sure what happened there exactly, considering the guy seemed so close to understanding the situation - whether his offer to surrender had never been genuine and he'd simply been fishing for information, whether there was some kind of miscommunication or what - either way they were once again back to fighting harder than ever. We initially just shrugged it off as an oddity and continued our grinding for points as before.

Another twist and - a spy?

However, things took an even stranger turn less than twenty-four hours later, as the guy from the Trashies whispered our guildie again, this time to tell him that someone from his guild had transferred in Personal Conquest Requisitions worth thirty million points from other servers, and while he didn't exactly approve of winning that way, he could hardly stop him now, could he?

This 180 degree turn from seemingly being ready to give up to "no, you should probably give up" was very surprising, and to be honest, not very believable from our point of view. Only the day before, he'd been very incredulous at just how many points worth of tokens my guild had saved up in previous Total Galactic Wars, questioning whether that was even possible without exploiting, just to suddenly find a guildie of his own who'd had millions worth of tokens in his back pocket all along?

We had first-hand experience with what it meant to use thirty million points worth of PQRs in a single event, and while it's very much possible, it takes a lot of time and considerable effort to accumulate that many of them. In our case, it had been years in the making, after we'd missed out on our chance to conquer Belsavis again and again, and had reached a point where we were basically willing to do whatever it took to win it. The idea that someone in a guild that hadn't really been interested in Conquest before would just suddenly be able to conjure up 200+ PQRs on a whim seemed highly unlikely.

We'd barely had time to discuss this when another twist occurred - another guildie who isn't actually very involved in guild business and doesn't care about Conquest (but had taken note of all the chatter about it this week) piped up to say that he was on a lot of different Discord servers, including the one for Sequels are trash, and that someone there had just posted a screenshot of a character with a whole cargo bay full of Personal Conquest Requisitions, which he then went on to share with us.

One reason this was startling was that someone had been joking off-handedly about how we might have a "spy" in the guild, and now it turned out that we kind of did. Since the guildie in question doesn't care about Conquest either way, I doubt he was intentionally leaking secrets to the Trashies, but he might well have thrown some off-hand comments about our strategy their way, just like he'd now shared their screenshot with us.

The other surprise was that the screenshot seemed to provide proof that the mysterious Trashy with his thirty million points worth of tokens appeared to be real - though doubt remained of course, because no character or guild name were visible in the screenshot, so it really could have been anyone, or it could have been photo-shopped, or... well, you get the idea.

I'm not gonna lie: in the moment, seeing all of that was a bit disheartening. I was willing to believe that we were unlucky enough for the story to be true, and thirty million points is a lot to overcome. I was pretty sure that we didn't have that many PQRs lying around at that moment ourselves. Did that mean we had already lost?

No, giving up over mere words was not the Twin Suns way. I quickly pulled myself together and told the other officers that while I'd acknowledged the risk of losing, we weren't just going to hand victory to the Trashies without them still having to work for it. I did a tally of our biggest token holders and decided that all was not lost yet, though there was a potential chance that things could still go very wrong for us.

The final countdown

On Monday things seemed to be fairly quiet in Sequels are trash, which certainly aligned with the idea that they were confident in their victory now that this one guy had an additional thirty million points in his back pocket. I'd shared my plans with my guildies on voice chat, and they agreed that we weren't just going to lie down and give up, though we considered not bothering with a rampage that evening to give ourselves a bit of a break.

However, not much later the Trashies suddenly surged in activity again and were back to rampaging themselves - which was odd and seemed to contradict the idea that they were sure of their impending victory. We decided to follow their lead at least for a couple of hours so as not to fall too far behind, and for once, we actually had more people online than they did. We were slowly but surely catching up again - until, like clockwork, they always seemed to gain another 200k points from somewhere. This made it very obvious that for all the questioning of how legit it was to be using Personal Conquest Requisitions at the end, they clearly had no qualms about popping them like candy to stay in first place at all times - something that people had already suspected, but which to me hadn't been fully proven until that night.

There was one funny moment when both guilds ended up running into each other in the heroic area on Oricon, and things were extremely manic for a minute or two as people were surging all over the place and both friendly and hostile emotes were flying left and right. Personally I just kept yelling "follow the star" as I was worried about some of my more easily confused guildies running after the other ops group by accident.

We finished the night being somewhat behind yet again, but only by a few million. Just as I was about to log off, I saw someone from Sequels are trash walk up to me on the fleet and recognised the same guy that had been talking to our guildie. He soon whispered me too, to ask about our token stockpile once again, and happily chattered away about how it had been a fun competition but surely there was no point in either of us wasting our resources on a big token battle tomorrow. I gave a few polite but non-committal replies and then logged off. For someone who seemingly wanted us to just fold, he still seemed quite uncertain of his own guild's position.

The next morning a small number of us ground out a few more points the normal way and then gathered round just before Conquest's end. The worst case scenario I could think of was that the enemy's big PQR holder just decided to pop them all to ensure the Trashies' victory, but on the plus side, since 200+ tokens which are subject to the global cooldown actually take more than ten minutes to click, we'd be able to see it coming.

What I considered the more likely scenario, since they did have a "natural" lead of several million points and based on the previous night's whispers showing a reluctance to go all out and "waste" resources, was that they'd be at the ready to use some Personal Conquest Requisitions if we showed any sign of fighting but would probably prefer not to use too many, if any at all. This seemed confirmed when they used a few tokens to increase their lead back up to about five million and then stopped.

Meanwhile I'd instructed the guildies online with me to "play dead" and wait. Based on some of our previous token clicking wars, I had a pretty good idea of how long personal point gains took to be added first to the guild total and then to the global scoreboard, so I waited until the Conquest timer had nearly run out and then told everyone to go (as well as clicking my own Personal Conquest Requisitions). About a minute later, our guild score jumped, and with less than a minute to go on Total Galactic War, our new, massively increased total appeared on the board and we leap-frogged the Trashies' score by about ten million points. Seconds later, Twin Suns Squadron had officially conquered Taris, without our opponents having had any real chance to react. We did not get any more messages about what a great competition it had been after that.

Ultimate thoughts

And thus another epic tale of Conquest victory was added to the annals of the Twin Suns. It definitely was a bit of a weird one though and provided some interesting food for thought. I find it interesting for example that everyone is fine with Personal Conquest Requisitions being used at the start or over the course of the event, but if you save them for the end, some people consider it "cheating".

All the conversations with what I can only assume was an officer or even the GM of Sequels are trash definitely added a strange new dimension to things as well. It made me realise that I definitely prefer to not get interpersonally involved with our opponents in Conquest. "Psychological warfare" via the scoreboard is one thing (such as by pushing your score up strategically to demotivate your opponent), but trying to talk them into or out of things one to one is a bit too awkward for my personal taste. I just want to compete based on the rules of the game, and maybe do the virtual equivalent of a polite handshake at the end to pay respect to a good competition.

With all the messages we got... I still don't quite know what to make of them even now. Was it all part of a grand game of deception/trying to get us to give up? The kindest interpretation I can think of is that the guy kind of thought of a stash of Conquest Requisitions as something like a pile of nukes - better used for deterrence than actually deployed - and that it genuinely pained him to think of seeing it all get burned up. But this is just a game; nobody gets hurt in Total Galactic War and the resources are there to be used.

I do think it was ultimately ironic that the Trashies had more information about us than most of our recent opponents, that we explicitly told them what our strategy was going to be - and yet they still fought until the very end just to lose to us doing exactly what we said we were going to do. If you read this, man, I hope your guildies didn't end up being too cranky, and I do still agree that it was a fun contest.