Random PvE Pursuits

I've always said that my love for PvP is a bit of an on-again, off-again affair. For the past three months I've been doing the PvP weekly on three max-level characters pretty consistently... but I think I've actually managed to burn myself out a little in the process. This week, I hardly felt like doing any warzones at all. Generally speaking that's not a big deal; flitting around between different activities is part of MMO life... but I have to admit that my timing in this particular case is a bit poor. My PvP characters are barely in full Obroan gear and should really work on upgrading to Brutalizer, not to mention that Ranked Season 2 started this week and I was going to dabble in it a bit... but oh well. Since I don't particularly care about being competitive, I guess it can wait.

Instead I've been pursuing random and sometimes long-neglected PvE goals on a variety of characters.

For one thing, I decided to once again work on getting all the datacrons on my main. (I've repeatedly started doing this before but always lost interest quickly.) Datacrons used to be something I cared about very little when I levelled up my first couple of characters, but ever since I started levelling alts with my pet tank I've been dutifully dragged past (nearly*) every datacron on every planet since he's a completionist and always wants to get them all. Again, at first I didn't really give this development much thought, but the more alts I level up this way, the more "wrong" it starts to feel that my main of all things, plus the alts I play the most often, are actually missing a whole lot of datacrons. It just feels imbalanced. So I've been working on that.

It was funny to go back and re-read my post from two years ago about riding the Jawa balloon for the first time and how exciting I found it at the time. Nowadays it's not nearly as thrilling anymore, plus in this case it felt a bit annoying to do the whole thing again just for the one datacron on the ledge that I missed last time.

Another thing that I've been doing is play some of my lesser played max-level alts and try to clear out their mission logs a bit. A lot of them still have one-time story quests for various daily areas, flashpoints and operations, not to mention those "achievement" missions that award speeders. I haven't really made any great strides on that front yet, but every little helps. Mostly I've been focusing on running flashpoints on my agent, but choosing the random option for level 50 hardmodes kept throwing me into the same three Imperial-only ones all week, which was a bit boring. I did some level 55 hardmodes as well to change things up and was surprised to see that, being just about adequately geared for the content, I actually had to pay attention to my healing. It wasn't exactly stressful, but whenever I play my Republic counterpart in warzones or ops, Scoundrel/Operative healing pretty much seems to come down to spamming your heal over time on everyone, while maybe adding the occasional instant cast. It was actually nice to be forced to use my entire arsenal of healing abilities for once.

We'll see for how long this particular diversion will keep me busy.

* The exception is the one on Belsavis that requires you to find randomly spawning Rakata Energy Cubes, which my pet tank got once and hasn't had an urge to ever do again, and the two Makeb ones, which neither of us has got. We once set an afternoon aside for one of the Makeb ones, but gave up after a couple of hours of jumping failures as it just got too frustrating.