More Max Level Shenanigans

The latest batch of double experience weekends are finally behind us, and I'm glad. Yes, I know why people love them, but I don't, and it's very annoying when most of your playtime is during the weekend and you can't play the way you want to because of the double XP event going on.

So, still being levelling hipsters, Pet Tank and I decided to have a look at what goals we had left to achieve on our max-level characters, where out-of-whack experience gains weren't going to "interfere" with our play. We mostly settled on giving our inquisitor pair some more love.

First we finished off various planetary quests that we still hadn't done on these characters, including at least one round of dailies where they were part of any given area: the Belsavis bonus series, Ilum, the Black Hole, Section X.

While in Section X, I insisted on picking up the feeder quest for the HK-51 chain to see whether it was significantly different from the Republic version. Answer: it's not, and everything that comes afterwards is exactly the same on both factions anyway. It was kind of funny though; after we had done the introductory bit, Pet Tank and I had roughly the following conversation:

Me: "Oh well, that's all the difference there is I guess. We can leave it at that."
PT: "But we started the chain now. You know how I am with leaving things unfinished."
Me: "We could just abandon it."
PT: "..."
Me: "But... but... I hated it the last time round!"
PT: "Shin..."
Me: "Fine! Fine! We'll do it!"

So after all the troubles I had with getting HK on my main, I went through the whole thing again, though this time with company all the way through, and it was actually a lot less painful. The funny thing is that Pet Tank already had HK unlocked via the legacy system anyway, and it's not as if he got a refund for doing it the hard way afterwards, but such is questing with a completionist.

Then we did Imperial side-Makeb, including one round of dailies there as well. One of these days I have to write a post about the staged weekly and how it's an interesting idea - once I actually figure out how the hell it works, that is.

Finally we also did the entire Macrobinocular and Seeker Droid chains on Imperial side, plus various GSI dailies. (As an aside, the HK chain can actually be done really well alongside these as they mostly send you to the same planets.) These were also mostly the same, but at least the intro and outro were noticeably different, and the mission on Dromund Kaas that's the equivalent to the one on Coruscant was something else entirely. Where you simply have to make it past a couple of locked doors on Republic side, the Empire has rotating death lasers! The repeated death squeals of our companions as they kept running into these sure made for some funny moments.

As far as the heroics at the end go, we managed to two-man the Nar Shaddaa car chase this time around (eventually, after a lot of failing at jumping), but the last fight alone took us about fifteen minutes, as we had limited dps and the boss kept getting heals off. We got help from guildies for the other two heroics, and they were still challenging, but definitely a little easier now that we actually knew what we were doing (unlike the first time around).

And then... we stood on the fleet and were unsure what to do. We had actually completed almost every single non-repeatable Imperial quest in the game (except for a few ops ones), and done almost every repeatable one at least once, including both dailies and flashpoints. I've never felt this close to having "beaten the game" in an MMO before; it was kind of scary.

Fortunately the double XP is over now, and we can get back to levelling even more alts to restart the whole process from the beginning.