My Other Bounty Hunter is a Powertech

 

And so is this one.

... wait, what?

Even as someone who generally enjoys levelling at a more sedate pace, I made use of the 12x XP pre-order bonus to level a second Sorcerer, as she was a character that I felt was kind of stuck in limbo. While I had a strong sentimental attachment to her due to having created her fairly early in the game, levelling her up felt kind of pointless considering that I already had a max level character of the same class, sex and advanced class.

As it happens, I had the exact same problem with a Chiss Powertech of mine (as I levelled a Rattataki PT last year), with the only difference being that she had "already" made it to level forty in the time since launch. Again, the 12x XP seemed like a good opportunity to finish off her story and round out her character.

Unlike with the Sith inquisitor, I have to say that I seemed to enjoy the bounty hunter story more the second time around, though I find it hard to put my finger on why. There were still bits that I didn't like (first and foremost the Taris storyline, and the way chapter three kicks off), but on the whole it felt more... coherent than I remembered it. And I did note in my post about my first playthrough that my experience of the story had been very fragmented at the time, which probably contributed to my lack of enthusiasm for it the first time around.

Since I already had a character of the same class, sex and advanced class, my ways of mixing things up were limited, but I did find a couple. For one thing I specced into dps instead of tanking, but oddly enough that didn't actually feel all that different while questing. (Death from Above is still the way to go.)

I also took Mako with me everywhere instead of Gault, who had been my Rattataki Powertech's companion of choice most of the time. Seeing a different companion react to story developments is at least one way of getting to see things from a different perspective.

In fact, my companions surprised me by showing me a little bit of inter-companion story that I hadn't seen before. Since I'm not too bothered with maxing out my companions on alts when I've already played the class before, I had almost no affection with Torian, but a lot with Mako (with whom I had actually quested). Imagine my surprise when during one of my later conversations with Mako, she suddenly expressed interest in Torian! Unlike on my Rattataki, where I romanced him, my Chiss felt indifferent about him and encouraged Mako to make a move - so the two actually became a couple, with one conversation being about them having dinner together and other references appearing in random conversation as well. When I later chose a flirt option while talking to Torian during a story mission, Mako chimed in with a joking comment about how I should keep my hands off him.

I was kind of curious whether I could trigger a jealous showdown along the lines of what can happen between Risha and Akaavi for male smugglers if I decided to put the moves on Torian after all, but I didn't want to risk it because... I didn't want to hurt Mako's feelings. Yes, I'm that pathetic. I don't want to make my NPC friends sad.

Since my Rattataki was fully light side, I decided to go down a more neutral route on this character. It definitely felt like the most natural state for a bounty hunter. Sadly I didn't notice it making much of a difference to the story. Earlier on, I shot a person whom my light side hunter allowed to get away. When I let them get away, this person came back to try and kill me. On this character, another person tried to kill me instead. Ho hum.

The very last choice you get to make in the bounty hunter story is an interesting one, and part of me certainly wanted to choose "the other option" compared to what I had done before, if for no other reason than to see the consequences. Sadly said option is just waaay too unbefitting of a bounty hunter (in my opinion) so I made the same choice that I made before. I suppose it's my own fault I didn't get to see a different ending.

I did play a bit differently compared to how I levelled my Sorcererer with the XP boost, in so far as I actually took the time to explore all the planets and get most of the datacrons on the way this time. I just had to engage with the world in some way aside from the class story or I would have gone batty.

Time flew by pretty quickly anyway, which was helped by the fact that I had fewer issues with missions bugging out and granting less XP than they were supposed to. I was level 53 when I finished my class story and moved to Makeb, which meant that I was "done" after only two mesas there.

As a bonus, getting this character to 55 meant that I finally got the achievement for maxing out all the different crew skills, as I was only missing Armstech, which just so happened to be what this character has been from day one. With a max-level Chiss I've now also got the all the legacy unlocks for different species except for Miraluka - and those are the one species I strongly dislike anyway (there's just something about characters with no visible eyes).

With twelve characters at the current level cap, I feel that I'm in a great position for next week's expansion launch. That just leaves the question of which of them to level to sixty first - and how.