Dark vs. Light: Cruising Along

We're only a week into the Dark vs. Light event and some of my guildies are already working on the fourth reward tier... or is it the fifth one by now? Meanwhile, I'm only about to hit Legacy Level (the second one). I'm not sure if I play particularly slowly for a veteran player or if I just happen to be surrounded by a high percentage of nutjobs. I'm not even sure which option would be preferable!

Of course, I could have levelled faster if I wanted to, even with my limited time. My smuggler initially flew through the levels while partaking in activities that I love, such as warzones and flashpoints. When I handed in my Introduction to Warzones mission along with my first PvP daily, she sky-rocketed straight from 19 to 22. But I soon started to feel - and this may sound odd to some - that I was going too fast.

I've seen a lot of people take the approach of treating their event alts as "disposable". (I think it was Calph who pointed out a character in guild chat that was literally named "Delete Later".) That's not me though. After ten years of playing MMOs, I can still count the amount of characters that I've deleted on one hand, and sometimes I even still feel bad about deleting those few, even though it happened years ago in some cases!

So for me, any event alts have to be treated "properly", which means that they get a sensible name, a look I love, an appropriate outfit, and a levelling plan that follows some kind of structure. I had made my first event character a smuggler because I wanted to replay the smuggler story, so I was going to actually do that, damn it! It's kind of surprising how much questing slows you down compared to chaining flashpoint and warzone queues. Even the boosted XP for class missions doesn't help much when you're still puttering around on Alderaan while getting close to level 50.

But I'm not regretting it. There will be other alts to level the fast way. This one is getting more of my time.

As people seem to like bragging about what they got from their reward boxes, I got, um... some NPC decoration that sounded cool. I think it was the Kel Dor Jedi Master? I added him to my collection but haven't actually placed him anywhere. And then there was the snazzy Volatile Conqueror's Saberstaff. Of course it was absolutely useless to my smuggler (and I do hope they end up changing those stupid binding rules), but I did unlock it in my collections system and bought it for my next alt...

Yes, I finally gave in to the dark side and made a character with a punny name. The suggestion had come up in guild chat only days ago and made me chuckle. Also, would you believe that after four and a half years of playing the game this was actually my first Sith Assassin? It's the one advanced class that I've been holding out on... I specced her Deception with an eye on PvP - I don't care if Hatred is better for AoE or whatever, I want to be that jerk that usually stunlocks me and then comes close to killing me dead before my resolve bar's even fully filled up.

Where I've been focusing on the story with my smuggler, Shinister the Assassin has taken over flashpoint and warzone duties. And what fun it has been! Tacticals without a healer can be quite a challenge. Not exactly hard, but people get used to dying on trash and constantly running back quite quickly. I should have an easier time now that I got Force Cloak though. There's a certain joy in having complete control over my aggro. I'm happy to do the pulling if the rest of my team is too timid, because I can always vanish if I get close to dying. On the other hand, when I see a group mate in danger I can taunt things off them. Win-win. In Mandalorian Raiders, I had a fun time effectively tanking the Boarding Party because I was the only one daring enough to pull and then spent the entire fight stumbling from one kolto station to the next, having lots of healing aggro, while the rest of the group slowly killed things. A similar thing happened in False Emperor, where that droid duo is apparently intentionally one-shotting you now if you step outside the blue circle, as counter-intuitive as that may seem (and to think we thought that it was a bug...). My pug group for that flashpoint was great fun though.

I probably started PvP a bit earlier than advisable, as I spent my first couple of matches - without Force Speed or Force Cloak - basically being killed from range while I just stood there (usually rooted), helpless like a deer in the headlights. Things have been starting to look up since then though, and the class certainly offers a very different play style compared to what I'm used to - lone, stealthy hunter vs. supportive team player.