Dark vs. Light: Update After Eight Weeks

As another month has passed, I thought it might be time to take stock of my progress towards the DvL achievements once again. At least one commenter was already completely done with the event when I last posted, and at least two guildies have finished legendary tier as well since then. My pet tank is quite close too; he only needs to finish the crew skill achievements and wait for the Gree to come around again to kill some of their droids. For some reason he was terrified of facing the GSF achievement required for legendary tier and asked me to complete that one for him. I did, but I'm still baffled that this out of all things was such a big deal to him, especially after he power-levelled multiple alts to fifty in about eight hours per character.

My own progress hasn't been too great, but then I was away on holiday for a week and another weekend was more or less taken up completely by attending a wedding. Let's look at my progress one character at a time again:

Shilu, the Scoundrel

Nope, still haven't even started KotFE and am therefore officially still working on tier three. But at least I finished Shadow of Revan and did Ziost. I also ran some more hardmode flashpoints, though I still have plenty to go.

Shinister, the Assassin

I said last time that I was probably going to "retire" her for now, but as it turns out I still needed to spend a lot of time at least logged in on this character to max out her artifice (done) and grind diplomacy to get towards Dark V (still ongoing). This is taking foreverrr!

Zeresa, the Commando

Hit fifty, largely stopped playing her as nothing more was required for the event. Still logged her a couple of times to max out her armstech, but that's done as well now.

Corfette, the Sniper

Sniper is another advanced class that I actually never played before, simply because I love the stealth gameplay of Scoundrel/Operative way too much and didn't find Gunslinger particularly enjoyable when I tried it. Upon reading Vrykerion's detailed reviews of Imperial agent chapters two and three recently, I was overcome by an urge to replay the agent story. Despite of the many interesting choices you can make in that one, I've still only completed it once! My Cathar on the Progenitor was an attempt to give it another go but got stranded on Hoth when KotFE came out and my focus shifted back to my home on The Red Eclipse. I might still finish her story some day, but probably not any time soon.

So, despite of how (comparatively) slow I've found it to level through the class story on Shilu, I decided to go down that route again with this character - and I planned specifically to aim for the path that has you defecting to the Republic in chapter two, which is why her name is (almost) an anagram of "defector". I haven't yet made it far enough to do so though and have only just completed chapter one (they really condensed that bonus mission with the holograms on the chapter end boss's ship...).

As an interesting side effect, this character has also turned into a bit of an experiment in just how far you can get by just sticking to the class story - no side missions, no flashpoints or PvP, no nothing. Funnily enough, I'm still just about on track at the end of chapter one, even though things were supposed to be tuned in such a way that you had to do something extra. I guess exploration XP counts for more than I expected, as I do enjoy opening up the entire map of each planet and gathering mats for my crew skills in the process.

Also, being only just about the right level for my missions has reintroduced a surprising amount of challenge to the game. Without being level synced or wearing level-appropriate gear, my sniper's rifle hits like a nerf gun and it's mostly Kaliyo who kills things (I have her set to dps instead of healing). While exploring Alderaan, I also died repeatedly from mobs up to five levels higher than me dismounting me and mauling me to death. Who'd have thought that the game could still be this deadly if you only try hard enough to make it so?

Shin-dow, the Shadow

Yes, at this point I'm struggling for names too. I opted to make my event consular a Shadow, since I "only" have one of those as opposed to multiple Sages (and Sorcs). At first I was going to make her the same back-stabby spec as Shinister but then decided that for variety I should probably go Serenity instead. While this spec is supposed to be very powerful, I can't say that it seems to suit me very well. In a world in which most things die very quickly, relying on dots just isn't that much fun in my opinion. It reminds me of when I tried to level a lowbie warlock through dungeon finding back in WoW. And in PvP I just seem to suck at not dying.

As an aside, for some reason I felt really inspired by this character's looks and bought her a whole oufit from the Cartel market as well as a matching green mount and pet from the GTN. I'm not much of a fashionista, but sometimes a look just "clicks".

Shi-rah, the Mercenary

I haven't done much with this one yet, but I wanted to create another Imperial character with whom to run random flashpoints while Corfette sticks to her "class story only" levelling experiment. I got her up to level ten to be able to pick an advanced class, but otherwise she's still slumming it on Hutta. Bounty hunter is one of those classes of which I have too many alts for odd reasons, so this is actually my fourth. Like Zeresa, I specced her dps as I don't really need yet another healer. I also made her a togruta since I've barely used that unlock since purchasing it and I felt that I should probably cut down on creating even more twi'leks. (I can stop any time I want to, honest...)

Getting good-looking armour for togruta is a pain in the neck though, much more so than with twi'leks. That clipping! I eventually settled on the Mandalorian Clansman set, which I thought looked good and didn't seem to suffer any clipping issues. The whole thing cost about ten million on the GTN, so it wasn't exactly cheap. Then I put it on... and in the first cut scene I could see that a tiny bit of armour does clip through the top of the front montrals, just small enough that I didn't notice it on the preview. Sigh. I'm going to keep it anyway.

I also put a black/black dye into it since I happened to get one from Shi-rah's cantina crates. And for some reason it refused to take! It would look fine in most cut scenes but as soon as I was back in the regular game the chest piece was back to its basic gold/grey. I googled it and found people reporting issues with this armour not taking dyes properly as far as two years back - of course, what else did I expect? I was about to write off the dye too, but then I added some gloves to the outfit, which I hadn't done before, and suddenly the colour changed to what it was supposed to be. Who knows how these things work?