A Tale of Tier Four

I mentioned before the patch that I had saved up a lot of CXP packs in anticipation of Command tier four. One more reason to be antsy about the patch's release was that I was running out of space to store the things if I didn't want to start redistributing them on alts, so I was really keen on finally being able to clean out my cargo hold, inventory and mail box.

Of course, nothing is ever that easy. To get the most out of all those packs, I wanted to wait with claiming them until my alignment (light side) had had a victory. Unfortunately, this doesn't happen very often on TRE right now, and I'd say there are about two dark side victories for every light side victory. I won't be so melodramatic as to say that light side never wins, but it's certainly proven elusive over the last couple of days. I tried staying up late in the evening, but even though my side was gaining, it was so slow that I eventually had to give up as I was falling asleep at the keyboard and had work the next day. Other times I always seemed to just miss it, with the victory popping just after I had to leave the house for an appointment or just before I came home from work. It was growing kind of aggravating!

Then, yesterday at around 6 in the morning, I logged on to finally find the light side at stage four already, and claiming victory shortly afterwards. Hurrah! What followed were several hours worth of inventory management, which is one of those things that you either enjoy or you don't, and I definitely did enjoy it in this case. I'm happy to report that all those CXP packs translated to a respectable 86 Command crates. And let me tell you, opening so many of the things at once is pretty fun!

I actually purchased all the Command stash extensions, a UI feature that I had always considered pretty pointless before then, but if you open that many crates at once it's actually pretty nice to be able to let the loot pile up for a bit without having to worry about claiming or disintegrating things every other crate. Plus it allowed me to be strategic and for example leave the blue gear pieces in the stash at first without claiming them, in hopes of getting a purple or even gold for the same slot out of one of the later crates.

I'm happy to say that it worked out pretty well for me, and I received an upgrade for every single gear slot. Sure, most of them were blues, and while they feel less prestigious than the purples we're used to and I'm still not convinced whether it's a good idea to even have all these tiers within tiers, everything was at least an upgrade. It seems that Bioware has finally found a sort of balance with tier four, making me reconsider Command rank 300 as a worthwhile goal for some of my alts.

Fiery Grophet seeking to camouflage itself on a carpet.

The thing that came as a surprise for me were the pets. I'm not a pet collector, so I have to admit I have a pretty short attention span when it comes to caring about them. Sure, I'll usually go "that's cute", but by the next day I'll already have forgotten that I even got a new pet the day before. But this tier had a grophet as one of the rewards from the crates. I've written before about really liking those. And the other pet was a cute green froggie with spots! D'aww.

But then the duplicates started rolling in. I hit disintegrate on a grophet and immediately felt a terrible jolt of guilt. It doesn't really make sense. I don't worry about what an uncomfortable life these creatures must lead, being stashed away between armour pieces and companion gifts inside of crates that mysteriously appear out of thin air. But when you ask me to take action myself, to actively destroy them... I suddenly feel bad. It's one thing to "disintegrate" a piece of armour, but a cute little animal? I'd always felt a little bad about it before, but the grophets were more appealing to me than the usual offerings, and due to opening all of those crates at once I had quickly accumulated a whole stack of them. Seven little grophets... sounds like the name of a fairy tale!

Eventually I went "to hell with it", claimed them all and sent them round to my alts. Who wouldn't want a cute little potato creature with spindly legs by their side? My Marauder's also seems to have an interest in slicing, who knew? It's a shame that you can't have more than one copy of a pet in your stronghold, or I could open Shintar's Home for Fiery Grophets in one of them. It's strange in what sort of directions playing a game like this can take your thoughts sometimes.